Are Oakland police ready to emerge from federal oversight? Not a chance
Published by the San Francisco Chronicle on August 31, 2021
By Cat Brooks
Last week, in a Pinteresque public safety plot twist, the case was made that the Oakland Police Department should be granted early exit from the federal oversight they have been under for about two decades.
Not “early” because they finished the 51 required tasks needed to exit oversight ahead of schedule. Nope, that would have meant completion before 2008. “Early” because they would be allowed to exit without having finished at all. OPD remains uncompliant with five tasks relating to use-of-force investigations, internal affairs complaint procedures and investigation timelines, tracking stop data, and discipline consistency.
Despite this, some city officials and Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong want us to trust that the department is on the right path and no longer needs accountability or oversight from the entity that was responsible for eking out a modicum of “act right” from this department.
Jim Chanin and John Burris are the two attorneys who unveiled the brilliant idea to let OPD off the hook. They represented the plaintiffs during the Riders case, which is how OPD was put under federal oversight in the first place. In the 1990s and 2000s, four Oakland police officers — Frank Vazquez, Clarence Mabanag, Jude Siapno and Matthew Hornung — played cowboys and Negroes in West Oakland, making false arrests and planting evidence that resulted in false convictions and brutalizing the community. It came to light when a rookie named Keith Batt blew the whistle. The investigation and ensuing lawsuit resulted in a monetary settlement for 119 Riders victims and the department agreeing to federal oversight on Jan. 22, 2003.
The department has failed to meet the exit conditions of that agreement ever since.
How Chanin and Burris came to the conclusion that things have finally turned around is a mystery. In January, in response to an alarming report by the federal monitor, Chanin said, “It’s just very disturbing. They’re moving in the wrong direction.”
Only a few months later it’s suddenly time to exit?
Nope.
OPD hasn’t just failed to complete the tasks required of it, the department has backslid as recently as last year.
Court-appointed federal monitor Robert Warshaw found last December that officers failed to turn on their body cameras 20% of the time. He also determined that the department was (at that time) out of compliance with eight of its 51 tasks, and that officers could do a “much better job” at de-escalation. The report cited an incident where an officer fired a beanbag at the head of a man in the middle of a mental health crisis.
It’s true that OPD is no longer killing as many citizens as it was at the time of the Riders lawsuit. A massive police accountability movement put a stop to that. But “progress” in a police department is more than cops not killing as many Black and brown people as they used to.
OPD is in the middle of litigation for spraying tear gas and firing flash-bangs during a peaceful protest last summer following the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Chief Armstrong admitted that OPD violated policy and was at fault — after misrepresenting the incident for more than a year.
Meanwhile, an investigation last year found that OPD continues to profile and stop Black men in Oakland eight times more often than their white counterparts, frequently without reason or citation.
In 2019, 500 complaints of officer misconduct were processed by Oakland’s Community Police Review Agency.
Despite the passage of SB1421, the Right to Know Act, the OPD has consistently failed to comply with its responsibility for transparency, ignoring or delaying public record requests from both the community and journalists.
And, only recently, the department found itself smack-dab in an internal investigation regarding an Instagram account, purportedly run by OPD officers, that spews misogyny and racism and balks at OPD policies aimed at reducing police brutality and corruption.
None of these are surprises. They line up exactly with the federal oversight items OPD has not managed to comply with. Worse, they demonstrate that the problem at the very heart of the Riders case and the federal oversight that arose from it — discriminatory and abusive policing — is still a major issue for OPD.
One positive thing to say is that the amount of money Oakland pays in misconduct lawsuits has decreased significantly. Just a little over $3 million was paid between 2015 and 2020, a massive improvement from the $57 million paid out between 2000 and 2010. But, get this, a 2020 KTVU report found that cities with independent police oversight pay less in officer misconduct claims than those without.
Chanin and Burris have been called OPD’s “fiercest critics.”
Not even close. Black and brown Oaklanders are OPDs fiercest critics. Chanin and Burris are high-paid attorneys whose fingers are currently nowhere near the pulse of what’s happening between the Oakland community and our Police Department.
Oakland’s Police Commission should lead a community engagement process to see what Oaklanders have to say about there being less eyes on the OPD. If the results suggest this is what the community wants, so be it. Until then, if OPD wants out from federal oversight, there’s a way to achieve it — by complying with the rules.
Cat Brooks is an award-winning actress, playwright, the executive director of the Justice Teams Network, the co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project and the co-host of UpFront on KPFA.