Since I still have a landline (and for some reason still answer it even though most of my friends and family don’t even know the number), and I don’t have caller ID, and I apparently don’t have anything better to do than talk to pollsters, I end up answering telephone surveys from time to time. I’m generally happy to do it—since I voraciously consume poll results during contentious elections, I figure that it would be hypocritical for me not to answer questions when pollsters call. So on Friday, 20 minutes after I happened to have posted comments on some of the Oakland mayoral candidates, I found myself answering questions about the upcoming local elections. And less than 48 hours later, I found myself answering another set of questions from a different polling outfit.

If I try to remember all the questions verbatim, then I will inevitably get things wrong, but since I had an inquiry about who had taken the polls and whether they asked about all 10 candidates for mayor, I’ll try to summarize the surveys as best I can from memory. The first survey was about 5-10 minutes long (it felt like 15, but I wasn’t looking at the clock, and it probably wasn’t quite that long), and was conducted by a woman identifying herself as being with Mountain West Research (I thought she said Madden West, but when I googled for information about the firm, I discovered that Mountain West is a big telephone survey operation, so I assume that I misheard her.)

The poll seemed pretty standard: In a neutral tone of voice, the woman would read something (a candidate’s name, or a summary of a ballot initiative, or a general statement about fiscal policy) and then ask me to say whether I strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, or strongly disagree. The questions addressed everything from my ideological self-identification (I chose “very liberal”) to my assessment of the tax referendums (despite my self-identification as “very liberal,” I said I “somewhat opposed” most of the tax proposals on this fall’s ballot), to my opinions about some of the Mayoral candidates. (Quan: “somewhat unfavorable;” Perata: “somewhat unfavorable;” Kaplan: “somewhat favorable.”) I believe Joe Tuman might have been included also (if so, “somewhat favorable”), but frankly, I can’t remember for sure. I’m fairly sure that I was not asked to evaluate any of the other 6 candidates. I was also asked the approve/disapprove question about the Mayor and some of the city council members who are not running for mayor (I believe I was asked about Kernighan, who represents my district, and De la Fuente, Brooks and Reid, but not about Nadel or Brunner).

Other questions were more general, getting at the same issues addressed by the ballot measures, but slightly more abstractly. I can’t remember the exact wording, but there were questions along the lines of “The city of Oakland is expected to face a large budget deficit for the next fiscal year. Which of the following statements best describes your position: ‘I support balancing the budget by increasing revenue through additional taxation,’ or ‘I support balancing the budget by cutting spending’?” Another question was something like, “The city of Oakland has laid off about 80 police officers, and city officials say that they may have to lay off 150 more if they do not raise additional revenue. Would you support additional property taxes in order to prevent further layoffs?”

I was a bit surprised that the Mountain West survey also asked about my district’s city council race, just because I never expect much polling to be done in city council races. In addition to the question about whether I approve or disapprove of Councilmember Kernighan (“somewhat favorable”), I was asked about whether I approve or disapprove of her opponent, Jennifer Pae (“somewhat favorable,” although if “no opinion” had been a stated option I probably would have gone with that one, since I know almost nothing about her except that she’s a young mover and shaker, and comes across as very cheerful and enthusiastic on Twitter). I was asked which of the two I would vote for if the election were held today, and that was one of the few questions that I wouldn’t answer at all, because I really don’t know—I am not unhappy with Kernighan, but if I learn anything that makes me think Pae would be better, then I am open to persuasion. (If any readers care to weigh in below, then I’m all ears, since I assume that a lot of people are more familiar Pae than I am.)

That was about it for the Mountain West survey. After it was finally over, I asked the interviewer who had commissioned the poll, and she said (as they always do) that she didn’t know. All in all, it seemed like a typical, professionally done survey, and I couldn’t tell from the questions whether it was being done for a candidate, or a media organization of some kind (Can local media even afford to do expensive polling on local elections? Beats me), or a union, or…who knows.

The second survey, done by McGuire Research, was quite a different thing. It was much shorter, and let’s just say that the interviewer had a much less formal mien. That’s not to say that it was a push poll (that is to say, a poll which is designed more to influence the opinion of the electorate than to measure it), but the interviewer had a much more relaxed style, and oddly seemed to veer almost into small talk at times. As for whether this was done intentionally in order to subtly guide my opinions in a certain direction, or whether it was done intentionally in order to elicit more honest responses from the interviewees, or whether it was done unintentionally due to poor training, I won’t speculate, but it was unusual.

The questions were much more limited than the first survey’s, and as far as I remember, they all related to the mayoral race. I was asked whether I was familiar with Don Perata, Jean Quan, Rebecca Kaplan, Joe Tuman, and I believe Terence Candell and Marcie Hodge. It’s possible that he also asked about Don MacLeay or Greg Harland too (my memory is a sieve, and I didn’t take any notes), but I am pretty sure that Fields and Young weren’t mentioned at all. I was then asked whether I had favorable or unfavorable opinions of some of the candidates (again, I can’t remember exactly which ones—certainly the first four listed above, and maybe one or two others). I was also asked whether I knew that Ranked Choice Voting was going to be used in the November election (“Yes”) and which candidates I would put as my first, second and third choices if the election were held today.

