I was honored to be called out for recognition, among others, at Friday’s special event at the Oakland Police Officers Association headquarters, by Sgt. Huy Nguyen, OPOA’s president. The event was to honor the Oakland Police Department’s Officer of the Year and Rookie of the Year. This is a big, meaningful event for Oakland cops, and it has great symbolic significance.
The banquet room at OPOA was crowded with OPD officers, including Interim Chief Beere, and others who had come for the early-morning breakfast and award ceremony. When you see so many Oakland cops all in one intimate setting, you get an appreciation for how diverse the group is: men and women of all backgrounds. You also get a sense, which I found wonderfully cheering, of how much these people love each other. There’s a sort of foxhole mentality, the camaraderie soldiers under battle inevitably develop with their colleagues. After all the stress of patrol and the attacks from police haters they have to endure every day, they were able to relax in the congenial company of themselves, in an atmosphere of peace and laughter. It made me happy to see our cops happy.
As Acting Chief Beere emphasized in his remarks, the loudest public voices often belong to the most vocal police haters, who make the news because reporters, who share these anti-police prejudices, scramble to give them media attention. But this can obscure the fact, as Sgt. Nguyen emphasized in his own remarks, that the vast majority of Oaklanders respect and cherish our cops. We can never forget that the haters are the minority, and they are increasingly marginalized as Oaklanders come to realize how important the police are to our daily existence.
I think the reason Sgt. Nguyen recognized me—and it was a total surprise to me—was because I happen to have a platform that expresses the thoughts of many Oaklanders who support the police. It’s fallen to me to have the honor to write this blog; when I began, five years ago, the defund-the-police movement still had some credibility, and some of the more ignorant members of the City Council were still committed to making law enforcement in Oakland disappear. Thankfully, we’ve defeated that movement, but we can’t rest on our laurels. As you’re well aware, there are still loud, ugly voices in Oakland, including on the City Council, that would like to see OPD entirely defunded. We have always got to be mindful of how destructive these people are, and resist them with all our might.
I’m constantly struck by the professionalism of our police officers. I know and they know that they’re the best-trained cops in America. No one is put through more rigorous training than they, but that’s a double-edged sword: not only are our cops real pros, they’re also hot commodities for other police departments that lack the resources to train their own officers as well as does OPD. This makes our police officers attractive recruitment targets for those other departments. This is one reason—although far from the only reason—why OPD struggles to maintain an adequate staffing level. Another reason is the remaining obstinacy on the City Council to give OPD enough money to attract and maintain a healthy level of staffing. The City Council lies when it says Oakland’s budget crisis won’t allow them to fully fund OPD for the minimum of 1,100 fulltime officers it needs. They could do this with a simple vote, but the career politicians on the City Council are afraid of losing their campaign funding from anti-police groups like SEIU, which for God only knows what reasons wish to emasculate OPD. And, of course, there’s yet another reason for OPD’s staffing problem: the negativity toward cops in Oakland. I said earlier that the vast majority of cops are cherished and respected by Oaklanders, but the morons who hate them spit at them and give them the finger and give them the mistaken impression that they’re not wanted in our neighborhoods.
Nothing could be further from the truth. I invite you to say to the next cop you see, “Thank you for your protection and service.” It’s a small gesture, but an important one. Our cops need every boost to their morale we can give them.
Steve Heimoff