Several high-ranking Oakland police officers hit with serious discipline in the spring are still waiting for their appeals to be heard, but the city’s police department could face consequences much sooner — even as the threat of a harsher penalty looms.
At a court hearing Wednesday, Judge William Orrick is expected to once again to extend the department’s long era of federal oversight. OPD has remained under the U.S. District Court of Northern California’s watch for over two decades following the infamous Riders brutality scandal.
The latest controversy emerged this year when top personnel in the department were hit with discipline for accusations they botched an internal investigation into Detective Phong Tran, who is now awaiting a jury trial on charges of bribing a confidential witness in a murder case.
This time, the consequences for OPD could be even more punitive. Ahead of Wednesday’s hearing, the Riders plaintiffs’ attorneys threatened to push for OPD to fall under federal receivership if the department does not take action to address internal problems.
“This massive failure after over 20 YEARS of monitoring is intolerable,” civil-rights attorneys Jim Chanin and John Burris wrote in a scathing statement about OPD’s internal investigation into Tran, who pleaded not guilty.
Receivership, a full step more severe than the department’s current oversight, would grant sweeping powers to the federal court, which could appoint someone with even greater control than the current independent monitor, Robert Warshaw, who can the department’s money, direct command staff and fire the chief.
To date, no other city in the country has seen its police department fall under a full receivership.
Chanin and Burris did credit OPD for vastly reducing the number of its brutality cases — one of the original causes for federal oversight, which proves, they wrote, that the department is “capable of significant change.”
Civil rights attorneys John Burris, left, and Jim Chanin leave after a federal hearing at the Phillip Burton Federal Building and United States Courthouse in San Francisco, Calif., on Monday, July 10, 2017. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
But they also pushed for the department to present an “effective action plan” to remedy its internal affairs problems and consistency of discipline, accusing police leaders of having paid “lip service” to Judge Orrick while privately continuing a “business as usual” approach.
The senior OPD personnel facing discipline are accused of failing to hold Tran accountable, including by “obstructing the internal affairs process” and violating the department’s standards for truthfulness, according to court documents.
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