Oakland police Chief LeRonne Armstrong announced a sweeping reorganization that will move dozens of additional officers to East Oakland in a bid to cut down on persistently rising crime rates in the area.
Calling it a necessary step to stem a wave of violence, Armstrong said he plans to deploy 48 officers to work in East Oakland by creating a sixth patrol district there. The move marks the largest such change in patrol assignments in nearly a decade — a response, Armstrong said, to the dire need to try something new in the face of worsening violence.
“This is significant, because it means the department has recognized the impact of the calls for service, the emergency calls, that are coming in from our East Oakland residents, and the need for more presence in our community,” Armstrong said at a press conference Monday. The change, he said, will take effect Jan. 22.
The move means less flexibility in responding to crime hot spots but more dedicated staffing in East Oakland, where crime — particularly homicides and other gun-related crime — has vastly outpaced all other areas of the city this year.
Under the plan, the boundaries of police districts three, four and five will be changed to incorporate a new district in the most eastern part of the city.
Armstrong specifically highlighted districts four and five, which currently run east of Fruitvale Avenue, 35th Avenue and Redwood Road. Oakland police investigated 76 homicides this year in those two districts through Dec. 12, compared to 53 across the rest of the city. As of December 20, OPD was investigating 133 homicides that took place in 2021, the highest number recorded in the city since 2006.
Nearly 55% of assaults involving firearms this year have also taken place in those districts, as have about 70% of cases involving negligent discharge of a firearm, and just over half of the city’s aggravated assaults not involving a firearm. District three also has seen spikes in violent crime, with the city’s highest number of robberies and carjackings.
Armstrong said the plan — which involves boosting the department’s patrol division from about 240 to 296 officers — does not rely on any new hires. Rather, he said so-called “tac teams,” which are used to supplement officers in high-crime areas and respond to outbreaks of violence across the city, will be disbanded and their officers distributed to patrol divisions.
Armstrong said the move was meant to provide “a more stable deployment,” given that about three out of every five calls to police come from East Oakland — a “huge” disparity that helped drive the staffing change. The department has so far resorted to paying overtime to staff patrol shifts there, Armstrong said. With the changes, he added, the average number of police beats per district will drop to five from six or seven.
“Those officers will be there full time, around the clock, 24-hours a day,” Armstrong said. “We’ve been supplementing current patrols with overtime. This will fill that gap, making it less of a responsibility on our officers to fill into overtime shifts.”
Two City Council members for East Oakland praised the plan as a necessary step to combat violence in their districts and said they would be watching response times to gauge how well the new strategy is working.
“This is something that I’ve been calling for — the reallocation of resources in a structural way,” said City Council member Loren Taylor, who is running for mayor to replace Libby Schaaf in 2022.
Taylor dismissed concerns about sacrificing flexibility across the department for more dedicated patrols in his council district.
“They always have the flexibility of redeploying folks,” Taylor said. What the change does, he said, is create “more of a stable structure to support East Oakland.”
Councilwoman Treva Reid, who represents Council District 7 in deep East Oakland, said the changes were overdue.
“We have been waiting for more resources to be allocated into East Oakland,” Reid said. “There are many here in this community who are traumatized and re-traumatized” by the violence.
Source: www.mercurynews.com