Welcome to Oakland Report

Reasoned, evidence-based analyses and critiques on the City of Oakland and neighboring communities

Welcome to Oakland Report, a publication founded by citizens¹ of Oakland, California.

Our mission is to deliver articles written by and for Oaklanders and neighboring communities—articles that help us better understand our City and and the East Bay.

We believe that our community is desperate for reasoned, evidence-based analyses and critiques of the policies, actions, and inactions of our city, county, and state governments.  We aim to educate citizens on local governance so they can interpret and influence policies that deeply affect our lives and livelihoods. 

We seek integrity, accessibility, and quality in the articles we publish. We seek truth.

We don’t expect everyone to agree with everything that is published, but we do expect that the articles are grounded in verifiable evidence and logic so that all observations and conclusions may be rationally challenged.

Our first posts will highlight public safety policy

Our first two articles (coming soon) are both on public safety—a topic that is top of mind for almost everyone in Oakland this year.

• The first article will be an in-depth investigation into the outcomes of the Mobile Assistance Community Responders of Oakland (MACRO) Program, the City’s first attempt to “reimagine” the police.  MACRO completed its 18-month pilot program in October with no assessment of performance against its goals. We will fill that gap. 

• The second article will provide a perspective on police staffing in Oakland and the relationship between crime rates here and in the rest of the country. While this is a frequently the subject social media opinions, there is a dearth of informed discussion in Oakland on the topic. Yet there are ample studies and data that address this topic, and we will discuss them. 

Two upcoming events are of particular relevance to public safety in 2024: 

1. A study on police staffing commissioned by the City Council which is due to report out in the summer of 2024, and;

2. A replacement for Measure Z that will be placed on the ballot in November 2024. Measure Z is a 10-year law that expires in 2024. It mandates minimum police staffing levels, funding for police and violence prevention, and community policing policies. 

Oakland Report will not focus solely on public safety. But given its present impact and urgency in the lives of citizens, we will give it the weight of our attention for the coming months. 

We are powered by civic duty, not money

We seek to sustain this effort through volunteer article submissions and efforts, not paid executives or editorial staff, to avoid the inherent conflicts of interest that arise from sponsor and member supported publications. If no decision-makers or creators are being paid, there is less incentive to publish content that only tells people what they want to hear. 

We welcome submissions from anyone in the Oakland and neighboring communities. Email us at oaklandreport@substack.com.

We also welcome comments and discussion from all of those interested in the open dialogue and debate that democracy requires. 

Jacob Rukin and Tim Gardner (co-founders)

oaklandreport@substack.com

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1. "Citizens" does not refer to citizenship in the legal sense, but instead refers to anyone and everyone who resides in our city and is eager to engage thoughtfully and critically in our politics and future. As citizens, we have a duty to engage civically, and with knowledge. This is, after all, our home. We can’t leave the job of tending it to “someone else.”