I sincerely hope Pamela Price is not under the illusion that she has a mandate to usher in a “new era of change and reform in Alameda County” when it comes to policing and crime.
Her ten-point program frankly disturbs me, and I think it should disturb you too. Overall, it’s nothing more than an indictment of cops, DAs and judges—in other words, the public servants responsible for keeping us safe. If you’re familiar with the progressives’ tired old tropes—see, for example, almost anything Cat Brooks or Carroll Fife have said—what you’ll find in Price is not only more of the same, but more of the same on steroids.
Here are the tedious accusations of “racially-based policing” and accusations that “District Attorneys [such as Nancy O’Malley] have been chiefly responsible for creating and increasing the system of mass incarceration through their outdated policies and practices.” Price never addresses the question of who is committing all these crimes; indeed, she shies away from it because the facts are embarrassing. Instead, she wants, like Cat Brooks, to decarcerate the prisons, and this she plans to accomplish by “reduc[ing] some nonviolent offenses from felonies to misdemeanors.” (One is reminded of the new law that makes shoplifting de facto legal.) What other crimes will now become unpunishable misdemeanors? Price also would ban charging youths as adults. Will that make the surviving family members of a person slain by a 15-year old feel any better, or make Oakland safer? Obviously not, but it’s part and parcel of the progressive insistence on normalizing crime.
Price promises also to “create a “Police Accountability Unit…that will vigorously and transparently investigate and prosecute all unlawful police misconduct. This unit will review all cases officer involved killings in the past 10 years to identify any cases where prosecution may be warranted.” Great, just what we need: another layer of government bureaucracy to harass police departments. Don’t we have enough? Cops can’t even flush a toilet with someone investigating them. But Price ran on being tough on cops, and she has to deliver something to her far-left, cop-hating voters. Hence, a new front in the War on Police.
Honestly, Price’s “solutions” to public safety are laughable; they sound like something out of a Saturday Night Live skit. Let’s end money bail, she argues, because “People of color are disproportionately held in custody due to their inability to post bail.” It never occurs to Price that people who don’t break the law don’t have to worry about posting bail because they’ll never be in custody. Price alleges that there must be racial bias in the arrest statistics: “While Black people are less than 13% of the County, we make up 64% of the jail population, are 20 times more likely to be incarcerated than our white counterparts, and make up 50% of the adults on probation.” Could this be because of racial disparities in the commission of crimes? Price has no answer. Instead, she blames “the over-criminalization of poverty” as the reason why so many people of color are behind bars. This clearly implies that it’s okay for poor people to break the law, for example by shoplifting, or holding up a store, or stealing some old lady’s purse.
The motives behind people like Price are admirable, I suppose: a more just society. But the reasoning is crazy. Everybody wants to live in a city where there’s no crime, where we don’t need police because everyone behaves morally, where teenagers are free to play ball or hang out in safety and peace and don’t feel the need to sideshow or have guns. Such a city may exist in Heaven: it certainly doesn’t exist in Alameda County. I’m afraid we’re going to have to endure some rough years while Price serves out her regime and seeks to revolutionize a criminal justice system that, really, could be brought into harmony by the simple expedient of all the citizens of Alameda County obeying the law.
Steve Heimoff