Letters to the Editor

David Stein and Leona Quarry
Crime is Not Just a Police Problem
A Neighborhood Organizerís Perspective on Crime in Oakland

Dear District Four Voter,
It has come to our attention that the council race in District 4 has
raised the issue of the Leona Quarry development project, how the
candidacy of David Stein is questionable regarding development in the
City of Oakland, and how his seating as District 4 councilmember would
impact the quality of life for District 4 residents.

As the major organizers of the residentsí response to both the ìBig Boxî
quarry proposal of a few years ago and to the present high density
housing proposal, we categorically support David Stein as a
councilmember for the City of Oakland. Despite his inability to vote on
the current proposal regarding the Leona Quarry land use because a
former member of his law firm was previously employed by the quarry
owners, we believe that David Stein would carefully and intelligently
evaluate any development proposal brought forward to the City Council.
We consider Mr. Stein to possess the integrity and concern that we would
want a councilmember to have for any development issue in the City.

We truly believe that David Steinís decisions will be independent of any
outside political influence that may come from State Senator Perata or
Councilmember De La Fuente. His track record as a community voice
regarding the Raiderís ìdealî proved to us that he would assess each
issue with fiscal responsibility and sound judgment that will benefit
the average Oakland resident, rather than those with heavy monetary
influence.

Those of us engaged in the tremendous effort to get the City to ìdo the
right thingî with regards to the reclamation of the Leona Quarry gravel
mine urge our neighbors in District 4 to vote for David Stein.

Sincerely,

Dr. Maureen Dorsey
Dr. Barbara Sutherland
Sparky Carranza

Crime Is Not Just a Police Problem
By Ann Nomura October, 2002

Mayor Jerry Brown and City Manager Robert Bobb are hopelessly out of touch with Oaklandís crime problem. Every time someone says crime, they say police. Yet when one asks the police why we have so much crime they say, the economy, the job market and any number of other factors.

Crime does not just affect police and criminals in Oakland; it affects children, teachers, nurses, doctors, and merchants. Crime affects all of us. Parents fear sending children to school. A merchant watched a shoplifter whoíd assaulted her walk freely around her neighborhood for months. Shooting victims refuse to testify, because they fear for their safety if they do. Hospital workers watch the endless parade of wounded.

Crime in Oakland affects us all and we all need to be a part of the solution. Unfortunately, our leaders have decided that crime is a police problem.

So, when neighbors call for vigorous enforcement of Oaklandís City ordinances to prevent crime, city officials refer them to the police. When neighbors complain about intolerable noise pollution caused by a stereo store next door to a home, the city refers them to the police. When a neighbor calls the County of Alameda Child Protective Services about at risk youth, in section eight housing, they get referred to the police, because crime is a police problem.

I work for the County Hospital. City employees and county employees, all work on the front lines. Most of us want to be a part of the solution but we canít because crime is a police problem. Jerry Brown and Robert Bobb have to involve all public employees and the community in solving this problem.

Vigorous enforcement of existing City ordinances could reduce crime. We have a Motel/Hotel Deemed Approved Ordinance aimed at reducing crime in these businesses. Perhaps since a police officer was shot recently in front of a motel, the City of Oakland code inspectors could focus on these establishments.

Oakland has decided to fight sideshows with more enforcement, more laws, and more police; maybe the City of Oakland could take a multidisciplinary approach to stopping sideshows. The neighbors, the merchants, CEDA (Community Economic Development Agency) and the Metropolitan Transportation Agency could look at traffic calming measures in areas where sideshows create a threat to residentís safety. We could turn this into and opportunity for neighbors instead of a military maneuver. The City Manager could develop a traffic-calming plan, with street redesign, landscaping and maybe a few trees. We could invest in our community, instead of in crime. No, I guess not because
crime in Oakland is a police problem.

In my neighborhood children in poorly managed publicly subsidized housing have created ongoing problems and concerns. Unsupervised youth from these apartments have been involved in vandalism, theft and possibly assault. In trying to solve these problems neighbors were told crime is police problem. Clearly most of the children in public housing donít commit crimes, and many are victims of crime. What if Child Protective Services, Oakland Public Schools, Oakland Parks and Recreation, the Oakland Housing Authority, the neighbors, and the property owners all coordinated their efforts. Maybe we could make these apartments safe for the children who live there. Perhaps we could get
some at risk children into programs. It seems a couple of after school programs for these kids would be less expensive than building a new juvenile hall.

