Cops may avoid charges for bungling sex inquiry
The Oakland police supervisors who oversaw the bungled investigation into the department’s scandal involving a sexually exploited teenage girl may never come up on administrative charges.
At issue are repeated delays in the city and federal court investigations into the matter, and their possible effect on the one-year statute of limitations for disciplining police for alleged misconduct under the state Peace Officers Bill of Rights.
New Police Chief Anne
Kirkpatrick — who would have a big say over possible discipline for any Police Department investigators who fouled up — did not get an advance warning of the scathing report into the scandal that the department’s federal court monitor issued last week. She is only now going through the case in detail.
Meanwhile, the oneyear clock on filing any disciplinary charges is ticking. Loudly.
“I have been banging on this over and over,” said Jim Chanin ,an attorney whose civil rights lawsuit against police in the early 2000s led to the federal court oversight of the department. “The clock is either ticking or already ticked out on some of the officers and supervisors involved.”
Allegations of Oakland cops sexually exploiting the teenage girl who called herself Celeste Guap first surfaced in September 2015, when Officer Brendan O’Brien committed suicide and left a note detailing his and other officers’ involvement with the girl.
According to the federal monitor’s report, thenPolice Chief Sean Whent initially did not believe Guap was credible and “sent an unmistakable signal that this case was not a priority.”
One witness said Whent had described the case as “bull—,” although the former chief denies saying that.
The report also said investigating officers showed “bias against the victim.” One investigator reportedly called the victim a “whore.”
Mayor Libby Schaaf and City Administrator Sabrina Landreth became aware of the investigative shortcomings six months later, in March 2016, the report said. At about the same time, U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson ordered the federal monitor to take over the internal investigation, and a new team of Oakland cops was ordered to review the case.
In June, Schaaf and Landreth — who assumed day-to-day oversight of the department after Whent abruptly resigned — hired an independent investigator to review the initial probe. The investigator, however, was told to hold off until the new internal affairs probe was completed and never interviewed anyone.
When federal monitor Robert Warshaw learned in January that nothing was happening, he turned his own investigators loose on the city, and last week, they produced the report that portrayed not just the Police Department but also Schaaf and Landreth in an unflattering light. Then he handed the whole matter of disciplining the officers who fouled up the probe back to the city.
So now the question becomes: When did the statute-of-limitations clock start ticking?
Chanin says that, for some of the officers and supervisors, it will be when Kirkpatrick learns their identities. It’s unclear whether she knows yet.
However, Michael Rains, an attorney whose firm represents a number of police unions, says the clock started when police brass or city officials learned there might be a problem. That was a while ago — in fact, the one-year deadline might already have expired.
“They can try to argue otherwise, but when it goes to court, they are going to lose,” Rains said. High court connection: The U.S. Supreme Court said last week that it will take up the most important gerrymandering case in more than a decade — and it turns out that a San Francisco political scientist played a significant role in the court action.
Eric McGhee , a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, had been puzzling over the question of how to draw California’s congressional district boundaries impartially ever since he joined the nonpartisan think tank about 10 years ago.
“It was like an itch I had to scratch,” McGhee said.
McGhee, 44, was determined to measure just how much partisanship was involved when the state’s lawmakers carved up the district maps after the 2000 census.
He later crossed paths with a lawyer, Nicholas Stephanopoulos, and they came up with what they call the efficiency gap — a way to measure how politicians load up safe districts where Democrats or Republicans have a clear majority. The idea is to create “wasted” votes for the enemy party, either by loading far more of its supporters than needed into a district or spreading them thinly across many districts.
The result was an article published in the University of Chicago Law Review in 2015. It caught the eye of a legal expert working to challenge district lines in Wisconsin that had benefited Republicans.
The efficiency gap became a key factor when a three-judge federal appeals court ruled in November that GOP state lawmakers had drawn up maps to stack the deck for their party.
“My goal when I started all this was to promote a conversation,” McGhee said. “It never occurred to me in a million years that all this would happen. It’s been pretty amazing.”