Let's keep blaming reformers for everything and police for nothing.
The tough-on-crime folks are slobbering over a letter posted by the Oakland, California, NAACP, the city’s failure to address violent crime.
“Failed leadership, including the movement to defund the police, our District Attorney’s unwillingness to charge and prosecute people who commit murder and commit lifethreatening serious crimes, and the proliferation of antipolice rhetoric have created a heyday for Oakland criminals,” the Oakland chapter writes.
“Almost too many lines to choose from,” tweeted Bay Area based filmmaker, and former Michael Shellenberger staffer, Leighton Woodhouse.
“Yet another illustration of the reality that we err by proceeding as if the loudest activists in the room speak for the communities whose views they claim to represent,” added the Manhattan Institutes Rafael A. Mangual. “No surprise to SF residents (incl. that NAACP Oakland is demanding action in response to left-wing DAs, defund the police, and other "progressive policies" that have made "murders, shootings, violent armed robberies... a pervasive fixture of life in Oakland," another user posted.
Yes yes, we get the exquisite irony. And the historically vital NAACP carries more ideological heft than a white Oberlin anarchist, which is how opponents of reform have managed to depict defund activists. And there’s nothing sweeter to the ears of tough-on-crime advocates than when Black people say they’re scared of crime, better yet, when they blame progressive policy and defund.
But Oakland never defunded the police. An ABC investigation found that police funding increased 18 percent between 2019 and 2022. And, really? Reform DA Pamela Price is refusing to prosecute people who commit murder?
As per the usual playbook, the the movement to recall Price began before she’d even done anything in office. As the Intercept reports:
The visceral criticisms of Price have taken hold just seven months into her first term in office and made it difficult for observers to distinguish impartial criticism from backlash to the reform movement writ large. In the cases of both Price and Boudin, proponents of tough-on-crime policies have drawn a link between criminal justice reform and crimes against Asian Americans.
“All of this was happening under [Nancy] O’Malley,” Brooks said, referring to the previous Alameda County district attorney. Part of the backlash to the criminal justice reform movement is a law-and-order drum beat that capitalizes on and manipulates people’s fear and pain, Brooks said. “It’s a bunch of false flags,” she added. “Unfortunately, that is a tactic we know that the right uses to prevent solidarity.”
When I lived in the Bay Area you were always a little bit more aware of your surroundings in Oakland than in San Francisco (which is why it was so ridiculous when every prestige outlet depicted SF as a violent Hellscape). But, anti-police sentiment in the largely Black community did not start with BLM or defund the police. How about the police murder of Oscar Grant in 2009? How about how the Oakland PD unleashed such violent on Occupy protestors that they broke the skull of a vet who’d served in Iraq? The Oakland PD has been under federal oversight since 2003. Last April, a federal judge demanded the city pay 10.9 million dollars (defund the taxpayers!) in a class action lawsuit. The judge wondered how to address the “cultural inability” of the Police Department to hold itself accountable.
“The one issue that we haven’t made a ton of progress on is the cultural rot that existed at the time that you brought this suit 23 years ago,” Judge William Orrick told lawyersJames Chanin, who, along with John Burris, represented the plaintiffs.
Orrick said by June 1 he expects to issue an order mapping out what tasks remain. The parties will next meet in court at a compliance hearing on Sept. 26.
“We do have to recognize that the question of culture is an ongoing process,” Burris said. “It is not one day, two days, then you stop. It is how do you handle the problems when they developed and whether or not the culture is such that you hold people accountable from beginning to end.”
Huh so maybe the city has bigger problems than a 19-year-old liberal arts student holding a sign.
Such as, the abysmally low clearance rate.
Note that crime has actually decreased since 2013. And the clearance rate with it. In 2020, Oakland PD cleared just 17 percent of violent crimes.