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Nearly everyone who congratulated the city\u2019s progress also acknowledged how it must \u2014 and plans to \u2014 remain compliant, even without federal supervision.<\/p>\n
Mayor Barbara Lee, who spoke before Judge\u00a0Orrick, said that the department has come a long way since the turn of the century, when she said OPD was acting recklessly and \u201cout of control.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u201cThis is not the same police department. These are people who don\u2019t know anything but constitutional policing,\u201d Lee said. \u201cWe just have to make sure we stay the course.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The court oversight stems from a class action lawsuit filed by 119 plaintiffs in 2000 that accused four officers, known as \u201cthe Riders,\u201d of violating civil rights by beating Black residents and planting drugs and other evidence on them.\u00a0<\/p>\n
To settle that suit in 2003, the court ordered Oakland to fulfil 51 reform tasks to improve how it trains, tracks and disciplines officers, while under the supervision of a monitoring team and federal judge. \u00a0<\/p>\n
It is one of the longest \u2014 if not the longest \u2014 such arrangements in U.S. law enforcement history.<\/p>\n
Over the past 23 years, numerous city officials have come and gone, including six mayors and 15 permanent or temporary police chiefs. Twice, Oakland went through three chiefs in one week, as the scandal-plagued department struggled to regain independence.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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The department has come close to emerging from federal oversight before.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In 2016, civil rights attorneys representing the plaintiffs appeared ready to request that OPD begin a one-year probationary period to end oversight, but then a scandal involving officers trafficking a teenage girl surfaced.<\/p>\n
In 2022, Orrick ruled that the department could enter the yearlong probationary period. Not long after, the judge extended that period after former police Chief LeRonne Armstrong was placed on administrative leave and ultimately fired after the release of a report that detailed the department\u2019s mishandling of two officer misconduct cases.<\/p>\n
Orrick acknowledged that moment, saying he \u201cjumped the gun four years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we all thought these things would be achieved\u2026 that didn\u2019t happen and here we are today,\u201d the judge said Wednesday.<\/p>\n
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Last week, however, OPD reached a milestone. Federal Monitor Robert Warshaw, in a court filing ahead of Wednesday\u2019s hearing, found the department had achieved compliance with all 51 tasks \u201cfor the first time in the history\u201d of the reform effort.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Still, Oakland will not be without outside oversight if the federal monitoring team leaves town.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Voters in 2016 overwhelmingly supported creating a civilian oversight board that is among the strongest in the country, with the ability to investigate misconduct, discipline officers and fire police chiefs. Voters expanded the board\u2019s authority four years later.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s those structures that give attorney Jim\u00a0Chanin \u201chope\u201d that the department will continue its mission of constitutional policing when federal oversight ends, he said Wednesday.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThings will go wrong, that\u2019s just part of institutions,\u201d said Chanin, who has represented the plaintiffs alongside fellow civil rights attorney John Burris. \u201cBut it is about having the structures set up, having the accountability\u2026 and dealing with it in an open way.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Orrick repeatedly emphasized that the next four months will be critical and he expects no missteps from OPD before the next court hearing scheduled for Sept. 29.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s never going to be \u2018mission accomplished,\u2019\u201d the judge said. \u201cIt is something that just has to be done every day.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee, with Interim police Chief James Beere behind her, speaks at a recent press conference…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":335398,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[184,7,332,143,145,144,13],"class_list":["post-335397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-bay-area","tag-california","tag-east-bay","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335397","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=335397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335397\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/335398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}