Pamela Price is fighting back against her pending recall in two ways: first, she’s high-profiling the tiny number of indictments she’s actually made lately (to convince voters she’s really tough on crime), and second, she’s launched a propaganda campaign replete with lies.

I’m watching this situation down in Santa Ana (Orange County), as it mirrors so many of the issues we confront here in Oakland and Alameda County. Briefly, there’s this city council member in Santa Ana, Jessie Lopez, an extremely woke progressive, a Carroll Fife or Rebecca Kaplan type; she earned the wrath of the local police union, the Santa Ana Police Officers Association (SAPOA) for voting against a pay raise for cops last December. (Lopez also has been criticized by property and landlord groups for her strong support of rent control which mainly hurts small landlords.)

Call me a dreamer, but when I saw the special section in the Sunday Chronicle entitled “10 BIG IDEAS TO HELP FIX SAN FRANCISCO,” I hoped against hope that one of those “big ideas” was “Hire a lot more cops and let them crack down on crime.”

Readers of this column know that I think Oakland’s MACRO program is a joke. The city’s website claims that “MACRO's goal is to reduce responses by emergency services (Fire & Police), resulting in increased access to community-based services and resources for impacted individuals and families, and most especially for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC).” That sounds ambitious, but the only MACRO units I’ve ever seen deployed (and I live in downtown/uptown where there are a lot of homeless people and drug addicts) have been a few vehicles cruising around. Once I saw two MACRO people offer a bottle of water to a homeless person who was living in a bus stop.

We come now to the Reparations task force’s section called “Methodologies for calculating compensation and forms of compensation and restitution.” Of course, it was always taken for granted by the members of the task force that huge amounts of money would be transferred from government and the public-at-large to the Black community. The question was simply, how much, and in what form?