What would happen to a city if its government effectively stopped enforcing laws protecting public space and private property? Oakland, California, has been testing the proposition. Many have heard about Oakland’s extraordinarily high violent-crime rate, which, despite recent declines, remains roughly four and a half times the national rate and the worst among California’s big cities. But in recent years, the city has also struggled to enforce laws against illegal dumping, burglary, car break-ins, and squatting.
As a result, much of the city is “buried under trash,” according to a recent government report, which found that the city collects some 20 million pounds of illegally dumped debris—47 pounds per resident—annually. Oakland also has the highest level of property crime of any large U.S. city. It solves these crimes at a rate of just 0.1 percent—meaning that one in every 1,000 property crimes reported to the Oakland police produces an arrest—compared with rates of about 10 percent in San Francisco and 13 percent in Berkeley, respectively. And the city has become home to a shadow industry of “squatter removal services,” including one whose sword-wielding operators promise to help landlords reclaim homes from unauthorized occupants, since the sheriff’s office often takes months to act.
Finally, a reason to check your email.
Sign up for our free newsletter today.
To an outsider, this might seem a bizarre state of affairs. Oakland sits directly across the bay from San Francisco, one of the country’s most productive economic centers. It lies within commuting distance of the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford, two of the world’s leading research universities. It boasts nearly 20 miles of waterfront, one of the ten largest container ports in the country, an international airport, and a year-round Mediterranean climate. Its residents have higher per-capita incomes than the average American or Californian. Oakland is a major hub of the region’s public-transit network, abuts redwood-covered hills, and boasts a thriving food and entertainment scene.
What explains this apparent paradox? At a macro level, the same thing that explains much of the dysfunction afflicting the rest of California: a kind of resource curse, whereby a state blessed with abundant natural bounty and a booming economy is bled dry by self-serving elected officials, union bosses, and nonprofit activists. Books could be written analyzing this dysfunction, but a handful of statistics will suffice. California ranks at or near the bottom of the country in adult literacy and has more homeless people than any other state. Fewer than one-third of its fourth-graders read at the NAEP “proficient” level, while the University of California is confronting a sharp deterioration in students’ performance in foundational math courses. The state has spent $14.6 billion on a high-speed rail system that has yet to carry a passenger and lost an estimated $20 billion to pandemic unemployment fraud.
But Oakland’s problems are extreme even by California’s dismal standards, and it’s worth understanding why. The most important factor is Oakland’s dysfunctional police department, which has been neutered by a combination of decades-long adversarial oversight, internal mismanagement, and pervasive low morale. Until it ended recently, federal oversight of the Oakland Police Department had been in effect since 2003—the longest-running federal police monitorship in U.S. history—following a settlement of its “Riders” scandal, in which four officers were accused of beating suspects, planting evidence, making false arrests, and falsifying police reports.
Under this regime, the OPD’s internal hires (including its chiefs), use-of-force policies, and officer-discipline protocols were all subject to the approval of a nonresident federal monitor, Robert Warshaw, who had overseen the department since 2010. His monitoring operation, paid for by Oakland, for years cost the city roughly $1 million annually, though that figure fell recently as the department moved closer to ending federal oversight. Warshaw, who set the OPD’s compliance goals and determined whether the department was meeting them, took a direct role in the firing of several police chiefs.
The OPD is also subject to the Oakland Police Commission, a civilian oversight body with substantial authority over department policy. Among the most controversial policies adopted under this system was Oakland’s restrictive rule on police pursuits, which generally permitted officers to chase suspects only for violent crimes. The policy proved so problematic that, in 2024, Governor Gavin Newsom took the extraordinary step of deploying state police to patrol Oakland’s streets and catch criminals who “flee with impunity because it’s common knowledge that OPD [pursues] in only very limited circumstances,” as he put it in a letter to then-Mayor Sheng Thao.
Meanwhile, the OPD itself has too few officers to meet the city’s policing needs and loses several officers each month to attrition. It has gone through five chiefs in five years. The department was so overwhelmed by the hundreds of thousands of stolen-vehicle and license-plate alerts it received from its recently installed Flock license-plate cameras that it elected to disable the notifications.
Including the federal monitor, police commission, mayor, and various other committees, the OPD has been operating under at least seven layers of adversarial oversight and a widespread “culture of fear” of running afoul of these authorities, as a recently departed police chief put it. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the department is so ineffective at solving crime.
What is stranger is that a powerful subset of Oakland’s political class seems to encourage the ambient anarchy. This includes recalled Mayor Thao, who was indicted last year on federal bribery charges and, while serving on the city council, voted to strip the OPD of funding (before reversing course when the political winds changed); current city council member Carroll Fife, who rose to prominence defending the rights of squatters and campaigned on promises to defund the police; and Alameda County Supervisor Nikki Fortunato Bas, who, while serving on the city council, pushed unsuccessfully to halve the OPD’s budget.
For all its depth and scale, Oakland’s dysfunction remains a tractable problem—given the political will to fix it. This, however, the city does not seem to have.
