Mayor believes the new top cop will last

OAKLAND >> If the recent past is any guide, perhaps the first question to ask about Oakland's new police chief Floyd Mitchell is, “How long can he last?”

Mitchell, hired after 25 years of service with the Kansas City police and a more recent, four-year stint as chief in Lubbock, Texas, will be the latest to serve full-time as the top cop in Oakland, a city that has seen several chiefs come and go over the past decade, including two separate occasions where three different chiefs were appointed in a single week.

Mayor Sheng Thao announced Mitchell's hiring Friday, capping a 13-month search to replace LeRonne Armstrong, whom the mayor fired for his handling of an Oakland Police Department cover-up scandal.

A 56-year-old Black veteran of the U.S. Air Force, Mitchell will lead a department struggling to end a disastrous fouryear stretch of high crime rates, and he will attempt to guide OPD out from under two decades of federal oversight.

But the chief will also need to figure out how to stick around in a city where most can't seem to hang onto the job for more than a couple years at a time.

Thao says she's confident about the new hire, noting that overall crime declined under his watch in the two previous Texas cities — Lubbock and Temple — where he most recently served as chief.

“Floyd has a proven record in his crime-reduction strategy,” Thao said in a Friday afternoon interview. “And he believes in proactive policing, where we can intervene before crimes happen. And he is very data-driven.”

Most critically, she said, Mitchell appeared most prepared among four finalists to oversee the city's Ceasefire strategy — a violence interruption initiative that Thao has recently begun championing as a key pathway out of the ongoing crime crisis.

In job interviews with the mayor, Mitchell was not shy in addressing the circumstances around his resignation last September as chief of the Lubbock police, Thao said.

His stint there ended amid local news reports that unanswered 911 calls spiked after Mitchell reduced the number of dispatch staffers, and later tried to prevent concerns about the faulty system from being made public.

“There were no excuses from him,” Thao said of the new hire. “He talked about what he learned from the situation that makes him a better police officer, a better chief.”

Exactly how Mitchell explained Lubbock's 911 response woes — a familiar problem in Oakland — is something Thao said would need to be answered by the new chief himself when he arrives to town sometime next week.