Our collective shame

I have not watched the video yet. I have read the transcripts auto generated by Youtube of the dispatch calls but that’s about it. I have had people tell me what’s in the video and I have read media reports of what is in the video as well. So that’s sort of where I’m at with all of this which maybe allows me to be more detached than simply enraged about what happened.

I know there’s a lot of focus on getting accountability through punishing the individual police officers but what we’re seeing here in Alameda and elsewhere are institutional problems. If we keep focusing on individuals and classifying police officers into good apples and bad apples we don’t get to the root of the problem: the institution of policing itself.

I was going to wait to write about Alameda’s missed opportunity last year to make immediate changes until after the Special meeting on the 8th but the more I pondered the issue the more frustrated I got and I don’t want the City Council majority to punt again. So I’m going to remind folks that we had the opportunity in July of last year after the Mali Watkins incident and in the wake of all the other national tragedies to pivot to do something more than just the status quo.

In July 2020, then Vice Mayor John Knox White and then Councilmember Jim Oddie placed a referral on the agenda to declare racism a public health emergency. Using that lens they had explicit asks with deadlines to make immediate changes, for example:

The Alameda City Council commits to identifying up to 42% of the City Police Department budget to reallocate towards programs that support public health, wellness and resilience and can respond to emergency calls for which the Police are not necessary as identified by Alameda’s Chief of Police. The Council also commits to reviewing the budget again based on the recommendations of the community-led steering committee and based on the outside audit described below. These cuts will be proportional to the 42% reduction in services that the Department has historically responded to and identified to shift to other departments. The City Council directs the City Manager to begin an outside audit of the activities of the Alameda Police Department, to be made publicly available, including the time spent on activities overseen by the Department in the last 12 months, the time and staffing provided for these activities and City policies that may need to be changed in order to meet the goals and objectives outlined by the community-led steering committee on safety and security for all Alamedans. Additionally, the budget reallocation will explore the following areas: 

A. A workplan by July 31, 2020 for a top-to-bottom change in the community service culture in the Alameda Police Department that reestablishes community member safety and well-being as the City’s primary goal and commits the entire department to long-term, ongoing anti-racism training and outcomes to ensure the training is changing behavior.

B. The identification, development and implementation of a crisis intervention and management program to divert calls for emergency services away from the police and towards crisis intervention programs that are well-suited to handle mental health emergencies.

C. The identification, development and implementation of a homeless intervention and support program.

D. A restructuring of the City’s Traffic Safety Enforcement Division to focus on a short-term strategy of targeting street safety-related behaviors: red-light running, stop sign running, speeding, illegal and unsafe turns, Driving Under the Influence (DUI) and cellphone violations. A long-term strategy of seeking State Law changes to allow for unarmed, non-sworn community traffic safety personnel to focus on red-light running, speeding and failing to yield to pedestrians as already exist in other parts of the State and country and have been found to reduce the disparate enforcement impacts on communities of color while making real strides in street safety.

This all might possibly had been in place at the time that the 911 call was made to report Mario Gonzalez “not doing anything wrong” just “scaring” someone’s wife.

Instead, the City Council majority punted and asked citizen volunteers to do the heavy lift of figuring all this out before they were willing to take action. The thing is, we could have done both. We SHOULD have done both. We could have put in place the plan outlined in the referral AND had the subcommittees meet and talk about how we can improve Alameda public safety and race relations moving forward.

The shame of it all is that it may take the loss of someone’s life for this City to take action that should have been taken nearly a year ago.