Famous economist Milton Friedman once said: “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”
Let’s focus that quote on public policy addressing violence in Oakland, shall we?
According to the city’s website, the “Department of Violence Prevention applies a public health approach to violence prevention focused on community-led intervention strategies to realize sustained safety and stability of the families and communities most impacted by violence.”
It was created in 2017 with one lofty goal: reduce homicides by 80% over three years.
Instead, as the SF Chronicle reported, “homicides have risen each year since the department was created, from 67 in 2018, to 75 in 2019, to 102 in 2020, to 124 in 2021.” (2022 recorded 120 homicides.) Rather than decrease by 80%, homicides INCREASED by 53% over three years (74% increase after four years).
Around January 2020, Oakland hired Guillermo Cespedes as the “Chief of Violence Prevention,” paying him over $326k/year. Again, I’ll ascribe the best of intentions to Mr. Cespedes. But his department’s results have been abysmal.
Not only have the results been horrible, the department took ~$17 million away from the Mayor’s proposed police budget in 2021. Oakland Police Department’s chief said that the shift in funding would result in the loss of 50 open police officer positions.
And within hours of that warning, two armed robbers held up a television crew that was interviewing … Cespedes. Seriously, that really happened.
By 2022, ABC13 reported that “your chance of being a victim of violent crime in Oakland is 1 in 77, nearly three times higher than the state of CA at large.” That’s … staggering.
Given all of this, what’s next? Oakland’s new mayor has said she will spend more on the department. And Cespedes is leaving at the end of this month to create and run the Office of Community Safety in Los Angeles. Seriously, LA has hired him to replicate his efforts in Oakland.
With only the best of intentions I’m sure.
