Last month, at a small church in East Oakland, Calif., hundreds of fed-up city residents gathered outside of a community safety meeting held by Mayor Sheng Thao and District Attorney Pamela Price.
The group was as diverse as it was united, and despite the reduction in their quality of life over the past year, there was a palpable energy of hope.
Seneca Scott, a community leader, hosted the get-together under the banner of his Neighbors Together Oakland (NTO) organization.
A one-time Oakland mayoral candidate, Scott formed the group in 2021 as a response to the influx of outside money and special interest groups that have contributed to his city’s decline.
“We’re coming together to hold our leaders accountable,” Scott exclaimed. “We’ve seen crime spiral out of control, and it’s largely because of the detrimental actions of our leaders inside that church. We will no longer let them ignore us.”
Members of the NTO rally greatly outnumbered supporters of Thao and Price, who were largely younger and White — many sporting COVID masks.
The optics perfectly encapsulated Oakland’s current political divide.
One side featured a range of ethnicities and socioeconomic classes, passionately unified in their love for the ailing city they call home.
The other side, small in numbers and masked in anonymity, was reminiscent of the wealthy non-residents and institutions that funded the 2022 campaigns of Oakland’s “pro-crime” politicians.
Ever since they’ve taken power, Oakland has reached a tipping point in both lawlessness and residents’ outrage.
More importantly, the city has become a national symbol of radical reform gone too far, and hopefully, a deterrent for other cities now charting a similar path.
“Soros-funded DA,” a near-redundant phrase in democratic strongholds across the county, rings painfully true in Oakland — a city of 430,000 just across the bay from far better-known San Francisco.
Price’s DA campaign was not only funded by Soros but also saw significant backing from Wayne Jordan and Quinn Delaney — lefty Bay Area real estate moguls who reside in posh Piedmont, far removed from Oakland’s blight.
Thao, a former city council member famous for her staunch “defund the police” rhetoric and voting record, was also backed by the trio — in addition to the city’s powerful labor unions.
In total, Thao raised less than 30% of her campaign funds from actual Oakland residents compared to 55% from her top rival Loren Taylor.
Since then, Thao and Price’s victory — and subsequent governing style — have accelerated the already-rising tide of chaos now plaguing Oakland businesses and residents.
How bad is Oakland’s crime wave?
Despite the narrative by progressive media outlets like NPR that America’s post-pandemic crime surge is largely a myth, the numbers in Oakland clearly demonstrate the opposite – particularly with regard to violent crime.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, homicides have risen 37% in Oakland since 2019, robberies are up 30%, car break-ins have spiked 40%, and vehicle thefts have more than doubled in just the past year.
A 22% rise in homelessness since 2019 and a whopping 2,500% rise in downtown drug overdoses since 2020 have only furthered the mayhem.
There are even pirates in the Bay waters near Oakland.
I reached out to Brandon Harami, head of the “Community Resilience” department at Oakland City Hall and policy director for the city’s hard-hit District 4, about what solutions are currently being proposed to reverse the city’s decline.
He never responded.
So we spoke with an upset resident of the district Harami represents, who gave his name as Garrett Buty.
Buty spoke about the crime spike decimating his once-safe neighborhood.
“In the past year, I’ve had my home burglarized twice . . . I pay $30,000 in property taxes a year, and the police didn’t even come to my house. What am I paying all this money for?”
Buty’s front door was broken down by blunt force entry a few months ago, and his home was ransacked.
The Oakland Police Department, which is highly understaffed amidst a heavy rise in home invasions, released a statement in July suggesting residents take it upon themselves to reinforce their front doors.
In addition to home burglaries, car thefts are skyrocketing.
In fact, Oakland now has the highest rate of car thefts of any city in the nation per capita.
On Sept. 16 alone, 46 cars were stolen within the city limits. Such stats — and stories — are not just placing Oakland under the national magnifying glass, but causing many to question the effectiveness of radical criminal justice reform as a whole.
The blame can’t entirely be placed on politicians like Mayor Thao and DA Price — the COVID pandemic has also had a lingering effect on crime.
