Category Archives: Public Safety

Make Oakland Better Now! Looks At Two Proposed Amendments to the Mayor’s Budget – Part 1

Posted on June 7, 2013 by | 5 Comments

On June 13, Make Oakland Better Now! will be present at the Oakland City Council Meeting at 6:30 p.m., urging the City Council to adopt the Mayor’s proposed budget with Council President Kernighan’s proposed changes.  This post is the first in a series to look at the budget amendments proposed by Council President Kernighan and those proposed by Council Members Brooks, Reid, and Gallo.  More information can be found in the Oakland Tribune’s Coverage, here, and Chip Johnson’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle, here (paywall).  We encourage all Oaklanders to join us at council in urging your representatives to adopt a budget reflecting the city’s need for public safety and fiscal responsibility.

Oaklanders who follow these things know what’s happening with the city budget.  As our City Council gets ready to pass a new two-year budget between now and July 1, we have the following:

In this post, and the two that follow, we will show that the Mayor’s budget, with APB1, is an imperfect but reasonable approach.  But as we will also show, APB2 constitutes an assault on efforts to restore public safety to Oakland. It is a potential public policy disaster, and it is based on millions of dollars in errors and wrong assumptions.

The Mayor’s budget is not perfect.  Among other things, it seeks to raise the sworn staffing of the Oakland Police Department to about 700 officers, while implying that this number is the goal; Make Oakland Better Now! believes that public safety is a top priority for the city, and that our police department is drastically understaffed. We further believe that the minimum number of sworn officers serving should be 900.  We believe the Mayor’s projected police attrition rates are unrealistic, so that her plan and budget will not even get us to 700.  But this budget is, at least, a step in the right direction.  And the budget’s supporting documents make it clear the Mayor appreciates the seriousness of Oakland’s long-term fiscal problems.

Recently, Council and the administration have begun evaluating how to amend the proposed budget to address a slight increase in anticipated revenues ($3.02M in Year 1 and $2.46M in Year 2) and some one-time revenues. With APB1, Council President Kernighan has proposed restoring two code compliance inspectors to enforce graffiti, blight and unpermitted mobile vendors, an illegal dumping crew, litter mitigation crew and $500K to restore 34 seats in San Antonio Head Start.

Critically, and in line with either the letter or the spirit of the recent Wasserman / Bratton recommendations, APB1 proposes adding the following civilian police support:  4 police evidence technicians, 3 criminalists for the crime lab, 1 latent print examiner, 2 CODIS (DNA index) investigators and an additional Neighborhood Services Coordinator, so that there will be 2 coordinators in each of the five new police districts.

About 40% of APB1’s proposed additions are public-safety related, which seems reasonable for a city that says its first priority is public safety.  None of the additions are for sworn personnel. As a whole, APB1 makes sense to us.

But then there is the APB2 proposal.  The proponents of APB2 claim to have identified additional revenue of $9M in 13-14 and $8M in 14-15, and propose spending over $6M in the two years for 3% cost of living adjustments for all miscellaneous (i.e., non-sworn) employees.  As we will show, we believe these calculations and many of their cost and revenue assumptions are erroneous.

APB2 adds nothing for public safety other than what is required by the Compliance Director.  It inexplicably doubles the Compliance Director’s salary (giving him $540K per year instead of the $270K ordered by Judge Henderson).  Just as inexplicably, it includes a new $300K budget line to “Hire Consultant to Craft Comprehensive Community Safety & Services Plan” – something Oakland has already done (i.e., Wasserman’s consultancy).  Meanwhile, APB2 proposes to eliminate the City’s contract with the California Highway Patrol and the five new police dispatchers, who are critical to managing the City’s ability to take 911 calls.  It includes no funding related to the OPD’s civilian staffing needs or to the Wasserman / Bratton Recommendations.  This is not how we make our city safer.

In our next installment, we will show how APB1 follows city policy, while APB2 , if adopted, would violate city policy and widely-accepted principles of municipal budgeting.

