Carlo Bossoli: Ruins of a Large Genoese Fortress at Sudak, 1856. Image in Public Domain

In a hard-hitting Free Press piece, Neighbors Together Oakland’s founder Seneca Scott observes that the Left assumes wealth/race divide people’s perspectives on criminal justice, with only affluent white folks wanting fortified police forces. Instead, says Scott, minority residents in poorer neighborhoods are often the firmest advocates for beefed-up policing—because they’re most impacted by unsafe living conditions.

From 2018 to 2022, the number of homicides in Oakland has jumped by 79 percent after falling by 46 percent in the six years prior. In the last year alone, violent crime has risen by 17 percent.

Oakland now has the state’s second-worst 911 response time. Residents say they have waited 10 minutes before anyone even picked up the phone. Meanwhile, the number of homicides that result in charges has dropped from 65 percent in 2019 to 36 percent in 2022.

“Anyone who has the ability is making an exit plan,” said Scott. “Like, you’re in a country going to war soon and people are looking at it like, how do we get out? That’s what it feels like.”

In the past few years, Scott has become the city’s own version of his Roman philosopher namesake—speaking truth to power—for a growing number of Oakland residents sick of crime and a smug political class that has not only failed to do anything about it, but ushered it in.

You might think a black activist and union organizer in the Bay Area would be a progressive who supports Black Lives Matter and defunding the police, but Scott rejects both movements. In fact, he says the defund debate is split along racial lines.

“The black people who live in the impacted neighborhoods were pretty much united in the fact that they did not want to cut the police budget,” he says. “The white people in affluent neighborhoods were pretty much united in that they did want to.”

Scott calls himself a “post-partisan solutionary.” Though he used to be a leftie, he now unabashedly calls out “phony” progressives on Twitter (now X) for being “dismissive towards Black and Brown people.” He says he doesn’t do left-right politics and told me that both parties now cater to elites.

That’s why Scott has started the nonprofit Neighbors Together Oakland.

“We’re building a multiracial, multi-class coalition. We’re not using race as a divider, but as a uniter,” said Scott. “The Democrats wrongly demonize everybody who’s a white man or say every single thing that’s wrong with society is white supremacy. It’s bullshit. But they’re doing it on purpose because they know if rural white people and inner-city black people ever started voting together, we would be able to take our republic back.”

This article originally appeared in the Free Press. Read the whole thing here.

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• Retired SJ officer: Local “defund the police” rhetoric full of holes

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