The interviewer had used a pretty casual conversational tone throughout the interview, but I had chalked that up to his being a native English speaker, whereas the woman doing the first interview sounded like she was probably not a native English speaker. But at a few points during the survey, the interviewer from McGuire seemed to go a bit overboard in his informality. For instance, when I said (as I did in my post on Friday) that I would probably put Rebecca Kaplan as my first choice if the election were held today, he said offhandedly as he was noting it down, “Okay, Kaplan…lots of people seem to be saying Kaplan,” or something along those lines. Excuse me? Since when do people doing surveys for political polls tell the interviewees how other people have been answering the questions? My gut feeling is that he was not trying to influence me in any way, but it seemed like such an unprofessional thing for a surveyer to say in the middle of taking a poll that it did make me wonder.

That was the most striking example, but there were other moments where his chatty style seemed to border on the unprofessional. For instance, when I told him that I might just leave the third choice blank if the election were held today, he said something like, “okay, so you wouldn’t put any of the other candidates there, Candell or Marcie Hodge or Quan or anyone else…?” Again, I really didn’t get the feeling that he was pushing me to give particular answers, but it seemed a bit odd for him to start throwing out names like that.

I’m generally a skeptic, but not a conspiracy theorist, and my guess is that his informality was just a personality or training issue, and not anything more sinister. It seemed as if he had a list of candidates in front of him on a piece of paper or a computer screen so that he could mark down my choices, and he was just sort of thinking out loud as he glanced through the list. It was a bit strange, however, and people can draw their own conclusions. (The main reason it struck me is because these interviewers are always so determinedly lacking in personality, as if they are doing their best to imitate a robot when they read through their scripts. Being surveyed by a guy who sounded like a normal human being having a normal phone conversation was disarming!)

As I do whenever I am interviewed, I asked him at the end who had commissioned the poll, and he replied, as expected, that they are never told who has commissioned the poll so that they won’t bias the results. So there you have it. I did a half-assed Google search in case I could determine who was doing the polling, but as far as I know such information isn’t always easy to find, at least not until quarterly campaign spending disclosures are filed, which might show what campaigns have hired what polling firms (and even that might not shed a lot of light on things, however, because often a pollster will contract out the grunt work to a surveying firm such as Mountain West, so Mountain West or McGuire might not have been directly hired by the organization who had commissioned the poll.) If anyone happens to know who paid for the polls, I’d love to know, just to satisfy my own curiosity. Better yet would be to hear some actual polling data. There seems to be a widespread assumption that Perata, Quan and Kaplan are the only candidates with a serious chance, and I have no particular reason to doubt that, but like most assumptions, it would be nice to have more data to back it up

Over a year ago I posted this photograph from a vacant lot along the Oakland waterfront. One commenter suggested that it looked like a relic of the dying American economy. Another thought, more colorfully, that it was “maybe the last known hideout of a gang of Cotton Candy Carny Vendors on the run from the law.”

Whatever it evoked, the scene no longer exists. Construction crews have been working to expand neighboring Union Point Park, so this overgrown, debris-strewn lot has been transformed into tidily landscaped parkland, with a small stretch of the Bay Trail running through it. The graffiti-decorated concrete pipes have been replaced by new lampposts, landscaping and bike racks, and the cool (but deteriorating) boatworks building behind it will also be renovated and put to some use:

This project is funded by Measure DD, the bond measure passed by Oakland voters almost a decade ago—the same measure that is allowing for all the improvements around Lake Merritt, of which the redone parkland along the Lakeshore side is just one example:

Unfortunately, the canada geese have discovered the plush new carpets of grass since these photos were taken, so picnickers and sunbathers aren’t quite as plentiful as they were in the spring, but even so, this side of the park still looks better than it has in decades. (Other wonders of the Lake Merritt work: the smooth pavement and new bike lanes which have turned a bike ride on Lakeshore from a medieval ordeal into a pleasure, and the razing/rebuilding of the 12th street viaduct, which is so exciting that someone has created an entire blog just to document daily developments in the construction.)

And Measure DD projects aren’t the only positive developments around Oakland these days. In fact, there is exciting news on many fronts: Oakland’s plentiful new restaurants are getting approving attention from coast to coast; new bars, clubs and performance spaces continue to open at a furious clip; and the art scene continues to thrive. I see more bikes on the road than ever before, with a wider variety of riders on them. Even with Oakland’s high unemployment rate and shrinking police force, crime continues to be down by double-digit percentages compared with recent years in nearly every category except residential burglaries. In many ways, Oakland feels a lot like a city on the upswing.

