Is this the woman who ruined Oakland? The progressive DEI boss who launched ‘public safety task force’ just before crime soared

A former Vietnamese refugee who credits the Black Panthers for her worldview tightens her grip on crime-ridden Oakland as Democrat Mayor Sheng Tao’s right-hand man.

Carina Lieu, who works as a DEI officer in the city manager’s office, is a veteran community activist who has led efforts to dismantle police and develop “alternative responses to calls for help.”

The former biology teacher was a key player in Oakland’s “Reimagining Public Safety Taskforce” that launched in September 2020, just as crime began to rise in the doom-loop city.

But it was her attempt to bring critical race theory into the school curriculum, including the belief that Jesus Christ is a symbol of capitalist oppression, that raised eyebrows even in liberal California.

“The pathology of whiteness is pervasive in today’s mass shootings, Trump rallies, and anti-immigrant sentiment,” she wrote in a 2019 essay.

‘It literally kills people physically and causes emotional and psychological trauma. That is the reason to further argue the case for Ethnic Studies.’

And she suggested that the phrase “Jesus saves” has more to do with bank accounts than salvation.

“To this day, when someone says ‘Jesus saves,’ the meaning is conveyed in a spiritual sense,” she wrote.

“But deep down, my ancestors shudder at the ambiguity, which means that Jesus was a tool to enslave the mind and dismantle indigenous traditions for capitalist gain.”

Lieu served on the Oakland Youth Commission for three years beginning in 2019 and brought her views to the task force created in response to the Black Lives Matter movement.

The task force urged cutting the city’s police budget in half and “reconstructing the public safety system in Oakland.”

‘Defund the Police’ is more than a protest cry for these young people,” she wrote on her LinkedIn page.

“They want a system that reinvests in them and their communities.”

But crime began a long climb: the number of murders rose from 78 in 2019 to 126 last year.

Crime increased by a total of 18 percent in 2023, with property crime increasing by 17 percent and violent crime by 21 percent.

And in the first four months of 2024, home robberies increased by 118 percent compared to the same period last year.

Last month, an elderly jewelry store owner crouched behind her counter in horror as eight heavy-set, masked men forced their way in and smashed the display cases with sledgehammers, making off with more than 85 percent of her stock.

And residents of an Oakland neighborhood woke up this week to find that the city had removed the traffic lights for good after homeless people were repeatedly targeted by their copper components.

Kaiser, PG&E, Clorox and Blue Shield announced last month that they are putting $10 million of their own money into additional safety measures, including private police and “buddy escorts” to escort employees who don’t feel safe going to lunch.

Mayor Thao, who took office a month before Lieu was appointed to her latest role, has suggested that ‘life coaching’ could be the secret to solving her city’s rising crime rates, but is accused of leading a ‘dumpster of crime’. , filth and inhumanity’.

“I won’t be shocked if, in the next six months, four of Oakland’s largest employers announce they will leave the city, taking their thousands of employees with them, and deliver the final blow to our beleaguered city,” said Steve Heimoff, president. of the Coalition for a Better Oakland.

According to crime tracker Neighborhood Scout, Oakland is essentially the most dangerous city in America, with a violent crime rate nearly four times higher than the national average, making it safer than zero percent of American neighborhoods.

But 39-year-old Lieu, who uses the pronouns “they” and “them,” claims the level of crime can be attributed to “White America,” with its “pathology” and “superiority complex.”

“When I was 15, a Latinx colleague introduced me to the amazing story of the Black Panther Party,” she wrote in a Tweet in 2019.

“Sitting in a downtown office, my life changed forever as I began to see the world differently.”

In developing her case for reforming school curricula, she emphasized that people “should feel uncomfortable exploring implicit biases because this is the turning point where change happens.”

She dismissed Christianity as “a tool for spiritual subjugation, language change, and essentially the enforcement of social order,” and advised students to examine America’s “racist pathology, inherited through years of schooling and influence.”

And she suggested that the entire Western world has questions to answer about Europe’s history of exploiting countries in the developing world “which stems from the assumption that underdeveloped societies were uncivilized.”

“People of color were deceived into accepting Christianity so they could be subjected to colonial rule,” she argued.

But Lieu, who lists her “superpowers” ​​as “listening and bringing people together,” emphasizes that white people have a role to play “as an ally in dismantling systems of oppression.”

“We need ethnic studies more than ever to dismantle the violence caused by white supremacy,” she concluded.