OAKLAND — Oakland Mayor Libby Schaff presented a plan Friday that could ultimately unleash 76 additional police officers to fight a deadly surge of gun violence that has wracked the city and contributed to a homicide count of 129 this year as of Friday afternoon.
“Our staffing levels are at a crisis point right now,” Schaaf said during a press conference.
Her administration’s plan would increase the number of officers from the current 676 to a total of 752 by filling 60 vacant positions and unfreezing 20 other positions.
Two police academies would be added to the five already budgeted through the summer of 2023 under the proposal.
The City Council on Tuesday will consider Schaaf’s proposal as well as one unveiled by Councilmember Sheng Thao on Thursday. Thao’s plan aims to fill the vacant positions in part by offering officers from other departments $50,000 signing bonuses to come to Oakland and by providing $20,000 bonuses to city residents who enter and graduate from police academies that train them to become cops.
Schaaf estimated the academies will run about $5.8 million but said that will be covered through cost savings and not at the expense of city services.
Schaaf said her administration’s plan should complement Thao’s proposal, which also entails adding a couple of police academies — one for new recruits and a shorter one for officers who join Oakland’s police force from other departments.
She cautioned, however, that the police department has not had much success attracting officers willing to make lateral moves, although the signing bonuses could change that.
The police department has struggled to fill its academies, which have seen only about 40% of recruits graduate in recent years, or about two dozen new officers at a time, according to city records.
Schaaf’s plan assumes the police department will get about 30 new officers from each academy. After accounting for attrition, the number of sworn officers on the force could range from 695 beginning this month to roughly 734 by the summer of 2023 — or 18 short of the authorized 752 positions.
Although the council convened a task force in 2020 to “reimagine public safety” by exploring whether non-police responses to mental health crises calls, traffic infractions and other dicey situations might be more effective in reducing crime, it ended up increasing the police budget by $38 million in June.
Still, some council members are wary about spending more money on the police department without further examining how it deploys resources in light of exceeding its budgeted allotment by millions of dollars in recent years.
The current budget also allocated almost $18 million to establish a Department of Violence Prevention that sends “violence interrupters” to neighborhoods hard hit by crime. Their mission is to help connect families and individuals with services to stabilize their lives and prevent future shootings and homicides.
Other initiatives, like a new non-police crisis response team that will be run by the fire department, have yet to be up and running.
Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas said the city’s public safety strategy needs to be comprehensive and include “effective and accountable” policing as well as crime prevention strategies.
Fortunato Bas said she’ll be paying close attention to how the police department allocates resources. “How the chief assigns police officers is effective in solving crimes, and that is a huge area that has not been getting enough attention.”
Much is at stake, she added.
“I think what we are experiencing now with the violence, it’s very serious and it’s very traumatic,” she said. “We need to urgently make sure people feel safe. These are really unprecedented times.”
Source: www.mercurynews.com