Comment Archives: stories: News
Re: “Are More Cops the Answer?”
Jonathan,
I'm glad you brought up Measure DD.
Measure DD was funded as a capital project via $198 million in bonds, but there is no money for the operations and maintenance budget for the lakefront improvements. Deanna Santana pointed this out at the recent community forum on public safety sponsored by Make Oakland Better Now! (April 28, 2013 at St. Paul's Episcopal Church). I believe Santana also said the new West Oakland Youth Center also has no operations and upkeep budget.
Santana's point was similar to the one we've highlighted in this article; public safety is about more than cops. There's a delicate balance. De-funding important capital projects and non-police services can have major negative impacts on public safety.
Santana said at that meeting that she would like to implement a "fair share" budget, one that doesn't require the trade-off of funding one department at the expense of others.
Unfortunately the police department, because of its outsized costs, directly competes with general fund dollars that should be used to upkeep this beautiful public works project. Perhaps the Council will find money to fund maintenance and repairs for the millions we've borrowed and spent. It would be a shame if we had to let our wonderful city improvements crumble over the next few years because of a very costly effort to ramp up police staffing levels, an agenda that is by no means guaranteed to make the city safer.
Re: “Oakland Officials Withhold Air Pollution Plan”
Good coverage, a well balanced article.
Re: “Are More Cops the Answer?”
What this really comes down to, is are you going to believe two Occupiers and their cherry-picked quotes from academic studies that don't discuss Oakland, or your own eyes? Oakland has invested in tremendous infrastructure projects recently like Measure DD (Love Our Lake Day is June 9!), as well as crime prevention, subsidized housing and all sorts of social programs, while cutting the number of police. And crime has gone up dramatically. If cities didn't need police, someone besides Occupiers would have figured that out long ago. Oakland's need for more police is apparent to virtually everyone in the city except this newspaper, it seems.
Re: “Are More Cops the Answer?”
Personally, I cannot wait for the airport "boondoggle" to be built, because it is what passengers want, a seamless connection from BART to the airport, and is likely to go a long way in making BART a really viable option for airport transit. Both AirBART and AC Transit's airport run are miserably unpleasant and inefficient, and the new system bypasses everything that makes them that way. It would have been better to have a BART station AT the airport, but no one had the sense to make that happen.
Re: “Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0”
I am beginning to believe that Yelp IS (emphasis) being paid to filter out negative critical reviews. I have established a credible profile on yelp, and my visits to the various Ford dealers appeared for a time, and then they got filtered out, while newbies came on with no profile pic, only one or two reviews, but because they were 5-star (obviously fake) reviews, they got posted while mine got shoved to the back and filtered out. I have proof of this because while my reviews were showing I got an owner comment. Then a few days later, all my Ford reviews started being filtered out again. This leads me to logically conclude that the Ford Dealers ARE paying Yelp to BURY my critical reviews, which are actual experiences I had. Before I didn't believe it, but now I have PROOF!
Sound Ford deceptive, fraudulent, bait-and-switch, failed spot delivery, Bill Pierre Ford, Evergreen Ford, all lied and balked at a signed contract because they did not get lender approval first. I have lost a lot of respect for Yelp today because of this. I mean, if you can't share your honest experiences, whether good or bad, what's the point? When Ford Dealers pay to bury negative reviews that are completely legitimate? Now I know I will not buy a Ford again!
Re: “Are More Cops the Answer?”
Joe,
I agree that the BART-connector is a boondoggle, and a poor use of public funds for infrastructure investment. Remember, however, it was the BART board that was in charge of approving that project, not the Oakland City Council. And I think that if the recent additions to the BART board had been on the panel back then, the outcome might have been different.
Regardless, Oakland is awash in smart infrastructure improvement projects. The Lake Merritt upgrade being completed right now is just one example. The upcoming MacArthur Transit Village is another. Still another is the Fox Theater. Although expensive, it has been a major catalyst for the revival of the city's Uptown district, helping attract bars and restaurants to the area. The success of Uptown is also one of the reasons why the city's tax base is rebounding.
As far as fixing potholes, tree trimming, and cleaning up garbage -- those issues are important to fund, too. They add to the quality of neighborhoods, help residents feel better about where they live, and help create stability. Those are all issues that can impact crime. Plus, these municipal expenditures employ people -- typically Oakland residents -- and thus feed back into the local economy.
That's another advantage they have over police spending. As Mary Eisenhart noted in this comment string, one of the big problems with spending so much on police is that most of the the money leaves Oakland -- and ends up in outlying areas. Darwin and Ali had an excellent cover story on that topic last year ("The High Costs of Outsourcing Police"). It found that 90 percent of Oakland police officers live outside the city.
Re: “Are More Cops the Answer?”
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Re: “Are More Cops the Answer?”