But their policies and rhetoric have clearly incentivized brazen criminality as never before.
Amid all of this maelstrom, Oakland doesn’t have a police chief.
That’s right, after winning the election with less than 700 votes over her opponent Loren Taylor, Mayor Thao abruptly fired the African-American police chief, LeRonne Armstrong.
Eight months later, she has yet to appoint a replacement despite the city’s crime spike.
Thao’s inaction has not gone unnoticed: In August, the local chapter of the NAACP released a statement saying Armstrong’s firing was directly responsible for Oakland’s crime surge.
This came after their request last December for a recount of the highly contested mayoral race — which saw some 11,000 votes thrown out due to technicalities, despite Thao edging out Taylor by a mere 680 ballots.
The anti-Thao furor came to a head in September when city leaders missed the deadline to receive public safety funding from the state.
I reached out to Thao for comment on the deadline, but her office failed to account for why they chose to forgo millions of dollars to fight crime while the city continues to fall into disrepair.
Again the NAACP has voiced its concerns, demanding an independent investigation into how this crucial deadline was overlooked.
There seems to be nothing in the way of slowing down Oakland criminals, who have been emboldened by a feckless mayor and understaffed police force hamstrung by an inept civilian commission.
Oh, and let’s not forget about the equally complicit progressive city council and a district attorney who routinely gives sweetheart deals for murder.
As Tuan Ngo, a local public safety activist, puts it, DA Price and Oakland’s “disastrous” City Council are “putting our lives in danger.”
No Price deal has struck a more reprehensible chord than her leniency following the murder of Jasper Wu — a toddler caught in the crosshairs of a drive-by shooting in late 2021.
Two gang members opened fire on Oakland’s 880 freeway, resulting in Wu’s death. Initially, Price, who inherited the case from her predecessor, stated she was reviewing the felony charges against Wu’s assailants and considering “non-carceral forms of accountability.”
This led to an uproar of public rallies demanding stronger prosecution, and eventually gave way to the “Recall Pamela Price” movement.
Since then, Price has committed to charging both men with felony murder — though she will be dropping all sentencing enhancements applied by the former DA. Despite such efforts, the petition for her recall remains underway.
The Wu case inspired Jill Nerone, a 32-year veteran of the Oakland DA’s office, to resign in March of this year. “I no longer feel able to adequately and ethically protect the rights of victims under your administration,” said Nerone in her resignation letter.
Two months later, prosecutor Danielle Hilton also resigned in protest.
A number of other prosecutors have since left for surrounding, more moderate counties.
Meanwhile, more radical prosecutors who worked under San Francisco’s DA Chesa Boudin, who was recalled last year, have transferred to Price’s office.
This exchange of sensible prosecutors for radical ones, along with the mayor’s failure to replace the Police Chief she fired nearly a year ago, is further propelling Oakland toward rock bottom.
Paul Pinney, a former deputy DA with the city of Oakland, places blame for Oakland’s urban ills squarely on its reduced police force.
“Oakland needs to hire a police chief and more police officers – quickly. Police are demoralized and feel they have no backing,” he said.
As for DA Price, Pinney says she “talks tough but needs to start prosecuting gun crime with all the tools at her disposal. Criminals will not modify their behavior,” he added, “if there are minimal consequences for gun use.”
Despite Oakland’s swift and deadly decline, the speed at which the city has fallen may have a silver lining.
The whirlwind of radical leaders pushing adverse public policies has, at the very least, convinced both activists and residents that their city’s experiment in criminal reform isn’t working.
Add in increasing national attention on Oakland’s failures and the city — much like neighboring San Francisco — is emerging as a model of how not to govern in post-Covid, post-BLM, post-”defund-the-police” urban America.
“Criminal justice reform is important. But entirely abandoning criminal justice isn’t reform, and that’s what our officials have done,” says NTO’s Scott. “The safety and quality of life for the majority can’t be sacrificed at the altar of their broken ideology. And come election time, the neighbors of Oakland are going to be heard.”
Jared Klickstein’s writing can be found at jaredklickstein.substack.com. He’s currently working on the memoir “Crooked Smile,” which will be published next year.