U.S. Attorney-General Merrick Garland’s announcement yesterday about federal monitors overseeing police departments is very good news for the Oakland Police Department. Readers may recall that for nearly twenty years OPD has been overseen by a federal monitor as a result of the notorious “Riders” incidents of the late 1990s.
The Riders were a group of rogue OPD officers who performed various deeds of misconduct, to which OPD allegedly turned a blind eye. Oakland attorney John Burris sued Oakland on behalf of 119 plaintiffs and won them an award of $11 million. As part of the settlement, Oakland agreed to participate in a Negotiated Settlement Agreement (NSA), under which a federal “monitoring team” would oversee the reform process and ensure OPD’s compliance with scores of individual tasks. Robert Warshaw, a former Associate Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy who then became a consultant, was hired as the NSA’s Compliance Director in 2010. His annual salary is said to be around $500,000.
Warshaw’s relationship with OPD has been rocky. The department naturally resents his interference and what they see as his constantly “moving the goalposts,” finding new things to complain about. The original NSA was supposed to last only for 5 years but is now 18 years old.
The tension between the two sides escalated last year, when former OPD Chief Ann Kirkpatrick was fired by Mayor Schaaf and the Police Commission, supposedly at Warshaw’s instigation.
As the NSA limps on, Garland’s announcement hints at light at the end of the tunnel. The Justice Department’s “new rules” concerning police monitors include “setting limits on the watchdogs’ tenure and budgets and requiring them to undergo more training.” Monitoring teams, like Warshaw’s in Oakland, also exist in Minneapolis, Louisville, Baltimore and Phoenix. Garland seemed to echo sentiments in OPD and in the Oakland Police Officers Association: “It is also no secret that the monitorships associated with some of those settlements have led to frustrations and concerns within the law enforcement community. We hear you, and we take those concerns seriously,” he said, without mentioning Oakland specifically.
It seems clear, from what I hear, that patience with Warshaw in Oakland is wearing thin, not only within OPD and OPOA but even in the Mayor’s office and parts of the City Council. Burris himself earlier this month hinted at an end to the NSA when he praised OPD as making “real momentum toward substantial compliance.”
Only five “mandated reforms” remained to be fulfilled as of early September, which Burris said puts OPD “close…to the finish line to begin discussing the end of court oversight at OPD.” (It goes without saying that the notorious cop-basher, Cat Brooks, publicly broke with Burris over that statement. After years of close association with him, she now calls him a “high-paid attorney…whose fingers are currently nowhere near the pulse of what’s happening between the Oakland community and our Police Department.”)
Well, Cat Brooks is increasingly irrelevant, and it’s just a matter of time until Oakland can say to Robert Warshaw, “Buh-bye, and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.”
Steve Heimoff