We’re all hoping we can recall Madame D.A., and I think we will. But we have to realize this: Recalling Price will do nothing to immediately reduce crime. Sure, it will make us all feel good. And it will give us hope that, after going off the rails, Oakland can begin to get back on the track of a normal city.
But if you’re hoping recalling Price will be the panacea for our pains, I assure you it will not. There are other things we’re going to have to do, starting with greatly increasing the number of cops. I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating: former OPD Chief LeRonne Armstrong, a good man and a great chief, who was unjustly and corruptly fired by Sheng Thao, has told us that OPD needs between 1,100 and 1,200 fulltime sworn officers in order to begin to tackle our epidemic of crime. In order to reach that level of policing, we have to do two things: (1) kick out the cop haters on the City Council, which is responsible for funding OPD. Until we get rid of the likes of Carroll Fife, Rebecca Kaplan, Nikki Bas and Dan Kalb—the worst of the worst—we’ll never be able to dig ourselves out of the hole they deliberately threw us into.
Then, (2) we have to find the money for all those new cops. It will cost in the tens of millions of dollars, but there are places we can get it without raising taxes. For one, we can stop funding all these stupid, pointless anti-violence schemes. Most of them are nothing more than false fronts—in other words, opportunities for bureaucrats, both elected and appointed, to funnel money to their friends and relatives, the way Price hired her boyfriend. These programs have nothing to do with you, or me, or true public safety; they’re fictional B.S., and their promoters, like Fife and Thao, depend on most of us having no ability to penetrate their opaqueness to know anything about them. We have no way of holding them accountable. We have no way of knowing what they’re actually doing. What the bureaucrats do, every day in their illicit Potemkin villages, is fill out forms that purport to prove that they made, for example, 1,272 contacts in the month of June, or prevented violence in 719 separate incidents. What does that even mean? Are you willing to take the word of somebody who’s paid by some anti-violence program, someone whose politics are probably way to the left of yours, somebody who’s willing to fabricate a number so they can look good to their boss, who in turn is fabricating numbers to look good to her boss, who is…and so on, up the greasy pole to Sheng Thao.
We then have to abolish the Police Commission. That star chamber was formed at a time when mistrust of the police was at an all-time high due to the propaganda of the anti-police, pro-crime complex, which consists of agitators such as Cat Brooks and woke media outlets such as KQED, the San Francisco Chronicle and Oaklandside, who conspire to put out false information and repeat it over and over again, in such a way as to appeal to the collective guilt of gullible White people, who naively believe the lie that the mere fact of their skin color makes them racists.
There’s one final thing we have to do: and that is the hardest. We have to understand all the reasons the police feel intimidated from doing their jobs, and eliminate those reasons and let cops know there’s a new sheriff in town. Cops need to know they can actually go out and arrest perps and use physical force to do it. Right now, cops are afraid of being the next cop indicted by Pamela Price and sued by ambulance chasers like John Burris. They’re literally terrified of doing their jobs. Every time they get called to an incident, they pray to God, “Please don’t let me be the next Johannes Mehserle.”
Because it can happen like that, in the snap of a finger: You’re doing your job to protect the public and the next thing know, Pamela Price, with her lifelong hatred of law enforcement, has your life in her clutches. KQED, the Chronicle and Oaklandside are demanding your scalp; the lesser news outlets repeat their lies. And you’re screwed.
So we have to root out all these reasons why cops are afraid to do their jobs. We have to unshackle the police, take the handcuffs off, and let them know we have their backs. If they have to use force, use it, and don’t be afraid, because one thing is for sure: the thugs aren’t afraid to use force against them. We have to let our cops know we will not allow anything or anyone to hassle them. If a cop shoots someone in self-defense, that cop must not be prosecuted, and we need to pass laws that mandate that families of shooting victims who threaten cops are not allowed to hire the likes of John Burris in a civil case if the cop has not been found guilty in a criminal case. If anything, the families should be held accountable for being complicit.
All this is going to require an immense restructuring, not just of our laws, but of our attitude toward those laws, toward police and toward criminals. This is our work. And believe me, recalling Pamela Price is just Day One of the long march to recover our civilization. Please be prepared to get active in the Price recall; you can’t just sit in front of your T.V. or read this blog and hope someone else does the work. It’s up to you, and me, and everyone else. Otherwise—and this is a warning—it won’t get done.
Steve Heimoff