Meet Oakland’s at-large City Council candidates (2025)

Ten candidates are running for the at-large City Council seat in Oakland, which long-time incumbent Rebecca Kaplan is leaving at the end of the year.

Table of Contents

  • LeRonne Armstrong
  • Rowena Brown
  • Shawn Danino
  • Kanitha Matoury
  • Mindy Pechenuk
  • Nancy Sidebotham
  • Cristina Tostado
  • Charlene Wang

The at-large seat has no special powers compared to the other councilmembers. But unlike the seven district seats, the at-large councilmember represents the entire city of Oakland. That means this elected official can take a broader view of the city’s big issues, similar to the mayor.

The 10 people in this race include a former police chief, a legislative director, a housing policy wonk, a business owner, a tax preparer, an environmental and civil rights advisor, a retail supervisor, and an activist. Despite their divergent backgrounds, many embrace similar ideas for how to address Oakland’s most pressing problems. For example, several candidates want to hire an auditor to figure out what’s ailing Oakland’s budget. Many also believe the police department should have more officers and less oversight.

We interviewed eight of the 10 candidates. Two candidates, Selika Thomas and Fabian Robinson, did not respond to several emails and phone calls.

We are presenting the candidates in alphabetical order.

Here’s how to learn more about the Nov. 5 election, including how to register and vote.

LeRonne Armstrong

Meet Oakland’s at-large City Council candidates (1)

Armstrong, Oakland’s former police chief, youth mentor and basketball coach, grew up in West Oakland and served in OPD for 24 years.

“I think the most important thing I’ve contributed to Oakland is being a bridge between the police department and the community,” Armstrong said. “Being the police chief, that really was a huge focus for me, building trust with our community.”

Like other candidates, Armstrong wants to hire an outside auditor to evaluate the city’s budget and find things to potentially cut so that Oakland can get on surer financial footing. He said he believes it would be useful to sit down with Oakland’s labor unions and to get on the same page about the city’s budget situation.

“That leads to a more open and transparent conversation about what the city is in need of to avoid any additional financial deficits, in terms of potential bankruptcy, if we don’t remedy these issues,” he said.

Recognizing that housing and infrastructure are major needs, Armstrong would advocate for the city to continue using Measure U dollars — the $350 million bond measure passed by voters in 2022 — to pursue infrastructure projects and streamline the building process to make it easier to build homes. He also wants the city to partner with community organizations already building affordable housing and would urge the city to pursue state and federal grants to support housing.

Like other candidates, he wants to partner with Alameda County more to find resources for the unhoused.

Improving road conditions is a priority for Armstrong. He said the city should prioritize a list of the worst streets in the city and develop a public timeline so residents can know when those roads will be repaved. (Oakland’s five-year paving plan includes a map where residents can look at the timeline for repaving street by street. Armstrong said the timeline should give more granular updates of when paving will be completed in a given area).

Armstrong also wants to deploy traffic radar cameras at the city’s most dangerous roads and intersections to hold speeders accountable. The city used to have something similar — automated red light cameras — but they were taken down years ago. More recently, Oakland, with help from the CHP, deployed scores of Flock Safety license plate reader cameras across the city to help police spot and track vehicles associated with crimes, and there are also plate scanners set up by private neighborhood groups. As a councilmember, Armstrong said he would advocate for more technological support for OPD, such as surveillance cameras.

Armstrong is a strong supporter of growing the ranks of Oakland police officers. It’ll be a challenge to find money to raise the department’s officer count, but Armstrong said the city currently has taken money from frozen OPD positions to pay for overtime, as well as to fund other departments. He believes that by restoring that funding for OPD staffing, the department could increase to 792 officers.

Armstrong said the city could partner again with Merritt College to create a pipeline for recruits to the department. Under Armstrong, OPD signed up for an initiative to get more women into the department, which he’s interested in continuing as a councilmember. According to OPD’s most recent staffing report, the number of female OPD sworn staff has declined from 15.56% in 2021 to 14.48% in 2024. And Armstrong would push for better marketing to attract new hires. “We have a lot to offer, but if council doesn’t provide a marketing budget to actually recruit, and that’s for dispatchers as well, it definitely shrinks your pool of candidates,” he said.

