Oakland has once again found itself in the crosshairs of President Donald Trump, who said Monday he would place the nation’s capital under federal control and named the East Bay town among the other cities he may target.
Trump promised to activate the National Guard to take over Washington, D.C.’s police department, an effort he said would involve cracking down on crime and removing homeless encampments in the city.
Declaring a public safety emergency in the capital, the president added, “We have other cities also that are bad — very bad,” naming Chicago and Los Angeles as examples.
“And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland,” he continued. “We don’t even mention that any more there — they are so far gone. We’re not going to let it happen. We’re not going to lose our cities over this. And this will go further.”
Oakland, known for its rich history of progressive politics, is familiar with such attacks by Trump, who also clashed with former Mayor Libby Schaaf in 2018 after she gave the public advance warning of a raid by federal immigration authorities.
Crime is on a steady decline across the board over the past 18 months in Oakland, where city leaders previously had struggled to fend off conservative critiques of a spike in violence and burglaries during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mayor Barbara Lee, a former veteran of Congress who has seldom held back in calling Trump a threat to democracy, issued a statement Monday saying flatly: “President Trump is wrong.” She highlighted the city’s declining crime rates while calling his comments “not grounded in facts, but in fear-mongering.”
“This is not leadership – it’s an attempt to score cheap political points by tearing down communities he doesn’t understand,” said Lee, in her statement.
An Oakland Police Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Oakland’s longstanding civil-rights voices, meanwhile, said the president’s threat of sending the National Guard should be taken seriously. To them, however, it is also nothing new.
“He’s gaining more attention by attacking Black and brown folk, in particular, and working people in general,” said Walter Riley, a prominent Oakland civil rights attorney. “We expect that he would attack Oakland because of the status we have in the progressive movement.”
Trump’s choice to name cities such as Washington D.C., Chicago, Baltimore and Oakland — all of which have large Black populations — did not strike racial justice leaders here as any kind of coincidence.
“Trump is only unique in his crudeness and his incredibly brash way of speaking,” said Elaine Brown, the former chair of the Oakland Black Panther Party. “That’s about it. At the end of the day, the systemic issues have been in place for a long time.”
Councilmember Carroll Fife, who represents West Oakland and parts of downtown, said the sweeping cuts by the White House to social spending could ironically produce more crime in the coming years.
“The goal is to put people in situations where their needs are so dire that they have to engage in illegal activity,” she said.
Even leaders of tough-on-crime approaches to public safety in Oakland warned Trump against any such move.
Carl Chan, an Oakland Chinatown leader who helped lead the November 2024 recall of progressive Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price, said any such takeover would be “disastrous.” He said the city is too diverse and unique for an outsider to take over, and he feared the effect that such a takeover would have on police officer morale.
“If they send the National Guard to take over, there will be tons of protests within the city,” said Chan, adding, “we don’t want to go from one extreme to another.”
The city’s leaders have credited the recent drop in crime to a focused violence-intervention strategy. The mayor and city police leaders celebrated the decline in violence last week at a news conference.
“Our work is far from done,” Lee said at last week’s event. “We’re going to keep building on this progress with the same comprehensive approach that got us here.”
As of Aug. 3, police had investigated 41 crimes as homicides this year — a 24% decrease from this time last year, when there were 54 investigated homicides and 65 at the same time in 2023.
Reported burglaries are down by 25%, robberies by 41% and violent crime as a whole by 29%, according to police data. Property crime has followed the trend, with 41% fewer reports of automobile break-ins, as well as 45% fewer carjackings and commercial burglaries alike.
Critiques of Oakland’s longer-term struggles with crime have not come from Trump and Republicans alone. Gov. Gavin Newsom last year sent California Highway Patrol officers to Oakland, an effort to flank the city’s police in combating a crime problem that at the time had lingered well beyond the pandemic’s worst days.
The governor also issued an executive order last summer calling for the removal of homeless encampments, which Trump on Monday said he would task the National Guard with doing in major cities, beginning with Washington, D.C.
Newsom, who has built his national political star in part by defying Trump’s policies, did not immediately comment on the president’s comments Monday, and neither did state Attorney General Rob Bonta.
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