Statistics and Stereotypes

(Update: I was corrected in the comments by people with better statistics. I am now convinced that Oakland has a severe crime problem relative to other cities, and I'm leaving this post up to show you that if you still believe Oakland does not have a crime problem, you should change your mind like I did. Go here.)

Of course I'm adding my own name to the list of Oaklanders remembering Officers Romans, Sakai and Dunakin, and hoping that Officer Hege recovers.

Statistics time. The idea that Oakland is a dangerous city is prevalent, and somewhat misleading. That I can say this after an outrage like yesterday
is backed up by numbers. I'm originally from the Philly suburbs. Below is a table of Philadelphia and Oakland violent crime rates per capita, relative to the national average:

CITY	Murder	Forcible Rape	Robbery	Aggravated Assault	All Violent Crime
Oakland	3.5	1.81	2.78	1.87	2.31
Philly	3.04	1.85	2.94	1.78	2.31

That I can claim even the day after these killings that Oakland isn't that bad is backed up by statistics, but that I have to say it is because of the high profile of the event. Humans are bad at thinking about statistics but good at thinking about human drama. Look at those numbers again. What's your association with Philly - forcible rape? Robbery? Both higher than Oakland! No, your association is cheesesteaks and the Liberty Bell, the virtues of which are both extolled by proud (ex-)Philadelphians, many more of whom move to Oakland than the other way around. Are Philadelphians deluded and naive, or are Oaklanders buying into the negative image of our own city exacerbated by high-profile tragedies like this one?

Because of these shootings, even if you're an Oakland cop, you have a 0.5% chance per year of getting shot in the line of duty. I'm not diminishing the heroic burden the OPD bears, but putting a number on it puts it in perspective. My probability of getting shot is very close to zero. And chances are, so is yours, unless you live in certain parts of the city which we all want to make safer.

People across California and the country just had their stereotypes of Oakland reinforced, and this isn't helping the city's residents or businesses. Horrific as it is, we have to not only work on the city, we have to defend Oakland's reputation. That's why when friends elsewhere in the Bay Area and the country make generalizations or tasteless jokes at Oakland's expense, I stop them their tracks. Not only do I not think it's funny, I won't be a passive party in reinforcing a negative image for the city.

On the media criticism front, not to kick the Chronicle while it's down, but their article on the shooting was rambling and disorganized, and I'm glad to see the Oakland Tribune stepping up with excellent coverage. I'm glad to see that we can expect (as we should) that our own city's paper covers events here better than the Chronicle. To this end, once again props to Zennie for doing original reporting and getting out there on other media. The vast majority of bloggers, including myself, are opinion jockeys whose only real journalism comes from links to original reporting and data we find elsewhere. It's exactly because there aren't many Zennies that losing traditional print media with professional journalists is a disaster.

Story Time: The Parkway

RIP Parkway: you rocked the hizzazzle.* Very sad for Oakland. (Update: Councilwoman Pat Kernighan is seeing what can be done to keep it open.) At City Homestead it was observed that visiting the Parkway is a bit of a rite-of-passage for those of us coming in from less culturally gifted parts of the world - "Wow! It's a theater, but you can drink beer! And they have couches!"

And now, story time:


- The only time I've seen a Godzilla movie on the big screen was there. This is easily the Parkway's strongest endorsement.


- One of their filmed announcements made clever use of perspective with a cocktail glass that appeared to be close to the camera but, when the announcer drank out of it, revealed itself to be in fact about the size of a toilet bowl. This was perhaps inspired by the fireplace scene in Citizen Kane. Or, was it the other way around?

- It was during their showing of Trekkies that I had the epiphany that George Takei was gay. That this should have been the mode of revelation is in direct contradiction to the theory of the Howard Stern show's Artie Lange, who instead informed George on the show that everyone knew he was gay when he told a prank caller that his dog was named "the White Queen". In French. To be fair, we should consider Artie's argument to have some merit.


- I saw Cannibal Holocaust there. And participated in one of the more fascinating impromptu psychology experiments of my life. There was a mumbling, flailing woman in the (crowded) theater whose process was obviously not intact, and during the film she kept standing up, pointing and talking at the screen, and in general making a nuisance of herself. Finally one guy had his fill and began a campaign of ridicule, prompting her to head for the exits. The tone in the murmuring theater was confused - some combination of trying not to laugh openly at this person who'd gone out of her way to make a spectacle of herself, plus feeling sorry for her, plus fear that she would snap and open fire or something, plus just plain wanting to watch the damn movie undisturbed. Then came a (to put it mildly) shift in attitudes: the wingnut in question stopped at the exit and shouted to her oppressor and to the room in general: "I hate this place anyway, it's run by a bunch of (n-word)s!" There was an extended pin-drop pause and the temperature in the room dropped noticeably, and there rose a low collective "ooooooooh". The guy who had before been making fun of her shouted back "You can't talk like that! Now get outta here before I beat the s*** out of you!" She ran.

