8 ms·

Oakland Neighbors Crowdfunding Private Security

68 points by vellum 13y ago

PhasmaFelis 13y ago
> “We shouldn’t have to do this,” says Steven Kirsh, who is running the last of the three Rockridge campaigns, “but we need to do this.” He doesn’t see the Oakland Police Department suddenly getting more resources, so in order to protect his belongings, family and property value, the $82 per household doesn’t seem like much to ask, for 12 hours of patrolling five days a week. For a four month trial it will work out to less than a dollar a day. What do you wanna bet this guy would scream to high heaven if the city wanted to tax him an extra $82 a year to fund more patrolmen?
- mattbaker 13y ago
  My first thought exactly.
- jmspring 13y ago
  Knowing someone in Oakland that is part of a community considering private patrols, they'd rather not be paying for their own security. That said, Oakland like many municipalities granted the moon for pensions during the boom times without considering the busts. This, coupled with the pensions of higher ups, is putting a serious hurt on dollars available to boots on the ground. Yes, people at some point might have griped about "an extra $82" in taxes, but they are way beyond that point now. OPD isn't patrolling the hills, property crimes are rarely followed up on, etc. Snark all you want, but there are people with families living there that are at their wits end.
  - yapcguy 13y ago
    Have they ever thought about leaving Oakland? I know it's not easy to just move, especially with family and job commitments, but I wonder if the people you know have ever mentioned what the breaking point would be.
    - tempestn 13y ago
      If they can solve their problem for less than $1 per day, they're probably a ways from the pack-up-and-move point. (Of course the effectiveness of this private security remains to be seen.)
    - krakensden 13y ago
      If you're rich, sure, but if you're poor, where do you go? To somewhere else just as bad and less convenient? America's affordable housing policy is high crime and shit schools. There's nowhere to move to.
- Vekz 13y ago
  Thats the thing about taxes though. You don't know where your moneys going to end up for sure. Oakland's government is notorious for squandering funds on private consultants and good will projects. A Tax raise is more like an uncontrolled penalty scenario for your money. People are a lot more willing to put funds in when they feel they control outcome.
- cmsmith 13y ago
  I don't accept your premise that the people paying for this program would reject higher taxes. But it's worth noting that Oakland has some of the highest property and sales tax rates in what is already a highly taxed state. And as a reward, it has some of the highest crime rates in the country. So I could understand if someone thought that increasing tax rates was not a particularly effective way to increase public safety.
- vellum 13y ago
  It's earmarked specifically for his neighborhood. Plus, the neighborhood has more control. If the security firm sucks, the neighborhood can fire them, or have them bring in different people.
- Lazare 13y ago
  Honestly, I imagine he would LOVE to pay $82 per year for that level of extra patrolling. In fact, I'm sure they'd prefer it, because taxation can remove the free-rider problem Kirsh is struggling with, meaning that he'd get more patrolling for less money, all else equal. The problem is that all isn't equal. Krish no doubt knows, just as you do if you'd think about it, that there is no possibility of paying $82 in taxes to obtain that level of extra patrolling. The local government is dysfunctional, their cost structure bloated, the political process broken. Keep in mind, Oakland has some of the highest local taxes in America; in a very real sense Kirsh is already paying that $82 per household (and more besides) yet not getting the patrolling he wants. What would adding another $82 do? Would it fund 12 hours of patrolling, five days a week? If you know ANYTHING about the cost structure of modern police departments in general, or Oakland in particular, the notion is absurd. The city of Oakland is not capable of providing what Kirsh and his fellows want. It's like looking at someone buying a second hand Acer laptop $200 off Craigslist, and muttering that you bet he would refuse to pay $300 for new Macbook Retina. He almost certainly would not refuse that, but we'll never know, because that deal is certainly not on offer.
- krakensden 13y ago
  This is Rockridge. There is a 99% chance this person is Very Liberal(tm), and would be just fine with increased taxation. There are also extenuating circumstances- OPD is its own worst enemy.
- agilebyte 13y ago
