A serious debate is playing out in Oakland on police financing.
The difference of opinion was on display during the recent Oakland City Council vote to cut Mayor Libby Schaaf’s police budget. The debate also flared up over Schaaf’s agreement with the state to have the California Highway Patrol bolster the city’s police department as the city experiences dramatically increased violence.
Homicides are dramatically increasing. Armed robbery and shootings are up 50% over 2020, and car jackings have doubled.
Now Councilwoman Sheng Thao will advocate at Tuesday’s City Council meeting adding two police academies to train new officers.
The trade-off posed by the broadly “anti-police” faction in Oakland politics between money for police and community-based “violence interrupters” is a misleading one.
The latter is a great direction for Oakland to continue pursuing. The related (albeit police-involved) CeaseFire program, bringing together social services, community leadership, “violence interrupters” and police, has shown excellent results over the last decade. Its relative absence forced by the COVID-19 pandemic was unfortunate. But “violence interruption” by itself is no basis for failing to expand inadequate police presence.
Though no one can afford a cop on every corner, in contrast with advocates’ claims, there is a well-documented relationship between police presence and less serious crime.
Oakland, by level of crime, is one of the most under-policed cities, not just in California but also the nation.
Oakland has the lowest ratio of officers to violent crimes of the 50 largest American cities. It has one of the lowest rates of homicides solved, at under 50%.
Studies of Oakland’s police and crime levels have recommended 1,200 officers. The city has fewer than 700.
San Francisco has more than 1,800 officers. Yes, it has over twice Oakland’s population but reports similar absolute violent crime totals.
The people who suffer most from our urgent chronic police shortage are those living in lower-income, higher-crime minority communities such as East Oakland. Unsurprisingly, two councilmembers representing these areas opposed the budget cut.
Community anti-police advocates, led by Cat Brooks, advocate cutting the police budget in half. They argue that police have failed to stop crime, so we should stop looking to them to do so.
This is like saying that since doctors haven’t stopped death, we should forget them and rely on vitamins to treat cancer and heart disease.
Police-spending opponents focus on incidents of officer wrongdoing. The effort to limit or cut police budgets is often framed as if it were an effort to punish perceived bad actors. But overall budget cuts fail to do this. Stopping officer wrongdoing needs to target the individuals responsible.
Far from punishing bad cops, police budget cuts — or failures to expand budgets to respond adequately to crime — punish Oakland residents generally, especially those living in higher-crime neighborhoods.
Despite Brooks’ claims to speak “for the community,” recent nationwide and Oakland-based surveys indicate more than 80% of Black people, like all other people in American cities, want at least the level of police protection they already have or more, not less. If anyone doubts this, let’s vote on it.
Studies show Black city residents, who suffer higher violent crime rates, also benefit disproportionately from police hiring and resulting crime reduction.
Oakland should pursue available funding from the state budget surplus and federal COVID-19 stimulus to expand the city’s understaffed police force.
At the same time, consideration needs to go to hiring significant numbers of new trainee officers who reside in Oakland, to the extent possible coming from communities where crime is high, and hired with less extravagant pension benefits that won’t blow up the city’s police budget.
Steve Koppman has worked as a government analyst at federal, state and local levels. He holds a master’s degree in public policy from UC Berkeley.
