On December 15, MOBN! Board members Bruce Nye, Jim Blachman and Mike Ferro met with new Oakland Chief of Police Tony Batts at the Chief’s office at OPD headquarters. Topics of our conversation included MOBN! Public Safety Committee leadership’s five working goals,  Oakland’s homicide problem, the challenges of police resources, qualitative and quantitative, the challenges to Oakland’s communities regarding crime, especially violent crime community policing, the chief’s views on staffing needs and what MOBN! can do to help to improve Oakland’s public safety.

We started by telling Chief Batts the five potential policy goals Public Safety Committee leadership had been vetting with our members, on line, in our research and in discussions with experts on policing:  1. Stronger police and community connections, 2. Excellence in police leadership, morale and dedication to service, 3. More effective and efficient policing, 4. Measurement and reporting of crime reduction and quality-of-life improvement, and 5. Optimizated implementation of the Negotiated Settlement Agreement. Chief Batts agreed with all of these, but added another: Establishing community legitimacy for the department. Chief Batts believes legitimacy has been damaged and a community trust relationship has been destroyed by police bad behavior and corruption (as in the Riders’ case), failure to provide prompt responses to citizen service calls, and the failure to deal with the city’s high level of violent crime.

The chief minced no words in discussing the devastating effects of violent crime, both in the communities most directly affected by that violence and in Oakland as a whole. Batts described as intolerable the existing environment of lawlessness, providing the example of the most recent police-involved shooting episode, where criminals were shooting one another in broad daylight while fleeing the police. 

          But he was equally harsh in describing the complacency in the community about the killings and the lack of outrage about them.  He described a recent meeting with a group of community leaders who seemed inured to the killings problem, and whose main interest seemed to be their own power struggles for authority within their groups rather than the harm to the community as a whole of the ongoing violence. Chief Batts believes Oakland must pull together to reduce violence, not to continue a pattern of disagreement and divisiveness.

          The Chief believes the first public safety priority must be to address the problems of guns, drugs and gangs.  He believes our violent crime rates are utterly out-of-proportion to our size, resources, demographics or any other characteristic of measurement. Oakland has become one of the most violent cities in the country and our future as a city depends on getting the violence under control. This challenges the comments of some citizens who have in recent weeks posted on blogs that Oakland’s murder rate this year seems to be slightly lower than it was last year, so things must be getting better now that we have a few more sworn officers in the department. Oakland’s current rate of violent crime, even if it varies somewhat from year to year, is simply not acceptable, period. Oakland also has a backlog of 2500 domestic violence cases that the OPD cannot now investigate.

          How should we know if we have enough officers in uniform? was not a question we had to ask Chief Batts. One of the first things he said during our conversation was that he needed twice as many officers as he has now. But , he said, this is not the same as whether or not we have the number of sworn officers specified in Measure Y, or whether staffing meets the typical “rule of thumb” number of 2 officers per thousand of population (which would get us to the currently authorized 800 or so officers).  He believes that this sort of “rule of thumb” calculation is useless.  While Oakland may be a somewhat typical mid-sized city with modest resources, our crime problem is anything but typical, mid-sized or modest.

          Chief Batts describes his fundamental level of control of the OPD as about 40% because of limitations on the use of Measure Y officers, city council insistence on walking beats and NSA requirements.  All of these things impede the department in achieving its most important goal:  reducing violent crime.  By comparison,  he says he had 100% control of the police department in Long Beach, and was successful in reducing crime.

          Our new Chief’s view of effective policing is not the same as the old-style vision of Measure Y. Measure Y may have reasonably reflected conventional progressive thinking about policing ten years ago, but the world of policing has changed radically since then. He sees policing in Oakland in part as the creation of a laboratory. The best policing means approaching all interventions as experiments. This means that we have to test each intervention in the unique crime environment of each violent social networt. If what we do works, then we proceed always with caution. If what we do does not work, then we rethink, retool and try again. This is state-of-the-art evidence-based policing and there are fifteen cities in the U.S. now involved in a coordinated demonstration program.