Why talk about curses, then? Because despite all this good news, one can’t help but wonder if Oakland is on the verge of collapse. The city’s municipal finances are in terrible shape and projected to get much worse. The unemployment rate is said to be around 17%, but given the wide disparity between Oakland’s rich and poor neighborhoods, I wouldn’t be surprised if it is more like 50% in some areas. Oakland’s precarious financial situation and wealth disparities are, of course, just a microcosm of what we also see on a state, national and global level. And events as varied as the ongoing economic crisis, the BP oil spill, and the rise of Sarah Palin as a prominent political figure have made some of us wonder if prophets of doom like Dmitri Orlov or Jim Kunstler might not only be entertaining cranks, but also correct.

During this moment of instability and pervasive anxiety, here comes the race for mayor. Ten candidates have ultimately qualified for the ballot, and while none of them (with the exception of the minor candidate who openly espouses municipal bankruptcy) seem nervy enough to propose solutions commensurate with the city’s fiscal problems, the race does promise some entertainment value. We have the “Green” Party candidate who wants to abolish parking meters. We have one city councilmember who seems to think that helping to squander all the city’s money during the boom years makes her qualified to lead the city during these bust years. We have a former community college trustee whose best-known accomplishment was using her public credit card for over $4000 of personal spending, some of it in Las Vegas. We have a professor and political analyst who seems smart and sensible, but perhaps more eager to share the details of his preferences in baked goods than the details of his plan to cope with Oakland’s fiscal disaster. We have a veteran politico who was term-limited out of his state senate seat, but apparently held it long enough to leverage it into a lucrative longterm arrangement with the state’s extremely powerful prison guard’s union.

As an under-40 blogger with an interest in “alternative” transportation, I may be demographically doomed to vote for Rebecca Kaplan, but some of her proposals seem fantastical (which is not to say fantastic) and some of her recent actions, such as placing herself between a line of riot police and an unruly crowd after the Mehserle verdict, or voting in support of a liquor store in North Oakland, have made a lot of people wonder if she is perhaps a bit too eager to be all things to all people. (Then again, she’s an energetic and smart lesbian former rabbinical student and transportation wonk who did her undergrad at MIT, on whose campus I spent much of my early boyhood—I mean, what’s not to love, right?)

Despite the motley assortment of oddballs, insiders and longshots who are running for mayor, it’s hard for me personally to muster any enthusiasm about any of them, but the campaign will at least provide a fair amount of drama for the next few months. As for whether Oakland—and the state and the nation—will see a renaissance in coming years, or enter a tailspin of ecological, financial, and social collapse…we’ll just have to wait and see. Interesting times, indeed.

What do I think about his candidacy? It’s too soon to think much of anything: my own vote is certainly up for grabs, since my feelings about the current crop of candidates range from mild disappointment to horror, but Tuman’s most compelling attribute at the moment is what he lacks—that is, complicity in the fiascos which pass for state and local government in California these days. Tuman comes off as a fairly intelligent and well-spoken guy from the little I’ve seen of him on TV, but there’s more to running a municipal government than being smart and articulate. His website’s “issues and solutions” section is, in my view, unobjectionable but thin. (Increasing the Oakland Police Department’s size by more than 50% to 1100 officers is a nice goal, but on a day when more than 10 percent of Oakland’s police force was laid off, with further layoffs looking likely in a few months, it’ll take more than vague statements about reviewing compensation packages for new hires to convince me that Tuman has any great ideas for reversing the trend.) It’s mildly interesting to listen to him discussing the possibility of police layoffs on KCBS in late June, when he was commenting on city politics in his role as a disinterested analyst while he was presumably planning his entry into the Mayoral race behind the scenes at the same time.

At this point, I feel the same way I did in December: the only prospect that excites me in Oakland’s mayoral race is the possibility (a slim one, but a boy can always dream) that I might be ineligible to vote in it because I’ll no longer live in this mess of a city. There are some things I really like about Oakland—Arizmendi and the Lake Merritt pergola are apparently two that Joe Tuman and I share—but the more I pay attention to the city’s politics, the more disheartened I get. Maybe I’ll walk the dog down to Arizmendi in the morning, then head over to the Lake to see if Tuman has anything new or interesting to say at his press conference.

I wonder if the Whitman campaign’s incursion into Oakland is less about trying to win Oakland votes and more about sending a message to the Brown campaign that the erstwhile eBay CEO is prepared to spend whatever it takes to be the highest bidder in California’s gubernatorial auction—not that those two things are mutually exclusive, of course.

Liberal Oakland Mayoral Candidate Seeks Campaign Staff (oakland downtown)

Life-long leftist grass roots organizer and business woman considering bid in upcoming election.

In order to evaluate a logistical and thematic approach we are soliciting applicants for the positions of Treasurer, Publicist, and Community Liaison. Please review position descriptions below and submit your qualifications by email. In person meetings will be scheduled to for further discussion.

