There’s this Oakland troll who hovers around online and is frequently critical of the Coalition for a Better Oakland. He calls himself Trash Night Heron. He (I’m assuming his preferred pronoun is “he”) recently presented his analysis of why it’s impossible to increase the number of sworn officers in the Oakland Police Department beyond fifty new cops every two years.
Carroll Fife retweeted him, of course: anything that hurts the Oakland Police Department, Carroll is for. Look: if Oakland really wanted 1,100 cops, we’d have them. Let me remind everyone that 1,100 is the minimum number of cops that Chief Armstrong tells us he needs to properly combat crime. For Carroll Fife or Mr. Trash or anyone else to tell us that the current level of crime is inevitable because we can’t afford to stop it is an unconscionable lie.
We’re Americans! We set big goals. When John F. Kennedy said in 1961 that we’d get to the Moon “this decade,” there were plenty of skeptics. But we did it. We achieved the impossible and proved the naysayers wrong. We also proved we can be audacious when we elected Barack Obama in 2008. So I don’t want to hear any crap about “Oh, we just can’t afford more cops.” That is defeatism, but even worse, it comes from people who have a grudge against law enforcement. They seem to want more crime in Oakland; it helps them politically.
I don’t know why anyone would hate the police the way Fife and her friends do. I suppose it’s because they’ve had bad experiences with cops. If that’s true, it can only be because they’ve committed crimes and were held to account for them. For instance, when Fife invaded that West Oakland house in late 2019 and started squatting there with some of her friends, they were compelled to move out in January, 2021, by law enforcement, after a judge found they were illegally occupying the house. Fife didn’t like that. Probably she’d had anti-police feelings for a long time and this merely reinforced them. She appears to believe that police have no right to interfere with anyone who claims the crime they’re committing is for “social justice.”
Let that sink in. If someone steals your car, they can get away with it by claiming they need a car but can’t afford one. Car theft then becomes an alternative means of achieving social justice. If someone invades your home and throws you out, they can get away with it by pleading that they’re poor, you’re rich, they need a house, and yours is the one they want. Home invasion then becomes an alternative means of achieving social justice.
You can use your imagination to justify almost any crime with the excuse that someone poor has the right to “equality” by seizing the property of someone who has more than they do. This is Carroll Fife’s belief, or so it seems to me. When my colleague Jack Saunders quips that the Left’s philosophy is, “Poor people gonna steal and it’s okay when they do,” that seems to be Fife’s philosophy too.
I don’t mean to pick on Fife. She’s had a hard life, same as the rest of us, and we all should feel compassion for the suffering of each of us. I feel for Fife, I really do. I believe she feels the pain of poor, homeless people and criminals. I believe she practices what she thinks of as “Christian values.” I just wish she would have a more balanced, reasonable view and understand that it’s not only her poor and homeless constituents who need understanding and help, but the rest of us, whose lives are upended by all the crime and filth. Maybe Fife believes it’s payback time: Let “rich” white people feel the pain and deprivation that people of color have always felt. If that’s the case, then Fife is wreaking vengeance upon her political enemies. But is vengeance really what we need right now? Because the immortal law of karma says, “Vengeance on me today, vengeance on you tomorrow.”
It doesn’t have to be this way. Fife & Co. don’t have to further divide our city along racial, political, ethnic and income lines. It’s dangerous, stupid and wrong. But it’s the path to power, at least in Oakland, and power is what Fife craves.
I’ll sum up by saying that crime is so bad in Oakland that, if we really can’t afford to bring OPD up to snuff, then let’s call in the National Guard. That’s the answer to obstructionists like Mr. Trash who claim that there’s not enough money in Oakland to fight crime. Our answer has to be: We will fight crime by any means necessary, even if it means canceling the departments of Violence Prevention, Race & Equity and others whose existence seems based on dubious assumptions.
Steve Heimoff