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Posted in City Budget, City Council, Mayor, Public Safety

Here are the slides from Make Oakland Better Now!’s Public Safety Forum

Posted on May 17, 2013 by | 1 Comment

Close to 100 Oaklanders attended our forum on Sunday, April 28, and heard presentations on Oakland’s public safety budget challenges from City Administrator Deanna Santana, Assistant Andrew Murray, then (now retired) Police Chief Howard Jordan, then Captain, now Assistant Chief of Police Paul Figueroa, and Deputy Director, Bureau of Services Gil Garcia.  We are presently editing, and expect to post video clips from the presentations next week.  In the meantime, here are the city’s slides.  You can also download them here.

We will have much more to say about recent events and their impact on public safety very soon, so watch this space.

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Posted in City Budget, Public Safety

Justin McCrary: The Economic Argument for Policing

Posted on April 27, 2013 by | 8 Comments

On Sunday, April 28, 2013 at 1:30 p.m. at St. Paul’s Church, 114 Montecito, Make Oakland Better Now! will sponsor a public forum, “Can Oakland Afford to Be Safe?,” featuring Chief of Police Howard Jordan, City Administrator Deanna Santana and key staff members to discuss the connection between Oakland’s budget challenges and the need to rebuild the Oakland Police Department. All concerned Oaklanders are urged to attend. Meanwhile, we are looking at issues related to the economics and financing of public safety.

On Thursday night, as part of Council Member Libby Schaaf’s Safe Oakland speaker series, economist and Berkeley Law Professor Justin McCrary spoke about his and Aaron Chelfin’s study, “The Effect of Police on Crime: New Evidence from U.S. Cities, 1960-2010.” Like many academic papers — particularly those in the field of economics — the study will seem fairly ponderous to lay persons. So it was helpful to have him give a relatively simple presentation of his findings, and field questions from Chief of Police Howard Jordan, Assemblyman Rob Bonta, Council Member Noel Gallo, and Council Member Schaaf. His presentation can be summarized in the following bullet points:

  • In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a prevailing “old view” among scholars that the level of police staffing did not affect the crime rate all that much. But in the 1990s and 2000s, there has been a growing body of evidence indicating substantial effects of police on crime.
  • In “The Effect of Police on Crime,” he and Gelfin reviewed changes in police staffing and crime in more than 200 cities over a 50 year period, and found the evidence clear: increased levels of police result in lower crime rates. The effects are larger in the recent era, as police departments have become more innovative.
  • Their study is in accord with the experience Professor Zimring chronicled in New York, where the number of police went up and the crime rates plummeted (murder at 17% of the 1990 level, robbery at 18%, and motor vehicle theft at 7%). Likewise, it is in accord with the Los Angeles experience, where murder, robbery, and motor vehicle theft are at 25% of the 1990 levels.
  • Cities with the biggest crime drops have done two primary things: invested in police staffing and in new strategies, primarily saturation policing and aggressively using information technology
  • There is a “police elasticity of crime” of minus 0.50 (minus one half). This means that a 10% increase in police results in a 5% reduction in crime, a 5% increase in police results in a 2.5% decrease in crime, and the converse is true as well: a 10% decrease in police will result in a 5% increase in crime.
  • This reduction in crime results is a reduction in incarcerations; thus, saving money that would otherwise be spent on prisons.
  • Transportation agencies (such as Caltrans) assign a dollar value to a human life to conduct transportation safety measures cost-benefit analyses. According to Professor McCrary, the Caltrans number for a human life is $7 million (although we have seen numbers ranging anywhere from $2.6 million to about $9 million). Using the $7 million, figure (and, presumably, the more calculable cost of property crime), McCrary calculates that every dollar spent in Oakland on policing will result in a $2.90 improvement in public safety, not including the amount that is saved by lowering the incarceration rate.

We have some doubts about the rather arbitrary assignment of dollar values to lives, happiness, etc. But Professor McCrary makes a good point: whether it’s transportation agencies or other state and federal agencies, they receive ever-increasing funds to save lives. Yet city governments, including Oakland, have been cutting the spending needed to save lives.  As McCrary puts it, why do we increase spending to save lives on the highways but not to save lives on the sidewalks?

