SAN FRANCISCO — Oakland’s mayor testified Friday that she agreed to fire the city’s police chief two years ago because she and the community had lost faith in the chief’s ability to reform the police department.
“It is not possible to be an effective police chief once you have lost the trust of stakeholders,” Mayor Libby Schaaf told jurors hearing former Oakland police chief Anne Kirkpatrick’s wrongful termination lawsuit against the city and its powerful police commission.
“If the community does not feel like the police chief cares about the community, or lives her values in her work, they will not find the police department legitimate,” the mayor said.
Schaaf’s testimony starkly conflicted with the narrative Kirkpatrick presented on the stand earlier this week, when she accused the city of failing to protect her against a retaliatory firing by its police commission for being a whistleblower.
Terminating Kirkpatrick in February 2020 was not an “easy” or “spontaneous” decision, Schaaf said. Oakland had already been rocked by a constant change in police leadership. It has seen 11 police chiefs since 2009, including three over five days in 2016 in the aftermath of a major sexual abuse scandal within the department.
Kirkpatrick was appointed police chief in 2017 as someone the mayor hoped would be a strong leader who could trigger cultural change within the police force and truly reform it, Schaaf testified. She described the police culture back then as “toxic,” “macho” and “like a frat house.”
But even though she continued to publicly praise Kirkpatrick until right before the firing, Schaaf said, she had started to lose faith in the chief’s ability to reform the department as demanded by a federal judge. Oakland’s police department has been under a court mandate to reform itself ever since the city settled a lawsuit against it in January 2003. The suit alleged that a handful of rogue officers known as the Riders roughed up West Oakland residents, planted drugs on them and falsified arrest reports.
Schaaf recalled how at one hearing before the federal judge overseeing the reform efforts in 2019 that Kirkpatrick became “defensive” and seemed to be in “denial” when it was suggested the department was slipping behind in achieving required reform measures.
Kirkpatrick insisted earlier this week she was not in denial, saying the process for measuring compliance relied on old use-of-force and discipline data. She said the department was still heading in the right direction, and more recent data would reflect that.
But court and other public records revealed growing tensions between Kirkpatrick and a federal monitor, Robert Warshaw, who reports to the court how the police department is progressing.
Warshaw found that Kirkpatrick went against recommendations of her own commanders, who found that senior officers made mistakes at the scene of the shooting of Joshua Pawlik, 31, in 2018. Five officers shot and killed Pawlik in North Oakland after startling him awake as he lay next to a gun.
Although a community police review agency and Kirkpatrick had cleared the officers of wrongdoing, both Warshaw and the police commission called for the firing of the five officers.
Kirkpatrick also faced scrutiny when the Oakland Black Officers Association placed a public letter in a local newspaper accusing her of not taking seriously their concerns about discrimination within the department. They had urged her to remove a police captain who oversaw hiring practices they considered racially biased.
Kirkpatrick admitted in court that she failed to understand the whole picture when the chair of the Oakland Black Officers Association, Lt. Aaron Smith, brought the concerns to her. She said she ordered an independent investigation into their concerns and was “exonerated.”
Kirkpatrick testified this week that she was fired for reporting alleged misconduct by some members of the police commission, a group of seven residents assigned the power to oversee the department’s policies and procedures and to fire the police chief in conjunction with the mayor. Three of them are appointed by the mayor and four by a panel of residents selected by the mayor and council.
Kirkpatrick maintains that some commissioners routinely abused their power, harassed police staff and sought special treatment by the police department.
Schaaf denied that whistleblowing had any bearing on her decision to join the police commission in firing Kirkpatrick. The commission and Schaaf together have the authority under Oakland law to fire a police chief “without cause,” which is what they ultimately did with Kirkpatrick.
Schaaf said Kirkpatrick’s concern about the commissioners’ behavior “increasingly dominated” their conversations, so much so that she surmised Kirkpatrick “was becoming undone” by the tension.
“She was so beleaguered by all of it,” Schaaf said.
The police commissioners are expected to testify when the trial resumes Monday. The trial is scheduled to end Tuesday.
Source: www.mercurynews.com