Oakland’s mayor has found a counter-narrative to quiet critics on crime. Is it true?

OAKLAND — Rather than avoiding conflict during a tricky first year in office, Mayor Sheng Thao has consistently gone on the offensive.

While she’s kept critics at bay on budget woes, the departure of the A’s, and more, she has had more trouble shaking the public safety issue.

Crime fears have helped Thao’s detractors undermine her leadership and prop up her opponents, feeding a fledgling recall effort and leading Gov. Gavin Newsom to intervene in Oakland’s affairs.

But the mayor now appears to have landed on a counter-attack that could re-establish her control of the crime narrative and offer a thesis for why the violence problem isn’t letting up: an audit that determined the city’s once-lauded approach to curbing gun violence fell into neglect before Thao took office.

Critics question the mayor’s narrative, as well as the legitimacy of the audit, which was compiled by a former Oakland police official who’s currently on Thao’s payroll.

Since the audit’s release in January, the mayor has leaned heavily on its findings in TV interviews and speaking events, blaming Oakland’s high homicide rates — which haven’t regressed from a pandemic-era spike, as they have in other large cities — on what she has called a “depletion” of the city’s Ceasefire strategy.

Operation Ceasefire sought to negotiate de-escalations to gun violence between warring gangs by offering an ultimatum: either stop retaliating against each other and instead be connected with mentorship and jobs and education opportunities, or face strong prosecution.

Thao told NBC Bay Area recently that crime is once again receding because her administration has “resurrected” the strategy. In a very small sample size, killings investigated by Oakland police as homicides this year are marginally down compared to year-to-date totals in the previous two years.

She also said the revival has already helped relieve Oakland’s spike last year in burglaries and robberies — a less intuitive connection to make, given that the program deals exclusively with violence.

Her representatives have stressed in interviews a balance that needs to be struck between toughening up law enforcement — such as welcoming a local surge of California Highway Patrol officers that Newsom sent to Oakland last month — and bolstering social services designed to prevent crime.

“It takes investment and attention and focus” to bring existing public-safety strategies to a larger scale, said Holly Joshi, the head of the city’s Department of Violence Prevention, who previously served as an OPD police officer when Ceasefire was in its heyday.

What doesn’t work, Joshi asserted, is to lean away from a “proven strategy” like Ceasefire, “which is what happened in 2019.”

The messaging from city officials is clear: Oakland fell back into a cycle of violent crime because Ceasefire was “refocused, defunded and effectively gutted” by the old guard, as a mayor’s office announcement put it.

But is that true? And, if so, what exactly went wrong?

Ceasefire, the audit argues, fell apart because the city watered down “call-ins” that brought gang members to one place so police could negotiate peace between them, and police stopped approaching shooting victims at hospitals to discourage retaliations.

It also found the cops stopped conducting weekly “shooting reviews” to determine where violence had occurred and whether a de-escalation could be negotiated. The stakes for this were high, the report argues: A fifth of Oakland’s homicides and shootings last year occurred in gang territories.

But by the time the audit was being conducted last year, the Oakland Police Department had begun picking up the slack, holding five call-in meetings in 2022, up from just one in 2020 and three in 2021, the years that COVID-19 was at its worst. The report’s only criticism of recent meetings is that Alameda County prosecutors didn’t attend and that PowerPoint wasn’t used.

The operation also had almost fully rebounded its volume of “custom notifications,” or direct conversations between law enforcement and credible community members with individuals identified as likely to be involved in gun violence.

The old guard argues that Thao’s narrative is false and political in nature — no one ever actively neglected Ceasefire, they said, and officers leaving OPD during the pandemic forced a reduction in output. Third-party nonprofits that had once helped deter crime were now working remotely.

“The operation was never ‘defunded,’ never diminished,” said Justin Berton, a consultant who served as Schaaf’s spokesperson. Saying so, he added later in a statement, is “an insult to the officers and violence interrupters who grinded through the pandemic.”

Schaaf herself defended her administration’s treatment of Ceasefire in a social media thread posted after the audit’s release. Until her waning days in office, she had cited the operation’s success and lamented Oakland’s progress on reducing homicides being undone by the pandemic.

The report’s timeline of when exactly the program began to come apart is murky. Its summary and conclusion imply that Ceasefire was continuously watered down starting in 2016 — but even Ersie Joyner III, a member of the California Partnership for Safe Communities team that compiled the audit, disagrees with that.

Joyner said in an interview that after a sex-trafficking scandal that year involving East Bay law enforcement briefly distracted from the operation, the program got back on track in 2017 and 2018. A former OPD captain who actually oversaw Ceasefire during his time there, Joyner said his retirement in 2019 marked “the eye of the perfect storm.”

“There was a lack of philosophy, different individuals sitting at the table,” he said.

But he also attributes the program’s problems to the leadership of former Chief LeRonne Armstrong, who wasn’t hired until nearly two years later, in 2021.

Both Joyner and the audit assert that Armstrong diverted resources meant for Ceasefire to his own initiative, the Violent Crime Operations Center, which sought to investigate past homicides rather than prevent future killings.

Thao’s critics, meanwhile, say Joyner probably shouldn’t have helped with the audit at all, given that he’s also on Thao’s payroll, serving as a consultant on public safety. In an interview, he said his role did not influence his work with the California Partnership for Safe Communities team.

Armstrong, the former chief fired by the mayor last year, noted that OPD under his watch reported data on Ceasefire’s progress to the City Council, including one in late 2022, when Thao was still a council member.

“Ceasefire was not a panacea,” Armstrong said. “Its focus is to reduce homicides and recidivism, and none of those things have anything to do with commercial burglaries and carjackings you’re seeing in Oakland.”

Regardless of how the previous administration treated Ceasefire, it has become Thao’s key to establishing a position of strength on the crime issue. But it is also a very public wager that violence can be reduced under her watch — and only time will tell if the bet pays off.