We discussed experiments in Cincinnati and Boston (the “cease fire” programs).  He very much favors these kinds of programs, which give offenders a choice between the very serious consequences of criminal activity and the benefits of participating in clear-path education and job programs.  The problem, of course, is that job programs have to have viable end-points:  if you participate in a job program, there has to be a job at the end.  We commented that this wasn’t part of policing, and Chief Batts strongly disagreed:  he feels that modern policing sees this as all of a piece – it’s a community and a police problem.

Chief Batts favors community policing, but feels that well-intentioned efforts to assign community policing activities to designated officers (e.g., Measure Y) may actually impede community policing.  Such efforts take the pressure off of most officers to be part of a community policing approach by implying that the department’s designated officers (in Oakland, the “Problem Solving Officers”) are the ones responsible for meeting that requirement.

          There is a very difficult aspect to community ownership of Oakland’s violent crime problem, and we expect we’ll be hearing more about this during the very difficult budget discussions coming up in the coming weeks.  Chief Batts believes dealing with violent crime is the fundamental priority for the police department and the community. Only by reducing violent crime – and the guns, drugs and gangs -- in the affected parts of town, can OPD build a foundation of trust and legitimacy in our city and begin to make community policing in all of its flavors meaningful.  Given the city’s financial crunch, this may well mean that we, the Oakland community as a whole, will need to accept, for a period of time, a reduction in other police services, including police service responses from 911 calls, alarm calls to residences and businesses, perhaps even investigation of traffic accidents. This is a stark reality and any alternative will be equally difficult for many Oaklanders: more taxes to hire many more cops. We will have very difficult choices to make in the next several months.

Chief Batts is working with a consultant he used in Long Beach to assemble the department’s strategic plan, and he is also putting together an academic advisory board.  He expect to have his strategic framework completed by the end of January and his fully-developed strategy completed by the end of April.

          We asked Chief Batts what role MOBN! should play in helping to improve public safety in Oakland. He made it clear that we need to continue as we have been trying to do, to open up the conversation about crime, policing and the community.

On December 15, MOBN! Board members Bruce Nye, Jim Blachman and Mike Ferro met with new Oakland Chief of Police Tony Batts at the Chief’s office at OPD headquarters. Topics of our conversation included MOBN! Public Safety Committee leadership’s five working goals,  Oakland’s homicide problem, the challenges of police resources, qualitative and quantitative, the challenges to Oakland’s communities regarding crime, especially violent crime community policing, the chief’s views on staffing needs and what MOBN! can do to help to improve Oakland’s public safety.

We started by telling Chief Batts the five potential policy goals Public Safety Committee leadership had been vetting with our members, on line, in our research and in discussions with experts on policing:  1. Stronger police and community connections, 2. Excellence in police leadership, morale and dedication to service, 3. More effective and efficient policing, 4. Measurement and reporting of crime reduction and quality-of-life improvement, and 5. Optimizated implementation of the Negotiated Settlement Agreement. Chief Batts agreed with all of these, but added another: Establishing community legitimacy for the department. Chief Batts believes legitimacy has been damaged and a community trust relationship has been destroyed by police bad behavior and corruption (as in the Riders’ case), failure to provide prompt responses to citizen service calls, and the failure to deal with the city’s high level of violent crime.

The chief minced no words in discussing the devastating effects of violent crime, both in the communities most directly affected by that violence and in Oakland as a whole. Batts described as intolerable the existing environment of lawlessness, providing the example of the most recent police-involved shooting episode, where criminals were shooting one another in broad daylight while fleeing the police. 

          But he was equally harsh in describing the complacency in the community about the killings and the lack of outrage about them.  He described a recent meeting with a group of community leaders who seemed inured to the killings problem, and whose main interest seemed to be their own power struggles for authority within their groups rather than the harm to the community as a whole of the ongoing violence. Chief Batts believes Oakland must pull together to reduce violence, not to continue a pattern of disagreement and divisiveness.