Jonathan,
Again, you're over-simplifying and thus misstating the IBM report. You need to reread it. For example, the report also examines (page 14) cities that have high crime rates (where rates are not going down) and higher than average expenditures on police (like Oakland). The IBM report contends that these cities are spending too much on police as well, calling it the "Vicious Circle of Crime."
In those cities, the IBM authors note, "high spending on police services is crowding out other types of investments necessary to eliminate conditions conducive to crime. For those cities, their failure to shift resources from police services to economic development and public infrastructure is proving costly."
As you can see, the report is clearly not only about cities that have successfully reduced crime -- it applies to cities that have not as well.
Re: “Are More Cops the Answer?”
Hi Bob--and thanks for that explanation re: infrastructure investment. I don't have any argument against infrastructure spending; indeed, in Oakland there is much which qualifies as deferred maintenance in our infrastructure which needs serious attention. I do question, however, how much public safety benefit this yields? In that spirit, permit me an example. In Oakland, some public projects for infrastructure investment come from dollars outside of Oakland (county, state and federal). One such project is the train being constructed to connect the Coliseum BART station with the Oakland Airport. That has been a huge infastructure investment with, I believe, federal dollars. (if memory serves, this was stimulus money). Supposedly this was going to create transit oriented development (development around transit systems). In the rush to accept these dollars, however, we created a rail line that runs directly to the BART station with NO stops along Hegenberger Road. No stops at any hotels. No opportunities for stops at other businesses that might develop there. Instead, the train has the opposite effect--it encourages passengers to get out of Oakland quickly by going to the BART station and then continuing somewhere else. This was a huge infrastructure project--and outside of temporary construction jobs for trade unionists (a good thing), I am unclear what development or new tax base it promoted. More to the point, I fail to see a public safety benefit here. I realize I am only giving one example, and I would welcome a counter example from you to demonstrate the opposite here.
Re: “The A's Belong in Oakland”
The o.co stadium is an embarrassment & terrible stadium for the spectator experience. Simply put they need a new stadium. Oakland is broke and ought not contribute money towards that effort, though some contribution of land is reasonable. We're i Wolfe I would doubt whether Colisseum City will be built in the near future. What other proposals are out there? You can say you want the A's to stay but they need a new stadium and taxpayers should not be footing the bill.
Re: “Are More Cops the Answer?”
Unlike most of the participants in this thread, Mayor Quan subordinates reason to money. For her, "more police" is an opportunity to swindle. In particular, she knows that the Measure Y taxes expire next year. She will put a measure on the Nov. 2014 ballot, desperate to revive it. After all, Measure Y/BB finances the agencies that help her at election time.
Quan was the lead campaigner for Measure Y in 2004, insisting, "This Measure guarantees that the current budgeted number of police 739 must be funded before Measure Y is enacted. In short this brings the total number of police to 802... All of us have to run for re-election – none of us would break such an obvious promise." ( http://www.orpn.org/MeasureY_802quotes.htm ) The measure passed; she and City Hall immediately broke the promise.
If Quan runs for re-election on the 2014 ballot, a vote to give her more Measure Y money is a vote to be swindled again.
If a new Y continues to divert a chunk of the tax revenue to failed social programs -- like Youth UpRising run by an executive director who has paid herself $250,000 a year -- a vote for Measure Y is a vote for more waste.
Re: “Are More Cops the Answer?”
Bob et al, first you guys ignore the entire context and point of the IBM study - which is that AFTER crime rates have declined substantially, increasing policing is not as effective as increasing other kinds of spending - and then you attempt to extrapolate some rule from the study that there is a specific percentage of general fund spending, across diverse cities, that should be spent on police. Your facts are just plain wrong, and your conclusion - that Oakland doesn't need more cops - is absurd.
Re: “Are More Cops the Answer?”
It seems there is some amount of talking past one another here. One question is the percent of its budget Oakland should spend on police. The second is how many police officers Oakland should hire.
Of course they're intimately connected. But it doesn't follow that because Oakland devotes too much per capita to public safety, it therefore has enough police. It seems pretty clear -- whether you're looking at private security in Oakmore, or massive service delays across the city, or OPD's depleted robbery and homicide investigative squads -- that it doesn't. Mr. Winston has reported as such, in his November 14th, 2012 article on the department's homicide clearance rate: "OPD's inability to solve crimes is due in part to understaffing."
Understaffing which, of course, goes back to the matter of compensation. So, if can we can agree OPD needs enough officers to investigate and solve crimes, we can better ask the next question: what's a cop worth?
Re: “Are More Cops the Answer?”
It is also a very bad thing that we cannot require Oakland cops to live in Oakland.
Re: “Are More Cops the Answer?”
Joe,
Your question to Darwin as to what Oakland could be spending money on instead of more police is answered in the IBM study as well. The IBM authors strongly argue that cities should be spending much more money on "infrastructure investments needed to attract and support future growth."
Without such investments, the authors contended, "cities will not be able to generate the future revenues they need to support their operations." The authors go on to state that, without economic growth spurred by municipal investment, cities run the risk of entering a "death spiral" -- in which they don't have the tax revenues to sustain their costs.
