Pamela Price said “The healing process cannot begin until we do our due diligence.” An enigmatic statement! What “healing process” is Price talking about? She refers to the families of individuals who were shot by police, usually while resisting arrest. Of course, we all wish peace upon those grieving families. But progressives are always more concerned for criminals than they are with the greater innocent population who suffer at the hands of criminals.
We hear constantly about people whose homes have been broken into, or store owners whose livelihoods are at risk from looting, or friends who have been mugged or carjacked, or individuals who have been shot or murdered by insane gun fetishists, or—in the last resort—people so desperate for safety and security that they physically move out of Oakland. We feel great sorrow for these, our neighbors. There’s a form of PTSD rampant in Oakland: we live on edge these days, never knowing when or where “it” will strike. Going out at night is no longer an option for huge numbers of us. We’re seeing our shops close, our property values plunge, businesses (and jobs) leaving town, or refusing to move to Oakland, and our streets growing increasingly filthy, weird and hostile. This is the legacy of decades of “progressive” government in Oakland.
Price also tweeted yet another anti-cop smear in a post about the Tyre Nichols shooting: “Black men are still being murdered in the streets,” her implication being that police are slaughtering Black men left and right, 24/7. But who is really killing Black men? Not cops, but other Black men. By the thousands and thousands each year, Black men, usually gang members and/or involved in the illegal drug trade, are massacred by Black men. How many Black men were killed in 2021 by cops? According to the Washington Post, about 285 nationally. By contrast, in 2021 nearly 11,000 Black men were killed by guns. Assuming that, say, 10,000 of those were killed by other Black men in 2021, that means that Black men are killing each other at 35 times the rate of those killed by cops. So why is Pamela Price so upset about cops? Why doesn’t she rant and rail against Black-on-Black murder?
Then Price refers to “due diligence.” Normally, this legalistic term is used in sales transactions. What does Price mean by “due diligence”? One thing and one thing only: making life hard for the police, which she calls “accountability.” That Price, with her connections to Black radicals such as the Panthers, hates cops is indisputable. Everybody knows it, although it’s politically incorrect to say so. That Price is part of Cat Brooks’ “abolish the police” cult is obvious. That she’s the vanguard of a revolutionary movement meant to impose a fascist regime of racial grievance on us should be clear to anyone with a basic understanding of history, and especially of Hitler’s rise to power. (For progressives, cops are the new Jews.) I have no doubt that, eventually, Price will be revealed for who and what she really is, and will be deposed from office and embarrassed before History. But “There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip.” How much horror will the good people of Alameda County have to endure before a majority of voters rise up to demand safety?
You know what Price could do is she was really serious about “due diligence”? We’re told by authorities that most of the violent felonies in Oakland are committed by the same nefarious group of a few hundred misfits. Clearly, a lot of people in the community know who they are, but won’t talk, because they’ve been conditioned by people like Price, Fife and Brooks to hate the police. This makes Price, Fife and Brooks complicit in the murders. Why don’t we see Price, with her great position of authority, telling the community, every single day, “Please help us identify these sickos who are killing our people.”? Instead, Price encourages cop hatred, which, of course, empowers the real killers to continue to prey. Pamela Price’s twitter name is “PPriceCares.” But she doesn’t care about Black men being slaughtered.
I can’t warn people strongly enough of the menace these progressives pose to Oakland. There are many aspects of progressivism I believe in: a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion; LGBTQ rights; a scientific approach to climate change; a fairer, more equitable tax system; keeping religion, especially conservative Christianity, out of government. What I resent is that so-called “progressives” have hijacked the term to embrace a race-based con game that focuses on two things I loathe: a soft-on-crime mentality that refuses to affix the blame where it properly belongs: on criminals and the culture that breeds them; and the theft of wealth from the middle classes to those elements of the poor whom the Left approves of (which includes the criminals). There’s nothing “progressive” about that at all. It’s regressive, in that it puts us closer to a time when predation, and not law, ruled the world.
Ms. Price, wake up. Your job is to fight crime and prosecute criminals, not to coddle them and attack the police. Often I have to take a deep breath and center myself when I get too upset with these people. I remind myself that they’re in power only temporarily, that their ideology is so internally corrupt that their cult must eventually collapse, and that the future will be better once they’re gone. I take comfort in knowing that across America, race hustlers such as Price are repudiated, and for good reason. Sadly, Oakland and Alameda County seems to exist in their own bubble, immune to the logic of the greater society. Whether this will destroy us, or if our people will awaken for their own salvation, remains to be seen.
Steve Heimoff