February 6th, 2021
By Joshua Patstone, A Letter to the Editor
With the help of community members and groups such as Black Minds Matter Peralta (BMMP), the Board of Trustees has reached a tremendous milestone by eliminating the contract with the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department (ACSO). Student voices have been heard. The sheriff’s department now has 3.4 million dollars less to fuel a campaign of militarization and racialized violence. Peralta is setting a national precedent for other districts and municipalities to follow.
Peralta now has the goal of replacing police with alternative means of ensuring campus safety. The district is currently in the process of contracting three new security firms. This new transition is being widely accepted by the public and shows much promise, but the progress has been met with push back. There is a growing number of voices, specifically media outlets, that I believe are engaging in irresponsible, biased reporting while providing little to no constructive contribution.
In late December, KTVU news took the liberty of covering Peralta’s situation in a manner that obscures the hopeful reality and exacerbates existing anxieties surrounding the topic of police and crime. KTVU’s report on the transition bears the overly suspenseful title of, “Questions arise over unarmed security at Peralta Colleges” . The report begins by stating that “some wonder if the District moved too quickly”. It goes on to list overly dramatized concerns regarding the contracts, while failing to acknowledge the overwhelming support shown by students and faculty at the board meetings. There was, though, a brief moment of positivity in the 5 second sound bites given to both Chancellor Carla Walter and Trustee Linda Handy, the only people of color in the report, who ensured that the transition is both secure and supported by the majority. But this quick sound bite was outnumbered by the interviews with the Sheriff’s office and other Peralta citizens who appeared to express a tone of apprehension and fear. I believe the report was clearly biased towards the police and did not reflect the popular opinion at Peralta, nor did it represent the diverse demographic of students who are actually affected by police violence. To me, this is yet another example of how conservative the media remains at the expense of the well-being of the population.
There has, thankfully, been responsible reporting at the Peralta Citizen. Staff writer Brisa Santana did a fabulous job in giving voice to the hard-working advocates at Peralta, particularly within the Black Minds Matter group. The efforts of these advocates are seldom acknowledged and often taken for granted, but Brisa was able to capture the sentiment of the students and faculty on campus. She highlighted the fact that the Holistic Safety Action Plan has been endorsed by the Academic Senate at Laney College. She reminded the readers of why and how this movement for justice transpired. Unlike KTVU, she was able to give credible evidence and concrete data supporting the problem of policing at schools. Brisa’s brilliance is an example for everyone in the movement for justice to follow.
I believe that Peralta is a safer and more respectable institution without a Sheriff’s contract. Even if we were to respect the idea of criminality and legitimize the logic of the criminal justice system, a contract with law enforcement to me would still be an irrational approach to campus safety and a complete waste of funds. According to the “Personal Safety Handbook” issued by the Peralta Community College district, which documents crime statistics on campus each year, crime at Peralta is not a common occurrence. And even with the rare occurrences of crime at Peralta, police mostly appear after the crime has been committed and are only useful for completing paperwork and facilitating police reports. It is hardly a task worthy of 3.4 million dollars. The district could have easily avoided spending millions of dollars each year by simply dialing 911 during an emergency. Fires and medical emergencies are very, if not more, likely to occur on campus than crime, yet the district does not have contracts with the fire department and EMTs. Why did we risk the safety of students and waste resources by contracting the Sheriff’s Department? We need to critically think about why crime occurs in the first place and why we have such a dependence on law enforcement and methods of punishment. We should all work to attain an in-depth, historical analysis on the role of policing in our community, so we can make rational decisions regarding public safety. Easing our anxieties and taking an approach of optimism and rationality is the best way to ensure everyone’s well-being for years to come.
What would be irresponsible would be to defund the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office and replace them with a much higher priced alternative with no history, no licenses, and no appropriate training who appear to be intimately associated with the activists and politicians who pushed to defund the police.
There are clear signs that the RFP was fraudulent (including Peralta’s unwillingness to release RFP documents under an FOI request) and that the groups on the receiving end orchestrated “Defund the Police” with the goal of rerouting money to themselves and their political allies.
CRC, one of the recipients of Peralta’s largesse and as reported by The Citizen, is run by the husband of a recently elected City Councilmember. He appeared in video this summer working up the crowd and, with much profanity, equating violent and non-violent protest as equally reasonable means to the same end. That end has come into focus at Peralta. It involves seven figure contracts flowing to him.
