Oakland is struggling to contain its crime wave, in part because of chronic understaffing of the police department, according to a former police chief.
The city has been plagued by crime since time immemorial, but since the pandemic, reports have risen sharply and are still falling.
Some of the incidents included a mass shooting during a Juneteenth celebration and an elderly Asian woman who was robbed just outside her nursing home.
“Oakland has never been like this. You used to be able to say something to some of these kids,” local pastor Raymond Lankford said last year.
“Our women are being shot in their homes… If our homes are not safe, where else is safe?”
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Violent crime is down from last year’s peak, but property crimes such as burglaries and car thefts remain stubbornly high and brazen.
Dozens of thieves have looted a gas station after driving their cars through the glass doors. ATMs are also regularly ripped out of walls and stolen.
A survey by the Koreatown Northgate Community Benefit District found that 94 percent of businesses had been robbed and 92 percent did not even report it.
This, according to some prominent Oakland residents, is the central problem: The police can’t keep up, and both victims and criminals know it.
After the massive looting of the gas station, in which $22,000 worth of goods was stolen, it took nine hours for police to arrive on the scene.
A February report from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice found that only 1.5 percent of serious crimes were solved, including just 6.5 percent of violent crimes.
While the rest of California is spending record amounts on law enforcement and sending more suspected criminals to prison than ever before.
A huge crowd robs an Oakland gas station after a car crashes into the glass to break in
In contrast, Oakland’s budget provides for only 678 officers, including those who are disabled, the bare minimum required by law.
This is only two-thirds of the national average of 2.4 officers per 1,000 residents. Furthermore, in a city of 435,000 residents, there are only 35 officers on patrol at any one time.
Emergency response times are the lowest in California, again due to staff shortages, which means victims don’t bother calling emergency services at all.
The police even struggle with staff shortages in the registration department, outdated software and a reporting management system that hasn’t been updated since 2006, leading to woefully inaccurate crime statistics.
Former Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong, who was fired last year by Mayor Sheng Thao, blamed City Hall for the problem, saying it was deliberately siphoning off police funding.
Thao imposed a freeze on police hiring last year, despite the fact that there were and remain shortages. Critics like Armstrong allege that the council is deliberately shrinking the role of police without enough replacements.
“There’s a sense of lawlessness. A sense of, we can do whatever we want, there’s really no consequences – almost like a video game,” he said The free press.
“Our leaders are deaf to the tone.”
Armstrong claimed the problem was so obvious that lawbreakers were coming to the city for “crime tourism.”
Armstrong told me that Oakland’s free trade zone is now attracting criminals from out of town because they know they can get away with it, the newspaper reported.
Tim Gardner of the Oakland Report had a similar view: “You have a police force that is incapable and a criminal group that is smart enough to recognize that, test it, and realize they can do anything they want.
“It’s 100 percent self-inflicted.”