Mayor Gives Up Airport Rent-a-Cop Business

Mayor Dellums and councilmembers De La Fuente and Jane Brunner announced today that the City will give up its business of renting officers to the Oakland Airport in order to provide welcome officers on the streets. While every bit helps, the change will flood the streets with a grand total of ... 15 police.

City Hall began the rent-a-cop scheme back in 2002, a few months after the 9/11 attacks. Oakland won a profitable contract to provide police. How profitable? As reported by ORPN last August, according to the budget then, the Port of Oakland, which operates the airport, was to pay the City $5.2 million for police that the City costed out at $4.2 million.

Twenty percent is a great profit margin, and the City was willing to take one to two dozen police off the streets in order to make a million bucks. Although mayor Dellums was not in office back then, he did not denounce the scheme in his press release today. The county sheriff will pick up the airport policing business finally relinquished by the City.

Actually, the announcement is the second time City officials have used a rearrangement of police from the airport to pat themselves on the back. In March 2006, police chief Tucker said thirteen officers would be redeployed from Oakland International Airport to the patrol division. However, they did not increase patrol officers on the streets at any one time, only reducing the amount of overtime. (Oakland Tribune, Mar. 2, 2006)

This time around the officers removed from the airport will not increase patrol staff, who answer calls for help received at the dispatch center (which itself remains understaffed with ten long unfilled vacancies of non-sworn dispatchers). Instead, the airport police will boost the ranks of problem solving, or community policing, officers. Why? The Measure Y fund has an embarrassing surplus. The personnel shift draws down on the Measure Y fund while not increasing the total number of Oakland police. In fact, we have fewer police today than when the city council sold Measure Y on a promise to expand the force to 802 officers.

In recent weeks, demands by Oakland residents to do something about violent robberies, sideshows, boom cars and other attacks and disruptions have increased. The brief visit of the Guardian Angels to the Grand Lake district was embarrassing to City Hall. Councilmember Brunner's proposal to hire at-risk youth to walk with BART patrons, while still moving forward, has drawn mostly derisive laughter from the public.

Eager to win the perception of taking action, Dellums and other city officials dressed out the shift of 15 officers with pompous statements. "People have the right to move safely throughout every part of this City," said mayor Dellums. Councilmember Brunner said, "We know that the number one priority in Oakland is public safety."

"Safety is our number one priority"

In order to reclaim peaceful neighborhoods, Oakland needs at least 1,100 police officers, not the 700-and-some we have now, not the 802 target set by the mayor and city council in their budget. Instead, Dellums scrounged up a one-time shift, not addition, of 15 police. It is like waving a Softee bat as though it were a fearsome steel sword. Contrary to Brunner's claim, City Hall does not give public safety number one priority.

For observers of the pettiness of City Hall politics, the announcement of the airport switch has one more point of interest. The mayor's office put out a news release quoting councilmember Brunner and the council president. However, more than a week ago, councilmember Kernighan wrote in her newsletter that Oakland must "bring back the 19 or so officers now working at the Airport. The Port is currently paying the City for these officers, so the City will lose about $4 million from the Port to do this, but I think we have no choice."

Perhaps councilmembers jostled to take credit with the mayor. Kernighan is not mentioned in today's press release – which also suppresses the observation, confirmed in her quote above, that City Hall is reluctantly giving up its rent-a-cop business scheme.