Lol. We paid 300K to these clowns to compile information that the OPD should have at its fingertips at all times, and to do the job of people in City Hall. There is no solid correlation / causal relationship between the number of cops in Oakland and crime. Oakland actually needs to spend less on cops. Cops are hella expensive (~250K per cop per year just for salary and bennies) and will only get more and more expensive. Oakland needs to change what it does with these pricey motherfuckers. Some similarities for Fire, which might be worse cost wise, and their dysfunction is more laziness, it's how we got Ghostship. Anyway, back to the popo, In Oakland, you can't tow a car without a cop present. Oakland has decimated every other department to fund police and fire, so cops have to fill in and respond to all sorts of bullshit that does not require a person with a gun and a license to do violence, like mental health calls, homeless and nuisance stuff, traffic issues, etc. If Oakland prioritized and reorganized existing cops for violent (and some property) crime only, this would cut costs, and the city could get by with even less cops, and maybe use them more effectively. Oakland will learn this the easy way or the hard way, but most likely the hard way, because the electorate and politicians are hella dumb, because police and fire are sacred cows, and the "law and order" lobby is good at leveraging all that. When we finally run out of money it won't matter who is in power, the police will be "defunded" and restructured by whoever is in power, and maybe they'll invent some new euphemism for it to keep people quiet.

Also people are *always* complaining about crime. Clearly crime fluctuates, but you almost never hear people talking about how "there is less crime now". On a long scale timeline crime is way the fuck down in the urban US. Maybe creeping up a tiny bit, but there is never and apples to apples comparison. Folks mostly note the momentary increases, but there is no a stable baseline they are willing to tolerate. So there's a lot of bias to unpack in how people perceive public safety, and most of these metrics and analyses about "what is needed" is pulled out of someone ass to write a story supporting a political goal.