I confess to having a great deal of skepticism about “police oversight” organizations. They’re all the rage these days, especially since George Floyd. Every municipality seems to feel the need (or is being pressured to feel the need) for a civilian committee to watchdog the cops.
The latest I’m aware of is San Mateo County, which last night held a special meeting of the Board of Supervisors to discuss “Sheriff’s Oversight,” that is, civilian oversight of the county Sheriff’s Department. Local news agencies reported that “The goal of the study session is to provide the board with information about community-police relations, existing oversight, civilian oversight, and the range of models or forms that oversight could take, according to the county.”
In the end, the Supervisors “backed a model that creates a civilian advisory body, reinstates a public safety and social justice subcommittee, and contracts an inspector general on an as-needed basis.” The exact form of this model remains to be worked out by the Supervisors, but suffice it to say it will simply shackle another branch of law enforcement and do precisely nothing to keep the public safer.
Here in Oakland, it’s almost easy to lose track of all the agencies that watchdog OPD. There’s the Police Commission, of course, and its investigative arm, the Community Police Review Agency. Then there’s the powerful, secretive Coalition for Police Accountability (CPA). (Former Police Commission head Tyfahra Milele alleged that CPA “exercised too much influence over the [Police] Commission’s business.”) There’s also the Federal Monitor, Robert Warshaw, who’s been effectively controlling OPD for years. Then there’s the City Council itself, which controls OPD’s budget; the Council is filled with police abolitionists who want to defund OPD, which also has its own internal investigative arm within its Internal Affairs Division.
Together, all these organizations make OPD “the state’s most watched police department.” And the person most responsible for all this scrutiny is former two-term Mayor Libby Schaaf, who presided over this explosion of watchdogs and boasted that Oakland is in“the vanguard of police reform.”
All of these groupings, with the exception of OPD’s Internal Affairs Division, are hostile to cops. The people responsible for choosing their members often have histories of antagonism toward law enforcement. Some of them have criminal records themselves and were chosen for that reason. Some day, I believe, historians are going to have to figure out just when and why our civic bureaucracies became so hostile to law enforcement. By then, sadly, cities will have paid the price for demeaning and weakening police, even as the forces of criminality and evil arise to levels not seen in America for centuries.
Sometimes I feel like Howard Beale, the fictional news anchor from the 1976 movie Network, whose rant on live television—"I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"—has become one of the iconic utterances in the history of American film. One can’t do that sort of thing in polite society, of course, and so I channel my outrage into more acceptable ends, like working to recall Pamela Price. I would love to live to see the day when Oakland, and America in general, admits the horrible mistake it made when it became temporarily infatuated with wokeism, when we return to the days when crime was low, criminals were punished swiftly, and police were respected and admired by citizens from all sides of the political spectrum.
Steve Heimoff