Early this spring, a seven-year-old Oakland girl watched in terror as four armed men tied her parents, beat the bound father bloody, tore jewelry from the mother’s wrists, ransacked the house and stole their life savings – all the while pointing a gun at the 7-year-old, warning all of them that if anything went wrong, the child would be the first to die.
Extreme, but hardly a freak occurrence. On April 9 came this release from OPD:
OPD Investigating Violent Crime Spree as Three People are Killed In 24 Hours
On Thursday, the Oakland Police Department (OPD) investigated 32 robberies within 24 hours. These crimes varied from armed robberies to carjackings citywide. In multiple cases, individuals used the stolen vehicles to commit additional robberies.
Now, in the midst of the worst crime wave of this century, a small group of Xtremely woke Oakland activists has somehow gained the ear of City Hall, claiming the answer to crime is trimming the police force -- which they condemn for “over-policing” the City of Oakland.
“Over-policing” implies lots of police officers patrolling constantly, such that you would see them frequently, even obnoxiously. Is that your experience?
The fact is that Oakland’s budget authorizes a force of 786 sworn police officers. We have 717.
The short-handed force keeps it together the best they can with costly (and unhealthy) amounts of overtime, and constant shuffling of people from job to job. The City has shut down such operations as traffic enforcement, and shrunk the gang violence unit. They have even raided the community resource officers that voters agreed to fund in 2004 by approving Measure Y, a new tax to pay for a direct citizen voice in policing priorities. We aren’t getting what we paid for, and the cops don’t like it either. Sources inside the department tell CBO that morale is at a dangerously low ebb. Attrition keeps hacking away at an already short roster. There are other law enforcement agencies hiring right now, most of them outfits with a lot less drama than in this overly political situation.
Is Mayor Schaaf’s force size, 717 officers, the right number? The FBI says that 842 is the average size of a metro police force, but the Bureau cautions that that figure is only an average. It is not to be construed as a recommended staff size. After all, the Bureau points out, conditions vary. Unusually tranquil cities quite properly have smaller than average forces, like ours. But does that really sound to you like a fair description of Oakland?
You get better (yet more troubling) comparability if you sort cities by violent crime rate. Places with the homicide, robbery and aggravated assault numbers faced by OPD have a force size that averages 1,805, per FBI data.
So how do we manage with just 717, and dropping? Not very well, it turns out.
Back to FBI statistics where we come upon a telling metric called the “Clearance Rate” -- the fraction of criminal investigations that lead to both an arrest AND charges filed by the D.A. The average big city police department clears 39.0% of all violent crimes. Oakland’s clearance rate for violent crime is 17.3%. The big city average for burglary clearance is 10.0%. Our number is 1.7%. For other clearance rate comparisons. see chart. It would appear that with fewer people, less gets done.
Surveys of Oakland residents show sympathy for the Defund movement’s anger over police brutality. But the same polls also show support for more police officers on the streets of Oakland. This suggests that while taxpayers strongly favor social justice, they feel just as strongly about criminal justice. That’s the uniform judgment recorded across the demographic spectrum. Black and white, poor and wealthy – all Oakland neighborhoods feel short changed on police protection.
The Defund movement began in reaction to the shameful killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last May. Within days that city’s panic-stricken city council voted to “abolish” (their word) the Minneapolis police department, touching off a brief wave of copy-cat gestures in many cities.
Seattle, for one, was quickly awash in the civil disturbances that had started in Minneapolis. Seattle even reached the point where an entire district of the city was occupied by protesters who barred any city agents from entering. As part of a peace treaty, the city government settled with its occupiers by pledging to cut the police budget by 50%.
Both cities have since rescinded those unworkable promises. In the national urban crime wave that came in the wake of last summer’s burning and looting, public interest in “shrinking the police footprint” has given way to a more urgent demand to shrink the criminal footprint. That happens when too many innocent residents gaze into the barrel of a robber’s gun. Ask around. Know any CVS clerks?
Long before the George Floyd killing, Oakland had already adopted a stringent policy constraining police officer use of force. It is a very rare event. The last suspect killed by an Oakland police officer was in April of 2020 when a man left his beaten female companion for dead by the roadside, fled by car, later ramming an approaching police cruiser before jumping out, gun in hand. You decide. I would take the shot. Both cops were taken to the hospital, one with a leg broken in two places. But OPD investigates such events with great intensity. It might surprise you to know that under our city’s policy, any officer who so much as touches a recalcitrant person is liable to be investigated for improper use of force.
