by Randy Shaw on December 4, 2023 (BeyondChron.org)
Mayor Sheng Thao, DA Pamela Price, A’s fans push for sale
A Great City in Crisis
Let’s not beat around the bush: 2023 has been a nightmare for Oakland, California. Public safety concerns are off the chart. Car and restaurant break-ins are routine. Babies have been shot while being driven down freeways. Residents are being assaulted in neighborhoods previously thought safe.
Oakland journalist Leighton Woodhouse refers to the situation as the Terrordome. How did the city get to this point? Can positive changes come in 2024?
Here’s our analysis.
The Most Publicized Causes
DA Pamela Price
Social media has already delivered its verdict on Oakland’s crime and violence surge in 2023: new District Attorney Pamela Price and new Mayor Sheng Thao.
Price ran against a longtime Deputy DA with strong endorsements. Given that Price was a civil rights attorney who had never prosecuted a criminal case, I assumed she would lose. But voters treated this like a campaign for city council, not District Attorney. Price’s progressive political views were popular in Alameda County and that’s how she won.
Signs that Price was the wrong person for the job soon became clear. She now faces a recall election that she likely will lose. Price didn’t help her cause last week when she banned the stellar news site The Berkeley Scanner (@BerkeleyScanner) from a public meeting. Bay Area media groups rushed to the Scanner’s defense, soon forcing Price to relent. But it was a bad look from a “progressive” politician.
The election will most likely occur in late April. If the recall succeeds the Alameda County Board of Supervisors would appoint a replacement DA until voters select a permanent one in the November 2024 election.
How much does the DA matter? San Francisco’s terrific DA Brooke Jenkins can’t stop car break ins, drug dealing, and retail thefts on her own. But what Jenkins has done is huge. She has restored public confidence that the District Attorney is doing everything possible to hold wrongdoers accountable.
Price sees perpetrators of crimes as victims of historical racism. Brooke Jenkins offered a deeper analysis. In her inauguration speech she said, “reform does not just mean doing away with laws or even their consequences. Reform is not lowering or eliminating expectations for those who come from underserved communities or disadvantaged backgrounds. To do so, would perpetuate the very same oppressive outcomes that people purport to want to prevent. If I expect you to be a criminal, and consistently convey that expectation, there is a higher chance a person will become such. We must not reduce Black and Brown communities, and other communities of color, to these stereotypes.”
Oakland needs a DA like Brooke Jenkins.
Mayor Sheng Thao
Mayor Thao took office with the strongest progressive City Council in Oakland history. Unlike with Price, voters had no reason to suspect Mayor Thao would not be strong on crime. But in only her second month in office she fired her popular police chief, LeRonne Armstrong. Armstrong was that rare Oakland chief to have both the support of the city’s Black community and rank and file officers.
Armstrong was fired for reasons that made no sense at the time. A former federal judge issued a fifty page ruling in September exonerating him from wrongdoing.
The Oakland Police Commission opposed the firing. After the judge’s ruling the “Oakland Police Commission issued a statement saying the report recommended that Oakland reverse Armstrong’s dismissal and remove it from his personnel record due to ‘problematic’ and ‘unreliable’ analysis.
Oakland still lacks a permanent chief despite the ongoing crime wave. Many other city departments also lack permanent leaders.
That failure falls on Mayor Thao. Her first year has shown she lacks the management and political skills to improve public safety. She has not convinced the public that she understands how to solve the crisis.
Loss of the A’s
Adding to Oakland’s troubles in 2023 was Major League Baseball allowing the A’s to move to Las Vegas. Oakland did everything it could to keep the A’s. Fans even mobilized a huge visible campaign to force John Fisher— the worst owner in pro sports—to sell the team. A’s fans knew that had Joe Lacob been able to purchase the A’s as he desired there would be a shiny new stadium in Oakland and the A’s would resume appearing in World Series.
If any Oakland official can be blamed for not building a stadium it’s Jerry Brown. But that was long ago. And Brown seems to escape blame Brown for anything that happened while he was mayor.
MLB’s unanimous approval of the move to Las Vegas reflects the right-wing politics of many owners and their discomfort with Oakland’s racial diversity. Oakland remains a major league city, a term that should never be defined by the hosting of professional sports teams.
The Housing Market
In Generation Priced Out I assessed Oakland’s strategy for using new housing to promote equity. The city was starting a building boom that changed the look of downtown and nearby areas. Thousands of units were planned for West Oakland, billed as only a short BART ride for San Francisco office workers.
But the work at home phenomenon killed these plans for West Oakland. Local developers feel it could be five years before lending on new housing in Oakland resumes. This would cause housing costs to sharply rise, worsening the city’s affordability. Let’s hope the new state laws encouraging new housing gets Oakland lenders to change course.
Hopes for 2024?
Mayor Thao must hire a police chief with broad community support. The smart move would be to reinstate Armstrong. But that has yet to happen which indicates the mayor is looking elsewhere.
Pamela Price’s recall campaign will itself raise hopes for positive change. The campaign to replace her will have a very different feel from that in which she was elected.
Oaklanders really love their city. It’s sad to see confidence in the city’s future replaced with feelings of resignation. A change in criminal justice leadership via a new police chief and DA will help Oakland overcome its problems and move forward in 2024.
Randy Shaw
Randy Shaw is the Editor of Beyond Chron and the Director of San Francisco’s Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which publishes Beyond Chron. Shaw’s latest book is Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America. He is the author of four prior books on activism, including The Activist’s Handbook: Winning Social Change in the 21st Century, and Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century. He is also the author of The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco
