The special council meeting introducing the Reimagining Public Safety Taskforce to CPAB, SSOC and Police Commission has begun. oakland.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.…
The Special Meeting is having video glitches and failures, Kaplan and Clerk Landingham observe that this has happened before during Zoom meetings with a large number of participants [vs attendees] #oakmtg
Second call about OPD failures to enforce "basic laws" around Lake Merritt to this meeting. This caller is concerned about Reimagining will lead to "more problems", and wants to "building up new capabilities", suggesting police need to back those as well #oakmtg
Asata Olugbala says the main problem that the City keeps saying "violence prevention is working", but its not. She wants the city to be more sober in assessing Measure Z, Ceasefire, etc. #oakmtg
Kaplan introduces a policy suggestion for OPD to make “guns the top law enforcement priority,” and "requesting follow up information on gun tracing, and timely deployment to notifications of shootings and armed robberies", links that to de-prioritizing policing protests #oakmtg
Kaplan's report suggests that OPD has had a diminishing success in tracing guns since 2017, almost half as many handguns traced in 2019 vs 2017, 2019 decrease over 2018 #oakmtg
Gallo says that the difference between a politician and a drug dealer is that the drug dealer gives you something. Recounts eyewitnessing a gun robbery, recently, suggests gun crimes are happening due to social failures #oakmtg
Reid says that the highest number of homicides is in D7, and the second highest is in D5. Wants a strategy on "reducing level of insanity", like Gallo, he's describing social issues, repair as core issues, needs. #oakmtg
Reid says that D7 is returning to its nickname "killing fields of Oakland". He describes, Guatemalan gangs and African American gangs taking each other's lives, but he begins to get back into law and order territory by saying he doesn't even know if there is a solution #oakmtg
Reid pulls out his oft-used claim that he walks his dogs in San Leandro, says that if shooters shot straighter, there'd be a higher murder number. He is now saying that young Latino and AA don't believe in Covid proscriptions, drinking 40oz, buying drugs, selling drugs #oakmtg
Reid spoke for nearly ten minutes, incredible that no one cut him off, given the number of speakers and organizations present today. #oakmtg
Harris says she doesn't support defunding police, but rather making it more efficient. She largely agrees with Reid's assessment of the issues in D7, and says that East Oakland has become a dumping ground for everything that Oakland doesn't want. #oakmtg
Harris complains about a lack of transparency and accountability within Ceasefire #oakmtg
Bas says that Covid has exacerbated social inequities, lack of jobs and lack of constructive things to do. She says the Reimagining Taskforce has potential to "break the cycle" of doing the same things, investing in alternatives to policing #oakmtg
Thao says that she agrees with Gallo about going after root causes, after school and library programs, internships. Community policing, and having community leadership. She says that Ceasefire needs to do a better job of being visible in community #oakmtg
Remarkably, the Ceasefire evaluation included in today's agenda packet was co-authored by one of the original designers of the Ceasefire model, Anthony Braga. Its weird that the OPD commissioned a study from someone one assumes is invested in having the program appear to work.
Cespedes is giving a background on Department of Violence Prevention. He's been the Chief of the program--so named to appear to be an analogue to the Police Chief. DVP appears to have a handful of staff members, and wields its programs thru 21 third party orgs #oakmtg
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
At Finance now, Director Erin Roseman: "reduced revenues and overspending in police department..."
City's revenues are trending downward from last year, the most significant being Real Estate Transfer, then Business License Tax...some are trending upward, but not enough to counteract the declines"
Current decline in RTTF is akin to what happened in great recession...after 2006 going to 2008, revenues from RTTF declined, same pattern is visible if you look at chart in 2021...steep decline in 2022 and 2023...large part of this is due to things beyond city's control.
Despite never numbering more than twenty people on the ground, the finance/real estate backed Price Recall rallies always attract a large share of media, often more than 50K protesters taking over a freeway. Ask why, and you have the answer to many of Oakland's problems.
These rallies are the only ones where I'm ever actually over on my head count. It's not even twenty, and I said two dozen earlier as a mocking joke, but they were just above one dozen.
Another w/no details about changes. It's ironic that the accusation from the recall backers is that BOS is trying to "confuse" voters, when its Velena's vacuous reporting doing that. She doesn't even get what's at issue right. nbcbayarea.com/news/local/eas…
There definitely is this weird cottage industry in sports where fans love to follow pundits that get everything wrong time n again, with Howard Terminal as the clearest example of that. None of these doofs ever knew what they were talking about, they still obviously don't.
Case in point, I believe these grant numbers are inflated & City never provided an in-print total, Regardless, they reveal dishonesty of pundits & even Thao, who claimed Oakland is "88 MM" or "100 MM" away. Assuming these numbers aren't also invented--a big if--it's nearly 200 MM
What I find interesting in all this is once the deal became impossible, Thao collaborated with local sports reporters to start throwing out numbers that can't be verified; there's no City report on any of this. They are wildly inventing it all with clear goal of conning fans
The special meeting to introduce Council President Bas' amendments for the budget has begun. That's the first item. Not likely there'd be a vote today at all on the whole budget
Bas is introducing the amendments, she says there've already been hard decisions made. Going through the list, I've already covered this in threads. Reversing the OFD brownouts, adding 2 MM in DVP; ambassadors for biz corridors; traffic safety 1 MM; 2 civ police investigators
Adding a dedicated MACRO team for Oakland libraries, a new fund to create rapid housing for homeless
Just after beginning serious negotiations, Kaval/Fisher broke them off to instead launch a pressure campaign with sports/mainstream media more than willing to help
The pressure campaign's narrative was that the A's had offered a generous package to the City on HT, but that evil Council members were blocking it. The truth was that Fisher ordered our City to pay what could be a billion dollars in offsite infrastructure.
At Public Safety, OPD recounting new IAD policy practices as a result of the Armstrong issues:
It's an absolute fact that thanks to dumbing down by corporate media for decades, no one actually understands how police are made, how an academy is created and the actual fact that the number of people who want to be police AND CAN is extremely finite.
The Oaklandside story on payments for witnesses came up during Public Safety. Not surprisingly, OPD didn't budge on it oaklandside.org/2023/06/13/oak…