A federal judge ended 23 years of federal oversight of the Oakland Police Department on Tuesday, closing a reform process that began after the notorious “Riders” police misconduct scandal.
U.S. District Judge William Orrick announced at a Sept. 29 hearing that the OPD’s federal monitoring would be terminated and the underlying civil rights case dismissed with prejudice. The monitoring team will remain involved only to wind down its work, according to court records.
The decision ends what plaintiffs’ attorneys described in court filings as the longest-running consent decree over a police department in U.S. history.
“This is not the police department of the day that I really experienced as a community activist,” Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee told reporters at a Tuesday press conference. “… This decision today, of course, is the floor. It’s not the ceiling.”
Oakland Police Chief James Beere said responsibility for ensuring the department maintains its reforms will now shift locally.
“The oversight’s gonna belong to the people of Oakland,” Beere told reporters. “… Instead of reporting to the federal court, we’re gonna [be] reporting back to the city and back to our community that we serve.”
The oversight dates to the “Riders” scandal when 119 people sued Oakland in 2000, accusing four police officers of civil rights violations that included false arrests, excessive force, planting evidence and falsifying police reports. Oakland reached a multimillion-dollar settlement in 2003 and agreed to sweeping court-supervised reforms covering internal affairs, the use of force, supervision, training and officer accountability.
The negotiated settlement agreement was initially expected to last five years. Instead, federal oversight stretched across more than two decades, as the OPD repeatedly struggled to sustain compliance with the agreement’s reform requirements.
Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee addresses the crowd during the Golden State Valkyries’ jersey reveal at Oakland City Hall in Oakland, Calif., on March 30, 2026. (Supriya Limaye/ISI Photos/Getty Images)
The OPD reached compliance with all 51 reform tasks for the first time in May. Orrick cautioned that reaching that milestone did not mean the department’s work on the “path of constitutional policing” was finished.
“This is not something that OPD could achieve for a moment in time and achieve victory,” Orrick said during the May hearing. “… No one can say mission accomplished but I do congratulate the City and OPD on getting this far.”
The OPD did not remain in full compliance through Tuesday’s final hearing. The independent monitor’s report from Sept. 15 found the department had again fallen short on Task 2, which governs how quickly internal affairs investigations must be completed. The monitor found that 83% of serious Class I misconduct investigations reviewed from the first quarter of 2026 were finished within the required timelines, slightly below the 85% threshold.
The monitoring team nevertheless said the OPD had previously demonstrated that it could meet the requirement and credited Lee, Beere and other city leaders with fostering “a culture of accountability.” The department remained compliant with the other actively monitored internal affairs requirements.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys acknowledged before Tuesday’s hearing that the OPD now “bears virtually no resemblance” to the department at the start of the case and agreed that federal oversight in its existing form should end, according to a joint court filing. They asked Orrick to retain jurisdiction for another year while the OPD and the Oakland Police Commission reported on the department’s progress.
Oakland voters created the Oakland Police Commission and the Community Police Review Agency in 2016 and expanded the city’s civilian oversight structure with the Office of the Inspector General in 2020. The inspector general is charged under the city charter with auditing the OPD’s continued compliance with the settlement reforms, even after the agreement expires.
Lee said the end of the case transferred the responsibility for sustaining those reforms back to Oakland.
“We have a lot of work to do,” she said at the Tuesday press conference. “But this is a major step toward constitutional policing and towards, again, our city taking ownership of policing and public safety.”
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This article originally published at Oakland police exit 23 years of federal oversight after ‘Riders’ scandal.