Most Murders of Black People in Oakland Go Unsolved. Authorities Have No Plan to "Fix It" [if Cops Have No Legal Duty to Protect Citizens, What's the Basis of Their Authority and Our Duty to Obey It?]
the SO-CALLED social contract IS SAID TO BE AN agreement whereby citizens voluntarily agree to obey government authority in exchange for police protection and other services from the government.
If there is no social contract then there is no rational basis for the belief in political authority - the basis for all governments, everywhere. Here, BW is not talking about the purpose of government or how government can be improved. Rather, the problem is whether the government has a right to rule over people IN THE FIRST PLACE and whether people have an obligation to obey THEIR IMPLIED authority. What is the basis of the government’s implied right to rule over people in the first place? Is there a rational basis to account for authority or a logical way to account for its existence? [MORE]
From [HERE] This is the common experience for families of homicide victims in Oakland, where most homicides go unsolved — a devastating phenomenon that regularly plagues the city, according to a San Francisco Chronicle analysis.
Black men are grossly overrepresented in both homicide totals and in cases that go unsolved.
Watkins was one of 120 people killed in Oakland last year. By the end of 2022, the Oakland Police Department reported “clearing” — meaning resolving a case, either through an arrest or other means — just 32 out of those cases, or 27%. The FBI defines a clearance rate as the percentage of homicides from a given year that were resolved — as well as cases that were resolved from prior years. That gave Oakland police an official 2022 clearance rate of 36%.
Oakland’s rate is far below other large California cities, including San Francisco, and a national average that suffered during the pandemic, declining to about 50% in 2020, the most recent year for which the FBI had figures.
The Chronicle analysis found homicides in 2022 were more likely to go unsolved in East Oakland, where the majority of the city’s lower-income Black and Latino residents live, and more likely to be solved in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods closer to the city’s affluent population, like downtown and, increasingly, West Oakland.
In a city whose Police Department has churned through a dozen chiefs while under federal oversight for 20 years, the reasons for Oakland’s consistently low solve rate may be myriad.
A 2020 UC Berkeley study uncovered “stark racial disparities in arrest rates for homicides” and many complaints about the way Oakland police respond to homicides. Victims’ families, particularly Black ones, reported “disrespectful and discriminatory” treatment and that police didn’t take their safety concerns seriously enough as cases dragged on unsolved. The study found that this contributes to the difficulty police have in getting witness cooperation, and raises grave fears of retaliatory violence. [MORE]