It’s the same old story: Oakland has only so much money. So when it comes to funding the police, on the one hand, or social services, on the other, what is the best way to split the difference?
This is the debate that has consumed Oakland for years. There are those who would take funding away from the Oakland Police Department and shift it to social services, like housing, violence prevention, drug treatment and the like. Those who favor this approach tend to be on the left, or what can be called the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
Then there are people who believe that, at a time of massive crime, Oakland needs a strong police force that can protect us. The Coalition for a Better Oakland, including myself, favors this point of view. It’s not that we’re against social spending, but we do have two problems with it. One, social spending is notoriously hard to account for. Measurability of outcomes is difficult, and results can easily be fudged, so that we can’t really understand what we’re getting for our money. Even advocates for increased social spending acknowledge it can take years to determine if any particular program is effective. A second problem is that there is a relationship between the number of cops on the street and levels of crime, although defunders don’t like to admit it.
I was reminded of this dichotomy reading yesterday’s front-page story in the San Francisco Chronicle headlined “Victims of a deadly year in Oakland.” It highlights the life and death of five individuals who were slaughtered in 2021 in Oakland. This obituary-style writing is a somewhat anodyne practice in journalism: it shows that the newspaper has a heart and cares about people. Such articles enable the paper to deal with violent murder through the lens of sentimental emotionalism, and that’s okay: we all get emotional when we consider what’s happening in Oakland.
However, when you interpret the article in terms of the dichotomy I outlined above, it’s clear that the Chronicle implicitly favors the social spending side of the equation. True, the authors don’t come out and say so directly. But you have to keep in mind—and this is very important—that on its editorial pages, the San Francisco Chronicle has consistently advocated an anti-police philosophy. Whether it’s regularly running op-ed pieces from Cat Brooks, or whether by failing to give police supporters a platform, the Chronicle has aided and abetted the “defund the police” movement for years.
So I find it ironic that, while the Chronicle is wringing its hands over last year’s 129 murder victims, they have done their fair share of contributing to the madness. Why is this? Do you think that the ultra-rich Hearst family, which owns the Chronicle, is somehow “woke”? I doubt it. I think, rather, that the Hearsts take a hands-off approach to their paper, leaving it to editor in chief Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, his editorial page editor, Matt Fleischer, and other editors to decide what stories to run and what slant to give them. And I suspect, also, that the news and editorial staff are personally oriented toward an anti-police bias, even as they themselves depend upon the police to protect them when they’re on location in, say, downtown Oakland, where a Chronicle cameraman was assaulted and robbed at gunpoint last month.
It’s all so odd. There’s an old adage that “A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged.” This helps, as much as anything else, to explain why older voters, and even younger liberals who live in dangerous cities like Oakland, tend to become more active supporters of law enforcement. It also explains why the drift away from the “woke” Democratic Party has been so stark this past year. People desire, above practically everything else, safety. They don’t want to be victims of mindless crime. They understand, in a deeply intuitive way, that the police are the sole force standing between them and the predators who would prey upon them; they comprehend the simple truth “more police=less crime.” They’re not racists, which is how people like Cat Brooks maliciously portray them: they simply want to be secure in their persons and in their homes.
So how should Oakland’s limited dollars be divided between social services and police? I would argue that’s not the right question. The right question to ask is, What does it take to protect the people of Oakland? Let’s do that first, and then we can figure out how to spend whatever money is left over.
Steve Heimoff