Sometimes I write this blog because I feel very strongly about something and I want to share it with friends. But sometimes, I write because I don’t know what I feel, and writing can clarify my thoughts.
This post is of the latter variety.
I was shopping at Whole Foods the other day when I heard a loud commotion. It was a crazy, disheveled woman, hurling curses at the top of her lungs and carrying as many grocery items as she could hold. After she left, I asked a security guard if she had paid for the groceries, and he said No. She did this every day, he said, and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it; if he got involved in any way, he’d be fired.
This made me very angry. That woman was a drag. She was upsetting all the customers and completely disrespectful of all decent standards. She’s exactly what’s wrong with Oakland. There are too many of her kind. She’s why the city is dying (of course, the City Council also is culpable), why people don’t want to live here, and why stores—including possibly Whole Foods—are closing.
My reaction was well expressed by a letter to the editor in yesterday’s Chronicle. The writer, a man, wrote, concerning retail shoplifting, “It’s time to bring the hammer down and make people responsible for their actions.”
Exactly.
But the more I thought about it, the more another stream of thoughts arose. The woman was obviously hungry. She was obviously mentally ill, possibly on drugs. She had hit the lowest rung of human existence. No doubt she felt she had no choice but to steal her food, and her angry, vulgar screaming was directed at everyone in the store who looked at her with disapproval—which was pretty much everyone in the store. How, exactly, are we to “bring the hammer down” on her?
I wrack my brain. We have Gov. Newsom’s CARE Court, but I don’t suppose anyone actually believes it will help. We have 5150 laws but they’re seldom imposed. We have a police force, but they won’t, or can’t, get involved. Meanwhile, we have a huge number of “progressive” electeds who feel their job is to protect people like the shoplifter woman, which is to say they don’t believe their job is to protect stores or the general public. This is as stalemated a situation as I’ve ever seen in my life and it’s likely to get worse. So what to do?
It would be easy to simply not make a decision. That’s what most of us do: kick the can down the road and hope things get better. But experience has taught us that procrastinating does not result in things getting better but in things getting worse. Anything’s possible, of course. Crime may start to tick down and stay there. Oakland may recover. Historians may eventually decide that the pandemic had an awful effect on Oakland, but the effect was only temporary, and then we bounced back from the brink.
Or maybe not. The two sides of me wrestle all the time, but the reality is that we have to make decisions. That’s where conscious choice, not emotions, comes in. And, in writing these words, I’ve clarified my thinking. I’ve decided that we do have to do something radical about this shoplifting problem, which is emblematic of the greater crime problem. For me, bringing the hammer down means changing the approach we bring to crime in Oakland. Rationally, there’s no reason store security guards shouldn’t be allowed to stop shoplifters. Whole Foods’ corporate ownership may rule otherwise, but that doesn’t make them right, just fearful of litigation. The ACLU may claim that shoplifters have rights, but that’s bunk, and I think we all know it. The Oakland City Council may decline to allow cops to actually protect stores, but all they’re doing is driving retail out of town. We do have to figure out what exactly is “the hammer” and how exactly to “bring it down.” But one thing is for sure: if we don’t make people responsible for their actions, the life of our city is at risk—as we’ve seen. I say this, not as a Trumper, but precisely because I want to avoid his being re-elected. If the Democratic Party can’t figure out a way to fight crime, he may well be.
If I were on the City Council, I’d make it my top priority to stop people like the Whole Foods shoplifter and make sure she couldn’t do it again. That there would be enormous obstacles in the way is certain. But I’d fight against those obstacles, always keeping in mind the goal: to make Oakland once again safe and clean.
Steve Heimoff