In the Details: happenings, findings, discoveries and observations at City Hall, Week Ending 3/1/2026 (3)

1) Council Public Safety Committee Chair Rushes Independent Police Oversight Director as He Presents Evidence OPD Skelly Presentation Was Flawed

Oakland Public Safety Committee Chair Charlene Wang set up an awkward juxtaposition for the Community Police Review Agency [CPRA] and the OPD on the issue of Skelly process at Tuesday’s Public Safety Committee meeting. The report back on the Skelly process, an optional due process protection California government employees can request after discipline has been recommended, was agendized on a request by Public Safety member CM Rowena Brown. Brown had asked for reports and presentations from both the OPD and CPRA—CPRA is involved in a smaller subset of OPD discipline and Skelly cases that fall under its purview under the Charter.

The way OPD carries out its Skelly mandate has been a central issue to police oversight and discipline at both the CPRA and at the NSA case management conferences for some time as a backlog of discipline cases awaiting Skelly hearings has added to OPD’s staffing shortages. In his reports to the Oakland Police Commission, CPRA Director Antonio Lawson has pointed out problems in the Skelly process he says are created by bias, as OPD’s own police are appointed as Skelly officers. Lawson also highlighted Skelly recommendations that conflict with discipline findings, leading to bad arbitration outcomes for the City. Lawson has suggested that the City move Skelly out of OPD to a third-party firm.

During their presentation, OPD’s Chief James Beere and Internal Affairs Bureau Captain Bryan Hubbard announced that OPD had cut back the Skelly hearing backlog via a mixture of ordaining more officers to hear Skellies and streamlining reporting and document gathering processes. The two said that there were now only 46 cases awaiting hearings, less than a third of the Skelly case backlog in 2024. After about a 20 minute presentation from OPD, CMs asked questions for another ten minutes, while Lawson waited in the wings. At that point, Brown, who requested the report, reminded Chair Wang that Lawson was still waiting to give his presentation. But Wang used her Chair power to instead insist on asking more questions of OPD. Wang, and to a lesser extent Vice Chair Ken Houston, continued back and forthing with OPD for another 11 minutes.

After a nearly hour-long discussion with OPD, it became clear that Wang had left little time for Lawson to give his presentation. Wang did little to hide her impatience with the situation as the hour was rapidly approaching 8pm, and there were still two contracts for Oakland Fire left to be heard. Wang interrupted Lawson repeatedly as he began his presentation, urging him to hasten his delivery—even as Lawson presented evidence that the lynchpin datapoint in the OPD’s claim of reducing Skelly hearing backlogs was flawed.

According to Lawson, rather than the reduction to 46 Skelly cases that had received kudos from CMs minutes earlier, the number of outstanding Skellies was actually around 87. Lawson noted that his information came from a weekly Internal Affairs Bureau meeting agenda from the previous Friday, which lists all pending Skelly cases for internal review and monitoring.

Wang brushed aside the claim at first, and several minutes later again rushed Lawson as he brought up other troubling issues. Lawson also told Committee members that all but one Skelly decision that had come before him during his tenure had sought to alter the discipline. This is one of Lawson's central complaints about the way OPD Skelly officers handle the hearings, going beyond the scope of the Skelly role, which should be confined to assuring that the process was fair, impartial and lawful. Lawson told the Council members that when Skelly officers try to reverse the discipline, it creates a disunified City front—so that when an officer facing termination, for example, seeks arbitration, an officer can exploit the confused outcome from the City’s process to escape the discipline. Lawson pointed to significant potential financial impact on the City in those cases.

“[if the officer prevails in arbitration] the city's going have to pay him backpay including overtime that they would have earned during that entire period, and bring [the officer] back to a Chief who sought to terminate them. And that's why I said this needs to be handled outside by people who are impartial, so that even if they disagree with the Chief, the message from within the city is uniform. So that's why…my proposal was…”

But at this point Wang silenced Lawson completely and shut down his presentation, saying the Committee needed to take public comment.

As this publication reported, Lawson had already highlighted all of these issues in his most recent report back to the Oakland Police Commission, a week earlier.

The short-shrifting from Wang was notable. CM Fife mildly chastised Wang after public comment, noting that she had not managed the time well.

“I feel like Director Lawson was not afforded the equal time to present, and I'm a little concerned. And one of my colleagues did bring up to me how I mentioned to him that being a chair involves managing an agenda…so I want to just ensure that when we are having these deeply important conversations, that all of the presenters are afforded the amount of time that they need to get their points across, so that we can make informed decisions. Because now I'm also concerned about the discrepancy that I'm hearing, and I want clarity on that.”

Chief Beere returned to confirm that OPD's definition of “cases” differs from the actual number of officers awaiting Skelly hearings. Per Beere, these numbers were 46 cases, with 64 individual officers. But the numbers still did not jibe with Lawson’s higher number, something Lawson again brought up in his report back to the Police Commission a few days later. At that presentation as well, Lawson said he was not clear on how OPD is identifying “cases”, as every officer has the legal right to their own Skelly process.