Treasurer: Will manage incoming contributions and campaign expenses as well as insuring compliance with regulations governing the reporting of both. Experience with campaign finance preferred.

Office Manager/Publicist: Will handle phone calls, correspondence, and headquarter establishment. Will also manage website and social networking presence. Competency in Twitter and Facebook a must. A high-quality camera is a plus. Excellent opportunity for a student of PR.

Community Liaison: Advisor to candidate on trending issues and position formulation. Will reach out to local groups for support, standing relationships with community organizations will be of the up most importance. Duties will include scheduling meetings, and coordinating a supporter’s network.

All positions will be on a part-time volunteer basis with future compensation dependent on fundraising success.

If you are dissatisfied with the current candidates for office and would like to take a stand and make a difference for a better Oakland please send an email with information about yourself and your vision.

Being Mayor of Oakland is a thankless job, and it won’t be getting any easier as the city careers toward a fiscal cliff, but apparently a lot of people want the gig: there are already more than half a dozen names in the hat, or hats in the ring, or whatever your preferred hat metaphor is. And no, I’m not signing up for this incipient campaign—at least not until the mystery candidate emerges from the shadows.

With that said, I did hope to discuss the specifics of his plan a bit more, but I simply ran out of time last night (also, the post was getting longer than I expected). As I wrote last night, most of the meeting was dedicated to a presentation of two documents: the “Strategic Plan Framework,” and a slide show which enumerates the ways in which the Police Department fails to live up to the goals presented in the Strategic Plan, and then repeats the information in the Strategic Plan about how Batts hopes to meet those goals. Both documents are very quick, very easy reads, so I recommend them to anyone in Oakland who wants a clear and simple presentation of what Batts’s priorities are.

I won’t summarize the presentation here, because it is already written in bullet point format in the documents, but Batts (along with Assistant Chief Howard Jordan and Scott Bryant, a strategic consultant who is advising Batts as he reworks the department) did elaborate on several of the topics, so I’ll relay some of that information here in case it is not widely known.

Before I get into any details, I want to mention two things that seemed to pervade every aspect of the meeting. One is Batts’s commitment to transparency, communication, and community involvement. Almost all public officials pay lip service to open government, and almost all of them fail to live up to it. Chief Batts, as far as I can tell, really means it, almost to the point of obsession. He has held dozens of meetings with citizens and organizations all over the city since he was appointed, and he urges residents to provide feedback via online surveys (add your 2 cents here) or by other means. He has reached out to the press and promised to hold regular press conferences. He added Public Information Officers so that the department can get information to the press and the public more quickly and effectively. He makes sure that information is being shared with the public promptly at crime scenes. The man is no dummy, and he knows that fostering good relations with the press and the public will make him personally popular, improve the city’s reputation, and also pay off with increased community cooperation in fighting crime. So there’s strategy and self-interest behind his outreach, but I also think that he truly believes all his talk about providing good service to the department’s “customers.”

The other thing that pervaded every aspect of the meeting was the staffing problem. Almost everything Batts said was placed in the context of explaining how he hoped to accomplish more with inadequate resources. For instance, he explained that he has ordered detectives to work patrol twice a month in order to help reduce 911 response times and provide more police presence in neighborhoods. This helps on the streets, but obviously it means that fewer manhours will be devoted to detective work. And with more officers on the street, more cases will be kicked up to the detectives, so the detectives’ workload could increase as they simultaneously have fewer hours to devote to investigating crimes. He is gambling—that’s his word, not mine—that the beefed up police presence on the streets will eventually pay off in lower numbers of crimes that need to be investigated, but it is a gamble, and clearly he would prefer to have more patrol officers and a full detective corps. He simply doesn’t have enough bodies, so he has to find new ways to make do with what he has.

Another example is 911 response times. Chief Batts displayed this disturbing graph of average response times to 911 calls, comparing Oakland to the norm:

This is an average, so in many cases, it takes far longer than 15 minutes for a cop to show up when someone calls 911 and reports a crime—Batts alluded to horror stories about people who have reported burglaries in the early afternoon, and then been woken up at 4 am by an officer who was finally showing up to take a report. (“Unacceptable” was a word that Batts and Bryant used several times during the presentation.) You can see in the graph that the bulk of the delay is caused because processing the call takes longer, and dispatching a unit takes longer. These are directly caused by a shortage of dispatchers and a shortage of officers on the streets. Batts said that a city like Oakland should have about 12 dispatchers on duty during peak hours (2 pm to midnight, roughly). Oakland usually has 6 dispatchers working during peak hours. He did note that 11 new dispatchers are about to be trained, which will nearly double the total amount (there are currently 15). This should help improve response times somewhat.

