Oakland’s policies undermine police ability to deter crime

Frequent cuts to the number of police in recent years have adversely impacted Oakland’s ability to take advantage of a major benefit to policing—deterring crime from occurring in the first place.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

In 2015, Ron Davis, the executive director of President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, praised the Oakland Police Department for serving as a model for building stronger relationships with the community they protect. In the pre-defund era, policymakers understood that while policing needs oversight and continuous improvement, it is also essential for a safe and functional society. After all, a just and effective police force represented progress from the days where the lawlessness that Oakland is now experiencing—wild west-like gunfights in the streets, vigilantism, and failure to protect the most vulnerable—was more common.

Just 5 years later, Oakland began a program to significantly cut funding and responsibilities from the police department. Unfortunately, the result has been an unprecedented escalation in crime that is largely unique to Oakland. A survey from earlier this month found that 90% of Oakland residents reported being personally concerned about crime. Despite the public sentiment, Oakland’s city council further cut the police force in the FY 24-25 budget to the lowest level in decades.

In the “Equity Consideration” sections detailing reductions to police, the budget repeatedly notes that fewer police will mean slower response times. This suggests that city leadership believes police serve a purely reactive purpose—to respond to and investigate crimes that have already occurred. But this view neglects one of the most important benefits of police officers: deterring crime from happening in the first place.

According to The National Institute of Justice, the certainty of being caught and apprehended is a powerful deterrent of crime. Since the only people trained and entrusted by society to apprehend suspects are police officers, researchers repeatedly find a link between additional police presence and crime rates. The Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) summarized the work of criminologists Aaron Chalfin and Justin McCrary:

Recent research finds that increased police staffing helps to prevent crime, primarily through deterrence, in medium and large cities. This effect is particularly strong for violent crime, especially homicides; an increase in police staffing by 10% is estimated to reduce violent crimes broadly by 3.4% and homicides by 6.7%. Property crime, broadly speaking, reduces by 1.7%. Additionally, this research also shows that the crime-reducing benefits of hiring an additional police officer exceed the annual cost.

German Lopez at Vox compiled studies from 2005, 2016 and 2020 that show similar outcomes of increased police presence. In particular, the 2020 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded: “Each additional police officer abates approximately 0.1 homicides. In per capita terms, effects are twice as large for Black versus white victims.”

Of course, the idea that people are deterred from committing crimes if they think they will be caught is common sense, even to those committed to a city with fewer police. While Oakland leadership continues the years-long process of cutting policing positions, they also frequently promise more short term police presence when they want to publicize they are taking resident concerns over safety seriously.

European countries seem to understand the benefits of additional police more than we do in the United States. While the U.S. has about 210 officers per 100,000 residents, Europe has 341. As would be expected from the studies above, data from the United Nations finds Europe’s murder rate is about 1/3 that of the United States. Europe also had less than half the rate of serious assaults in 2022, which are crimes less likely to be confounded by the disparities in gun ownership.

With the new budget, Oakland will soon have either 156 or 138 offers per 100,000 residents, down from 181 previously. Even before those cuts, Oakland had fewer police officers per violent crime than any other US city. This limited staffing ensures near certainty that criminals will escape arrest for their crimes. In 2022, when the city had nearly 100 officers more than what the new budget allows, Oakland’s crime clearance rate (arrest rate) for all Part I crimes was just 1.5%, and only 6.5% for violent crimes.

Furthermore, Oakland’s limited police staffing continually leads to situations that seem incomprehensible in a modern city. Only 35 officers patrol a city of more than 435,000 people. 15 officers were charged with controlling a crowd of thousands when 14 people were shot in a gunfight. It took more than two days for police to respond to an apartment complex shot-up several times.

Oakland’s Experiment With Limited Deterrence Comes With Costs

Oakland has reduced public safety spending under the theory that those dollars are more effectively spent elsewhere. While the research on alternatives to policing lack evidence of efficacy, both nationally and locally, there is strong evidence that lack of economic opportunity is linked to crime. Relatedly, programs that target young people for jobs, particularly over summers, are shown to reduce violent crime in the short term because many potential criminals are rational actors:

Since the benefit of a criminal act must be weighed against the value of the offender’s time spent in an alternative activity, an increase in the opportunity cost of an offender’s time can be thought of as a deterrent to crime.

