- Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said Thursday efforts to defund her city’s police department went ‘too far,’ after it saw crime surge to levels not seen in 15 years
- Democrat Schaaf told Politico her city needs to address the ‘root causes’ of rising crime, after she scrapped the anti-cop campaign in December
- ‘I think it was a correction to the ‘defund’ conversation… I personally think went too far and got convoluted,’ Schaaf, who once championed the movement, said
- Cops recorded 134 murders in 2021 – nearly double the 78 seen in 2019, before the ‘defund’ movement began – as well as nearly 7000 violent crimes
- The increase alarmed Schaaf, she said, spurring the politician to implement a proposal in December that scrapped funding cuts to Oakland police
The mayor of one of California‘s most crime-ridden cities said Thursday that efforts to defund her city’s police department went ‘too far’ after it saw violent crime surge to levels not seen in 15 years following the movement’s introduction in the summer of 2020.
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf asserted to Politico in a sit-down interview that her city urgently needs to address the ‘root causes’ of rising crime, mere months after the Democrat pulled an abrupt about-face on the anti-cop campaign at the end of last year after seeing murders and violent crimes surge to concerning levels.
‘It’s been particularly heart-wrenching in Oakland because we had just made national headlines for cutting gun violence in half and sustaining those lower rates for five years,’ Schaaf, who was elected in 2015, said. She was referring to the city’s high homicide rate, which reached levels not seen since 2006, when the city recorded a then-abnormal 148 killings.
The levels then fluctuated in the double digits for the next decade-and-a-half, before abruptly spiking from the 78 seen in 2019 to 109 in 2020 – the same years calls for defunding the police, spurred by the Black Lives Matter movement, were introduced in earnest.