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Oakland police chief addresses recent crime spike, alarming number of homicides
Apr 13, 2021
Armstrong decries budget cuts, but police critic notes department’s huge share of city’s general fund
By GEORGE KELLY | gkelly@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
OAKLAND — Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong on Monday decried the city’s recent spike in violent crimes — including six homicides in six days in East Oakland — before urging city staff to cover what he called necessary costs for enforcement details.
In remarks Monday afternoon at police headquarters, Armstrong addressed the recent fatal shootings and sideshow activity, describing it as “completely unacceptable.”
“It’s tragic for the community to have to deal with this level of trauma and pain,” Armstrong said. “My heart goes out to all of the families that have lost loved ones as a result of this violence.”
According to this news organization’s count, Oakland police have investigated 41 homicides this year, including one early Saturday and two Saturday night, compared to only 14 investigated homicides at this time last year. The city logged 109 homicides in all of 2020.
After tallying other current counts related to the year’s grim toll in violence — 159 shootings vs. 2020’s 79; 149 car-jackings vs. 2020’s 57; 340 robberies vs. 2020’s 226 — Armstrong laid bare recent department budget cuts’ impacts and practical effects.
“[T]hose millions of dollars were resources, they were officers,” he said. “They were officers in our ceasefire team, our crime reduction teams, community resource officer teams, traffic officers. We lost all of these resources, and we see the tremendous impact that that loss is having on our community.”
He then called on Oakland city councilmembers “taking votes for CARES Act funds, hopefully reallocating resources to the department.”
“This is a tall task in the city of Oakland to address this violence, but you can’t do it without resources. This city has to value the lives of our community members,” Armstrong said.
In comments Monday, Cat Brooks, co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project and executive director of the Justice Teams Network, pushed back firmly against Armstrong’s narrative.
Brooks said in part that despite any funding loss, the police department receives almost half of the city’s general fund, and that funds could go instead to other programs such as community ambassador patrols in Chinatown or around Lake Merritt, in contrast to recent policing efforts there.
“The crime spike is laying bare the exacerbation of poverty’s impact, and we cannot police our way out of that,” Brooks said.
Referring to people who break laws more out of need rather than greed, Brooks said “If you get a bunch of shot-callers in a room and asked them what would it take to stop the violence, they would unanimously say ‘I need to feed my family, I need a job and not just a 6-dollar-an-hour one,'” she said.
“We need an investment in trauma response: the city’s Department of Violence Prevention should have … a team of trauma workers to send out when violence happens. When this or that horrible thing happens, we pretend there’s not a ripple effect.”
In response to a question about tactical staffing over weekend shifts in response to current sideshow enforcement, Armstrong called specific details necessary.
“When you have three homicides in a 24-hour period, that is taxing on your police officers,” he said. “It forces us to use those resources that should be dedicated to reducing violent crime and trying to apprehend the people responsible for these shootings to addressing sideshows. But there’s still not enough resources to do both.”
Armstrong shared at the news conference that there had been no determination yet on any possible racial motivation in an attempted robbery Saturday morning in the 600 block of 10th Street that left an Asian pedestrian bruised but refusing medical care.
He ended his remarks by expressing his sympathies to the family of Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old fatally shot Sunday during a traffic stop by an officer in Brooklyn Center, Minn., and said the department is monitoring developments out of Minnesota and preparing for the Derek Chauvin trial’s outcome and any related potential community unrest or protests.
Contact George Kelly at 408-859-5180.
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