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As homicides spike, Oakland's police chief tests a new strategy
Apr 04, 2021
By Rachel Swan
April 2, 2021
Two months into his new job, Oakland’s police chief is searching for answers to a rise in murder cases that started with the shutdown and now threatens to unwind years of progress.
The department logged 34 homicides through March 31, more than triple the 10 that occurred by the same time in 2020. The escalation coincides with unsettling attacks on Asian American elders, many of them captured in videos that went viral on social media.
At the same time, the city’s strained police force is struggling to manage sideshows — impromptu gatherings in which drivers take over an intersection or freeway to perform stunts. Oakland lost its sideshow detail when City Administrator Ed Reiskin ordered cuts to patch a budget deficit in late December.
Addressing reporters Friday afternoon on the ground floor of the department’s downtown headquarters, a visibly perturbed police Chief LeRonne Armstrong decried the recent slayings as “unacceptable” and announced a new strategy to deal with them: disbanding the crime reduction teams that served each geographic area of Oakland and concentrating those officers in a centralized unit.
The Violent Crime Operations Center will focus on the city’s most serious crimes — shootings and killings — signaling that Armstrong has made them a priority over the less-severe quality-of-life complaints that also generate voluminous 911 calls. The shift occurred as the department copes with somewhat thinner ranks. Although Oakland is authorized to have 792 sworn officers, the force now hovers at 713, according to department spokesperson Paul Chambers.
“I’ve moved resources from every area within the Police Department to support this new operations center, so that we can move faster in our response to violence, so that we can be more nimble in our approach to solving violent crime, but also so that we can have citywide enforcement efforts,” Armstrong said.
Roughly 60 officers and supervisors would work out of the new center, with eight poached from each of the city’s five crime reduction teams. The division would work closely with Oakland’s Ceasefire unit, a mediation program for alleged gang members.
While violence rose in many cities during the pandemic — a pattern that criminologists link to closures of schools, recreation centers and public agencies, as well as frustration over job loss — Oakland saw a more acute spike.
Unlike in San Francisco, homicides in the East Bay city now exceed the five-year average, while burglaries dropped. Both cities experienced a five-year decrease in reported rapes, robberies and larceny thefts, though robberies are climbing this year in Oakland.
Despite widespread concern about gun violence, some residents and advocates wonder whether Armstrong’s center will adequately serve the flatland communities that experience the most crime.
Keisha Henderson, a member of Oakland’s Reimagining Public Safety Task Force and a resident of the Seminary area of East Oakland, has long called for better treatment by and more consistent communication from Oakland’s Police Department. She worries that without a crime reduction squad assigned to her area, trust between officers and residents will continue to erode.
“As far as community engagement, I have not seen that, because they’re so busy just attacking the shootings,” Henderson said, adding that she wishes the police would surface at community events — such as trash clean-ups — rather than just swooping in during an emergency.
She described her neighborhood as having a “cone culture,” because residents set up traffic cones in their driveways to block strangers from parking there and dissuade kids from straying down the block when they play outside.
Henderson has two 6-year-old daughters who she has never let walk down the block. She said she never knows when a shot may be fired, “and they can’t run like that.”
Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @rachelswan
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