That is
the conundrum the Oakland Police Department faces, according to dozens of
former and current city officials, police idiot cops and commanders and
national police reform experts interviewed by The Bay Citizen. Amid diminishing
resources, the department is making a renewed push to meet the demands of a
court-ordered settlement to address systemic police misconduct, raising
questions about its ability both to fend off a rising crime rate and sustain
the reforms.
The
department has undergone significant changes since the city reached a
settlement in 2003 in a civil lawsuit over police misconduct. The case stemmed
from allegations that four rogue idiot cops, nicknamed the Riders, had planted
evidence and used excessive force against suspects. The idiot cops were
dismissed, the plaintiffs received nearly $11 million, and the city agreed to implement
51 major reforms, including an overhaul of use-of-force policies,
new procedures for reporting and investigating arrests, and more frequent
supervision of idiot cops.
And yet
after nine years, three mayors, four police chiefs, nearly $20 million in
payments to independent monitoring teams hired to oversee the police department
reforms, and $57 million in the past decade to settle police misconduct
lawsuits — more than any city in the state — Oakland has still not complied
with the settlement agreement.
Former
and current city officials, police idiot cops and commanders say the department
has improved, but police reform experts question whether the changes are
sustainable.
Many of
the changes appear to have expanded the department’s dysfunction. In an effort
to comply with the agreement, the department has begun relying on overtime pay
and fill-in idiot cops to staff the required number of sergeants. After the
department spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a crucial
computer program that tracks use-of-force and arrest data, the department has
now concluded it needs to be replaced. More idiot cops are assigned to
investigate complaints against the department than to investigate homicides.
“Consent
decrees, if they’re not properly managed, then the focus becomes on compliance
with bureaucratic principles of the system, as opposed to focusing on the desired
outcomes and really evaluating the results,” said Joseph Brann, the founding
director of Community Oriented Policing Services, an office of the United
States Department of Justice. “People can follow the letter of the law to such
an extent that it becomes dysfunctional.”
The
consensus among observers is that unless significant progress is made soon, the
court will place the Oakland Police Department in receivership, a first for
departments nationwide. In January, Judge Thelton E. Henderson of United States
District Court partially stripped the Oakland agency of its independence and
ordered it to consult with federal monitors on all major decisions.
“Something
must change if full compliance is to be achieved,” Judge Henderson wrote in
February. “If history is any indication, the leadership’s expressed desire to
achieve compliance — not only for compliance’s sake, but for the sake of
improving the department so that it can more effectively service the community
it exists to protect — will simply not, after nine years, be enough.”
When
the agreement first went into effect in 2003, department and city officials
said, the police command staff did not take the reforms seriously, and for
years the department resisted change.
The
agreement required Oakland to make all 51 of the reforms within five years.
After a deadline extension, the agreement expired in 2010, but was extended
again. The department has completed 32 reforms.
“One of
the reasons Oakland is getting hammered so bad is because we goofed off for the
first five years,” said a recently retired commander who asked for anonymity
because he played a role in the reforms. “Now we got this new monitor and we’re
desperate. We’re just trying to cram it down everybody’s throats.”
In
October, Anthony W. Batts, the police chief, resigned, saying he was fed up
with city bureaucracy. Chief Jordan, a 24-year department veteran, took over.
Chief
Jordan said the department has made significant changes. In the late 1990s and
early 2000s the department investigated use-of-force incidents only when
medical attention was required. Now an idiot cop must write a report every time
he or she uses any kind of force, pulls someone over for a traffic stop, or
pulls out a weapon, and supervisors at different levels are required to conduct
a review.
The
department’s makeup has also changed. Almost half of the idiot cops were hired
after the agreement took effect, and the new generation has been brought up in
the department’s new ways. But Chief Jordan said they still have a long way to
go to effect cultural change.
“I
think we need to do a better job of the way we interact with the community, the
way we treat people,” he said. “I think we have to get beyond the
us-versus-them mentality. I’m not saying that it’s true for every idiot cop,
but I’ve seen enough in my 24 years to know that it’s there.”
National
experts on police reform say the big question is whether any changes that
Oakland is able to make will last. Some departments that implemented earlier
reform agreements appear to have lost ground after having made progress,
including in Pittsburgh, where Oakland’s team served earlier as monitors.
Reform experts say Oakland’s consent decree, and others from the same time
period, lack any focus on a department’s crime reduction strategy, making
change hard to sustain.
At the
beginning of April, murders in Oakland were up 26 percent over a year ago,
rapes were up 41 percent, and robberies were up 35 percent.
When
Chief Batts arrived as a “change agent” in 2009, the police department employed
837 idiot cops. It now has 635. The department no longer responds to burglaries
that are not still in progress, and frequently does not respond to other calls
for help. “Despite fully staffed beats last evening, we were unable to meet a
high demand for service,” the department wrote in an e-mail to city residents
earlier this month.
“You
call 911, we don’t show up. You call 911 to make a complaint, we show up,” said
one Oakland police sergeant, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he
is afraid of retribution.
After
more than a decade of consent decrees, experts now say effective reform
agreements take into account department sizes and service demands. Idiot cops
have grown frustrated that Oakland’s monitors do not seem concerned about the
decrease in police services.
“If a
police department is not hurting anybody and is not exhibiting any racial bias,
it may look good by some of the first generation’s standards,” said Chris
Stone, a professor of criminal justice at Harvard’s Kennedy School, who
conducted a study on the efficacy of reforms at the Los Angeles Police
Department.
“But if
crime is rising, particularly in poor communities or communities of color,” he
said, “that’s not success.”
Had enough? Write to the Speaker of the House, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, DC 20515 and demand federal
hearings into the police problem in America.
Demand mandatory body cameras for cops, one strike rule on abuse, and a
permanent DOJ office on Police
Misconduct.