Next month, the Oakland Police Department will dispatch a team of officers to Santa Clara County to protect the Super Bowl, but department officials say it won’t impact their ability to staff patrols and other crime-fighting work in Oakland.

At Tuesday’s Public Safety Committee meeting, several councilmembers gave approval to OPD’s plan to send officers to Levi’s Stadium for the NFL’s championship game next month. The full council still needs to approve the proposal.

Oakland will also send officers to help the South Bay city for World Cup matches at Levi’s Stadium in June. 

Councilmembers were initially wary of the plan. 

For years, OPD and its supporters have complained that the department is dangerously short-staffed and that they cannot spare losing any more officers for duties like patrol and investigations. 

The department is budgeted for 678 officers but only has 613 filled positions, according to data reported to the Oakland Police Commission. And the department is only able to field 518 officers because 89 are currently on long-term medical or administrative leave. OPD currently loses about six officers per month. For perspective, the department’s 195th academy, which began last July, is down to 14 trainees; the academy that began in November has just 23. 

OPD also already relies heavily on overtime assignments to backfill patrol and other critical positions, and year after year, the department exceeds its overtime budget by millions of dollars. A report published last year found that OPD needs 877 officers to adequately cover the city.

Last year, Huy Nguyen, the president of the Oakland Police Officers Association, raised alarms about “dangerously low staffing” and said, “We can’t continue to leave open beats every night because we’re understaffed. We make a lot of promises and we can’t deliver.”

Councilmember Carroll Fife told OPD she was struggling to approve the Santa Clara assignments when the police union “is consistently talking about the lack of officers every single day.” 

“To me, that is a contradiction,” she said.

Interim Assistant Chief Casey Johnson explained that the agreement with Santa Clara will not obligate Oakland to send more officers than the city can safely part with, and that other agencies will also be deploying law enforcement to the stadium. 

OPD will be reimbursed by the city of Santa Clara for sending around 25 officers who will be off duty and working overtime. This is OPD’s second time sending officers to assist with a Super Bowl, and its first time handling FIFA events. The full council must approve the agreement at its next meeting. 

The Oakland officers will be equipped with tactical gear and can be called back to Oakland in the event of an emergency, according to OPD. The department’s memorandum budgets 3 hours of travel time to and from Levi Stadium.   

Johnson also noted that OPD will maintain regular assignments in Oakland, and that no officers who are assigned to work on the day of the Super Bowl will be allowed to volunteer for overtime assignments.

Acknowledging that some officers may want to go to the Super Bowl or a FIFA match because “it’s cool,” Johnson said, “We have a city to protect. And the city is going to be a priority.”

Charlene Wang, who chairs the Public Safety committee, asked if denying the resolution would create a rupture in OPD’s relationship with Santa Clara. Bay Area law enforcement agencies often send officers to support one another during emergencies. Several jurisdictions recently offered to send Oakland help when a parole officer was shot and killed, and numerous law enforcement agencies from across Northern California came to Oakland in 2020 during the George Floyd protests. The OPD staffer said a rupture wasn’t likely, but warned that rejecting the agreement would send “a little bit of a message” to other Bay Area cities.

“We like to keep those relationships intact,” he added.

Wang also noted that one of the World Cup events is happening on Juneteenth, which has occasionally seen spurts of serious violence, including a mass shooting near Lake Merritt in 2024. 

A different OPD staffer said if such an event were to happen, OPD would have personnel on scene to handle it and can also rely on support from the Alameda County Sheriff’s office. Johnson also noted that diverting officers to Santa Clara will not hamper human and sex trafficking operations in Oakland.  

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