Crime in Oakland affects us all and we all need to be a part of the solution. Police alone cannot solve all our problems: high crime motels and hotels, sideshows and poorly managed low-income housing are only a few examples.

As long as City employees refer all complaints to the Police Department, the police will remain overwhelmed. City Manager Robert Bobb and Mayor Jerry Brown must take some responsibility for Oaklandís out-of-control crime. All City agencies and employees should cooperate and coordinate to try to prevent crime, instead of telling neighbors to watch, wait and call the police. Crime is not just a police problem.

MAYOR'S POLICIES CREATE CRISIS IN OPD
By Dan Siegel, June 9, 2002

The Oakland Police Department is in crisis. The lawless and brutal behavior of some of its officers - most notably the so-called Riders ñ will cause the City to suffer its worst financial beating since the Raiders deal. At the same time Oakland's murder rate is skyrocketing, with 50 percent more killings than we had at this time last year. Although it is over simplistic to claim a single cause for changes in the crime rate, there is a clear link between the rise in both police abuse and violent crime in Oakland - City policies that have downgraded community policing in favor of the overly aggressive policing strategies favored by former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

Attorneys for the Riders (Oakland police officers facing criminal charges for brutalizing and robbing West Oakland residents) want Mayor Jerry Brown and City Manager Robert Bobb to testify about the changes in police strategy that they claim encourage officers to mistreat the public. They may have a point. In June 1996, the City Council adopted one of the most comprehensive community policing policies in the United States. The idea was to make our community safer by creating partnerships between the police and the public to identify and prioritize public safety concerns and to develop comprehensive approaches to address them. Rather than relying on overstressed and anonymous officers racing around to answer 911 calls, community policing utilizes a multi-pronged strategy to address and remedy the underlying conditions that foster crime, such a closing crack houses and creating recreational opportunities for young people.

Under Oakland's policy, each of the City's 57 neighborhood-aligned police precincts should have a Crime Prevention Council that broadly represents the residents in the precinct, a Neighborhood Services Coordinator to assist the Council and act as a community organizer, and a stable contingent of police officers. However, in 1999 our newly-elected strong mayor began to implement a policing strategy based on New York City's COMSTAT model, which utilizes a computer analysis of street crime to assign squads of officers to aggressively patrol neighborhoods where offenses such as prostitution or street corner drug dealing are on the rise. In this context "aggressive patrol" often means accosting, searching, and bullying people in the chosen neighborhoods without regard to their actual involvement in criminal activity. The abuses of Mayor Giuliani's approach are well known, including the jailhouse torture of Abner Louima and the 41-shot police killing of Amador Diallo in the entryway of his Bronx home.

But the problems created by the COMSTAT approach reach far beyond police abuse and the looming record City payout. The routine mistreatment of African American and Latino residents, especially young people, is creating a sense of alienation and hostility between the police and the community that is worse than at any time before the Black Panther Party was created to fight similar abuses. In this environment people are less likely to cooperate with the police and some use their hostility towards law enforcement to justify criminal conduct. In this mindset, if the police are the bad guys, then maybe
the criminals are the good guys.

In August 1998 several people from Oakland attended a community policing conference hosted by the Chicago Police Department, which has transformed itself with a comprehensive community policing strategy. One of the most interesting sessions featured a debate between high-ranking police officials from Chicago and New York City. The Chicago officials criticized their New York brothers for an approach that victimizes the community and alienates police from the people they are supposed to serve. Oakland now deserves similar criticism.

The Oakland Police Department must change course. Community policing remains Oakland's official policy. This is an opportunity for the City Council to step up and demand that the community policing law it passed be fully implemented.

Dan Siegel, a member of the Oakland school board, was one of the authors of
Oakland's community policing ordinance.

Reply from Don Link
Dear Dan,
Thanks for sending me your op/ed piece. It is cogent, well-written, but perhaps not correct in light of some of the changes of the reorganization of OPD. In those places where the patrol officers are beginning to engage themselves in the NCPC and get-to-know-the citizens process, citizens report a welcome change of more police presence and police willingness to stop and connect with citizens on the beat. We have heard quite a number of favorable accounts at the CPAB, surprisingly some of them coming from tough areas where all we received prior were complaints (Golden Gate/San Pablo in North Oakland, Skyline High School Area).

