A federal jury determined today that Oakland Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick was wrongfully fired by the city’s police commission and mayor two years ago.
The verdict came a week and a half after a civil trial began on a lawsuit Kirkpatrick filed in August 2020 alleging the city failed to protect her from being terminated in retaliation for being a whistleblower.
The jury awarded Kirkpatrick $337,635 in damages, which is the amount she would have received in severance pay had she not chosen to sue the city instead.
A spokesperson for Mayor Libby Schaaf referred a request for comment on the verdict to the city attorney’s office, which did not immediately respond.
Kirkpatrick’s lawsuit said she drew the ire of the police commission by telling city administrators that some commissioners abused and harassed police staff and sought special treatment because of their powerful role. The commission, made up of seven appointed city residents, oversees the police department’s policies and practices and has the authority to fire the police chief in conjunction with the mayor.
Kirkpatrick also accused the city of violating her free speech rights by firing her for speaking up.
Although the jury did not support Kirkpatrick’s free speech claim, it did agree that the firing was at least partially the result of retaliation.
“We thought she was speaking in her capacity as chief,” one of the jurors told Courthouse News Service after the trial. “We thought there was evidence that retaliation played some role in her discharge, which was why we found it was unlawful.”
During the trial, Kirkpatrick testified the commission resented her for calling out some of its members for behavior she characterized as corrupt and inappropriate.
But Schaaf and some commissioners gave a different account on the stand and denied there was any retaliation.
Even though she continued to publicly praise Kirkpatrick until right before the firing, Schaaf testified, she had started to lose faith in the chief’s ability to reform the police department as demanded by a federal judge. The department has been under a court mandate to enact measurable reforms 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 a 2019 hearing before the federal judge overseeing the reform efforts, Kirkpatrick became “defensive” and seemed to be in “denial” when it was suggested the department was slipping behind in achieving required reform measures.
Police commissioners who took the stand after Schaaf provided similar versions.
“She was not the kind of leader we were going to need to take us out of the (court monitoring),” former commission chair Regina Jackson testified.
The commissioners said they also were concerned about Kirkpatrick’s failure to properly address racism in the department’s hiring and recruiting practices, even when it was brought to her attention by the Oakland Black Officers Association.
Court and other public records have also shown there were growing tensions between Kirkpatrick and a federal monitor, Robert Warshaw, who reports to the court how the police department is progressing in its reform efforts.
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.
Source: www.mercurynews.com