"People get robbed everywhere, even San Ramon"

On April 22, councilmember Jean Quan told a reporter, "I have people yelling and screaming because they're so fearful. I tell them, you want me to promise that you'll be safe forever? I can't do that. People get robbed everywhere, even in San Ramon."(San Francisco Chronicle, Apr. 23, 2008

Councilmember Quan is famous for her disdainful attitude toward public safety in her district. On MacArthur Blvd. in the Dimond commercial area, police filed the following crime reports for just a five-day period:

Can councilmember Quan find a commercial street in San Ramon where four violent crimes occur in five days?

Two of the above four incidents occurred within a block of the Lincoln Court senior housing development. Councilmember Quan claims the project as a great success of hers. While she arranged for the City to give a sweetheart loan to the for-profit developer, she did nothing to identify funding for public safety needs in the area.

The councilmember made the remark after a series of restaurant robberies across Oakland in which both the cash register and the diners were robbed at gunpoint. One of the robberies was in another commercial area in Quan's district, at the Happy Garden Restaurant on the Laurel stretch of MacArthur Blvd.

The councilmember made the remark after three separate incidents within a few days during which store clerks or residents in their homes shot at robbers.

Stung that the press reported her remark, councilmember Quan published the objection she emailed to the reporter: "I am somewhat disappointed that you used this quote, not part of the meeting without the context in which I gave it which was the need to organize our neighborhoods on a day to day level. In the context you use it, it makes it seem I am not recognizing our higher crime rates."

This is classic doubletalk. The councilmember says the quote "makes it seem" she does not recognize Oakland's crime rates. She does not actually admit that Oakland has considerably more than a "higher" crime rate; Oakland has a public safety crisis.

As for the context for the statement, Quan says she was stressing "the need to organize our neighborhoods on a day to day level." That activity is already well advanced. Oakland residents go to extraordinary lengths to observe and document public safety issues. They attend a multitude of meetings on the problem. Meanwhile, Quan voted for a hiring freeze on the police department for more than two years earlier in the decade. Actually, the councilmember has a record of telling residents they are imagining a crime wave.

Oakland is ranked the fourth most dangerous city in the U.S. by the research arm of Congressional Quarterly. Residents and merchants are not thinking about San Ramon. We simply want the relative safety of an average American city.

The crisis in Oakland is caused by two groups of people. One is the small percentage of residents who live the thug culture of disrespect, preying on poor and middle class people all over Oakland. The other group is those Oakland public officials who refuse to address the fact that Oakland has only half a police department, who refuse to give priority to the most important task – committing to an adequate police force of at least 1,100 officers. Instead, public officials actually tolerate and give funding to those who make a career of capitulating to the culture of disrespect.

Therefore, our job is twofold. We must "give" city councilmembers a colleague or two elected for the purpose of getting Oakland an adequate police force. Then we must back them up as they convince their colleagues to address the public safety crisis. Instead of making sarcastic remarks about San Ramon.