Oakland’s City Council, notably short on management experience, (compensated for with a ton and a half of self-regard) avoided the instant commitments that got Minneapolis and Seattle into trouble. Instead, Oakland policy makers set a goal of cutting the police budget in half, leaving all details to a posse of 17 political appointees. It was named the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force. They, in turn, were urged to recruit advisors from the community, people with thoughts on how urban policing might be modernized. The task force empaneled 140 such advise givers.
And so, 157 people set out to reinvent public safety in a city where armed robbery was just then soaring from a comparative rarity to an hourly occurrence. The task force members all spoke of being moved by the revolutionary rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement. But actual police experience was scant. Not a single member of the Oakland Police Department was invited to offer advice. For professional policing input the task force went instead to a retired deputy chief, a man best known for his command role during the discredited Riders program back in the George W. Bush years. As architects of contemporary law enforcement, the Reimagineers were in way over their heads – however well-meaning.
The political honesty of the venture, however, is questionable. At one point, as the City Council was holding public hearings on some task force ideas, Mr. Ryan Lester, a member of the task force Budget Data and Analysis Advisory Board, spoke up, revealing that he saw problems with the proposal. The impudent Mr. Lester was soon thereafter canceled in a hurried vote and exiled from the project, both his person and his questions gone at the crack of an angry gavel. A deliberative process it was not.
Nor was it terribly scrupulous at avoiding conflict of interest tangles. Many of those participating and voting on the police force of the future represent organizations that stand to benefit in windfall fashion if the stated goal – redistributing $200 million per year in policing funds among social service providers – were actually implemented.
Much of the Reimagining recommendation list amounts to micromanagement of OPD in ways just marginally relevant to crime fighting. Feeding the poor, better housing, city jobs for people of color – all worthy goals but not usually considered the job of police departments.
One suggestion, however, appears to have real merit. The program, borrowed from the City of Eugene, Oregon and taken quite seriously by experts in criminology nationwide, is called Cahoots. The version being proposed for Oakland by the task force has been renamed MACRO. Both versions build on the observation that many calls for police assistance are small-bore stuff, not really requiring a trained and armed law enforcement officer. Many calls (most calls, the task force seems to think) seek help managing inebriated, drug-addled, emotionally troubled or otherwise disorderly people who, in any event, are basically harmless. Instead of police officers, we might send trained social workers or mental health professionals to refer disruptive people for mental health services. There may well be something worthwhile in this new approach.
The cops think there is. They are not against new ways of doing things. They welcome the help. The Oakland Police Officers Association, the cops’ union, gave MACRO its full-throated endorsement, calling for “immediate implementation” back in March. Police know a crisis when they see one, and, as usual, they have taken action up to their pay grade.
Now, also per usual, they must wait for the higher-ups to study every ramification. You can’t be too cautious – not with elections right around the corner. And make no mistake -- crime and homeless camp policies will decide the next city election. Too many people have heard the gunshots for City Hall to shine us on any longer.
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CRIME CLEARANCE RATES
TOTAL VIOLENT CRIME
All cities – 45.6%
Big cities – 39.0%
Oakland - 17.3%
MURDER/MANSLAUGHTER
All cities – 81.6%
Big cities – 59.6%
Oakland - 47.1%
RAPE
All cities – 34.5%
Big cities – 33.6%
Oakland - 11.9%
ROBBERY
All cities – 29.7%
Big cities – 26.5%
Oakland - 18.1%
AGGRAVATED ASSAULT
All cities – 53.3%
Big cities – 46.0%
Oakland -- l6.2%
TOTAL PROPERTY CRIME
All cities – 17.6%
Big cities – 11.9%
Oakland - 1.2%
BURGLARY
All cities – 13.5%
Big cities – 10.0%
Oakland - 1.7%
MOTOR VEHICLE THEFT
All cities – 13.7%
Big cities – 19.0%
Oakland - 1.7%
ARSON
All cities – 21.7%
Big cities – 9.2%
Oakland 2.6%