Oakland’s Rapists Get Away With It

Great and alarming piece in the Alameda Times-Star this weekend, about how the Oakland Police Department is so understaffed that about 1,800 cases of rape and sexual assault have gone unsolved. The caseload goes back five years, and victim advocates are furious. Police officials blame the problem on the city’s focus on patrol at the expense of investigations. This atrophy of the department’s investigative capacity has been a long-standing problem, first identified in an internal report published in the last year of Jerry Brown’s administration.