James Beere, a 29-year veteran of the Oakland Police Department, has been selected as the city’s permanent police chief, Mayor Barbara Lee announced Tuesday.
The appointment elevates a department insider to one of Oakland’s most scrutinized public safety jobs – and one that has been marked by years of instability. Since 2009, the city has had 11 different police chiefs or interim chiefs, a revolving door that has complicated efforts to steer the department through federal oversight, misconduct scandals and persistent concerns about violent crime.
Beere has served as interim chief since December, when former chief Floyd Mitchell stepped down after just over a year and a half on the job.
“Our city has experienced too much turnover in police leadership over the years, and Oakland deserves stability,” Lee said in a press release. “James Beere embraces meaningful civilian oversight and constitutional policing, values collaboration with our neighborhoods, businesses, and faith leaders, and is fully prepared to lead on day one.”
Beere’s selection requires formal approval by the City Council.
A longtime Oakland officer, Beere has spent nearly his entire law enforcement career inside the department. He worked early assignments in vice – the team handling sex trafficking cases – and narcotics before rising to sergeant in the intelligence unit, which supports major investigations and tracks crime data. He later served as commander of the criminal investigations division.
Unlike Mitchell, who came from Lubbock, Texas, Beere has deep ties to the city – he lives in the city with his family, and all three of his sons have attended Oakland public schools.
Even before Mitchell officially left the city, Beere served as the public face of the department following back-to-back school shootings in November – first at Skyline High School, where a student was injured, then one the next day at Laney College where football coach and athletic director John Beam was killed.
Beere takes over during a citywide drop in crime since the worst days of the pandemic. In 2025, homicides fell to their lowest level since 1967. That comes following the 2024 reboot of Ceasefire, a city program that helps to mediate conflicts between gang members, and also helps to connect at-risk individuals with job training and life coaching.
Still, the department has struggled to recruit and retain officers.
While Measure NN, a parcel tax approved by voters in 2024 to fund public safety, requires Oakland to budget for 700 officers, the city budget only authorizes 678 officers. Only 618 of those positions are full – down from 720 officers five years ago.
Under Beere, the police department could finally shed the federal oversight it has been under since the Riders police brutality scandal in 2000, in which four officers were accused of beating residents and planting evidence. In May, a court monitor found that Oakland’s department had achieved full compliance with court-mandated reforms laid out in a 2003 settlement aimed at improving officer training and discipline, a critical step toward achieving independence.
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This article originally published at Oakland Police Department veteran chosen as city’s newest police chief.