We’ve come to expect some pretty low behavior from the defund-the-police crowd, or what’s left of it. But what Rebecca Kaplan is trying to do really sets a new standard for hobbling our police department—and encouraging the spread of disinformation.
She actually had the chutzpah to introduce legislation to the City Council that would “reallocate” $493,000 from the Oakland Police Department’s Public Information Office.
Now, to more fully understand this, you have to keep in mind that the defunders, of which Kaplan has been a leader, have suffered great setbacks to their agenda this Summer and Fall. Public opinion turned fiercely against them. After Oakland’s horrendous months of murder and mayhem, even the staunchest liberals realized that weakening the police department is a bad idea. Mayor Schaaf herself is calling for more cops (a call echoed by Mayor Breed in San Francisco). The defunders thought they were winning their War Against Cops, and now, this sudden, dramatic shift threatens the very core of their woke ideology.
What Kaplan is actually doing is merely a continuation of her efforts to defund the police. She and her closest allies—Carroll Fife and Nikki Bas—never stopped those efforts. When they realized that the public loathed the phrase “defund the police,” they started calling it “reimagining.” But it was the same thing. Now, they’re calling it “reallocating.” It’s a clever game, but rest assured, we’re on to them, and so are you. They’ll never stop trying to defund the police.
Targeting the department’s Public Information Office is particularly odious. The PIO is the way OPD talks to us citizens. We need to know what OPD is doing, and the PIO informs us. Oakland sadly no longer has reputable journalists working our beat, the way they used to. With the disintegration of newspapers, there’s only a handful of reporters that even pretend to cover Oakland anymore. The public is starved for real information, and only the PIO can provide it. As City Administrator Ed Reiskin points out, “Such a reduction [as Kaplan proposes] would adversely impact the department’s ability to communicate with the general public directly, correspond with the media, and distribute internal information.”
I suspect cutting OPD off from communicating with us may be Kaplan’s strategy. With no voice to counter the allegations against cops made by people like Kaplan and Fife, the public will hear only from the defunders, with their inciteful exaggerations and untruths. This is the totalitarian way, whether of the Left or the Right: destroy the media, make yours the only voice audible to the people, and hang onto power.
(The City Council was supposed to vote on Kaplan’s proposal last night. If they did, I’ll post the results as soon as I find out.)
Steve Heimoff