Résumé
Increases in violent crime in the early 2000s caused a great deal of concern among Oakland,
California, residents and policymakers. In response, in November 2004, Oakland voters passed
a ballot measure that created the Violence Prevention and Public Safety Act (also known as
Measure Y), which provides $19.9 million per year for violence-prevention programs, 63 new
police officers focused on community and neighborhood policing services, and an independent
evaluation of the measure.
This report summarizes RAND’s assessment of Measure Y–funded community-policing
efforts through September 2008, expanding on the first-year process—or implementation—
analysis and examining the effectiveness of community policing as implemented through the
problem-solving officer (PSO) program. To conduct the analysis, we relied on four sources of
information: (1) a Web-based survey of PSOs; (2) an assessment of PSO deployment data used
to summarize the deployment, stability, and coverage of the PSOs; (3) official crime statistics
from January 1, 1998, through April 30, 2008, used to form two crime measures for each PSO
beat—violent crime and property crime—which, in turn, were used as outcome variables in
interrupted time series analyses; and (4) semistructured interviews and focus groups with Oakland
Police Department (OPD) staff.