Budget cuts will kick in for the Oakland Police Department on Thursday.
The cuts come at a time when crime is on a sharp rise in the city, one such example was an attempted robbery of a TV news crew on Monday.
Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong joined Jeff Bell and Holly Quan Wednesday morning to share his concerns.
"What concerns me the most is our inability to respond to 911 calls for service," said Armstrong. "We clearly know that we are not responding to calls as fast as we’d like currently because of our low staffing numbers."
OPD currently has 714 officers on the force, not nearly enough to adequately handle the uptick in crime in the city, said Armstrong. With these cuts, the department numbers could easily dip below 700 by the end of the year, he said.
Currently, the department has an attrition rate of five or six officers a month, he said, who are leaving for other jobs in other departments.
And the cuts include reducing the number of police recruiting academies from six to four, which will greatly impact the number of graduating officers in each class. "We on average graduate about 30 police officer trainees from each academy," he said.
The majority of the funding cut will go towards violence prevention, but Armstrong worries that those programs won’t be launched in time to cover the gap made by the loss in police department funding.
"Those resources won’t be out in our community available to help reduce violence," said Armstrong. "They won’t be ready for several months."
Armstrong said he’s always been a supporter of violence prevention. But with 65 homicides committed this year, "we have a real problem in Oakland."
He believes a collaborative approach is best, that law enforcement cannot tackle the violence on its own. "We are going to need violence prevention as well as community involvement."
Next week Armstrong said he plans to hold a rally to allow Oaklanders to come out in support of violence prevention.
Looking ahead to the July 4 weekend, Armstrong said that there will be increased presence in the city with extra attention paid to fireworks.
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