What happened to Oakland?
Here’s a City-Journal piece on that topic, in case you’re interested.
An excerpt:
But Oakland’s problems are extreme even by California’s dismal standards, and it’s worth understanding why. The most important factor is Oakland’s dysfunctional police department, which has been neutered by a combination of decades-long adversarial oversight, internal mismanagement, and pervasive low morale. Until it ended recently, federal oversight of the Oakland Police Department had been in effect since 2003—the longest-running federal police monitorship in U.S. history—following a settlement of its “Riders” scandal, in which four officers were accused of beating suspects, planting evidence, making false arrests, and falsifying police reports.
Under this regime, the OPD’s internal hires (including its chiefs), use-of-force policies, and officer-discipline protocols were all subject to the approval of a nonresident federal monitor, Robert Warshaw, who had overseen the department since 2010. His monitoring operation, paid for by Oakland, for years cost the city roughly $1 million annually, though that figure fell recently as the department moved closer to ending federal oversight. Warshaw, who set the OPD’s compliance goals and determined whether the department was meeting them, took a direct role in the firing of several police chiefs.
The OPD is also subject to the Oakland Police Commission, a civilian oversight body with substantial authority over department policy. Among the most controversial policies adopted under this system was Oakland’s restrictive rule on police pursuits, which generally permitted officers to chase suspects only for violent crimes. The policy proved so problematic that, in 2024, Governor Gavin Newsom took the extraordinary step of deploying state police to patrol Oakland’s streets and catch criminals who “flee with impunity because it’s common knowledge that OPD [pursues] in only very limited circumstances,” as he put it in a letter to then-Mayor Sheng Thao.
Much more at the link.
Oakland should be a lesson for other cities in what not to do. But I doubt they’ll heed the warning.
[NOTE: I wrote about the federal oversight problem back in 2022, in this post.]
Recently pulled off 880 freeway to get gas and stop at convenience store. Multiple signs at small strip mall basically saying “don’t leave any valuables in car, they will be stolen”.
With black marker, someone had added “Leave windows down and car unlocked”.
A. Blacks form about 22% of the population of Oakland but hold the mayor’s chair, the city clerk’s chair, and four of the eight non-executive seats on the municipal council. You see this in other municipalities. The body of people who take an interest in running for office these days is disproportionately black.
==
B. Black politicians have signature priorities. One is to distribute patronage of various sorts to their clients (who are modally black). Another is to act as an advocate for professional guilds which are disproportionately black (social workers, school administrators). Another is to harass and punish people they regard as the enemy. (That would be police officers who are not black).
==
C. Leftoid politics in general is all about generating status strata and acting to enforce breaches of strata. Black politicians (and a large chuck of the black rank and file) are incensed when they observe challenges by ordinary (non-black) people as these are low status people breaching protocol. When the person challenged is a black public official, the reaction is more neuralgic.
==
D. Black politicians regard phenomena which cause them or people they care about to lose face to be an affront. Impersonal performance evaluation and data generators are resented because they commonly do that. See, for example the Mayor of Chicago insisting that ShotSpotter technology be turned off.
==
E. Please note that disagreeable controversies (Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, Karmelo Anthony) arise from complaints over status strata being breached.
==
F. Non-black leftists also construct and are motivated by status strata. They disagree with blacks as to why blacks are of higher status than rank-and-file whites, but they are in accord with the notion that they are. As such, all the influence that these types bring to bear in situations are in the service of enforcing these status rules.
==
G. Please note the assumption of the ‘diversity’ discourse. Performance is to be defined in terms of inputs and in terms of the deference to higher-status people is encoded into its institutional culture.
==
H. You’ll notice that whether or not institutions execute to the best of their ability their notional tasks is a matter of indifference in this mentality. Merely pointing out they do not is an affront.
==
Large numbers of people are completely demobilized and do not react to the failures of local government. Others are on board with the priorities of people who seek out positions in local government.
==
What you have is the result of a dialectic between professional-managerial class people of various races (usually white, usually drawn from outside the business sectors) and blacks of various strata.
One issue we have in this country is that responsibility for law enforcement is vested in political units which are deficient in population and often in tax base as well. You should, now and again, municipal police forces in discrete small towns to be found surrounded by countryside, where they act to supplement the work of county sheriff’s patrols and the perimeters of their responsibility are set by the county sheriff. In non-metropolitan counties, the jurisdiction of sheriff’s departments should have a demographic floor (say, a non-institutional population of at least 85,000) with many sheriff’s departments serving a partnership of counties. (With the budget for the department set by a convocation of county boards proceeding by weighted voting and the costs apportioned between member counties per population). In metropolitan zones, police services should be in departments which embrace the whole of a metropolitan settlement and affiliated exurban zones – at least if that settlement is below a certain demographic threshold. It should be county governments or a consortia of all seven counties in question which should be responsible for police services in and around San Francisco Bay. The only municipal police should be in discrete small towns in the exurban zones.
“What is stranger is that a powerful subset of Oakland’s political class seems to encourage the ambient anarchy. This includes recalled Mayor Thao, who was indicted last year on federal bribery charges and, while serving on the city council, voted to strip the OPD of funding (before reversing course when the political winds changed); current city council member Carroll Fife, who rose to prominence defending the rights of squatters and campaigned on promises to defund the police; and Alameda County Supervisor Nikki Fortunato Bas, who, while serving on the city council, pushed unsuccessfully to halve the OPD’s budget.”
And all of these people were elected by the citizens of Oakland…repeatedly.
A people always gets the government it deserves.