With the elimination of redevelopment, Oakland should be spending more money from its general fund on infrastructure improvements and investments -- which not only will help the city attract development and spur growth, but also provide jobs to local residents (provided there are local-hiring requirements in place). Such investments can have a synergistic effect -- more jobs, more tax revenues, more money for services, all of which can help lead to less crime.
Instead, the Quan budget, and the proposals from Make Oakland Better Now!, put almost all of their eggs into one thing -- more spending on police, and yet there's very little good research to show that this idea will have the desired outcome:
Again from IBM (from an earlier study they did, "Smarter, Faster, Cheaper"): "No relationship was found between spending on police services and lower crime rates, which is the outcome that police services are supposed to be driving."
Re: “Are More Cops the Answer?”
I don't think any sane person can maintain we don't need more police in Oakland (and police who take the job seriously and prosecute robberies, grand theft auto, etc. and do decent forensic work); the problem is that in the exuberance of years past when it was hard to recruit officers, the city committed to a completely unsustainable compensation package it now can't get out of. It's not that we don't need more cops, it's that we apparently can't afford the ones we've got. The only either-or aspect of this and libraries, parks, etc. comes from this.
Re: “Are More Cops the Answer?”
Daniel and Jonathan,
You're reading the IBM study too narrowly. If you analyze the report, you'll see that Oakland is already spending much more than other cities on policing, and more than what the authors think is smart. The study notes that the average city spends about 34 percent of it general fund budget on policing -- but Oakland currently spends about 41 percent. More importantly, the IBM report notes that the average city spends about $295 per capita on policing -- a figure it deems to be too high. Oakland, however, under Quan's budget, would spend about double that amount -- $560 per capita -- on policing in 2015 ($218.2 million for a population of 390,000).
In other words, Oakland is already spending far beyond what the IBM study says is prudent for police services.
In addition, the IBM study does not take into account the fact that some cities, like Oakland, pay very high salaries and benefits to police officers, thereby greatly limiting their ability to have more cops. Instead, the study looks at aggregate spending, and from that point of view, Oakland already has passed the threshhold of what makes sense to spend on police.
Also, Jonathan, I've been a journalist for eighteen years, and Darwin BondGraham and Ali Winston are two of the finest young reporters I've had an opportunity to work with. And your attempt to dismiss their work is silly.
Re: “Are More Cops the Answer?”
While there is, indeed, a broad social science literature on the relationship between unemployment, poverty, racism and other forms of inequality and crime, siting such literature does not explain why Oakland--not necessarily leading and certainly not alone in many of these indicators--has such an incredible crime problem. There is no direct relationship that I see between these socio-economic indicators and the extent of our crime problem. Simply put: there are cities worse off that are safer (or perhaps "less unsafe" is a better way to say it).
More importantly, where is the social science research that shows that a municipality can meaningfully impact any of these socio-economic indicators through programming and spending? That is the choice here: should Oakland invest in more police officers (which it is uniquely qualified, indeed authorized, to do) or should it divert resources towards investments in programs with the aim of causing large, meaningful swings in socio-economic conditions?
Despite relatively recent focus on getting more police officers, the dominant political sentiment among elected officials, and Oaklanders generally, for decades is that you have to do both. That is still the conventional wisdom. I look forward to the East Bay Express' analysis of the other "half" of this equation: how have cities' non police spending and programming brought crime down without increasing the number of police officers?
Re: “Are More Cops the Answer?”
Certainly the debate would be better informed by it being started by real journalists who don't omit key parts of a referenced study to make a specious case, or actually call the subjects of their articles for responses prior to publication, and don't see writing for a newspaper as an extension of their participation in the destructive local Occupy movement.
Re: “Howard Jordan Was Never the Right Choice”
Mayor Quan chose Jordan to be Chief because she thought he would follow her orders via Santana and back up her silly ideas like the 100 block plan.
To his credit, he did contradict some of her more ridiculous assertions, but generally he went along with the Mayor.
Your optimistism that Frazier via interim chief Whent is a big improvement is not justified. We've switched from a police chief who was a lapdog for the Mayor to one who is a yes man for Thomas Frazier. He'll carry out Frazier's directives no doubt. But whether he should is another question.
Frazier's selection of Whent signals his approach of changing the culture of OPD by playing tough cop on other cops.
There is a concept foreign to Frazier called restorative justice. In Oakland it's only brought up in the context of an alternative to punishment for civilian crimes. In South Africa it was called Reconciliation and was primarily between officials and law enforcement people who committed human rights crimes during apartheid. It had mixed results in South Africa but some success.
It shouldn't apply to cops who truly seem to be abusive or who shot people recklessly. There are some of those still in OPD who have benefited from the protection "binding arbitration" clause of the city charter.
The South African approach should be tried before Frazier pushes half of OPD onto medical leave and we have even worse crime than before Frazier took over.