The reason I found this so interesting is that here was a roomful of people who had paid for the explicit service of having their taboos systematically violated (at least visually), but who were collectively reduced to silent disbelief by a single earnest racial slur.


- Having fallen asleep during video presentations of Rocky Horror Picture Show at I don't know how many high school cast parties, I was dragged as a "grown-up" to one of the live-action showings Parkway to finally get me involved for real. I still fell asleep. My lack of endorsement should not be cause for distress, as I once slept through a performance of The Merchant of Venice in Stratford, England at the Royal Shakespeare Company Theater. I'm told I snored loudly at both RHPS and RSC. Please note that Riffraff's performance in the Spice Girls movie is much better than in RHPS. (Yes. Really.)

RIP Parkway!


*From Elamite hizzazzl, "grand house, palace". Thought by overenthusiastic historical linguist Shevoroshkin to be descended from proto-Dravidian *hutata, "Snoop Dogg".

Princess Hedera Gets Her New Blog Template

Hey, I hope you're happy now. Is there anything else you want, your royal worshipfulness?

Hey, I kid, I kiiiid! Italics mean sarcasm on this blog. Isn't that wonderful?

Al Davis Serves Sauron

I knew that title would get some click-through. But you have to read my sports rant first!

There are two reasons to worry about sports teams leaving your city. The more legitimate one is the loss of tourist dollars and the effect on the city's economy. The second and frankly less important reason is the patriotic one that we like the A's (or Raiders or whoever) and don't want to see them go.

As for the first one, what, exactly, do Oakland and in particular the neighborhoods around the Coliseum lose if the A's leave, in terms of revenue? What percentage of money spent on game day does not go directly into the As' (or Raiders', or Warriors') coffers? Have there been studies done as to how much money would be lost for Oakland's residents? It's hard to argue that restaurant revenues and other recreation in Oakland would take much of a hit because of this. Who comes to a Raiders game and then goes out in Oakland? I would love for this to change, but looking at the geography of the stadium, you either BART in, and then BART right back out (getting to Coliseum BART on the caged-in raised platform) or you jump back on the freeway. By the time you're passing the Broadway exit, do you stop for a beer at Pacific Coast, or do you keep going home to Pinole or Vallejo? While this seems reasonable, it's also all speculative and anecdotal, so if there are numbers please point me to them.

Pro sports teams are accustomed to (pardon the expression) having cities over a barrel when they threaten to move. Example: 15-20 years ago when the Steelers wanted a new stadium, they essentially told Pittsburgh "build us one, or we move, and your hanging-on-by-a-thread downtown area is dead". As a former Pennsylvanian, I can tell you (gratefully) that the West Coast is notoriously uninterested in sports relative to the Northeast and Midwest, probably owing to better weather, and furthermore out here we're much better served by non-sports tourism than cities in those parts of the country. San Francisco's downtown does not depend on sports revenue. That's why when the Niners tried the same stunt with Newsom a couple years back, he told them not to let the door hit their ass on the way out. Can you tell I love how stunned the owner was by this? (The day after I wrote this I was reading CNN and saw that in fact, parts further east are taking this same attitude: this article in part discusses the uprising against the Marlins' demand for a new stadium in Miami.)

As to the second reason - city patriotism - in general, Americans' attitude toward sports franchises is blurred. We think of them almost as a government agency. They're not; they're a local franchise of a national company, operating out of profit-motive. Just like the Taco Bell two blocks from your house. Are you more loyal to that one than the one up in Albany? That's all fine, but then don't be puzzled when teams screw their "home city" for a few dollars; don't be puzzled when players change teams "just for money". Yes. They're professionals. They're doing it to make money.

In addition to the lost revenues, mayors of other cities don't want to be known as the guy or gal who let the home team leave on their watch. By all means, follow Chip Johnson's proposal and sue the A's to keep the name and colors in Oakland, so the team can be reincarnated in the event another organization comes to Oakland in the future. For now, the current A's organization shouldn't hold its breath waiting to be courted.

I fully support the city of Oakland handling the A's and the Raiders the same way that Newsom dealt with the Niners. Losing these teams will not affect the downtown.

Also, how do I know Al Davis serves Sauron? Because he's an orc. Spot the difference!




Above: a vicious creature that creeps around in the darkness and slime whose occasional glimmers of intelligence emerge from incoherent hissing and growling only in flashes of deceit and animal-like blood instinct. The other one was in Lord of the Rings.

The Cost of the Riots: At Least $1,200,000

One million of the $5.5 million that OPD is over-budget is owing to the riots. Add to that $200,000 in property damage.

