#PoliceAcademySix
APTP Condemns City Council Vote to Betray the People and Fund Two Additional Cop Academies
We need the public to know that Councilmembers Thao, Kaplan, Kalb, Gallo, Reid, and Taylor voted to fund two additional police academies over the next two years, undermining some of the minimal progress we fought so hard for this summer to reimagine public safety.
This is a reversal of the budget vote that Kalb, Thao, Gallo, and Kaplan made just a few short months ago, when they heeded the overwhelming demands of people across the City of Oakland that we steer this ship in a different direction.
A big part of the People’s win in the budget vote in June was to cut the number of police academies from six to four. Council’s vote on Tuesday is a complete betrayal of the countless Oaklanders who worked tirelessly for a year to get the city to reimagine public safety. Their decision represents nothing more than a rash and shortsighted reinforcement of the status quo.
Violence is spiking in our neighborhoods. We are losing our loved ones. We all want it to end.
More cops won’t help. The cops we have now aren’t helping. Even by their own standards, the cops are failing — despite a $38 million budget increase and a budget of nearly $350 million per year, arrest rates in Oakland since the start of the pandemic have remained the same, and clearance rates remain abysmally low.
We know (and the council knows) that investing in more police is not an effective way to lower the homicide rate. We also know that investing in more police is not a feasible way to reduce acts of violence across the City of Oakland.
What investing in more police does, however, is deprive the City of Oakland of the invaluable resources needed to make a real impact on the rates of violence in the Town. Resources that need to be invested in the best violence prevention methodologies that we have access to — doubling down on what is currently working and identifying what is missing and needs to be resourced.
Instead of investing in what works, the Police Academy Six have led the council down a path of more policing. And let us be clear — hiring more women and POC recruits and providing childcare for cadets does nothing to move the needle — it is more of the same systemic violence dressed up in diversity. In fact, a University of St. Louis study found that departments with more diversity may have more violent policing. In the words of NWA, “Black police showing out for the white cop”.
Make no mistake: this decision was not part of a genuine process to address the violence affecting the City of Oakland. With the exception of Councilmember Kaplan, those who voted yes last night have not demanded an explanation from OPD as to what is happening with the over $350 million they are budgeted. They have not addressed the amount of time and money OPD wastes on detail assignments, at special events, on ambulance runs, at encampments, or other nonviolent, non-emergency calls for service. There has been little to no exploration of the tens of millions of dollars funnelled into their pet program, Ceasefire, that pays for over thirty officers who are tasked with reducing intercommunal violence. The list goes on.
Council members claimed that this vote was necessary to avoid losing Measure Z (violence prevention) funding if we fall below a certain number of officers, and that the exemptions to Measure Z could not have prevented this outcome. It is difficult to take this assessment seriously when we consider both the failure to investigate OPD mismanagement as identified above and the failure to work with the community to fully explore all options before moving ahead with her plan. Even City Administrator Ed Reiskin told us we could be eligible for an exemption.
It is unacceptable to have so-called progressives weaponize the pain and suffering of Black and Brown Oakland communities to propose more violence for their own political gain. Such naked opportunism and inability to grasp the issues facing our communities should be disqualifying for any city office.
The People of Oakland have made clear that they will only support elected officials with the vision to reimagine what public safety really means and the courage to fight for it.
With elections on the horizon, it is critical that Oaklanders are clear who deserves their support, and who does not.