Armstrong said he would continue to support the Department of Violence Prevention and the anti-gun violence Ceasefire program. Earlier this year, an audit found that Ceasefire became less effective in recent years, partly because of Armstrong’s decision to create the Violence Crime Operations Center, which diverted resources from the initiative. Armstrong said he disagrees with that finding, and that as chief he helped remove thousands of guns from the street.

“Oakland is plagued by more than one or two things, there’s a series of crimes that need to be addressed,” Armstrong said.

One of the most controversial public safety debates in Oakland today is OPD’s vehicle pursuit policy. Some believe the policy ties officers’ hands and prevents them from catching suspects, while others say it’s important to reduce the number of chases to prevent unnecessary injuries and deaths. Armstrong said there are misconceptions about what the policy allows for, but he is for modifying the rules.

“I know people say ‘Chief Armstrong had no pursuit policy,’ but the policy doesn’t actually prevent you from pursuing,” Armstrong explained. The policy could be amended so officers can initiate chases when they witness people committing crimes, he said. “If we see somebody break into a car right in front of us, we should take action and try to apprehend them.”

Armstrong believes city officials should be pushing to end the negotiated settlement agreement, which has kept OPD under federal court oversight for over two decades because of systemic racism and violence perpetrated by officers against mostly Black Oakland residents. OPD has struggled to complete a lengthy list of reforms it agreed to over 20 years ago, although the department came close under Armstrong’s leadership.

However, in January 2023 an outside investigation faulted Armstrong and other command staff for failing to properly discipline an officer involved in a hit-and-run in a parking garage. A neutral hearing officer later criticized the investigation into Armstrong and recommended that Oakland reverse the discipline he received.

In a different case, OPD’s internal affairs division found that a homicide detective named Phong Tran accused of bribing a witness and perjuring himself had done nothing wrong, even though two men’s murder convictions were overturned by a state judge because of his actions. Independent investigators and the police commission’s investigative arm later concluded that was the wrong decision and faulted Armstrong and seven other mostly high-ranking OPD officers.

Armstrong was placed on leave in early 2023 while Mayor Sheng Thao considered what to do with the findings of the hit-and-run investigation. Thao fired Armstrong shortly after this when he made public comments criticizing the federal monitor as corrupt. Armstrong subsequently filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against the city, which is still pending in federal court.

Armstrong said he believes the department’s internal affairs division is working well. He added that he thinks OPD is working harder investigating police officers for alleged misconduct than it is investigating homicides.

He said it’s up to the city attorney to make the case for why OPD has complied with the mandates of the NSA, and that to date the office hasn’t done that.

“That’s the focus I want to bring to the council, about the reality of the work that’s been done over the last 20 some odd years, and how if we don’t challenge this we’ll never get out from under this” Armstrong said. “Because no police department is perfect, and you can always find something that you can say is a problem.”

Assuming Mayor Sheng Thao survives the recall campaign, Armstrong said he would have no issues working with her.

“For me, it’s about getting the work in Oakland done,” Armstrong said. “If we keep that first and make that the focus, I don’t think there should be an issue — or at least I won’t have an issue.”

Rowena Brown

Meet Oakland’s at-large City Council candidates (2)

Brown is the legislative district director for Assemblymember Mia Bonta, who represents Oakland and Alameda in Sacramento. Brown previously worked as a staffer for Councilmember Loren Taylor and as an 8th-grade teacher. She also served as a job coach and career counselor providing assistance to workers and disabled adults. A state board member for the organization Black Women Organized for Political Action, Brown is an elected representative of the Democratic Central Committee for the 18th Assembly District.

In her interview with The Oaklandside, Brown said she’s already working on behalf of Oakland residents. Becoming a councilmember would be a way to continue this service. For example, she recently coordinated with regulators and stakeholders in Oakland to draft legislation to establish a monitoring system for hazardous incidents involving metal shredder companies. Brown said the impetus for this bill was the fire that broke out last year at Radius Recycling, formerly known as Schnitzer Steel, in West Oakland. The fire sent toxic smoke billowing over the city.

