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

• Carina Lieu, 39, played a key role in pushing the city's move to defund the police 
• Now she helps oversee DEI in a city where crime leapt 18 percent last year
• Read more: Moment jewelry shop owner, 69, cowers in terror from thieves

A former Vietnamese refugee who credits the Black Panthers for her worldview is tightening her grip on crime-ridden Oakland as a right-hand woman to Democrat Mayor Sheng Tao.

Carina Lieu, who serves as a DEI officer in the city administrator's office, is a veteran community activist who has led efforts to defund the police and develop 'alternative responses to calls for assistance'.

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

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

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

'It is literally killing people physically and causing emotional and psychological trauma. Such is the reason for making the case for Ethnic Studies further.'

And she suggested the phrase 'Jesus Saves' has more to do with bank accounts than with salvation.

'To this day when someone says 'Jesus Saves', its meaning in the spiritual sense is conveyed,' she wrote.

'But deep down my ancestors shudder at the double entendre meaning that Jesus was a tool to enslave minds and dismantle indigenous traditions for capitalist gain.'

Lieu spent three years on the Oakland Youth Commission from 2019, feeding its views into the taskforce set up in response to the Black Lives Matter movement.

The taskforce pushed for the city's police budget to be slashed by half and 'reconstruct the public safety system in Oakland.'

'Defund the police' is more than a protest cry for these youths,' she wrote on her LinkedIn page.

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

But crime was beginning its long march up with murders jumping from 78 in 2019 to 126 last year.

Crime overall increased by 18 percent in 2023 with property crime up 17 percent and violent crime up 21 percent.

And in the first four months of 2024 residential robberies have soared by 118 percent on the same period last year.

Last month an elderly jewelry store shop owner crouched in terror behind her counter as eight heavily-built masked men forced their way in and began smashing the display boxes with sledge hammers, making off with more than 85 percent of her stock.

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

Kaiser, PG&E, Clorox and Blue Shield announced last month that they are plowing $10 million of their own cash into added security measures including private police and 'buddy-escorts' to accompany workers who don't feel safe heading out for lunch.

Mayor Thao, who took office a month before Lieu was appointed to her latest role, has suggested that that 'life-coaching' could be the secret to solving her city's soaring crime rate but has been accused of presiding over a 'garbage dump of crime, filth and inhumanity'.

'It will not shock me if, in the next six months, four of Oakland's biggest employers announce they're leaving town, bringing their thousands of employees with them and administering the final death blow to our beleaguered city,' said Steve Heimoff, president of 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 almost four times higher than the national average that makes it safer than zero percent of US neighborhoods. 

But Lieu, 39, who uses the pronouns 'she' and 'they', claims that crime levels can be laid at the door of 'White America', with its 'pathology' and 'superiority complex'.

'When I was 15, a Latinx peer exposed me to the hxstory of the Black Panther Party,' she wrote in a 2019 Tweet.

'Sitting in a downtown office, my life forever changed as I began to perceive the world differently.'

Developing her argument for reforming school curriculums she insisted that people 'must get uncomfortable about examining implicit biases because this is the inflection point where change occurs'.

She dismissed Christianity as 'a tool of spiritual submission, language conversion, and essentially enforcing social order', advising that students should examine America's 'racist pathology inherited over years of schooling and influence'.

And she suggested the entire western world has questions to answer with Europe's history of exploiting countries in the developing world 'brought on by the assumption that underdeveloped societies were uncivilized'.

'People of color had been tricked into accepting Christianity so they could be subjugated to colonial rule,' she opined.

But Lieu, who lists her 'superpowers' as 'listening and bringing people together', insists that white people have a role to play 'as an ally to dismantle systems of oppression'.

'We need Ethnic Studies more than ever to dismantle violence set up by white supremacy,' she concluded.