News from the Oakland Police Department: After a horrible drunk person drove his car into a packed minivan in East Oakland, severely injuring multiple people, including two children, the felonious driver attempted to flee the scene. Thankfully, “residents in the area were able to detain him until OPD officers arrived,” and the driver is now being held in jail.
Bless those unnamed residents. They saw evil, and they made the moral and physically courageous decision to resist it. Some people would call their action “vigilantism”: law enforcement undertaken without legal authority by a self-appointed group of people.
Vigilantism has gotten a bad name over the years. The lynchings perpetuated against Black people by the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups were forms of vigilantism. Trayvon Martin was murdered in 2012 by George Zimmerman, a self-professed vigilante who claimed to be protecting his neighborhood. And, of course, the red state of Texas has just passed a law paying vigilantes to make citizens’ arrests on anyone they suspect of enabling abortion.
But the good citizens of Fruitvale who detained the drunk driver were also vigilantes. This shows that there are distinct “flavors” of vigilantism: “good” vigilantes and “bad” vigilantes. It also demonstrates something else that has been overlooked in the discussion: law-abiding Oaklanders are ready, willing and able to take the law into their own hands and enforce public safety, if the city of Oakland and the Oakland Police Department won’t.
It’s not that OPD doesn’t want to enforce the law. They do. It’s what they signed up for. The problem is that OPD is not being allowed to perform their jobs fully, due to a constellation of factors: the Negotiated Settlement Agreement (NSA); a Police Commission dominated by anti-cop types; a City Council that has, in effect, announced it doesn’t trust OPD; a Mayor who no longer cares very much about anything except her next job; and a disengaged electorate that lets all of these things pass.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying OPD could or should have prevented the drunk driver from doing what he did. We could have 10,000 cops on the streets, and idiots would still be idiots. What I am saying is that too many people think that law enforcement in Oakland is lax to the point of ineffectual, and therefore they think they can perform blatant acts of criminality and get away with it. And why wouldn’t they think that way? They look around, and see the same things you and I see: crimes both petty and profound, from the homeless camper with piles of (stolen) bicycles outside his tent, to the mugger and the smash-and-grabbers breaking into our cars—and no one gets pinched.
I want to see an OPD that’s a thousand-officers strong. I want these officers to be the best-trained, most professional and moral cops in America. I want Oaklanders to be proud of their police. I want Oakland to win an award for “safest city in America.” I want all of our citizens to be peaceful in their homes, happy in their jobs, engaged with their neighbors and devoted to the cause of Justice. I want to see a day when our neighborhoods no longer need vigilantes because there are no criminals for them to stop.
Steve Heimoff