Thao will do anything she can to keep OPD from arresting criminals. She doesn’t believe in prosecuting bad guys; she subscribes to Pamela Price’s Big Lie that our criminal justice system is so saturated with racism that it will never eliminate crime. So she’s out there throwing spaghetti against the wall, to see if anything sticks.
What does she think will stick? She’s resurrecting Operation Ceasefire. Thao claims that Ceasefire can reduce crime. So what is Ceasefire? It’s a feel-good program "focused on deterrence,” says Department of Violence Prevention Holly Joshi. “So we are identifying and focusing on the less than 1% of community members who are at the center of violence and driving gun violence in this city.” The theory is that if Oakland sends “counselors” to “work with” that 1%, they’ll see the light, abandon their nefarious ways, and lead productive, law-abiding lives.
Well, the theory sounds good. But the fact is that Ceasefire ended in 2019 because it didn’t work. It was a waste of time and money, as it has been everywhere it’s been tried. For example, the city of Baltimore attempted a Ceasefire operation, but it was “a failure,” according to the Baltimore Sun, and the program went “kaput.” A professor at Johns Hopkins, which is in Baltimore, explains that “problems” with the program included “Not targeting the right people [and] no real follow-through with delivering services to offenders, among other things.” Even Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh, who had pushed for the program, had to admit that Ceasefire “has not been successful” and that her city “must reassess its assets and resources to reach the laudable goals we all agree are important.”
Is anyone surprised that yet another program devised by leftist sociologists was a failure? And does anyone seriously believe that Oakland bureaucrats, who can’t even pave the streets properly, have the intelligence to make Ceasefire work the second time around? When the program was first implemented in Oakland, in 2012, they said it had three goals: “Reduce gang/group-related shootings and homicides,” “Decrease recidivism and incarceration rates of individuals,” and “Strengthen police-community relations.” Well, ask yourself if any of those goals has come anywhere near to being realized.
That old saying, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result,” is truer now than ever. By this definition, Sheng Thao is insane. There is only one way to end the scourge of crime in Oakland, and that is for the communities that hatch the most crime to completely change their moral and ethical values. As long as youths come of age in a culture that celebrates depravity, crime will continue to ravage Oakland. On some level, Sheng Thao must realize this. But she’s out there every day, throwing spaghetti at the wall, trying anything that might work except for the obvious: pushing for drastically more cops, working to defeat liberal judges, and using her bully pulpit to denounce sociopathic behavior. Of course, if she did those things, her paymaster, the Service Employees International Union, would abandon her. So Thao toes the SEIU line, the murders and robberies continue, and Oakland speeds up its death spiral.
Steve Heimoff