Fraught with racial tension, still struggling with drugs, gangs, and violence, and patrolled by angry, resentful officers, Oakland is the epicenter of police-community conflict in Northern California. So Oakland’s problems are everyone’s problems. The numbers are particularly worrisome because of the fact that, despite paying high salaries, the OPD’s turnover rate is among the highest in the state each year, dozens of officers, having cut their teeth on some of the toughest streets in the state, move to other Bay Area cities where, presumably, they apply the lessons they have learned. Police critics charge that although the terrible years of the crack plague are gone, the culture within the police department has been slow to emerge from the white-knuckled, fight-or-flight posture of the early ’90s. In accordance with national trends, Oakland’s violent crime rate has dropped sharply - albeit from the appalling to the merely troubling - so it’s hard to understand why, in the last few years, the numbers of misconduct complaints against Oakland officers has nearly doubled, from 83 in 1998 to 154 in 2000. Today, it’s impossible to conceive of a time when the police were almost routinely called upon to deal with such grisly incidents as 1992’s Bosn’s Locker massacre, in which a man sprayed a crowded barroom with automatic weapons fire, killing three. Though the crack and meth mercados off Hegenberger Road still rival the worst parts of Washington, DC,and Detroit, it’s undeniable that much has changed on the streets of Oakland. During the years Andaya cruised its streets, Oakland was a really tough town, a blue-collar, multicultural port city whose dalliance with the crack epidemic of the late ’80s and early ’90s left nearly two hundred men and women dead on the streets every year.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |