Fighting Crime In Downton Oakland Essay

Fighting Crime in Downton Oakland: A Public-Private Partnership Case Study During the early 1980’s Oakland, California had a crime problem which plagued the city. This problem with crime was greatly impacting the cities and investors attempts to revamp downtown Oakland. Oakland had Asia Development Corporations and Bramlea, two large investors, move into downtown Oakland. These two investors created new office spaces which attracted other tenants such as IBM and Clorox. Although Oakland had new investors and business moving in, they still had many available buildings not being occupied. Oakland leaders, Bill Bodgum, Police Chief George Hart, and Peter Sama, all agreed that the issue which was preventing potential business from relocating

First, the police force was not adequately staffed to take on the crime problem downtown and due to lack of funding they were not in a position to expand their current staff. The issues with the private security sector was the lack of coordination and the fact they could not prevent crime outside of their assigned areas/buildings, leaving citizens unprotected as they walked the streets, waited on buses, and traveling back and forth to their vehicles. Not to mention, the private security sector was costing investors and tenants a great deal of money. To combat this issue the leaders of downtown Oakland devised a plan to add more police officer to their force to the expense of the investors and tenants. The police force would add three patrol officers during the day and two patrol officers at night to patrol an area the size of six-by-seven city blocks to prevent crime. This seemed to be a great plan and all investors and tenants had committed to investing their share to support this crime prevention plan. Although everything was looking good toward a successful launch of the project, one of the major investors filled bankruptcy leaving the other large investor having to pick up the