Oakland City Council rejects further cuts to police budget.
In a dramatic, nearly 10hour meeting culminating in a contentious 422 vote, the Oakland City Council refused to cut $11 million from the police budget.
Tuesday’s vote means the Oakland Police Department will lose $14.3 million in funding instead of $25 million, an amount that was proposed by council member Nikki Fortunato Bas. Only Bas and City Council President Rebecca Kaplan supported the measure for a larger cut.
The council had cut more than $14 million on June 23, a move that was criticized by Bas and others who demanded deeper cuts to police. After that vote, some council members acknowledged that the vote was hastily taken and decided to revisit the budget Tuesday, and to slice the police budget in half in the coming years. Calls nationwide to defund police followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25.
Tuesday’s plan called for reallocating $11.4 million from the police toward underfunded programs like schools, housing, and social services. It outlines funding for several community initiatives, including $1.3 million for schoolbased violence prevention teams, $300,000 to survivors of human trafficking, and $500,000 to community safety ambassadors.
“When it comes to rethinking public safety, I’m completely in line with the fact that we need to be there,” said council member Loren Taylor, who voted against the plan Tuesday. “If the dollars aren’t there, I can’t support what’s going to be listed.”
The Oakland Police Department’s $300 million budget swallows about 44% of the city’s general fund, the highest proportion of any city police department in the nation, according to a 2017 analysis from the Center for Public Democracy. Measuring police spending as a portion of the general fund, however, can be unreliable since cities vary substantially in what they include in that fund.
As of 2018, Oakland had the nation’s highest rate of violent crimes per officer.
The proposed cuts included $8 million in police overtime funds, $2.75 million of which comes from policing events and festivals. It also called for eliminating some nonsworn departmental positions, including the police public information officer.
Last month, the City Council proposed that a task force be created to explore reducing the police budget by 50% by next year. Mayor Libby Schaaf has supported creation of the task force.
But, in recent weeks, Schaaf has publicly spoken out against the proposed $11 million cut, including in a Tuesday morning email to constituents. The email cited Oakland’s historically substandard dispatch response, and the fact that the city’s police department has the lowest officer percrime staffing in the nation.
“Today, Councilmembers Kaplan and Bas are proposing a dangerous and irresponsible amendment to that alreadyapproved budget,” Schaaf wrote. “Their proposal would further impair emergency response capabilities, as well as make illusory budget cuts that could throw Oakland into even greater fiscal vulnerability.”
On Tuesday, Taylor supported the school, housing and social service programs that would be funded by the reallocation, but he questioned the source of their funds.
“The challenge that I see is that we haven’t identified real money for it,” he said. “These are great proposals and programs we haven’t allocated money for yet.”
Kaplan swiftly defended the reallocation.
“What is being spent on the Police Department is real money. It’s Oakland taxpayer money,” she said.
Police Chief Susan Manheimer opposed the proposed cuts, saying that much of the department’s overtime costs came from an understaffing problem.
“It would be helpful to show you the things you’re proposing to cut so we can show you the impact on the community in real time,” she said. “We are really in the hole.”
Council members Sheng Thao and Dan Kalb, who abstained from the June 23 vote, copresented a motion that softened the plan to cut $11 million from the police budget, in part by reducing the police overtime cut.
Following a 44 deadlock on the new motion, the council had to call in the mayor to intervene with a deciding vote.
“I know we all support reimagining public safety and advancing racial justice. The council has committed to that,” Schaaf said. “I believe that Oakland needs to commit to a new system that is based on real numbers that does not mislead the public about what it can actually accomplish. With that, I respectfully vote no.”
With their motion denied, council members Thao and Kalb again abstained from the vote on the plan to cut $11 million, and it failed to pass.
Also on Tuesday, the council discussed a measure to build a community task force to reimagine Oakland’s public safety programs over the next year. This task force, led by residents most impacted by police brutality, will engage the community in a planning process to redirect crisis response to civilian peace officers. The council will vote on the task force plan July 28.
“Our proposal accomplished shining a spotlight for the public on what the city invests in, because that’s a statement on our values,” Bas said Wednesday. “We need to keep having these discussions in the open if we want to fundamentally rethink how to keep our community safe.”