Banner summer for Oakland

So, to recap.

The general political climate in Oakland at the beginning of the summer was best summed up by the Trib in their Council race endorsements, which they introduced by saying “If there were ever a city crying out for leadership, it’s Oakland,” then proceeded to endorse the re-election of every single incumbent. Oakland voters followed suit at the polls in early June, and sent Nancy Nadel, Jane Brunner, Ignacio De La Fuente, and Larry Reid back for four more years.

Mid-June news of a large-scale gang bust by the Oakland Police Department was almost immediately eclipsed by allegations that Oakland City Administrator Deborah Edgerly had interfered with the 2-month investigation by tipping off her nephew, a member of the Acorn gang and City of Oakland employee, that his phone was tapped.

Faced with widespread citizen outrage, Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums took the opportunity to demonstrate his unique ability to find the absolute worst possible way to handle a municipal crisis, first giving her until Monday, June 23rd to either resign or be fired, then pre-empting his own deadline by sending out an e-mail on Friday, June 20th directing all department heads to report directly to him. Nevertheless, Edgerly remained at the helm at the beginning of the following week.

Then on Tuesday, June 24th, Dellums held a press conference announcing that Edgerly would retire from her post, at the end of July (although she would continue to work for the city for as long as six months while selecting her own replacement) but claimed that the announcement was unrelated to the brewing scandal, saying her retirement plans had been in place since January. When pressed for details on the search for Edgerly’s replacement by Chip Johnson on KQED Forum, Dellums Chief of Staff David Chai remained insistent that the plan had been in place since January, but refused (or was unable) to answer follow-up questions about when the search for a replacement had begun.

By Friday, June 27th, Councilmembers Ignacio De La Fuente and Pat Kernighan were calling publicly for her to be placed on administrative leave until her retirement date, and Dellums finally did so that night, naming his interim CEDA director Dan Lindheim acting City Administrator. Edgerly fired back the next Monday, claiming that Dellums didn’t have the authority to appoint her replacement, in response to which, the Mayor finally fired her on July 1st, then told reporters the following day that claims he had behaved indecisively were “absurd.” Ultimate fallout of the Edgerly scandal is yet to be determined, awaiting the results of an FBI investigation, for which subpoenas were issued in late August.

Reaction to the Edgerly mess from the rest of City Hall varied widely. Oakland City Attorney John Russo, Oakland City Auditor Courtney Ruby, and Oakland City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente stepped in with government reform packages, offering proposals ranging from a new anti-nepotism law to an audit of hiring practices to records reform, while District 3 City Councilmember Nancy Nadel called such actions “opportunistic power grabbing (PDF)” and warned that we should wait for all the facts before “rushing to judgement.” Calls to eliminate waste in Oakland’s government were met with derision by District 4 Councilmember and wanna-be Mayor Jean Quan, who announced in a newsletter that she believes the worst case scenario is that the City has less than a million dollars in waste that could be cut.

The administrative crisis was compounded by a financial one. The Council passed a mid-cycle budget with $15 million in cuts in June, but got two bits of unpleasant news the next month. First, in response to findings of vote counting irregularities with LLAD from activist David Mix and ORPN founder Charles Pine, the Council admitted defeat and agreed not to collect the tax, putting them another $12 million in the hole. Then Dellums acknowledged that the revenue estimates he had presented in his (late) budget proposal were inaccurate by millions of dollars and announced he was bringing in former City Manager Robert Bobb to sort out the mess and find a replacement for Edgerly. Bobb announced two weeks ago that the actual deficit was somewhere between forty and sixty million dollars. Matier and Ross later reported that Oakland’s fund reserve dropped from over $60 million last year to $22 million currently. Although the City is unable to account for where the money went, Finance and Management Committee Chair Jean Quan tried to put a rest to concerns, saying “It’s not like the money was stolen.”

Things just got worse in August, when the City experienced a spree of local business robberies that appeared to have no rhyme or reason, with targets ranging from a pizzeria on Skyline to a nail salon in Temescal to a monument to mediocre cuisine in Rockridge. Dellums responded by blaming the economy, informing the citizens that the apparent crime rise is perception, not reality, and calling in the volunteer Guardian Angels to patrol our streets. The spate of high profile crime wasn’t limited to restaurant robberies - Oakland residents also got to deal with arsons in West Oakland, a four year old boy getting hit by a stray bullet, and this weekend, the second murder this year of a pregnant teenager. A Labor Day shooting in East Oakland brought the year’s homicide tally to 95, up from 88 this time last year.

In response to rising concerns about crime, the Council agreed to place a parcel tax on the November ballot that would hire 105 additional police officers and 75 additional police service technicians over the next three years, at a cost of $275/year for Oakland homeowners. Dellums named former County Health Department director Arnold Perkins as his temporary Public Safety Director. Although the public will have to wait until September 11th to see the Mayor’s full public safety program, residents got a preview of Perkins’s answers for the Oakland crime problem in a Trib editorial this weekend, where Perkins suggests to Martin Reynolds that citizens combat the crime problem on their own by bringing fried chicken to the groups of young men loitering on their streetcorners.

