I took a long walk along Telegraph Avenue yesterday, from my neighborhood up to Temescal, and along the way saw two big signs in store windows. One said “Abolition is the presence of housing, healthcare, education, & life free from state violence.” The other, at a gallery, said “Queer art for abolition. No cops! No cages!”
Abolition in both cases refers to the complete eradication of all police forces, at the city, county, state and national levels and, one presumes, even the abolition of the U.S. military. The fact that far-left radicals are even talking about police abolition is a victory of sorts for the maniacal polemicist, Cat Brooks, who continues to call for abolishing the police. That terror message has spread out to the greater community, and some people are foolish enough to believe it. I try to put myself into the mind of the people who put up those signs and I have to say it’s a weird, confusing place. There’s a lot of magical thinking involved. “Gee, if only we abolish the police, all the homeless people will suddenly have nice places to live, and we’ll all have free healthcare for life, free college education, and we won’t have to worry about getting killed by cops.” The “queer art” people echo that delusion.
As a queer myself, I reject the notion that LGBTQ people want to abolish the police. Indeed, we respect the police for the very obvious reason that they protect us from bashers who would harm us. Police and law courts don’t put people in “cages.” They put them into “jail cells,” which is where we send criminals who have been duly convicted of a crime. Prison may not be the Ritz Hotel but prisons do give inmates three square meals a day, medical care and a safe place to dwell until, and if, their release date comes.
As for “state violence,” I’ve asked this question before and have never gotten an answer from the wokes who want to abolish the police. Whom do you fear more, cops or drug-crazed criminals who would just as soon split your skull open for five bucks for a hit of fentanyl? How many Black men have been shot or stabbed to death in Oakland in the last five years? Let’s say, conservatively, 400. Who murdered them, the state? Obviously not. So why are these progressives bitching and moaning about “state violence”? How about complaining about criminal violence? I’ll tell you why. The wokes don’t care how many Black men die. Oh sure, they raise hell when a cop shoots a Black man (which is vanishingly rare in Oakland). But when a Black man murders a Black man, which happens all the time, they’re strangely mute. It’s as if a memory-killing amnesia virus blots out their brain cells.
Sometimes I just want to grab these cop-hating wokes and shake some sense into them. No police? Are you insane? Maybe they think the Millennium has come and everybody has turned into an angel. But the Millennium has not come. This is Oakland, the most under-policed city in the country. As Tim Gardner reports on his Substack, “Oakland had fewer police officers per violent crime than any other US city.”
The results of the Quan-Schaaf-Thao years of police defunding were entirely predictable: an explosion of crime that has turned our city into bedlam. We did our best to warn everyone but were unsuccessful. We still have morons running around who would follow Cat Brooks off a cliff. Stupid people! Unthinking people! A threat to our economic and personal safety and security. Absolute ideologues, they’re incapable of rational thinking, and so the only way to fight them is to beat their butts into the ground during elections. If only we could have a Mayor and a City Council that rejected the perfidy that Brooks and her friends Pamela Price, Carroll Fife, Sheng Thao and Nikki Bas peddle, we could rescue our beloved Oakland. Can we begin on November 5? Si, se puede.
Obituary: Robert Allen
An obituary is out of the ordinary for this blog, but I want to commemorate the life of Dr. Robert L. Allen, who died July 10, at the age of 82.
Robert was a scholar and U.C. Berkeley professor, a civil rights activist, and a superb human being. Perhaps his greatest professional accomplishment was his 1989 book, “The Port Chicago Mutiny.” Robert also co-edited “Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America—An Anthology” (1995), a collection of essays meant “to create a living mosaic of essays and stories in which Black men can view themselves, and be viewed without distortion."
Robert was my friend and next door neighbor here in Oakland for years; we got to know each other well. In “Port Chicago” Robert unearthed the facts, which had been hidden for decades, of the worst domestic disaster to hit the U.S. Navy in history, when, in July, 1944, 320 Navy and Coast Guard personnel, almost all of them Black, were killed in an explosion at Port Chicago, on the Carquinez Strait east of Martinez. When surviving Black sailors refused to continue to load munitions, afraid of another explosion, the Navy court-martialed them. It was this injustice Robert investigated and revealed. Just one week after Robert’s death, the U.S. Navy Secretary, on July 19, 2024, exonerated all the men.
I wish Robert had been alive to witness what his work had wrought.
Robert was a gentleman and a scholar. We hit it off immediately. We would talk about politics, religion, literature, art, history, philosophy, entertainment, the news, ourselves, just about anything. I remember one time. The Loma Prieta Earthquake had just struck. Frightened, I knocked on Robert’s door. When he answered, a cloud of marijuana smoke emerged. We both thought it had been The Big One (it wasn’t). Despite the power outage, Robert had a little 4-inch battery-powered T.V. that worked, and we watched while it reported, and misreported, the breaking news. We freaked out when the broadcaster said the Bay Bridge had collapsed! (It hadn’t.) Robert’s longtime friend was the novelist Alice Walker (“The Color Purple”). As the reports out of San Francisco, where Ms. Walker lived, became more and more alarming, with portions of the city clearly devastated, Robert announced he had to get to San Francisco and make sure she was all right. (No cell phones in those days!) With the Bay Bridge closed, he decided he’d drive there via the Richmond Bridge. I told him he was crazy, the roads would be gridlocked, but his mind was made up. He was truly nervous about his friend. (She was fine.)
I wish I’d kept up with Robert all these years so we could have talked about reparations, homelessness, the recalls, wokeism, and other issues in Oakland, a city he loved. His was a voice of reason, intellectualism, love and empathy. He will be missed.
Steve Heimoff