Re-Engineering Community Safety
What is happening?
Community safety is a huge challenge in Oakland because it is often defined narrowly. A growing number of people are acting out the lived trauma of inequity, disinvestment, abuse and oppression, the inevitable conclusion to the foundational practices of one of the most violent and discriminatory countries in the world.
In Oakland, we spend more of our general fund on militarized policing than any other city in America and despite consistent increases to the annual budget, our police force delivers worse and worse results every year. Every officer Carroll has spoken to in the field says there needs to be more investment in social services like drug treatment and affordable housing. Even rank and file officers know the current approach is not working for anyone.
Why is it important?
As long as we invest in crime fighting over EVERYTHING else, we will continue to create the conditions that got us here in the first place. To paraphrase UC Berkeley Professor Nikki Jones at one of our District 3 town hall, we know that the young people who are most at risk of being targets or perpetrators of violence are those who are disconnected from school and similar social institutions, who have been hungry and very likely unhoused.
Increasing amounts of research show that the fear of punitive policing is less influential in preventing crime than strong social institutions such as family and community, that are supported through economic opportunities, access to basic resources and mental wellness.
These are the problems we need to solve if we ever hope to reduce crime in the long run. Being safe also means access to safe housing, stellar education, healthcare and living wage work. If these things existed, far fewer people would consider stealing purses and robbing stores.
What’s been done so far?
It is time to reimagine and implement new solutions to community safety. Councilmember Carroll Fife has organized and brought forward proposals to immediately address the current conditions and to invest in community-based violence prevention programs.
➔ Launched the Mobile Assistance Community Responders of Oakland (MACRO) Pilot Program. MACRO is a civilian crisis response program for non-criminal, non-violent police calls for service, dispatching EMTs and social workers to respond to 911 calls for mental health crises. The pilot launched in April 2022 and in one month they responded to over 2000 calls.
➔ Advocated for cost-saving opportunities for civilian employees to take over certain functions performed by sworn police officers, resulting in the Vehicle Enforcement Unit within the Oakland Dept of Transportation. More than 5,600 calls for abandoned vehicle service each year are no longer handled by police, resulting in more timely and cost-effective service. In 2023, the unit more than doubled the vehicles they removed from the streets than OPD the previous calendar year.
➔ The Department of Violence Prevention received an increased budget to employ more violence interrupters and community ambassadors to be out in neighborhoods most impacted by violence.
➔ Introduced commercial corridor safety and ambassador grants, given to three community organizations in order to expand existing ambassador programs and community safety measures on several commercial corridors.
What else can we do?
As Councilmember Carroll Fife organizes for affordable housing and environmental re-design of some our most crime-impacted neighborhoods, she is also advocating for a two-pronged approach to community safety, an approach formed from many conversations with community members:
In The Short-Term
➔ Environmental design with improved, repaired and expanded lighting, artwork and clean streets.
➔ Expand MACRO program hours in order to triple their caseload.
➔ More civilian foot patrols such as community ambassadors and ongoing community events.
➔ Support our small businesses in upgrading their security systems, facades and a host of changes they’ve suggested.
➔ Address 911 challenges - There are too many vacancies and slow responses at 911 dispatch. These are civilian roles, we can host West and East Oakland job fairs to rapidly staff up these workers, work with our labor partners in SEIU 1021 to support existing 911 operators and support job centers to provide needed training and typing classes.
➔ Within OPD, staff beats dramatically differently - Enlistments in America’s military and police departments are at historic lows, Oakland and many other cities are struggling to meet their budgeted numbers. OPD beats can be reconfigured to provide more resources to each community with half of the current staffing; if city-wide roles such as investigators are brought into each beat it will allow officers to have a nuanced awareness of hyperlocal problems and the ability to address the issues residents are specifically asking for. Each beat would then have 8 members (5 beat officers, 1 sergeant, 1 problem-solving officer that works with the community to identify issues, and 1 investigator)
➔ Within OPD, staff the beats for longer assignments - Currently officers can change assignments each year, resulting in officers rarely getting to know the community and vice versa. Longer assignments will lead to officers becoming more effective in understanding the communities where they work, solving issues and doing their jobs.
➔ Strengthen community organization in each beat - There is both a short-term and long-term nature to this, where we can promote diversity and membership in the current Neighborhood Council structure. Over time this work could also lead to hiring and training community members to lead community councils and support addressing the resource needs of each neighborhood on a block-by-block basis.
In The Long-Term
We’ve been here before. We’ve seen the War On Drugs and we’ve seen the era of being tough on crime. The benefit of the long view is that we have also seen that there has NEVER been ongoing work on eradicating crime-creating conditions, but rather the opposite. We can’t make the problem just those who are committing the crimes.
We can do this by centering our community safety work around building a care-taking community, where we build up government services and social institutions. An example is the Richmond Model that centers its work on creating “a beloved community.” The model differs in a number of ways from traditional intervention programs such as Ceasefire, for example by creating actual city jobs with good benefits for the formerly incarcerated, and as a result it has been correlated with a 71% reduction in gun violence by 2017 across the city since the creation of the Office of Neighborhood Safety in 2007.
In a care-taking community, we have affordable social housing and well considered environmental design, specifically targeting historically marginalized and disinvested communities. We must develop policy frameworks such as the Black New Deal in order to address historic harms that purposefully stifled economic access and stability or accept the consequences.
We need to make immediate changes to how we resource and police our communities now, while planting the seeds to actualize significant changes in the next decade and beyond.