  It would have to be more than $82 though (how much?) because they would have to pay for the citizens in others hoods whose income is less or non-existent.
- bluedino 13y ago
  $82 probably buys you ONE hour of police officer time, but three hours of private security officer time. No unions, no pensions, no politics, blah blah.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    Private security officers are cheaper because lots of them are either: 1) Considerably less trained/qualified than police officers, or 2) Police officers working part-time for additional income, whose training, benefits, etc., come through their main job (and who become unavailable when required to perform overtime in that job, for which they are paid more.)
    - krakensden 13y ago
      OPD is also very expensive compared to other police departments: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/throwing-more-money-at-police/Content?oid=3560590 http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/throwing-more-money-at...
was_hellbanned 13y ago
>....with the aim of compensating for an understaffed police department... When I left Oakland in 2009, I was throwing away one of the free, local papers when something caught my eye. It was a short article stating that the Oakland PD truancy rate was, I believe, 37%. So, a significant portion of Oakland PD don't show up for their shifts. Perhaps there is a legitimate reason for this. Unfortunately, every time I try to dig up this statistic, I just get results regarding student truancy efforts by Oakland PD. Also, in 2008, Oakland PD blew $15,000 on, I believe, Screamin' Eagle exhausts for their police Harleys. After complaints of hearing loss, they took the pipes back off, then spent $1,200 on a 'study' to test whether they increased safety (they didn't), caused hearing damage (they do), and complied with noise standards (they blatantly violate Federal noise laws, and OPD doesn't care). The article I'm looking at is unclear as to whether or not the $15k was in addition to the initial cost of $500 per bike, from before the hearing complaints, removal, study, and re-installation. I miss a lot of things about Oakland, but Oakland PD's antics are not among them. I don't blame people one bit for wanting private security.
- ballard 13y ago
  It sounds absolutely ridiculous to pay someone else to do what the police are getting paid to ostensibly do. It also further divides a community between protected and unprotected. Perhaps someone that knows more about OPD could chime in: 0. Can't slackers be fired? 1. Is there a recruitment problem that constrains 0.? 2. Is leadership failing to motivate and/or inspire morale? 3. How many OPD regular officers live in Oakland? (I would wager it's very high or very low.) Postscript: I love Oakland, both its gems and its warts. It's hard to find good music in the Bay Area, especially live blues.
  - krakensden 13y ago
    I don't know the specifics of shift truancy, it's possible that management is making impossible demands- but OPD has a plummeting budget to work with, and has been flunking out of federal receivership for years. Leadership regularly gets booted for that offense. Probably ~90% live outside the city: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/the-high-costs-of-outsourcing-policeandnbsp/Content?oid=3306199 http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/the-high-costs-of-outs... Detroit passed a fatwa requiring police to live within the city a while back, I'm not sure it solved anything.
bdamm 13y ago
Bring on the franchises.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
frank_boyd 13y ago
> [...] crowdfund private security services, with the aim of compensating for an understaffed police department in the city with the highest robbery rate in America. Why?! Why should security become the responsibility of private people? That's pretty sick. You are paying taxes to receive this service. But your "representatives" prefer to provide "security" to everybody but their own citizens, it seems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_... The solution is to protest and vote!
- noarchy 13y ago
  >The solution is to protest and vote! I suspect that they may have looked into that solution, and found it wanting. Hiring their own security gives them far more control. They know where their money is going, and they can adjust things, as needed. This doesn't end the problem of continuing to be taxed, of course. That's a much harder nut to crack.
tlrobinson 13y ago
Federal government shutdown. Oakland residents crowdfunding private security. Libertarian dreams coming true. Well, minus the Silk Road raid.
- aric 13y ago
