OPD Pursuit Revision Proposed; Recall Election Scheduling; OPD Graduates Smallest Academy in Years; Middle Schoolers Protest Port No Show; Committees Round Up & More

Jenkins, Reid Propose Legislation to Direct the Oakland Police Commission to Review/Revise OPD's Vehicle Pursuit Policies

CMs Kevin Jenkins and Treva Reid are jointly bringing a resolution that would direct the Oakland Police Commission to review and possibly revise OPD’s pursuit policy. The legislation will be heard at tomorrow's Public Safety Meeting.

The charter allows the City Council to direct such revisions by the Oakland Police Commission [OPC] by affirmative vote. If the legislation passes, the OPC would undertake review and possible revision alongside OPD. If the two agree on changes, they would produce a joint recommendation to Council for a later vote; but if they differ, separate, competing legislations would come back to Council. It's also possible that both OPC and OPD would decide to take no actions on the policies.

The legislation presented by the two council members reveals few clues about the outcome Reid and Jenkins seek. Reid and Jenkins’ legislation suggests that “Oakland residents and policymakers have expressed interest in modifying the current pursuit policy." But neither the report nor legislation state a source for the claim. And the legislation does not list a preferred outcome or the goal of the putative Oakland “residents and policymakers”.

The Jenkins/Reid legislation would direct the OPC to review the policies based on the 2023 Police Executive Research Forum [PERF] recommendations for pursuit, as well as the 2022 California Commission on Police Officer Standards and Training pursuit guidelines. The PERF guidelines establish specific best practices about when and how to initiate and carry out pursuit, and when to terminate pursuit. The POST document is far more general, supplying only the rough guidelines for creating department policy.

A cursory review of OPD’s pursuit policies shows they adhere closely to the PERF guidelines specifically and the POST guidelines generally. Oakland’s current policy, last updated in 2014, allows for pursuits if there is “reasonable suspicion” that the vehicle has been involved in a violent crime or crime using a firearm, or probable cause the suspect is in possession of a firearm. The pursuit must also follow strict protocol, and must be called off under specific circumstances as well—when the risks to the public outweigh the potential benefit, for example, or when the vehicle has been lost sight of. Changes made in 2022 also forbid pursuits where speeds exceed 50 mph on city streets without authorization from a watch commander.

The OPD’s data, though limited, indicate that almost all of OPD’s pursuits since 2018 have followed forcibly violent crimes, and most have involved a firearm. According to the same data, OPD’s pursuits have declined since 2022; that year, the unauthorized pursuit of a driver on International Blvd led to the death of Lolomanaia Soakai, a pedestrian who was eating street food on the sidewalk with his family. In that case, the officers involved did not request authorization and did not follow training protocols before initiating the pursuit that led to the fatality [and injuries of other family members].

Shortly after the incident, OPD crafted the new guidelines for authorized pursuits that required watch commander authorization for any pursuit that reaches 50 mph on city streets. In a recent series of comments to the Oakland Police Commission about the subsequent decrease in December, 2023, former Interim Police Chief Darren Allison characterized fewer pursuits as beneficial, rather than a cause of concern.

“I will tell you, though, over the years, because we put such a high degree of focus on the risk that is associated with high speed pursuits—to the person we're pursuing, to the officer and to the community that's involved—that what I've seen in my experience is officers and sergeants are canceling pursuit at a greater frequency than they had been in the past. And what we've seen is although you might have a pursuit that's issued for very valid reasons—maybe it's an armed robbery, maybe it's a shooting—we'll see officers saying okay, this is going too fast, or the car is driving too recklessly to continue and they will self-cancel.”

The move by Jenkins and Reid follows a high-profile ballot measure that will allow the San Francisco Police Department to initiate pursuits on a wider scale—but it's already clear that SFPD has a much more liberal pursuit policy than Oakland, regularly judging the risk to the community on a lower level than OPD does. SFPD have had several high profile collisions involved with pursuits, including a teen being struck and injured by a vehicle fleeing a previous pedestrian collision. San Francisco's data show that a third of police pursuits lead to deaths and injuries of suspects and community members, as well as the police officers themselves. Similar results are found at the national level.


