For some context, we got a hold of Roselyn Romero, who covers public safety for the Oaklandside.<\/a><\/p>\nAnd Roselyn, can you give us the thumbnail version of how the Oakland Police Department ended up under court oversight in the first place?<\/p>\n
ROSELYN ROMERO: Yeah, sure. So back in the late \u201990s and early 2000s, over 100 mostly Black men sued the city of Oakland and the Oakland Police Department, alleging that a squad of rogue OPD officers kidnapped, beat them and planted drugs and other evidence on them. And so as part of that civil rights lawsuit, the Oakland Police Department and the city of Oakland agreed that the Police Department was going to essentially complete a reform program, which was eventually known as the negotiated settlement agreement.<\/p>\n
And as part of that NSA, the police department would have to complete 51 tasks and subtasks, and all of those tasks are reforms aimed at improving transparency within the department, reducing corruption and essentially reforming the internal affairs investigation processes. And so that negotiated settlement agreement officially started in 2003, and it wasn\u2019t until this year that the reform program was officially over.<\/p>\n
MARK BRODY: Does that mean that the 51 tasks were completed, that OPD finally made those reforms after 20-plus years?<\/p>\n
ROSELYN ROMERO: So, yes and no. At the last court hearing where the judge had to rule whether to continue federal court oversight of the Oakland Police Department, end it or extend it, the court monitor \u2014 his name is Robert Warshaw and he is a retired police chief \u2014 his last report actually showed that the Oakland Police Department wasn\u2019t in compliance with one of those 51 tasks.<\/p>\n
However, that reform or that task, the Oakland Police Department had actually been found to be in compliance with that task before, it\u2019s just that they backslid at the most recent quarterly check-in. And so that one task was related to the timeliness of internal affairs investigations.<\/p>\n
MARK BRODY: OK, so they had achieved them, they just hadn\u2019t achieved them at that exact moment, it sounds like.<\/p>\n
ROSELYN ROMERO: Correct. Yes.<\/p>\n
MARK BRODY: You mentioned Robert Warshaw, who was the monitor in Oakland, is also the monitor here in Maricopa County with the sheriff\u2019s department. What can you tell us about what his methods are, how folks within the Oakland Police Department responded to him, how he worked with the department to try to get it into compliance?<\/p>\n
ROSELYN ROMERO: That\u2019s an interesting question because I feel like at least the anecdotal stories that I\u2019ve heard from people within the Police Department and people who are more critical of the Oakland Police Department have said different things about Mr. Warshaw.<\/p>\n
I want to say maybe 2022 or 2023, when the Oakland Police Department was getting really close to exiting federal oversight, there was this pushback from a lot of community members here in Oakland who were arguing that Mr. Warshaw was essentially prolonging federal monitoring for his own gain.<\/p>\n
Of course, not everyone agrees. A lot of police accountability activists I\u2019ve spoken with argued that, instead of blaming Mr. Warshaw, we should instead blame the Oakland Police Department. That\u2019s essentially what critics have been saying.<\/p>\n
MARK BRODY: Were there any objections to ending the oversight? Like the folks who filed the original lawsuit, are they satisfied now with where the Oakland Police Department is?<\/p>\n
ROSELYN ROMERO: We haven\u2019t heard specifically from the 119 plaintiffs. However, the two civil rights attorneys who sued on behalf of the plaintiffs \u2014 their names are John Burris and Jim Chanin \u2014 they agreed that ending federal oversight was probably a good call. However, they did say that we would prefer that the Oakland Police Department be under one more year of supervision, federal court supervision, not necessarily involving them, the two attorneys, but involving the monitor as well as the federal judge, just to make sure that the Oakland Police Department was actually complying with all of the reforms.<\/p>\n
But eventually they did say that ending oversight is probably a good call. There were also a lot of activists that submitted a letter to the court prior to that last hearing arguing that the Oakland Police Department does not deserve to be out of federal court oversight because if they continue to be backsliding even in these relatively minor ways, who\u2019s to say that they\u2019re not going to backslide even more? And they also argued that the city of Oakland\u2019s current civilian oversight structures are not funded enough and not staffed enough to take over the federal monitor and the federal court once that oversight ends.<\/p>\n
MARK BRODY: At the end of the day, this took more than two decades to get from point A to point B. Do folks feel like the department is in a better place now than it was, that all of this was worth it in terms of having a better police department, a more accountable police department, that sort of thing?<\/p>\n
ROSELYN ROMERO: I would say yes. It seems like overall, the civil rights attorneys who brought the lawsuit, the city of Oakland and the police department, as well as the federal judge, all had a pretty hopeful tone at the last court hearing. They all said that Oakland is ready to take on the torch and that the Oakland Police Department today is radically different, culturally and systemically, than it was when the scandal in 2000 broke out.<\/p>\n
Of course, there are several activists and Oakland Police Department critics who argue that only time will tell if the reforms will sustain and will actually continue. But overall, I think that at the last court hearing, everyone who spoke emphasized that this end of oversight is not the end per se of holding the Oakland police accountable, it\u2019s more so the beginning of a new formal process of the city, the police department, and the civilian oversight bodies making sure that the police department can sustain those reforms.<\/p>\n
MARK BRODY: All right. That is Roselyn Romero, public safety reporter for the Oaklandside. Roselyn, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.<\/p>\n
ROSELYN ROMERO: Thank you, Mark. Appreciate it.<\/p>\n
KJZZ’s The Show transcripts are created for audience accessibility. Transcripts are created on deadline with the assistance of AI tools and then edited, and may not be in their final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ’s programming is the audio segment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MARK BRODY: Maricopa County is appealing a judge\u2019s decision to keep the Sheriff\u2019s Office under federal court oversight.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":504844,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":["post-504843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504843","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=504843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504843\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/504844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=504843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=504843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=504843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}