Rebecca Kaplan, who is one of my favorite politicians, is running for Oakland City Council — and she has a great idea how to solve one of the city’s most pressing problems.
See, Oakland can’t hire enough cops. That means a voter-approved community-policing plan, which requires foot patrols in all the districts, is way behind schedule; there just aren’t enough officers to walk the beats. The OPD has more than a hundred job openings, and not enough applicants. And among those who apply, a lot don’t make it through the police academy.
So the city of Oakland is spending a lot of money on recruiting (including billboards near the Bay Bridge, which Kaplan, an AC Transit board member, thinks is nuts: “I know the demographics of the people crossing that bridge, and trust me, none of them are going to apply to be Oakland cops.”)
One of the things the city has learned is that ex-military people tend to do better in the academy — they already have the physical fitness and disciplinary training. So the city is sending fliers to military bases around the country. “Which is not terribly effective,” Kaplan told us in an interview today. “The thing is, with stop-loss, nobody’s really gettiing OUT of the military right now.”
But there’s a perfect applicant pool that the city is ignoring.
“There are 5,000 people who have been kicked out of the military because they’re gay or lesbian,” she said. “They have a dishonorable discharge, so they may have trouble getting work. But a lot of them are totally qualified to be Oakland cops.
“The OPD pays about four times as much as the military, the Bay Area is a great place for gays and lesbians, and if you’ve been policing Baghdad, moving to Oakland is going to look pretty attractive.”
The names of those 5,000 people are accessible, if the city wanted to do a little work to round them up (Ron Dellums, former chair of the House Armed Services Committee, could probably handle it with one phone call).
But that might not even be necessary: “If the Oakland mayor and police chief held a press conference and said, hey, Uncle Sam doesn’t want you but Oakland does, I suspect the word would get out.”
Somebody ought to put this woman on the City Council.