By Chip Johnson
The San Francisco Chronicle
OAKLAND, Calif. — In his first week on the job, Oakland Police Chief Anthony Batts asked the city’s high-ranking officers to draw up an organizational chart of the city’s most active criminal enterprises, and explain their structure and hierarchy, from shot-caller to street soldier.
No one in the room could do it.
The new chief, however, had a leg up on the situation. During his seven-year tenure as police chief in Long Beach, his department investigators tracked Mexican drug mules from the border through Long Beach and to their final destination: Oakland.
Batts believes Oakland serves as the regional drug distribution hub for the rest of the Bay Area and points north.
“Crime is based on economics, whether it’s Mexican gangs bringing in the drugs or the black gangs who sell them,” he told me during a meeting at a local cafe last week.
It’s obviously far too early to tell how effective the new chief will be after less than a month on the job, but he certainly makes a very strong first impression.
At age 49, Batts is a man of average height with a shaved head, a muscular frame and barrel chest. He is well spoken, comfortable with himself and confident, but not arrogant.
What immediately sets him apart from his predecessors is that he has a plan to restructure the department and address some of the most serious crimes affecting the city.
It’s a plan not generated by politicians but formed by an independent thinker. “I think the Oakland Police Department is broken, and we have a tough time providing even basic services,” Batts said. “We have dissatisfied residents who call the police and don’t get results, and that’s our core function.”
But with 17 vacancies in the police dispatch center, and without accurate data on crime organizations or the technological sophistication to collect it, the department is operating at a distinct disadvantage, Batts said.
Thus at the top of his to-do list is a departmental restructuring to provide more efficient basic services and an attack on the city’s organized criminal enterprises.
It would be a welcome change in Oakland, which was named the No. 3 most violent city in the nation in an annual report released Monday by CQ Press. Oakland has ranked in the top 10 on the list for the last three years.
Because drug sales - and the violence that result from it - are a regional problem, Batts has proposed a regional partnership with the San Francisco Police Department to share resources to go after the big fish.
Batts will continue to seek assistance from federal and state law enforcement agencies, but hopes that via a mutual assistance program with San Francisco and other cities, he can multiply the numbers of his own undersize force of less than 800 sworn police officers. He also plans to review search and seizure laws with sworn officers and plans to use the laws in a proactive manner, he said.
He is familiar with the challenges facing young African American kids growing up in disadvantaged communities. He grew up in some of the toughest communities in South Central Los Angeles, and has firsthand knowledge of the problems.
“Does anybody care about us here?” he said, recalling the questions he asked himself time and again as a young man growing up.
“There are good families in those communities - and I’m not talking about the gangsters,” he said. “I want to make things better.”
Next month, after he’s finished a “diagnostic” examination of the Police Department, Batts will unveil his vision of what Oakland police should be, said Scott Bryant, a strategic consultant who worked with Batts in Long Beach.
Batts would also be the first one to admit that without community support, even the best efforts of the Police Department alone cannot turn the tables on criminal activity.
“This community is going to have to stand up” and make their feelings known, he said. “No one is going to save us but us.”
Copyright 2009 San Francisco Chronicle