Thank to our member Rajni Mandal, who reports on the Police Commission, we know that, at their Aug. 6 meeting, “Two commissioners were reappointed,” Rajni writes, “Chair Garcia-Acosta and Alternate Commissioner Omar Farmer.” Chair Garcia-Acosta mentioned the "minute but powerful movement against oversight” at the meeting, whose topic was the Police Commission’s so-called “Discipline Matrix.” That’s their bureaucratese for how to harass cops.
Unfortunately, the Police Commission makes gaining access to its minutes almost impossible (because they don’t want the public to know what’s happening), so we don’t know the context in which Garcia-Acosta made his derisory comment. But Rajni is a good reporter and if he says that’s what Garcia-Acosta said, then I believe it.
So what was Garcia-Acosta referring to? Obviously, to the movement in Oakland, of which we’re a part, to unshackle OPD from the oppressive clutch of the anti-police cult, which includes the Police Commission, the Federal Monitor, and all the other anti-cop mechanisms that blossom poisonously in Oakland. In fact, it’s possible that Garcia-Acosta had us—the Coalition for a Better Oakland—in mind.
Speaking for the Coalition, we’re certainly not “against oversight.” But we are against the obsession on the part of wokes to crush OPD so that it’s unable to perform its mission of protecting and serving us, the people of Oakland. I’ll go further: I’d like to see oversight of the people who purport to have oversight of the police. Who’s protecting us from them?
Who exactly is Ricardo Garcia-Acosta? He’s a self-described “community advocate and thought leader” (so modest of him to call himself a thought leader. So was Hitler). He built his career on “violence prevention,” the buzzword that has so captured the affection of leftist politicians but which is really just a smokescreen for funding City Council sycophants who crave a career in government so they can get a good salary and benefits. So desperate are Bay Area politicians for approval from woke influencers that nearly every municipal bureau in every city—from police commissions to Boards of Education to park departments—hires consultants like Mr. Garcia-Acosta to “advise” them how to install DEI programs, which we all realize are just fronts for racial preferences and thus unConstitutional. Garcia-Acosta saw the opportunities for himself in equity-obsessed Oakland and crawled up the greasy pole to leadership until—ta da!!!—he leads the Police Commission, one of the most powerful posts in the city. He’s the kind of reverse-racist who criticizes “criminal behavior [by police] when it’s carried out on black and brown [sic] folks,” but is strangely mute when it comes to criminal behavior carried out on black and brown folks by other black and brown folks, which of course constitutes the vast majority of Black and Brown murders. God forbid Garcia-Acosta should call out criminality in his own community (no, that has to be hushed up), but instead blames cops for the hundreds and hundreds of murders of young Black and Brown men in recent years, when the truth is there hasn’t been a police killing of a Black man in Oakland for a long time. Even Pamela Price noted that “There is no other disease or injury in Alameda County that displays such stark disparities in race and ethnicity as the epidemic of gun violence,” although she, like all reverse-racists, blames that on three factors—COVID, gun ownership, and ghost guns, while never even mentioning the moral dysfunction that characterizes so much of the inner city community and causes its young inhabitants to kill each other.
In reaction to this insanity, the law-abiding people in Oakland in recent years have banded together and risen up. We recalled Price and the equally-obtuse Sheng Thao. We have pressured the City Council to resist imposing the most draconian cuts to law enforcement. The Oakland Police Department now knows that a sizable majority of Oaklanders respect and support it. For Garcia-Acosta to call our movement “minute” is disrespectful and factually inaccurate, but he’s correct in calling it “powerful.” Yes, we are powerful. We have numbers. We have the voters. We have the momentum. We have decency on our side. And we’re not going anywhere.
Steve Heimoff