“The most regulated police department in the U.S.” – that’s how insiders describe the Oakland Police Department. “Nowhere else, not even close” says one highly-placed OPD officer of the myriad of agencies and individuals who get paid to keep a close eye on the department. And every year, it seems, another layer of watchful bureaucracy is added by the City Council or others convinced that OPD is a rogue organization that needs to be reined in.
There are at least seven entities with oversight functions over OPD:
- The Police Commission
- The Community Police Review Agency
- The Office of the Inspector General (Police Commission)
- The Oakland City Council
- The District Attorney
- The Federal Monitor and Compliance Officer (Robert Warshaw)
- The Police Officers Standards and Training Commission
Together, they scrutinize every move OPD makes, from newly-minted officers fresh out of the Academy to the Police Chief himself, from citizen complaints to officer decertifications. Much of their activity occurs in what a top official calls “a black box,” meaning that their activities are conducted in secret, with little or no accountability.
As with so many government bureaucracies, much depend on who gets the jobs running these entities. All too often, appointments are politically motivated. It’s hard to imagine, for example, someone getting appointed to the Police Commission who does not have a record of criticizing OPD; its nine members are selected by the eight City Council members plus the Mayor. Carroll Fife would never appoint someone like me, who likes and respects cops. As a result, the cop-scrutiny business in Oakland is top heavy with cop haters and police skeptics. Some members of the Police Commission have told me they’re in favor of the complete abolition of OPD, an attitude shared with radicals like Pamela Price.
We need not go here into the details of what each of these seven entities actually does on a day-to-day basis. Suffice it to say that Oakland cops feel beleaguered. Of course, everyone agrees, including cops themselves, that some reasonable degree of oversight is desirable, if the gulf between cops and “the community” is ever to be repaired. The key word is “reasonable.” In my judgment—and I’ve been doing this work for a while—the limits of reason were passed long ago, as our woke City Council imposed every more stringent controls on OPD. And things are just getting worse. The latest insult from the City Council is a proposal to remove OPD’s Internal Affairs Department, which investigates allegations of police misconduct, and transfer it to the Community Police Review Agency, the investigative arm of the Police Commission. (This proposal is said to have originated with Dan Kalb.) It is “unheard of” for that step to be taken in America, says a source within OPD. But the City Council seems likely to approve it, and Mayor Thao will sign it into law. Taking such a step will undoubtedly backfire, because there are two thousand cases a year that require IA investigations and CPRA already is overloaded in terms of what their staff can handle.
Citizens of Oakland, who ask only for an effective police department that is enabled to fight crime, should be concerned about this piling of agencies on OPD. Sting might have written his immortal lyrics about this ominous phenomenon in Oakland:
Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I'll be watching you
I am calling for a complete revision of police oversight in our city. It’s time to seize control of this process away from the cop-hating wokes on the City Council and Police Commission, and restore sanity to police oversight. Oakland residents ought to be ashamed of the way cops are treated here. We should be like normal cities, who trust and respect their cops. Instead, we have a mafia-like cabal of far-left radicals who refuse to admit that increased crime is the direct result of their misguided efforts at social justice.
Steve Heimoff