Here’s a name you probably don’t know, but should: Millie Cleveland. She’s one of the most vicious police haters Oakland has ever known, and a real behind-the-scenes power. She’s been making war against the Oakland Police Department since the 1970s, and continues her scourge today. Mayors and City Council members come and go, but Ms. Cleveland is always there, lurking somewhere in the shadows, spreading her cop hatred and thereby enabling pro-crime elements to thrive.
Cleveland made the news again recently. Everyone in Oakland, it seems, from Mayor Lee on down, is rightfully trying to end the dictatorial overlordship of the Negotiated Settlement Agreement on OPD. Just when it seems that much-desired end is within reach, Cleveland, in her guise as a leader of the so-called Coalition for Police Accountability, wrote a letter to Robert Orrick, the Superior Court judge who has kept the NSA alive far past its expiration date, in which she urged him to keep the agreement going forward endlessly. “Oakland doesn’t have the will to reform,” she told him. “Instead of moving forward, we fear that we see indications that we appear to be slipping backward.”
Cleveland, whom I do not know, is a large part of the problem in Oakland. She’s been a race baiter for decades and, although old now, shows no signs of softening her hardline race-based ideology. If you’re looking for the poster child of woke Black liberation theology in Oakland, meet Millie Cleveland.
Here are some things to know about her.
She lives in East Oakland. She was a Black Panther. She worked for SEIU, the leading anti-police union in Oakland.
She was a leader of the attack on the Oakland branch of the NAACP for supporting the Oakland Police Department. She harshly criticized the branch for blaming the “defund the police” cult for the rise in crime.
She was a member of MACRO’s advisory board who called for the City Council to “strengthen” MACRO, even though the program is widely viewed as an expensive failure.
She’s chair of the Coalition for Police Accountability’s steering committee in Oakland. That Coalition has tried for years to undermine and weaken the Oakland Police Department.
A strong supporter of the anti-cop Police Commission, Cleveland also is resisting efforts to cut the budgets of the other two main police opponents, the Office of Inspector General and the Community Police Review Agency, which she believes should have far greater oversight of OPD. (I wrote about this last week.) Their budgets, like those of other city bureaucracies, must be cut due to Oakland’s fiscal crisis. Cleveland, somewhat surprisingly, admits that “The purpose of the OIG and CPRA is to take over” OPD. “Eliminating the watchdog is not saving money.”
More personally, Cleveland embraced the cultural race wars when she criticized a White man on X for stating that all the farejumpers he ever saw on the subway were Black. I wouldn’t go that far, but many are.
She celebrated her longtime collaborator Carroll Fife’s 2024 re-election victory, and opposed the election of LeRonne Armstrong to the City Council.
There are many other instances I could cite that testify to Cleveland’s incendiary character. She is, in short, the kind of person that has held Oakland down. To her, “progress” is a zero-sum game, which Black people must win and White people, including our multi-racial police department, must lose. I’m sure that Millie Cleveland personally is a nice lady, and I wish her well. But the reality is, we as a society don’t need such people anymore. We’ve moved way beyond her simplistic and rather hateful race ideology, with its irrational resentment of our brave men and women in uniform. I hope and pray that, eventually, Millie Cleveland realizes the error of her ways.
Steve Heimoff