Second thoughts on defunding police
Five members of 17 on task force urge waiting until better solution is found
When Black Lives Matter protests shook the ground beneath Oakland City Hall this summer, the City Council laid out an ambitious goal: cut the $ 300 million police budget in half, and invest the savings in social services.
Now, some of the people picked to devise an action plan want the city to change course. In a joint letter, five Black members of Oakland’s Reimagining Public Safety Task Force say they don’t want to see the number of police reduced until the task force comes up with a comparable or better solution.
If that means keeping the force intact while testrunning another type of response, the group says, so be it.
The five signatories — John Jones III, Keisha Henderson and Ginale
Harris of East Oakland, and Antoine Towers and Carol Wyatt of West Oakland — introduced their letter Wednesday night, during a scheduled meeting of the 17member task force.
“Black lives are being lost ( and) harmed at an alarming rate in our
city,” said the letter, written just as Oakland logged 100 homicides for the year so far — the highest number since 2012.
“Even more lives will be lost if police are removed without an alternative response being put in
“More lives will be lost if police are removed without an alternative response being put in place that is ... as good as or better than the current system.” Letter from five members of the Oakland task force
place that is guaranteed to work as good as or better than the current system,” it continued.
The letter raises a series of philosophical questions about the movement to defund police. Will slashing a budget be enough to curb police violence against Black people? And what are the consequences of having fewer officers on the street?
Harris’ voice shook as she spoke at the meeting Wednesday night.
“People aren’t fighting for equity, they’re fighting for ‘ defund the police,’ ” she said. “Well, let’s fight for the equity piece, first.”
Policing in Oakland could look dramatically different if officials implement the ideas on the task force’s draft list of recommendations. They include: a hiring freeze, eliminating the Internal Affairs Division, replacing the police who investigate domestic violence calls with civilian clinicians, shifting traffic enforcement over to the Department of Transportation, and transferring the 911 dispatch over to the Fire Department or city administrator.
While the idea of cutting police funding gained traction after the widely televised reactions to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, it’s now complicated by a surge in homicides in Oakland, particularly in the flatland neighborhoods below Interstate 580. In polls and at public meetings, residents of these largely Black and Latino areas have demanded fairer and more consistent policing.
Task force members who represent these
areas say the rest of the group isn’t listening. The task force is tense by nature, with 17 appointees hailing from all parts of the city, and several advisory boards that add dozens more participants. Meetings tend to be chaotic, as the group’s hired facilitators struggle to keep the project on track.
“The five of us gathered because we were frustrated that ... at a time when the violence, and specifically the homicide in East Oakland was increasing, there
appeared to be an unwillingness to have a conversation about it,” said Jones, a coauthor of the letter who lives in East Oakland’s Allendale district.
Jones, 46, embodies all sides of the current policing debate. A community activist who spent years incarcerated, he remembers being roughed up by an Oakland police officer at 12 years old, while playing baseball with friends outside their apartment complex at 92nd Avenue and Holly Street. The officer slammed Jones against a wall and muttered a racial slur.
But Jones is also a single father raising two of his three children in the Allendale, where police choppers hover overhead on a near daily basis, cars routinely turn donuts at the intersection of 38th Avenue and Brookdale, and gunfire crackles through the night. Jones said he worries whenever his 18yearold son leaves the house, and not because he fears a deadly encounter with the police.
The letter proposes six new “guiding principles” for the task force, which was initially scheduled to deliver recommendations to City Council in December, a deadline that was later extended to April. The group’s principles would likely go up for a vote of the entire task force at the next scheduled meeting in late December.
Aside from advocating for a detailed evaluation of any plan that purports to replace traditional police officers, the set of principles also calls for a cost analysis. If the plan saves money, that savings should be directed toward public safety before it’s invested in any other type of service, the letter says.
City Councilman Loren Taylor, who cochairs the task force and whose district is in East Oakland, said he supports the ideas of the letter, even if they conflict with the original mandate to strip half the police budget.
If the task force adopts the new principles and uses them to invent a new, more just form of law enforcement that doesn’t substantially cut funding from the police, “in my mind, that’s a success,” Taylor said.