What's Driving Oakland's Crime Wave?

public  |  Last May, Oakland police arrested nine teenagers for a string of almost three dozen robberies throughout the East Bay. In one of the robberies, the juveniles brutally attacked a 63-year-old woman in a busy upscale Oakland shopping district, beating her in the head and dragging her by her hair across the sidewalk. Then, they attacked a bystander who tried to intervene.

Within days, the perpetrators were set free with no charges.

When you share stories like this one on social media, by far the most common refrain you hear is, “They voted for this.” And that’s true: Last year, Pamela Price, the far-left District Attorney for Alameda County, won her election by a decisive 53%. Sheng Thao, the current Mayor of Oakland, who once called to defund the police, won by a sliver.

But even the most ardent criminal justice reform voters never imagined they were voting for what Oakland has become. Crime has become a fixture of daily life in the East Bay, and nowhere more than in Oakland. In the most recent crime report available, crime was up 28% in the city over the same week last year, which was itself a huge crime year. Violent crime has increased by 19%, robbery is up 30%, burglary by 44%, and auto theft by 52%. Oakland has had 10,000 car burglaries so far this year, which is about one for every 43 residents.

Now, the explosion of crime, which has impacted just about every Oakland resident’s day-to-day life, is transforming the politics of this famously ultra-progressive city.

“She is on the criminals’ side,” an Oakland resident said of the District Attorney at a town hall meeting on public safety. “To any of you who voted for her: Shame on you, and elections have consequences. She told us what she was going to do, and somehow, the majority of people in this town voted for her anyway.” 

The room exploded in applause.

Price ran on a decarceration platform. She defends her policies as the right thing to do and says she is being unfairly blamed for rising crime. At a recent community meeting, Price said she had let the kids who committed the robbery spree go free because the youths were masked, and her office could not discern which of the thieves was responsible for which of the attacks. 

She went on: “All counties across the state have been asked to decriminalize young people. And so our county has adopted that as a policy.”

The line was not a crowd-pleaser. A friend of the 63-year-old victim, who had witnessed the crime, described putting her friend in an ambulance and sending her to the emergency department. “I just want to say that there must be consequences,” she told Price. The audience clapped and cheered.