BERKELEY DAILY PLANET
Tuesday
March 7, 2006
COUNCILMEMBER CHARGES POLITICS DELAYS OAKLAND POLICE SAFETY PLAN
J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Oakland Police Department has a plan to almost triple the number of
police officers on Oakland streets at peak crime periods, but said
that implementation of the plan is being delayed by Mayor Jerry Brown
and City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente because of opposition
from the Oakland Police Officers Association labor union.
The proposed plan would raise the number of available, on-call
police officers from 35 to 84 at times when crime in the city is the
highest, including weekend nights and early mornings.
District 6 Councilmember Desley Brooks said that Brown, who is
running for California Attorney General in the June primary, and De
La Fuente, who is running to succeed Brown as mayor, "think that it
is more important to get the police officers' endorsement in their
political races than to get more police officers on the streets.
Shame on them. I am always amazed at the self-dealing going on at
City Hall. But this has reached a new low."
Both Brown and De La Fuente are in difficult races, with Brown
pitted against Los Angeles District Attorney Rocky Delgadillo and De
La Fuente with two major opponents, City Councilmember Nancy Nadel
and former Oakland-Berkeley Congressmember Ron Dellums.
Neither Brown, De La Fuente, nor Oakland Police Officers Association
President Bob Valladon responded to calls requesting a comment on
Councilmember Brooks' charges.
Brooks said that the police officers' union opposes the chief's
proposed deployment plan because it would virtually eliminate police
overtime payments, which have become a staple in Oakland police
paychecks.
"But that's $12 million in overtime costs out of our budget that we
could use for other needs in the city," Brooks said.
The councilmember, who represents one of the areas hit hardest by
the city's recent spike in violent crime, made the charges at Frick
Middle School in East Oakland during a police-community meeting
sponsored by the People United For a Better Oakland community
organization (PUEBLO).
She said she expects to raise the issue again at the next Oakland
City Council meeting, scheduled for tonight (Tuesday) at 7 p.m. at
Oakland City Hall on the corner of 14th Street and Broadway.
Police Chief Wayne Tucker, who
also spoke at the PUEBLO meeting,
confirmed the existence of the deployment plan and blamed its delay
on the OPOA.
"I have the power to implement the plan on my own authority," Tucker
said, "but under the 'meet and confer' provisions of the union
contract, I have to get the approval of the union. I'm pushing for
it. It would not take us long to implement."
Tucker was not asked if Brown or De La Fuente had a hand in delaying
the implementation of the patrol deployment plan.
Police overtime is an enormous budget and political issue in
Oakland. Last June, the San Jose Mercury News reported that police
overtime was running at $6 million in fiscal year 2004-05, 50 percent
over budget, with the city auditor asking the grand jury to
investigate the problem and, according to the article, "to look
specifically into whether top officials of the city's powerful police
union are driving overtime costs and blocking reforms to reduce them."
The Mercury News reported that public access to Oakland employee
records showed that two top police union officials had taken home
more than $300,000 in overtime pay since 2000. That included $71,470
in overtime for police union president Valladon.
"We are paying huge amounts of overtime and it's killing us,"
the
paper quoted Council President De La Fuente as saying at the time. De
La Fuente had earlier called for an outside audit of Oakland police
overtime costs.
At the same time, Oakland has been hit by a spike in violent crime
in recent months-including 33 murders in the last three months of
2005, 19 in the first two months of 2006, and five more in the first
week of March-and residents have complained of long delays in police
patrol responses to 911 calls.
Tucker said Saturday that
"the measure of violent crime is not
homicides but street robberies and assaults with firearms. Those
types of violent crimes are increasing, and way off the charts from
this time last year." Tucker told meeting participants "the emerging
violence in Oakland is of grave concern to us."
But Tucker blamed the delays in police response to reported crimes
not on the number of Oakland police officers, but on the way patrols
have been organized.
"We presently have 803 sworn
OPD officers," Tucker said, "that's
pretty rich staffing for a city of this size. I won't stand up here
today and say that we are understaffed. We're not. The problem is in
the way our police are being deployed."
That was a radical change from the assertions by police and city
officials during the Measure Y violence abatement bond campaign in
2004, when Oakland voters were told repeatedly that the Oakland
Police Department was severely understaffed, and the
police-to-citizen ratio was significantly lower than other comparable
cities. Tucker was not a member of the Oakland Police Department in
2004.
Under the City of Oakland's current police deployment, Oakland
police patrol officers work in standard eight-hour, five-day-per-week
shifts, with equal staffing for all hours throughout the week.
But according to Chief Tucker's proposed "Patrol Division
Deployment
Plan," prepared by Lt. P. Sarna, current deployment leads to
periods-such as midnight, when the shifts change-when the numbers of
crimes are rising while the numbers of police on the streets are not.
Tucker's report notes that "this places the department in a catch-up
mode for a significant period of each time each shift."
The report called such an across-the-board even deployment,
regardless of the crime rate at any given hour, "inefficient," and
said that it left "beat officers ... severely overburdened during the
period of the highest crime workload. ... Present deployment clearly
violates the simple rule of 'being there when the need is greatest.'"
By contrast, Tucker proposes to divide police patrols into three
overlapping shifts-five days a week for eight hours a day, four days
a week for 10 hours a day, and three days a week for 12 hours a
day-so that patrols could be increased at peak crime rates and decreased
at other times, with no overtime costs.
"We need to get as many blue
suits out on the streets as we can,"
Tucker told participants at Saturday's meeting. "We're working on
that."