Newsom’s hands-on approach to crime in California cities gains critics in Oakland

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s letter to Oakland city leaders last month urging them to change the city’s policy on police vehicle chases seemed out of the ordinary: a governor weighing in forcefully on a somewhat-obscure element of local policing.

But it’s part of a larger, slowly unfolding effort to exert state influence on law enforcement in Oakland and other California cities as crime concerns rise during an election year. In the past six months, Newsom has deployed California Highway Patrol officers to Oakland, then quadrupled their shifts; sent National Guard prosecutors to help the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office with drug cases, then chastised District Attorney Pamela Price for not accepting the assistance quickly enough.

The state intervention — which includes extra deployments of California Highway Patrol officers, National Guard lawyers, or both in Oakland, San Francisco, Bakersfield and Riverside — plays well with some worried residents and business owners. And it may help fend off right-wing critiques of California as a liberal dystopia. But it has drawn criticism from police accountability groups and privacy experts concerned about the effect on residents, especially communities of color.

“We’re a charter city. We have self rule,” said Brian Hofer, who chairs Oakland’s Privacy Advisory Commission, which recommends policy to the city on technology and privacy rights, including police surveillance. “We certainly need financial help, but we do not need this hostile takeover from Sacramento.”

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As California’s political pendulum swings back toward tough-on-crime policies, the governor has tasked highway patrol officers with cracking down on auto, retail and cargo theft in Bakersfield, and fentanyl dealing in San Francisco. Oakland, however, has drawn the bulk of the state attention.

The Highway Patrol in Oakland

The city’s scandal-plagued police department already has operated under the oversight of a federal monitor for the past two decades. Violent crime rose by more than 20% in 2023, before dropping again in the first half of 2024, according to data from the police department and the Major Cities Chiefs Association. Gentrification has brought new waves of residents with different expectations about safety and policing.

“Oakland is so fractured right now,” said Hofer. “Fifty percent (of residents) think the CHP should be here and running the show because Oakland City Hall can’t manage itself. The other 50% totally resent this.”

Newsom has called the California Highway Patrol “the Swiss Army knife of law enforcement in the state,” and said the agency’s job in Oakland is “not to substitute, but to support” the work of city officials. He’s said the surge is temporary and will last into November.

“We’re encouraged by local reporting that crime is going down,” Newsom spokesperson Tara Gallegos said Friday. “It’s a step in the right direction for the Oakland community, but there is more work to do.”

Since the highway patrol began surge operations in Oakland in February, the agency — tasked with helping patrol the city’s crime and traffic accident hotspots — said it has made 747 arrests, recovered more than 1,500 stolen vehicles and seized 74 guns as of Friday. Some police watchdogs expressed skepticism about those numbers; CalMatters requested documentation of the arrests and seizures but did not receive it by press time. A spokesperson for Alameda County District Attorney Price said her office has received 11 cases connected to the highway patrol surge for prosecution. “Their numbers obviously don’t match our numbers,” Price told reporters earlier this month.

The inability to agree even on basic data comes at a politically fraught and contradictory moment for criminal justice policy in Oakland and California. Price and Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao both face recall campaigns backed by coalitions of residents, business owners and a deep-pocketed Piedmont hedge fund manager, who say they’ve failed to keep residents safe. Californians will vote in November on a ballot measure that would toughen sentences for property and drug crimes.

Meanwhile, the latest crime statistics from both Oakland and California show property crime trending downward and well below historic highs, mirroring a nationwide pattern.

James Burch, a spokesperson for the Anti Police-Terror Project, said community activists see a mismatch between the specific problems plaguing Oakland and the highway patrol’s historic emphasis on traffic stops and recovering stolen vehicles.

“We need to figure out how to support small businesses, especially those getting broken into, and we need to stop the flow of gun violence on our streets,” he said. “We don’t see CHP having the skills, the experience, the technical know-how to address these issues.”

