Bid to defund police is dividing Oakland
Push to halve force’s budget meets highlevel resistance
When Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf took office in 2015, she offered a simple but powerful pledge for a city scarred by violent crime: She would boost the tattered police force to 800 officers.
Today she’s within arm’s length of that goal, after inching up from 722 officers to 792 — even as the department pushed through a sexual misconduct scandal, cycled through chief after chief and endured the scrutiny of a federal court monitor.
But now the mayor and other leaders face a new challenge. Across the city, activists are loudly rallying to defund the police, organizing protests and marching to Schaaf ’s and council members’ houses. Though criticism of law enforcement has long been a staple of Oakland politics, it’s suddenly gained momentum, part of a national reckoning after the death of George Floyd.
“In this current moment, we don’t sound so radical any more,” said Cat Brooks, cofounder of the Anti PoliceTerror Project, who spent the last five years speaking at City Council meetings and leading demonstrations to agitate for police budget cuts. She ran unsuccessfully against Schaaf for mayor in 2018.
Supporters of the movement want to strip half of Oakland’s police budget — some $150 million — and divert it to community services, social workers and teachers. They have the ear of some council members, one of whom proposed a
$25 million cut to the Police Department next year, calling it the first step toward the more ambitious goal of slashing the police budget in half.
“I believe we can get to $25 million today in this current budget cycle, then set a goal toward a larger reduction and a plan that will allow us to reimagine how we do community policing,” Councilwoman Nikki Fortunato Bas told The Chronicle.
She introduced her budget amendment during an eighthour City Council meeting last week, in which police became the focal point of a painful discussion about Oakland’s financial health. The City Council is set to approve the budget on June 30, in a moment of social upheaval and economic crisis.
Pressure to defund the police has created a political quandary for city leaders in Oakland, some of whom promised for years to reform and beef up the Police Department, but who also acknowledge the raw emotions over police killings of Black men and women. To further complicate the debate, Oakland is already grappling with extensive cuts to city services in the wake of COVID19.
Some City Council members say now is not the time to hastily lacerate a department, even if they support the philosophical idea of defunding and want to keep the $150 million goal in sight.
“If we’re really having a conversation about reducing the police budget by 50%, then I want to have that conversation,” Councilwoman Lynette Gibson McElhaney said. “But we’re not going to do that work in 10 days.”
As fury from activists grew more intense, the city released a proposal Friday to shave about $12 million from the Police Department. In a memo to the City Council, Bas suggested a means to come up with the difference: reduce overtime and freeze vacant positions. She cited city data showing 51 sworn officer vacancies and 55 open civilian jobs within the department, some of which could be trimmed, the councilwoman wrote.
With the money saved, Bas would fund a variety of services. She requested $5 million for community ambassadors; $2.5 million for violence prevention in schools; $1 million for victims of human trafficking; $800,000 for investigators to review cases of police misconduct; $500,000 for mental health; and $300,000 for a process to rethink safety in Oakland. Bas then instructed the city to devise a road map to chop police funding in half in its next twoyear budget.
Council President Rebecca Kaplan applauded the $25 million reduction, and submitted her own spreadsheet with $20 million in possible savings, such as hiring police laid off from other departments, instead of new recruits who need more training. She said that with a little creativity, the city could reach Bas’ $25 million target.
“I think it’s important for people to understand that when we say we do not want to rely on police for every response, we’re not saying there should be no one you can call,” Kaplan argued. “Let’s have appropriate, trained responders for every particular need.”
Schaaf, however, was not convinced. She agrees with Bas and other City Council members that many law enforcement duties could be accomplished by unarmed civilian professionals. San Francisco Mayor London Breed recently announced plans to remove sworn officers from noncriminal calls, including school discipline interventions, behavioral health crises and disputes between neighbors. Schaaf said Oakland is on track to make similar reforms.
Yet significantly defunding the Police Department is not the answer, the mayor argued.
“Even with my efforts to bring our sworn staffing up a little bit ... Oakland still has the lowest officerpercrime ratio of any department in America,” she said during an interview Wednesday. She stressed that more cuts “would compromise our commitment to equity,” given that Oakland’s lower income, predominantly African American and Latino neighborhoods suffer from higher crime.
In a city of deep divisions, the desire for safer streets and a stronger police presence still seems to have broad support. When the force reached a low point of 615 officers in 2013, residents of the hills above Interstate 580 got so frustrated that they hired private armed security guards to patrol their neighborhoods. Crime overwhelmed the more workingclass flatlands, where people live with the constant threat of shootings, witness human trafficking on International Boulevard and hear the screech of cars doing doughnuts on residential streets, often without a police officer in sight.
“The level of need and demand for police has outstripped our resources on every measure: crimes per capita, crimes per officer — just pick anything,” said Barry Donelan, president of the Oakland Police Officers’ Association. He added that “homelessness, mental health and public safety are all righteous things that need to be funded ... but the proposal is to fund one by defunding the other.”
Even as the Police Department staffed up, residents complained about slow response times to lowerlevel crimes such as burglaries. The recent string of antipolice protests didn’t help — merchants harangued the mayor and City Council after vandals smashed windows and looted buildings, and the police didn’t intervene in time to stop it.
“We had more than 30 businesses vandalized,” said Carl Chan, president of the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce. Bas’ district includes Chinatown, and many constituents there are skeptical of any plans to reduce police funding, Chan said.
Yet an equally passionate crowd has mobilized to slash police funding, and it includes some of the folks who may have hired security guards to patrol their streets seven years ago, Brooks said.
Speaking from a Juneteenth rally on Friday — which was replete with “Defund the Police” signs — Brooks was breathless.
“It grew throughout a fiveyear campaign, and exploded astronomically this year,” she said. “It’s a whole new day.”