I suppose we should be grateful that Sheng Thao belatedly discovered that she’s pro-cop and is now actively calling for more police training academies. “Better late than never,” goes the old saying; if Thao was late to the party, at least she’s finally here with the rest of us.
But we have to account for the amazing intellectual pretzeling Thao has had to contort herself into, in order to comprehend her new position. For it was just a little more than 2 months ago, at the Oakland City Council’s notorious meeting in which a majority voted to defund OPD, that Thao decisively declared police academies were not “fiscally responsible,” and sided with her fellow defunders—Fife, Kaplan, Kalb, Bas and Gallo—to strip OPD of $18 million. (Only Treva Reid and Loren Taylor voted to maintain OPD funding.)
Circumstances in politics can change rapidly, requiring politicians to reverse their positions. There’s nothing wrong with this. Obama decided to back gay marriage after being opposed to it. George H.W. Bush raised taxes, after promising not to. Many Democrats and some Republicans now concede the Afghan War was a mistake, after initially backing it. We should never fulminate against a politician who manages, after due consideration, to stumble into the truth.
But we can ask questions about their motives. In Thao’s case, why did she not understand in June, when the Council took its wrongful vote, that Oakland needs more cops, not fewer? We can only make inferences, but they’re based on facts. Here’s mine: Thao, an ambitious pol who insiders say is running for Mayor next year, took the political temperature at the time and concluded that she had more to gain by being perceived as anti-cop than pro-cop. Thao, who represents District 4, had watched the virulently anti-cop radical, Carroll Fife, vault to victory in District 3 the previous November, based largely on the votes of “progressives” who admired her stance on police defunding and help for the homeless. What had helped Fife, Thao reasoned, would help her. Besides, the fact that the City Council’s president, Bas, and Vice Mayor, Kaplan, also voted for defunding gave her protective cover.
But a lot can happen in three months. First, Thao watched as public reaction shifted heavily against the defunders and in favor of OPD during the city’s current crime wave. Chief Armstrong and Oakland Police Officers Association president Barry Donelan went public in a major way, reminding voters that crime was surging and that the City Council was throwing citizens under the bus. Every major Democrat in America, from Obama to Biden, explicitly condemned the “defund the police” movement, putting pressure on all other Democrats to do the same, or be outcasts in their own party. Thao, taking all this into consideration, made her decision: reverse course.
Was she uncomfortable with her own blatant hypocrisy? Probably. One of the first things she did after her switch on academies was to head to Twitter to do damage control. People already were calling her out for being a flip-flopper; her colleague on the Council, Loren Taylor, expressed the dismay many were feeling when he said, “I am shocked that she is proposing the exact thing that she voted against two months ago.” Thao realized that she had painted herself into a corner, and had to get out. So she tweeted, on Sept. 7: “To be clear, I am incredibly proud of my vote in June”—yes, the very defunding vote she was now repudiating. At the same time, she faced the problem now of defending her call for more academies. She did this by tossing a bone to the defunders: she claimed that, due to her intervention, future academies would “focus on hiring locally, and hiring a more diverse & gender balanced police force that is rooted in the community.”
This is complete nonsense, an historical fiction of Trumpian dimensions. Oakland Police Academies already were focused on local hiring and diversity, and have been for years. OPD’s official “Disparity Reduction Measures” clearly detail the steps the department is taking “to increase diverse recruitment efforts.” OPD chief LeRonne Armstrong himself led the Oakland Black Officers Association before becoming Chief last year; for the better part of a decade he’s been stressing the importance of hiring more POC as sworn officers. By any measure, the percentage of Blacks, Asians, LatinX, women and LGBTQ officers has increased over the years. In other words, Thao is now supporting—and trying to take credit for--something that already exists.
In the end, we have to welcome Thao’s “better late than never” conversion, but we also have to question her intellectual acuity and integrity. If her positions on issues as vital as police reform can shift so suddenly based on polls, how are we to take her seriously on anything?