Additionally, a serious policy point is this: the United States seems to be the only developed nation in the world that separately funds its policing (a local government expense) and its incarceration (a state expense). So instead of paying more for policing to prevent crime, we pay more to punish criminals once caught. If a city police force is expanded, with the resulting reduction in crime, the state’s expenses for incarceration go down, but the city gets no benefit from the reduction.

This disconnect suggests the need for some nationwide, or at least statewide, policy changes. According to Professor McCrary, no one who studies crime thinks the solution is more incarceration and fewer cops, and yet, that is the direction we are going. So while Oakland needs to find local solutions to its public safety budget dilemma, a big part of the long-term solution will ultimately have to occur at a higher level.

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Posted in Public Safety

Will the Mayor’s Proposed Budget Rebuild Oakland’s Police Department?

Posted on April 22, 2013 by | 12 Comments

On Sunday, April 28, 2013 at 1:30 p.m. at St. Paul’s Church, 114 Montecito, Make Oakland Better Now! will sponsor a public forum, “Can Oakland Afford to Be Safe?,” featuring Chief of Police Howard Jordan, City Administrator Deanna Santana and key staff members to discuss the connection between Oakland’s budget challenges and the need to rebuild the Oakland Police Department. All concerned Oaklanders are urged to attend. Meanwhile, we are beginning our analysis of the mayor’s proposed policy budget and its impact on public safety.

Make Oakland Better Now! is in the process of analyzing the mayor’s proposed policy budget that was released on Wednesday. One element struck us immediately. While this is the first proposed budget to include police academies in years, we question whether those academies will result in the sworn officer increases the mayor has announced. We are concerned that because Oakland needs at least 900 officers, if not more, the goal she posted are being moved and not in the right direction.

The proposed budget assumes that the four academies budgeted for the current and next fiscal years will produce a total of 160 officers. It also assumes that the attrition rate from now until the end of fiscal year 2014-15 will be four officers per month. If these assumptions prove correct, but by our calculation Oakland will actually reach 725 officers in December 2014, dropping down to 701 at the end of this budget period in June 2015:

Academy Yield

This number is nowhere near where we need to be in terms of police staffing.The Alameda County Grand Jury recommended that the City of Oakland increase its sworn officers to a minimum of 1,200. The 2010 Police Resource Optimization System analysis called for a minimum of 86 more patrol officers than we had in 2009 (which would have taken us to 926) and optimally 183 more patrol officers (for a total of 1,013). While the city’s Public Safety Consultant Robert Wasserman has not yet made a staffing recommendation, we suspect that he will also recommend a number of sworn officers much higher than 701. And we would not be surprised if the compliance director does the same thing.

Our first concern is that the goal should not be 697 or 701 or anything close to those numbers. The goal should be, at a minimum, 900 total sworn police officers. No one thinks this is going to be easy, but when the city talks about hard decisions, it should be talking about the decisions necessary to get us to a fully staffed police department, not just adding another 50 or so officers. There should be a great deal of focus on creative solutions to this problem.

Our second concern is the issue of officer attrition. Last fall Chief Jordan projected losing five officers to attrition per month. More recently, the administration has been assuming that a recent downward trend in attrition would continue and projected a rate of losing four officers per month.

If Chief Jordan’s projection is correct, then as of June, 2015 we will be at 674 officers, not 701. And if the yield per academy is 37 (the number from the most recent police academy) or fewer, the number of sworn officers would be even lower.

Our third concern is ensuring that once the officers are hired, the city can afford to retain them over the long-term. After Measure Y passed, some litigation and an immense amount of community pressure, the Dellums administration increased the size of the police force to 837 officers in 2008 – the most in the departments’s history.  That number, a few more than Measure Y required, didn’t last long, tumbling down to fewer than 650 by the end of Dellums’ tenure.

Police staffing and budget graph

A March 22 administration report tells us that the five-year cost of getting to 833 officers will be  $178 million, or an average of more than $35 million per year:

Police sworn staff increase to 833

On top of that, the city projects a total of about $50 million over the same period (or another $10 million per year) for civilian support and supervisory control.

