Short-term Gimmicks Doomed to Fail

After leaving Oakland with half a police department for years, but now confronted by petitions, a March 7 rally, and community meetings expressing outrage over unsafe neighborhoods, City Hall leaders introduced a handful of short-term gimmicks to fight lawlessness.

Mayor Brown, accompanied by mayoral candidate Ignacio De La Fuente, the city administrator, and police brass, held a press conference on March 1. Centerpiece of the announced measures was a task force of 115 police who will be used as someone's reading of "crime data" indicates. These police will not respond to specific calls for help; indeed, police chief Tucker specifically said there will be no increase in the average of 35 to 38 officers on duty at any time to answer non-emergency and 9-1-1 calls for the entire city. He told the Associated Press that the redeployment of officers would come in part from low-crime areas. Maybe residents should consider moving to a "high crime" area if they want police service.

A grand total of 13 officers will move from airport duty to patrol in order to relieve a bit of the mandatory overtime that has brought morale in the department to a ten-year low. However, overtime shifts will be added at the airport!

Some police now on desk assignments will be moved to street duty. This shift may increase the rate of resignations, if a disproportionate number of the desk officers are over 50 and eligible for retirement.

In addition, the existing crime reduction teams will be decimated or disbanded in order to group them in the 115-officer task force. It's like shuffling peas on a table, a familiar con game on the streets of New York City.

At an emergency meeting on Feb. 28, the city council directed the city administrator to find more money to speed up recruitment of new officers. The administrator immediately said the amount would likely be less than the $3 million requested by the police department's training division.

Voters accepted the Measure Y deal back in November 2004, taxing themselves $20 million in new taxes. A good chunk of the money is supposed to "hire and maintain" 63 additional officers. However, police staffing has actually declined by 30 since the council wrote Measure Y. Hidden switcheroos of money in the City budget are going on with Measure Y, just as with Measures Q and DD.

Chief Tucker did not acquit himself well when he made an untenable claim. He told the San Francisco Chronicle that he is confident the City will get to the 802 officers promised with Measure Y by January 2007. Even with stepped-up recruiting efforts, the City will not hire 100 officers plus as many as 50 more to replace those who quit and retire in the next ten months.

Two candidates and a cop

(Photo: Oakland Tribune)

On March 1, De La Fuente told the Oakland Tribune that he regrets having voted for a hiring freeze on the police department. The freeze began in 2002 and extended for nearly three years until late in 2004, after the council had extorted Measure Y money from voters at the November election.

What good is De La Fuente's "regret" when no one at City Hall has a workable, committed plan to bring Oakland up to the 1,100 police it needs?

The short-term gimmicks announced on March 1 are signs of political desperation. Jerry Brown is running for attorney general, the top law enforcement job in California. De La Fuente is running for mayor with no firm obligation to restore peaceful neighborhoods. Indeed, De La Fuente participated in the Measure Y fraud of promising 802 officers before the vote then saying afterward that voters did not really expect 802 officers any time soon.

Meanwhile, mayoral candidates Ron Dellums and Nancy Nadel have avoided any mention of the fact that Oakland has half a police department by comparison with most major cities.

City Hall is desperate to quell collective expressions of the simple demand that the council make public safety top priority. The mayor and councilmembers rolled out their bag of gimmicks when they saw that more than 600 people have signed the "Enough Is Enough!" petition in support of a rally at City Hall plaza on March 7.

Massive Public Rejection of Gimmickry

Within two days, it became clear: the public rejects the gimmick solutions to police understaffing that the mayor offered on March 1.

• A wave of more than 150 people added their signatures to the online portion of the "Enough Is Enough!" petition (click here), bringing the total to nearly 750, plus dozens more who have signed the petition on paper.
   
  
• The Oakland Tribune published an editorial on March 3 with the blunt title, "Task force worthless without more officers." It concluded,

  Knowing they had Measure Y money coming, city officials should have budgeted enough money right off the bat to set up numerous academies immediately so they could churn out qualified officers in a timely fashion.
  ...
  Where was this urgency 16 months ago? No wonder so many critics of Measure Y were skeptical back then of entrusting city officials with more of their money to fiddle with.

• Here at Oakland Residents for Peaceful Neighborhoods, which is one of the groups supporting the petition and March 7 rally, we received several inquiries from media outlets eager to cover understaffing of police in Oakland and the consequences that people suffer in the neighborhoods.
  

As the movement for peaceful neighborhoods builds, two questions rise to the fore: What do we need, and how do we get it?

We need at least 1,100 police, and we need a serious commitment to a realistic plan to get them. It will not happen overnight, but it cannot be postponed or studied to death.

As to how to get it, we must keep up the pressure on the councilmembers. No one knows what goes on inside their heads, but their actions clearly put top priority on grabbing money here and there for political pork. They put lowest priority on public safety and efficient infrastructure, the basic duties of city government. Over ten years they added 357 positions to the City budget, but police staffing wound up right where it started.

Following the March 7 rally, our next opportunity to show councilmembers they must change or be gone is the mail-in vote on the so-called landscape and lighting tax (LLAD) expected in May and June. We already pay enough for peaceful neighborhoods as well as street lights and decently maintained parks. The LLAD tax is no more about landscape and lighting than Measure Y turned out to be about more police. The City has one budget, fed by general fund revenues plus a long list of regressive parcel taxes. We must break the cycle and show the councilmembers that their life of political pork is over.