The more serious problem is the shortage of officers. The green area in the graph shows delay that is almost entirely caused by a lack of available units—dispatchers are ready to dispatch, but there are no officers ready to be dispatched. Unfortunately, this is extremely hard to address without a major increase in the number of sworn officers, and there are few prospects for any significant improvement in this area anytime soon—Oakland is already about 25 officers below the minimum number of sworn officers mandated by law (803) and Batts said the department loses an average of 4 to 5 officers a month due to attrition. I believe he said that there are two lateral academies scheduled for later in the year (lateral academies are short police academies for officers coming from other jurisdictions), and that he expects a full academy to occur in 2011 (I could have some of this wrong, because I didn’t take notes about everything). Those academies might help keep Oakland near 803 sworn officers, but Batts himself has said that 800 officers is far too small for a city of Oakland’s size and Oakland’s crime rate.

Batts also pointed out that because there is an endless backlog of 911 calls, it means that police officers in Oakland are almost never able to do any real patrolling—or what he called “hunting for crime” by driving up dark alleys, checking in on parolees, and so on. Ideally, he believes that 30% of an officer’s time should be spent on that sort of stuff; in Oakland at the moment, the percentage of time spent on that sort of stuff is essentially zero.

Chief Batts is working on ways to have civilian employees take over some of the desk duties that sworn officers now do, so that he can get more officers out on the streets, but it’s hard to imagine that you can free up a significant number of officers that way. Batts, despite his general candor, was extremely careful last night not to wade into the perennial debate about how to pay for more officers. In the context of answering a question about CompStat, he pointed out that while he is friendly with Bill Bratton and believes strongly in using time-sensitive data analysis as a tool, Oakland is not New York, and indeed, the West Coast is not the East Coast. He noted that eastern cities typically have much larger police forces per capita, but officers are less well paid. He pointed out that New York has about 40,000 police officers and joked, “That’s an army! I could take over the world if I had 40,000 officers!” Despite those observations and the frequent references to limited resources, Batts strenuously avoided expressing any judgments about funding decisions, or the high salaries and generous benefits and pensions that OPD officers receive.

To his credit, Batts never made any effort to use the understaffing of the OPD as an excuse for not being able to accomplish his “vision” of turning Oakland into one of the safest large cities in California by 2015. Instead of whining about how he can’t get anything done with only 800 cops, he talks about the staffing problems as if they are simply a fact of life that he needs to work with. That unwillingness to pass the buck or make excuses is one quality that people seem to find so refreshing.

I’m getting depressed just writing about this stuff, so I should probably move on to the more positive aspects of the meeting. Assistant Chief Jordan reminded people that crime was down 37 percent in January compared to January 2009, and crime is down 31 percent for the year to date. Oakland had 7 homicides through the end of February, compared to 9 in 2009 and many more in 2008. Chief Batts said at one point that the D.A. is bringing more cases, so I assume that means that even as the number of crimes committed has been declining, the number of crimes solved has been rising. I don’t want to read too much into two months of statistics, but I’d certainly rather have the numbers trending lower instead of higher.

Chief Batts has some other priorities which I won’t go into here, since I don’t have anything to add beyond what is in the presentation. He is very interested, for example, in strengthening ties with neighboring cities in order to address some of the regional problems that cause Oakland’s violent crime—the movement of drugs and guns being two major examples. He wants to move to a “Total Community Policing” model, basically meaning that instead of having certain officers assigned to work closely with communities while most officers chase 911 calls, he wants to move toward having all OPD officers work more closely with the communities in their beats.

Chief Batts also seems to believe that a major cultural change has to occur both within the OPD, and out in the community, although I’m not sure he would use that phrase. Morale is incredibly low among OPD staff, according to survey results that appear in the slide show, and the citizenry’s confidence in the OPD is also quite low. Batts is determined to change both of those things, and that is where I think that his leadership qualities may play an important role—deploying resources wisely is one thing, but inspiring confidence among one’s staff and the general public are something else entirely. If Batts fails on either front, then the other one alone might not be enough to really change anything. If he succeeds on both fronts, however, then his goal of making Oakland one of the safest cities in California by 2015 might not be quite as far-fetched as it seems.

Overall, I suspect that most civilians left the meeting feeling more optimistic than they did when they entered. I know that I did—the bad news was mostly old news, and the more recent developments (about the continued drop in crime this year, and the specific strategies that Batts is employing) sound like good places to start. Chief Batts strikes me as a strong leader, but not the kind of strong leader who is so deeply insecure that he cannot delegate properly or share credit where it is due or defer to those who may have more expertise or better ideas about a particular subject. (Did I mention Rudy Giuliani in last night’s post? Ah yes, I did.) And he seems very serious about his goal of dramatically improving the relationship between the department and the community—last night’s meeting was just one example of his efforts to foster collaboration and cooperation instead of division. I would normally be too lazy to write all this up in a long (and somewhat unstructured) blog post, but I figure the least I can do to repay Batts’s efforts to reach out to the public is to help him spread the word. Remember, there are still two more meetings next week, one in West Oakland on Wednesday and in San Antonio on Thursday, and the Chief of Police wants to hear your thoughts and concerns—how often does that happen?

