Actually, I don’t have a gun, and never will. But the use of that R-word is offensive to me. For example, our neighbor to the north, Richmond, created a Reimagining Public Safety Community Task Force “to prepare a plan to transition from Richmond's current ‘community policing’ model to a plan conducive to the reduced police force and return to Council with the preferred policing model and a plan for implementation…”. Yes, in Richmond, as here in Oakland, there’s a hard core of defunders who resent the police and wish to significantly reduce—if not eliminate—their budget.
November 8 is election day, and in Richmond, as in Oakland, there are important City Council and Mayor elections that will determine the future of the Richmond Police Department. The Mercury-News just ran a story asking voters to support reasonable, moderate candidates against those favored by the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA), which constantly talks about “police violence” and “alternatives to policing.” The RPA has undue influence on the progressive City Council, but that can be ended on Nov. 8. Argues the Mercury-News, “…the City Council majority’s effort to reimagine public safety has significantly contributed to the sudden reduction of cops on the streets and investigating crimes.” The Richmond Police Department, like Oakland’s, is hemorrhaging cops: RPD’s number plunged “from 182 in the 2014-15 fiscal year to 149 in the 2020-21 fiscal year, when the RPA gained majority control and demands to defund the police accelerated.” The count was even worse in the 2021-2022 fiscal year: the department is now down to 110 officers.
Here in Oakland, we’re faced with a similar decimation of the police department, and for the same reason: cop-haters on the City Council. OPD is down to 680 sworn officers, more than 200 fewer than Chief Armstrong says is the minimum number he needs to fight crime. We just experienced our 101st homicide, the third year in a row of 100+ murders. And still, our own Reimagining Public Safety Task Force wants to further scalp OPD of officers and funding.
How strange it is that Oakland and Richmond are on similar tracks into anarchy and crime. And yet, maybe it’s not so strange. Both cities have strong progressive leanings. Both cities struggle with poverty, homelessness, racial tension and crime. Both cities have given rise to decades of social idealists, whose visions—worthy on the surface—seem inevitably attached to attacks on the police department, and are, in the end, unworkable. Both cities routinely elect progressives to office. And, most importantly, both cities finally have the opportunity to throw off the shackles of failed progressive policies on Nov. 8. That’s when we can fire the Reimagine crowds in Richmond and Oakland and get rid of that awful “Reimagining” word—an insult to true creative imagination, a perversion of a perfectly good word to serve the abstract absurdities of radicals.
Steve Heimoff