“I work together literally with all state and local and county agencies,” Brown said. “I like to liaison and bring people together toward solutions.”

As a councilmember, she said she would help Oakland improve its finances by making sure the city gets its fair share of resources from the state and federal government. Brown noted that her boss, Bonta, helped the city get funding from the state last year to support the MACRO program, which deploys civilians to respond to non-emergency calls. Like other candidates, Brown said she would focus on building partnerships with Alameda County leaders to get more support for homelessness and mental health services.

Brown said she wants to focus on root causes to address public safety problems in Oakland, addressing them with “holistic solutions.” As an example, she said the city needs to adequately support the police department, fully fund the Department of Violence Prevention, and continue to fund Ceasefire.

Brown has talked a lot with unhoused people in Oakland, and noted that this community contains veterans, seniors, and people with substance use and mental health issues. She said she wants to develop more transitional housing with the help of county agencies.

“We know that there has to be more,” Brown said. “If the city of Oakland is to tackle its homelessness issue, we would do well to partner with the county, because a lot of the resources are funneled through the county.”

Brown said city officials have made huge strides in increasing affordable housing and she intends to try creating more projects similar to recent successes like Elaine Brown’s building, The Black Panther, near West Oakland BART.

Brown also emphasized the importance of making residents feel safe on Oakland streets. In 2020, Brown said she worked with community stakeholders on a project to install traffic calming measures in the Arroyo Viejo area of Oakland, where she learned firsthand how long it can take to complete these types of projects. Brown said she wants to make sure the Department of Transportation has the resources to get these kinds of street design projects over the finish line in an expeditious manner.

“I would love to create a situation where we could actually employ more engineers,” Brown said, noting that many known solutions to road safety problems are held up for lack of staff in OakDOT.

Brown said her message is that she’ll collaborate across government to solve problems.

“We know that this role of being an elected member in the community is not glamorous, it’s not the well-paid job of the century,” she said. “I’m stepping up because I really want to continue serving the community in Oakland.”

Shawn Danino

Meet Oakland’s at-large City Council candidates (3)

Danino is a senior development officer for the city of San Jose’s Housing Department. Prior to this, he worked for the California Department of Housing and Community Development. In this role, he reviewed Oakland’s Housing Element — the city’s plan for building new homes — which added capacity for over 28,000 new units. Danino also helped rezone Rockridge to accommodate thousands of additional units, a move that hopefully can make the exclusive area accessible to more kinds of people.

Describing himself as a “budget nerd,” Danino said he believes it was a mistake for Oakland to sell the Coliseum instead of getting a long-term ground lease and building mixed-use housing around the site.

If elected, he would continue the city’s work converting publicly-owned parking lots into housing, which creates more shelter for people to use while also adding property tax revenue to the city’s coffers. Danino said he would also work to persuade the owners of single-family homes to transform their lots into denser housing, which he said will prevent displacement.

To address public safety, Danino wants to focus on improving 911 response times — the time it takes for an operator to answer a call and dispatch police or firefighters, and the time it takes for first responders to arrive. He also thinks investing resources into community policing and the anti-gun violence Ceasefire program should be top of the list. But he takes issue with the traditional framework for talking about crime.

“The way we’ve been thinking about public safety historically is problematic,” Danino said. “I studied sociology as an undergrad, and for me, an important takeaway is that crime is very much a symptom of poverty.”

Road safety is another priority for him. Danino said he wants to expand paths that people with limited mobility can use to get around. He said making Oakland more pedestrian-friendly would add more eyes on the street, which could make the entire city safer.

He would also advocate for a policy to make it easier to build densely in historic districts. There’s no reason, he said, Oakland can’t build additional stories on top of buildings in the Grand Lake neighborhood while preserving the historic facades.

Like other candidates, Danino supports building tiny homes and emergency interim housing for unhoused residents. Danino said no other candidate in the at-large race is better suited to making homelessness “an issue of the past.”

Food can also be an economic driver for Oakland. On day one of his job, Danino said he would advocate for a policy to make it easier for food vendors to run legitimate businesses in Oakland and create neighborhood markets.

