Darwin BondGraham at Oaklandside has recently brought attention to the fact that OPD is no longer allowing public broadcast of their police scanner radio channel. Other departments, like California Highway Patrol, continue to keep the channels open and tell officers to use special encrypted channels for sensitive information. Darwin makes a great case for how useful access to that stream has been to reporting on OPD activity.
Closing OPD’s radio scanner channel is only the most recent step towards darkness with respect to transparency for citizens. Despite claims for data transparency supporting community policing efforts, OPD has consistently withdrawn data about its day-to-day activities from public view. For example:
- Darwin is an expert at how abused the city’s public records system is, having won an important legal suit against Oakland when his requests were ignored
- The data stream OPD does provide regularly experiences data drops that citizen groups have noticed.
- To get a sense of just how troubled data management is within OPD, this is a statement years ago from the Dept of Justice:
Beginning in January, 2021, the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) became the national standard for law enforcement crime data reporting in the United States. The transition to NIBRS represented a significant improvement in how reported crime is measured and estimated by the federal government.
It is now 2025 and OPD is still not in compliance! From 2016-2019, many other communities received funding to help with this transition. Even now, OPD and city administrators give only vague indications as to when we might expect to have Oakland’s data on a par with other cities.
Oakland’s new mayor, Barbara Lee, has made strong statements about the virtues of data transparency in civic government; these apply especially well to OPD. She has appointed Erica Joy Astrella who has deep experience in modern IT to focus on data and technology transformation. OPD and all of Oakland desperately need her help as we try to make sense of how our city is governed.