Three years ago, civil rights lawyers John Burris and James Chanin prepared to call for an end to the Oakland Police Department’s decade-long federal oversight program. A widespread officer sexual misconduct scandal surfaced, and the fallout gave pause to the attorneys.
At the time, it appeared Oakland police may emerge from federal oversight, which began in 2003 and stemmed from the Riders case of rogue officers planting drugs and beating West Oakland residents.
On Friday, Burris and Chanin, who represented the Riders’ victims, filed new court records documenting their “disappointment” with the OPD. The attorneys, who have overseen the federal watch program now in its 17th year, wrote that police leadership has slipped at an “unprecedented” level.
“The OPD is sliding backwards on multiple fronts,” the attorneys wrote. “These developments are extremely disappointing.”
The attorneys went on, “If this negative trend is not reversed in short order, (we) will have no choice but to consider additional measures such as those which force” a motion calling for increased oversight.
That assessment punctuated a bad few weeks for the OPD. After his widely publicized criticism of a police shooting investigation, monitor Robert Warshaw this week found the department out of compliance with a court-mandated reform, which had previously been achieved in 2014. On Thursday, protesters at City Hall called for the firing Chief Anne E. Kirkpatrick.
Burris and Chanin noted progress of one of the reform efforts, car stops of African-Americans — department data shows it decreased 43 percent between 2017-18 — but said Warshaw’s determination the department is further out of compliance in three areas is “unprecedented as far as (we) can recollect.”
Warshaw, in documents released this month, criticized Chief Kirkpatrick for her discipline of officers and commanders over the 2017 shooting of Joshua Pawlik. Kirkpatrick went against the recommendations of the Executive Force Review Board, which called for harsher punishments.
“The overruling of an EFRB was also unique in the history of the NSA,” Burris and Chanin wrote. “The Monitor’s decision to declare a task that was in compliance to be out of compliance, while not unique, has not occurred since” the sex scandal in 2016.
In 2016, Chief Sean Whent was ousted as a result of how the OPD handled that case, which involved officers allegedly exploiting a teenager named “Celeste Guap.” In a statement, a spokesman for Mayor Libby Schaaf said the mayor remains committed “to build the most progressive police department.”
“The monitor’s report provides a transparent and clear look at the department’s challenges and progress made as it strives toward a model for 21st century policing,” said her spokesman Justin Berton.
After winning re-election in November, Schaaf renewed the chief’s contract through 2022. The mayor has not wavered in her support of Kirkpatrick, even as the police accountability coalition called for her firing at a Thursday protest outside City Hall.
Councilman Noel Gallo, chair of the council’s public safety committee, questioned the value of Warshaw’s reports and his one-week per month visit to the Oakland Police Department.
Hired in 2010, Warshaw also monitors the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office court-reforms in Arizona. Previously, the court-appointed compliance director was required to live and work in Oakland. After Thomas Frazier left, a federal judge added the position to Warshaw’s monitoring duties.
“He just shows up here, writes his report and moves on,” Gallo said. “We never seem to move ahead. It’s a side job for him to come to Oakland and criticize it.”
Gallo said “the police chief has made some mistakes” and called the handling of the Pawlik shooting “inexcusable.” But, he added, “I don’t think we need to go to the point and fire someone and start all over.”
Rashidah Grinage, of the Coalition for Police Accountability, said Burris and Chanin’s comments reinforce the need to remove Kirkpatrick.
“There is no question that her tenure has resulted in movement away from compliance with the NSA rather than toward it,” Grinage said Friday. “ After two years, she has failed to be the transformational leader she professed to be, and her recent exoneration of the officers involved in the unjustified killing of Joshua Pawlik offers no reason to hope that things will improve.”
The chief was hired in February 2017 in the wake of the officer sexual misconduct scandal. Her departure would be the first time Warshaw directly fired a chief, though he has played a behind-the-scenes role in the departures of chiefs Anthony Batts, Howard Jordan and Whent.