You know, following this stuff day to day, you’re always angry, of course, but as with anything, after a while you just sort of get used to it. There’s outrage, sure, but somehow it just gets dulled over time. I had a wake-up call this weekend, watching the way people not from Oakland reacted to my telling them, in this kind of jaded, matter-of-fact way, about the restaurant robberies and the statements in response from Dellums and Tucker. Their response, which was just complete disbelief that anyone would tolerate living in such a place, made me realize just how totally, totally fucked-up the situation is in this town. (I am sorry for the language. Although I may have a few sailor-like tendencies in person, I do try to restrain myself on the blog, but sometimes there are no other words.) The people of Oakland deserve better, and there is absolutely no reason we should tolerate the status quo even a day longer. Immediate action is needed from City Hall. As for what that action should be, well, you’ll have to wait for tomorrow on my thoughts there. Today is just about reveling in completely justifiable outrage.

When your best isn’t good enough, it’s time to go

So I’ve had like a dozen people ask me this week why I haven’t written anything yet about the latest plan for ending Oakland’s spate of restaurant robberies from Mayor Ron Dellums and Police Chief Wayne Tucker.

For those who missed it somehow, Dellums says that the problem will not end until we all start running around writing down license plate numbers of all the suspicious looking vehicles we see. The Mayor also made the extremely helpful observation that he thinks people are robbing restaurants because they are “targets of opportunity.” Um…duh.

Meanwhile, the police department basically blames the continued robberies on the media, saying that all the coverage of robberies and no reporting on arrests emboldens would-be robbers. Again…duh.

The police department thinks this is unfair, since they’ve actually arrested 52 robbery suspects in the past two months, although none of those arrests are of suspects in the recent restaurant robberies. So…52 suspects. 60 days. Out of how many crimes? Well, between June 24th (xls) and August 24 (xls), we went from 1,897 reported robberies for the year to 2,606. So…two months, 709 robberies, 52 arrests. And the problem is with the media not reporting arrests? If they say so.

Anyway, I mostly haven’t written about it yet because it’s just too depressing. The latest pleas for help and rounds of blame and sad defensiveness are just so totally pathetic that my immediate reaction was one of pity rather than anger. Both Dellums’s and Tucker’s remarks just give off this overwhelming stench of complete desperation. And yeah, it’s totally unacceptable that they can’t get a handle on things, but my feeling at this point is that both really are doing the best they can. The problem is that both are just completely overmatched by their jobs. And when you’re doing your best and working as hard as you’re capable of (I’m not saying that the Mayor is working harder than most people would be capable of, BTW, just that I don’t think it’s in him to do anything beyond what he’s already doing), and the result is just flat-out not acceptable, that means it’s time to hand the reigns to someone else. At this point, the best thing both Dellums and Tucker could do to help Oakland move forward is to put their egos aside and admit that these extremely important jobs should be filled by someone with more energy, more ideas, and more, well, just general competence.

How much of our crime crisis has to do with ineffective leadership at OPD?

So in Citywise today, we learn that Robert Bobb announced at an event yesterday that the budget deficit is going to be between 40 and 60 million. Ouch. Bobb is right - it’s going to be an ugly September indeed.

But he said something else at the same event that I find even more upsetting. In response to a question about crime or the police department or something like that, Bobb reported that he had actually asked Oakland Police Chief Wayne Tucker recently what the department’s crime reduction goal for the year was. Tucker responded that they didn’t have one. Take a second to let that one sink in.

If I hadn’t been completely convinced already that Tucker just needs to go as soon as possible, hearing that certainly did it for me. If you haven’t jumped on that bandwagon yet, you may want to take a gander at some of Ron Oz’s essays. Oz has many interesting things to say about policing, although I recommend taking his demographic comparisons with a grain of salt, well, not even that - just ignore it. He has a habit of taking data from two different sources and draws sweeping conclusions from these apples to oranges numbers and makes assumptions based on them and in general, it’s kind of a bad scene. But the police stuff is solid.

The City Council cannot be trusted.

So the Council last night approved the Mayor’s funding request for $7.7 million in Measure Y money to pay for a new police recruitment package. It’s always disturbing when the Council makes bad decisions, although rarely surprising. Last night was especially disappointing for me because they spent like two hours hashing out just what an irresponsible move this is, to the point where it was pretty crystal clear to everyone in the room that this is going to cause a lot of pain down the road.