On hearing the discrepancy, Houston, in his newly fashioned role as Vice Chair, minimized the discrepancy in an effort to continue celebrating OPD.

“Let’s just say it's 87—[OPD] cut it in half,” Houston said, and then left the meeting soon after making his comment.

The back and forth motivated Fife to request that the report come back within 3 months—not the original six months originally planned.

2) In July, Council/City Missed Legally Required Determination to Continue Using Flock

On Tuesday, the OPD provided its 2024 annual surveillance reports to the Public Safety Committee, nearly an entire year late. The OPD’s Gabriel Urquiza apologized for the lateness and claimed that the focus on agendizing and passing the Flock contract interfered with the agency’s capacity to get the reports out. OPD is not required to present all the reports in one item and one report, but it has been the agency's practice since the surveillance law passed. The comprehensive report included the Flock first annual report and recommendation.

The City’s surveillance laws require Council’s review and determination on a use policy no later than one year after it is adopted by Council. For Flock, that deadline came and went in late July 2025—one year after that use policy was passed by Council in July 2024. The clear failure to follow the City's laws on the report recommendation brings the legal use of Flock from that point in July to recent Council decisions, into question.

The City’s surveillance ordinance states that within one year of the adoption of the technology’s use policy, the Privacy Advisory Commission [PAC] shall review the OPD’s annual report and prepare recommendations. The report then must come to Council for review and recommendation—in a sense ratifying, rejecting or amending the PAC recommendation. Both PAC and Council’s role is required and mandated by law.

The PAC made its deliberation in favor of the technology at its May 1 meeting—during a time when the OPD had stalled on giving comprehensive auditing records for Flock usage to date. But those records were subsequently acquired by public records request by the San Francisco Standard in July. The Standard revealed that Oakland had failed to follow its own use policies and state law on the use of Flocks' automated license plate reader. The report also suggested that the OPD did not have a clear way of monitoring use by other law enforcement agencies.

The date of the publication of the Standard report was just days after the 7/10 Rules Committee where the City moved to pull the item from its pending scheduling. The item should have been heard at a 7/22 Public Safety Meeting, but in withdrawing the scheduling request, the City Administrator's representative claimed that the reports had not yet been heard by the PAC. Per the PAC’s minutes and agendas, that's not correct—many of the reports and recommendations, including Flock, had cycled through the PAC for review and recommendation.

The comprehensive report surveillance technology report again came back to Rules in November and was scheduled for the December 9 Public Safety meeting. But at that December meeting, it became clear that the City had made an error in the legally required title of the reports, framing it as an informational item instead of an action item—the report requires Council recommendation and thus requires it be stated as a resolution that requires a vote. The OPD pulled the report again. in the subsequent conversation about the timeline, after Brown asked if the delays were the responsibility of the PAC, Joe Devries, the PAC’s CAO liaison told CMs on the record that most of the reports had been heard and recommended by the PAC months earlier.

At Tuesday’s meeting, the Public Safety Committee didn’t discuss the missing of the date required by law and gave the reports brief attention before forwarding them to the Council where the determination will be made. An inquiry made by this publication 10 days ago revealed that the City and Flock had not yet signed the contract authorized by Council action in January.

It's unclear whether there is any acknowledgement at the City that the late report appears to contravene the City's surveillance law—and may have meant that the City had to pause Flock until the item could be heard. More on this in weeks to come.

3) Homelessness Solutions Director Strategic Action Plan Presentation at Homelessness Commission Inadvertently Puts EAP in Negative Light

The Homelessness Commission was set up as an addendum to the legislation that created Measure W, the vacant property tax. The Commission advises on how to use funds from Measure W and Measure Q and on general homelessness policies. But since its inception it has met sporadically, and its recommendations and processes are often ignored by City Council—as one example, it has so far been hardly mentioned in the conversations around the Encampment Abatement Plan update that CM Ken Houston has been trying to pass at Council. The last time the board met before this Wednesday’s meeting was in September.

The Commission convened to discuss a presentation on the City’s Strategic Action Plan on homelessness given by the Interim Director of the City’s Homelessness Solutions Department, Sasha Hauswald. The Homelessness Solutions Department was created by Lee to unify and focus the City’s efforts and policies on homelessness last year.

Recently, Lee has given statements to the press that suggest she supports services and rehousing over displacement and “abatement” and Hauswald's presentation reflected Lee's view in many regards. As such, it was difficult for Hauswald to avoid giving the impression that the City's strategic action plan is a counterweight to Houston's efforts. Hauswald noting that ambient, felt moved to give multiple assurances that the strategic action plan she was presenting to the Commission was not a commentary on Houston’s EAP.

