Oakland is struggling to stem its crime wave in part because of a chronic lack of police staff, a former chief says.
Since time immemorial, the city has been plagued by crime, but reports have risen dramatically since the pandemic and are only declining slightly.
Among the incidents: a mass shooting during a Juneteenth celebration and an elderly Asian woman who was assaulted outside her retirement home.
“Oakland has never been like this. It used to be that you could say something to some of these kids,” local Rev. Raymond Lankford said last year.
“Our women are shot in their homes… If it is not safe in our homes, where is it safe?”
Elderly woman brutally attacked in unprovoked assault in Oakland
Violent crime is declining from last year’s peak, but property crimes such as burglary and car theft remain stubbornly high and rampant.
Dozens of thieves looted a petrol station after crashing a car into the glass doors, and ATMs are routinely ripped out of walls and stolen.
A survey by the Koreatown Northgate Community Benefit District found that 94 percent of businesses were robbed and 92 percent didn’t bother to report it.
This, some prominent Oakland residents argued, is the core problem: Police can’t keep up, and victims and criminals alike know it.
After the massive looting of the gas station, where goods worth 22,000 dollars were stolen, the police took nine hours to arrive.
A February report by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice found that only 1.5 percent of serious crimes were solved, including just 6.5 percent of violent crimes.
This happened even though the rest of California spent record amounts of money on policing and justice and sent more accused criminals to prison than almost ever before.
A massive mob storms an Oakland gas station after a car crashes into the glass, breaking it.
In contrast, Oakland’s budget only allows for 678 officers, including those on disability leave, the absolute minimum required by law.
That’s just two-thirds of the national average of 2.4 police officers per 1,000 people, and puts just 35 officers on patrol at a time in a city of 435,000.
Emergency response times are the lowest in California, again due to lack of staff, leading to victims not even bothering to call.
The police even struggle with a lack of staff in their records department, with outdated software and a reporting management system that has not been updated since 2006, leading to woefully inaccurate crime statistics.
Former Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong, who was fired by Mayor Sheng Thao last year, blamed City Hall for deliberately diverting police money over the problem.
Last year, Thao froze hiring in the police force, despite its current and continuing understaffing, and critics like Armstrong say the council is deliberately trying to shrink the police’s role without enough replacements.
“There’s a sense of anarchy. A sense that we can do whatever we want, that there are no consequences, almost like in a video game,” he said. The free press.
“Our leaders don’t understand the tone.”
Armstrong said the problem was so obvious that offenders were coming to the city for “crime tourism.”
“Oakland’s freewheeling nature is now attracting criminals from outside the city, Armstrong told me, because they know they can get away with it,” the outlet wrote.
Tim Gardner of the Oakland Report had a similar view: ‘We have an incapacitated police force and a criminal population that is smart enough to recognize this, test it and realize they can do whatever they want.
“It’s 100 percent self-inflicted.”
