Crime is out of control in Oakland. Everybody knows it; everybody sees it; everybody is suffering because of it. Sideshows. Illegal dumping. Homeless people tapping into electrical meters and water hydrants. Illegal fires in encampments. Tents and cars blocking sidewalks. Fences and railings torn down. Drug-addled zombys ranting in the streets. Piles of trash everywhere. Used hypodermic needles. Encampments next to schools, playgrounds, and in our parks. It’s like something out of a dystopian movie fantasy, except that it’s real.
A lot of these things are, admittedly, threats to our quality of life, more than they are to our safety. But threats to our safety also are mounting.
“The numbers are alarming. In Oakland alone, police say robberies are up 15% this year over last and car jackings are up a whopping 95% in that same time,” ABC News recently reported. Oakland’s murder rate is on pace to its highest-ever number, with 84 victims as of Sunday, compared to only 64 in 2020. The latest death was an 18-year old man, shot over the weekend in Broadway’s club district, at 19th Street.
Oakland’s Police Chief, LeRonne Armstrong, repeatedly has warned the public. “We find ourselves in a crisis,” he said in June, after the City Council voted to defund the Oakland Police Department by $18 million. Oakland is “reeling” from violence, he added, and the City Council’s cuts will only make things worse. 9-1-1 response times will stall, there will be fewer cops on patrol, and future Police Academies (where rookies are trained) have already been cancelled.
Meanwhile, what is the City Council’s response? Its president, Nikki Fortunato Bas, who led the defund effort, calls violence “a public health crisis,” as if robbery and murder were caused by a virus. This deliberate distortion of reality not only exacerbates the level of crime in Oakland, it lets criminals off the hook by implying that they couldn’t help themselves, the “public health crisis” made them do it.
One phenomenon that is clearly apparent is the difference in how Hill people feel about this, as opposed to Flatland people. As this map shows,
areas marked in purple have the city’s highest crime rates: Fruitvale and West Oakland especially. Meanwhile, Hill neighborhoods have very low crime rates. Although Hill people are intellectually concerned about crime, they don’t especially worry about it because they think they’re immune, which is why council members who voted to defund OPD, like Thao, Bas and Kalb, keep getting elected: their constituents don’t understand how badly the council’s June 24 defunding vote hurt OPD.
But I think this is starting to change. The Coalition for a Better Oakland is going to be increasingly proactive in letting citizens know how much their safety is being jeopardized by a City Council that is more committed to catering to their “woke” base than it is to public safety.
Steve Heimoff