And the link doesn’t stop there. He also co-founded APTP, the group that has been active organizing most of the protests and political actions as well as the destruction of much of downtown Oakland last summer. This small group at the core of the “Defund the Police” push appears to have set themselves up to be the big winners.
They have conveniently set up subsidiary organizations that money can be routed to instead of the police. It looks like CRC is one of these. MH First is likely another. The politicians are actively encouraging functions that just happen to overlap with these newly minted non-profits be removed from the police and given to community organizations. It will be interesting to see who Zulu, the organization that appeared out of nowhere to receive one of the Peralta contracts, is tied to.
This is all being actively promoted at a much larger level in Oakland by Councilmembers Nikki Fortunato-Bas, Carroll Fife, and Rebecca Kaplan who have allied themselves with Cat Brooks of APTP fame and are actively pushing dramatic cuts to OPD despite protests from communities of color on the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force and the consistent polling of Oakland residents that indicates nearly 3 in 4 would like to see greater police presence, greater investment in investigation, and greater enforcement. These preferences for MORE police have been reiterated by five Black members of the RPSTF who represent the areas of Oakland plagued by violence and the recent rapid escalation of homicides and shootings.
In short, the safety of students and the residents of Oakland is being compromised for personal political and financial gain. ACSO was cheaper, better trained, and had a strong track record as evidenced by the low level of crime on campus. But, ACSO doesn’t provide the opportunity for self-dealing. #DefundThePolice does.
The Chronicle and The Citizen have it right.
Defund the Police was never about racial justice. It’s about profiteering.
Thanks to The Citizen, the links between APTP’s Defund the Police push and the beneficiaries of the Peralta contracts became much more public than some would probably have liked. They were caught with their hand in the cookie jar.
Never underestimate the pull of money and power, particularly when you can hide those motivations beneath a social justice facade. Students make great unwitting pawns in political power plays. Welcome to the cynical world of modern politics.
The Citizen’s breaking of this story is amazing and above and beyond student journalism. If they rapidly follow it where it leads and report if fully and fearlessly, it will likely be one of the most impactful bits of reporting by a student publication in the past 50 years.
This is not just responsible reporting.
It is brilliant reporting.
You are right, we should never underestimate the pull of money and power. The fact is that states and municipalities carry overwhelming debt owned by private equity and in order to pay off their debt, governments authorize police to generate revenue through extraction. This practice mostly affects mostly marginalized communities, which is why we constantly see unarmed Black people being targeted by law enforcement. When people put in the effort to critically think and pull at these strings, they are able to see how deeply connected the police are to the financial power structure that dominates our society. If you want to seriously talk about the problem of corruption and financial gain, you need to first consider law enforcement and its relation to finance and class conflict. If people are truly concerned with resources being siphoned from the public, their energy should be directed at the rich and powerful and their private security force, not groups like APTP and CRC. APTP was founded in response to police brutality, the police were founded in order to union bust and patrol slaves. Who is the real threat?
This is not a coherent take. If the police are actually revenue generating as you claim, then defunding them would result in less money to spend, not more.
The police also were not founded in order to union bust and patrol slaves. Almost every large urban society has had a police force going all the way back to the ancient Egyptians. In the US, the first police forces were in New England, and generally formed around businesses trying to protect their warehouses from theft at night.
ACSO was not patrolling Peralta because of class conflict, nor were they a private security force for the rich and powerful. They protected students mostly from theft and violence from other students and served as a deterrent protecting the student body from the lucrative businesses of stealing bikes, laptops, and cell phones.
OPD spends almost all of its resources and most of its effort protecting high crime neighborhoods, not the wealthy. The wealthy have very little crime to deal with and, in the absence of police, pay for private security. Low income communities do not have that option.
The real threat is a lack of information, just as it was on January 6th. People are being led astray with radical talk, bad actors, and social media that doesn’t come close to aligning with the facts.
If you buy in to APTP’s marketing, you end up doing things like replacing a highly trained, very professional security organization with amateurs and grifters who cost nearly twice as much. If you repeat this in Oakland, you get a lot of people killed.
APTP is not coming to save Peralta from the (non-existent) rampant police brutality that plagued its campuses.
They’re coming to make a buck.
I’m sorry, I’ve lived in a “high crime” neighborhood all my life and the police DO NOT protect us. People resort to crime because they lack the resources to survive. The punitive justice system has proven to exacerbate crime and throw people into a cycle of recidivism. Instead of funding something that clearly does not work, why don’t we use those resources to address the root causes of crime which is mostly poverty.
