Every law your government passes is another nail in the coffin of personal freedom, so they must be carefully considered. Every liberal democracy will eventually die but we don't have to hasten it by making every new law "for the public good". I'm not saying what Oakland is doing is good or bad, but every new law should be carefully considered and I think that a lot of people forget that everytime the government makes you do something that means you lost another bit (or chunk) of freedom. See the Patriot Act for instance, we may never recover from that it severely damages and continues to damage individual rights and privacy as the primary cudgel the US government uses to justify unconstitutional surveillance of Americans.