OAKLAND — The City Council on Tuesday approved a plan to host two additional police academy classes next year and use a recruiting agency in an effort to add dozens of police officers to its force as it tries to combat a deadly surge of gun violence that has contributed to a homicide count of 129 people this year.
The plan adds two additional academy classes to supplement the five currently authorized by the City Council for the current two-year budget cycle, bringing the total number of academies over two fiscal years and projected to add about 60 officers to the current sworn staff of 676.
“Today’s action will allow us to carry out a holistic vision of public safety to address the tragic surge in crime and violence in our city by increasing Oakland’s police force by 60 more officers,” said Mayor Libby Schaaf, whose administration proposed the hiring plan forward Tuesday, in a written statement after the vote.
The council postponed another plan put forth by Councilmember Sheng Thao, which aims to fill the vacant police officers 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.
The details of that proposal will be discussed at a Dec. 21 council meeting, the council decided. In the meantime, the city administration will start to explore using the outside recruiting agency to recruit experienced officers to the force, which Thao also proposed.
“Waiting until 2023 for new recruits to finish training will not fill the vacancies we have now,” Thao said in a statement after the vote.
But the idea of hiring “laterally” from other police departments was a contentious one among the council, who did not vote unanimously on the hiring plan. District 3 Councilmember Carroll Fife abstained. And District 5 Councilmember Noel Gallo voted against the plan, saying that past attempts to hire experienced officers have put the city “in trouble” and stuck them with officers who had problematic records.
Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong also noted the past problems with hiring laterally, but he said that training a group of experienced officers for Oakland would be faster than training new recruits, meaning that officers could hit the streets sooner — about 15 weeks after the start of the academy training — than waiting for new recruit academies that typically take about 26 weeks.
Thao added that by using a hiring agency and creating a diverse panel of people to interview lateral officers, the city can better screen officers who have poor records and focus on hiring officers from the LGBTQ community, people of color and women.
Currently, the city is budgeted to have 737 officers but with officers resigning or retiring at a faster clip than expected, the department has struggled to fill positions and is down to 676 sworn officers.
A current police academy is slated to graduate about 26 officers before the end of the year, but after that, it will be months before the future academy classes send new officers out onto the streets.
Dozens of Oakland residents or other members of the public called into the meeting Tuesday to weigh in on what has been a heated debate in the city about how to increase public safety and whether to increase or decrease police staff and resources.
Many residents and activists have questioned whether the problem is truly a lack of police staff or a failure to allocate resources properly to focus on violent crime.
“For decades in Oakland we’ve over-invested in policing and the number of homicides and robberies this year are clear proof that this approach to public safety simply does not work,” Cat Brooks, Executive Director of the Justice Teams Network and a co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project, said last week after Schaaf unveiled the police hiring proposal.
But others have called for more police to stem the violence in a year that has seen the highest number of homicides in almost a decade.
While the City Council met Tuesday morning, the leaders of five Oakland-area chambers of commerce held a press conference decrying the increase of violence, and calling for increased police staffing to address the problem.
“We feel that no one is safe, and no place is safe,” said Carl Chan, president of the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce. “Anyone can become a victim of crime, and that is not acceptable.”
Research is mixed on whether boosting police numbers reduces crime or how that strategy compares with violence-prevention measures.
Thao has also pointed to the requirements of the Measure Z parcel tax that voters approved in 2014 to pay for police and violence-prevention programs that provides that the city must staff at least 678 officers. If the number falls below that, the city cannot collect the tax, although there is a grace period to allow it to take steps to hire more officers and the council can legislate for an exemption.
“While I believe that the solution to violent crime is deeper investments in our communities and in non-police interrupters, we must have adequate staffing in our police department to ensure we can remain Measure Z compliant and increase our abysmal clearance rate,” Thao said.
The city administration estimates the two academies will graduate 30 officers each, although even reaching that number of recruits has been a struggle in the past. The police department’s leaders have said they’re working to reach more people in their recruiting efforts by beefing up their outreach to local colleges, among other things.
Combined with an estimated monthly attrition of about eight officers per month leaving, the city administration figures that there will be about 734 sworn officers by the end of the two year budget cycle in summer 2023.
The total cost for the academies and hiring efforts over the two-year budget cycle is estimated to be about $11 million, city memos state. According city administrator Ed Reiskin, the city will get those funds from savings within the police department from past academy classes being smaller than planned, as well as salary savings from positions across the city not being filled as quickly as expected. It will also use a fund balance in the city’s equipment fund to pay for things like vehicles that are budgeted in the general fund, freeing up general funds to go toward the police hiring.
At the Dec. 21 council meeting, the City Council will consider additional recommendations from Councilmember Loren Taylor, including a recommendation to prioritize hiring for investigations officers, as well as increase non-sworn positions on that team to assist with solving violent crimes. He is also calling for beefing up the staffing for Ceasefire, a program that involves a partnership between the police department and community leaders to intervene in situations where gun violence may escalate.
And Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas called for the city administrator to report to the council in January about the progress on certain policy directives passed earlier this year by the City Council, including conducting an analysis on the police department’s calls to service and an independent audit of the police department, both of which would help inform how the department uses its resources.
Staff writer Jakob Rodgers contributed reporting.
Source: www.mercurynews.com