Also, at our Leadership Summit for NCPC and Home Alert Leaders at Oakland HS on May 18, there was some interesting feedback from Police Academy Police Officer Trainees who enthusiastically stated that getting to know the citizens in the beat was one of the more important duties that they had been taught. They attended the Summit, stayed all day, and actually participated in the PSA breakout sessions. The several that I talked to seemed genuinely convinced of the need to connect with the citizens they served. It looks like the training we advocated has actually been implemented.

Anecdotes: in my own beat, we discovered that our call-in Hotline report was not reaching our patrol officers. When I questioned one of the senior officers on the beat about this, he mentioned that OPD had no mailboxes for the officers--all communications to them, mail, reports, everything was delivered into their hands by their Watch Sgts. He also said that a lot of the mail and other things never got to them because of this system. We strategized and he came up with the high tech idea of a filing cabinet with folders for each beat located in the line-up room where all patrol officers in the city reported for line-up. The Lt. suggested a folder for each officer and Sgt. Pete Dunbar thought it was a great idea and 10 days later the filing cabinet was in place with the folders in it. Two others followed for the other 2 Areas. Patrol officers liked it, but the Sgts liked it even more because it meant that they would not have to carry around their tremendous bundle of papers, mail, etc to deliver to their patrol officers when they ran into them face to face! I characterized this innovation as a gigantic leap into the 19th century.

Joking aside, this was simply an example of an old practice issuing from the chain of command model persisting unnoticed until someone pointed out how absurd and inefficient the practice was. (The same innovative patrol officer has gone on to create beat binders with information about projects, players (with photos), problem situations etc., being passed from shift to shift along with the cell phone. The various shifts of patrol on the beat are being encouraged to update the individual pages as new things arise so that the different shifts on the beat are communicating with one another about beat matters in a formal way. I have suggested that if the MOU with the union allows it, patrol officers on a beat should be judged as a unit in their formal evaluations based on the health of the beat. This would encourage further teamwork and prod the beat team to do some attitude adjustment with the dead wood on the beat team.

It's still a work in progress, but there are signs of progress and hope that the changes will provide the desired results. In my beat, I have never known who more than one of the patrol officers was (and that because of a neighborhood incident) and never seen them attempt to involve themselves in the NCPC activities until now. The weakness of the system is the lack of tactical officers to deal with street level drugs and other quality of life issues. An individual patrol officer cannot charge into a situation with six dealers alone. Right now, there are not enough bodies in OPD to man the airport, the schools, the beats, and the tactical squads.

OPD's statistical system is called ARCO Stat (Area Command Statistics) and has the Captain in charge and PSA Lts. on the spot for statistics and trends in their areas of responsibility. If they are not responding to disturbing trends (e.g. increased burglaries, robberies, etc.), they are asked what they are doing to respond to the crimes at a public meeting with their peers and commanders. OPD doesn't have the manpower to send special squads into the problem areas; it must respond using its wits and the forces already deployed.

Regarding the killings in East and West Oakland, I feel that it is unlikely that Oakland will ever be able to prevent them unless the community is willing to get involved in the process. The level of distrust of OPD has not abated very much and there is active fear of retaliation in addition. Our hope may be in the new officers going on duty and the new emphasis on patrol doing community policing. In time, with officers committed to working with citizens and for them, we may see a change in attitude on the part of the public, and the vital public pressure that stops the senseless killing over trivial matters. Along with public pressure, jobs, rehabilitation, training, education, the whole nine yards needed to address the deficiencies these people are struggling with.

In the meantime, I think that there is no question that Chief Word stands for and enforces honest, professional, courteous policing. His hammer-like response to the Riders is evidence of that along with every other public and private utterance on the issue. There is no doubt in my mind that he has no patience or tolerance for Riders-like policing in Oakland. Like you, I feel that it is unfortunate that we had to be tarred with the Riders incident, and worse that it will cost the city so much in lawsuit losses and prosecutions overturned. The Riders will also cost OPOA a bundle in legal costs, perhaps focusing their attention more closely on advocating closer attention to OPD's Manual or Rules for their membership. They are always quick to defend their members; this incident may encourage them to look at preventive measures to avoid costly situations of this sort in the future.

Don Link