The Oakland Police Commission on Nov. 14 voted to establish an ad-hoc committee for “reviewing and assessing policies and practices related to handcuffing within the Oakland Police Department.” The Commission did not explain why they chose to review this topic at this time. No public comments were taken before their vote, nor was OPD notified beforehand what sorts of changes the Commission might be considering or when further hearings will be held.
All of which leads me to make some inferences.
It seems clear that this move is just the latest effort by the Police Commission to intrude into the department’s business and further stymie it. “What haven’t we investigated yet? Handcuffs? Excellent!” The Commission’s anti-police bias has long been notorious. As I was told by a former commissioner, the Police Commission is stacked with individuals who harbor grudges against cops, who consort with professional police defunders, and who believe that because they’re on a “police commission” their task is to find stuff to oversee, which means—like the McCarthyite Communist hunters of old—they find “corruption,” “misconduct” and “abuse of power” everywhere they look.
They’re now about to find it in OPD’s use of the most elemental form of criminal control ever devised: the handcuff.
Here’s how William Bratton, the former Los Angeles Police Chief, described “the principle reason for handcuffing an arrestee. [It] is to maintain control of the individual and to minimize the possibility of a situation escalating to a point that would necessitate using a higher level of force or restraint.”
Police critics are always complaining that cops are brutal sadists who routinely use far greater force than necessary in order to subdue uncooperative arrestees. You’d think, therefore, that these critics would welcome the handcuff as a safe, humane way of controlling suspects, who may violently resist being detained and pose a lethal threat to officers.
But an examination of past attitudes of police critics in Oakland suggests that they’ve long eyed handcuffing as problematic. For example, check out this Police Commission document referencing a 2017 study from the Community Police Review Agency, the secretive, little-known arm of the Police Commission that investigates police misconduct: “The use of handcuffs and other restraints is intrusive and can impact the community’s trust in the police. As courts put it, the use of handcuffs ‘substantially aggravates the intrusiveness of an otherwise routine investigatory detention and is not part of a typical Terry (investigative) stop.’ The application of restraints shall never be considered a part of standard operating procedure.”
Inherent in this statement are some assumptions, entirely arbitrary, unproved and illogical, that defund-the-police activists actually believe:
- that handcuffing is “intrusive.” Of course it is! Preventing an arrestee from becoming violent, or from escaping, obviously requires intrusion into his behavior.
- that handcuffing “impacts the community’s trust in police.” Who is this “community”? Not mine, and not, I think, yours. Nobody I know objects to handcuffing. Once again, we see defund-the-police types postulating some mythical “community” when in fact they refer only to themselves and to the radicals with whom they associate.
This is the sort of thinking that infects the Police Commission and makes all its actions suspect. Citizens should be alarmed by this unnecessary and refractory decision. Handcuffing is clearly needed in arrest situations to protect victims, officers and suspects during moments when testosterone is running high and the possibility for violence exists. But, as we’ve seen in the Police Commission’s similar criticism of police chases, stop-and-frisk, sideshow enforcement, BART fare enforcement policies, arresting shoplifters, and other “intrusive” police action, commissioners are bound and determined to emasculate OPD.
I’ve long wondered why this anti-police bias exists as persistently as it does in Oakland. It makes no sense. The main victims of crime in Oakland are people of color: they’re the first ones to cry out for more police protection. And yet, year after year, the “community” elects politicians who try to cripple the police. How are we to explain this? I confess that I can’t. These progressive voters just re-elected Carroll Fife, and sent Nikki Bas to the Board of Supervisors. The inmates are running the asylum. Evidently things have to get worse before they begin to get better.
Steve Heimoff