By Cat Brooks

Police forces around the country are complaining about staffing shortages. By and large, they’ve blamed the community and city leaders for not being sufficiently supportive — even though law enforcement receives the lion’s share of every city budget in the country.

We heard such disinformation recently when Oakland Police Officers Association President Barry Donelan blamed declining OPD staffing levels on “anti-police rhetoric” which is driving hard-working, dedicated Oakland police officers to leave in droves.”

While this is an obvious falsehood, it remains important to ask: why are so many cops leaving, who are they, and what is OPD spending its time on?

One major reason staffing is down is because so many cops have quit the force to escape discipline. “Heavy discipline” was among the top factors cited by departing officers in exit interviews, which OPD started conducting last fall.

What this means is that between OPD’s nonstop scandals — which range from sharing racist, sexist Instagram memes and pro-Trump insurrection posts, to teargassing kids, to overtime fraud, to murder — and Oakland’s community-led demands for accountability, the environment has become unfriendly to corrupt cops who could easily go do their dirt elsewhere without consequence. Good riddance.

Oakland’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for city workers has also had an impact. On March 8, OPD Deputy Director Kiona Suttle revealed that 15 sworn officers will either be fired or forced to quit because of noncompliance with the mandate.

This seems to confirm the widely-held suspicion that vaccine refusal has contributed to the reduction in officer staffing in Oakland like it has everywhere else — a suspicion that grew when officer attrition spiked by 160% in October, the month the vaccine mandate took effect.

The top reason for leaving listed in exit interviews is “dissatisfaction with OPD leadership.” This shows that, despite Libby Schaaf’s gaslighting of Oaklanders with tall tales of OPD reform and the police association’s false narrative spin, OPD remains as dysfunctional as ever. Yet the City of Oakland fills their unaudited budget of almost $350 million every year.

Let’s be clear — while OPD is a terrible place to work, it is not unique in falling below its budgeted number of officers. A similar trend is happening all over the country. A national survey of nearly 200 law enforcement agencies last summer found that retirements went up by 45% and resignations went up by almost 20% in 2020-21.

After decades of overspending on law enforcement, our nation’s police forces have now grown so large there’s simply no way they can keep themselves fully staffed. So, they’ve resorted to cannibalizing each other, poaching officers from neighboring departments. And Oakland residents are left to pay the price tag of training cadets who ultimately go on to work elsewhere, or out-of-towners whose records of conduct are difficult to unearth.

Oakland will never be able to fill so many empty positions. Period. There’s just not enough people interested in working for OPD. The only solution is to scale back our police force. We’ve got to make do with fewer officers.

We can do this by ending the practice of making police be the ineffective first responders to every single social ill. They are not counselors, therapists, mental health workers, or animal welfare specialists. Sending them to do these jobs has proven not only costly but also deadly to Black and brown communities.

It won’t be a difficult shift. Right now, OPD only spends a fraction of its time on violent crime. The Anti Police-Terror Project published a report last year which found that OPD wastes significant amounts of time and money responding to nonviolent and non-criminal issues instead of focusing on violent crime.

The Department could free up the equivalent of over 60 full-time officers and save millions if it was no longer responsible for matters that don’t require an armed officer — like towing abandoned cars and catching stray dogs — as well as situations like mental health crises or interacting with unhoused neighbors.

The truth is we have too many cops, not too few. But OPD doesn’t want you to know this. That’s why they’re dragging their feet on releasing updated data about how they spend their time, which City Council demanded and is already past due.

We know what keeps us safe, and it’s not more police. It’s meeting the needs of our most vulnerable community members. That means housing, schools, jobs, mental health care, and violence prevention.

The way out of this manufactured staffing crisis is to tell OPD to do less with less — and to invest in what really keeps us safe instead.

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