"Public Safety Districts" Abandon Safety

A proposal moving through mayor Dellums' office would give City Hall excuses for Oakland's public safety crisis, mainly by blaming peaceful residents for not doing enough.

Prepared by the mayor's public safety director, the bureaucratic plan to divide the city into three so-called public safety districts would:

• Reduce the influence of residents on their neighborhood crime prevention councils, small as their input is now, by relegating public safety to one committee within a "broader" council. Reversing the roles of government and the populace, City Hall would hold "training sessions" to tell residents what their views about public safety and the councils should be.

• Put the burden on peaceful residents to perform a whole range of "volunteer" activities, such as organizing a neighborhood cleanup, hiring a local youth, painting out graffiti, and even starting a book club. Many Oakland residents already do these things, but now the City practically assigns them as "benchmarked" duties. Gee, we didn't start a neighborhood book club. That must be why Oakland is the fourth most dangerous city in the country.

• Moan about "funding to scale" for street outreach, mediation, "healing centers," mental health services, re-entry services, and a long list of other social programs. Meanwhile, the strategy document has not one word on the understaffing of the police force.

• Divert resources so more bureaucrats can meet with each other. They'll coordinate, refer, collaborate, prioritize and otherwise shuffle problems around. No cost or staffing estimates are in the draft document yet.

	Will these layers of well-paid officials make Oakland streets safe?
The full document is here (PDF file).

There is really nothing new in the policy toolkit. Experts and officials have talked about every element for decades. The new feature is the brazen attempt by City Hall to tell the populace what they must do, blaming them for City Hall's failure to provide the relative safety of an average American municipality.

While the document calls for a "social justice marketing and media campaign," whatever that is, it has not a word of criticism for City managers who ran National Night Out by partnering with a drug rapper. Indeed, the proposal would increase the power of the Neighborhood Services Division executive.

Several new talkshops are proposed, including a public safety policy council. Among the members would be Mayor Dellums (that's how it is written, not "the mayor"). This raises the question: will Dellums' wife fill in for him, or will council meetings be limited to those rare time slots when Dellums is neither campaigning nationally, traveling abroad, nor taking a nap?

Dellums' public safety director, Arnold Perkins, presented the draft document to about 100 persons invited to a closed meeting at the Lakeview Garden Center on Sept. 11, 2008. Mr. Perkins has already been paid thousands of dollars to write up a proposal that is pure fantasy. The plan bears no recognizable relation to the real problems of Oakland: takeover restaurant robberies; the thousands of assaults, armed robberies and other violent crimes that we suffer every year; the understaffing of the police force by half; and City Hall's alliance with gutter rappers along with its ideology of making excuses for thugs, carjackers, and drug dealers.

Reader Comments

Neighborhood councils are an old idea which were in play in Oakland before I moved here. There was one left when I arrived in l989, the north Oakland district community council headed up by Bill Lowe, Marge Gibson's former aide. At one time NOVA and other groups had sent their representatives but left when they couldn't get any voice.

Obviously, they are going back to politically controlled organizations. I guess the NCPC's despite all their warts and lack of democracy were still too democratic for their tastes.

What does the name change matter? Everything, when you are trying to destroy community policing by eradicating the very last citizen crime front in Oakland, done by a mayor who now wants to promote book clubs as an answer to the city's crime problems.

Yes, remove the problem solving officers (PSOs), then make the crime councils irrelevant so they won't need PSOs. End of community policing by mayor who stated he wanted to support community policing.

– Former Oakland resident Val Eisman