This figure doesn't take into account business lost due to bad public perception of safety - both from safety downtown, and safety on BART (including from BART's own police force). Small businesses in Oakland don't need more challenges at this point in economic history.

You Can Help Defeat Nepotism in Oakland City Government

The Oakland City Auditor needs your help to ensure transparency and control nepotism in City Government.

The Deborah Edgerly mess left no room to doubt that nepotism was a huge problem in this city. Fortunately, it spawned efforts to reign it in. Unfortunately, those efforts are being stymied from the highest levels. There was an Chip Johnson piece in the Chronicle last week about how Oakland city employees are resisting a legal request from the City Auditor’s office for information, apparently with the complicity of City Manager Dan Lindheim and, by extension, the mayor and her husband.

From what I've seen so far from her, city auditor Courtney Ruby has one goal: transparency in government. Consequently, having to confront this kind of bald-faced resistance to a basic good government effort to de-opacify the goings-on in City Hall, she has put out what HarriOak News referred to as "an unprecedented plea for help":

Dear Concerned Oaklanders,

You have likely seen the article in today's Chronicle. It is accurate - the Administration is trying to withhold key documents essential to my audit of the City's hiring practices.

There is no question that these documents should be released to my office. As City Attorney Russo states, "I issued an (legal) opinion in 2007...under the charter, the auditor has unlimited review power."

I am your eyes and ears inside City Hall. These anti-nepotism documents, as part of my Hiring Practices Audit, are critical to restoring transparency and accountability in Oakland's government.

My office will be pursuing legal avenues, but nothing is as effective as the power of a concerned electorate. I encourage you to contact the Mayor's office today and let them know that you expect the Administration to fulfill the City Auditor's request.

Committed to serving you and Oakland with the utmost integrity,

Courtney A. Ruby, CPA
City Auditor


Office of the City Auditor
City of Oakland
1 Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, 4th Floor
Oakland, CA 94612
Phone: (510) 238-3378
Email: cityauditor@oaklandnet.com
Website: www.oaklandauditor.com

So get on email and let the Mayor know, and spread this so-far very quiet news far and wide. The City Attorney has ruled clearly and we're getting into basic questions about respecting the rule of law. According to one commenter at HarriOak, when s/he called the Mayor's office, s/he was told that comments must be faxed or emailed. So I've already emailed my comment to officeofthemayor@oaklandnet.com. Full contact information for the mayor can be found here.

Update: Happy ending. After another Chip Johnson column (mentioning 40 emails to City Hall, of which I was one) the situation is resolved. Below is an email sent out by Ms. Ruby today. See, they do listen to citizens:

Dear Oaklanders,

Early this morning, the Administration fulfilled my request for hiring practices documentation.

Your voice, joined with scores of other concerned and committed Oakland citizens, triggered another key step toward establishing transparency and accountability at Oakland city hall. I am especially grateful for and honored by your willingness to respond immediately when the cause of good government calls.

Today I have fresh confidence that the new City Administrator shares the goals and aspirations demonstrated this past week by you, Oakland’s concerned citizens.

Together we can have the city we all want - one that is managed with transparency, accountability and enlightened, ethical leadership.

Committed to serving you and Oakland with the utmost integrity,
Courtney A. Ruby, CPA
City Auditor

The Bird Sanctuary at Lake Merritt

Once a week or so, I pick up a nice little Vietnamese sandwich in China town and then go over to the bird sanctuary along Lake Merritt, over there by the Junior Center of Art and Science. You know, the first wildlife sanctuary in the United States, established in 1870? Until today I didn't know either. That's yet another point of pride for Oakland, which we ought to be trumpeting more loudly.


A black-crowned night-heron at Lake Merritt. While the name and the red eyes may make these fellows seem slightly malevolent, they're really pretty mellow.

As much as I enjoy the herons and cranes and grebes and canvasbacks over there, I can't help but wonder how to explain several observations. If you have info, by all means share in the comments.

1) There's a geodesic dome with birds in it. As I later learned from a user at RockridgeResidents.org, the dome is "one of the first, and probably the longest surviving of [Buckminster Fuller's] ingenious domes." Another first! The mystery is what the purpose is of the birds in it? It doesn't seem that they can get in and out, but the species inside are the same as the ones outside, and they don't seem to be injured. The upkeep inside the dome doesn't seem to be great. What's the story on this?

2) In addition to all the native critters that take advantage of the sanctuary, there was a chicken wandering around today. Now, I'm no ornithologist but I'll wager chickens aren't native fauna.

I know it's challenging to keep a place clean when birds are flying everywhere, but the upkeep of some of the facilities (especially that dome) and groundskeeping seems like the city hasn't paid it much attention recently. Even a few more informational plaques about what they're doing there would really help the public appreciate it more. This spot has the potential to be a really outstanding family and outdoor destination.