Oakland will elect a new mayor this year as our current mayor, Jerry Brown, seeks to follow Bill Lockyer into the Attorney General’s office.
Brown gave a fairly boring State of the City speech yesterday which focused mostly on the new development in the city. 
"There has been in the past six years a tremendous business investment in Oakland," Brown told the City Council. "There has been a tremendous vote of private capital in the future of Oakland."
Its true-there has been more business investment in the city while Brown was governor. In the past, Oakland mayors have been more interested in playing politics than growing the city’s economy. But while there has been more construction downtown, the bread-and-butter issues that matter to residents in the neighborhoods seem to have been ignored. Worse, Brown really did nothing to deal with Oakland‘s crime problem.
The year Brown took office, there were 68 homicides. In 2003, the homicide rate spiked to 114, falling to 94 in 2005. Brown may say he reduced crime in the past couple of years, but clearly crime has gotten worse since he has been mayor.
For those of us who don’t live in the "flatlands" as they say here in O-town, you’d hardly know that Oakland has a police department. Sure, when there are 94 homicides to deal with, and lots more shootings, rapes and robberies, I can understand when my stolen purse just doesn’t rate any police attention. But when I tracked down a gas station surveillance camera video that showed the idiots who stole my purse using my credit card, I couldn’t help but to expect a little bit of help from the police department. No, instead, I got an earful of attitude from the police department receptionist. But my little run-in with the police department (and a total lack of interest, sympathy or customer service) is nothing compared to the experience a handful of my neighbors had with the Oakland Police Department.
Last year, my neighborhood had a rash of burglaries that were happening when families were home. The Oakland Police Department couldn’t have been less interested. Those of us who pay the bills for the bloated and failed city government do expect some attention once in awhile, particularly when a burglar is routinely breaking into our houses when our kids are home. But the crimes went unsolved, until the burglar got stupid and ventured through the Caldecott tunnel to the small, quiet town of Orinda. In one afternoon, the Orinda police had the guy in handcuffs and the burglaries stopped. And Oakland highers-up wonder why the taxpayers keep moving "through the tunnel" where the neighborhoods are safe and the public schools actually work. For the complete details on how the Oakland Police Department flubbed this up, read Debra Saunders’ column here.
Some of Jerry Brown’s failure on the crime front can be laid at the feet of the community. Community activists in Oakland want to see crime go down, but fight any policy changes that might actually lower crime (curfews, etc). They want the taxpayers to pony up for midnight basket ball and community policing, but don’t seem to have any interest in holding parents accountable for their criminal kids. But Oakland‘s single biggest problem is crime and Jerry Brown has failed to deal effectively with that problem. Brown really should be running for Secretary of Education–he is far more interested in education issues than crime (the education crowd doesn’t like him because he’s a fan of charter schools.) But he’s not–he’s asking us to elect him as our top cop. Unfortunately, his record on fighting crime in Oakland shows that he definitely is not qualified for the position.
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, January 18th, 2006 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.
