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.