I’ve met quite a few Community Safety Ambassadors while making the rounds of Downtown/Uptown. Just yesterday I was chatting with one, on Broadway. He was charming as could be, a nice, polite young man, eager to help. It’s a good program for Oakland to have. But is it worth another $1 million, which the City Council just allocated when they passed their new budget on Wednesday?
You’ve probably seen them, in their black shirts with a lime-green top, patrolling the streets. There are 30 of them, all men with the exception of a handful of young women, all wearing black caps with UPTOWN DOWNTOWN prominently displayed. They provide the following services, according to their website:
Buddy escorts
Umbrella escorts
Business engagement
Provide directions
Provide recommendations to visitors, residents, and employees
A little later in the website, it explains in more detail what the Ambassadors do:
Greening And Beautification
Our ambassadors undertake tasks such as landscaping, groundskeeping, and public plaza maintenance.
Maintenance
Our Ambassadors tackle tasks such as graffiti abatement, illegal dumping removal, litter abatement, and power washing.
Hospitality
Our Ambassadors offer a range of services, including buddy/umbrella escorts, business engagement, and giving directions.
All of this, concludes the website, “is designed to elevate the visitor experience by providing exceptional care to public spaces throughout our downtown area.”
Now, as I said, it’s a good program. In funding it, the City is trying to put its best foot forward, so that when visitors come here (at least, during the daytime), they might experience something positive about Oakland, rather than the bad publicity we usually get.
But is the Community Safety Ambassador program really worth $1 million a year? The Uptown Downtown Oakland Community Benefit District (which runs it) website says that its “guiding vision…is to create a thriving 24/7 business, retail, entertainment and residential district in the heart of Oakland for the betterment of Downtown Oakland and the greater Oakland community.” I think we all can agree that Downtown/Uptown is emphatically not “a thriving 24/7 district in the heart of Oakland.” Instead, Broadway and the surrounding streets have never been shoddier or emptier of retail in my nearly 40 years here. Whatever the city thinks it’s doing—and bless them for trying—it’s not working.
What else could Oakland spend $1 million on? Lots of things. I’m sure you have your own ideas. Mine would be to direct that money to the Oakland Police Department. According to the website ZipRecruiter, the average annual salary for an OPD officer is $71,376. If you factor in benefits, it’s $102,167.
So for $102,167, with an extra $1 million OPD could hire nearly ten additional cops. Granted, that doesn’t sound like a lot, but since OPD currently has only about 678 officers on the force—well below the needed number of 1,200 for a city of our size—an extra ten cops would be extremely welcome. They would certainly help with the problem of overtime.
Maybe some folks think it’s more important to have the Ambassadors than to have ten additional cops. I agree that the Ambassador program is a good one. I like seeing those young men and women on the street. But given our fiscal realities, we have to constantly make hard choices concerning what we spend our precious money on. In my opinion, there’s no greater priority than cops. None, nada, zilch. If we’re not a safe city, Community Ambassadors aren’t going to help, no matter how wonderful they are as human beings. My feeling is that Oakland is entering an era of heightened danger this long, hot summer, and we’re going to need every cop we can get.
Tomorrow’s my birthday. Yes, the same birth date and year as Trump, at almost the same time of day, and in the same city, which means our horoscopes are basically identical—if you happen to believe in astrology, which I don’t. Tomorrow also is Trump’s personal hosanna to his birthday, marked by that self-promoting military parade. Have a wonderful weekend.
Steve Heimoff