Danino has pledged to take no money from corporations or fossil fuel companies, and said as a candidate he will treat climate change as a real crisis.

“We can’t be prioritizing surface parking lots over small businesses; we can’t be only investing in tree canopy in areas like Rockridge,” Danino said. “We need to make a human scale version of Oakland.”

Kanitha Matoury

Meet Oakland’s at-large City Council candidates (4)

Matoury, a first-generation Cambodian immigrant whose family was impacted by political persecution, owns the downtown deli and grocery store Howden Market. She served as a reservist in the U.S. Air Force. Matoury said she loves Oakland but has endured a lot of problems trying to keep her business afloat, from disruptive protests to a car crashing into her storefront.

“I’m not political, I’m just a regular person who said, “This is not working guys, let’s fix it.”

As a business owner, Matoury said she understands budgets and would apply that knowledge to Oakland’s financial problems. Like other candidates, she believes Oakland needs to audit all its departments to figure out how they’re using public funds.

“It’s not a pretty job, it’s a mechanical job,” Matoury said. “You have got to go in there and look at the engine and take out what’s not necessary. We’ve got to keep the car running and driving and carrying people along the way.”

Matoury wants to hire more police officers and loosen OPD’s pursuit policy to include non-violent crimes. She said the city needs to enforce its laws while addressing the root causes of crime. She also raised concerns about complaints that police feel restricted from enforcing the law.

To make housing more affordable, Matoury said Oakland needs to work more with federal, state, and local agencies. She noted that many of her store’s staff can’t afford to live in Oakland and have to commute from Vallejo, Benicia, or Pinole because home prices and rents are so high.

“We need to widen the housing inventory and we need to make it easier to build,” Matoury said. Some of her customers are developers, so she hears firsthand how difficult it is to build in Oakland. “We need to incentivize the builder.”

One of her goals is to streamline the permitting process and combine departments to reduce fees that can be passed on as savings to businesses.

As a councilmember, Matoury said she would direct funding to programs that have proven effective at helping homeless people and prioritize support for the newly unhoused. She also wants to audit organizations receiving taxpayer funds to serve homeless populations.

“It’s crucial that the organizations working on these issues focus on restoring dignity for those they serve,” Matoury said. “Without this, we can’t expect meaningful progress.”

Matoury, who has witnessed friends close their shops in downtown Oakland, wants to offer tax incentives to assist struggling local businesses and incentivize new companies to stay in Oakland. She would also expand job training programs.

“I know how to take a dollar and make it $100,” she said. “I don’t think anybody running in this race has that background. I’m the regular person who’s going to represent your voice and say we need to turn our city around.”

Mindy Pechenuk

Pechenuk is an educator and political activist who is affiliated with the Promethean PAC, a political group run by adherents of the late Lyndon LaRouche, who has been described by many historians and journalists as a conspiracy theorist, fascist, cult leader, and anti-semite.

Pechenuk, who has run unsuccessfully for other local elected seats, said she wants to fight against drug cartels and revive Oakland as a great industrial city.

“I’ve contributed greatly to Oakland both running various campaigns and through my work politically to get Donald Trump elected to the presidency of the United States,” Pechenuk said.

As a councilmember, Pechenuk said she would go into the budget and “take out all the fluff,” which includes funding for nonprofit organizations that provide many kinds of services. Pechenuk would redirect that money to the police and fire departments. She believes this would restore money to OPD, which she claims was defunded. (Since 2019, OPD never had its budget reduced, although the council did discuss reducing funding for the police, and did allocate smaller increases than were necessary to maintain some police services.)

She would also prioritize bringing manufacturers to Oakland.

“If you don’t have the productivity, if you don’t have the skilled workforce, the jobs for small to medium businesses, then you’re killing the city, and you’re always going to have a deficit no matter what,” Pechenuk said.

Like some of the other candidates, she believes selling the Coliseum was a mistake because it doesn’t address the underlying problem driving the city’s financial problems, which is lack of revenue.

Pechenuk wants to change policies so police are under less oversight and are freer to engage in riskier practices. Like other candidates, she wants to make it easier for police to initiate vehicle pursuits. She also wants to change rules that require police to report when they use force on members of the public.

