Happy New Year Oaklanders! We all want 2016 to be the year Oakland sees a major reduction in violent crime. There are many steps needed to make that happen, but one of them is expansion and improvement of Oakland’s Operation Ceasefire Strategy.
Please join Make Oakland Better Now! for our first Operation Ceasefire Summit on Saturday, January 9th at 2:00pm.
Members of Oakland’s Ceasefire team will examine crime fighting strategies and new community policing efforts. They’ll also answer tough questions: Is the City doing enough to stop gun violence? Is Ceasefire working?
Panelists include:
• Chief of Police Sean Whent
• Police Captain Ersie Joyner
• Ceasefire Manager Reygan Harmon
• Department of Human Services Director Sara Bedford
• Department of Human Services Manager Peter Kim
• Ceasefire Consultant Stewart Wakeling
• Rev. Damita Davis-Howard
Date: Saturday, January 9, 2016
Time: 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Location: Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church, 3534 Lakeshore Ave, Oakland, CA
RSVP on Facebook: www.facebook.com/events/542580982575583
More about event:
As a centerpiece of Oakland’s violence reduction strategy, Ceasefire brings together data-driven crime fighting strategies, community engagement, and community policing in a focused effort to reduce gun violence among Oakland’s gangs. It’s a strategy many Oakland community groups, including MOBN!, have strongly supported, and for two years it appeared to help produce significant results.
But with little improvement in violent crime in 2015, and homicides slightly up, we at MOBN! believe it’s time to ask tough questions: Is Ceasefire still working? If it is, what else is going wrong? If it isn’t, how can we help get it back on track?
We’ll have a full, frank and no-holds barred discussion of this critical element of the City’s plan to reduce community violence: What’s working? What’s not? What needs to change? What will success look like?
This is a critical conversation at a turning point in the fight for community safety in Oakland. Please join us, invite your friends and neighbors and anyone who cares about safety in our city.
Useful links:
Ceasefire Oakland
Mayor’s State of the City Address: What the Mayor Said About Public Safety
San Francisco Chronicle: Getting Oaklanders to lay down their guns
I hate to have to point out that It can’t exactly be a “full, frank, no-hold-barred” critical discussion of any sort because all the panel participants are directly involved in or long-time promoters of the Oakland Ceasefire effort or of Ceasefire efforts generally. This includes Make Oakland.
For a useful discussion it would be necessary to have a tough-minded, no-holds-barred panelist like Frank Zimring of U.C. Boalt Law School.
I should add that a critical skill that needs to be brought to any analysis of Ceasefire (or crime generally in Oakland) is the basic understanding of data management otherwise known as statistics. One of the long term problems in Oakland has been exploitation of convenient numbers for political purposes. Thus social programs aimed at “at risk” youngsters have long continued because (supposedly independent) program evaluators have used poor data in politically-useful but intellectually irresponsible ways.
In the past many Oakland elected officials have made unsubstantiated claims about reductions in various crime categories when the fundamental data is unreliable (most crime) or, in the case of homicides, where the fundamental data may be reliable (dead bodies are accurately countable) but short term variations remain within the long term standard deviation. Short term variations within or close to the standard deviation are not meaningful in terms of program performance, Ceasefire included.
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