Blog

Because of Oakland’s budget crisis and the necessary cuts to Oakland’s expenses, some have argued that Oakland’s violence prevention programs, now housed in the Department of Violence Prevention (DVP), should be cut and the money instead spent on the Oakland Police Department (OPD). Make Oakland Better Now! (MOBN) firmly believes that funding both police and violence prevention is necessary for a thriving community. 

Cutting Violence Prevention would have a tiny effect on Police funding

The total 24/25 budget for the DVP is about $24M; of that the General Fund furnishes about $7.5M, Measure Z about $12M, and about $4.5M from various state grants. For OPD, the 24/25 budget is $375M, which is composed of $347M from the General Fund, $18M from Measure Z, and the rest from various state grants. The DVP allocation from the general fund is about 2% of OPD’s allocation. Completely doing away with the DVP allocation and giving it to OPD would only increase the OPD budget by 2%, and is practically nothing compared to the projected $100M deficit in the next fiscal year. Put another way, let’s look at the place of the DVP in overall General Fund expenditures:

Now this is the General Fund, not including Measure Z, but when people talk about taking violence prevention funds and giving them to the police department, it is the General Fund they are referring to, since the Measure Z funds are dedicated. We see that in Oakland violence prevention is 13^th in priority, lower than the library’s General Fund allocation, lower than Parks, etc. Violence Prevention is simply not a large part of the Oakland budget.

Why, then, do people attack DVP Programs?

Violence prevention programs are, while not new, certainly not as old as just locking people up, and their effectiveness is not as well trusted as the officer with a gun. But in Oakland, in the 2004 Measure Y, we decided that we would support a parcel tax that funded both police and violence prevention, renewed that tax in 2014 (Measure Z), and, since it expires this year, we will vote on another renewal this November. Measure Z, and Measure Y before it, allocate slightly under 60% of the funds to the police and 40% to violence prevention programs. MOBN! has always supported and continues to support funding both police and violence prevention.

What are Oakland’s Violence Prevention programs?

Given that most of the violence in urban areas like Oakland arises out of the poverty and hopeless situation of many of our residents, the Fund for Children and Youth (OFCY) is Oakland’s basic long-term violence prevention program. It is funded through the Kids First initiative and is a mandated 3% of the Oakland General Fund, which is $23.5M in the 24/25 budget. These programs have been shown to be effective at raising literacy rates and caring for our most vulnerable children and youth, both with OFCY evaluations and in the general research literature. For instance, there was a national study that found that children who have participated in Head Start are 30% less likely to have been in a correctional institution by age 21.

While OFCY is specifically focused on children and youth, the DVP violence prevention programs are more diverse.  They include support for Ceasefire; Community Healing and Restoration; Gender-based Violence Response; Gun-Group Violence Response; and, School Violence Interruption and Prevention, each of which is described on the DVP website. Each of these programs is incredibly important to the health of the city. Ceasefire, which is a homicide reduction program that has been effective both in Oakland and other cities, depends on the social services offered to help those identified by OPD as potential perpetrators of violence. Community Healing and Restoration includes exactly those programs that Princeton researcher Patrick Sharkey in his book “Uneasy Peace” shows are effective in reducing violence: community activities, restorative circles, those programs that increase the number of people outdoors, in the community, interacting. In fact, in the list above of DVP programs, each and every one of them is based on well-studied violence prevention programs that are also instituted elsewhere. We are not “experimenting with non-police community programs” as some have charged, which a simple google search on any of the programs will attest to. 

What about accountability?

The issue of accountability is often brought up with respect to the DVP programs. Accountability is provided on two levels: individual providers must state their annual goals, and then must provide data to the DVP on their performance against those goals; and, Measure Z mandates that evaluations must be done regularly by outside evaluators. Evaluations from outside evaluators are on the DVP web site. The individual provider evaluations are provided to the Public Safety Committee of the City Council and to the Safety and Services Commission (SSOC). An example is here As a consequence of not meeting their goals, individual providers can have their payments delayed and their contracts not renewed. The outside evaluations do not look at individual providers but instead evaluate whole programs, for instance “job training for recently incarcerated people” to determine the long term effect on violence. Often these evaluations show room for improvement, for instance with job training programs there must be mentoring “life coach” support for the trainee long after the training ends, to encourage the person to stay in the job rather than get swept up back into their previous life. If programs are found to have gotten off track, as with the recent audit of Ceasefire, the administration is asked to make periodic reports to the SSOC and to the Public Safety Committee of the City Council to show that the deficiencies are being addressed.

Oakland needs both

Oakland needs a well-funded police force and well-funded violence prevention programs, because we do not want to be a garrison city with no social programs to help people caught in the web of violence and we do not want to be a lawless city with no police. We need both. MOBN! has endorsed and will be working toward the passage of the Measure Z renewal (and there will be more on that in a later post). And we will also be looking forward to the promised City Council effort to re-structure the budget, beginning this September, an effort that we hope will result in looking at all ways to save money, not just the us vs them mentality of those who would defund either the police or violence prevention.