OAKLAND — It took civilian investigators 15 months to close a police misconduct complaint because they ran into a “communication breakdown” with command staff, according to new court filings.
These investigations are supposed to last only six months, a standard upheld by federal officials who expect the Oakland Police Department to resolve 85% of complaints by the public within that time. State law is more lenient, allowing up to a year.
Missing the deadline helped sink the troubled department below the threshold required for the city to eventually close the door on federal oversight, an arrangement that has endured for over two decades since a 2003 settlement in the infamous Riders police brutality case.
Ironically, the complaint in question was never even sustained, meaning the civilian investigators ultimately found no misconduct by officers. It is an example of the tightrope that OPD has struggled to walk in a seemingly endless era of oversight.
“The Department must reckon with the underlying (issues) that have allowed such a widespread and cascading series of failure,” civil rights attorneys Jim Chanin and John Burris, who litigated the Riders case, said in court documents filed Thursday, ahead of a July 10 hearing.
Civil rights attorneys John Burris, left, and Jim Chanin speak after a federal hearing at the Phillip Burton Federal Building and United States Courthouse in San Francisco, Calif., on Monday, July 10, 2017. Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick and City Administrator Sabrina Landreth attended the hearing to respond to criticism over the police department’s handling of an underage sex scandal case. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
Originally required to complete 52 reform tasks, OPD has over the years come close to emerging from the oversight. But numerous scandals have set the department back, leaving the police in a “sustainability period” limbo that has now lasted over three years.
There are three remaining “tasks” with which the department needs to be found in full compliance in order to end federal oversight: thoroughly investigating complaints against officers, doing so in timely fashion and disciplining cops in a consistent manner.
The misconduct complaint that took 15 months was primarily handled by the Community Police Review Agency, which acts as the investigative arm of a civilian-body, the Oakland Police Commission, that also oversees OPD’s affairs.
Another delayed complaint, also handled by civilian investigators, involved an officer accused of making “threatening remarks during a mental health hold of an uncooperative man who had assaulted his (own) father,” according to court filings.
The timing lapse in this case appears to have been avoidable. The officer was determined to have committed a use-of-force violation, a finding approved by police Chief Floyd Mitchell at one of his weekly meetings with direct reports.
But then the case encountered a “significant, unexplainable administrative delay of over three months,” which court filings attribute to the internal-affairs officers tasked with processing the relevant paperwork.
In the end, the investigation lagged beyond a year, past the state’s expiration date. The officer could no longer be disciplined.
“Both of these cases represented major oversights” by OPD’s internal affairs, wrote the federal oversight team led by court-appointed official Robert Warshaw, “and we find this to be a serious issue.”
Members of the Oakland Police Department take part in a ceremony to honor the 55 Oakland police officers who died in the line of duty on Thursday, May 8, 2025, in Oakland, Calif. About 200 people, including relatives of the deceased officers, current and retired Oakland police officers and city and county officials took part in the annual ceremony. The memorial wall inside department headquarters has the names of the 55 Oakland police officers killed in the line of duty between 1867 and 2024. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
OPD had been struggling for the past few years with declining investigation times for misconduct complaints, according to recent court filings.
Police leadership offered numerous reasons for the delays, the filings note, including “case complexity,” “scheduling conflicts,” “administrative delays” and “extraordinary scope and resource limitations.”
The civil rights attorneys said the “sheer variety of excuses” marked a “staggering” departure from OPD’s past ability to handle complaints in timely fashion.
Any decision to end oversight would be in the hands of U.S. District Court Judge William Orrick, who last year ordered that OPD’s internal-affairs bureau report directly to Mitchell, the police chief.
Mitchell’s hiring, the outcome of a yearlong job search by city officials, came on the heels of two internal-affairs police scandals in Oakland, one involving felony allegations against a detective accused of bribery and witness tampering.
The other, an allegedly blown misconduct investigation into an officer’s hit-and-run with a parked vehicle, led to the firing of Mitchell’s predecessor, Chief LeRonne Armstrong.
“The court can no longer tolerate the lack of integrity, consistency and transparency with which Internal Affairs has operated,” Orrick wrote last September. “The resolve and attention of the new Chief is required to put the Department back on the path to (sustainability).”
Warshaw, the court-appointed monitor, operates in near-total privacy — a closed-door approach that has allowed local politicians and ex-police chiefs to fill the silence with questions about his motivations.
But in its latest report, the monitor’s team credits OPD for how it has handled some recent misconduct complaints, including “improvements in communication” that led internal probes to result in criminal charges.
Chanin and Burris, the Riders plaintiffs’ attorneys, were less forgiving.
“OPD has repeatedly demonstrated that it cannot perform competent Internal Affairs Investigations or discipline its own officer fairly,” they wrote, “and now they are once again blowing 180-day investigation deadlines.”
Shomik Mukherjee is a reporter covering Oakland. Call or text him at 510-905-5495 or email him at [email protected].