To get to 923 sworn officers,  the projected cost over five years is $225 million, or $45 million per year:

Police sworn staff increase to 933

And the additional cost for support and supervisors is projected to be another $58 million, or an average of about $11.5 million per year.

Clearly Oakland can’t take these numbers at face value. A big part of the discussion needs to be about the cost of policing and what can be done to reduce expenses.  Moreover, in the five year forecast, the administration has listed some 35 examples of possible budget balancing strategies. City government has to look hard at these and many others.

And there are questions that in some ways are bigger than the dollars and cents. Why are these costs so high? Why does Oakland spend so much digging itself out of a hole? Why has the police department attrition rate been so high and what can be done to reduce it? How does the department attrition rate differ from that in other departments and why?  We repeatedly hear that after decades of poor police/ community relations, a decade of the NSA, and years of department shrinkage, morale in the department is terrible. What is the fix? Can it be accomplished?  We look forward to hearing Chief Jordan and our other speakers address this and related questions at the MOBN! forum on April 28.

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Posted in City Administrator, City Budget, City Council, Mayor, Public Safety, Uncategorized

Can Oakland Afford To Be Safe?

Posted on April 16, 2013 by | 2 Comments

With the pending release of the new Oakland city budget this week, we are about to see how the Mayor and the City Council set their priorities.  Make Oakland Better Now! believes that the top priority should be restoring, and growing, the Oakland Police Department in order to make Oaklanders safe.   In this light, we are proud to present this panel on Sunday, April 28, 2013 at 1:30 p.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, featuring City Administrator Deanna Santana, Oakland Chief of Police Howard Jordan and key budget and police staff.  Please plan to join us.

Microsoft Word - 042813_Flyer_v1 _1_

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Posted in City Budget, Public Safety

Come to Tonight’s City Council Meeting – But Then Keep Coming Back

Posted on January 22, 2013 by | 2 Comments

Oaklanders who follow City Hall know that four public safety proposals are coming before the City Council tonight at its 5:30 meeting, as Council decides whether to:

There is much information about these proposals in the media, including Matthew Arntz’s Tribune coverage here, Michael Cabanatuan’s and Matthai Kuruvila’s Chronicle coverage here and here, opinion coverage by Robert Gammon in the East Bay Express,  Tammerlin Drummond in the Tribune and Chip Johnson in the Chronicle, and Oaktalk here, here and here.  Most recent is MOBN! board member Ed Gerber’s op-ed here.

City Council Members Schaaf and Kernighan have urged their constituents to come to tonight’s meeting and stand up to the Occupy Oakland members and other bullies who are trying to monopolize the discussion and drown out responsible community voices.  Council President Kernighan has indicated she intends to assert control over the meeting to allow a full expression of all views.

Make Oakland Better Now! has made it clear that it supports all four proposals.  Many of our board members will be there tonight to express that support and urge Council to approve these proposals unanimously.  We strongly urge community members to join us and stand up for safety.  Fill out a speaker card here for agenda items 20, 21, 22 and 23.

But while we strongly support the three Reid/Schaaf proposals (Sheriff’s MOU, civilian positions, police academy), these are a starting point only.  City leaders need to (a) focus with laser-like precision on the steps necessary to rebuild the Oakland Police Department;  (b)  aggressively insure that the civilianization measures result in putting more cops on the street (unlike the civilian police complaint intake measure adopted in 2011 and still not implemented);  (c)  look at ways to increase the number of academies to a number that does more than simply keep pace with attrition (see the City’s two projections here and here).

We also support the amendment to the Strategic Policy Partnership contract (erroneously described as a “Bratton contract” by opponents and supporters alike).  But we do so with two cautions:  First, City leaders cannot look at the Strategic Policy Partnership recommendations as a series of menu items from which they can pick and choose.  As today’s Tribune observes, Oakland’s history of implementing consultant’s recommendations is poor.  The City has already proved conclusively that it has no ability to reduce the tragic epidemic of violence that is destroying families and victimizing large portions of our community.  If Oakland is going to spend $250,000 on a crime reduction plan, it has to implement the plan – all of it.

