Equity wokeists in Oakland go to pieces whenever they discover “racial disparities” in anything. Not enough POC hired into city positions? Let the hearings begin! Not enough cops of color in OPD? Someone must answer for this scandal! Not enough Blacks or Latinos given city contracts? We’ve got to change that! Not enough Blacks graduating high school? Lower the graduation standards!
But no White people on the Police Commission? No problema!
We all know what’s going on. Oakland is run by Black radicals. That’s not an accusation or a slur but a fact. White people tend to be more supportive of the police than people of color (with the exception of Asian-Americans). The people of color who run Oakland don’t want to dilute the power of the Police Commission. Our government leaders don’t like cops; they want to hobble cops, possibly even abolish the police, and instead let people with ill intent run free. And who are those people with ill intent? Yes, primarily people of color--another statistical fact.
If you’re a radical Black leader in Oakland with a sympathy toward Seventies-style Black Panther radicalism, you find the pathology in the Black community a very inconvenient fact. Barbara Lee, Carroll Fife, Pamela Price, Lateefah Simon and on and on can’t stand the fact that the racial demographic they represent has a tendency toward bad behavior. Of course, it goes without saying that the majority of Black Oaklanders are upstanding citizens, religious and respectful of our laws, who raise their children properly, thank God. But there is that 10 percent, or whatever, who misbehave and make our cherished city a worse place to live than it has to be (and this includes the homeless zombies who haunt and desecrate our streets). This is what the “progressive” Black leaders of Oakland cannot acknowledge. To do so would be to admit that the rationale for their careers—equity--is a farce.
Which gets us back to the Police Commission. It’s composed of seven commissioners and two alternates, and is overseen by a Chief of Staff. All are people of color, mostly Black, with a few Latino-Caribs. There is not a White person among them. Is this a scandal? Yes. White people are the largest percent of the population, comprising about 34% of the city’s 440,000 people. So how come the city’s largest demographic group by race has no representation on what is arguably the most important public safety board in Oakland?
Police commissioners are appointed by the City Council and the Mayor. Since these individuals are obsessed with “equity,” they always appoint either Black people to the Police Commission, or so-called progressives sympathetic to Black causes. This is because the attitude of our “leaders” towards cops is one of disdain, resentment and opposition. It’s been that way for decades, which is why the Oakland Police Department is the weakest of any major city in America. They can’t properly do their jobs because they’re hobbled by the City Council and by police-hating “police oversight” groups. It’s also because they’re deliberately underfunded. I don’t care what B. Lee and Kevin Jenkins and the rest of them say about Oakland’s budgetary problems; they could fully fund OPD if they wanted to, but they don’t want to (and the unions wouldn’t let them even if they did). They don’t believe in public safety. If they did, we’d have 1,100 sworn officers on the streets, and they’d be using every high-tech device known to man to hunt down and catch criminals. But this City Council has no interest in actually fighting crime. And so they stack the Police Commission with people of color who have sworn fealty to SEIU and their woke hatred of police.
Think about the blowback if the Police Commission had only White members. You’d have Carroll Fife leading angry mobs carrying flaming torches down Broadway. You’d have ambulance-chasing lawyers like John Burris suing the city. You’d have Black preachers screaming bloody murder from their pulpits. You’d have the woke media—the SF Chronicle, Oaklandside, KQED—setting their hair on fire, live on camera. Instead, we have a Police Commission that won’t allow White people—an act of racism if ever there was one--and all we get is…crickets.
By the way, my more conservative readers will love today’s post. But if I dare criticize Trump and his deplorable MAGAs, they give me hell. Go figure!
Steve Heimoff