One of our complaints about Libby Schaaf is that, early in her administration, she began inviting homeless people to come to Oakland, whose motto under Mayor Schaaf had become “Love Life.”

I can hardly portray myself as a student of Dr. King’s teachings, although I did grow up with as much knowledge of him as was possible for a news-hungry, liberal White kid in the North who had access to television, newspapers and magazines. I even marched once with Dr. King, although it was not for civil rights but at an anti-Vietnam War demonstration he led in March, 1967, from Central Park to the United Nations (and which was nearly broken up by a pro-war march that was a precursor of today’s MAGA minions).

One of the public relations triumphs of the pro-homeless movement—perhaps its greatest—has been inventing the phrase “criminalizing homelessness” (or, in other instances, “criminalizing poverty”). A Google search for the former results in 152,000 hits; for the latter, 477,000 hits.

Pamela Price has a right to her beliefs. One of her beliefs is that “children,” which is to say anyone below the age of 21, should not be punished with the full force of the law, no matter how evil the criminal act they committed may be. Thus, she said the other day: “Anytime we take a child into custody, we are impacting that child in a very deep way. And my charge is to make sure that the system does not destroy them.”

One insight the public could have a better understanding of is how extensive the anti-police network is in Oakland. We talk, accurately, about the City Council and people like Carroll Fife trying to ruin the Oakland Police Department. But the truth is that, behind them, there’s a powerful matrix of organizations that hate cops and have been working for years to drastically cut, if not eliminate, OPD’s budget, shut down the jails and free the inmates so they can prey upon us.