One of the worst outcomes of the woke-led “struggle for racial equity” has been the “discrepancies by race” theory. That’s where far-left activists insist that any measure of anything must result in equal outcomes for all races. In other words, if you’re measuring criminal behavior, you want convicted criminals to equal the racial breakdown of Oakland’s population-at-large, i.e., White 30.5%, Black 21%, Asian 15.5%, Hispanic 27.8%. Ditto for school graduation rates, income levels, home ownership. In a just and equitable society, the progressives argue, every measurable result of anything would find that precisely those percentages would be found. Any other result must, ipso facto, be the result of racism, and the insidious “structural racism” they discover everywhere they look.
That this is insane way of perceiving reality is never considered by our friends on the Left side of the aisle. They never complain, for instance, that only 0.2% of the NBA players are Asian, or that 70.4% of NBA players actually are Black. You don’t hear Carroll Fife screaming that the NBA discriminates against Asians, or in favor of Blacks. But let there be a racial discrepancy at Santa Rita Jail, and all hell breaks loose. Pamela Price is suddenly on the warpath, followed by her fellow race warriors stirring up racial divisions in a city where we already have enough divisiveness to last a lifetime.
Late last year the Oakland Police Department released its highly awaited Internal Investigation Outcome and Discipline Report. This looked at the number of internal investigations at OPD’s Internal Affairs division in 2024. The good news was that there were fewer complaints against officers that year than in 2023 (although the reasons for this aren’t entirely clear). But “The most notable finding in this report is the substantial decrease in [W]hite sworn member sustained findings between 2023 and 2024.” Only 4 white sworn members were sustained [i.e., the complaints against them were found to be valid] in 2024, down from 37 in 2023, and far lower than the number of Black (23) and Hispanic (25) sworn members sustained in 2024.
These statistics sent OPD into a panic. They realized that the race warriors on the left, sustained by their supporters in the media, would make hay of the numbers. Imputations that White cops can break the rules with impunity would hail from the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle to the City Council chambers. The Department bent over backwards to find “reasons” for the racial disparity. The culprit they eventually identified was “internally discovered allegations” to existing cases. This is where additional misbehavior was “discovered” after an initial complaint against the officer had been filed. Since OPD was unable to draw a firm conclusion that these “internally discovered allegations” were racially biased, they decided, in their “Recommendations” section, to “keep better record of internally discovered allegations,” including who discovered the violation, who approved adding the allegation to the case, when the allegation was added, and the cause/reason for adding the allegation. By thus layering yet another level of bureaucracy onto the internal investigations process, OPD officials—acutely sensitive to charges of racial bias in the department—hoped to derail efforts by the Police Commission, Community Policing Advisory Board and all the other anti-police agencies to accuse OPD of racism. This, they concluded, was necessary “to ensure that excessive discretion does not allow racial disparities to arise in this [investigatory] process…”.
Well, this ought to keep Internal Affairs busy for years, and hopefully deter the anti-police agencies from having a hissy-fit. Look, we all know that if you assemble enough data—even the most trivial data—you can “prove” anything. It’s called lies, damned lies and statistics. What if 37.9% of mid-level OPD administrators were White, instead of the 30.5% that Whites constitute of Oakland’s population? Racism!!! We must fire, demote or transfer precisely 7.4% of those administrators so that OPD has no discrepancies by race that could be due to racism.
You see where this leads: to a dystopia where everything is held to a single corrosive standard. Every human activity, every governmental function, every conceivable outcome must result in precisely the racial breakdown of Oakland’s population. That’s not only impossible, it’s psychotic. And it’s the only reason why the Police Commission, the Community Policing Advisory Board and all the other anti-police agencies exist. Which is reason enough to dissolve them.
Steve Heimoff