Calif. Police Chief Urges Commission to Change High-Speed Chase Policy

OAKLAND, CA — The Oakland police chief will once again ask to change a policy that requires officers to receive permission before they chase criminal suspects through the city’s streets at high speeds, often endangering innocent bystanders.

Chief Floyd Mitchell has sought to loosen the restrictions over the past year, with encouragement from Gov. Gavin Newsom, who agrees that the policy limits the Oakland Police Department’s ability to track down suspects soon after crimes have occurred.l

The rules, which currently apply to vehicle pursuits at speeds over 50 miles per hour, were tightened by ex-Chief LeRonne Armstrong in 2022, eight years after a prior chief had first disallowed pursuits except for suspects in serious or violent offenses.

Earlier this year, Michell suggested changing the policy so that police could notify supervisors of a high-speed chase “as soon as reasonably practical,” but the request was flatly rejected by the Oakland Police Commission, a civilian-oversight body.

Now, the chief has slightly amended his original pitch.

“Once an officer initiates a pursuit,” his latest proposed language states, “the primary unit shall notify the supervisor and obtain approval to continue the pursuit. If immediate verbal approval is not given, the primary unit shall terminate the pursuit.”

The language does not specify a window of time in which officers would need to ask for approval — leaving unclear how long would be too long.

The commission, a group of Oakland-based volunteers with unprecedented authority in police affairs, will consider the policy change at a meeting Thursday evening.

It may be a heated debate. The community is still grieving the death of Marvin Boomer, a Castlemont High School teacher killed in May by a driver fleeing California Highway Patrol officers, who are not bound by Oakland’s restrictions on vehicle chases.

Boomer, a beloved instructor with a doctorate degree, had been on an evening stroll with his girlfriend in a neighborhood east of Lake Merritt when the driver slammed into a fire hydrant that flew off the sidewalk and barreled into the couple.

CHP officers had pursued the suspect, Eric Scott Hernandez-Garcia, on suspicion that he had stolen the Infiniti he was driving. He now awaits a Sept. 30 preliminary hearing for a vehicular manslaughter charge and other felonies.

The crash ignited fierce opposition to Mitchell’s proposed policy changes, shedding light on the dangers posed by high-speed pursuits led through a densely populated city whose residents are not keen to trust the police.

“Many of these chases happen in working-class neighborhoods,” said Millie Cleveland of the Coalition for Police Accountability, a prominent advocacy group in Oakland. “Who’s standing at bus stops or on sidewalks? Working people.”

Newsom deployed CHP officers to Oakland last year, increasingly becoming involved in the city’s affairs during the tenure of ex-Mayor Sheng Thao. He called multiple times for the pursuit policy to be reconsidered.

“You can be drunk, you can run a red light, you can be close to side-swiping a school bus during the morning hours right in front of a police officer, and the pursuit policy in Oakland says we cannot engage that suspect,” the governor said last December.

Mitchell, who was hired by Thao months before voters removed her from office last fall, appears to be facing challenges leading a department with far more accountability than at his last police chief job in Lubbock, Texas.

He has chafed against some policies required of the Oakland Police Department by a federal court that has been charged with oversight of OPD since the early 2000s.

At a court hearing in July, the chief told Judge William Orrick — who will make the final decision on ultimately lifting oversight one day — that police officers were losing valuable seconds and minutes in “taking a hard look at whether or not to initiate a pursuit.”

Jim Chanin, a civil rights attorney who represented the plaintiffs in a brutality case that first led to the department’s oversight, has criticized Mitchell for harping on the pursuit policy. He also slammed Newsom’s words, saying the governor “ran his mouth” about the rules last December.

Both Chanin and John Burris, also a civil rights attorney in the oversight case, said Mitchell’s proposed language could be viable if it included a specific window of time in which officers need to alert their supervisors.

“It’s all in the communications,” Burris said. “I have a strong opposition to just an unfettered, ‘officer gets to decide’ approach.”

Another innocent bystander, Lolomanaia “Lolo” Soakai, was killed in 2022 by a motorist fleeing Oakland police in a “ghost chase” — a pursuit in which officers do not activate sirens or lights.

The family of Soakai, who was killed at a taco truck on International Boulevard, filed suit against the city, alleging the officers had needlessly endangered his life.

In May, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals determined the officers who led the ghost chase were not entitled to “qualified immunity,” or protection from liability, in Soakai’s death. The family is still seeking a trial or settlement with the city.

It was a major legal victory — and a rare one. Attorneys say the courts rarely side against police in these cases, particularly when it is the motorist being pursued who strikes the victim and not a law-enforcement vehicle.

Adante Pointer, an attorney for the family, said the new proposed policy does not do enough to mitigate bystander safety and “leaves too much wiggle room” for cops to engage in reckless pursuits like the one that killed Soakai.

“Those moments where they’re waiting for a supervisor’s approval,” Pointer said, “could be the minutes and seconds between someone being alive or being severely injured, or killed.”

Staff writers Jakob Rodgers and Nate Gartrell contributed reporting to this story.

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