I want to acquaint you with two official Oakland bureaucracies that were created to hassle and stymie the Oakland Police Department by defunding cops and coddling criminals and in general making public safety harder to achieve.
We already know about the Police Commission, that body of incompetent political cronies that every day tries to reduce the effectiveness of our cops, in the name of “equity.” We already know of the ruinous Oakland City Council, whose members come and go but which remains hostile to OPD and eternally attempts to defund it. But here are two lesser-known organizations that are all part of the cabal to wreck OPD and make Oakland Safe For Criminals Again.
The Coalition for Police Accountability (CPA) is a private nonprofit composed of far-left police haters, including unions who support woke politicians (SEIU, in particular). CPA is notoriously secretive about its funding. We don’t really know where their money comes from, but the ties between CPA and Oakland government, especially the Department of Violence Prevention and the so-called MACRO program, are extensive. There’s often no clear line between CPA and official Oakland government, making transparency difficult and accountability impossible.
Concerning their funding, the closest we can get to determining who pays CPA is this note on their website: “CPA gratefully acknowledges support from Sociological Initiatives Foundation and the Unitarian Universalist Fund for a Just Society.” The former, SIF, is one of those bastions of the liberal university-leftwing activist complex that so dominates the intersection of academia, philanthropy, government and corporate HR programs—the very culprits that hatched up DEI and tried to foist it on the American people.
SIF describes its mission as “to foster social change by funding projects that reflect a partnership between academia and community-based organizations that seek to create a more just and equitable society by defending and protecting people against powerful political, economic and other interests that undermine and impede the eradication of social injustices, discrimination.” This is, of course, a fancy way of saying “woke.” It’s the way all woke radicals speak: in hifalutin language designed to obfuscate the truth, not enlighten the public.
Then there’s the Unitarian Universalist Fund for a Just Society (UUF). I’ve always admired Unitarians because they’re the most liberal, tolerant and inclusive branch of Christianity, so unlike the turgid evangelicals that have taken over the Republican Party. In this case, the UUF argues its mission is to “Use community organizing to bring about systemic change leading to a more just society…to mobilize those who have been disenfranchised and excluded from resources, power and the right to self-determination…and to have an active focused campaign to create systemic change.” Once again we see the intersectionality between money, woke values and so-called “community organizations” that are little more than fronts for far-left agitating. (I wouldn’t be surprised to learn, for example, that Cat Brooks’ little APTP group gets funding from either SIF or UUF or both.)
At any rate, the Coalition for Police Accountability is well-funded and its outsized influence on Oakland government is pernicious. Its links with the Police Commission are extensive; the two organizations are two sides of the same coin that leads to police defunding, lowered morale at OPD and much more difficult working conditions. When CPA says its goal is to make sure “the Oakland Police Department operates with equitable, just, constitutional, transparent policies and practices that reflect the values and engender the trust of the community,” what it really means is the “policies and practices” of police haters such as Pamela Price, Cat Brooks and Carroll Fife. When they talk about the “trust of the community,” they mean the distrust among people of color (i.e., “the community”) that they themselves, the CPA, instigate through relentless propaganda. When they bray about “equitable, just” policies, what they really mean is fewer police making fewer arrests, more leftwing prosecutors (such as Price) who let offenders off, and more crime of the sort that has ravaged Oakland.
As I noted in this space more than two years ago, a matrix of anti-police organizations, including CPA, is “the engine behind Fife, Cat Brooks, Sheng Thao, Pamela Price, and the rest of their gang.” Well, we’ve settled scores with Thao and Price; Thao is probably headed toward jail, and, while Fife and Brooks remain behind, they’re just detritus washed up on the littered shore of history.
Tomorrow, I’ll talk about the other little-known bureaucracy that’s declared war on the police, the Inspector General for the City of Oakland.
Steve Heimoff