The biggest problem with public attitudes toward the Oakland Police Department is that too many people simply don’t know what’s happening within it. It’s a question of education. You can’t arrive at a rational conclusion about anything, if you’re unaware of the facts.
A lot of Oaklanders don’t like OPD, or think they don’t, because all they’ve heard for years is a one-sided narrative that identifies most cops as thugs, racists and haters. Organizations like the Anti Police-Terror Project, and individuals who conform to its views, routinely throw phrases out there such as “police terror” and “police violence,” the implication being that cops go to work every day with the intention of violating citizens’ rights and—if they really get their way—beating people up for no reason.
This narrative is incredibly powerful in Oakland. We’ve heard it for years and years, not only from APTP but from City Council members, community members and even at the Oakland Police Commission. A docile media dutifully repeats these allegations; young reporters, with scant resources at their disposal, report only one side of the story, while their editors, who frequently themselves have anti-police views, highlight stories that impact negatively on cops.
What the public is not hearing is any sort of counter-narrative. There’s almost no one out there who has anything good to say about OPD or individual cops. There are sound reasons for this. First and foremost is the Negotiated Settlement Agreement (NSA), which since 2003—eighteen years ago—has required “police reforms” that never seem to get accomplished in the eyes of the NSA’s monitor, Robert Warshaw, who has been making a lot of money in his oversight role.
One can’t help but feel that Warshaw may have a pecuniary interest in keeping the NSA limping along year after year; a cushy job-for-life is not to be trifled with! One of the most negative impacts of the NSA is that OPD is reluctant to reply to their critics. I can tell you that OPD leaders are afraid that, if cops spoke out, Warshaw would get angry, and figure out some way to punish them and the department.
What sort of things could cops say, if they were permitted to speak out? They might look into a T.V. camera and, speaking from the heart directly into the eyes of the public, state why they became cops in the first place, and how much protecting the public means to them; they could humanize themselves. They could tell the public how it feels to be spat on, or given the finger, or called brutes, while they’re going about saving lives and property. But cops are not permitted to speak out—and that’s one reason why the anti-police narrative is pretty much the only one the public hears.
Another is the media. As I said earlier, anti-police attitudes are rampant in newsrooms. A good example of this is the way the San Francisco Chronicle has given APTP’s Cat Brooks a seemingly open invitation to write long op-eds on a regular basis. These op-eds contain her screeds against cops; as in the case of Warshaw, no amount of training or improvement in OPD’s performance is ever enough for Brooks, whose ultimate goal is abolishing OPD. Meanwhile, it would be hard to find a single pro-cop op-ed the Chronicle has published. Once again, the public isn’t hearing the other side of the story.
No wonder so many Oaklanders think cops are bad people! All they ever hear are the allegations, the accusations, the smears and half-truths and outright falsehoods. I don’t blame Oaklanders for having those attitudes. They don’t realize they’re living in a news desert.
That’s one of the reasons we started the Coalition for a Better Oakland: to educate the public. One of the projects I’m working on is to better understand the training and monitoring process that cops undergo. OPD is among the most intensively trained, regulated and scrutinized police departments in the country, but I still hear people say that cops need better training and oversight. (Indeed, this is a constant meme from APTP.) The public needs to know how well-trained OPD really is. To the best of my ability, I will be reporting on this in the weeks to come.
Steve Heimoff