OAKLAND — Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday the deployment last year of California Highway Patrol officers to combat this city’s crime problem led to the recovery of over 4,000 stolen vehicles “in Oakland alone.”
Newsom lauded the success of CHP’s involvement in Oakland, where state Transportation Secretary Toks Omishakin said the available data clearly reflects that crime has declined in the city since last year.
The two were flanked by CHP leaders at a news conference in Newsom’s office, where the governor announced that new teams of officers from the state law enforcement agency would similarly be deployed to major cities and areas up and down California, including San Diego, Sacramento and the Central Valley.
“We initiated that operation” in Oakland, Newsom said, “which continues to this day with tremendous success.”
Newsom resisted suggestions by reporters that the press event had anything to do with President Donald Trump’s threats earlier this month to send National Guard troops to major cities in the country.
Trump had gone out of his way to call out Oakland, saying the city is “so far gone” on the crime front that it was hardly worth a mention.
Data from the Oakland Police Department shows crime is down across the board in the city, starting with homicides — arguably the category where it is the most difficult to juke stats — and extending to other violent crime, plus property crime and burglaries.
A California Highway Patrol investigator surveys the crime scene after a state parole agent was fatally shot at the State of California parole office building in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, July 17, 2025. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
Oakland has fewer police officers now than when crime was spiking in 2023, though Newsom’s deployment early last year of CHP officers provided reinforcement amid the city’s financial troubles.
The governor said he had been petitioned last year — in the very office where Thursday’s news conference took place — by then-Mayor Sheng Thao, unnamed Alameda County supervisors and members of the local Oakland clergy, to deploy CHP officers.
His estimate that over 4,000 stolen vehicles were recovered in Oakland alone was not immediately confirmed Thursday by city officials.
Newsom also credited, but did not name, Mayor Barbara Lee, who the governor said had “embraced” the CHP’s involvement in Oakland. Currently, he said, the operations include DUI enforcement and seizures of illegal guns.
And although he said the news conference Thursday was routine and unrelated to Trump’s recent threats, Newsom suggested the White House should look into deploying the National Guard in Louisiana and Tennessee, where voters helped elect Trump, if his concerns about crime are genuine.
Those two states placed among the worst in rankings of violent crime rates published by the U.S. News and World Report.
Trump, who deployed National Guard troops to take over policing in Washington, D.C., has not formally explored taking such a measure in Oakland.
A trial concluded earlier this month in a lawsuit filed against the Trump administration by state Attorney General Rob Bonta over the deployment in June of the state military force to Los Angeles in response to protests of federal immigration raids.
“We asked the court to grant a permanent injunction,” Bonta said in a release at the time, “to stop the Administration from using the military for domestic law enforcement and maintaining a standing army in Southern California.”
Shomik Mukherjee is a reporter covering Oakland. Call or text him at 510-905-5495 or email him at [email protected].