Oakland police cold case unit closing – NBC Bay Area

Despite having cracked 30 cases in the last three years, the Oakland Police Department’s cold case homicide detail is being dissolved as the department scrambles to deal with staff losses and budget cuts, top officials acknowledged to NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit.

The unit had two full-time investigators and one sergeant unit the department began to shift investigators out earlier this year. The last investigator is currently on loan from another part of the department and is being transferred out by the end of the year.

The department’s statement to NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit about the unit did not spell out what will happen when the last investigator leaves. But the department stressed any of the city’s 10 homicide investigators can still work cold cases.

Minutes after the department sent that statement, a top police official appeared at a public hearing and confirmed that the unit’s fate is, in fact, sealed.

“We have just shut down our cold case unit,” investigations Capt. Omar Daza-Quiroz told the city council’s public safety committee on Tuesday.

The prospect of the unit’s total demise stunned families who have been counting on its investigators to keep their hopes for justice alive.

“You get rid of the cold case unit, what does that do for the families?” said Brenda Grisham, whose 17-year-old son Christopher LaVell Jones was killed by a stray bullet fired as he and his family were preparing to leave their East Oakland home to go to church on New Year’s Eve in 2010.

Grisham now lobbies for justice reform. She says while politicians talk about the realities of budget cuts and staffing shortages, she doesn’t think they truly understand what the unit’s closure will mean to victims’ families she works with.

“Nobody’s thought about that, if they have not lost the person because it’s not going to affect them, and they don’t really feel that that’s a part of OPD, and it’s a very, very big part of OPD,” Grisham said in a recent interview.

“It’s terrible,” said Tamika Bass-Stephens about the prospect of the unit’s closure.

She was counting their being able to find who killed her 19-year-old nephew, Andre Robinson Jr., shot from behind in 2020 as he brought breakfast to his girlfriend in East Oakland.

While that case remains unsolved, Bass-Stephens says Oakland police have made an arrest in the 2023 New Year’s Day slaying of her husband, James Earl Stephens II, an innocent bystander hit with gunfire as he sat in a car outside a smoke shop in East Oakland.

“I’m lucky, I was blessed, but I know there’s a lot of other families have lost loved ones to murder, and they still haven’t had any resolve to their case,” she said.

Bass-Stephens now fears the unit’s loss may rob those families of their chance at getting justice.

 “We need them. We need them like yesterday,” said Marilyn Washington Harris, whose 18-year-old son Khadafy was shot outside McClymonds High School in August 2000.

Like Grisham, Washington Harris works with survivors and their families to help them understand the complexities of the justice system.

“We just want our just due,” she said. “I, as a mother who’s lost a son – 25 years, it’s a cold case – I need something better to happen than what’s happening.”

Even if the department were to keep the unit alive, the current staffing level of one full-time investigator doesn’t make much sense, one expert says.

“Having one cold case detective is tough,” said Aaron Benzick, a Dallas-area veteran homicide investigator who founded Solve the Case, a national nonprofit dedicated to helping local law enforcement crack old cases.

He says authorities need to understand there’s a true cost to public safety when they seek cuts. “These aren’t just old cases that we’re going back and looking at because we want to show off and do a good job,” Benzick said. “We want to bring answers to families….we want to get these killers off the streets so that more lives can be saved.”

Despite the bad news, Washington Harris still hopes the department will be able to find a way to keep the cold case unit – and the hopes of families – alive.

“Even if mine don’t get done, as long as I can see other mothers being done, I’ll know that they’re working,” she said.