By Paula Hawthorn
The MOBN! Board is concerned about the handling of the case against Oakland Police Department Chief LeRonne Armstrong both because the result is that Chief Armstrong, an effective Oakland leader and respected chief of police, was fired and because the process that was used was flawed. We would be delighted if Mayor Thao would reinstate Chief Armstrong, but we recognize that is probably unrealistic. But the process flaws need to be corrected, and we call on Mayor Thao to correct them.
These are:
- When Chief Warshaw (the court-appointed Monitor for the Negotiated Settlement Agreement between the attorneys for the plaintiffs & the City of Oakland) determined that there should be an outside investigation of the OPD issue, the City should have, instead of hiring outside, San Francisco attorneys to investigate, turned the case over to the Citizen Police Review Agency (CPRA). The CPRA is the investigative arm of the Oakland Police Commission, and it is exactly this sort of investigation that the Oakland public expects it to do. The CPRA is entirely separate from OPD, does its own independent investigations, and was ignored in this case. We ask why, and we would like a clear answer from the Administration why they did not first ask the CPRA to investigate.
- When the Mayor announced, first, that Chief Armstrong had been put on leave, and second, that he had been fired, those actions should have been with the very visible support of the Police Commission. Although the Mayor does have the right to fire the chief of police without consulting the Police Commission, to publicly do so is disempowering to the Police Commission.
The citizens of Oakland have twice voted for a strong Police Commission and CPRA because we believe that outside oversight of OPD is necessary. This is not a statement of distrust of this particular police department, but just a general fact: outside investigations of entities is more effective than inside investigations which is why banks don’t audit themselves, restaurants do not do their own health checks, etc.
Chief Robert Warshaw, the former police chief in Rochester NY, has been the court-appointed Monitor since 2010, and in addition the Compliance Director since 2014, and has acted as that outside oversight for these many years. But that function must be transferred to the Police Commission and the CPRA, so that Oakland can have continuing OPD oversight after the NSA sunsets.
We must ask: why did the Monitor demand that the SF attorneys investigate this case, and why did the City agree rather than turning it over to the CPRA where it belonged?
If the answer is that the CPRA does not have the capability to do this investigation, then again we ask why the City does not move to strengthen it, rather than pay the fees of the SF attorneys?
And why was the Police Commission publicly ignored? If that was because the Police Commission did not want to fire Chief Armstrong at that time, but rather to have an investigation done, why were they not allowed to do that?
Strengthening the Police Commission is necessary to get out from under the NSA.