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July Police Academy Sells Training Slots
to Other Cities
The Oakland police academy that began July 11 will provide no more than 27 sworn officers when it finishes next January. However, the academy is also training officers for other cities.
The academy began with 40 candidates, but six of them are for other police departments, which are paying the City of Oakland to train officers for them. The remaining 34 enrollees were Oakland candidates, but seven have dropped out or failed the grade.
Why didn't Oakland enroll 40 candidates for OPD? Either the City could not recruit that many people who want the job, or the City simply preferred to get money from other jurisdictions for training their officers.
As soon as Measure Y passed Nov. 2, 2004, City officials knew they had a big challenge in fulfilling the obligation to provide 802 officers. Yet eight months later they cannot, or will not, find 40 candidates for an academy.
At a party several months ago, an Oakland resident met some young men in a commercial school that prepares students for police work. When he welcomed them to consider working in Oakland, they laughed. Oakland is too understaffed, they said.
Councilmembers dug the City into a hole by freezing OPD hiring for nearly three years, which helped drive the number of employed officers well below the insufficient but required 802 specified by Measure Y. It now appears that potential Oakland officers perceive understaffing as a systemic problem. Can we blame them if they are reluctant to go into such a situation?
Today councilmembers are telling the world that Oakland cannot get up to 802 officers for two years or longer. They need to do just the opposite: Come up with credible plans to staff up much more rapidly. It might not always be true that where there's a will, there's a way, but where there is no will, for sure there is no way. That's the situation today. The councilmembers do not care enough about public safety to provide 802 officers with the millions of dollars they are collecting in Measure Y taxes.
Facts bring out more facts ... and damage control
Click here for more.
–July 27, 2005
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