THE OAKLAND CITY COUNCIL once again rejected two veteran members of the city’s Police Commission who were nominated by an independent selection committee, but unanimously approved two other commissioners nominated by Mayor Barbara Lee. 

The back-and-forth between Oakland’s Police Commission Selection Panel and the City Council about incumbent commissioners Omar Farmer and Ricardo Garcia-Acosta has been going on since their terms expired last October.

That’s when the council first rejected their reappointments, ostensibly on the grounds that the Selection Panel didn’t engage in a robust outreach and recruitment strategy to find possible candidates to replace the pair.

In a memo to the council, staff from the City Administrator’s Office, which is responsible for recruitment, said it made several adjustments to its outreach process in order to address councilmembers’ concerns, including targeting marginalized communities, handing out information at community events, hosting informational sessions and using the city’s social media accounts, email lists, websites and media relations resources to get the word out about the vacancies.  

And while that process resulted in 13 applicants, the Selection Panel didn’t review or discuss any new applications prior to voting unanimously in December to re-nominate Farmer as a commissioner and Garcia-Acosta as an alternate, according to assistant city administrator Felicia Verdin.

During Tuesday’s meeting, several councilmembers continued to express concerns about the selection process but didn’t articulate any reasons why Farmer and Garcia-Acosta might be unqualified to continue serving on the Police Commission, which they’ve been doing in a “holdover” capacity since they were rejected in October.

Several members of the public asked the council to explicitly state why they were lining up in opposition to the two candidates and Councilmember Carroll Fife noted that there had been no real discussion of their merits as commissioners.

“I didn’t hear any problems that were validated about the candidates,” Fife said. “I haven’t heard anything about the candidates being problematic that has been substantiated.”  

Fife also said that if all the talk about the selection process is really about what the Oakland Police Department or the police officers’ union have been pushing for in terms of which candidates they prefer, then she’d like to hear from them directly.

“Can we please have a transparent conversation about what is going on here,” she said. “If it’s a question about what the Police Department wants, what they think is best, can we hear from them?”

At the City Council meeting in October when Farmer and Garcia-Acosta were initially rejected, several members of the public implied that the pair represent the “status quo” on the commission, which in its alleged hostility toward the Oakland Police Department has imposed rules that they said make policing more difficult and that drove out chiefs of police, including Floyd Mitchell, who left the job on Dec. 5. 

Former Oakland Chief of Police Floyd Mitchell appears during his introduction in the Oakland City Council Chambers on March 27, 2024. Barely a year and a half into his tenure at OPD, Mitchell resigned from the department on Dec. 5, 2025. (Alain McLaughlin/City of Oakland via Bay City News)

Both men rejected those claims and said they have worked hard to ensure OPD continues to improve its policing policies, in part, to get out from under the control of a court-appointed special monitor.

The monitor was installed in 2003 as part of a federal court settlement following the so-called “Oakland Riders” scandal, during which officers routinely falsified police reports, planted evidence, beat suspects and generally abused Oaklanders’ civil rights.

The negotiated settlement agreement requires the department to initiate reforms focused on use of force policies, racial profiling, internal affairs investigations, officer discipline and transparency, among other things.

At the same meeting Tuesday during which the Council voted 6-2 to reject Farmer and Garcia-Acosta — with councilmembers Fife and Noel Gallo voting in the minority — it also voted to approve Mayor Lee’s two nominees for the Police Commission — retired judge Evelio Grillo and retired firefighter Doug Wong.