If there’s any good news in reports that Oakland will have a budget deficit of $350 million over the next two years, it’s this: Thao says that she’s freezing hiring in the Department of Violence Prevention.
Readers of this blog will agree, I suspect, that the DVP is a joke. It was a smokescreen to cover up defunding the Oakland Police Department using the lame excuse of “violence prevention.” Radical City Council members created and endorsed this gimcrack notion, and sold it to credulous voters. Of course it makes more sense to prevent crime than to prosecute it! Therefore (went the woke reasoning), let us prevent crime by magically creating something called the Department of Violence Prevention. Let us then sink millions into it. Let us hire our friends and cronies to manage and staff it. Let us then manufacture statistics showing how many crimes the DVP prevented, and let our friends in the media publish our claims, which will further bamboozle the public. Let us defund OPD again, and again, and again, and make the claim that, if having a police department worked in reality, Oakland wouldn’t have our level of crime! Ergo, the more crime there is, the more it proves that OPD is ineffective, which justifies defunding them even more. Let us expand DVP into a major city bureaucracy, and if crime continues to spiral, let us tell people that it takes time to effectively prevent crime. It took us decades to get into this crime mess; it will take us decades to get out of it. Meanwhile, keep the faith! The Department of Violence Prevention will start to work one of these days! Keep hope alive!
Well, that was the fantasy, the con that the wokes sold us. Only problem is, it ran into the brick wall of reality. Oakland’s budget deficit isn’t entirely the fault of the woke city government, but it is in large part. That government failed to address crime for years. Instead, it tolerated crime, even encouraged it by failing to get tough with criminals and by electing pro-crime hustlers like Carroll Fife and Nikki Bas and a District Attorney like Pamela Price. Word goes out on the street: “It’s okay to pillage homes. Even in the Hills. Doesn’t matter if the crime is caught on camera, because PoPo will never come after you, and even if they do, the new D.A. has your back.” So the criminals are emboldened, and when the people cry out, “Protect us!”, the City Council responds, “Help is on the way! The Department of Violence Prevention is coming!”
But it isn’t coming. DVP didn’t prevent anything. Instead, the department has imploded. Its director, Guillermo Cespedes, quit last month “amid a continuing spike in gun violence.” Just a few months ago, Thao promised to invest more in DVP as part of her plan to “hit the ground running.” It was time, she said, to “double down on the violence prevention programs.”
Instead, she’s been forced to eat her words. The Mayor who would say anything to get elected actually has to govern this dysfunctional city. When she got elected, she said how much she liked Chief Armstrong. She lied about that, too: she liked him so much she fired him, at the instigation, I believe, and much to the pleasure of Fife and Cat Brooks. It’s time to admit we have an intellectually challenged, weak mayor, a tool of the wokes, who doesn’t have a clue about what Oakland really needs. She’s in way over her head, and we should recall her before she can do any more damage.
Steve Heimoff