In Oakland, however, the combination of low odds of apprehension plus the reduced chance of prosecution by the district attorney are changing the cost/benefit calculation for criminality. An hourly wage job is less appealing when thousands can be made quickly by invading a home or stealing a car with little to no risk attached.

And even if we create a utopia where all our residents are employed and perfectly socialized, cities don’t have border walls. Obviously, the lack of police makes Oakland an appealing place for those who would want to commit crimes. Apparently the 70 people who casually robbed and destroyed an Oakland gas station this month came from other cities.

While the lack of police response for 90 minutes is unacceptable, it is also possible that the perpetrators knew they would be able to get away even if the police did arrive, further eroding the benefits of deterrence. Videos like these are widely viewed online:

Such situations are the result of a decade spent implementing policies designed to place limits on what police are allowed to do. Tim Gardner explains:

One of these policies—the pursuit policy limiting the speed and type of chase—is not inherently a bad policy. It aims to protect the lives of innocent people who are frequently harmed by pursuits. These tragedies also cost the city tens of millions of dollars in lawsuits—a cost cut in half with the new policy.

However, this policy has consequences; it means non-violent and most violent criminals escape arrest. If we curtail this tool of law enforcement, we also need to replace it with effective technologies, strategies and resources to track and intercept offenders without a direct pursuit. But the city has not done that. So, in essence, they have issued a ticket to freedom for criminals.

Policing is a Good Investment for Employment

If Oakland is committed to ensuring economic opportunity for its young people, then providing a safe society for businesses to thrive will produce far more jobs than public money ever could. Only after the local government achieves its most basic requirement—providing a baseline level of public safety for residents and businesses—does it make sense to experiment with potentially useful programs.  

Perhaps there is no clearer example to show that Oakland has failed in this regard than the closure of the Hegenberger In-N-Out. Despite its profitability, the company said the environment was too unsafe for customers and employees to justify continuing to operate. As a result, East Oakland lost 115 jobs with a salary that began at $22/hour.

Even if we conservatively assume all of the 115 employees worked 20 hours a week for 50 weeks a year at the starting salary, In-N-Out would have paid a total of $2,530,000 in salaries annually, in addition to all the taxes a highly profitable business pays. The average annual cost of a police officer in Oakland is $284,000, which includes benefits and retirement pay. Hiring an officer to sit in front of the In-N-Out and deter crime may have been an extremely cost-effective way to keep the restaurant in business and those jobs in East Oakland. In fact, hiring a few more police to patrol the Hegenberger corridor over these past few years may have saved several hundred more jobs.¹ While there is no official tally of how many businesses have closed in Oakland, we do know that thousands did not renew their licenses this past year.

A Well-Staffed Police Force Allows For Better Policing

In addition to more economic opportunity, there are other advantages to a well-staffed police force. For starters, as we see Europe, when police are used to deter crime, less of it takes place. The clear benefit to this is that fewer people are imprisoned, and fewer resources are used for prisons.

Furthermore, relying on a limited police force working overtime hours is both expensive and dangerous. Fatigue is shown to be a major hindrance towards some of the goals of police reformers, including reducing bias, citizen complaints, and use of force incidents.  

Finally, when officers are not overburdened and able to find time to interact positively with residents, they are able to build trust. YaleNews reported:

The researchers found that a single, positive, nonenforcement-related encounter enhanced the legitimacy of police officers and increased people’s willingness to cooperate with the police.

The positive effects of the unannounced door-to-door visits were durable as residents continued to report improved attitudes toward police 21 days after the initial encounters, according to the study, which was conducted in partnership with the New Haven Police Department. The researchers found that the visits were effective across racial and ethnic groups and that the long-term positive effects were strongest among non-white residents and people who held negative views of the police prior to the intervention.

In spite of the cuts and restrictions that have limited the effectiveness of Oakland Police Department in recent years, the vast majority of people in Oakland still seem to understand that more police are likely to make their lives better and neighborhoods safer. Recent surveys consistently show a population that wants significantly more police.

In retrospect, 2015 was a fork in the road moment for Oakland. We could have chosen to use the era of police reckoning as a chance to pursue fairer and more just policing from a well-staffed force committed to building trust with communities they serve and protect. Instead, we gave-in to a small group of well financed voices whose ideology insisted that a city could function well without accountability to the law.

1. According to CBS News Bay Area, “Police officers were stationed at both parking lots on Friday afternoon, but workers said the patrols are only there for a few days a week. They said break-ins and robberies are still bad when the officers are gone.”