OAKLAND — Oakland police officers continue to face consequences for their role in a misconduct scandal that, according to a new report on Thursday, has ensured the department won’t get out from under the watchful eye of a federal monitor any time soon.
The latest report authored by Robert Warshaw, a monitor appointed by a federal judge to oversee the police department’s affairs on the city’s dime, reaches a scathing conclusion: OPD, it says, faces “very serious questions about its capacity to police itself.”
By the end of last year, OPD appeared to be on track to end two decades of oversight by reaching full compliance with a set of reforms demanded by Judge William Orrick; Warshaw’s new report, however, found the OPD has failed to ensure that “discipline is imposed in a fair and consistent manner.”
“Deep into the sustainability period, issues embedded in the history of the organization… have reappeared,” concludes the report, adding that “despite unquestionable progress” in complying with the tasks as written out, a “myriad of cultural deficiencies linger.”
It is yet more fallout from the debacle in January that began when a bombshell independent report found that an OPD sergeant had committed a hit-and-run on a parked vehicle, after which higher-ranking officers had covered up much of the wrongdoing and Chief LeRonne Armstrong had hastily signed off on the watered-down internal affairs probe that followed. Armstrong was subsequently fired by Mayor Sheng Thao.
In addition, Wilson Lau, the captain who in January was accused of deliberately botching an internal investigation into a sergeant’s misconduct, was dismissed last week from his current job at the East Bay Regional Parks Department’s police force.
That sergeant, Michael Chung, remains on paid administrative leave for committing the hit-and-run and later covering up an incident where he fired his service weapon in an OPD building elevator.
In February, another officer Lt. Joe Turner, was placed on leave in February after outside investigators found he didn’t properly hold Chung to account for the elevator incident.
Turner had allowed Chung to go home after sergeant told him he didn’t remember firing his weapon and suggested it might have been a suicidal act — a claim the investigators did not find credible, according to a KTVU report.
Lt. Omar Daza-Quiroz, who began the internal investigation of Chung’s hit-and-run, returned to work last month after previously being placed on leave, a police spokesperson said Thursday.
Orrick, the judge who has retained OPD’s federal oversight for two decades, said in January that the latest scandal “exposed rot” in the department that has persisted since the infamous Riders brutality cases came to light in the early 2000s.
In reversing his previous finding, Warshaw notes in the report a survey that found 57% of officers disagreed with the notion that the OPD’s disciplinary process is fair.
“The minute you start disciplining people inequitably because of things outside of what they did, you get in trouble — and that’s exactly what happened here,” said Jim Chanin, an attorney for the plaintiffs in the Riders cases whose settlement first led to federal oversight.
Armstrong’s firing, the highest-profile outcome of the scandal, has divided the community between those who say Armstrong was rightfully held accountable and others who argue he was unfairly scapegoated.
Armstrong has maintained his innocence and repeatedly claimed that Thao was carrying out Warshaw’s bidding when she placed him on leave, and subsequently dismissed him.
Last month, Thao said Armstrong’s long public campaign to be reinstated had contributed to her decision to part ways with the chief. She declined to comment at the time on Armstrong’s intimation that Warshaw was conspiring to oust him.
“In the aftermath of recent developments, Mayor Sheng Thao has invoked the leadership essential to the sustainment of a culture of accountability,” Warshaw said in Thursday’s report.
“The mayor has set the tone that should permeate the department so organizationally, it is in both technical compliance and on the road to real cultural transformation,” he added in the report’s conclusion.
