Nikki Bas is sending an email to her constituents that contains a huge, treacherous lie: “I have supported increasing OPD's budget each year.” (I have a copy of the email.) This lie is repeated a second time: “[A]gain, I have supported increases each year.”
Let us set the record straight. In June, 2021, Bas, as City Council president, proposed “that $18 million be slashed from the police department’s budget and funneled toward violence prevention and other social services,” according to the East Bay Times.
“What is needed in this budget,” Bas told the Times, “is not more money in this broken system. More than ever in this budget, it’s really up to us to say we’re not going to keep growing that sliver of pie for a system that is not working.”
In reporting on the same topic, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that “Oakland Councilwoman Nikki Fortunato Bas is calling for $25 million in police spending to be redirected to mental health, parks and recreation, homelessness prevention, youth programs and other social services.”
The difference in the reported amounts is because of the ways the two newspapers interpreted Bas’s proposal. Either way, Bas attempted to defund the Oakland Police Department of millions. Two months later, after Oakland’s Summer of Murder shocked the city and the nation, six members of the City Council had had enough sense knocked into them to reluctantly agree to add an additional police academy to increase the number of cops on the street. But not Nikki Bas and her friend and fellow cop hater, Carroll Fife. “[T]he resolution to add a fifth academy, introduced by Councilmember Sheng Thao, passed 6-2 with council President Nikki Fortunato Bas and Councilmember Carroll Fife voting against the plan.”
What is Nikki Bas trying to hand us? Her steaming pile of fabrications may fool one or two voters in District 2 who don’t keep track of the news, but it can’t fool us—and we will keep calling attention to Bas’s dishonesty. The truth of the matter—as Bas has emphasized in interview after interview—is that Nikki Bas does not believe in policing. In her warped world view, cops are the problem, not the criminals they’re sworn to protect us from. Where and why Bas got this fake concept, we can’t know…and possibly she herself doesn’t know. What we can know, and do, is that she stubbornly refuses to recognize the falsehood of her fixation, despite the cries from anguished Oaklanders for more police protection.
Now, trying desperately to whitewash her defund-the-police positions of last year, Bas is pretending to care about public safety. “I share your concerns about the violent crime in our city,” she wrote in her email, adding, “It's not acceptable. We all deserve a safer Oakland.” Readers will be forgiven for issuing a spit-take on this howler. Bas is fooling no one, of course: rage against her is widespread in District 2, particularly in Chinatown, but in other neighborhoods as well. The physical dangers that Bas, Fife and some others have inflicted on Oaklanders is bad enough, but in a way, Bas’s intellectual mendacity is even worse. This politician, lost in the woozy world of her ideological obsessions, isn’t worthy of being re-elected for a second term. To call what she’s doing now a mere flip-flop is to undercut the severity of her infamy. If she’s returned to City Hall, she will try again to destroy the Oakland Police Department. Let there be no doubt about it. Mentored by Fife and Cat Brooks, Bas will never believe that police are the first and last resort for public safety. Her grudge against cops has temporarily had to be submerged because voters would have run her out of town had she continued on her anti-police crusade. But that grudge is still there, slouching toward more defunding, waiting for the opportunity to emerge in all its insanity.
The good news, for those of you who have been waiting for someone else to vote for in District 2, is that Harold Lowe has finally begun his overdue campaign. He has the money and the organization. His website will be up shortly. He’s out there in the neighborhoods, on the hustings, meeting his voters. His profile is on the rise. We still have two months for him to make his case. And we, the Coalition, will assist Harold in every way we can!
Steve Heimoff