The fact that police patrols do not have a substantial impact on crime rates has been well known and documented for quite some time.[2] Even to the minimal extent that the police might be able to lower actual crime rates—and not just manipulate the rate at which crime is reported—they have very little interest in doing so since that would effectively put them out of a job. As an early study criticizing the FBI’s national crime statistics noted: Like all bureaucracies, criminal justice agencies can hardly be expected to implement policies that would diminish their importance; therefore, money appropriated to fight crime is allocated less to prevent crime than to detect and apprehend criminals after the crime has been committed. The relationship between business and law enforcement was described by Anthony Batts, the Chief of OPD when Mayor Jean Quan was inaugurated in 2011 who resigned days after the establishment of the first Occupy Oakland camp: I believe police departments are economic drivers. If you have bad stories coming out about crime or bad policing, investors are not going to come to a city. So in an industrial age city that is built much like Oakland has been an industrial age power house, it has to redo itself, it has to re-engineer itself with a different economy, and in order for that to happen you have to have a lot of investment, whether its federal funds or from private investors to come. Nobody’s going to invest in a city when you have a high crime rate so you have to drop that.[7] There are clearly those in law enforcement who realize the critical role they play in the business environment, and many in the business community who realize how critical the police are to their investment plans. In fact, the decisions of these two groups in investing and protecting private property can have far more influence than the relatively minor impact of a city government that shuttles funds around to accommodate them. Businesses leaders and police staff may spend their entire careers in a city like Oakland, while councilmembers and mayors come and go every four to eight years and likely feel beholden to the permanent forces in the city, rather than the other way around. https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/who-gives-the-orders-oakland-police-city-hall-and-occupy/
Posted on: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 10:02:10 +0000
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