Second, Oakland’s leaders have to own the public safety problem.  When they say public safety is our highest priority, they have to prove by their actions that they mean it, and are prepared to take responsibility for whether Oakland is or is not a safe city.  It is extremely troubling when our Mayor tells a blogger / reporter that Oakland cannot reduce violence without Federal help, as she did yesterday in a video interview with Zennie Abraham:

…we’re not going to bring down the murder rate in Oakland unless I can get a federal solution to control the guns and control the ammunition.

When we say that the mayor and the City Council have to own public safety, we mean they have to implement a plan to reduce crime and they, not the feds and not state government,  have to be accountable to the people who live here for the outcomes.  And we, the people who live here, have to demand that they be accountable.

So Oaklanders, come to Council tonight.  But keep coming back, and keep demanding answers.

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Posted in City Council, Mayor, Public Safety

Why The Bratton / Wasserman Proposal Should Be Adopted By Oakland’s City Council

Posted on January 14, 2013 by | 5 Comments

Tuesday at 5:30 p.m. at City Hall, Oakland City Council’s Public Safety Committee will vote on whether to forward to Council a proposal to add $250,000 to the City’s public safety consulting contract with Strategic Policy Partnership.  This is the Robert Wasserman, Chief William Bratton proposal that we discussed here.  We strongly encourage Oaklanders to come and support this proposal.

The proposal is starting to run into opposition based on two arguments that either misstate or misunderstand what the proposal is:  The first argument goes something like this:  Oakland has already spent, is already spending or going to spend millions on outside Occupy investigators, on a a Federal Court monitor, on a Compliance Director, why do we have to spend money on this as well?

It is true that Oakland is spending an enormous amount of money on its struggle to comply with the NSA.  However, none of that has to do with the subject of this proposal, which designed to do something Oakland is clearly unable to do for itself:  design and implement short and long-term crime reduction strategies.

Oakland does not have, and never has had a comprehensive public safety plan coordinating multi-agency programmatic and law enforcement approaches to violence and crime prevention.  Some critics have pointed to the 2006 Harnett Report.  That organization made several solid policing recommendations that should have been implemented and were not. But Harnett did not claim it was providing a comprehensive public safety program.  We know that Mr. Wasserman is already taking an inventory on everything agencies and non-profits to in Oakland do to combat crime, and those steps are a key element of the coordinated approach MOBN! has advocated.  Furthermore  OPD command staff admits it does not have the resources to provide a comprehensive plan.  This fact is pretty clear to just about everyone.

There is a tendency in Oakland, as in  many agencies, to contract for reports and then ignore them.  A certain amount of cynicism about what will happen to the plan is healthy,  logical and understandable.  But Oaklanders will have to be tenacious in demanding that the Wasserman / Bratton recommendations are fully implemented.  The probability that some elements in the City may want to ignore those recommendations is no reason to avoid getting us the help we need. It will be the job of the public to force City government to move them forward.

The second opposing argument goes like this:  Chief Bratton was police commissioner in New York City.  New York City police used “stop and frisk” policing.  Stop and frisk policing is used for racial profiling.  Therefore, Oakland should not contract with Chief Bratton.

This argument is so misleading in so many ways.  There is nothing whatsoever in the proposal to suggest that “stop and frisk” has anything to do with what Wasserman and Bratton are planning to recommend.   Oakland is operating under the NSA and will shortly be operating under a compliance director, so there is going to be plenty of machinery in place to prevent Oakland from turning further away from Constitutional policing.  Those making this argument fail to mention Chief Bratton’s experiences in Los Angeles, where he navigated the department out of Federal Court supervision, dramatically reduced claims for police misconduct (as well as crime), was widely admired by much of the Civil Rights bar, and where, shortly after he left, the Federal Court lauded the department for setting national and international standards for modern policing.

Furthermore, in his meetings with MOBN! representatives and other community leaders, Wasserman has made it clear that community involvement and community buy-in will be essential to the success of the plan.  Staff’s report reiterates that community involvement is a high priority.  There is simply no reason to think this is an effort to ram any particular police tactic down the community’s throat.

