We here at the Coalition are extremely curious about MACRO, the Mobile Assistance Community Responders of Oakland program by which “local community members who have been trained in crisis intervention and de-escalation” will respond to “quality of life” emergency calls, such as disorderly or disoriented people wandering the streets, drunken or drugged ranters, aggressive panhandling, family disputes, people who refuse to leave a premise, someone walking in traffic, and all the other non-emergency behaviors we unfortunately see every day in Oakland. Currently, of course, the only recourse a citizen has is to call 9-1-1 and hope a police officer shows up.
MACRO was dreamed up in the summer of 2019 by a coalition of nonprofit groups; it was especially adopted by City Council members Noel Gallo and Rebecca Kaplan. In the summer of 2020, two MACRO pilot programs were launched, in East and West Oakland. Earlier this year, the powers-that-be decided that “MACRO would be piloted from within the Oakland Fire Department.”
I know people who are convinced that MACRO is a scam and will prove to be a disaster. They see the distinct possibilities of slush funds of money with no accountability, of highly-suspect reporting measures, and incompetent “interveners” being called to situations with which they are utterly unprepared to cope. Then, too, anecdotes abound of the Oakland Fire Department being less than thrilled with being handed this new responsibility, which is not something they wanted.
I mentioned Rebecca Kaplan, who in addition to being the Councilmember-at-large is also Oakland’s vice mayor. She raised an interesting point yesterday on Twitter: “it’s important to have [MACRO] jobs people can be sustained in,” she wrote, in a kind of “you get what you pay for” argument. If you examine the latest hourly wages that Oakland has promised to pay the MACRO “street teams,” they’re pretty high; for example, Community Intervention Specialists and Emergency Medical Technicians get between $31.61 and $38.81 an hour. (These hourly wages were actually increased by the city by about 9 percent earlier this month, after city unions got involved in the negotiations.)
We don’t yet know the number of employees who ultimately will be on the payroll, although the number 43 has been touted. It’s also unclear how much MACRO will cost when fully implemented, although some reports project a budget of $8.5 million “if fully staffed.” We also don’t know where the money will come from. As Kaplan’s tweet suggests, it’s likely that some progressives will demand ever-higher hourly wages, a demand the City Council may find itself ill-prepared to resist, especially given that the people of Oakland are insisting on greater funding for OPD.
What’s even more unclear is whether MACRO will work. Its most ardent fans, such as Kaplan, promise that it will. “By providing civilian responders, we can save money and save lives,” she said last month. But let’s assume that MACRO does have 43 fulltime employees. The working day has three shifts, meaning that at any given time, there will be only 14.3 MACRO people available for the entire city. That could be enough; on the other hand, it might be woefully inadequate. Also unknown—and a huge worry among cops and EMTs alike—is what will happen if a MACRO street team encounters someone who suddenly becomes violent and dangerous, as seems inevitable. What are they supposed to do?
An additional problem is that many egregious crimes that Oaklanders hate apparently will not be addressed by MACRO. These include shoplifting, vandalism (especially downtown), noise caused by loud music, and dirt bike or motorcycle rallies that disrupt life and traffic at Lake Merritt on weekends.
Another outstanding question—one I personally worry about the most—is MACRO oversight. Who watches the foxes while they’re guarding the chickenhouse? The radical leftist Cat Brooks, whose Anti Police-Terror Project website drones on about “police terror” (but never about criminal terror) and who purports to speak for “the community” (whoever that is), is insisting that the City Council create a “community oversight board for MACRO.” While that makes sense (we don’t want those millions of dollars to go to shifty, shady places), it’s terrifying to think that Brooks, whose connections to council members like Kaplan and Fife are extensive but largely hidden, will manipulate things so that she and her surrogates get to essentially run a brand-new city program with a huge and growing budget. The potential for fraud and abuse, in my opinion, is great.
Maybe I’m just a worrier. Maybe MACRO will turn out just fine. I’m a positive person who tends to be optimistic about things. Still, with everything I know about how Oakland works, if I were a betting man, I’d wager that MACRO is going to be consumed in controversy, and in a year Oaklanders will be up in arms about funding a program that simply isn’t working.
Steve Heimoff