Monthly Archives: January 2014

Uncategorized

Strategic Policy Partners Returning To Oakland For “Do-Over” of Crime Reduction Plan

Make Oakland Better Now! was getting ready to post Part Three in its series on the SPP/Wasserman report (the first two are here and here.  Then, we learned from this past weekend’s Oakland Tribune that Mr. Wasserman is returning to Oakland to finish the job that was started.  We are pleased to hear this. And in this post, we give our views on what the next steps should be for Mr. Wasserman, for SPP and for the City of Oakland.

(more…)

4 Comments
January 28, 2014
Uncategorized

Strategic Policy Partners’ Final Report Is Here – Now What? Part 2

The long-awaited Strategic Policy Partners’ report “Addressing Crime In Oakland – Zeroing Out Crime – A Strategy For Total Community Action” has finally been released. While our overall reaction to the report is one of disappointment, we think there may be some positive takeaways. In our first post, here, we summarized some of the report’s recommendations. In this and the next , we will discuss our concerns and suggest next steps for the city.

Violence prevention programs:

When he met with community groups, Mr. Wasserman repeatedly stated that part of his mission was to inventory all city, county and state violence prevention programs providing services to Oakland’s citizens. We supported this because while we believe programs play an important part in violence prevention, we also believe the city needs to be much more careful to ensure that its violence prevention dollars are being spent wisely. To us, inventorying the programs means identifying them, determining how much is being spent on them, assessing their effectiveness as public safety tools and whether they were effective parts of the City’s public safety efforts.

(more…)

5 Comments
January 21, 2014
Public Safety

Strategic Policy Partners’ Final Report Is Here – Now What?

Part 1

The long-awaited  Strategic Policy Partners’ report “Addressing Crime In Oakland – Zeroing Out Crime – A Strategy For Total Community Action” has finally been released While our overall reaction to the report is one of disappointment, we think there may be some positive takeaways. In this and the two posts that follow, we will summarize the report, discuss our concerns, and suggest next steps for the city.

How We Got Here

In January of last year, the newly sworn City Council faced one of the most important issues of the year: whether to authorize $250,000 for a contract with Strategic Policy Partners, LLC to provide consulting services to the city of Oakland. regarding public safety. MOBN! discussed the proposal here, here and here.

(more…)

4 Comments
January 8, 2014