Oakland's Chaos is Newsom's Presidential Test
The Governor is putting state cops on the streets to protect his political future
The city of Oakland has become ungovernable. Thieves routinely commit brazen crimes in broad daylight, such as hitching an ATM to a van and dragging it down the street. Ramming cars through storefronts is now a common burglary method; burglars hit one liquor store that way three times since November. Recently, an Oakland police officer was murdered while responding to a burglary of a cannabis dispensary. Robberies rose last year by 38% over 2022, burglaries by 23%, and car thefts by 44%.
The lawlessness has taken a toll on local businesses and their employees. Clorox, headquartered in downtown Oakland, has hired uniformed security guards to escort employees to and from the BART station, while Kaiser Permanente, about nine blocks away, has advised its workers to eat lunch indoors to avoid street crime. In N’ Out Burger shuttered its first restaurant ever due to rampant crime near the Oakland airport, including more than 1,000 car burglaries in the vicinity since 2019. Shortly after In N’ Out announced its March closure, a nearby Denny’s followed suit.
The police department is short hundreds of officers and hasn’t had a permanent police chief in a year. Police are so overwhelmed that they often only respond to Priority 1 calls — typically crimes involving imminent danger to the public — and even then, can take as long as 20 minutes to show up. For calls involving stolen vehicles, misdemeanors in progress, or disputes on the cusp of becoming violent, officers will likely take more than 4 hours to arrive. Oakland has the second-slowest 911 response time in the state.
All of this is an embarrassment to California Governor Gavin Newsom, and, worse, a threat to his presidential aspirations. So today, he dispatched 120 highway patrol officers to Oakland to bolster the city’s flailing police force. The Mayor welcomed the law enforcement surge, despite her calls to defund the police just 3 years ago.