  Classical liberals/libertarians, voluntaryists, minarchists, and anarchists don't ultimately want underground markets. It's actually closer to a living nightmare to them. People who want 'real' liberation want freedom: not having to hide and not being victimized for consensual interaction. That is the freedom of choice and ability to choose openness. In other words, underground markets don't exemplify more liberal-libertarian models of governance. Underground markets more so reflect liberal-libertarian people attempting to coalesce under extreme duress. This holds true for other issues in parallel.
nikcub 13y ago
A modern spin on something that has been happening in less developed and some developed nations for a long time. While I lived in Cape Town, South Africa part of my office lease went towards private security guards, and at one apartment I rented part of that rent went towards private security as well. It was very common throughout the city and other regions to find co-ops form around businesses, farmers, home owners, etc. who would pool their money together and hire a private security force. At our second office, it was the entire main street of shopholders with some of the offices chipping in to hire a dozen fulltime security guards to patrol the street, check cars, etc. It worked reasonably well. You get to know the guards really well, they get to know the area well, and they were much more effective in responding to incidents than the police or other local authorities (in an earlier incident a man was once stabbed right infront of me, I called the ambulance and waited with him for an hour, he died and his body was eventually picked up later that night). There were also times it failed. In one incident the guards caught three people trying to jump a fence, they used a disabled toilet in one of the stores as a makeshift prison cell and beat the three 'suspects' up and kept them in there for 24 hours. I can't describe how much blood there was on the floor and walls, but the three were eventually released (I was told they 'have to' do this so that other potential thieves go elsewhere, and that the police wouldn't do anything) At first I was uneasy with the thought of having private security, but because of the failing of government to provide basic safety I ended up only every moving to areas that had a similar setup. Residents resorting to self-funded policing is a sign that something is very, very wrong with government administration. I never thought i'd see this play out in a major American city.
- agilebyte 13y ago
  Quick fix, yes. What happens with those security companies once the crime goes down though? Just like private prisons in US, I'd be worried these guys will make crime to keep the paycheck going.
  - mseebach 13y ago
    The prison lobby is a problem, not just because of what they're peddling, but because there are takers - the political system. Private providers to private clients don't generally have that problem because the gravy train has a nasty habit of coming to an abrupt halt if any shenanigans are discovered.
simbolit 13y ago
i am terribly afraid that if this "works", they created a great incentive for the city council / government (whoever is responsible in your jurisdiction) to cut corners at the PD. s/ libertarian dystopia here we come /s
- scarmig 13y ago
  Oakland has already cut so many corners at the PD that it approximates a circle...
e12e 13y ago
This really reminds me of Virtual Light: "But Rydell was always glad to have him on shift, because he was as determinedly nonviolent a rentacop as you were likely to find. And he probably wasn't even crazy. Both of which were definite pluses for Rydell. As Hernandez was fond of pointing out, SoCal had stricter regulations for who could or couldn't be a hairdresser. Like Rydell, a lot of IntenSecure's response people were former police officers of some kind, some were even ex-LAPD, and if the company's rules about not carrying personal weapons on duty were any indication, his co-workers were expected to turn up packing all manner of hardware. There were metal detectors on the staff-room doors and Hernandez usually had a drawer full of push-daggers, nunchuks, stunguns, knucks, boot-knives, and whatever else the detectors had picked up. Like Friday morning at a South Miami high school." -- Virtual Light, Willam Gibson, 1993 It's sometimes hard to tell if Gibson's fiction is moving closer to reality with each series, or if the progress of time takes reality closer to his fiction...
protomyth 13y ago
Considering parts of Oregon have had to go back to private citizens doing patrols due to budget cuts, I can see where private police forces or citizen patrols will probably happen more and more. It should be noted that standing police forces are a relatively new concept. Rome had one at the end, but that was became quite corrupt.

