One of Cat Brooks’s more misleading statements is that adding more police won’t have any impact on crime in Oakland. Here’s her standard refrain, repeated again in last Tuesday’s San Francisco Chronicle: “We keep doing the same thing [i.e. turning to cops to address crime] and it’s not working.” Brooks instead wants to take as much as 50% of OPD’s budget and direct it instead to “crime prevention and addressing trauma.”
This is standard anti-police fare: Police don’t prevent crime, police don’t solve crime, and police may actually aggravate crime. So we might as well radically shrink the size of our police department and instead hire “violence interrupters” and similar anti-violence professionals.
What is a “violence interrupter”? One form of it is found in the nonprofit Oakland group, Youth Alive!, which meets with “traumatized young victims of violence at the hospital bedsides to convince them, their friends and family not to retaliate.” That’s a good thing, and we need to support it. On a larger scale, Oakland’s Department of Violence Prevention (DVP) announced its “strategic spending plan” for 2022-2024, to the tune of $25 million; this includes money already budgeted as well as what DVP calls “additional funding needed.” The money would go, not only to the kind of hospital-based interventions of Youth Alive!, but to such things as a survivor hotline, youth coaching and employment services, block parties and town halls, mental health support, community ambassadors, legal advocacy, emergency shelter, drop-in centers, transitional housing, and, yes, violence interrupters.
This, too, sounds good, as far as it goes; and after all, $25 million isn’t that much money in the larger scheme of things. But the money has to come from someplace, and Cat Brooks would take it from OPD. Oakland cops earn an average base salary of $105,000 a year, so taking $25 million would result in the loss of 238 sworn officers, out of a total force of about 790. That means OPD would lose one-third of its cops. If you think crime is bad now, just imagine what would happen if OPD shrank by 33 percent.
Which leads to the questions, do police actually prevent crime, and if they do, do more police prevent more crime? The answer to both questions, according to the studies, is overwhelmingly YES: police prevent crime.
For example, National Public Radio cited a study from New York University that asked, among other questions, “What is the measurable value of adding a new police officer to patrol a city? And do additional officers prevent homicides?” The study found that for each newly-hired cop, between 0.06 and 0.1 homicides would be prevented. That number may sound small, but as the study’s director noted,“from that perspective, investing in more police officers to save lives provides a pretty good bang for the buck. Adding more police also reduces other serious crimes, like robbery, rape, and aggravated assault.” Even more impressive is the fact that “in the average city, larger police forces result in Black lives saved at about twice the rate of White lives saved.”
Then there’s this article on Vox that examined multiple studies from around the country and concluded, “There’s good evidence police reduce crime and violence.” The article cited a survey by the Criminal Justice Expert Panel, which consists of professors of law, economics, criminal justice, global conflict, public administration, political science and other specialties at top universities around the world. Interestingly, the study divided approaches to criminality and violence into short-term and long-term strategies. The impact of increasing the number of police officers “tends to happen quickly--almost immediately deterring and intercepting would-be criminals.” On the other hand, increasing budgets for “purely social services,” such as violence interruption, “can take years, or even decades, to truly address the problems of poverty, education and other underlying issues that contribute to crime.” In other words, “for short-term responses to increases in homicides, the evidence is strongest for the police-based solutions.”
I could cite more studies and analyses that conclude that the best, if not the only, way to quickly halt crime is to hire more cops. I suspect this is a truth the defund-the-police people are aware of but dare not publicly admit. I suspect, also, they know that their proposed violence interventions will take years or decades to begin to be effective—if they ever work at all—and that Oakland does not have the luxury of waiting years or decades to address crime while our people are being slaughtered and our stores ransacked. Therefore, it’s important for the public to understand that when people say turning to the police to prevent crime “is not working,” they’re dead wrong.
Tomorrow, I want to talk about what being a “progressive” means.
NUMBER OF DAYS SINCE I INVITED CARROLL FIFE TO HAVE TEA WITH ME, WITH NO REPLY: 17
Steve Heimoff