“Impressive.” The word seems to pop up whenever anyone talks about Chief Batts, and before I attended tonight’s meeting, I was determined to avoid that word if I wrote anything about it. I had seen snippets of him speaking at press conferences, and I had read about his success in reducing crime in Long Beach, and I had seen his admirably candid assessment of Oakland’s crime problem in his “strategic plan framework,” but I’m a skeptic by nature, and I also saw some things that made me nervous: in several different interviews or appearances, I had heard Chief Batts say that Oakland’s residents are the police department’s customers, and the department’s mission should be to provide excellent service to its customers. That sounded, to me, like the sort of pabulum that one might pick up at management seminars, and I was slightly worried that tonight’s meeting would be full of meaningless jargon about “partnering with our customers” in order to “advance a shared vision of Oakland” and blah blah blah.

To be sure, Chief Batts is a very polished public speaker, and I suspect that he has read a book or two (or fifty) by management and leadership gurus, but I was happily surprised to find that Chief Batts is frank, direct, and plain-spoken. When people ask him questions, he listens carefully, and then he gives a real answer. If he doesn’t want to answer a question, then he’ll explain why he’s not answering the question. If he gets interrupted while he’s answering your question, then he’ll make a point of returning to you later and giving you a full answer. That forthrightness alone is refreshing, in a city whose last police chief specialized in denying the extent of Oakland’s crime problems, and making excuses for the problems that he couldn’t plausibly deny. A taste of Batts’s candor can be seen in his assessment of Oakland’s current situation in the introduction to the strategic plan:

Oakland is not a safe community — in fact it is among the least safe and most violent in the US. Services provided to the Community by the Police Department are nowhere near the standards that should be expected. Many good people in the Community do not trust the Police Department and live in fear of the police as well as of criminals. Collaboration between the Police Department and the Community has not met Community expectations.

As I have said on many occasions, the Oakland Police Department’s management and service delivery systems are broken. The Department is clearly under‐resourced given the level of crime in Oakland and the demand for police services. Basic equipment needed for Department personnel to do their jobs, such as police vehicles, is inadequate. The Department lacks basic police management tools and processes that would allow its limited resources to be focused most effectively. As a result, the morale of the Department’s personnel is very low; the fact that they are still able and willing to provide services given the lack of support is commendable.

It’s no wonder that phrases like “breath of fresh air” tend to appear when people talk about Chief Batts: I can’t overestimate how startling it is to have the police chief acknowledge what pretty much everyone who lives in Oakland has believed for years. Much of tonight’s presentation was devoted to an elaboration on the myriad ways in which Oakland is “not a safe community” and OPD’s “management and service delivery systems are broken.” The full slide show can be seen here; it’s a sobering assessment, detailing high crime rates, slow response times for 911 calls, low clearance rates, low morale among OPD staff, and an enormous backlog in evidence analysis (CSI:Oakland would be a dull show indeed, given the crime lab’s backlog of 775 unexamined fingerprints, 1052 untested DNA samples, etc). Here is one slide that Batts showed tonight:

Having the chief of police show that graph at a community meeting is refreshing enough, but even more remarkable is having the chief of police show that slide as he explains his goal that “by the Year 2015, Oakland is one of the safest large cities in California — both in reality and perception.” I have serious doubts about whether that’s an achievable objective, but I’m glad to have a chief of police who wants to try.

In addition to his candor and his high aspirations, Chief Batts impresses with his leadership. I use that word advisedly, and somewhat reluctantly—after having lived under Rudy Giuliani’s reign, I’m well aware that the flip side of decisive action and accountability can often be vindictiveness, capriciousness, and grandiosity. When one spends some time in a room with Chief Batts, however, reaching for the word “leadership” is nearly unavoidable. There are some people who keep one’s attention by quietly exuding competence and authority, and Batts is one of them. A former boss of mine once described meeting with Colin Powell, and my boss said that he (who had met a lot of powerful men, and was in fact a pretty powerful man himself) had never met someone who so easily commanded one’s attention, not because of his high status or large size, but simply by carrying himself in a certain way. (Malcolm Gladwell has written interestingly about this quality in the New Yorker.)

There’s some of that in Chief Batts—when he speaks, you want to listen, and when he tells you that he can’t make Oakland into a better, safer city without your help, then you want to know where to sign up. I know I may sound like a schoolgirl with a crush here, and I don’t want to sound naive about whether he will actually be able to accomplish a lot in this mess of a city, but seeing Batts tonight reminded me of how rare it really is to encounter compelling leaders.

