Anytime the Oakland City Council talks about “civilianizing” OPD’s Internal Affairs Division (IAD), what they really mean is finding cop-hating leftists who will be biased against OPD in every case they investigate.
The way IAD works now, “Its job is to maintain the integrity and values of the OPD by conducting fair, impartial, and objective investigations of all allegations that an OPD employee has committed misconduct or that OPD policies or procedures themselves are flawed.” Critics argue that cops can’t oversee cops. I don’t see why not. We have plenty of instances in this country where professions regulate themselves, from doctors and lawyers to baseball. Even our vaunted trial system is based on “a jury of one’s peers,” not of unelected or mystery outsiders. If we trust cops enough to give them the power to arrest and, conceivably, shoot us, then we should trust their ability to be conscientious in dealing with their own internal affairs. No cop I’ve ever met wanted to be part of a crooked or corrupt police department.
But this consideration isn’t good enough for the police haters Oakland breeds like mushrooms after a rainstorm. They’re always eager to defund OPD, to increase their power over the department, to take the side of criminals (as we saw in the case of Pamela Price). And now, the cop haters have another proposal they hope to sneak past voters in the dark of night: “transferring all police misconduct investigations from Oakland Police Department Internal Affairs Bureau (IAB) to the Community Police Review Agency (CPRA).”
Let me break this down. As we’ve seen, police misconduct investigations currently are conducted by OPD’s own Internal Affairs Division. This proposal would transfer oversight to a little-known city bureaucracy called the Community Police Review Agency (CPRA). It’s little known because the people who run it don’t want publicity. They wish to be free to harass and hassle OPD anonymously. The fact is that CPRA has an enormous amount of power over OPD, and they aim to keep it that way.
The proposal was ushered along by none other than the leading cop haters on the City Council, Rebecca Kaplan and Carroll Fife, who launched her own political career by breaking the law when she squatted in someone else’s house and refused to leave. In the years since, Fife, an unapologetic reverse-racist, has been an unremitting hater of OPD. She has never stopped trying to defund OPD any way she could, and now she’s doing it again. Next week (Tuesday July 8), Fife’s proposal will be heard by the Council’s Public Safety Committee, which will “receive an informational report…on the Council policy direction regarding the transfer of OPD Internal Affairs investigations to the civilian-staffed CPRA, and the timeline and budget for full implementation.”
CPRA’s executive director, Antonio Lawson, on June 23 sent a memo to Oakland City Administrator Jestin Johnson in which he, Lawson, argued strongly for the transfer (which would greatly increase both his and CPRA’s power and budget), and which moreover he claimed would save $1 million annually for “Oakland taxpayers.” In addition to this purported saving, Lawson argued that “having an outside entity [i.e., CPRA] lead the investigations into alleged misconduct by OPD officers could create greater public trust that the investigations are complete and objective.”
Let me address this latter claim, the one about public trust. First, the only way to get onto CPRA is to be appointed by a Council member or the Mayor. That means that only anti-police leftists will ever be considered. If you’re a strong supporter of OPD, like me, forget it.
Secondly, if portions of the public do not trust OPD it’s because for many years anti-police agitators have propagandized that OPD is a rogue agency. The infamous Cat Brooks has led this charge, closely followed by elected cop-haters such as Fife, Nikki Bas (when she was on the Council), Rebecca Kaplan, Sheng Thao, Pamela Price and others. After hearing this pernicious message year after year, little wonder that some low information Oaklanders—mainly credulous young ones who profess socialist beliefs—came to believe it. So Lawson is fooling no one with his rhetoric. The majority of adults in Oakland, including people of color, trust OPD. The Lawson-Fife proposal is designed, not to increase public trust in the police, but to give the anti-police radicals greater power to undermine public safety.
It’s important to keep in mind where the CPRA comes from. It was created by 2016’s Oakland Measure LL, which also created the Police Commission. At that time, mistrust of the police was at an all-time high, stirred up by anti-cop agitators who were still steaming about the so-called “Riders” scandal (then already 16 years old) and the Celeste Guap affair. Supporters of LL called it “the strongest [police] commission in the country,” which indeed it has turned out to be, in a negative sense. Oakland in 2016 was about to embark on the most criminal and murderous phase of its history, but rather than strengthen OPD, its opponents sought to impose more draconian oversight, which really meant undermining the department and giving ammunition to its enemies.
CPRA invited everyone in Oakland to file complaints against OPD, no matter how frivolous they were. It guaranteed each a hearing, at enormous cost to the city. Now, of course, they want to absorb the entire caseload of IAD, a task they cannot possibly fulfill given the city’s budget deficit and CPRA’s own budgetary problems and tumultuous recent past, including its unexplained firing of former executive director, John Alden (who proposed “civilianizing” OPD’s Internal Affairs staff in the first place), and the more recent unexpected resignation of its last director, Mac Muir, who complained that he was “short on resources and unclear about the city’s plan for police oversight.”
It will be interesting next week, at the Fife-City Council meeting, to hear how she proposes to fund CPRA even as its budget is slashed. But then, having fair, complete and competent hearings has never been the aim of Fife, of CPRA, or the Police Commission. Power is their sole objective—the power to diminish and weaken the Oakland Police Department, if not to eliminate it entirely. Here’s the fact: police oversight in Oakland is a joke. It’s designed for nothing but to satisfy the hatred and resentment of cops by far-left socialist radicals. Please notify your City Council member that you strongly support leaving police oversight to the Internal Affairs Division.
Steve Heimoff