Instead, Burch argued, the city should invest more heavily in community violence-prevention programs that support those most likely to be involved in gun crimes to choose a different path.

One such program in Oakland, Operation Ceasefire, was scaled back during the pandemic but city officials say they have revived it this year.

At a July press conference, Newsom said a highway patrol crackdown on things like sideshows and DUIs can help free up local law enforcement to focus on other crimes. And Oakland Police Chief Floyd Mitchell said research shows that traffic stops can depress crime in an area for hours after the stop occurs.

“Part of what they’re doing in these traffic stops is to create a high visibility presence within our community to address that perception of crime and crime itself,” Mitchell said.

Asked whether business owners she talks to have seen results from the highway patrol surge, Oakland African-American Chamber of Commerce President Cathy Adams said no.

“Every call I get is they’ve been broken into and it’s taking too long for people to show up,” she said. Still, Adams said that while she’s “not in favor of mass incarceration,” she supports the additional police resources the highway patrol is providing.

“Oakland was starting to get a reputation like, ‘Hey, come on over, it’s a grocery store. You can get anything you want and walk right out,’ ” she said.

Demario Daniels said he was happy to have support from a highway patrol officer after another car hit his Mustang near Fruitvale Avenue, then took off.

“He was awesome. He helped calm me down,” said Daniels, who said he needed his car to look for work after a recent layoff. He said he appreciated that the officer reassured him but was honest about the fact that if he filed a report, it likely wouldn’t go anywhere.

When state and local policing policies don’t mix

The state intervention in Oakland policing has created the most waves when it’s come into conflict with local policies that were crafted with community input.

When Newsom said this spring that the state would pay for and install in and around Oakland nearly 500 automated license plate readers — surveillance cameras that law enforcement can use to track vehicles they suspect of being involved in crimes — police accountability groups raised concern that the devices wouldn’t be subject to the city’s surveillance policy. The policy requires annual reporting on the impact of any surveillance technology, and bars data from being retained for longer than 30 days.

The California Highway Patrol and the Oakland Police Department have since signed an agreement to each take custody of some of the cameras, and share the data between agencies. The company providing them, Flock Safety, will delete the videos after 30 days. The highway patrol will front the money for the cameras, with Oakland to pay the state back within a year.

On vehicle chases, too, the highway patrol’s policy differs from Oakland’s: Oakland officers are only allowed to initiate pursuit when they have a reasonable suspicion that the person they’re chasing has committed a violent crime or has a gun. Highway patrol officers have wider discretion to chase “in order to apprehend a violator of the law who refuses to yield to the officer’s lawful direction.” Officers should not chase if they can identify the suspects well enough to track them down later, highway patrol policy also says.

California Highway Patrol Commissioner Sean Duryee told the San Francisco Chronicle his officers recently chased people at high speeds in Oakland after seeing them commit minor traffic violations, such as passing unsafely and driving without headlights. A highway patrol spokesperson said those chases led to the recovery of two stolen cars and an illegal gun.

In his letter to Oakland officials, Newsom touted a recent highway patrol blitz in which officers used police cars and a helicopter to chase people suspected of participating in sideshows, making five felony arrests. He acknowledged that such pursuits “can be dangerous to police, suspects and innocent bystanders.”

“But there is also extreme danger to the public in allowing criminals to act with impunity,” the governor wrote, calling Oakland’s chase policy “an outlier” and asking the city council to reconsider it.

A 2023 report by the Police Executive Research Forum, a think tank, recommended police departments only allow vehicle chases when the person fleeing has committed a violent crime and poses an imminent threat to commit another violent crime. Funded by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the U.S. Justice Department, the study found that more than 90% of police chases happen because of traffic violations, that chases rarely lead to arrests for serious crimes and that about a fifth of serious injuries during chases are to innocent bystanders.

