An op-ed piece in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle highlights an important point that tends to be obscured by all the political chatter these days. “…[T]here’s little coordination of policy in San Francisco. By contrast, in cities that had had success fighting drug addiction, the courts, the police, defense attorneys, politicians and business leaders got on the same page.”
The piece points out how dysfunctional San Francisco has been, with London Breed blaming District Attorney Chesa Boudin for crime, Boudin blaming the police, who fought back against the D.A., and the Board of Supervisors meanwhile dithering as usual, mired in the muck of their progressivism. Business leaders looked on with dismay, as the looting of stores continued and Union Square remained a ghost town.
The same could be said of Oakland. We have a Mayor who can charitably be called a “moderate” but who, lacking the power to stand up to a bullying City Council, has been utterly ineffective in addressing the city’s woes. We have a City Council bound and determined to ram through their woke policies, even as time, experience and, yes, common sense have repeatedly proven they don’t work. We have a police department and police union that understandably feel disrespected and neutered; cops are not allowed by their superiors to do their jobs. Oakland doesn’t have its own District Attorney, of course, because it’s not a county, like San Francisco; but Oakland does have courts that routinely allow convicted felons, often repeat offenders, to get back on to the streets time and time again. Under the circumstances, this circular firing squad predictably has not only been unable to solve anything, but has actually contributed to the mess we’re in.
What will it take to get everyone in Oakland on the same page?
To begin with, voters will have to throw out all the progressives on the City Council. You know who they are. They are impediments to progress and will remain so as long as voters keep re-electing them. We also need to elect an Alameda County District Attorney who will actually prosecute criminals, not coddle them the way Chesa Boudin did (and the way Pamela Price will, if she’s able to get elected in November). It’s fine having a moderate Mayor; Libby would have done a better job if she were a so-called “strong mayor” (as Seneca Scott is advocating) rather than having to knuckle under to the out-of-control City Council. As for our business leaders, I can’t really criticize them. The Chamber of Commerce is simply trying to keep companies from fleeing Oakland, and are constantly fighting against the rapacious City Council’s efforts to raise business taxes.
It can be argued, of course, that Oakland is a citadel of democracy: many competing interests and points of view, all skirmishing for their share of the pie. But what about the interests of the People? Safety is our number one concern, but we can’t have safety until we have a properly funded police department, and a city government and Police Commission willing to allow the police to do their jobs. We can’t have safety as long as we have judges who think diverting criminals to alternative programs will end crime; it doesn’t, it can’t, and we need to fire those soft-on-crime judges and hire men and women who want to protect us, not the criminals. We can’t have safety as long as we have a City Council that values “social justice” over your and my rights to life and property.
Next to safety as our number one concern is the economic vitality of Oakland. We want strong, profitable businesses in Oakland, the more, the better—and that includes the big corporations. From such companies come sales, business and payroll taxes, which pay the city’s bills. Without these taxes Oakland is hard pressed to get anything done, including keeping parks open and supporting the arts. The people who reflexively protest against big corporations are the same ones who, with so little understanding of how cities work, want to drive them out of town. They want a decrepit downtown: why do you think the old Sears building (Uptown Station) has been idle for years? Such a beautiful space, so much money spent on its redevelopment, so why didn’t Square, or Uber, or some other big employer go there? Well, if you owned a big company, would you want to relocate to Oakland, where there are riots in the streets, where Carroll Fife is always trying to raise your taxes, where your employers feel unsafe just coming and going to work?
All these things point out how broken Oakland is. Until we get rid of the radical extremists, Oakland will remain a mess.
Steve Heimoff