Or more simply:
Oakland is pretty crime-encoouraging territory.
The best (most effective, and most efficient) ways to reduce crime are:
* Improve neighborhoods to the point where they feel well kept, and try to ensure there's a feeling that most public spaces have people watching them by having housing facing those spaces.
* Walk beats, be present in neighborhoods in a slow, ongoing way. Crime-in-progress tends to require police to be present for around 30-50 minutes for the actors to give up and wander off. Crime tends to be strongly discouraged though by regularly present officers who know the territory.
The problem here is that Oakland like most post-1930s cities is largely built in a semi-suburban pattern, with bones that work against neighborhood centers (which leads to blight) and don't have a strong sense of observation, which means crime feels free to happen.
In addition, it's not high density, so there's far too much territory to realistically fund a police force who actually walk beats. In addition, in a lot of neighborhoods the police would be afraid to do so.
So the obvious place to invest is in neighborhood center revitalization, encouragement of high quality urban development, and slowly getting rid of the semi-tenements that exist here and there. But that's long slow hard work. Gadgets are more fun.