Former Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong, who was appointed to the job in 2021 by then-mayor Libby Schaaf, faced another major legal setback after a state judge tossed out his lawsuit against Oakland last week.<\/p>\n
Armstrong sued<\/a> Oakland last year, alleging the city and then-Mayor Sheng Thao fired him in February 2023 in retaliation for speaking out against Robert Warshaw, the federal monitor who oversees the police department. Armstrong\u2019s lawsuit also accused Thao of violating his First Amendment rights. A federal judge dismissed<\/a> Armstrong\u2019s First Amendment claims last November and sent the remainder of the claims to state court to decide whether the city\u2019s leaders violated labor laws.<\/p>\n California Superior Court Judge Peter Borkon threw out the rest of Armstrong\u2019s case on Oct. 16 after the city objected to it through a demurrer<\/a>.<\/p>\n Borkon wrote in his ruling<\/a> that Armstrong\u2019s complaints against the city \u201cdo not rise to the level of whistleblower violations for two reasons.\u201d<\/p>\n First, the judge wrote, Armstrong\u2019s claim of whistleblower retaliation relied entirely on an alleged Jan. 19, 2023, conversation between Armstrong, Thao, and then-City Administrator Ed Reiskin. However, Armstrong\u2019s lawsuit failed to \u201cclearly allege\u201d what was said during this discussion.\u00a0<\/p>\n Second, Armstrong accused OPD\u2019s federal monitor, Rober Warshaw, of fraud, but the lawsuit \u201cfails to include any details\u201d that explain how a fraud was committed. The other laws Armstrong accused Warshaw of violating are state laws, which don\u2019t apply to federal court monitors, Borkon wrote.<\/p>\n Borkon\u2019s order said Armstrong \u201cdoes not provide facts demonstrating an objectively reasonable belief that Warshaw was issuing \u2018false reports regarding the OPD and Chief Armstrong in order to continue to personally receive tax payer money,\u2019\u201d as Armstrong had claimed in his suit.<\/p>\n Borkon gave Armstrong an opportunity to update his lawsuit and refile within 10 days.\u00a0<\/p>\n Armstrong\u2019s attorney did not immediately respond to questions from The Oaklandside about the case.\u00a0<\/p>\n Oakland City Attorney Ryan Richardson declined to comment.<\/p>\n Armstrong faced criticism over his handling of a sergeant\u2019s misconduct<\/p>\n Armstrong was appointed chief of the Oakland police in February 2021, during Schaaf\u2019s second term as mayor. Two years later, Thao, who had just been sworn in as mayor, took the extraordinary step of placing Armstrong on administrative leave while she considered how to respond to the findings of a report commissioned by the city that was highly critical of the police chief.<\/p>\n The report<\/a> summarized an investigation by a law firm that was tasked by the city with looking into two police misconduct cases involving an OPD sergeant. The sergeant had committed a hit-and-run in the parking garage of his San Francisco apartment building in 2021. Later, in a bizarre incident, the same officer discharged his gun inside an OPD elevator and threw the shell casing off the Bay Bridge.<\/p>\n The investigation found that OPD leaders did not properly investigate the sergeant\u2019s actions or properly discipline him. Armstrong \u201cfailed to hold his subordinate officers to account,\u201d the attorneys concluded<\/a>, and he failed \u201cto engage effectively in the review of the incident\u201d \u2014 a reference to the hit-and-run \u2014 \u201callowing the subject officer to escape responsibility for serious misconduct.\u201d The investigators recommended that Armstrong be suspended for 30 days.<\/p>\n Some community members rallied around Armstrong in early 2023<\/a> while he was on leave, demanding that he be reinstated. At the same time, Armstrong lashed out at Warshaw, the Oakland Police Department\u2019s federal monitor, accusing him of corruptly manufacturing the crisis<\/a> in order to prevent OPD from getting out from under federal court oversight.<\/p>\n Warshaw oversees OPD\u2019s compliance with a reform program the city agreed to in 2003 to settle the \u201cRiders\u201d case<\/a>, a civil rights lawsuit which alleged that a group of officers beat up suspects, planted drugs on them, and lied on police reports. Warshaw reports to a federal judge and is paid for his work by the city.<\/p>\n Thao fired Armstrong several weeks after he accused Warshaw of corruption. Her firing of the chief was a decision separate from the 30-day suspension he was facing.<\/p>\n In September 2023, a neutral hearing officer reviewed the external investigation of the OPD sergeant\u2019s misconduct and the 30-day suspension Armstrong faced and largely sided with Armstrong<\/a>. The hearing officer recommended in her 55-page report that the city consider reversing Armstrong\u2019s suspension and wiping the record from his personnel file, as well as meeting with Armstrong to resolve the dispute over his termination.<\/p>\n The hearing officer felt it was unrealistic to have expected Armstrong to have read the internal affairs reports at the center of the case involving the sergeant and concluded that \u201cnothing in the [law firm\u2019s report] supports a conclusion that the Chief failed to hold any other OPD officers to the standards, policies and rules of the Department.\u201d<\/p>\n However, the hearing officer didn\u2019t weigh in on whether or not Armstrong should be reinstated as chief.<\/p>\n Thao and the city took no action on the hearing officer\u2019s report as it was only a recommendation, not a binding outcome.<\/p>\n The Police Commission found Armstrong had another oversight failure<\/p>\n In November 2024, a federal judge dismissed Armstrong\u2019s claims that his right to free speech had been violated when he was fired. Judge Trina Thompson wrote in her ruling that elected officials like the mayor need to be able to make personnel decisions that further the policy platform they were elected to carry out.<\/p>\n \u201cBy criticizing the Federal Monitor, with \u2018extensive\u2019 news coverage of those criticisms, and stating that the Federal Monitor was attempting to \u2018extend his lucrative monitoring contract,\u2019 Armstrong was undermining the ability of Mayor Thao\u2019s administration to work with the monitor assigned by the Court to oversee OPD,\u201d Thompson wrote in her decision.\u00a0<\/p>\n Thompson sent the remaining labor law claims in Armstrong\u2019s lawsuit to a state court to decide.<\/p>\n Of Armstrong\u2019s claims that Warshaw manufactured a crisis in order to sustain his paid role as OPD\u2019s monitor, Borkon, the superior court judge, wrote that they were \u201cspeculative\u201d and failed to meet \u201cobjective standards\u201d of the whistleblower statute in state labor laws.<\/p>\n In addition to reinstatement as police chief, Armstrong sought economic damages, punitive damages to be paid by Thao, money for emotional distress, attorneys fees, and other compensation for his firing.<\/p>\n Last year, before the federal judge\u2019s decision in his lawsuit, Armstrong faced more criticism<\/a> after details of a separate investigation into OPD\u2019s handling of allegations surrounding a homicide investigator became public. OPD detective Phong Tran was accused of bribing a witness and committing perjury to send two men to prison. The Oakland Police Commission\u2019s civilian investigative agency concluded<\/a> that Armstrong had failed to ensure OPD\u2019s internal affairs division properly handled the Tran case. They recommended that Armstrong face a short suspension if he were ever reinstated as chief.<\/p>\n “*” indicates required fields<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong, who was appointed to the job in 2021 by then-mayor Libby Schaaf,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16095,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1846,4308,143,145,144,2453,14225,4312],"class_list":["post-16094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-lawsuit","tag-leronne-armstrong","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-oakland-police-commission","tag-robert-warshaw","tag-sheng-thao"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16094\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}