I don’t know if you noticed, but former OPD Chief Anne Kirkpatrick, who was fired without cause by Libby Schaaf in one of Schaaf’s more egregious acts, just won her lawsuit against the city. She had accused Oakland of wrongfully terminating her, and a Federal jury agreed.
The back story: Chief Kirkpatrick was hired in 2017 to lead a troubled department. She was the city’s ninth Chief in eight years; since then, Oakland has had three more. In 2017, OPD faced an avalanche of problems. It was under the iron grip of the Negotiated Settlement Agreement (NSA) and Robert “$1 million a year” Warshaw. Lots of people were talking about defunding the police. Graffiti downtown called for killing cops. The city was paying huge amounts of money to settle spurious civil cases against the police brought by ambulance-chasing lawyers. Many Black residents believed the department was racist. A year earlier, the Celeste Guap sex scandal had rocked the department. It was, in short, not an ideal time to take the lead of OPD.
But Kirkpatrick was widely liked by the rank and file. Accustomed to being disrespected, not only by Warshaw but by the Police Commission, the City Council and Occupy/BLM types, Oakland cops felt they finally had a Chief who had their back.
Predictably, reactionary elements in the city reacted negatively to a Chief popular with her ranks. Almost immediately, the Police Commission, which holds almost absolute power over OPD, decided that Kirkpatrick was not their kind of Chief. The Commission was particularly irked that not enough Black women were being hired and that Kirkpatrick didn’t kiss their heinies.
At one particularly contentious hearing on that topic, in 2019, a Commissioner attacked one of Kirkpatrick’s aides, calling her “disgraceful and shameful.” Kirkpatrick stepped forward to defend her aide. “I am not going to have you call her out as disgraceful. I am not, as the chief of police, as long as I’m the chief, you may not call her out.” And thus the stage was set for Kirkpatrick’s firing, a year later, as an angry, vengeful Police Commission decided to disappear her.
They could not have done it, however, without the connivance of Libby Schaaf. What was the Mayor’s role? When the Commission came to her requesting she fire Kirkpatrick, Schaaf came up with the idea of firing the Chief “without cause,” i.e., for no cited reason at all (which they had the legal right to do). That, Schaaf felt, would protect the city from a lawsuit, and it was done. Schaaf could, of course, have stood up for her beleaguered Chief, whom she had repeatedly praised. But she didn’t; she knuckled under to the cop haters, a disgraceful act of cowardice. Kirkpatrick wasn’t about to take it lying down. She sued the city, alleging that her firing had been in “retaliation” for the “whistleblower” role she played in reporting “corruption and misconduct” by the Police Commission. For example, one Commissioner, Kirkpatrick alleged, sought to have the city reimburse a fee she had paid for having her illegally-parked car towed. The Commissioner was improperly “asking us for a favor,” the Chief believed. The Commissioner demanded an apology from Kirkpatrick, which was not forthcoming. Two days later, Kirkpatrick got a letter notifying her that the Police Commission would begin meeting in closed session to assess her job performance. The die was cast.
In finding for Kirkpatrick, the Federal jury upheld her claim that she had been fired in retaliation by a vindictive, rogue Police Commission and a complicit Mayor. Indeed, it’s been my impression that the Commission is comprised largely of social justice warriors who don’t like cops (in some cases individual Commissioners have expressed a desire to abolish the Police Department), and who want to keep OPD demoralized and on its knees. Unchecked in their application of power, answerable to no one, this secretive organization—almost a cult—is obsessed with racial issues as opposed to law enforcement, and largely overlooked by the media, so that the public has very little idea it even exists. But the Oakland Police Commission is, in my estimation, a dangerous and destabilizing force. When we seek to assign blame for our city’s crime, and for the number of cops quitting OPD in frustration, we ought to include the Police Commission among those indicted. The Commission begins with the assumption that cops are crooked, racist and violent; like the Communist witch hunters of the 1950s, who discovered Reds under every bed, this Police Commission finds bad cops everywhere; and if there are none to be found, the Commission invents them.
Look, the Police Commission was created just six years ago, in 2016, by a ballot measure. It can be uncreated the same way. Can we have that conversation?
Steve Heimoff