“An officer if he even puts his hands on a criminal and the criminal pulls back and he has to use force to get the handcuffs on, he has to file a report saying, ‘I used force,’” Pechenuk said. “Those kinds of ordinances need to be repealed.”

Pechenuk would advocate placing chronically homeless people in special facilities so they can get long-term treatment for mental health problems or substance use issues. She said the city can’t keep relocating people from encampments. Pechenuk believes the underlying causes of homelessness could be addressed by creating more jobs and “closing the borders against the illegal immigrants that are coming in and flooding our cities and adding to the homeless problem.”

[Editor’s note: Immigrants are not “flooding” Oakland and adding to the homelessness crisis. Most of Oakland and Alameda County’s homeless residents have lived in the county for over 10 years, according to the most comprehensive and most recent data about these populations. Many of the homeless are longtime Oakland residents, including hundreds of military veterans.]

Asked about Oakland’s infrastructure problems like potholes and poorly designed roads, Pechenuk said she would make sure Donald Trump is elected “so we don’t have a nuclear war.” Pechenuk said she supports bike lanes but would prioritize hiring more garbage collectors to take care of illegal dumping.

“You have got a lot of infrastructure in Oakland that is collapsed, people living in poverty,” Pechenuk said. “That has to be addressed.”

If elected, Pechenuk would likely be the only member of the Republican Party on the City Council. She said she wouldn’t have any challenges working with councilmembers who staunchly oppose her political beliefs, and noted that there might be areas of common interest.

“Look at the recalls of Pamela Price and Sheng Thao — that’s mostly Democrats supporting that,” Pechenuk said, adding that she knows a lot of Democrats who signed copies of the petition she personally circulated to help get those recalls on the ballot. “It’s not black and white.”

Nancy Sidebotham

Meet Oakland’s at-large City Council candidates (5)

Sidebotham is a tax preparer who has worked extensively in Oakland on issues ranging from advocating for local businesses to chairing her neighborhood crime prevention council for two decades.

She has run for office several times in Oakland. Most recently, in 2022, she ran for the District 6 council seat. This is also her second campaign for the at-large seat, which she made a bid for in 2016. Sidebotham said she’s lost track of how many times she’s run for office. But her goal is less about winning and more about getting her messages out there.

“I tell the truth and I educate people,” Sidebothm said. “And people learn from that. And when I reach out people contact me, and when I reach out they listen.”

Sidebotham said Oakland’s budget problems are one reason she’s running. She believes the city should replace the head of the Finance Department with someone who “knows what she’s doing,” and take a closer look at how other departments are being led and staffed. Sidebotham also wants the city to evaluate how it is spending money on homeless services. Like several other candidates, she would advocate hiring an outside auditor to evaluate Oakland’s finances.

“The money is in some place. Where is it? And who got it?” Sidebotham asked. “If somebody got it illegally, they need to pay it back.”

Sidebotham believes OPD should have 1,000 officers minimum, and ideally 1,200. She said that will require changing the city’s “mantra” about defunding the police.

Since 2019, the police department hasn’t had its budget cut. But police spending hasn’t entirely kept up with inflation and other costs and some police services have been trimmed back. Growing OPD to 1,000 officers would cost the city many tens of millions extra every year at a time when Oakland is confronting budget deficits.

On improving housing affordability, Sidebothm questioned why the city hasn’t worked to build homes on vacant lots. She said the city needs to reevaluate its rules around development but also avoid dense construction that will threaten people in single-family homes. Sidebotham criticized Rebecca Kaplan for supporting denser development.

“I’m for building more affordable housing, but it needs to be done by code, and through rules that are already set up,” Sidebotham said.

Dealing with homelessness is the responsibility of Alameda County, said Sidebotham. The city is not set up to handle the problem. Sidebotham said during her last campaign, she advocated moving unhoused residents from Oakland to the fairgrounds in Pleasanton.

“The county is not doing their job in Oakland.”

