Defend Our NSCs and Access to Police Dept.!

By Nancy Sidebotham

Well, thanks to some very bad advice and the move to hire an outsider to oversee our only real link to the overworked and understaffed Oakland Police Department, we are literally being screwed again by our public officials!!!

I wrote awhile back that we were going to lose our direct contact with OPD because a person with political contacts got herself hired to "supervise" our long-standing Neighborhood Services Coordinators (NSCs). Reality is here! As of Dec. 7, 2006 our NSCs will be transferred downtown into cubicles at 250 Frank Ogawa Plaza.

OPD will have no contact with them without going downtown, and that will not happen. We will not get responses to our concerns because the NSCs will be too busy "organizing" and doing flier distributions. They will not be available to us, the citizens of Oakland. We have for the last eleven years built a bridge to OPD through the hands-on expertise of the many NSCs who have served us and OPD. They have been the link to all the city services that impact our daily quality of life. The NSCs have been our voice in the Service Delivery meetings (where officials coordinate response to crime spots) and fought to get our issues taken care of.

Now we are losing that, partly because of the "wisdom" of appointed citizens known as the Community Policing Advisory Board (CPAB), who in their elite and overzealous enthusiasm to make nice with the new, overpaid supervisor, jumped on the band wagon and worked to remove our NSCs from OPD. The logic is that they need to be watched, because many were not doing their job or because of whatever trumped-up excuse. A minority of the CPAB have seen the light and have come to realize their mistake in supporting this endeavor.

Our city council also fell under this spell, and the rest is going to be history unless you, the community, wake up and fight to stop the raping again of another program that gives community policing a place in what, to date, has been the gutting of citizen participation in how police and citizens interact to solve, protect, and deliver public safety in Oakland. I won't even go into the illegal use of Measure Y funding at this juncture.

There is no excuse for the NSCs to be removed from OPD. If they needed a supervisor so badly after eleven years in existence, then why not one from their own ranks? The union representing them did not fight to protect them ... politics was too strong, and I am sure that there was a deal made to sell them out for some other goodies that the union felt it needed.

You all have seen the increase in criminal activity, lack of police response, the horrendous waiting time for 9-1-1 and non-emergency calls. Yet the NSCs have always been there and worked to bring a timely response based on the constraints that the system has come to represent.

We need to let City Hall know that we want the NSCs left in OPD and allowed to work out of the locations that they have come to call home for so many years. It is not fair that again we, the community, need to give up another bastion that helped to bring community policing to Oakland. Who will our problem solving officers meet with daily to find out what the concerns are of the community?

The NSCs were told at various times that they would be moving, but the time line was accelerated to that day of infamy, Dec. 7, so that we the public would not get wind of the move. (Note: ORPN first wrote on this issue on Feb. 21, 2006.) This is how the City of Oakland does the public's business, and it has been the norm for the last six years.

The new supervisor of the NSCs believes that the NCPCs are inefficient (my opinion: we are too powerful). She wants Home Alert block groups to be the end-all (again, my opinion: smaller groups often lacking strong leadership – more sheep for slaughter). Her talents are based on OCO organizing tactics, on leading sheep to do whatever the leaders deem appropriate. The next move is to do away with NCPCs.

It is funny that when programs actually work and true leadership emerges fighting for the rights of those who are represented, then along comes someone with a "new" idea. Implementation is started first through seeming friendships and promises, then outright legislation that is brought by those who have fallen in line without the wisdom of knowing the truth other than what they blindly follow. Lastly, blatant untruths are put out so that the sheep will continue to slaughter before the reality of the real hypocrisy sets in.

The systematic cutting of citizens' access to OPD, city services and community policing has got to stop. The next city council meeting is Dec. 5, 2006 at City Hall, 6 p.m.. If you wish to speak at the open forum, you need to arrive early to sign up (or sign up on the Web), because you will not be allowed to speak in front of our elected officials once the meeting starts without filling out a speaker's card.

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