Why doesn't someone take a look at the retirement benefits? Like, why must Jane and John Q Public foot the bill for a cop's entire family in terms of health/medical insurance? Even after retiring; the bill is paid until the family dies. That's disgusting. We should not be paying for the medical insurance for the entire family (and even grown children and their offspring).

"Will the OPD's attempt to hold the city hostage with fear of lost services win out? Will Chief Batts leave Oakland for a more solvent city where he can fulfill his dream of community policing? It's possible the OPD will have to make more cuts in January, a prospect that is extremely scary - but that also says a lot about how badly this city needs to take more drastic steps to rein in costs."

Saying that OPD or Batts is attempting to hold the city hostage is scarcely justified. Also there is no evidence that Batts is considering leaving Oakland. Batts' credentials as a current leader in community policing are well-established (for example, look at the Board of Directors list of the National Network for Safe Cities). He doesn't have anything to prove to anyone except himself. In fact, Batts had decided to retire from police work after Long Beach, but took on the Oakland challenge. Batts's phrase for doing this: "Why would I stab myself in the eye with a sharp object [by coming to work in Oakland]?" Why don't you think about this for a moment?

Batts' history in Long Beach has shown clearly what his intentions are, as did his public discussions during the presentation of his Framework for a Strategic Plan for policing in Oakland earlier this year. Batts will use whatever resources he has to provide effective police services for dealing with crimes on a priority basis. Thus, if the City Council and Mayor deny him resources, he will work on crimes of violence as the first priority for policing. This is just managerial and practical reality. He wants to deal with the most serious crime first. Crimes of property and quality-of-life crimes will have to be dealt with by engaged citizens. We have 700 Neighborhood Watch groups in Oakland; they are going to have to dig in, but they can make a real difference.

And the reactionary anti-government notion that reducing costs is the only or only important answer to this problem (or any other problem) is utter nonsense. Oakland is very far from a poor community. Oakland has a good number of poor people living in impoverished environments who don't have any more money to give to taxes.

Oakland has a relatively large middle class which can afford to pay some additional taxes, but the incompetence of city government and the mistrust it has created make additional taxes a near-impossible selling job. Oakland also has its share of wealthy who can afford to pay a lot more taxes. The top five percent of households, 7500 of them, could no doubt pay an additional $5000 to $10,000 annually in taxes. That's about $40 million to $75 million additional revenue.

There's also virtually no fiscal transparency in Oakland, so we don't have any idea of how efficiently we spend money. If we are just wasting 10% in a total budget of $1 billion (the General Fund is only half of what Oakland spends), that's an additional $100 million available annually.

Victoria, I think you have it backwards on the post retirement medical benefits.

That 600Mill unfund obligation is mostly for non-public safety employees and fire fighters. Some is for older cops, but sometime in the last decade or earlier, the cops negotiated away their post retirement medical coverage.

When the council members kept hammering about how much the cops are paid relative to NYC cops 44k/year, the council members and all those SEIU speakers conveniently forgot to mention that virtually every city employee makes much more than a NYC cop.

The SEIU street sweeper featured in the glossy mailer makes 52,000 and then goes up each year.

The SEIU mechanic makes 69,000.

In private industry the sweeper would get maybe 38,000 and the mechanic about 45,000, and only a 401k contribution of a few thousand a year.

My point is that Oakland vastly overpays all of its employees way more than it can afford.

-len raphael

Mike, look at the income stats for Oakland residents. They are quite low.

Unemployment among black males under 40 is off the charts.

Cities cannot levy income taxes by state law. They can make exemptions for elderly or maybe very low income from certain parcel taxes, but basically parcel tax taxes have to levied evenly on property owners who then will do their best to pass thru to tennants.

We did too good a job convincing the cops that the city was in bad financial shape. The senior cops now understand that city is such a deep hole than no amount of concessions from them will prevent the city from further massive cuts and or layoffs in the next three years.

So no matter what they gave up now, they knew the city would ax the younger cops or slash everone's wages in a year.

The senior cops with the majority control of the OPOA ,  logically decided why give up 9% now when in a year or two they'd have to give up 35% or more in pay and retirement cuts. 

They realized they might as well try to hold on to what they got under the absurdly generous compensation given to them and all other city employees, for another two years and then take the ridicuously high pensions to exit this place.

-len

My point about Oakland's potential tax income stands. Oakland is not, by national standards, or by California standards, or by world standards, a poor city. I did not specify a taxation method, not parcel taxation or income tax. Moderate income households can afford to pay a small amount of additional tax to local government ($100). Wealthy households can afford to pay a large amount of additional tax to local government ($1000 to $10,000). The knee-jerk, reactionary, anti-tax, anti-government perspective is not a way out for Oakland, or a way to move forward.

Getting more money out of citizens will take leadership and it would be very very difficult because leadership seems so completely unavailable to Oakland.

The cost of violent crime in Oakland is very very high, in dollar terms, in terms of suffering, in terms of opportunity cost (businesses tend to look elsewhere than Oakland).

And the anti-government, anti-cop thing about excessive compensation is irrational. Being a cop is a very stressful job and most cops are going to retire early and die early as a result. The cost of living in Oakland is very high; it's not at all unreasonable to pay cops a living wage. They do a tough job. Some of the overtime payments in Oakland have been excessive as a result of poor police department management in the past, so that's another matter. In terms of the pay being high for city workers in Oakland generally, there's also good reason for that--the cost of living, the fact that most municipal workers work very hard, and the fact that municipal staffers tend to be significantly more-qualified for their jobs than the equivalent in private industry.

And, to this non-Republican, private industry is no realm of virtue. Private industry workers below the executive level have seen their real wages diminish for 30 years, while executive pay has skyrocketed so that the best paid executives get hundreds of times what their subordinates get. And we have created a small class of superwealthy executives whose ethical standards can be very compromised indeed.