Reform DA = Everyone discovers crime.
At a recent town hall, Oakland residents berated DA Pamela Price about violence in the city. “They’re probably out committing more crimes! They’re nasty little monsters!” a woman screamed about some teens allegedly involved in a string of robberies. Price tried to explain that there hadn’t been enough evidence to try the teens, not that she believes that when the socialist utopia comes and prisons are abolished, teenagers would stop being assholes. The cops also got a mouthful from a man who begged them to do their jobs better, but most of the virulence was directed at Price.
When Chesa Boudin was in office the national media descended upon poor San Francisco to tell dark tales of disorder and criminals run amok. Anything bad that happened was Boudin’s fault. Nothing is his successor Brooke Jenkins fault—except when she failed to prosecute a car jacker that crashed the stolen car off of Telegraph Hill, but then the chatter on social media was the San Francisco is SO left-wing even a tough-on-crime prosecutor is secretly an anarchist hippie. Jenkins said there wasn’t enough evidence because witnesses refused to cooperate. It seems odd that an incident caught on camera would require live witnesses, but you have to be really, really stupid—like there might be a Ceti eel in your brain—to so thoroughly buy into right-wing crime propaganda that you think Jenkins has a secret soft-spot for car jackers.
Anyway, one crazy thing about the San Francisco discourse was that Oakland, just across the bay, has always had a much higher crime rate than San Francisco. This is in large part because white people take their kids to Alcatraz, not Oakland, so San Francisco was going to get more attention from the media.
But, also, it’s hard to deny that crime suddenly EXPLODES in social and traditional media when a reform DA gets elected.
Let’s look at the most recent numbers in Oakland, according to ABC:
Property crime has increased 28%.
Homicides so far in 2023 are down 13% compared to 2022.
Burglaries are up 41%.
Vehicle thefts have increased 50%.
People tend to conflate burglary with robbery, but a burglary charge can range from, “You broke into someone’s home and killed them” to “taking someone’s package from their porch.” How much of the jump in burglaries is due to more and more people ordering all of their shit online? My apartment entrance is perpetually blocked by mountains of packages. Yes, it sucks when someone takes your coffee pods, but it’s not exactly a life-threatening incident.
The rise in carjackings? Let’s think. First, they rose everywhere in the country. Literally everywhere. Second, contemporary cars are a cross between highly functioning computers and tanks. They’re closer to KITT from Knight Rider than a 1980s sedan. Which means that you can’t just like … steal a car by hot-wiring it. This would account for a rise in stealing a car by threatening the passenger, which is obviously riskier for everyone than just stealing a car.
But more to the point, while everyone was screaming at Price, the one man asked the cops why they didn’t catch more carjackers. One of the officers meekly said that they weren’t allowed to pursue suspects in a car chase. First of all, this is false, there have been car chases as recently as this month. Attention promptly went back to Price. Price has never said she would refuse to prosecute a person who pointed a gun at someone’s head and took off with their car. It’s really not in the George Soros International Conspiracy Handbook for Reform DAs that you give an armed carjacker a pat on the head and send them to summer camp. However, if she does choose diversions, instead of prison, for underaged suspects? That means they get to finish high school instead of go to prison to be traumatized and then released back into the community with far fewer opportunities—when they’re still in an age range to commit more crime. Anyway. Clearance rates for stolen cars are, also, notoriously low. This is because police don’t give a fuck about your stolen car. So if anything is emboldening asshole teenagers, it’s the low likelihood of ever getting caught.
Even more to the point, homicides are down 13%. Yet the story is mostly focused on shooting fatalities.
Advocate Brenda Grisham lost her son to gun violence in 2010.
She believes crime in Oakland is reaching a boiling point.
"I was going to have a National Night Out event this week. I canceled because in the area where I am, there was a shooting, a murder and a drive-by in less than a week -- not safe," Grisham said.
Friday night, one person was wounded in a shooting at 19th and Broadway. Oakland Police Department says its looking for suspects.
"Violence is growing in our communities, and we have to work to ensure the proper resources are available so that violence can decrease and eventually stop," said Wanda Johnson from the Oscar Grant Foundation.
The incidents described above—the death of their loved ones is what matters for the families; citywide stats, I imagine, provide exactly 0 comfort.
But in most cities high homicides rates are confined to highly specific neighborhoods, and that’s a tragedy that should be addressed with smart, not abusive, crime-fighting. Clearance rates for violent crime in Oakland were at 17 percent in 2020, the last time data was available, and nationally, police spend the bulk of their time on traffic stops, not on solving homicides. But hey let’s all yell at the reform DA. The Oakland NAACP actually accused her of an “unwillingness to charge and prosecute people who commit murder and commit lifethreatening serious crimes…” “Don’t prosecute murders” is also not in the Soros Handbook. But ‘bust teens for shoplifting or turnstile jumping” instead of “direct all of your resources to the most serious crimes” is in the police job description.