MOBN!’s letter to the committee is here.  We will appear at the meeting to strongly urge adoption of this proposal.

To contact members of the City Council Public Safety Committee in support of this badly needed measure, e-mail the following:

Libby Schaaf:  lschaaf@oaklandnet.com

Noel Gallo (chair):  ngallo@oaklandnet.com

Dan Kalb:  dkalb@oaklandnet.com

Lynette Gibson-McElhaney: lgibson-mcelhaney@oaklandnet.com

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Posted in City Council, Public Safety

Learn More About The Upcoming Public Safety Proposals — Then Come Out And Support Them

Posted on January 10, 2013 by | 6 Comments

Just about everyone in Oakland and in Oakland City Government says “public safety is our number one priority.” If  we mean it, we are going to have to take big steps and bring big change. Among other things, this means finding cost-effective ways to grow the Oakland Police Department to a sworn staffing level of 900.  And it means having a comprehensive public safety program.

But while we are getting there, we also need to support the smaller measures that can make a difference. Three of those are the proposals by Council Members Schaff (D4) and Reid (D7) to borrow Sheriff’s Department officers, hire civilian technicians and lock in a second police academy for Calendar year 2013.

We’ve already posted about these proposals here, and a description is available here. Tomorrow, at the meeting of the Montclair Safety and Improvement Council, Chief Jordan, Council Member Schaaf and MOBN!’s Joe Tuman will be discussing the proposals and other policing and public safety issues. The details:

Montclair Safety and Improvement Council meeting, Thursday, January 10, Montclair Presbyterian Church, 5701 Thornhill Drive, 6:45 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.

Then, the proposals face two critical public hearings and two votes:

Tuesday, January 15, 12:00 noon, City Council’s Finance & Management Committee Meeting, Oakland City Hall, Sgt. Mark Dunakin Room – 1st Floor;  and

Tuesday, January 22, 6:30 p.m., Oakland City Council, Oakland City Hall Council Chambers (agenda will probably be posted here this  Friday.

MOBN! will be present at both meetings to encourage Council to take these important first steps. We encourage Oaklanders to be there as well.  We further encourage Oaklanders to e-mail the Finance & Management Committee members before Tuesday, January 15 and e-mail all City Council members before the January 22 meeting.

To e-mail the Finance & Management Committee in support of the three proposals:

Chair person Schaaf (lschaaf@oaklandnet.com)

CM Brooks (dbrooks@oaklandnet.com)

CM Kernighan (pkernighan@oaklandnet.com)

CM Kaplan (rkaplan@oaklandnet.com)

To e-mail all council members in support of the proposals:

Address your e-mail to council@oaklandnet.com

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Posted in Political Action, Public Safety

Is Chief Bratton The Answer For Oakland?

Posted on January 2, 2013 by | 13 Comments

Oakland is bringing in William Bratton as a public safety consultant.  Bratton made his name nationally as New York City police commissioner. During and after his tenure, New York significantly increased police staffing and experienced an unprecedented—and continuing—reduction in violent crime. After New York, Bratton came to Los Angeles, first as part of the federal monitoring team for its consent judgment (similar to Oakland’s NSA), and then as chief. In his 8 ½ years with LAPD, Los Angeles reduced homicides 41%, reduced violent crime 45,% and came out from under Federal Court supervision.

MOBN! representatives recently joined community leaders in a meeting with Oakland’s policing consultant Robert Wasserman, during which he announced the plan for Bratton’s involvement, described Oakland’s public safety situation as “the most difficult and complex policing challenge in the United States” and discussed long and short term strategies. Here’s MOBN!’s take:

Oakland’s violent crime rate has now gone beyond crisis and reached emergency levels. Oaklanders cannot expect that any one individual or quick solution is going to turn things around.

Wasserman’s and Bratton’s track records as leaders give us some reason for hope. But Oakland will only turn this around if Wasserman and Bratton speak this truth: reducing violence in Oakland with 600 officers or anything close to that number is impossible and unrealistic.  Also, they must dig deeply into the complex politics that have landed us in the current mess.

