The Riders Come Out at Night by Ali Winston & Darwin BondGraham

Author:Ali Winston & Darwin BondGraham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2023-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

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Oakland was on tenterhooks for the next week. Protesters continued to gather and march in Fruitvale and downtown, one group walking with a symbolic casket painted with Oscar Grant and Gary King Jr.’s names. Activists showed up to city council meetings to make systemic critiques, condemning the city for spending more than $230 million on policing—21 percent of the total budget—while the economy was in free fall following the 2008 financial crisis. “I don’t see a whole lot of discussion happening among this group talking about what’s going to be done to solve the poverty in the city of Oakland,” a member of the Uhuru Movement, a Black radical organization based in Deep East Oakland, told the council on January 6. “What I do see is a lot of the money going toward the police.”9

Unemployment was rapidly rising. Oakland faced a $108 million budget shortfall over the next two years, which would require layoffs and deep service cuts. The Great Recession began in December 2007, and Oakland, which, like many California cities, had been an epicenter of the subprime loans that banks handed out like candy in the early and mid-2000s, needed more funds to help its low-income residents weather the hard times. California was in no position to help. By the beginning of 2009, the state was staring down a $57 billion deficit, still crippled from the dot-com bust of the early 2000s and without any financial reserves.10 Black and Latino borrowers in Oakland were hit especially hard by ballooning interest rates and job losses. They led to mass foreclosures, which were heavily concentrated in the flatlands areas of East and West Oakland.11 There had always been a small homeless population in Oakland, but it began to grow, with large camps of tents and RVs expanding around the freeways and West Oakland’s industrial areas, a direct result of housing’s soaring cost.

Although Dellums ran as a progressive and was opposed by the Officers’ Association, he had no intention of shrinking the police department. In a presentation at a city council meeting a week after the near riots of January 7, the mayor stated he intended to maintain its ranks at 803 officers, more than Brown had authorized as mayor. Oakland would need at least $10 million for three police academies. Dellums had already gone on a hiring spree, backed by the 2004 Measure Y parcel tax and state redevelopment funds, bringing the OPD up to 837 officers in 2008.12 By November 2007, the imminent Great Recession forced Dellums to suspend the 166th police academy.13

Oakland’s economic crisis would worsen, but in the first few weeks of January, its leaders were preoccupied with the ongoing civil unrest, which many feared could spiral out of control. The city never saw large-scale civil unrest like Watts in 1965. Oakland’s peaceful reputation was memorialized in Johnson administration official Amory Bradford’s Oakland’s Not for Burning, a favorite target for radical critiques. Nor had Oakland erupted in 1992 following the acquittal of Rodney King’s LAPD assailants, avoiding curfews imposed in Berkeley and San Francisco.

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