Anti Police-Terror Project Statement in Response to Mayor Libby Schaaf’s Budget Proposal to Give More Money to Police
“Following the murder of George Floyd, the national movement to defund the police, and overwhelming public demand from the people of Oakland, the City of Oakland committed to defunding the police department by fifty percent. Libby Schaaf’s 2021-2023 budget proposal is completely antithetical to what the people are demanding and to the city’s promise to the people of Oakland. Increasing OPD’s funding after years of Oakland police abusing their power and terrorizing Black and Brown communities proves that Libby is incapable of imagining — let alone implementing — a safe Oakland that doesn’t include the mass policing, incarcerating and terrorizing of Black, Brown, Indigenous and poor Oaklanders. The vast majority of people in Oakland want the city to reinvest in our community and address public safety with prevention — not retribution. We want — actually we need — better schools, emotional and mental health support, economic opportunities, less potholes, cleaner neighborhoods, improved libraries, and housing for all, yet the Mayor refuses to listen to these demands.”
– Cat Brooks, APTP Co-Founder
Today Mayor Libby Schaaf released her proposed Oakland city budget for 2021-2023. Unfortunately, after tens of thousands of Oaklanders demanded the mayor reduce police spending and instead invest in community services, Mayor Schaaf has chosen to increase the police budget yet again.
OPD has been allowed to egregiously overspend year after year on overtime. In 2019-20, OPD overspent by $32.18M and the department spent $35.07M on overtime. Last year when thousands of Oaklanders came out to protest mayor Libby Schaaf’s curfew, OPD spent over $2m in one night (!) to police that event. Individually, police in Oakland are way overpaid. One officer earned over $500,000 in 2019 alone — compared to a senior librarian who made $96,000
Now, instead of addressing overtime exploitation and gross overspending by the department, Mayor Schaaf is choosing to normalize the bloated police budget by formalizing overtime spending. Adjusting this so-called “underbudgeting” will offer minimal restrictions on overtime and provide the police department with an even greater slush fund — all at the cost of critical social services our city desperately needs.
The reckless overspending on police has done nothing to make the streets of Oakland safer. Police do not prevent violent crime; they only respond after the fact. Even then, OPD in fact spends very little of its time and budget responding to violence: only 4% of OPD calls for service were for violent crimes in 2019. Instead, it has actually drained resources from the services and programs that are proven to actually keep communities safe, like housing, mental health, jobs and community violence interrupters — so we can get to the gun before the bullet flies.
One of our top priorities in this budget cycle is to ensure the city establishes the MACRO program, to respond to people with mental health crises with trained mental health experts hired within the Fire Department, rather than police. The creation of in-house Oakland City staff civilian response positions would ensure the full development of the program within compassionate and patient-centered paradigms outside of traditional medical models. By keeping MACRO in-house, the public would have oversight of the program and have the ability to monitor compliance while creating good, family-sustaining, union jobs.
Earlier this week Councilmember Carroll Fife and Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas passed a unanimous resolution to direct funding away from OPD and make a long-term investment in MACRO and other mental health alternatives to police, as well as gender-based violence services, community violence interrupters, civilian traffic enforcement, restorative justice for young people, and other initiatives recommended by the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force.
This comes after six long years of organizing. We forced the city to create the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force to figure out how to safely reduce OPD’s general fund allocation by 50% and invest in root cause solutions. Hundreds of volunteers worked with the Task Force for more than six months to craft a set of bold, smart, transformative recommendations that will completely reimagine public safety in Oakland. Councilmember Fife’s and Council President Bas’s resolution prioritizes several of the most critical recommendations for inclusion in the next city budget. Libby’s refusal to act on these recommendations is a slap in the face to the people of Oakland and everyone who participated in the reimagining safety process.
We must ensure resources are dedicated to establishing this program, not carving out even more money for a police department that consumes more than 44% of our general fund.
The People of Oakland are still reeling from the effects of the pandemic and this budget would do nothing to help them recover. We need a proposal that prioritizes housing and services for the homeless, reinvests in adequate city services, and reimagines public safety by cutting millions of dollars spent on ineffective or unnecessary policing from OPD’s budget. But none of this has been presented to us. Instead, we have a mayor who insists that we give more and more money to the police every single year – even if it means defunding every other department in the city.
We will continue to push back until we have an equitable budget that diverts money from the police, invests in Black and Brown communities, and supports alternative models to policing.