Snag in ending oversight of police

Oakland monitor cites new misconduct cases

The Oakland Police Department, hoping to end two decades of federal oversight, may have hit a setback with two recent officer misconduct cases, according to new court filings.

The monitor tracking the agency’s compliance with court-ordered reforms said in his latest report that the misconduct cases were sent to an outside firm for investigation in May. Details of the allegations weren’t released.

“While these investigations are not yet complete, information that has been developed to date regarding the Department’s internal investigation and discipline process is deeply troubling,” monitor Robert Warshaw wrote in a report filed in U.S. District Court on Monday.

Warshaw’s report was his first since April, when Judge William H. Orrick put the Police Department on a one-year probationary period to end federal

oversight. Warshaw, a retired police chief, is the independent monitor tasked with tracking Oakland’s progress in court-ordered reforms. The judge will make the decision of whether to end federal oversight, with Warshaw’s reports helping inform the decision.

The agency has been under a negotiated settlement agreement since 2003 in the aftermath of a class-action lawsuit. Six men in West Oakland said a band of officers known as “the Riders” planted drugs on them and assaulted them. Three officers were charged criminally but never convicted. A fourth officer remains a fugitive.

Revelations from Warshaw’s report come as the department seeks to tamp down another year of surging gun violence and homicides. The city saw its 100th homicide of the year on Monday. In late September, officials said they were ramping up traffic enforcement and other measures to try to get guns off the streets, noting that the department had so far seized 1,132 firearms, compared to 1,199 in all of 2021.

Tragedies persist as the department investigates a recent school shooting that injured six, as well as a house party shooting that killed two teenage brothers.

The settlement agreement identified dozens of targeted reforms to improve the beleaguered department’s processes of training, tracking and disciplining officers.

Warshaw wrote that his concerns about the two investigations kept the department from being in compliance with procedures in investigating misconduct allegations from citizen complaints. As of Aug. 31, the agency had opened 1,009 complaint cases, compared with 1,137 in all of 2021, according to Oakland Police Department figures presented to the Police Commission.

The agency was also found to be only in partial compliance with a mandate to complete investigations into the most serious misconduct allegations within 180 days.

While the report was mostly favorable, Warshaw also raised concerns stemming from an investigation into an evidence technician who was accused of sleeping on the job. Warshaw doesn’t specify when the investigation took place. The worker was terminated.

Warshaw didn’t disagree with investigators’ findings, but wrote they uncovered accusations that other evidence technicians slept on the job, among other allegations, and got away with it due to supervisors’ alleged failure to address “numerous performance deficiencies.”

The Oakland Police Department declined to comment on two investigations Warshaw mentioned, saying the agency wouldn’t know all the details until the probes are complete. But in a filing in response to Warshaw’s report, a lawyer for the city of Oakland took issue with the monitor’s “deeply troubling” comment.

“The Department disagrees with the (monitor’s) particularly negative conclusory characterization of the matters, especially before the referenced investigations are complete,” attorney Brigid Martin wrote.

Martin lauded the department’s progress. “As the Department makes every effort to curb a dramatic rise in deadly violence for the third year in a row, it does so with a firm foundation of Constitutional policing principles.”

The monitor found the agency in compliance with other mandated reforms, but attorneys in the class-action suit raised alarm over the two misconduct investigations, pointing out that the probes were sent to external investigators in May — one month after the judge signaled the potential end of oversight.

The plaintiffs’ attorneys said the two investigations could derail the Police Department’s hope of ending federal oversight before the one-year probationary period is up.

“This threatens to draw the sustainability period to an abrupt halt,” attorneys John Burris and James Chanin wrote in a filing in response to the monitor’s report.

The lawyers said the concerns about the two investigations called to mind the Celeste Guap case, which derailed the Police Department’s attempts to end federal oversight. In 2015, it emerged officers and sheriff’s deputies — from Oakland and around the Bay Area — had slept with a self-described sex worker who went by the alias Celeste Guap, including when she was a minor, and tipped her off about prostitution stings. Guap was an Oakland police dispatcher’s daughter.

Burris and Chanin stressed that they didn’t have information about the two investigations but said the fact that Warshaw is “deeply” troubled is a “flashing red warning light.”