Logically and historical this analysis is incorrect and superficial. The Egyptians did not have an official police force. Many African and indigenous civilization had a more advanced and community driven approach to safety. You cannot justify policing by saying that it has historical roots in many societies of the past. By that logic, slavery is justified since many large urban societies of the past owned slaves. We need to look past our insecurities and fears and start thinking of courageous ways to address harm in our community.
Also, there is a common consensus amongst social scientists that profit and policing are connected. The comment you were addressing is factually correct in many aspects. I would encourage all of my Peralta community to put a little more effort in forming a more sophisticated analysis.
The point being made was not that police are justified by their historical roots, but that the claim that policing evolved from slave patrols is not factual. If you have paid for a course at Peralta where a professor made this assertion, ask for your money back. It’s simply not true.
Police have always existed in some form in urban communities to protect both people and property. Policing has evolved for thousands of years. Everything from the badges to the uniforms to the name to the role itself are present in European pre-colonial society.
Police absolutely DO protect the community, and particularly high crime areas. Understaffed police do a meager job of it, like any understaffed organization. But increasing police patrols, budgets, and investigation almost inevitably result in reduced crime.
People are less likely to commit crime when they expect to be caught or have already been caught. Since the 1970’s crime has fallen precipitously, and the greatest benefit of that reduction has been disproportionately felt by low income communities.
To argue that policing results in recidivism is true, but a truism. Without enforcement, there is no opportunity for recidivism. There is just persistent crime. Persistent, uninterrupted crime is not an improvement on interrupted crime with partial recidivism.
Profit and policing ARE connected as you state. Without effective policing, communities are placed in a state of constant loss from which it is impossible to profit. Individuals and companies lose what they make to those who are free to take it.
Rather than purchasing one car window, you purchase five or six to replace those lost to auto burglary. Rather than purchasing one phone, you purchase another after the first is stolen. Rather than purchasing one bicycle, you purchase a few. Rather than investing in yourself, you invest in alarms and locks, barred windows and monthly security fees.
The root cause of crime is that crime is far more profitable than earning a living legally. And it always will be. The only way to address that is policing.
It will always be quicker to steal an iPhone or a laptop than to save up to buy one. It will always be more profitable to deal drugs than to sell hamburgers. The root cause of crime is that it’s easier and more profitable than legal behavior. Most crime is committed by a small percentage of the populace who make a lot more money than you or I will ever make.
The police exist to reverse this inevitability. In the absence of police, crime pays.
And those on Peralta’s campuses will now get to learn that first hand.
I’m a Peralta student who WANTS the police on campus. This letter doesn’t speak for all of the students. I am a person of color and this makes me worried. I have other friends too who are people of color that don’t like this change. Removing the police if I’m correct is costing the district more. Why spend more money for unarmed security when we could have armed police for cheaper???
With the rising crime in Chinatown down the street, why would I ever want to come back to Laney College or any of the other schools. I’m going to say it like this, since there’s no police to protect me at Peralta, I’m going to go to another district that will. I guess I’m enrolling to DVC or Chabot next fall. Peace out, Peralta
What’s this letter about? Is it about the Peralta Citizen’s reporting that got picked up by KTVU or that Black Minds Matter were not involved in the story?
The Peralta Citizen’s reporting of the security firms had nothing to do with Black Minds Matter. Maybe if they wanted to add perspective of the change in a follow up of the aftermath that could have been done but the piece written by Santana gave Black Minds Matter plenty of perspective and a platform to promote their movement. I think this letter is more of a complaint than a concern. I used to be a part of Peralta faculty and the Peralta Citizen didn’t reach out to me or any of my associates for comment. You don’t see me and many other Peralta community members writing a letter to the editor because they didn’t reach out. This is ridiculous.
But maybe I should write a letter to praise the excellent and incredible reporting they have done since the change in leadership. Or I could write one on how this letter doesn’t know what it even stands for. I’m no journalist but know better than to submit something I clearly know nothing about.
This anti police approach will never be the voice of any majority but those who tend to be the loudest and most disruptive. I wouldn’t have thought getting laid off, would be a great thing but leaving this district and no longer having to deal with the drama is relieving.
Peralta Citizen keep doing what you’re doing and don’t let haters get in the way of your work. PCCD thanks you for your coverage.