City Pulls Community Police
Out of Community Policing

In yet another violation of Measure Y and City ordinances, the police department ordered community police officers to abandon their community one day a week.

Problem solving officers (PSOs) work on drug houses and other issues that require sustained attention. Effective April 29, the department ordered PSOs to spend one day in five as patrol officers, taking dispatch calls. The order applies whenever one of their beats is "open," which is department lingo for unstaffed. As the order admits, "The Department is continuing to struggle with its ability to effectively and efficiently respond to calls for service," so you can be sure that beats will be unstaffed and that PSOs will be forced to let neighborhood issues become entrenched.

The founding City resolution that governs community policing (Res. 72727) makes clear that community policing is not regular patrol. Just last year a follow-on council resolution affirmed, "Community Police Officers shall focus their efforts on problem solving and quality of life improvement on their community policing beat, and shall not be routinely reassigned to 911 patrol or other non-community policing duties." (Res. 79235; emphasis added)

The new order weakens the work of community policing, by 20 percent to be precise. It breaches the distinction between community policing and patrol. It violates City law.

Once again, the farce of dedicated taxes is exposed. The new order uses PSOs for patrol even though the department pays PSO salaries with Measure Y funds. That measure said officers hired with the new taxes must be "assigned to ... specific community-policing objectives," and a list was spelled out (Part I, Section 3). No matter how much the City insists that a proposed tax will be used for this or that, the reality is that all the money goes into one budget pot. Insiders stir the brew, and what comes out stinks. Fiscal commitments are worthless in Oakland. Residents should remember that when they receive their mail-in ballot asking for a so-called Landscape and Lighting tax hike.

Underlying the latest desperate shift of officers from one job to another is the fact that Oakland has half a police department. OPD management has been reduced to chasing "hot spots." So when a pair of homicides in the Grand-Lake district makes it a hot spot, police are removed from Maxwell Park and West Street and the Laurel district. None of these areas enjoys basic public safety now, and their situation gets worse.

Meanwhile, city councilmembers spend their time squabbling over how to spend an $8.5 million surplus. Not one of them has the vision and dedication to forge a plan committing the City to achieve the 1,100 police we need.

Community policing works. Destroying it in the name of public safety is unacceptable. If there are not enough police (and there are not), and if the councilmembers refuse to make public safety priority number one (and they do refuse, with arrogance), then the only honorable course left to police chief Tucker is to resign. Chief Tucker, look at what retired generals are telling the president. It's time for you to become a retired police chief, which is what you were in 2004.

Politicians and Board Agree
on Stiffing Oakland Residents

The city councilmembers at the June 13, 2006 meeting of their public safety committee had little trouble drawing the Community Policing Advisory Board (CPAB) into a rotten "compromise." Oakland residents will continue to pay more money for less public safety.

The deal is this:

1. Oakland residents continue to pay the Measure Y taxes.
2. Police staffing is no closer to the promised 802 officers than before the meeting; it will still be two, five, or more years before this goal is reached.
3. Seven community policing Problem Solving Officers (PSOs) will formally change to patrol officers, making official what the department has already done.
4. The department can forget about new PSOs until the total police count of police officers reaches 720, "and that number is negotiable," in the words of CPAB chair Don Link. Current projections show that it will be a year before Oakland has 720 police.

CORRECTION: The above provisions are a tentative deal, all subject to further negotiation and compromise, since the council's public safety committee took no formal action. Members from the board will meet with police department management and negotiate the final arrangement, with the pols watching from overhead. We'll see who gives away even more of the store. Therefore, there are currently no true community policing officers at this time. They are all on patrol at least 20 percent of their time, and they are used like a tactical pool, in groups outside their individual community beats, for much of the remaining time. (June 15, 2006)

Apparently, the proposed arrangement is the most that the advisory board felt it could achieve. We agree, and it shows that more broad-based and powerful actions are needed. Unfortunately, the chair of the board is not merely reluctant to move toward such action. He outright opposes it, as his attack on the March 7 "Enough Is Enough!" petition and protest demonstrated.

From the accounts of the committee meeting available to us, not one responsible person on the council or the advisory board insisted that the City either staff up to 820 officers or stop collecting the Measure Y taxes from Oakland residents. Today, as for nearly a year and a half, we are paying new taxes while we have fewer police than when the council wrote Measure Y.