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Oakland is a city in political turmoil - a raid on the mayor's home by the FBI and news story after news story about a spike in crime. It's also, like many cities, facing pushback against new criminal justice policies, changes that emerged in part out of 2020's racial justice uprisings. In Oakland, some Black activists say the charge against that approach and misinformation about the causes of crime are coming from a surprising place, the local NAACP. NPR's Sandhya Dirks reports.
SANDHYA DIRKS, BYLINE: A year ago, former Fox News host Leland Vittert was hosting his show on NewsNation.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "ON BALANCE WITH LELAND VITTERT")
LELAND VITTERT: Cynthia Adams is with us, the Oakland NAAC (ph) president.
DIRKS: Adams had penned a letter calling for a state of emergency in Oakland over rising crime.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "ON BALANCE WITH LELAND VITTERT")
CYNTHIA ADAMS: You can't go to the grocery stores. You can't put your groceries in your cars. You can't do anything.
DIRKS: The words on the screen beneath her - Oakland's NAACP blames crime spike on liberal policies. After a national post-lockdown rise, crime fell in most places but not in Oakland. Many people are scared and frustrated. The local NAACP blames that on antipolice rhetoric and progressive politics, including the actions of Black electeds and activists.
ROBERT HARRIS: It all goes back to this so-called notion of defund the police.
DIRKS: That's Robert Harris with the Oakland NAACP. We sat down to talk at a country club in the Oakland Hills. Police weren't defunded in Oakland during pandemic lockdowns. OPD's budget actually rose, but recent budget crises leave funding in question, and the department is staffed well below recommendations. The claim that the defund movement is responsible for raising crime has been largely debunked by experts, along with another narrative the NAACP has echoed - that progressive prosecutors are letting criminals go free.
HARRIS: The NAACP has always supported police. When people were killed down south, it was because of the lack of policing.
DIRKS: For a long time, the Oakland NAACP has been relatively quiet, but they got very loud in February 2023, when the newly elected mayor fired the city's Black police chief. They're big supporters of his. The mayor says the police chief was fired after he covered up misconduct by some of his officers, but Harris says the NAACP felt betrayed. He says the mayor never met with them about this or anything else. He says the firing set a tone.
HARRIS: And when you set that kind of tone, and you give that kind of impression to the thugs, the thugs will take over, and they have taken over.
DIRKS: That message has been picked up by multiple national conservative outlets. A sample headline - ultra-woke Oakland leaders blasted by NAACP over a rise in crime. But some other Black activists in the city claim the local branch has been hijacked for a conservative and ultimately anti-Black project. They wrote their own letter, addressed to the national NAACP, asking them to investigate the local chapter. A a press conference last fall, Doug Blacksher, a former local NAACP member read part of it.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DOUG BLACKSHER: The Oakland branch is currently using its position to hijack the legacy of the historic organization and using it as a weapon, a weapon against their opposition.
DIRKS: The national NAACP didn't take action on that letter and hasn't commented. Walter Riley is a civil rights lawyer and activist who also signed the letter. He told me he doesn't want to be in a fight with the local NAACP, but...
WALTER RILEY: What I see developing is a few people deciding that they could make alliances with the right wing in order to gain political position.
DIRKS: Riley says, what may have started as a feeling of lost power or disrespect from the new mayor has become linked to something bigger, a campaign on the right to push back against criminal justice reform by crafting a narrative blaming crime on so-called woke policies.
CAT BROOKS: All this has been about building a base and getting their power back.
DIRKS: That's Cat Brooks, a local activist with the Anti Police-Terror Project. To her, this is part of a national project to seed a conservative, even MAGA movement locally, including in so-called progressive cities and among people of color. Her examples - taking over school boards and recalling progressive prosecutors, like in San Francisco, where a progressive prosecutor was recalled after a well-funded campaign blamed him for crime. Crime actually rose after he was replaced by a tough-on-crime candidate. Now the progressive prosecutor that serves Oakland is also being recalled.
BROOKS: Those people did what they did in San Francisco, and then they came over here, and they are utilizing Black faces to move the mission because then it gets hard - right? - for Cat Brooks to be like, this is white folks, this is white supremacy, etc., etc. But listen, the folks that the FBI infiltrated the Black Panther party with were not white folks.
DIRKS: Oakland's NAACP said they've taken no official position on the prosecutor recall, but they are affiliated with individuals directly connected to the recall campaign, including local activist Seneca Scott, a controversial figure who critics claim runs in far-right circles. Scott also went on Fox News to blame progressives for crime when he was on the executive board of the Oakland NAACP. They say Scott's no longer on the board, but they say he's still a member. As for Fox News and other right-wing media, here's the Oakland NAACPs Robert Harris again.
HARRIS: We'll never support Fox News with its current philosophy.
DIRKS: There have always been divides in the Black community around public safety and police, says James Forman Jr., author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning history "Locking Up Our Own." I asked him about why it seems like the face of a return to tough-on-crime politics is right now Black mayors and Black police chiefs in Democratic cities like New York and Atlanta. Forman says, it's complicated. For a long time, just getting Black police and Black police chiefs was seen as a civil rights victory. But for some, that has shifted, as evidence made clear having Black police hasn't changed policing.
JAMES FORMAN JR: Black people are simultaneously more likely to be victims of crime and homicide, more likely to be victims of police brutality and police shooting and more likely to be incarcerated, including for extraordinarily long sentences.
DIRKS: Taken together...
FORMAN: In the Black community, there are always going to be competing and warring desires and impulses and needs.
DIRKS: But for some, there are concerns that those divides are being used as a wedge between Black people in a moment when the national NAACP warns of the greatest threat to civil rights since the civil rights movement. Sandhya Dirks, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE ALBUM LEAF'S "THE LIGHT") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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