If we are going to get any serious community policing and
divert our young offenders into any kind of restorative justice programs, we
need to stop wasting our time with our community-policing-through-regressive-parcel-tax
Measure Y. http://www.measurey.org/
We can also do without Measure B that we had to pass later
to keep from losing the whole thing because the city did not meet the police
staffing levels it promised.
I am sure that some will be happy to hold up a laundry list
of numbers lauding the accomplishments of Measure Y. Unfortunately, Measure Y and the Measure Y
way of doing things do not measure up.
The reason that the Measure Y boosters and folk from “the
inner” circle of influence hold up a laundry list of numbers lauding the
accomplishments under Measure Y is because if you did not hear it from them,
you would never know. This is a crime in
and of itself. Much has been done and
the ground work for many a good effort has been laid. Why then do we always seem to be just at the
beginning of our effort?
Groundwork should have led to some serious building and
results by this time. But there is little
happening at a size that is being felt on the street. Many do not know what Measure Y is, others
have not even heard of it. In the course
of talking to residents and asking for their vote, I have only heard a few
positive reports on Measure Y programs.
Most tell me that they only have a vague idea of what it is about and
have not seen any effects. The rate of
robberies, shootings and truancy bear this out. The numbers of our young people
entering the criminal justice system year after year is hardly changed.
This is after how many years? How can we call it a success?
The measures that matter tell the same old sad story. We still have our revolving door, vicious
circle of mercilessness around the courts, prison and parole system. Measure Y in a year does not help as many
people who fall into this trap in a week.
We still have large numbers of people who will not cooperate with the
police, even in the case of the murder of their own family members. According to Oakland Police Capitan Anthony Toribio in 2010 about half the families of murder victims
would not cooperate with the police investigation.
And this Spring, like all Oakland Springs, fully half of the
youth who should be getting their High School Diploma will not. That is a measure of failure on our part and
a measure of trouble yet to come.
The jobs of working with our neighborhoods and the jobs of
organizing our neighborhoods are always the ones that get the ax first. If there is a budget problem, they cut the
community police officers, if there is a protest against Wall Street, they cut
back on community services, and it seems like some in our police force are
looking for ANY excuse not to do community policing. They seem to find that excuse quickly and our
political leadership seems to get them back on track slowly.
One of the biggest problems with the Measure Y way of doing
things is that we have no stability. We
lost a lot of ground when we cut the police staff, we lost it again at the last
budget, we lost it at Occupy and we continue to see community police officer
assignments and community organizing stop, restart and change personnel every
semester. Every time we start and then
stop and then restart a program, we have to start a lot of the work as if it
were new. That adds up to lost money,
lost trained people and worst of all, lost public willingness to get
involved.
What program can be effective with that kind of instability?
We spend more time and attention managing Measure Y than we
spend on organizing community policing.
We have nobody assigned to implementing restorative justice. What we do have is a great big pool of money
and some requests for proposals that brings the unwanted attention of
opportunists and instant self-appointed experts with homemade programs. Some are good, some are amateurish. We need to address root causes of our social
problems that cause high crime, not hold procurement fairs for a bunch of small
outside projects that do not give us the numbers and quality we need.
I also want Measure Y to go because so much of it is not
about Community Policing.
It is about the Fire Department, it is about school
discipline, it is about police staffing levels (thus Measure B) and it is all
about all the little political deals that made the “successful politics” needed
to get it passed. This house of cards is
unstable and it has fallen more than it has done good work. People voted for a lot that had nothing to do
with community policing when then voted for Measure Y.
The “smart politics” keeps us from having a smart policy on
crime and a smart policy on budgeting.
Community policing and restorative justice is our city
policy; we need to enforce it in management.
The job of community organizing should be part of how we do
business in our city. It should be led
by civilians and it needs to be intentionally reaching out to whole
neighborhoods across race and income differences. We should really be thinking of how to get
our grass roots neighborhoods empowered.
They need to have resources to distribute. We need to engage the
difficult social changes we will need to stop the cycle of chronic crime. If we are going to organize the neighborhoods
better than the current (unelected) Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council model
then we need to stop telling neighborhoods what to do and let our communities
act on their/our own telling us what they need.
Otherwise we will only continue to have token grass roots democracy
without many backers or any effective power.
The job of restorative justice needs to be a real job. To start with we should review every case
BEFORE we hand it to the DA’s office for prosecution. We have the power, through our police
enforcement, not to press charges
and we should use it. EVERY time we
arrest someone in Oakland we should review the situation and see if we can deal
with them locally.
Restorative justice is about a lot of things, but first and
foremost it is about restoring the damage done.
SUCCESS= A local
offender on a path to reform and making amends to their victims staying in the
community and in school.
FAILURE= Every young person we needlessly send to jail where
they get no rehabilitation services and only learn to become more criminal than
before and to then be released to a parole system that offers them nothing and cannot
keep track of them.
That FAILURE is the system we have now. Measure Y notwithstanding.
There is no shortcut to common sense and a common cause on
crime. Measure Y is a gimmick and it has
failed because it is a gimmick. There
seems to be quite a bit of consensus about changing how we fight crime and the
causes of crime and how we deal with a person caught up in crime. Otherwise we would not have voted for Measure
Y. Most of us want what Measure Y was
SUPPOSED to do.
We need to make community policing, restorative justice and
community organizing part of how we do business as a whole. Any real improvement will be a difficult
process of social change. We have
started this process and made a lot of progress. We now need to make that progress in the
quantity and quality needed to reach the whole of our community.