68 points by vellum 13y ago

> “We shouldn’t have to do this,” says Steven Kirsh, who is running the last of the three Rockridge campaigns, “but we need to do this.” He doesn’t see the Oakland Police Department suddenly getting more resources, so in order to protect his belongings, family and property value, the $82 per household doesn’t seem like much to ask, for 12 hours of patrolling five days a week. For a four month trial it will work out to less than a dollar a day. What do you wanna bet this guy would scream to high heaven if the city wanted to tax him an extra $82 a year to fund more patrolmen?

mattbaker 13y ago
My first thought exactly.
jmspring 13y ago
Knowing someone in Oakland that is part of a community considering private patrols, they'd rather not be paying for their own security. That said, Oakland like many municipalities granted the moon for pensions during the boom times without considering the busts. This, coupled with the pensions of higher ups, is putting a serious hurt on dollars available to boots on the ground. Yes, people at some point might have griped about "an extra $82" in taxes, but they are way beyond that point now. OPD isn't patrolling the hills, property crimes are rarely followed up on, etc. Snark all you want, but there are people with families living there that are at their wits end.
- yapcguy 13y ago
  Have they ever thought about leaving Oakland? I know it's not easy to just move, especially with family and job commitments, but I wonder if the people you know have ever mentioned what the breaking point would be.
  - tempestn 13y ago
    If they can solve their problem for less than $1 per day, they're probably a ways from the pack-up-and-move point. (Of course the effectiveness of this private security remains to be seen.)
  - krakensden 13y ago
    If you're rich, sure, but if you're poor, where do you go? To somewhere else just as bad and less convenient? America's affordable housing policy is high crime and shit schools. There's nowhere to move to.
Vekz 13y ago
Thats the thing about taxes though. You don't know where your moneys going to end up for sure. Oakland's government is notorious for squandering funds on private consultants and good will projects. A Tax raise is more like an uncontrolled penalty scenario for your money. People are a lot more willing to put funds in when they feel they control outcome.
cmsmith 13y ago
I don't accept your premise that the people paying for this program would reject higher taxes. But it's worth noting that Oakland has some of the highest property and sales tax rates in what is already a highly taxed state. And as a reward, it has some of the highest crime rates in the country. So I could understand if someone thought that increasing tax rates was not a particularly effective way to increase public safety.
vellum 13y ago
It's earmarked specifically for his neighborhood. Plus, the neighborhood has more control. If the security firm sucks, the neighborhood can fire them, or have them bring in different people.
Lazare 13y ago
Honestly, I imagine he would LOVE to pay $82 per year for that level of extra patrolling. In fact, I'm sure they'd prefer it, because taxation can remove the free-rider problem Kirsh is struggling with, meaning that he'd get more patrolling for less money, all else equal. The problem is that all isn't equal. Krish no doubt knows, just as you do if you'd think about it, that there is no possibility of paying $82 in taxes to obtain that level of extra patrolling. The local government is dysfunctional, their cost structure bloated, the political process broken. Keep in mind, Oakland has some of the highest local taxes in America; in a very real sense Kirsh is already paying that $82 per household (and more besides) yet not getting the patrolling he wants. What would adding another $82 do? Would it fund 12 hours of patrolling, five days a week? If you know ANYTHING about the cost structure of modern police departments in general, or Oakland in particular, the notion is absurd. The city of Oakland is not capable of providing what Kirsh and his fellows want. It's like looking at someone buying a second hand Acer laptop $200 off Craigslist, and muttering that you bet he would refuse to pay $300 for new Macbook Retina. He almost certainly would not refuse that, but we'll never know, because that deal is certainly not on offer.
krakensden 13y ago
This is Rockridge. There is a 99% chance this person is Very Liberal(tm), and would be just fine with increased taxation. There are also extenuating circumstances- OPD is its own worst enemy.
agilebyte 13y ago
It would have to be more than $82 though (how much?) because they would have to pay for the citizens in others hoods whose income is less or non-existent.
bluedino 13y ago
$82 probably buys you ONE hour of police officer time, but three hours of private security officer time. No unions, no pensions, no politics, blah blah.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  Private security officers are cheaper because lots of them are either: 1) Considerably less trained/qualified than police officers, or 2) Police officers working part-time for additional income, whose training, benefits, etc., come through their main job (and who become unavailable when required to perform overtime in that job, for which they are paid more.)
  - krakensden 13y ago
    OPD is also very expensive compared to other police departments: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/throwing-more-money-at-police/Content?oid=3560590 http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/throwing-more-money-at...

was_hellbanned 13y ago

>....with the aim of compensating for an understaffed police department... When I left Oakland in 2009, I was throwing away one of the free, local papers when something caught my eye. It was a short article stating that the Oakland PD truancy rate was, I believe, 37%. So, a significant portion of Oakland PD don't show up for their shifts. Perhaps there is a legitimate reason for this. Unfortunately, every time I try to dig up this statistic, I just get results regarding student truancy efforts by Oakland PD. Also, in 2008, Oakland PD blew $15,000 on, I believe, Screamin' Eagle exhausts for their police Harleys. After complaints of hearing loss, they took the pipes back off, then spent $1,200 on a 'study' to test whether they increased safety (they didn't), caused hearing damage (they do), and complied with noise standards (they blatantly violate Federal noise laws, and OPD doesn't care). The article I'm looking at is unclear as to whether or not the $15k was in addition to the initial cost of $500 per bike, from before the hearing complaints, removal, study, and re-installation. I miss a lot of things about Oakland, but Oakland PD's antics are not among them. I don't blame people one bit for wanting private security.

ballard 13y ago
It sounds absolutely ridiculous to pay someone else to do what the police are getting paid to ostensibly do. It also further divides a community between protected and unprotected. Perhaps someone that knows more about OPD could chime in: 0. Can't slackers be fired? 1. Is there a recruitment problem that constrains 0.? 2. Is leadership failing to motivate and/or inspire morale? 3. How many OPD regular officers live in Oakland? (I would wager it's very high or very low.) Postscript: I love Oakland, both its gems and its warts. It's hard to find good music in the Bay Area, especially live blues.
- krakensden 13y ago
  I don't know the specifics of shift truancy, it's possible that management is making impossible demands- but OPD has a plummeting budget to work with, and has been flunking out of federal receivership for years. Leadership regularly gets booted for that offense. Probably ~90% live outside the city: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/the-high-costs-of-outsourcing-policeandnbsp/Content?oid=3306199 http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/the-high-costs-of-outs... Detroit passed a fatwa requiring police to live within the city a while back, I'm not sure it solved anything.