In the question and answer session that followed the presentation, Batts paid close attention to the questions, answered them honestly and thoughtfully, and seemed to make a good impression on the audience. Then, as the Q-and-A was wrapping up, someone asked a question about what we could do about the chronic understaffing of the police department, and Batts deferred to Councilmember Jean Quan, saying that issues of funding and taxation are for his bosses to decide, not him. Quan, who is running for mayor, strikes me as a nice woman, and she certainly knows far more about the city budget than I do, but the contrast with Batts was inescapable. She stood in front of the room for five minutes talking about how much they’ve already had to cut from the budget, and about how much it would cost to hire more police, and about how much of the city’s funds are untouchable, and so on. I certainly don’t want to diminish the difficulties faced by Oakland’s elected officials as they try to keep the city functioning, but her answer was shapeless and meandering, and people literally started getting out of their seats and leaving as she spoke (in her defense, it was getting late). All I could think was, “This person wants to be the mayor? Oh, dear, we’re in trouble.”

Batts certainly has his work cut out for him, and only time will tell how much of an impact his strategies will have on public safety in Oakland, but sitting there listening to him, I was aware, as I’ve rarely been aware before, of the difference that strong, competent leadership can make. I’m curious to know how members of the OPD feel about him. My sense is that he is the kind of person that people want to work for: he preaches openness and transparency, he encourages discussion and new ideas, he clearly communicates his goals and his expectations for the department, he believes in encouraging practices that work and discarding practices that don’t work, he is a strong advocate of using empirical data to measure the department’s success, and perhaps most importantly, he has that ineffable quality that makes you want to help him succeed, and makes you believe that it might be possible.

Is all that enough to really turn Oakland’s crime problem around and make our city “one of the safest large cities in California” within five years? I really have no idea—as I said above, I have some serious doubts. An aura of competence and a vague strategic plan are all well and good, but we’ll just have to see whether he can translate that into a safer, less divided city. That said, I’ve been contemplating leaving this town lately, and as I listened to Chief Batts tonight, I felt, for the first time in months, a strong urge to stick around and help make this city better. We’ll see if that feeling lasts more than a few hours, but it’s nice to feel, at least for a while, that someone with some actual leadership qualities has come to Oakland. [Update: I wrote a second longish blog post summarizing some of the specific content of Batts's presentation, which you can find here.]

There are more meetings coming up in other neighborhoods, and I encourage people to attend them. (And none of them are way up a steep hill!) I tend not to be much of a meeting-goer myself, but I’m glad I went to this one. And if you think I’ve been too wowed by Batts’s charisma, then that’s all the more reason to go: you can ask him some hard questions yourself, and see how he answers them. Here are the remaining meetings this week and next:

Thursday, March 4, 2010

• East Oakland Senior Center
• 9255 Edes Ave., Oakland
• 6:30 – 8:00 pm

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

• Willie Key Recreation Center
• 3131 Union St., Oakland
• 6:30 – 8:00 pm

Thursday, March 11, 2010

• Manzanita Recreation Center
• 2701 22nd Ave., Oakland
• 6:30 – 8:00 pm

Seriously, enough is enough! If it were swine flu or a defective Toyota part or al Qaeda which was causing this level of ongoing slaughter in the United States, then it would be considered a national crisis. When it’s stupid or reckless or inattentive drivers who are causing this mayhem, however, the problem is mostly dismissed with a shrug and the explanation that these are just “tragic accidents.”

I understand why these individual incidents don’t make big headlines. (The Oakland hit and run death was relegated to the “News Briefs” on page 6 of yesterday’s Oakland Tribune; homicides sometimes get the same treatment—when these tragedies become routine, then they no longer qualify as big news.) And I also understand, legally speaking, why drivers who hit pedestrians (or bicyclists) are rarely held responsible for their negligence—these are, after all, “just accidents,” as the police often say when they explain why no one is being charged in these cases. Despite what it may feel like when one is walking or biking around American cities these days, the overwhelming majority of automobile drivers do not actually want to hit anyone. And the fact that responsibility for all these pedestrian deaths and injuries is borne by a diffuse array of individual drivers, rather than a single entity like a car company or a terrorist group, makes it seem less like a systematic problem and more like a random set of unavoidable tragedies.

It is a systematic problem, however. I don’t know precisely what perverse set of historical developments got us where we are today, but the fact is that we as a society have taken most of our public space and turned it over to millions of absent-minded or distracted or careless people who are each controlling about a ton of fast-moving metal. In my opinion, this is completely insane. It’s no wonder that so few people walk anywhere in most parts of the country!

And not only have we turned over most of our urban public space to people in cars, but we then do a lousy job of ensuring that they drive responsibly. Any 16-year-old who can do a three point turn can get a license to kill—excuse me, I mean a license to drive. Drunk drivers, who are essentially broadcasting to the world the message that they do not really care if they take the life of another human being, are usually allowed to get behind the wheel a few months after getting a DUI—and we usually don’t even take their cars away, so these people who have already displayed a lack of concern for obeying the law and for other people’s safety can easily get behind the wheel and drive to their favorite bar again, suspended license be damned.

