I’m sick and tired of people complaining about OPD’s overtime. Look: the department currently has about 667 full-time cops. That is hundreds less than a city the size of Oakland, with our horrible crime rate, requires, according to LeRonne Armstrong, the former OPD chief whom recalled mayor Sheng Thao fired. Therefore, OPD depends on overtime in order to keep cops on the beat. If the City Council really wants to reduce overtime, then let it act responsibly and fund another 500 cops. Then we’ll see police overtime fall dramatically.
Of course, this won’t happen because the progressives love the talking point of police overtime. It’s one of their favorite weapons in their arsenal of propaganda against OPD. Regular-ass people read a headline about the “alarming” rise in overtime and conclude that OPD is filled with slackers who lie on their time cards and make $500,000 a year—or is it $1 million?—in overtime, while buying Porsches and Rolexes and taking fabulous Caribbean vacations at the taxpayers’ expense. “OPD drawing scrutiny amid focus on fixing city deficit,” the S.F. Chronicle front-paged yesterday, with leftwing reporter Sarah Ravani referring for the umpteenth time to the department’s “chronic use of overtime,” as if it’s a disease like diabetes. The scrutiny, let’s admit, is Sarah Ravani’s. Regular Oaklanders just want to be safe, and we don’t care how much that costs.
This overtime crap is routinely peddled by Ravani or her colleagues at the Chronicle. They regurgitate the Big Lie that police spending must be reined in and “reimagined,” which as we all know means funneled to grifters. And the morons who believe it vote for police defunders like Carroll Fife, who will never rest until we retire her from politics.
Yes, OPD, like most urban police departments, spends a lot on overtime. But as Sgt. Huy Nguyen, president of the Oakland Police Officers Association, told me, OPD doesn’t have the resources to do its job to the extent they, and the public, expect. “Tackling this problem…requires strong and consistent support from both the community and our city leadership. Without that backing,” he emphasizes, OPD’s efforts to keep us safe “are often undermined or deprioritized.”
That’s putting it mildly. OPD doesn’t have the staffing because the progressive leftwing City Council for years has underfunded it. And then, when there’s a horrific crime spree and OPD is unable to contain it, who’s the first to criticize the cops? The City Council.
As if to visibly demonstrate its contempt for OPD, the City Council the other day asked OPD “to defer a 3% contractual wage increase scheduled for July 1, 2025” that had previously been agreed to. The department properly declined, citing as its main reason the fact that Oakland’s future budget remains shaky, with the city relying on suspicious income from deals no one understands, such as the ongoing saga of the Coliseum sale that never seems to happen. Even the head of the Chamber of Commerce, Barbara Leslie—who publicly endorsed Barbara Lee for Mayor--criticized Oakland’s commitment to public safety, leading many to wonder why the CoC supported a known opponent of the police funding Leslie claims to favor.
Police haters in Oakland continue to spread the lie that OPD doesn’t deserve funding because it’s a racist group that deliberately murders Black men. This slur “has had a truly massive impact on the modern profession of policing,” argues the Black scholar Wilfred Reilly. “The mass media,” he adds, “are, to an extraordinary degree, responsible for [this] widespread false belief.” (Sarah Ravani, I’m looking at you.) The fact is, there is no “war on Black men” by American cops. If anything—and it has to be emphasized—the war on Black men is waged by other Black men; this predator group preys on its own. And the only thing keeping us safe, including vulnerable Black people, is the dedicated vigilance of cops on the ground. Yes, the thin blue line.
Steve Heimoff