In July, the NAACP Oakland, California chapter forcefully condemned the city’s “intolerable” public safety crisis and failed leadership, including the movement to defund the police. “Murders, shootings, violent armed robberies, home invasions, car break-ins, sideshows, and highway shootouts have become a pervasive fixture of life in Oakland,” the chapter said.
We urge African Americans to speak out and demand improved public safety. We also encourage Oakland’s White, Asian, and Latino communities to speak out against crime and stop allowing themselves to be shamed into silence.
There is nothing compassionate or progressive about allowing criminal behavior to fester and rob Oakland residents of their basic rights to public safety. It is not racist or unkind to want to be safe from crime. No one should live in fear in our city.
— NAACP Oakland
Earlier this month, Defend American Ideals President Ying Ma shared her own story of growing up amid rampant crime in inner-city Oakland, and echoed NAACP Oakland’s call for policies that would allow residents to live peacefully and safely.
“We need to fight crime in general, for everybody,” Ma said at the University of California, Berkeley, in a lecture sponsored by the Clare Boothe Luce Center for Conservative Women.
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