Picking up illegally dumped trash is another thing she’d like the city, through its Department of Public Works, to prioritize. She acknowledged councilmembers can’t direct staff to take specific actions, which would violate the City Charter, but she said she would sit down with the public works director to get more information about the plans and timelines for picking up garbage.

Sidebotham added that she’s interested in making all council seats at-large, meaning residents could vote for any councilmember regardless of where they live. She believes this would make councilmembers more beholden to residents in East Oakland who have been neglected by officials representing downtown, North Oakland, and West Oakland.

Oakland ditched citywide elections for seven of the eight councilmembers in the early 1980s because the at-large system back then effectively drowned out the voices of communities of color and many local neighborhoods.

“We need to start getting together and educating people out there,” Sidebotham said. “I’m tired of all these organizations forming themselves, claiming they’re working for the city, when in fact they’re pushing their hidden agendas.”

Cristina Tostado

Meet Oakland’s at-large City Council candidates (6)

Tostado is a retail supervisor at Costco in Livermore and a member of the Oakland Library Commission. She also works as a volunteer mentor for the anti-gun violence organization Life Goes On and on the advisory board of the Oakland Public Education Fund. She previously served as a board member for the Oakland Latino Chamber of Commerce and was involved in an anti-illegal dumping pilot program launched by Alameda County Supervisor Nate Miley.

“I love helping out Oakland and people in general,” Tostado said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do in Oakland.”

Tostado said mental health would be a central priority for her as a councilmember, which she sees as closely tied to public safety. She would focus on collaborating with Alameda County to obtain funds that could be spent on personalized wellness plans and education.

“We have got to make sure people are in the right mindset and that they have resources to be able to be okay,” Tostado said.

Tostado said she would trim unnecessary expenditures from the city’s budget. She said the city pays too much money to consultants, although she couldn’t immediately identify an example.

Like other candidates, Tostado believes the size of Oakland’s police force is too small, and she supports the goal of employing at least 1,000 officers, with more of these officers being recruited from Oakland. She also wants to see more foot patrols. But getting OPD to 1,000 again runs into budget problems because it would cost many tens of millions extra each year — money Oakland doesn’t have right now.

Tostado said Oakland’s development process for new housing is too slow and that city officials should consider changing zoning laws. Over the past few years, the council has approved some sweeping upzoning in areas like Rockridge, and considered rezoning across the entire city to allow for more types of homes to be built in what were single-family zoned neighborhoods.

To address the homelessness crisis, Tostado said she wants the city to build more temporary emergency shelters for unhoused residents, and to explore upgrading buildings in Oakland that could be repurposed for housing. These are ideas the council and mayor have also implemented in recent years, including the establishment of community cabins and the purchase or lease of hotels and dorms as transitional housing. Like other candidates, she also thinks the county isn’t pulling its weight when it comes to helping the homeless.

“I don’t think we’re working enough with Alameda County,” Tostado said. “If we could work alongside Alameda County, the money they receive every year should be allocated here.”

It would also be helpful to expand funding for rental assistance programs and legal aid services for people threatened with eviction, she said. Tostado has some relationships with county officials, including Nate Miley and his staffer Erin Armstrong, who is currently running for the District 5 seat, and she’d like to use these to foster more collaboration.

Tostado said the number one infrastructure issue she’d tackle is potholes, which she says are “the size of asteroids” in Oakland. In fact, Tostado said she was partly inspired to run for office because she drives to Livermore for work and was impressed by the smoothness of the streets.

“I didn’t want to sit back and watch our government continue to be the same,” Tostado said. “I want to be the change.”

Charlene Wang

Meet Oakland’s at-large City Council candidates (7)

Wang works for the Environmental Protection Agency as a civil rights advisor. She previously worked as a Consumer Affairs Commissioner in Alameda County and was on the board of directors for the Oakland-based nonprofit Family Violence Law Center. Wang was appointed by President Joe Biden to the Department of Transportation where she helped launch a program to integrate communities split by highways. This includes two projects in Oakland, one of which aims to reconnect West Oakland to downtown.

“There are just a lot of opportunities that can be leveraged to bring not only better infrastructure, but better jobs and opportunities for Oaklanders,” Wang said.