“The danger is so great and the potential for innocent people getting killed or severely injured is very high,” said John Burris, the attorney who represented plaintiffs in a landmark 2003 settlement that led to two decades of federal monitoring of Oakland police’s performance on reducing civil rights violations. He said changing the city’s chase policy would likely require a signoff from the federal monitor assigned to that case.

Burris also represented the family of Erik Salgado, who highway patrol officers shot to death after Salgado fled a traffic stop in Oakland in 2020. The highway patrol settled that case for $7 million last year, and some police accountability activists cite the agency’s chase policy as a factor in the killing.

Any highway patrol officers investigating crimes in Oakland should receive additional training in implicit bias, the city’s communities and aspects of the settlement agreement governing use of force and police misconduct, Burris said. “We don’t want to have cops coming in and just thinking they can stop a car because there are Black and Hispanic kids in the car, or demanding to search their cars just because you stopped them,” he said.

He said he was not aware of any complaints to his office about the highway patrol stopping Oaklanders without probable cause during the surge but that his staff was monitoring the situation.

California Highway Patrol officers are more likely to be white and male than both Oakland police officers and those in California law enforcement overall, according to the state’s Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training. Helped by the automatic pay increases officers receive under California law, the highway patrol recently embarked on a recruiting campaign that boosted applications to join the agency at a time when many police departments are struggling to attract candidates.

The agency also differs from Oakland police in some measures of transparency. Oakland’s vehicle chase policy, for example, is listed on the police department’s website; California Highway Patrol asked CalMatters to file a formal public records before providing its policy.

Neither agency made any officials available for an interview for this story.

More lawyers for prosecution, but not defense

Differences in law enforcement policy can lead to jurisdictional battles. Oakland’s police pulled out of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in 2020, and San Francisco’s did in 2017 after participating for at least a decade, after civil liberties advocates raised concerns about FBI surveillance and profiling of ethnic and religious groups, immigrants and political protesters.

“We have more restrictive policies in the Bay Area because that’s what our community is comfortable with,” Hofer said. “Bring in the state or feds and that all goes out the window.”

Police departments’ efforts to build trust with local communities can suffer when another law enforcement agency parachutes in for a brief period, said Jorja Leap, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles Luskin School of Public Affairs who studies gang violence and community policing. She called the state’s deployment “a temporary fix for a deeply rooted problem” and a shift away from the efforts by cities including Oakland over the past two decades to engage with the root causes of crime.

“We have a bunch of police chiefs who all stood up and said, ‘We can’t arrest our way out of the problem,’ ” she said. “And now we’ve got a governor going, ‘Yes, we can.’ ”

Newsom has pointed out that the state has also spent millions of dollars on community violence prevention programs, including $6 million over three years for Oakland’s Operation Ceasefire. But his announcements of state public safety support to cities over the past year have focused largely on sending cops and prosecutors.

At the governor’s request, California National Guard lawyers and case analysts have been working fentanyl cases in San Francisco over the past year. Crime is down in the city, while accidental drug overdose deaths in the first six months of this year ticked down just slightly compared with the same period last year, from 405 to 373. The state help has gotten a warm reception from Mayor London Breed, and a chilly one from the San Francisco Public Defender’s office.

“The increased arrests for suspected drug-related crimes have filled our jails, clogged our courts, and harmed a lot of people who actually need help,” the public defender’s office said in a statement to CalMatters. “As predicted, arresting people for drug use has largely failed to get people into recovery programs.”

When Newsom said in February that he would also send California National Guard lawyers to help prosecute Alameda County drug cases, the county’s chief public defender, Brendon Woods, noted that his office was not receiving any additional state resources. “This is only going to lead to more caging of Black and Brown people,” Woods posted on X at the time.

Newsom assigned the lawyers anyway, and when he deemed that District Attorney Price was not taking advantage of the support quickly enough, he inked an agreement earlier this month to have the prosecutors work out of the California Department of Justice instead.

“We just don’t have time,” he told reporters in July. “People don’t want to wait another day. They don’t want to wait another weekend.”

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This story was originally published by CalMatters and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.