At the recent meeting, Wasserman was asked about the question of sworn staffing levels. He first responded that the matter was under review. He then stated that, while there are cities with a population of 400,000 that can keep their residents safe with 600 police officers, Oakland isn’t one of them.

In addition to bringing on Bratton, here is some of what Wasserman has in mind for Oakland:

Quick Wins:  Wasserman believes that he, Bratton and the OPD must start with some short-term actions to rapidly bring down crime. Operation Cease Fire is a critical part of this plan. He believes making Cease Fire successful requires the involvement of every City agency at the highest level—and the moral voice of the community must rise up against violence.

MOBN!’s comment: As long-time supporters of Cease Fire, we certainly agree it is important. But the start-up pace of Cease Fire in Oakland has been agonizingly slow, with one call-in this fiscal year. City Council only approved hiring a project manager last month. We have no idea when that position will be filled. The current Cease Fire consultants have estimated it will take a year before we know to what extent the operation is working.  This will not be a quick win.

More focused responses to 911 calls:  Wasserman proposes that OPD limit its immediate call responses to crimes in progress, so that officers decrease their response time to critical calls and have more time to police their assigned beats. He believes keeping officers in their beats will result in more proactive policing, which in turn will lead to crime reduction.

MOBN!’s comment:  Plenty of data supports the view that beat policing and proactive policing reduce crime and build relations between the community and officers. But Oakland only has about 260 total officers available for patrol. Only a fraction of them are patrolling at any given time.  We question whether there is even sufficient staffing to respond to crimes in progress.  And with such a small number of officers, we question whether there is an opportunity for community relationship-building, even if calls are reduced.

Change from Two Policing Zones to Five: Wasserman recommends Oakland change the structure of the department back to one of strong, geographic assignments.  In each of five zones, a captain will control all resources and be accountable for community relations.  Each area will have two lieutenants with similar accountability.  Implementation will start in two zones in February, followed by replication in the other three.

MOBN!’s comment:   We agree that geographic assignments and accountability need to be restored. But the question again comes down to staffing.  Five zones patrolled by 260 officers means an average of 52 patrol officers per zone.  Assuming 1/5 to 1/3 of active patrol officers are on patrol at any given time, this means an average of 10 to 17 officers per zone.

Community Involvement:  Wasserman expresses a need to involve every aspect of the community in policing issues.  This is more than just public relations—every part of the community has to be involved in, and responsible for, making the City safe.

MOBN!’s comment:  We agree that community commitment is going to be essential to bringing public safety to Oakland.  As we stated above, our city is in a public safety emergency.  We had 131 murders in 2012. Over the long-term, we need to bring the OPD and the community together.   But we have to stop the gun violence now.  Getting community consensus in a polarized community like Oakland may be possible, but it won’t be easy and it won’t happen quickly.  And we can’t wait for it to happen before we stop the horrible level of violence in our streets.

Wasserman told us he is inventorying governmental and non-governmental programs aimed at crime reduction.  Hopefully, he should learn about both the programs and the effect of the “voice of the community” in Oakland.  He should learn that Oakland has spent about $40 million in eight years on Measure Y “violence prevention programs,” supported by some of the most vocal and politically active elements of the community.  He should also learn that the average murder and average violent crime numbers during those years are both about 36% higher than the same numbers in 2004, the year Measure Y was passed .

There is plenty of data to show that more police officers means less violent crime. We’ll be posting more about this data soon.  There is no data to show that a city with inadequate police resources can reduce its crime rate with programmatic solutions.  Chief Bratton recognized this in a telephone interview with NBC Bay Area:

The biggest challenge is the number of officers,” Bratton said. “When you add them and use them appropriately, you get results.

Of course, Chief Batts told Oakland the same thing, and City Hall ignored him. So while we support the Wasserman initiatives, and look forward to Chief Bratton’s arrival, we hope they will focus not only on structural changes and community consensus, but on this core public safety fact:  we cannot make Oakland safe without an adequately staffed police force.  And the Mayor’s office and City Council have to make staffing their number one priority.

