This topic is a little controversial, but I have to address it. I came across this comment on nextdoor.com (I’m not correcting the grammar errors):
I'm so done with oakland. Today my car got broken into for a 3rd time. What happened was is that I was returning a rental car after my other car was totalled. And someone opened the door from the cracked glass and stole headphones and luckily nothing else. And I only left the car parked for 50 min. But I hate Oakland so much after this. Our city leaders don't care about rising crime and choose too defund the police rather than increase oversight over them. Yes police brutallity is a problem, but the solution isn't defunding the police when crime is increasing, its too increase oversight over them and hire more cops too stop criminals.
I agree with everything the writer said, except for his statement: “Yes police brutality is a problem.” I would respectfully ask the writer on what basis he makes this remark.
Certainly, if you listen to the media, there are often references to “police brutality.” Anything Cat Brooks writes or says is likely to contain the phrase. Reporters bandy the term about as though it were a regularly-occurring thing. For example, consider this headline, from the Associated Press:
Fires, damage at Oakland protest against police brutality
The article was about the latest riot downtown, last April. Look: When someone uses a noun over and over again, the tendency among people is to assume that the noun refers to something objectively real. If I tell you “The apple is red,” you will naturally assume that I’m referring to an actual apple.
But we’ve seen from recent history that just because somebody claims that something is real, doesn’t make it so. Trump keeps talking about the “rigged election.” Fox News parrots him. His deluded followers repeat the phrase. If so many people are talking about a “rigged election,” it must refer to something that actually happened, right?
Wrong. Josef Goebbels figured this out a long time ago. “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it,” he said, “people will eventually come to believe it.” Trump, who no doubt has studied Goebbels, understands this. But then, so do Cat Brooks and the others who keep on accusing cops of “brutality.”
I don’t blame the nextdoor.com commenter for inadvertently playing into Brooks’ Big Lie. He’s a victim of the same media as the rest of us. The only thing he’s heard about OPD for years is “police brutality.” No wonder he assumes it exists.
But let me ask him, and you, this: Can you cite a single instance of police brutality in Oakland? I’m not talking about The Riders from 20 years ago. I’m not talking about a situation in which a cop has to use force to disable a violent antagonist. I’m talking about a pure incident of police brutality, in which a cop or several cops beat the hell out of, or kill, somebody for no reason at all. It may be that someone claims to have been “brutalized” by cops. But claiming something doesn’t make it true. So, again, I ask: When is the last time an Oakland police officer was actually convicted of brutality?
The Community Police Review Agency (CPRA)—Oakland’s civilian review board of OPD, run by the Police Commission—is tasked with investigating incidents of alleged “misconduct” by cops. In 2019, the latest year data is available, CPRA received 500 complaints of “misconduct,” about 40 per month. These complaints are exhaustively investigated; probably no police department in America has a more thorough vetting process. Of the 500 incidents CPRA looked at in 2019, 81% were found to be either “not sustained,” “unfounded,” “exonerated” or to have not been in CPRA’s jurisdiction. In other words, more than four-fifths of the complaints were tossed out. That left 19% that were “sustained,” meaning that the complainant was right. Of these, a careful examination of the data shows that none of the sustained complaints was about “brutality.” Instead, they concerned technical violations of things like not giving an arrestee his Miranda rights, or improper searches, or accepting a gratuity, or problems with the cop’s “demeanor” (a highly subjective thing), or improper sexual activity. Only one incident in 2019 involved real misconduct: the shooting and resulting death of an individual by OPD cops, several of whom were terminated from the department after an investigation. Tragic as that was, I would argue it was not “brutality,” as the term is commonly understood. Awful, yes. Unjustified, yes. Against the law? Let the courts decide. Brutality? No.
In writing all this, I don’t mean to undermine the seriousness of any instance of police misconduct, whether it was an inadvertent Miranda violation or an unjustified shooting. Oakland police officers undergo the most rigorous oversight and training of any department in the country. (I’ll be writing much more about their training in upcoming posts.) Cops are terrified of committing misconduct; if anything, they let a lot of crime slide out of fear of being prosecuted. Of course, the ideal is to have no instances of misconduct at all, and that is something OPD and Chief Armstrong are committed to achieving.
In the meanwhile, though, let’s have a little more respect for the way we use language. “Police brutality” in Oakland is largely a myth or a meme, perpetuated by individuals who resent cops and want to see police departments abolished. Reporters who mindlessly throw the phrase “police brutality” around need to go back to J-school. And we citizens should be very wary about buying into alleged “police brutality” when the evidence for it is practically non-existent.
Steve Heimoff