Calif. Police Agency Nears End of Decades-Long Reform Oversight

A judge on Wednesday said the Oakland Police Department is months away from regaining its independence and emerging out of federal oversight, signaling a potential end to one of the longest-running police reform cases in the country’s history.

U.S. District Judge William H. Orrick, at a hearing in San Francisco federal court, floated the possibility of ending Oakland’s oversight at the end of September, if the Oakland department maintains full compliance with court-mandated reforms through the summer.

“My suggestion would be to terminate monitorship and close the case,” Orrick said, while warning that “some work remains.”

The hearing, packed with city leaders past and present, had a celebratory tone for a reform effort long defined by scandals, missed deadlines and turmoil within the department and city leadership.

But with the end of oversight predicted to be four months away, city officials, police commanders and civil rights attorneys praised the work that has brought Oakland as close as ever to closing an almost 25-year reform effort.

Nearly everyone who congratulated the city’s progress also acknowledged how it must — and plans to — remain compliant, even without federal supervision.

Mayor Barbara Lee, who spoke before Judge Orrick, said that the department has come a long way since the turn of the century, when she said OPD was acting recklessly and “out of control.”

“This is not the same police department. These are people who don’t know anything but constitutional policing,” Lee said. “We just have to make sure we stay the course.”

The court oversight stems from a class action lawsuit filed by 119 plaintiffs in 2000 that accused four officers, known as “the Riders,” of violating civil rights by beating Black residents and planting drugs and other evidence on them.

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.

It is one of the longest — if not the longest — such arrangements in U.S. law enforcement history.

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.

The department has come close to emerging from federal oversight before.

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.

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’s mishandling of two officer misconduct cases.

Orrick acknowledged that moment, saying he “jumped the gun four years ago.”

“I think we all thought these things would be achieved… that didn’t happen and here we are today,” the judge said Wednesday.

Last week, however, OPD reached a milestone. Federal Monitor Robert Warshaw, in a court filing ahead of Wednesday’s hearing, found the department had achieved compliance with all 51 tasks “for the first time in the history” of the reform effort.

Still, Oakland will not be without outside oversight if the federal monitoring team leaves town.

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’s authority four years later.

It’s those structures that give attorney Jim Chanin “hope” that the department will continue its mission of constitutional policing when federal oversight ends, he said Wednesday.

“Things will go wrong, that’s just part of institutions,” said Chanin, who has represented the plaintiffs alongside fellow civil rights attorney John Burris. “But it is about having the structures set up, having the accountability… and dealing with it in an open way.”

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.

“It’s never going to be ‘mission accomplished,’” the judge said. “It is something that just has to be done every day.”

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