Politicians Squabble Over Crime, Ignore Understaffing

As robberies, sideshows, and open drug dealing continue to plague Oakland, strains appeared in public among mayor Jerry Brown, the city council, the police chief, and normally loyal followers of City Hall.

Mayor Brown, who usually ignores public meetings, attended the July 18, 2006 city council session. Brown is feeling his opponent's heat as he runs for California attorney general. Although that office has little to do with street crime, Brown is embarrassed by Oakland's nationally famous disorder on its streets.

Brown's discontent became entwined with the destruction of community policing by chief Tucker. Instead of telling the public that he cannot provide public safety with a police force that is understaffed by half, Tucker is desperate to shuffle officers around, much like a boy plugging holes in a collapsing dike. Members of the community policing advisory board and the Measure Y oversight committee – both comprised of council appointees and normally obedient to City Hall – rightfully objected. Chief Tucker nonetheless assigned community policing officers, who work on specific problems in one beat, to perform regular patrol around the whole city for one day a week.

Tucker did let slip that 120 beats a week are unstaffed. Also, the mandatory overtime rule has been extended up to sergeants.

Councilmember Reid admitted that the city council's "solution" of last March – a resolution demanding that the police department hire up to 802 officers by Jan. 31, 2007 – was a meaningless piece of paper. That resolution was the council's miserable response to the historic "Enough Is Enough!" petition signed by more than 1,100 Oakland residents. (Oakland Tribune, July 23, 2006)

Instead of a solution, candidate Brown could only point blame at others. He attacked police officers for being reluctant to "engage the community," demanding they get out of their cars. That might or might not be true in some cases, but does the mayor think he can solve the problem that way? Police officers who use the powers invested in them have to worry about punitive scrutiny from a large Internal Affairs section, which is the City's counterproductive response to the Riders scandal.

Police officers who actually police have another problem in Oakland: the powers-that-be refuse to condemn the culture of disrespect that dominates the streets. It is plain wrong to disrespect thousands of residents by driving "boom cars" around. But the politicians will not condemn what is wrong. Councilmembers seriously suggested providing, at public expense, an off-street location to have even more sideshows. To this day, private agencies supported by the City celebrate the disruption of sideshows under the guise of honoring it as dance and culture.

Candidate Brown also blamed conflicting pressures on the police department by the city council, the police union, and U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson (who oversees the Riders settlement). He summed it up, "There are too many cooks in the soup." Unless you are a cannibal, even one cook in the soup is too many, but you get the idea.

Neither mayor Brown, nor any of the councilmembers, nor the heads of the citizen advisory bodies dared mention the real solution: they need to commit to a solid plan to get Oakland the 1,100 police officers it needs. Until that is done, the squabbling at City Hall will change nothing, and some day all too soon, a real civic disaster is going to show Oakland that the first job of a city government is to ensure public safety.