Desley Brooks characterized the city’s use of Measure Y funds to date as an abuse of the public trust, and she’s absolutely right: Read more

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Back in April 2006, Oakland’s City Council and then-Mayor Jerry Brown were feeling increasing heat from angry citizens about our understaffed police department. Only four months into the year, the City had already witnessed 36 homicides (we’re at 27 for 2008, BTW). People were holding emergency vigils to raise awareness of the growing violence problem. So our elected officials made a public commitment to fully staff the police force by the end of January 2007 (is this sounding familiar yet?) and gave the police (PDF!) department $2.8 million (PDF!) to do whatever they needed to get the job done. Some of the money came from a surplus in the General Fund, and the rest came from unspent Measure Y police funds.

A big chunk of the money was going to pay for 4 police academies between April and January (big ones, with space for 42 recruits each) and 2 lateral academies between April and January. The police department was also going to use it to institute monthly testing “to ensure a constant supply of applicants.” They were going to offer consolidated tests, so all three phases could be completed in a single weekend. We were going to use advertising funds to blitz local media markets. Mayor Jerry Brown announced that he would be partnering with the Peralta Community College District to create a pre-Academy training program that would help reduce our attrition rate. Read more

Oakland benefits from the misfortunes of other cities! Or not.

You may have read in the Trib on Friday that Oakland’s chances of fully staffing the police department this year are pretty good, because we have less competition than usual:

He was responding to committee chair Maya Dillard Smith’s question about whether it’s likely the Police Department can recruit so many officers when other agencies are hoping to do the same.

“Two months ago I’d say you’re right on the money when you say we’re in real competition with other agencies,” Tucker said. “Today, I think we’re not … I think there’s a hiring freeze in San Jose and Sacramento and Vacaville and Berkeley.”

You can watch Oversight Committee Chair Maya Dillard-Smith’s question here:

And here is Tucker’s reference to the hiring freeze (this comes at the end of a much longer response):

Anyway, you’re probably thinking “Hey, that’s good news for Oakland,” right? We never catch a break - lucky us. That’s what I thought, anyway.

But then as I was looking at Police Department websites from those other agencies as part of another post I’m working on, I noticed something. They are hiring! That’s right. If you want to join the San Jose Police Department, you can schedule your written test for June 8th (you can take the physical agility test the date before, and your oral board immediately following your written test). If you’re worried about passing the test, you might want to attend one of their optional pre-test seminars in April and May, or their two practice Physical Agility Tests, also offered in both April and May.

Sacramento’s Police Department is recruiting at career fairs, colleges, and conferences, and will be hosting a written test on Saturday.

Since websites don’t always get updated regularly, I called human resources departments in both cities this morning to inquire about police jobs and in both cases was told that yes, the department is currently hiring. I also asked if there had been a hiring freeze in place that was lifted during the last week. Both women I spoke with seemed to find this question bizarre, but told me that no, they were seeking police recruits just as actively a week ago as they are today.

Questioning Dellums’s promise

I wrote yesterday for Novometro about the feasibility of Ron Dellums’s promise to fully staff the police department by the end of 2008. CBS 5 had a report last night on the same topic.

In my story, I focused on the realities of the police hiring timeline, showing that even in a best-case recruiting scenario, there simply isn’t time to train any police who have not yet begun the hiring process and completed their POST exam by the end of 2008. The CBS 5 story didn’t really look into that aspect, but spoke with OPOA President Bob Valladon, who said “No, it’s not realistic, in fact it’s almost impossible. There’s not enough people that actually want to apply for this job and be able to go through the background and pass.” They also interviewed Oakland Police Chief Wayne Tucker, who said “It’s going to be difficult. It’s a real challenge for us, but it’s realistic.”

Um…it isn’t. Read more

When will Oakland have 803 police officers? At this rate, never.

So compared to many of the other items at Tuesday’s Council meeting, the unenforceable smoking ban was actually pretty unimportant (but kind of funny). They renewed the interim zoning controls (but only after staff spent the last four months cancelling projects that have been in the planning process for over a year), agreed to issue an RFQ for the Army Base (but only after have to fight with staff, who completely ignored the CED Committee’s instructions), and approved an 8 foot “bubble” between patrons of abortion clinics and pro-life protesters (but only after having to listen to a long line of pro-life activists complaining about their right to free speech being violated - thankfully, due to the late hour, there were only about 15 speakers. The rest had already been forced to leave so they could catch the last BART train back to the suburbs).

But the most depressing part of the meeting was when the Council received the quarterly Measure Y hiring progress report. On Monday I criticized the report for having too many excuses and not enough solutions. I don’t want to be disrespectful of the police department - obviously a police officer’s job is very difficult, and I do realize that there is a nationwide shortage of qualified officers contributing to our problems. But somehow other cities manage to maintain some degree of safety on their streets, and I think that most Oaklanders would agree that there is something severely wrong with our police department - whether that problem is the OPOA, not enough funding, mismanagement, the wrong approach to policing, or something else entirely. Something somewhere is not right. Read more