I’m troubled by the concept of “civilian oversight” of the police in an environment like Oakland where so many people have an irrational prejudice against cops. How are these overseers to be trusted when, as we know, they think that most things cops do are wrong? We have a term, “racist,” for people who don’t like people of color. What’s the term for cop-haters?
Cop-haters, I guess.
There are so many so-called police oversight agencies in Oakland that they now have their own oversight agency, the Office of Inspector-General. But OIG isn’t there to truly protect OPD from its enemies. No, it exists to bureaucratize and legitimize cop hating as an official city function, like street cleaning or garbage collection. If Oakland were honest, they’d merge all these agencies into a single Department of Cop Hating. The DCH would be directed by Cat Brooks, its lawyer Pamela Price, and its Chief Inquisitor Carroll Fife.
Just last week, OIG issued a press release stating that it’s “building a strong foundation for effective civilian oversight in Oakland.” You might have thought that, between the Police Commission, the Community Police Review Agency, the Oakland City Attorney, the Federal Monitor and, of course, the ever-indignant City Council, the Oakland Police Department already had enough “oversight” to last a lifetime. But no!
What the OIG is doing now is implementing what they call a “recommendations tracker.” This is because OIG and all the other police watchdogs have issued so many “recommendations” (read: mandates) to OPD that no one can even keep track of them anymore. So they need to bring in the computers to help. The software will list every “recommendation” issued since 2022, with seven sub-categories: project type, subject, release date, response date, update due date, implementation status, and explanation of implementation status. One can imagine a zealous “Recommendations Monitor” discovering that an OPD fingerprint clerk was five minutes late in returning from lunch and asking the computer which of some 4,167 “recommendations” the clerk had violated.
There’s not much information about Oakland’s Recommendations Tracker online, except that we know it was launched recently. An OIG report dated March 27, 2025 (just one month ago) is the first and only reference I can find: it establishes that the Tracker is a “current OIG Project” but otherwise offers no details. I can only conclude that despite the change in the public mood towards a more positive view of cops, Oakland city government intends to double down on their scrutiny of OPD. Never content to let the cops do their job, Oakland is bureaucratizing police oversight so that it becomes embedded in official city practices forever. Jesus Christ himself, along with Mother Theresa, the Buddha, Abraham Lincoln and Dr. King could become the Oakland Police Department, and the OIG would still be subjecting even their minutest activities to make sure that nobody was doing anything bad.
Well, that is one approach a city can take towards its public safety officers. Another would be to lighten up on the oversight so cops don’t feel like they’re inmates in a concentration camp. Lightening up means to eliminate most of these oversight agencies, fire or transfer their employees, fight the employee unions in court when they protest, and boost OPD’s budget by a huge amount. Oakland will never be safe until this anti-police ideology (which I believe is truly evil) is eradicated in its entirety once and for all.
Steve Heimoff