Super-Agency Partnership Strategy?
[September 15, 2008]

            I would like to acknowledge Don Link for helping me to appreciate a broader view of the Public Safety District strategy I last criticized.  I jumped on the report as significantly lacking a foundation by excluding a re-directed OPD from any definitive role in the proposed network for a grander plan to address Oakland's crime problems.  Don said he was impressed with Arnold Perkins' intentions, and since I never met the man it is my fault for failing to obtain better clarification.

            I read the "plan" at face value and bristled at its apparent confidence and dependence on Chief Tucker's return to the 1911 Three-Precinct system.  It seemed not to make sense to design a grand scheme around a shattered OPD foundation.  Appreciating Don's counsel, we would do well to overhaul OPD into a force that can propel public safety into a broader resonance that has a chance of offering sustained peace in Oakland.

            I am a firm believer in networking all available efforts into an effective holistic organism for public safety.  But, as we've witnessed with the scattered and unassimilated NCPC's and the utter wasting of Measure Y, and the pouring of vast overtime and outside agency resources onto the unquenched fire, there need to be two important things to occur...  (1)  The OPD must be properly functioning, with a high degree of motivation and efficiency.  OPD is the essential core ingredient to any public safety enterprise benefitting Oakland.  Its current dysfunction must not be stipulated.  The OPD personnel and the citizenry need to establish confidence in the effort and the results.  (2)  There needs to be clearly someone in charge; someone who is knowledgeable from the ground up... the ground being Oakland.... and someone who has intimacy with OPD, the caretaker of public safety. 

            It simply will do no good to grasp at more dots if the ones currently in view are not being connected.

            I was pleased to hear Don say he was impressed with Arnold Perkins and his ideas.  That helps me in my assumptions.  As for whether it is the cart or the horse that is dragging the process, in my mind the configuration should be clear.  There must be a driver in charge, in that a leaderless team never finishes the race.  All the best efforts, designs, and plans tend to wander without such a leader.  If it is a County-wide effort, then OPD should jump aboard since we have 60% of the population and most of the crime, and the County (likely the Sheriff) should take the overall network (partnerships) reins.  If the general effort is geared to help Oakland climb out of its malaise, then either Oakland's Public Safety Director or the Chief of Police should be the precipitant to effect a super-agency partnership solution.  Actually, the most critical partnership could/should be a strong and effective OPD Chief of Police in complete and qualified charge of OPD to address continuing crime issues in the neighborhoods, and a knowledgeable Public Safety Director to expand the resources and compound the expertise to address Oakland's criminality in the broader contexts.  With a weak and ineffective Police Chief, as many inside and outside the OPD believe we have today, no Public Safety Director would have a chance at implementing a broader application of efforts. 

            In any event, Oakland is generally perceived as having little take-charge qualified leadership, and thus there is a wet blanket and shivering lack of confidence over our City.  Such a condition will not foster even the best design for a partnership apparatus.

            Taking charge means not continuing what has obviously been failing.  It means re-designing an OPD that has a chance of winning the hearts and minds of all concerned.  It means scrapping the 12-hour shifts, gathering intelligent information, planting, rooting and nourishing, our cops into the neighborhoods, expanding our resources distribution from three separate and fragmented efforts (current Precincts) into real geographic policing that holds primacy for the 35 call-response Beats and the 57 problem-solving Beats, and generally getting into a reality-based crisis mode.  We can gain more officers on the ground in the neighborhoods, more investigators following-up crimes, and address more specific crime related issues, at significantly less cost and much greater effectiveness, with current assets, if we will just take a breath and not accept the mediocrity and incompetence that has strangled public safety in Oakland.

ronoz