To Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas, Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan, Councilmember Dan Kalb, Councilmember Carroll Fife, Councilmember Janani Ramachandran, Councilmember Noel Gallo, Councilmember Kevin Jenkins, and Councilmember Treva Reid:

Oakland can and must become a safer city for all, and as you set the city’s Fiscal Year 2023-2025 Budget we, the undersigned, call upon you to invest in true public safety and divest from ineffectual and harmful outdated practices by redirecting $20 million in funds from the Oakland Police Department (OPD) to the Oakland Department of Transportation’s (OakDOT) Budget for reshaping our streets and sidewalks to be safer, calmer, accessible and more people-friendly. By shifting scarce public funding to OakDOT we can make our communities safer places to live, travel, work, and enjoy.

OakDOT, through its street, sidewalk, and travel lane improvements, makes our communities safer, improves public health, better connects Oaklanders and fights climate change. The department has done a remarkable job despite very limited resources. Doubling the department’s funding for physical changes to make our streets safer can help our city rein in traffic violence in a way that random police traffic stops and regressive fines cannot.

By making our communities safer and more enjoyable places to be and travel between- we help knit the social fabric together, attracting more people out onto our streets, making them livelier, safer and less prone to crime. Additionally, Oakland voters overwhelmingly supported Measure U, calling for reshaping our neighborhoods to, along with more affordable housing, have better sidewalks, calmer roads, protected mobility lanes, more greenspace and pedestrian plazas. A robust OakDOT is critical for implementing these public safety and mobility improvements. These are durable changes which additionally support the long-term budget health of our city.

Meanwhile, despite receiving the lion’s share of the budget for years, the Oakland Police Department is not keeping Oakland safer. If more funding to the Oakland Police Department was the solution to a safer city, it would have worked by now. Sporadic and unequal enforcement against dangerous driving after the fact simply cannot be as effective as preventing dangerous driving through physical street changes. Additionally, the department’s long and ongoing history of failings and abuses are enough to fill books, newspapers, and courtrooms. Simply put-- it is the wrong “solution” to our city’s public safety issues.

The Oakland City budget is a document that shows what our city truly cares about, it is a statement about our morality and values. Oaklanders deserve a safer city.  Decades of experience have taught us that directing more resources to OPD is not the way forward. We call upon you to fund true public safety by directing funds away from OPD and into OakDOT.

Sincerely,

Traffic Violence Rapid Response and the undersigned: