Oakland is just the eighth most populous city in California, but for both good and bad reasons, it often punches above its weight in its influence in the state.
And it’s currently in the national spotlight as the ostensible hometown of Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president.
It’s true that the vice president happened to be born in an Oakland hospital. But she grew up in neighboring Berkeley, where her parents lived. Problem is, no one who aspires to the White House can afford to claim to be a Berkeleyite — the famous university city is too left wing, too People’s Park, too Berserkeley for Middle America.
Oakland — similar in its politics and demographics in numerous ways — is somehow a safer place to be from.
Except that for many who live in its sprawling, middle-class and working-class flats as opposed to its luxuriously priced upper-middle class hills, Oakland isn’t very safe at all.
And both its politics and policing have been a mess of late. Mayor Sheng Tao is embroiled in a financial scandal. The home of the Black Panthers was never an easy place to be a cop — nor has it been an easy place, for that matter, to be a Black person. The Oakland Police Department has been overseen by a federal monitor for 20 years.
While reported property crimes have apparently been dropping there — to be sure, we have doubts about that — violent crime in Oakland rose by more than 20% in 2023. Parts of the central city late at night appear to be dramatically under-patrolled by cops. Streetwalkers stand on all four corners of major intersections. One Southern California politician in the city last weekend to move his daughter back home reported that the formerly relatively tranquil Lake Merritt neighborhood was the scene of street sideshows by motorcyclists in broad daylight on a Saturday afternoon.
That being the case, we have to applaud Gov. Gavin Newsom’s decision in recent months to send in the California Highway Patrol — quadrupling their shifts there — to provide some backup support in crime fighting in Oakland, and a few other cities in the state. As Felicia Mello of CalMatters reports, “Not everyone in the cities he’s taken an interest in is thrilled with the results.” Bringing in the state CHP raises issues of local control, assuredly. Mello also reports that the governor also intervened in Oakland when he “sent National Guard prosecutors to help the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office with drug cases, then chastised D.A. Pamela Price for not accepting the assistance quickly enough.”
“We’re a charter city. We have self rule,” Brian Hofer, who chairs Oakland’s Privacy Advisory Commission, which recommends policy to the city on technology and privacy rights, including police surveillance, told the news source. “We certainly need financial help, but we do not need this hostile takeover from Sacramento.”
Don’t they? Are CHP officers trying to bring safety to the streets, and state prosecutors trying to bolster the staffing in the justice system, more hostile than violent criminals?
The governor called the CHP “the Swiss Army knife of law enforcement in the state,” saying its presence in Oakland is “not to substitute, but to support” the work of City Hall. He said the additional staffing will end in November.
“We’re encouraged by local reporting that crime is going down,” Newsom spokesperson Tara Gallegos told the reporter. “It’s a step in the right direction for the Oakland community, but there is more work to do.”
There is clearly more work to do in many California cities. And that policing in the main should be done by local cops under the authority of local electeds. But Newsom notes his CHP surge is a temporary one. Oakland African-American Chamber of Commerce President Cathy Adams, while saying she remains wary of any moves by the state that would result in mass incarceration of Oaklanders, told CalMatters that she welcomes the CHP presence: “Oakland was starting to get a reputation like, ‘Hey, come on over, it’s a grocery store. You can get anything you want and walk right out.’”
Temporary new police presence on the part of the CHP will be no panacea. And there are some worrisome aspects to the Highway Patrol’s less-than-transparent policies on high-speed chases on city streets, which too often lead to crashes. But Californians deserve safe places to live. When it comes to too much cogitation rather than action, “We just don’t have time,” the governor told reporters in July. “People don’t want to wait another day. They don’t want to wait another weekend.”
Originally Published: August 30, 2024 at 6:00 a.m.