But in context, and with many frustrated by the Council’s framing of homelessness, many commenters and Commissioners saw it that way, regardless. Likely at least some of that view was driven by Homelessness Solutions focus on systemic issues driving homelessness and an atypical transparency on the City's current aggressive eviction responses—by their very inclusion in the discussion, the two blunt realities, not much seen over the past year or so in Council deliberation, seemed to put the conversation at odds with Houston’s platform. Houston's two biggest rationale pillars for the EAP are that the City is not doing enough to evict homeless encampments and that enforcement alone will end homelessness. Hauswald's presentation offered refutations of both ideas.

Hauswald restated the systemic causes of homelessness—rooted in a delta between income and rent, misfortunes, medical debt and family problems—for a largely Black homeless population. And Hauswald also noted that, contrary to much of the framing of the EAP, Oakland had been involved in a robust regime of eviction since before 2025 that was failing to remedy any issues, and was likely exacerbating them.

“We need to do something a little bit different than the city has been doing in 2025. In 2025 we closed about 1,212 encampments. When we do that, we force folks to move to other locations where they may not have the same access to health care, to community support. People can lose mobility aids, medications. Research shows that there are harmful impacts on health and increased risk of overdose when there are encampment closures without sufficient services and shelter. Providing sufficient services and shelter takes time and investment, and that is what we aim to do next,” Hauswald said, outlining a pov on homelessness and a proposal that would have been in conflict with Houston’s EAP had it passed when it had first been presented last year.

Hauswald said the City would try to focus instead on providing more deep cleanings, trash removal, porta potties and promoting “good neighbor” policies. Hauswald also seemed to say that the focus of the City will be on maintaining a smaller subset of “high sensitivity areas”, which she referred to as “priority no camping zones”.

Houston has grudgingly softened the language of the legislation, adding a discretionary process of offering shelter and moderating sweeps, but it is still a far cry from the the Homelessness Solutions proposal, which would also apparently seek to decrease the number of areas that are considered "no go" encampment areas.

Hauswald did note that the plan would be contingent on, and work in concert with, policies passed by Council—her most direct statement about the EAP and Council’s discourse around it. But many of the observers did see the Plan as an antidote to the EAP, which Houston has clearly touted as a zero tolerance approach.

“I want to echo the appreciation for the candor of the presentation. In my opinion, one of the most insidious parts of the rhetoric around the EAP is this idea that solving homelessness is easy,” Charlotte, who identified as a supporter of homeless at encampment evictions, told Commissioners.

Long time homelessness outreach and support worker Needa Bee also thanked Hauswald for “pushing back” against the EAP.

“So I want to thank you and your team, Sasha, for first of all pushing back on the misinformation being put out there by the police, by the council president, by Ken Houston...that all the unhoused people here in Oakland are flocking from other cities. That's just not true. Thank you for pushing back on that very deep lie,” Bee said.

Commissioners thanked Hauswald for the comments in relation to Houston's plan, as well. That prompted Hauswald to distance herself from criticism of the EAP.

“I'm so glad that they're going to rethink the no camping zones [a feature of the EAP]. I think that's going to really make a big difference for our people. And I was wondering, when are we going to be able to get details, and will the areas become less restrictive, not just more of them, but less restrictive,” Vice Chair Jenny Castillo said to Hauswald.

“So that piece of the encampment engagement and neighborhood health section…like some other pieces of the Homelessness Strategic Action Plan will require collaboration and action on the part of City Council. And so this plan cannot come to fruition without all of us working together, and that that brings me to something that I've been thinking about as our members of the public have been talking, which is that this is not an encampment management or an encampment abatement policy, and it is not intended to set a stake on one side of the conversation...the problems are complicated and the solutions are incredibly, incredibly hard, and to try again when we don't succeed. And I think the polarizing nature of the conversation is harming our ability to make practical progress,” Hauswald said.

That Houston too saw the presentation and its aftermath as a criticism of the EAP, however, is suggested by his move to send a staffer to the Rules Committee the next day to strenuously complain that the Commission had not invited members of the Council to the meeting. Though his written comments, as read aloud at the podium by his staffer, praised Hauswald’s presentation, the tone of the comments was recriminatory. Houston’s claimed his complaint was so urgent, it could not wait until a City Council or Committee meeting. The Rules Committee only politely obliged and did not allow comment any longer than any public commenter would get.

Several factors indicate that Houston may have lost some support of Council, City and Mayor in his efforts to be sole leader on the City's homelessness policies. Around the same time that Lee articulated her position to the EBT, the Rules Committee declined Houston’s framing of his EAP as an issue so urgent it must skip committee and go directly to Council with little lead time—a pov they've become more and more reluctant to humor. That triggered an outraged Houston to lash out on social media, though he subsequently deleted his comments. After the EAP was scheduled to Life Enrichment instead of directly to Council, that Committee’s Chair, CM Carroll Fife, also moved to withdraw it and it currently does not have a firm date for introduction.

As Hauswald noted, the Council does have the ultimate say on the EMT and the EAP. But while the EAP is in limbo, the City's strategic action plan will be heard at Life Enrichment March 10.