On November 4th, Oakland voters will pick their next mayor. All month on “Crosscurrents,” we are going to bring you the voices of each of the 15 people who are campaigning for the job.
This fall is Rebecca Kaplan’s second time running for Mayor of Oakland - she came in third in 2010 when current Mayor Jean Quan was first elected. Kaplan has been on the city council since 2008 and she is Council Member at Large - meaning she is Oakland’s only council member who was elected by the whole city, rather than just a single district. She lives in North Oakland with her wife who she married this summer. Reporter Jeremy Dalmas spoke with her at her campaign office by city hall.
REBECCA KAPLAN: So in the last several academies 1,400 Oakland residents applied but only 32 were accepted - out of 1,400 who applied. And I was told that some were rejected for bad credit scores, some were rejected for prior marijuana use. And so we look at things like this that don’t seem to have a relationship to whether someone would be a good police officer and those should not be grounds for rejecting people from the department.
