OAKLAND (KCBS RADIO) – In the wake of dangerous driving, catalytic converter thefts and increased violence, Oakland is redeploying police resources.
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf announced on Wednesday that the city has brought back its traffic enforcement unit and added eight new detectives to the crime solving unit. The change is an effort "to have presence on our streets to stop what has been insane dangerous driving, as well as taking illegal guns out of cars that have been stopped," she said.
"Already this year, our department has taken more than 1,200 illegal guns off the streets," she explained. "We thought last year was unprecedented, the whole year we recovered 1,199. We are already ahead of that this year."
In the bigger picture, Schaaf said that federal laws have to change.
While California has stricter gun laws that other states, Schaaf maintained that "we all have got to work harder to ensure that the federal government adopts common sense gun control laws: banning assault weapons, acquiring universal background checks."
"The proliferation of illegal guns in our community is real, it is a threat." she said.
Schaff said that this week she personally donated to Giffords.org and Everytown for Gun Safety – groups working to elect lawmakers who will pass gun control measures.
The mayor's announcement comes less than a week after Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong told KCBS Radio Insider Phil Matier in a KGO interview that he planned to increase traffic stops in an effort to target people suspected of carrying guns. Armstrong called them "focused stops," because law enforcement will focus on those that they "believe are carrying firearms" or committed "egregious traffic violations."
Schaaf and Armstrong's decision to increase traffic enforcement is controversial because traffic stops historically have disproportionately impacted minority communities, specifically Black people. According to a San Francisco Chronicle analysis of 2020 data, Black residents in Oakland were 5.3 times more likely to be stopped by police than white residents, the second-largest disparity in stops of Black and white residents in the Bay Area. During those stops, police in California used force – lethal or nonlethal – against Black people at 2.6 times the rate of white people, the data showed.
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