Thirty-six people died in Oakland’s infamous Ghost Ship fire. Police had seen and had been told almost two years earlier that people were living there illegally. Yet they did nothing.
Why? Because it’s not their department. It would be merely a bureaucratic cliché if the outcome hadn’t been so tragic. Amazingly, Mayor Libby Schaaf endorses this shameful denial of responsibility. It’s political pandering at its worst. “Our police officers are trained to identify criminal activity, they are not trained in code enforcement,” Schaaf told our reporters. Well, Madame Mayor, maybe it’s time to train them, like other cities do and Oakland has in the past.