Oakland’s New Police Chief
An update from Alex Gronke and his ongoing coverage of Oakland Police.
When William Bratton resigned as Los Angeles’ top cop on Monday, folks in Oakland wondered for a moment if the celebrity chief was heading north to turn around the city’s troubled police department. A Southland police chief is Oakland-bound, but it’s not Bratton.
Anthony Batts, Oakland Police Department’s new chief, was the chief of police in Long Beach for seven years. With demographics similar to Oakland’s and a comparable number of cops per 1,000 citizens, Long Beach has a lower crime rate than Oakland. In 2007, Long Beach reported half the number of violent crimes than Oakland despite an extra 80,000 residents. That figure alone is reason for crime-weary Oaklanders to have hope. Batts is also a different kind of police department administrator than Oakland has had for most of this decade.
Chief Batts has a doctorate in public administration and publishes articles in academic journals and other publications. In 2006, Batts co-wrote an article in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Law Enforcement Bulletin outlining his department’s success with community oriented public safety (COPS) despite “a high level of police activity that keeps its officers in response mode.” Batts could be describing Oakland when he writes that “patrol officers in such areas continually address calls for service and detectives handle exorbitantly high caseloads.” But in Long Beach community policing appears to work.
Consider the citizen complaints against the Long Beach Police Department. In 2007, the citizen police complaint commission received 285 complaints compared to 341 the previous year. Oakland had nearly 1,000 citizen complaints in 2007.
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