Some of the beats aren’t nearly as lucky as oakland-wide. 21X has a bad YTD (up 38% for crimes against a person, aka violent), although Sept was a good month for them. But, 20X spiked. Not so shocking, Aug was the opposite. Hence, crime seems to just be moving back & forth between those two beats.

I got
- Graphs for Area 1, Area 2, Area 3
- Graphs for 5 Area 1 beats, including 12Y/13X (Rockridge), 12X (Temescal), 13X (Hills), 9X, 11X
- Graphs for 4 Area 2 beats in the Fruitvale area, including 18Y, 20X, 21X, 21Y
- YTD & Median per month Tables from 1/1/08->current for all above Areas & Beats, plus the following 4 Area 1 beats: 4X, 7X, 9X, 10X.

I sent a PDF with the results to the entire City Council, plus a few senior OPD folks. I don’t have Batts email, but hopefully this makes it to him. Then, we’ll see if his desire to do anything with Community Policiing is real or not.

This shows what affect OPD can have even now. To have more & make the arrests necessary we’re back where we started. We need:
–More Officers
–More Investigators (once again, OPD has more in IA than for ALL the rest of Oakland & it’s 400,000+ people)

Where ideas & discussion can help is getting the City to hire more of both.

BTW, since the economy has changed, & there’s more supply (of potential officers) & less demand (in hiring competition from other cities), it should be possible to do this at a lower expense than a couple years ago.

I don’t know if the labor agreement with the OPOA covers new hires, but given the changes that affect the marketplace, and given that what’s good for OPD Officers & the Citizens is the same (more Officers), I hope the OPOA will show some flexibility in the salary of new hires…

I agree. We have to complain and demand change, even if we have don’t yet have good ideas how change might come. One problem is that the (to my mind racist) tolerance of violence in Oakland as a whole has been ongoing for many years and the solutions will also be very long in coming.

Patrick: “Why not prosecute participants as accessories to attempted murder?”

What legal charges are made is a rather small part of the solution. The real problems lie in identifying the participants and in arresting the right people. These aspects will require extensive investigation and community cooperation and carry the risks of more social upheaval, mob misbehavior, police mistakes or misbehavior, more lawsuits against the city of Oakland, etc. After which the problems will continue and the police and the community-at-large which wants the violence stopped will be even more hamstrung than before.

-len raphael

I think you’ve pointed out the nature of the problem. That part of Oakland is dominated by violence and other crime and many people are frightened of criminals and gangs and also frightened of and angry with the OPD and downtown generally. Any police action is going to be very messy.

Solving Oakland’s violence and crime problems is not for most of the the armchair generals here. It’s going to take a long time and enormous resources. The OPD and the Mayor and the City Council are going to have to do a lot of thinking and planning and allocation of scare dollars.

The community is going to have to lead the way and pitch in and do some very hard work. The OPD and City Hall can’t do it by themselves. The community is going to have to educate itself about effective crime reduction and police department reform. From what I’ve seen here, well-informed opinions about these topics are exceedingly rare.