Readers of this column know that I think Oakland’s MACRO program is a joke. The city’s website claims that “MACRO's goal is to reduce responses by emergency services (Fire & Police), resulting in increased access to community-based services and resources for impacted individuals and families, and most especially for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC).” That sounds ambitious, but the only MACRO units I’ve ever seen deployed (and I live in downtown/uptown where there are a lot of homeless people and drug addicts) have been a few vehicles cruising around. Once I saw two MACRO people offer a bottle of water to a homeless person who was living in a bus stop.
When MACRO was created, in 2022, the city said its desired outcomes included
(1) Decreased negative outcomes from law enforcement response to nonviolent 911 emergency calls, especially among Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC);
(2) Increased connections to community-based services for people in crisis, especially among Black, Indigenous, and People of Color;
(3) Redirection of MACRO-identified 911 calls to an alternative community response system;
(4) Reduced Oakland Police Department & Oakland Fire Department expenses and call volume related to 911 nonviolent calls involving people with behavioral health, substance use, and unsheltered individuals.
So how’s MACRO doing? Not very well. “Nearly 18 months after its launch,” reports Oakland North, “the efficacy of a civilian unit [MACRO] in Oakland designed to handle certain non-violent 911 calls remains unclear.” MACRO employees are handling increasingly fewer individuals—in March the count was 1,397 but by July it had plunged to 455. (More recent figures aren’t available. And keep in mind these statistics are merely reported contacts by MACRO employees. They may consist of nothing more than asking “Would you like some water?”) MACRO’s manager blames the reason for his disappointing results on undefined “staffing and training issues”; even a MACRO Board member called the program “dysfunctional.” The program still doesn’t even have a dedicated phone number.
The public isn’t allowed to go to MACRO meetings because the Board won’t allow them, which makes MACRO unaccountable to the taxpayers who fund it. MACRO is, in short, a secretive, non-transparent social program that seems to be chaotic and ineffective.
San Francisco has a similar program, the San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team (SFHOT), a $50 million a year effort that makes nearly identical claims to those of MACRO. And how’s that doing? “Failing,” says an official city audit of SFHOT, released earlier this week. The audit “found parts of the system to be dysfunctional and disorganized.” Its goals and data collection efforts “fail to meet expectations.” The program suffers from “a lack of coordination, planning and oversight,” and even though SFHOT expanded the number of street teams in 2020, that effort was “without a corresponding increase in capacity.” The biggest program, the audit stated, was a near-complete “lack of oversight,” making it “currently impossible to see meaningful customer results.”
Well, MACRO, meet your doppleganger across the Bay, SFHOT.
None of these findings should surprise anyone. The truth is, the only reason these programs—including so-called “violence prevention” programs—exist is because progressive city council and Board of Supervisor members who hate the police have lied to the public for years. These progressives (the same ones behind the “defund the police” movement) can’t come right out and say they want to abolish the police, because their constituents would rightly ask, “So who would protect us from crime?” So they’ve invented these whackjob programs that defund the police, in effect, by transferring money away from them, to these schemes that people like Sheng Thao claim will make us all safer. And when we, the public, ask how long it will take SFHOT or MACRO to actually start working, we’re told, “These things take time. Be patient.”
It’s such a scam. The wokes always ask for more time for their crazy schemes to work. Pamela Price is saying the same thing: give her a few more years.
Look, we’re sick and tired of excuses. These nutty intervention programs are a waste of money. I’d like to see some investigative reporting on who’s hired to run these outreach teams; what are their financial connections to elected leaders? Who’s scratching whose back? The whole thing seems sketchy. I’m not saying it’s not nice when city employees drive around all day looking for homeless people to give water to—but that is not going to have the slightest impact on Oakland’s real problems. I’d like to see the $16 million plowed into MACRO to be reinvested in the Oakland Police Department. And I’d like to see the zombies and gangsters who infect our streets taken away, either to jail or to mental hospitals. Isn’t it time to demand that our electeds actually protect us?
Have a great weekend. Back on Monday.
Steve Heimoff