Empower Oakland Report Wants to Defund the Police

Yes, Measure E funds more police recruitment and training, among other vital services. Didn't we already pay for that? Yeah we did but if you paid for a haircut and then had to come back and pay again, would you be angry? Would you blame the hairdresser?

Finding good candidates for a position that—allows you to walk around with a gun, drive a fast car and detain people you don't know who may not like you the moment they see you—is turning out to be hard and it’s hard all over. Like that haircut you will still need, you will need to find and train cops regularly. They quit, they get injured on or off the job, they move or they decide this wasn't for them. No it's not cause they have “too many bosses.” In a paramilitary organization, you have a commanding officer and he has a commanding officer, that's it.

So Loren and his friends say they're mad and don't want to pay for more recruitment and training programs, just defund them- they're too expensive-they say. Maybe there is a magical way to fully staff a police department? If there is, most cities and towns didn't get the fairy dust either. And, most cities and towns, like ours, are experiencing a drop in crime at the same time.

[As an aside, my theory is that the pandemic was a generational shock. People in front-line jobs like store clerks or nurses or teachers or emergency workers including cops, got sick, got stressed, even died. It'll take a generation, I believe, to replace them. And because the image of law enforcement is fluctuating so wildly, how does one decide to become a cop? That's a longer discussion.]

The folks in Loren's cabal aren't really led by him but by the techbros who run and fund Empower Oakland/Report. They base their principles on the idea that small “d” democracy doesn't work as well as a few rich people deciding what we need (because the rich know better right?) but first they must make us believe that all government officials are corrupt or inept so why invest our time, trust or money in making government work better? And while many of us learned about how laws are made through the cartoon character, the bill, most of us know almost nothing about local government.

The big difference between local (including state governments) and the feds is that the federal government has the treasury of the United States to play with and they can and regularly do run deficits. Neither state nor local governments can run deficits and local governments always operate on a thin revenue balance. They cannot afford to make one bad prediction or overpayment. At the same time, unlike your family budget, local and state governments are required to maintain a reserve. The other part of this equation that complicates governing cities and towns is that they have much less control over private investment than the feds.

For instance, local governments have almost nothing to say about how much housing gets built or whether it's what a community needs. They can make some adjustments in things like setbacks, parking and what it looks like. They can partially regulate how it treats its tenants. But state and federal governments ultimately decide whether affordable housing gets funded at all and often make ugly bargains over who can live there with the property owners of our market system.

A city or town can't decide which businesses will invest in our neighborhoods and downtowns. They can only decide if some businesses can't are safe and not always that either.

The people who go into political careers are often as naive about their power to govern as those being governed. They promise to do things that prove too difficult to accomplish and then when frustrated, look for solutions like charter change, mistaking a tweaking of the rules for structural change and electoral responsiveness.

We live in a society and in a country that only briefly, like an elusive butterfly, has sought to help its people- the New Deal in the 30s saved many from starvation and hopeless, the War on Poverty and the Great Society in the late 60s lifted some communities out of stagnation and enhanced opportunity for many; and the period in California where higher education was free changed many peoples lives including my own. But behind all these were movements.

The Labor movement which our new wannabe overlords in Empower Report so disparage, gave us the New Deal and the middle class which made the US the envy of all. The Civil Rights movements and btw, there have been generational iterations from the Reconstruction Period to post WWI and the magnificent post WWII Civil Rights movements, which included Asian struggles for full citizenship and waves of immigration from the great lands of the Aztec and Maya, also fought for and gained recognition.

None of the changes in how our governments responded to our needs happened without these movements, particularly those of Black populations throughout the South during which many people died or were imprisoned to get us here.

Now our struggle, from Washington to Silicon Valley to the flatlands of Oakland, is beginning again to build a movement. Will the forces that encourage us to organize for our needs vs the ones who tell us to withdraw because governing is too difficult win? Which one? Sometimes it just feels too hard.

So let's let the techies figure it out for us? They have lots of data proving nothing can be done. And let's give them more of our personal data so they can"keep us safe” or use it however they deem it necessary.

For instance, this tech-backed crowd says that ordinary community members should not be able to join together to oversee whether our highly paid officers are doing their jobs correctly-for instance, that they are not participating in any types of abuses of power that have long plagued our police department. If that is true, should we abolish one of our foundational beliefs in our system of justice-that of our jury system too?

Another example is that our legacy media has been starved. Most newspapers have one reporter where they used to have 3 or 4. One covered city hall, another the school district, another the police department and snother the county, etc. But those aren't covered anymore and if your average citizen doesn't know the mayor can't run the schools or what the DA or county supervisors do, its no surprise. It's not a conspiracy either, it's Wall Street's takeover of the newspaper business. You can't make those big profit margins by employing people. It's difficult to get straight information on who runs what in this confused atmosphere of mixed media.

So you end up believing that “progressives” want to defund the police

*when it's the right wing techbros with their realtor/landlord friends who are lobbying against funding more police. They also want you to believe that

*rank and file workers are a special interest but that big time landlords are not.

My answer is still, if you believe that, I've got a ballroom to sell you or how about a slush fund for cop beaters or a turquoise reflecting pool??

Photo by Alex Brandon via Reuters

Oh the choices are endless. But don't forget that for about $16 a month, you and your neighbors can win a shiny new fire engine with the firefighters to go with it-Vote Yes 4 E

Ryasick: credit Getty Images

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