It’s not just pedestrians and bicyclists who are in danger from this absurd set of circumstances—we just happen to be the most vulnerable, since we aren’t ensconced in protective metal cages ourselves. Roughly 40,000 Americans die in car crashes every year, and many, perhaps most, of those crashes would not occur if drivers simply slowed down a little bit and watched where they were going. I don’t believe that most automobile drivers are more indifferent to human life than other people, but they just happen to be piloting very dangerous, fast-moving objects with minimal training. (Auden wrote that “indifference is the least/We have to dread from man or beast,” but if he had spent a few hours riding a bike around a modern American city, he might have changed his mind about that.)

It’s about time that politicians (aided by the police, prosecutors, etc.) undertook a serious effort to make people realize that recklessly endangering the lives of other people will not be tolerated anymore. Even baby steps would be a nice start, such as aggressively ticketing all the oblivious drivers who blithely cruise through intersections while people are in crosswalks, forcing the walkers to jump back to the curb—if the risk of killing pedestrians isn’t enough to make drivers pay attention, then maybe a few moving violations will start to do the trick.

Of course I had no inkling at the time about the cruel twist of fate that would cause such a fumble—the fact that it is Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat which is endangering the passage of any kind of health care reform is horrifying, given that the expansion of health care to the poor and uninsured was Kennedy’s life’s work. So what should be done now that the possibility of getting any compromise bill past another Republican filibuster attempt in the Senate is gone? I’m no expert in health care legislation, and I won’t pretend to understand the details of the legislation the Senate passed, but I trust people who do understand the details, like Jonathan Cohn of the New Republic, or Paul Krugman of the New York Times, or Dean Baker and Jacob Hacker and others who are urging Democrats in the House of Representatives to pass the Senate Bill as it is, so that it could go straight to President Obama for his signature without having to pass through the Senate gauntlet again.

In an ideal world, I would personally favor a much more socialized health care system, but we don’t live in an ideal world, or an ideal country—we live in a country where Scott Brown can be elected to the Senate in Massachusetts, and Sarah Palin can be the Vice Presidential candidate of one of the two major parties. If there is any time to set idealism aside and take an incremental step in the right direction, then this seems like it—tens of millions of Americans lack health insurance, resulting in untreated preventable illnesses, medical bankruptcies, and tens of thousands of preventable deaths every year. (If terrorism resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans every year, both parties in Congress would be falling over each other in their rush to do something about it; when our inadequate health care system results in the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans every year, one party dithers and squabbles, while the other party just obstructs every effort at reform.)

I wrote to Congresswoman Barbara Lee via her house.gov web page today (letter reprinted below), and called her office as well. The aide I spoke to on the phone told me that Lee had not made a decision on whether she would be willing to support the flawed Senate bill, but said that they were getting a lot of feedback from constituents. I told him that this seemed likely to be the only real opportunity to pass any kind of significant health care reform for the foreseeable future, and that I urge Lee to help make sure that Democrats in the House of Representatives do not miss this chance. I encourage other people to contact Congresswoman Lee (or whoever your representative is) and tell her staff that this is not the time to hold out for a better bill, or to shelve health care reform until some other year—if it was this difficult to get inadequate legislation through the Senate with a filibuster-proof supermajority, then “progressive” Democrats are crazy if they think that they will be able to get something better passed in the near future. Barbara Lee may not have to worry about her own re-election, but opposing the Senate bill because it is inadequate is not standing on principle—it is supporting the status quo.

The phone number of Lee’s Washington office is (202) 225-2661, and her staff eagerly await your calls.

Here is a copy of the email I sent through Lee’s website, typos and all. I should have crafted it offline instead of trying to compose it on the fly inside the form on her website, but I pretty much managed to say what I wanted to say:

Dear Congresswoman Lee,

I am concerned that if Congress does not enact the health care reforms currently on the table, then significant health care legislation with not be passed for years and probably decades. I know that the Senate bill is very imperfect, but the status quo is simply unacceptable: tens of millions of Americans have no insurance, resulting in unnecessary deaths, expensive emergency-room visits, and medical-related bankruptcies. This is a disaster! I am appalled that Democratic members of congress are on the verge of letting this unique opportunity to enact real reform pass by.

Democratic majorities in the Senate and the House are unlikely to be this large in coming years, so the notion that it is better to wait and try to pass better legislation in coming months or years strikes me as wishful thinking. This may be the only chance to take a significant step in the right direction on health care reform, and if this opportunity passes, then Democrats in Congress will share responsibility for all the unnecessary deaths and bankruptcies that we see in the future.

Please do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I urge you to do everything in your power to pass the Senate health care reform bill and get it on President Obama’s desk. Please let me know where you stand on this once-in-a-generation chance to finally do something about our awful current health care system.

Sincerely,