OPD Chief Tony Batts presented his long-term plan last night to a cash-strapped City Council that was forced to lay off 80 of his officers in July. Armed with a thick binder of stats, he acknowledged that his police force must "do more with less," at least for now. So the chief outlined the data-driven approach to fighting crime that he employed to good effect as chief in Long Beach.
As OPD sergeants occupied the front row in the City Council chamber, Batts made a presentation full of alarming statistics. Oakland has more violent crimes per capita than any other California city (1,592 per 100,000 residents, compared to 705 for San Francisco and 642 for Long Beach). Oakland residents have to wait longer than other Californians for dispatchers to respond to 911 calls. And the average OPD homicide investigator has more cases stacking up on the desk than his or her counterparts in Los Angeles, San Francisco or Sacramento.
But the most dramatic number came when the chief described his own schedule. Batts conceded he's having to spending almost all of his time right now on old business-compliance with the settlement OPD negotiated with a federal judge in 2003 to settle abuse allegations in the Riders case. In that case officers were accused of framing residents of West Oakland for crimes and abusing suspects in police custody.
"Right now, I'm having to spend 80 percent of my time on the negotiated settlement," Batts told council members. "That's job number one for me."
With all the news that accompanied the police layoffs during this summer's budget impasse, it's easy to forget that the OPD is still under a federal judge's supervision for allegations of police misconduct that long predate Batts. The Riders case served as the most extreme example of frayed relations between Oakland residents and police.
In an interview after the City Council meeting Tuesday night, Batts said that the negotiated settlement has introduced important reforms. These include requiring OPD to develop more robust systems of officer evaluation and to perform departmental audits of issues such as racial profiling. But different court-appointed auditors have asked for different priorities from year to year, Batts said, forcing the department to shuffle in order to meet moving targets. The lack of continuity in OPD leadership hasn't helped, either.
"The judge overseeing the department has been a little bit impatient with our pace of reform in some places," Batts said. "And he's had to deal with different police chiefs. Now, he has to get used to this short, bald dude from Long Beach."
Batts also said that he's confident that bringing his top staff up to speed on audit compliance will free him to focus more on today's crime-fighting rather than yesterday's problems. He said Oakland police officers should be spending a third of their time on "officer-initiated activity," proactive police work where cops cruise up and down streets and alleys in the city's crime "hotspots." That's not coming close to happening, according to Batts, as OPD has to be more reactive than proactive in its approach.
With violent crime down 16 percent this year in a city that just laid off 10 percent of its police force, City Council members were full of praise for Batts and a force that has managed to do more with less-for now. And Batts returned much of the compliment-saying the City Council's efforts to address Oakland's crime issues through efforts like Measure Y, which funded a specific set of officers for beat-specific, community-policing efforts.
"I've become a cheerleader for Measure Y and all its community-policing components," Batts told Council Member Jean Quan, who helped draft the measure. "But I want every OPD officer to be seen as a community-policing officer."
Batts said a city of Oakland's size needs 905 sworn officers to successfully fight crime. For now, it's getting by with 682. Batts says he's managed by shifting more officers from desks to patrol cars, but attrition is already starting to eat into the number of cops on patrol. City Council members talked of bringing more investment to the city in order to bring more tax revenue, but the police chief said that delaying investment in police services might undermine that effort.
"If we don't get crime down in Oakland, we won't have people come through to invest in the city in the first place," Batts said.
