Yesterday I described how a dramatic infusion of Federal and state funds into Oakland, the result of COVID relief laws, seems to have eliminated the financial reasons for cutting the Oakland Police Department’s budget; and I asked Vice Mayor Rebecca Kaplan to tell me why I was wrong, if I was. (I’m still waiting to hear…)
Today, I want to delve deeper into City Administrator Ed Reiskin’s 12/20/20 memorandum detailing why, six months ago, he recommended deep budget cuts in Oakland. At that time—which, let’s remember, was before pandemic relief funds existed—Reiskin made some assumptions that were true, and others that proved to be false.
Reiskin’s recommended cuts to OPD were startling: he proposed reducing or deferring funding for such vital areas as sideshow enforcement, patrols around Lake Merritt, demonstrations and gatherings downtown (which as we all know almost always lead to looting and riots), traffic control, and foot patrols in neighborhoods. He even proposed eliminating an upcoming Police Academy, which is where new OPD recruits are trained.
But a hopeful Reiskin anticipated that the State of California and Washington, D.C. might be coming to Oakland’s rescue, as the winter pandemic deepened and the public clamored for help. “[City] staff are hopeful,” Reiskin wrote, “that Federal or State Aid and a rapid economic recovery will allow the city to restore these critical services as soon as possible.”
Reiskin, at that time, was realistic enough to recognize that OPD was woefully underfunded. “The Oakland Police Department has long had the lowest officer-per-crime staffing level of any police department in the country,” he told the City Council; and then he seemed to place the blame for OPD overtime—a chief gripe of the defund crowd--not on the department itself, but on the City Council and the Schaaf administration, which “have consistently under-budgeted police overtime, particularly in light of increased costs and historical need.”
This was a revelatory admission. It suggested two things: first, that at least some voices in city administration (if only Reiskin himself) recognized that OPD needed a lot more money, and secondly, that Schaaf and the Council needed to move beyond their shrill cries for defunding (or “reimagining,” as the Council’s P.R. spinmeisters now rechristened it) and get real about policing in a crime-ridden city.
But despite these admonitions from their own City Administrator, Council members like Kaplan, Bas and the newly-elected radical from District 3, Carroll Fife, nonetheless forged ahead with their plans to cut OPD’s budget by as much as 50%. Reiskin’s hope—that “Federal or State Aid and a rapid economic recovery”—all proved to be true, thank goodness (and it wasn’t “or”, it was “and”: Oakland got big bucks from both Sacramento and D.C.). Oakland no longer had a budget problem, so the defunders couldn’t honestly use that excuse to slash OPD’s funding. But that didn’t stop them, even though their excuse didn’t hold water.
But there was one assumption, or prediction, Reiskin made in that 12/20/20 memo that proved to be disastrously false. He predicted that the number of OPD “sworn personnel” (cops on the street) would be 758 by now. Instead, the actual number two days ago, when I last checked, was only 723. That is 35 fewer than Reiskin promised—and every day, we hear insider reports of another 8, or 10, or 15, or more, poised to quit imminently, because they’re so demoralized.
When you take all these things into consideration, it’s very difficult to escape the conclusion that the City Council is using an outdated memo from six months ago as a smokescreen to cut OPD’s funding, when their real reason for doing so is obvious: cop-hatred and vengeance. They don’t like cops, and they wish to destroy the department; and if they can’t starve it to death financially, they’ll make life so hard for cops that they’ll quit in droves, without being replaced, which is simply the woke way of “defunding the police.”
Steve Heimoff