Oakland, CA. – Oakland’s mayor has had enough with the police commission not presenting candidates for police chief. This week, Mayor Sheng Thao announced that she will declare a state of emergency if the police commission doesn’t find three reasonable candidates for chief by the end of the year.
Oakland has had eight police chiefs in the last 14 years and has not had a permanent chief in seven months, since Mayor Sheng Thao fired LeRonne Armstrong.
“Our city deserves a great police chief who can come in and get to work,” Thao said. “It is the responsibility of the Police Commission to conduct a search and present finalists, and if they cannot do that by the end of this year, then I will have no choice but to declare an emergency so we can move forward.”
Thao says the commission is not doing its job, but the commission disagrees.
“The mayor dismissed the former chief without a plan and preempted the commission’s ability to review the investigation report,” Tyfahra Milele, chair of the Oakland Police Commission, said in a statement. “After the chief’s dismissal, the mayor refused to meet with the commission leadership for two months, and the city only gave the commission a list of consultants in May.”
The police department has been under the leadership of Interm Chief Darren Allison since February, after Thao terminated Armstrong, who was found by an independent panel to have mishandled officer misconduct.
NBC Bay Area described the revolving door of police chiefs in the city: “Oakland has had a revolving door of chiefs over the past several years. Anne Kirkpatrick was fired in February 2020 after three years, she says without cause. She was awarded $1.5 million in a wrongful termination lawsuit against the city.”
In 2016, the city went through three police chiefs in nine days, after Chief Sean Whent left the department in the wake of a sexual misconduct scandal involving several officers.
Oakland has been struggling with rising crime, police misconduct and a failure of its 911 system. NBC Bay Area’s investigative unit found that the city had more than 50,000 abandoned 911 calls in one year, double from the year before. An abandoned call is when the 911 caller hangs up before they get help.