bdamm 13y ago

Bring on the franchises.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

frank_boyd 13y ago

> [...] crowdfund private security services, with the aim of compensating for an understaffed police department in the city with the highest robbery rate in America. Why?! Why should security become the responsibility of private people? That's pretty sick. You are paying taxes to receive this service. But your "representatives" prefer to provide "security" to everybody but their own citizens, it seems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_... The solution is to protest and vote!

noarchy 13y ago
>The solution is to protest and vote! I suspect that they may have looked into that solution, and found it wanting. Hiring their own security gives them far more control. They know where their money is going, and they can adjust things, as needed. This doesn't end the problem of continuing to be taxed, of course. That's a much harder nut to crack.

tlrobinson 13y ago

Federal government shutdown. Oakland residents crowdfunding private security. Libertarian dreams coming true. Well, minus the Silk Road raid.

aric 13y ago
Classical liberals/libertarians, voluntaryists, minarchists, and anarchists don't ultimately want underground markets. It's actually closer to a living nightmare to them. People who want 'real' liberation want freedom: not having to hide and not being victimized for consensual interaction. That is the freedom of choice and ability to choose openness. In other words, underground markets don't exemplify more liberal-libertarian models of governance. Underground markets more so reflect liberal-libertarian people attempting to coalesce under extreme duress. This holds true for other issues in parallel.

nikcub 13y ago

A modern spin on something that has been happening in less developed and some developed nations for a long time. While I lived in Cape Town, South Africa part of my office lease went towards private security guards, and at one apartment I rented part of that rent went towards private security as well. It was very common throughout the city and other regions to find co-ops form around businesses, farmers, home owners, etc. who would pool their money together and hire a private security force. At our second office, it was the entire main street of shopholders with some of the offices chipping in to hire a dozen fulltime security guards to patrol the street, check cars, etc. It worked reasonably well. You get to know the guards really well, they get to know the area well, and they were much more effective in responding to incidents than the police or other local authorities (in an earlier incident a man was once stabbed right infront of me, I called the ambulance and waited with him for an hour, he died and his body was eventually picked up later that night). There were also times it failed. In one incident the guards caught three people trying to jump a fence, they used a disabled toilet in one of the stores as a makeshift prison cell and beat the three 'suspects' up and kept them in there for 24 hours. I can't describe how much blood there was on the floor and walls, but the three were eventually released (I was told they 'have to' do this so that other potential thieves go elsewhere, and that the police wouldn't do anything) At first I was uneasy with the thought of having private security, but because of the failing of government to provide basic safety I ended up only every moving to areas that had a similar setup. Residents resorting to self-funded policing is a sign that something is very, very wrong with government administration. I never thought i'd see this play out in a major American city.

agilebyte 13y ago
Quick fix, yes. What happens with those security companies once the crime goes down though? Just like private prisons in US, I'd be worried these guys will make crime to keep the paycheck going.
- mseebach 13y ago
  The prison lobby is a problem, not just because of what they're peddling, but because there are takers - the political system. Private providers to private clients don't generally have that problem because the gravy train has a nasty habit of coming to an abrupt halt if any shenanigans are discovered.

simbolit 13y ago

i am terribly afraid that if this "works", they created a great incentive for the city council / government (whoever is responsible in your jurisdiction) to cut corners at the PD. s/ libertarian dystopia here we come /s

scarmig 13y ago
Oakland has already cut so many corners at the PD that it approximates a circle...

e12e 13y ago

This really reminds me of Virtual Light: "But Rydell was always glad to have him on shift, because he was as determinedly nonviolent a rentacop as you were likely to find. And he probably wasn't even crazy. Both of which were definite pluses for Rydell. As Hernandez was fond of pointing out, SoCal had stricter regulations for who could or couldn't be a hairdresser. Like Rydell, a lot of IntenSecure's response people were former police officers of some kind, some were even ex-LAPD, and if the company's rules about not carrying personal weapons on duty were any indication, his co-workers were expected to turn up packing all manner of hardware. There were metal detectors on the staff-room doors and Hernandez usually had a drawer full of push-daggers, nunchuks, stunguns, knucks, boot-knives, and whatever else the detectors had picked up. Like Friday morning at a South Miami high school." -- Virtual Light, Willam Gibson, 1993 It's sometimes hard to tell if Gibson's fiction is moving closer to reality with each series, or if the progress of time takes reality closer to his fiction...

protomyth 13y ago

Considering parts of Oregon have had to go back to private citizens doing patrols due to budget cuts, I can see where private police forces or citizen patrols will probably happen more and more. It should be noted that standing police forces are a relatively new concept. Rome had one at the end, but that was became quite corrupt.