San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Is Oakland really worse off than ever?
Public safety issues are not unique, but the abuse the city gets for them is
Maybe it’s the property crimes and robberies happening in high-traffic commercial corridors and now plaguing posh Oakland enclaves that previously never really had to worry about public safety.
Maybe it was In-NOut Burger shutting down its only Oakland location over safety issues and car break-ins.
Maybe it’s more about emotion: For various reasons, three professional sports franchises — the Golden State Warriors, Las Vegas Raiders and now the Oakland Athletics — decided to leave Oakland in the past five years, robbing the city of a much-needed sense of pride.
For anyone trying to argue that Oakland has never been as bad off as it is today, there’s no shortage of examples to validate the point.
The reality is Oakland is wrestling with a web of interconnected issues — most of which deal with public safety and aren’t unique to the city. Yet Oakland gets vilified for its struggles in ways few, if any, cities in this country do. There’s an unhinged fury in the relentless Oakland criticism pushed hardest by the political right and their moderate allies. These fearmongers want everyone to believe Oakland is a doomed city with a hopeless future. Is this true, though? Oakland is a beautiful, courageous, singular place, but crime has been a problem for decades, no matter who has been the mayor, police chief or Alameda County’s district attorney. Troubling rates of gun violence, property crime and robberies go back to the crack epidemic of the 1980s, meaning Oakland’s woes have long been part of a national discourse. A 1989 New York Times article described Oakland as a “dangerous, unstable city where housing projects crackled with gunfire and narcotics arrests soared … and municipal hospitals had become M*A*S*H units.”
Overall violent crime in Oakland peaked in the early 1990s, hovering between 9,000 and 10,000 reported incidents in the years from 1991 to 1993, according to the California Department of Justice. Between 2019 and 2023, total violent crimes never exceeded about 7,500 incidents in a year, according to Oakland Police Department data.
Oakland, as bad as people believe it is today, isn’t as dangerous as it was decades ago.
“Crime is a relative thing: Do you feel safe or not?” said longtime Oakland political consultant Jim Ross, who said he remembers Oakland in the 1980s when a day at Lake Merritt would get interrupted because law enforcement needed to search the water for bodies. “Oakland today compared to the ’80s and ’90s is a completely different
city. It’s a better city.”
Some of Oakland’s loudest local critics — particularly those who say Oakland can arrest its way to a brighter future — wouldn’t agree. These folks bemoan how Oakland is a shell of itself, and they pine for a time when the city was safer and overall just a better place to live.
Just like the “Make America Great Again” crowd, these people also never specify when this apparently idyllic time was.
Maybe they’re referring to the mid- to late 2010s, the era before historic racial justice protests called for police departments to have less funding in 2020, before Oakland elected its progressive mayor and before Alameda County welcomed its first progressive
district attorney in 2022.
Around 2015, America’s economy was bouncing back from the Great Recession and the housing market crash of the 2000s. Oakland was one of the 20 cities with populations over 100,000 that had the biggest growth in income during 2010-19, according to a report by Forbes.
The city’s unemployment rate from January 2014 to December 2019 reached pre-recession lows, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau.
Oakland’s Ceasefire program (which identified people most likely to commit or be victims of crime and provided them with mentoring, life coaching and job resources) was reducing gun violence in the city. In 2017-19, Oakland had fewer than 300 shootings and homicides, according to police data, which was lower than any year since 2008.
The Golden State Warriors were packing Oakland’s former Oracle Arena (now the Oakland Arena) and winning championships in 2015, 2017 and 2018. Oakland was ranked one of the best sports cities in the country in 2019, according to personal finance company WalletHub, so local pride in the city was high.
Not a single one of the many things that made those years special — a strong economy, people having jobs, investments in violence prevention, the positive publicity the city received from its sports teams — had anything to do with conservative public safety policies and recalling progressive leaders. That’s what Oakland’s most
misguided critics are demanding now.
But this argument has little value when Oakland is an easy punching bag for right-wing media and for politicians seeking to score points with conservative and moderate voters.
The right’s propaganda machine needs to make cities with progressive leaders seem lost and broken. It isn’t just about poisoning the minds of locals, it’s about poisoning the atmosphere around Democrats’ policies across the country.
Forget that rural areas and cities in red states like Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Kentucky and Tennessee have higher gun violence and drug overdose rates than blue state California’s larger cities.
Even California’s most powerful politician, Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is eyeing a future presidential bid, uses Oakland as his springboard to pursue conservative public safety initiatives. Newsom is pushing for harsher prosecution and sentencing of people who break the law, when in the past he advocated for criminal justice reform and rehabilitation over putting folks in jail. And Newsom’s recent effort to install hundreds of security cameras in and around Oakland has been widely criticized by privacy advocates.
Oakland is having very real struggles, but as Ross told me, “Oakland’s golden time is in its future, not in its past.”
It’s a fair point that more people need to hear.
The city hired a new police chief in Floyd Mitchell, who last month during his introductory
news conference promised to support antiviolence initiatives like Ceasefire, which has proved effective in the past when it had the funding and staffing it needed.
Oakland leaders are also making public safety and business investments in East Oakland. Taking a radical approach to improving one of Oakland’s most underserved areas will benefit the entire city.
Oakland’s beauty is in its diversity, and the city recently launched an Immigrant Micro Business Support Program, which targets immigrant startup businesses, providing them with culturally and linguistically competent business assistance so they can be successful.
Oakland leaders are even taking steps to keep the city a destination for sports. The A’s are leaving the Oakland Coliseum at the end of this season, but there are already commitments for the Oakland Roots and Oakland Soul soccer teams to play their 202526 season home matches at the location.
If we want a better future for Oakland, according to Kev Choice — a musician, community activist and vice chair of the city’s Cultural Affairs Commission — we can’t ignore the city’s problems, but we can emphasize the good things.
“What I love right now is we’re seeing the resiliency in the community,” he told me. “People are finding new ways to maintain and grow despite all the challenges.”
There’s nothing more Oakland than that.