She believes the city can reduce budget costs by removing overhead in different departments and finding smarter ways to deliver services. As an example, Wang said the city is behind schedule on paving streets, partly because the Department of Transportation lacks enough staff to oversee paving contracts. She said centralizing contracting would prevent delays due to understaffing. Wang also sees opportunities in potentially merging departments with similar missions, such as DOT and Public Works. Mayor Sheng Thao initiated a similar plan for several departments as part of her biannual budget in 2023. It’s unclear how much that has saved the city.

Like other candidates, Wang said the city needs an audit of its finances, specifically in departments and contracts. She said the city should develop metrics for evaluating outcomes, and if any program is not delivering, “we should look at it seriously for cutting.”

“Long-term, there just needs to be a lot of economic development that should generate tax revenue,” Wang said, adding that the city should also apply to more grant programs and find tax credits that can supplement revenue.

Like other candidates, Wang believes Oakland’s police force is too small compared to other cities, which she said has led to an “unacceptable level of service” when it comes to the time it takes for officers to respond to high-priority calls. Wang wants the city to hire more police from Oakland, and to take advantage of state legislation that permits California cities to hire undocumented immigrants as police officers.

“I think not only having DACA people enroll in the police department will make Oakland safer as a whole, it will also ensure undocumented communities in Oakland feel safe to call the police,” Wang said.

Wang would also advocate for stronger civilian oversight of OPD. Citing recent reports about internal affairs failing to hold police officials accountable for lapses in discipline, Wang said the city needs to civilianize this role. Currently, the Police Commission’s civilian investigators examine allegations of police misconduct, but they’re doing this alongside OPD’s internal affairs division.

Wang acknowledged that it will take time to hire officers, and that as a councilmember she would go to local schools and colleges to encourage young people to apply. The city should also make work easier for existing police employees by investing in tech tools like Flock cameras, speed cameras, GPS decoys, and other tools.

Oakland is already expanding the kinds of surveillance tools it deploys, including recently adding hundreds of license plate readers with help from the state.

Wang also wants to free officers from some of the reporting obligations they have under the negotiated settlement agreement, the reforms OPD agreed to in 2003 after a gang of West Oakland cops was fired and criminally charged for beating up people and planting drugs on them. She believes less paperwork would allow officers to spend more time in the community.

“It’s not that I don’t think we should do the documentation — we should absolutely comply with the NSA and meet those obligations so we can get out from under federal oversight,” Wang said. She said the city could employ transcription software to make it easier for officers to file reports.

Wang said Oakland has failed to build housing for working class and middle-income residents. She wants the city to explore creating an inclusionary zoning policy that, combined with upzoning, would make it easier for developers to build homes affordable to this demographic. Oakland’s current strategy uses impact fees — fees developers pay into a fund that can be used for affordable housing projects elsewhere in the city. Wang added that impact fees currently collected from developers remain useful for subsidizing affordable housing for low-income residents. Inclusionary zoning is something city staff have started exploring.

Wang said she has issues with the existing system for homeless assistance in Oakland. She described the system as requiring people to sit on a waiting list for a long time before they qualify for housing, which puts them at greater risk of developing PTSD, substance use issues, and other problems. Instead, Wang believes it makes more sense to prioritize interventions to help people who are on the brink of living on the streets due to one-time economic events, such as losing a job or experiencing a significant rent increase.

“The whole point is to ensure they don’t become chronically homeless,” Wang said. “Link them up with jobs, for example, cleaning up trash in the city, clean up graffiti, plant trees, fill potholes, do some of the Public Works work we need anyway.”

For Oakland’s economy, Wang wants to focus on bringing manufacturing jobs back to Oakland, specifically in renewable energy and clean transportation. She pointed to Fremont, which she said has enjoyed a green manufacturing boom, and suggested the same could be done in East and West Oakland, where residents need good paying jobs. She would also pursue an initiative to give out tax credits to encourage entrepreneurs to set up shop in communities of color.

“We do want to pursue development of new businesses that can ultimately grow our tax revenue pie, and also make it easier for people to build wealth and seek the American dream,” Wang said.

Meet Oakland’s at-large City Council candidates (2025)

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