          The Chief believes the first public safety priority must be to address the problems of guns, drugs and gangs.  He believes our violent crime rates are utterly out-of-proportion to our size, resources, demographics or any other characteristic of measurement. Oakland has become one of the most violent cities in the country and our future as a city depends on getting the violence under control. This challenges the comments of some citizens who have in recent weeks posted on blogs that Oakland’s murder rate this year seems to be slightly lower than it was last year, so things must be getting better now that we have a few more sworn officers in the department. Oakland’s current rate of violent crime, even if it varies somewhat from year to year, is simply not acceptable, period. Oakland also has a backlog of 2500 domestic violence cases that the OPD cannot now investigate.

          How should we know if we have enough officers in uniform? was not a question we had to ask Chief Batts. One of the first things he said during our conversation was that he needed twice as many officers as he has now. But , he said, this is not the same as whether or not we have the number of sworn officers specified in Measure Y, or whether staffing meets the typical “rule of thumb” number of 2 officers per thousand of population (which would get us to the currently authorized 800 or so officers).  He believes that this sort of “rule of thumb” calculation is useless.  While Oakland may be a somewhat typical mid-sized city with modest resources, our crime problem is anything but typical, mid-sized or modest.

          Chief Batts describes his fundamental level of control of the OPD as about 40% because of limitations on the use of Measure Y officers, city council insistence on walking beats and NSA requirements.  All of these things impede the department in achieving its most important goal:  reducing violent crime.  By comparison,  he says he had 100% control of the police department in Long Beach, and was successful in reducing crime.

          Our new Chief’s view of effective policing is not the same as the old-style vision of Measure Y. Measure Y may have reasonably reflected conventional progressive thinking about policing ten years ago, but the world of policing has changed radically since then. He sees policing in Oakland in part as the creation of a laboratory. The best policing means approaching all interventions as experiments. This means that we have to test each intervention in the unique crime environment of each violent social networt. If what we do works, then we proceed always with caution. If what we do does not work, then we rethink, retool and try again. This is state-of-the-art evidence-based policing and there are fifteen cities in the U.S. now involved in a coordinated demonstration program.

We discussed experiments in Cincinnati and Boston (the “cease fire” programs).  He very much favors these kinds of programs, which give offenders a choice between the very serious consequences of criminal activity and the benefits of participating in clear-path education and job programs.  The problem, of course, is that job programs have to have viable end-points:  if you participate in a job program, there has to be a job at the end.  We commented that this wasn’t part of policing, and Chief Batts strongly disagreed:  he feels that modern policing sees this as all of a piece – it’s a community and a police problem.

Chief Batts favors community policing, but feels that well-intentioned efforts to assign community policing activities to designated officers (e.g., Measure Y) may actually impede community policing.  Such efforts take the pressure off of most officers to be part of a community policing approach by implying that the department’s designated officers (in Oakland, the “Problem Solving Officers”) are the ones responsible for meeting that requirement.

          There is a very difficult aspect to community ownership of Oakland’s violent crime problem, and we expect we’ll be hearing more about this during the very difficult budget discussions coming up in the coming weeks.  Chief Batts believes dealing with violent crime is the fundamental priority for the police department and the community. Only by reducing violent crime – and the guns, drugs and gangs -- in the affected parts of town, can OPD build a foundation of trust and legitimacy in our city and begin to make community policing in all of its flavors meaningful.  Given the city’s financial crunch, this may well mean that we, the Oakland community as a whole, will need to accept, for a period of time, a reduction in other police services, including police service responses from 911 calls, alarm calls to residences and businesses, perhaps even investigation of traffic accidents. This is a stark reality and any alternative will be equally difficult for many Oaklanders: more taxes to hire many more cops. We will have very difficult choices to make in the next several months.

Chief Batts is working with a consultant he used in Long Beach to assemble the department’s strategic plan, and he is also putting together an academic advisory board.  He expect to have his strategic framework completed by the end of January and his fully-developed strategy completed by the end of April.

          We asked Chief Batts what role MOBN! should play in helping to improve public safety in Oakland. He made it clear that we need to continue as we have been trying to do, to open up the conversation about crime, policing and the community.