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City Inflates Police Count at Town Hall
"On police staffing, Tucker said the city has 705 officers."
That's what the Oakland Tribune reported the day after the police chief spoke to a Town Hall meeting also attended by the mayor, the city manager and a host of City staff. We heard Chief Tucker's "705," too.
But it's apparently false. According to records at the Oakland Police Department, it employed 688 police officers as of Dec. 5.
Did the department find 17 officers between Dec. 5 and Dec. 17? The currently running police academies did not, to our knowledge, finish and graduate sworn officers before Dec. 17. In fact, those academies are falling part, with dropout rates up to 47%.
What good is a Town Hall meeting when city officials present false information?
Chief Tucker also asserted that Oakland would have the 802 police officers required by Measure Y in 2007. Given his apparent misstatement of the current officer count, doubts arise. Does chief Tucker claim the beginning of fiscal 2006-2007 – July 1, 2006? Hardly. Does he mean the end of calendar 2007? With police academies unable to recruit, with mandatory overtime and rock-bottom morale driving officers to quit and retire, the City will be lucky to have as many as 739 officers by then.
Measure Y, the law that collects parcel and parking taxes for 802 police and a host of outsourced social programs, was written under considerable skepticism about city council intentions. To get the measure passed, the council wrote an extraordinary provision that if the City could not maintain 739 officers before using Measure Y money, it was not allowed to collect the Y taxes for that fiscal year.
The City began collecting taxes on Jan. 1, 2005. Now a city official stands up, misstates the number of officers we have today, and projects compliance in 2007, a projection that only a fool would believe.
It is basically the city councilmembers who disregard public safety while grabbing public safety funds for political uses. The police chief ought to resign and go back to his well-earned retirement from the county sheriff's department. Instead, to keep his job, he has joined them in misstating the facts.
Meanwhile, our homes are burglarized and vandalized, our cars broken into and stolen, all while one corner after another succumbs to the domination of drug dealers. The incessant pounding of boom cars provides a suitable background for it all.
– Dec. 23, 2005
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