One insight the public could have a better understanding of is how extensive the anti-police network is in Oakland. We talk, accurately, about the City Council and people like Carroll Fife trying to ruin the Oakland Police Department. But the truth is that, behind them, there’s a powerful matrix of organizations that hate cops and have been working for years to drastically cut, if not eliminate, OPD’s budget, shut down the jails and free the inmates so they can prey upon us.
This matrix is the engine behind Fife, Cat Brooks, Sheng Thao, Pamela Price, and the rest of their gang. They are why our work at the Coalition for a Better Oakland is so hard. We’re up against an entrenched, well-funded, radicalized opposition, determined in its hatred of police, un-educable, and skilled at propaganda. This matrix fundamentally created and now owns the City Council and the Alameda County District Attorney.
Who comprises this matrix? At the top of the list, I place Pamela Price, who already, after just a week as Alameda County District Attorney, is starting to do the damage many of us predicted. After staffing her office with some of the most revanchist police haters in the county, she feels she has a free hand to wreak havoc with public safety. In a recent interview, she calls this a “transition process,” and promises that the District Attorney’s office will from now on be “very, very different” from what it has been in the past. In other words, she’ll be going after cops instead of criminals.
But Price could not have achieved her high office without the aid of the radicalized nonprofit organizations she represents. Here are some of them. Many have members with links to the Black Panthers. Most are concerned with shutting down the jails (“decarceration”), with persecuting cops (“police accountability”), and with transferring public funds to the Black community (“economic justice”).
Ella Baker Center for Human Rights
Care First Community Coalition
Interfaith Coalition for Justice in Our Jails
Coalition for Police Accountability
If you examine the agendas of these groups, there’s remarkable overlap. They want to:
-End what they call “mass incarceration”
-Close Santa Rita Jail and release all prisoners
-End criminal charges against youths
-End gang injunctions
-Defund or abolish the Oakland Police Department
-Arrest more cops for doing their jobs (“police accountability”)
-Make police personnel records open to the public (“transparency”)
-End cops’ ability to defend themselves in violent situations
-Give reparations and other transferences of wealth to Black people
-“Monitor” the Oakland Police Commission so that they’re even more harsh on OPD than they already are
Most of these groups use hyperbolic language in order to stir up their followers: “police brutality,” “blatant murder of community members,” “vicious beatings and abuse by police,” “fighting for police accountability,” etc.
Many of them hide behind Christian facades that are merely Trojan horses for advancing pro-criminal, anti-cop agendas.
None of them ever criticize Black-on-Black murder, or call upon Black youth to stop joining gangs, fetishing guns, and resorting to violence.
These are the people responsible for Oakland’s current state. They now have more power than ever before, and are intent on using—and abusing—it. Their weathervane is DA Price. Here’s her first misstep, the case of little Michaela Garecht, a nine-year old who was murdered in Hayward in 1988. Those of us who’ve lived in Oakland for decades have been waiting for the authorities to find Michaela’s killer. They finally did—a guy who previously had murdered two other women. But once the case landed in Pamela Price’s lap, the DA decided to go soft on the murderer.
This case will be followed by many others unless we stop her. To the extent Price is able to get away with coddling criminals, all of the radicalized groups will feel emboldened. So keep your eyes on her. Get ready to mobilize against her. Even if you voted for her, please understand the grave peril she and her colleagues pose to the safety and security of all Oaklanders. Maybe when you or a loved one is mugged or your apartment robbed, you’ll join us.
Steve Heimoff