Oakland revives race-profiling pact
Panel opts to let council decide fate of expert’s police-bias study
Oakland City Council members revived the prospect Thursday of extending the contract of a Stanford University professor hired to track discriminatory policing in the city and recommend ways to root out the practices.
On Thursday, hours before Professor Jennifer Eberhardt was to speak at an Oakland town hall on community and police relations, the Rules Committee opted to allow the full council to decide Tuesday whether to keep Eberhardt. The decision nullifies a vote from two days earlier, when the Public Safety Committee declined to extend the contract.
The $250,000 extension would secure the Stanford team’s services until August 2019. Councilmen Larry Reid and Abel Guillen voted in favor of extending the contract on Tuesday, while Noel Gallo voted against it and Public Safety Committee Chair Desley Brooks abstained.
The Public Safety Committee’s move was swiftly condemned by Eberhardt’s supporters, including Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, who said her work is “critical if we want to build community-police trust and make Oakland an equitable city for all residents.”
The city hired Eberhardt in 2014 at the direction of the court-appointed compliance director. A federal judge overseeing the Police Department appointed a monitor and later a compliance director to ensure that Oakland abides by the terms of a negotiated settlement agreement in the “Riders” misconduct lawsuit from the early 2000s.
In the 2003 settlement, the city agreed to sweeping reforms that included better tracking of “stop data” on suspects pulled over by police and sharper internal affairs investigations.
In a report issued Thursday, the monitor highlighted Oakland police’s continuing relationship with Stanford University and its decision to abide by Eberhardt’s recommendations.
Eberhardt’s findings, doled out over the past few years, are widely cited by Oakland’s residents and city officials when discussing the issue of race and policing.
In a 2016 report, Eberhardt’s team found that Oakland officers were four times more likely to search African American men than white men during a traffic or pedestrian stop, and attributed the disparities to “implicit bias.” Another study, released last year, combed through bodycam footage and found Oakland officers typically spoke less respectfully to black people than white people during traffic stops.
The researchers noted improvements in an early 2018 report. They found that officers had reduced the amount of times that they stopped black people for non-trafficrelated reasons by about 18 percent during a six-month period in 2017, and attributed the success to Oakland Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick’s “precision policing” model.
However, the researchers noted that “very little progress” had been made when it came to comparing stops by race. The study found that black people still accounted for 68 percent of those stopped by police — a ratio comparable to earlier figures. White people made up 7 percent of the stops during this study period, and Latinos accounted for about 19 percent.
Eberhardt, Schaaf and Kirkpatrick were panelists at a public safety town hall meeting Thursday evening to talk about rebuilding trust between the community and police.
Hundreds of Oakland residents turned up for the twohour event, which drew heavily from Eberhardt’s studies.
Kirkpatrick and Schaaf toed the line between touting the department’s successes — including decreasing use-offorce incidents — while acknowledging its challenges.
While none of the panelists addressed Eberhardt’s contract explicitly, many of their comments defended her work.
Kirkpatrick promised the audience that a culture change was under way among her ranks.
“You do not change a culture until you first change your thinking,” she said. “Thanks to Stanford, they have taught us to think differently.”
Schaaf said any encouraging statistics didn’t matter until citizens begin to feel their government is treating everyone fairly.
“We have a lot more work to do,” Schaaf said. “These numbers, though, are our accountability measure.”
The conversation turned contentious at several points during the evening, with many residents accusing police of not doing enough to stop racially biased policing.
One attendee accused the moderator of ignoring her question card and said she would back down if Schaaf would take the papers in her hand.
The request prompted Schaaf to walk away from the panelist table and speak to the woman privately. The gesture prompted others to do the same, and soon a handful of residents lined up to speak to the mayor directly.