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Posted in Public Safety

What Will It Take To Restore The Oakland Police Department?

Posted on December 20, 2012 by | 21 Comments

As we explained last month, all four City Council members elected in the most recent election have adopted the MOBN! position that rebuilding the City’s police department is the City’s highest priority.  Last month, City Council Members Larry Reid and Libby Schaaf proposed three public safety measures, including one that Council confirm a police academy conditionally budgeted for June, 2013.

MOBN! supports all three measures, including the academy confirmation, the use of Alameda County Sherriff’s deputies and the hiring of civilian technicians.  But even if these proposals are adopted, the City’s current course will not restore the department in the near future.  Here’s why:

New officers cannot be hired until they have completed an academy and field officer training.  Recruiting, academy and field training take about a year.    Officers coming out of this training process have to replace officers who retire or transfer to other departments, and if the yield from the academies is greater than attrition, the department grows by the net difference.

Police Chief Jordan reports that the department’s attrition rate for sworn officers is five per month.  He’s planning on two academies per year, and the projected yield of officers from each academy is forty.   At this rate, even with the two academies per year, he projects that there will be 610 officers in June, 2014, sixteen fewer than there are presently.  And if that pattern continues to hold, it will be ten more years – June, 2024 – before there are at least 800 officers.

MOBN!’s public safety plan – endorsed by incoming City Council Members McElhaney and Gallo and reelected City Council Member Kaplan – calls for 900 officers.  At the rate of two academies per year and an attrition rate of 60 officers per year, that would be accomplished in 2029.

More recently, the administration’s Five Year Financial Plan offered a different and less pessimistic scenario.  (The Five Year Financial Plan does not set City policy or a City budget, but projects revenue and expenses based on a variety of assumptions).  Based on  the monthly officer attrition rates of 4.75 in 2011 and 4.25 through September, 2012, the administration assumed the downward trend would continue and that a reasonable projected attrition rate was four officers per month.  Based on this assumption, and again assuming two academies per year, the administration estimated it would take five and one half years – i.e., until the end of Fiscal year 2017-2018 – to build the department to 793 officers (see page 44 of this report).

The administration’s hope that the attrition rate will fall is probably not realistic.  Many officers report that department morale is very poor.  The City and Plaintiffs have now reached agreement on a “Compliance Director,” with broad powers over police affairs, and that fact is not likely to have a positive impact on morale. Ten miles away, San Francisco has a major campaign to hire and train new and lateral officers, so Oakland’s police have other readily available employment options.

The proposal by Council Members Reid and Schaaf to remove the conditions from Council’s approval of a June 2013 academy does not address when or how often subsequent academies should be held.  But if they were scheduled in September, March and June of subsequent years, and if the attrition rate was as Chief Jordan projects, it would take Oakland until March, 2016 to get back to more than 803 officers.  To achieve the MOBN! goal of 900 officers would take until March, 2018.

And the big question that remains unaddressed by Chief Jordan, City Council, the Mayor and the City Administrator is this:  if our goal is to rebuild the Police Department, what will it cost to do so, and how will this be financed?  In The Five Year Plan (Page 44), the City Administrator apparently projects that increased costs for the OPD at its current size will be more than $30 million by 2018.  If the OPD increases its sworn staffing to 793 by 2017-2018, the added annual cost (including salaries, benefits, retirement and academy costs) will be another $28.2 million.  (MOBN! presently has a detailed public records request pending with the City to help us understand all the elements that go into this figure, and we hope to share an analysis of the data in the second half of January.)

Oakland is a city with a tragic murder rate (123 as of December 18). We have seen a 23% spike in murders, muggings and other major offenses and a 44% decrease in arrests.  All the while, Oakland has shrunk its police department by 25% in less than three years.

If public safety is truly our top priority, city leaders must focus on growing the department.  And we cannot wait six years, let alone twelve or fifteen, for that to happen.  Oakland must commit to an accelerated plan for academies and for the funding of the restored department.

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Posted in City Budget, Public Safety