Oaktown Body Count

Two more murders this weekend in lovely Oakland, California, bringing the year's total so far to 30. That puts San Francisco's unlovely stepsister on course to tie or maybe even break the all-time homicide record set back in the 90s. In fact, adjusted for population, Oaklanders are now shooting, stabbing and otherwise dispatching each other at rate even higher than that racked up by pre-Giuliani New York City in 1990.

The difference is that since 1990, New York's murder rate has plummeted to where it is now barely a quarter of what it was in the bad old days and New York has become the safest big city in America. Meanwhile, Oakland continues to go from bad to worse, and the prospect of Ron Dellums, a David Dinkins look and think-alike, becoming mayor later this year, makes the prognosis grimmer still.

Is there a lesson to be learned here? In New York, the police started cracking down hard on so-called "minor" offences and lo and behold, major crime dropped precipitously. In Oakland, the police don't even bother investigating most crimes short of rape and murder. "You can file a report online," they'll tell someone who's missing a car or a wallet or the contents of his house.

The cops claim they haven't got enough manpower, which is probably true, and the city claims it doesn't have the money to hire more cops, which might be true as well. But at the same time, the cops were fighting tooth and nail to protect their union-guaranteed right to determine their own assignments. In other words, if the police chief decides a certain dangerous neighbourhood needs to be flooded with cops at certain times, the cops are entirely within their rights to say, "Sorry, man, I don't do nights and weekends."

It's hard to blame them; I wouldn't want to set foot in many Oakland neighbourhoods no matter how heavily you armed me or how well you paid me, but then I never joined the police department and swore to uphold the law. Also, the government and civil administration of Oakland is so intellectually and morally bankrupt that it more closely resembles that of a third world banana republic than a major American city, which wouldn't exactly inspire confidence in those who are out in the streets charged with upholding minimal standards of civilised behaviour.

My take is that much of Oakland has simply given up and accepted that this is the way things are, that there's nothing really to be done. Suggest a New York-style zero tolerance crackdown on routine thuggery and drug dealing and you'll run smack into the race baiters, who will scream that it's an attack on "African-American youth." Even point out the obvious, that the overwhelming majority of Oakland's crime is being committed by "African-American youth," and you'll be branded a racist whose views aren't worthy of being discussed.

So Oakland continues to live in let's-pretend land, and its leaders pull hangdog faces and make sanctimonious statments about how awful it all is while out in the streets people keep dying. And guess who's doing the most dying? African-American youths, of course, and who's killing them? The ones pulling the triggers and wielding the knives, obviously, but they have accomplices in the form of every city official who is too cowardly or too enslaved to a failed ideology to do what obviously needs to be done.