I thought MACRO was a scam from the moment I learned about it. I based this on my experience as a journalist in Oakland for 30 years, including investigative reporting I did on Oakland anti-violence programs. I saw shockingly fraudulent, near-criminal stuff that seemed wired into the DNA of Oakland social services; and the intervening years since have only strengthened this impression. In Oakland, if it smells like BS, it usually is. And MACRO smelled like BS.
Now, we have a thoroughly credible report on MACRO that is absolutely scathing. It concludes that MACRO is a complete failure, even when measured by its own standards. The report was written by a gentleman named Tim Gardner; he seems to be a citizen journalist who publishes his findings on Substack under “Oakland Report.” The date of publication was Dec. 26, 2023, which was 4-12 months ago, but the criticisms remain timely (and thanks to Jack Saunders for sending the report to me).
I urge you to read the entire report. It’s long but will hold your interest. The most shocking thing (if anything coming out of Oakland even has the ability to shock anymore) is the absolute incompetence of MACRO’s creators. The program began in 2020 ago as a “pilot,” funded by the City Council with $1.85 million. It remains a pilot program today. As Gardner writes, “By definition, a pilot recognizes that the motivating idea, or its implementation, may not work. Failure is an option. Otherwise we are being disingenuous to call it a pilot.” MACRO has not worked, not even close. And yet the City Council wants to continue to fund it, now to the tune of $9 million a year.
Here’s Gardner’s shattering conclusion: “MACRO has negligible benefit on police costs, has had only limited success in getting its clients help through referrals, has no indication that it has reduced negative interactions between its clients and police, and provides no data on whether its clients achieve improved life outcomes.” Little wonder the program is such a disaster: it was hatched up by two of the least talented, most ideologically-biased people ever to sit on the City Council, Rebecca Kaplan and Carroll Fife, at a time when the two were still dreaming of defunding the Oakland Police Department by 50%, which believe it or not actually seemed doable in 2020. The duo’s claim was that MACRO would make Oakland more “equitable,” which merely meant that fewer BIPOC people would be arrested for breaking the law. As usual with such efforts at “equity,” the results have been exactly what you’d think: life gets worse for everybody in Oakland, while achieving precisely nothing of what its authors intended.
Gardner goes out of his way not to say that MACRO ought to be ended. Instead, under the section “Could MACRO be fixed?”, he diplomatically offers seven suggestions “that might help MACRO to deliver far more benefit to the community at much greater efficiency.” Reading through them, however, you have to wonder why they weren’t included from the start. Instead, MACRO was brewed up in the Kaplan-Fife cauldron and imposed on OPD, the Fire Department, and the city as a whole with seemingly no plan, no forethought, no way to even tell if it was working or what precisely it was supposed to do. The Kaplan-Fife idea was “Anything but funding the police,” even if the alternative was to create a vaporware program that simply threw money down every conceivable rabbit hole in Oakland. The program has become nothing more than “street-side palliative care”, in Gardner’s words: giving homeless people a bottle of water, maybe a blanket—for $9 million a year.
This is what incompetent, woke government has wrought. It’s interesting that, in the last several weeks, the local media has been reporting on massive fraud and theft in San Francisco’s homeless programs, including this morning’s twin articles that “hundreds of millions of dollars” haven’t even been tracked and that yet another city-funded homeless shelter is being accused by the S.F. City Attorney for submitting fake invoices.
We need to understand that this homelessness-woke complex has turned out to be one of the biggest frauds on the taxpayers since Teapot Dome. I am calling for an immediate halt to all funding for homelessness programs until we get a grip on where the money has gone. There are grifters lining up to get their paws on gigantic pots of money that Oakland is doling out to seemingly anyone who shows up, as long as Rebecca Kaplan and Carroll Fife approve of them; and no politician in Oakland seems able to stand up to them and say “Not a penny more!”
Steve Heimoff