At ALCO BOS, Special Meeting to Determine Scheduling of Recall Election

The Special Meeting to determine the scheduling of a recall election date will be held at 3pm Tuesday. The scheduling item is being considered in a separate special meeting to accommodate scheduling conflicts for Supervisors who could not attend the entire regular meeting that precedes it.

The culmination of several weeks of political pressure and speculation, the deliberation will unfold under the shadow of Registrar of Voters warnings that scheduling the recall to any date other than the November 5 could create problems for smooth operation of the General Election.

In the wake of Measure B, passed overwhelmingly by voters in March, the BOS has presumably* phased out the archaic language and outdated rules contained in Section 62 of the charter for recalls and replaced them wholly with the state’s rules on local recalls. The state rules will now govern how and when the recall occurs and what happens if it's successful. The state rules would allow the BOS to schedule the election to November now that the decision is being made within a 180 day window of that date. The rules also allow the BOS to forego the decision entirely and leave it up to the Registrar by declining to act within the fourteen day window that ends Tuesday; the Registrar would then be required to act to schedule the recall within 5 days, and would almost certainly schedule it to the November 5 election if the BOS took no action Tuesday.

Legal questions about the recall process also abound. The ROV decided to forego the County’s charter rules that were still extant at the time, which required the ROV to certify the recall signatures within ten days of their receipt. The ROV failed to meet the ten-day deadline, and then opted to use the state’s rules which allow a 30 day manual count of the signatures—though Measure B had just passed, it was still in process and not yet in effect at that time. Questions also remain about the Registrar’s choice to ignore the charter’s rules that mandate signature gatherers be Alameda County residents. These may become issues after the election date is designated.


OPD Academy Graduates Second Lowest Academy Class in Two Decades

The OPD graduated 12 officers from the 193rd police academy on Friday. The graduating class is among the OPD's lowest since 2005, when the OPD graduated 8 officers in the 157th academy—the first academy in three years after a hiring freeze instituted by the City Council at that time. In 2017, the 177th academy graduated 11 officers in the aftermath of the Celeste Guap Scandal after a series of academies that produced less than 18 officers. The number of officers produced in the academy is the lowest since that date.**

The 193rd academy began with 22 recruits, but it lost recruits weekly, according to updates to the City Council’s public safety committee through the half year academy cycle, contributing to a higher than average attrition rate for a class that started below typical recruitment levels. The last two academies have also had historically low recruitment and graduations—the 192nd graduated 22 officers, the 191st, 18. The 190th graduated 18 officers.

With the addition of 12 officers, the OPD’s current staffing level falls short of the level it was during budgeting at this same time last year, 724–that's a net loss of 8 officers. Due to down-budgeting in anticipation of lower OPD staffing, the current staffing exceeds the budget by several positions, but may drop below the budgeted level within the next two months.


Also:

Rally by City’s Unions Demanding Finance Dept Work Harder to Recoup Delinquent Business Tax

Members of the City’s unions will rally in front of City Hall and then comment at Tuesday's Finance Committee meeting. The unions, including IFPTE Local 21, SEIU 1021, IAFF 55 and IBEW Local 1245 say that there is upwards of $34 MM in untapped business tax delinquencies and are urging Finance Director Erin Roseman to make sure they are collected going into the mid-cycle budget. The unions say they’ve encountered “resistance and a troubling lack of transparency,” from Roseman’s Finance Dept. City Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas has agendized the collection of delinquent business tax for several weeks at the City Council as the City faces a looming budget deficit in this current fiscal year and the next in the hundreds of millions.

Middle Schoolers Will Protest Airport Expansion at CED Committee in Wake of Cancelled Study Session

CM Dan Kalb originally had scheduled an informational session on the Port of Oakland’s proposed Oakland airport expansion for this Tuesday. But in a subsequent meeting in April, Kalb revealed that the Port had walked away from its central role in the session, forcing the cancellation of the session.

Warriors for Justice, a Youth vs the Apocalypse organizing group from Oakland Urban Promise Academy Middle School, will be coming out in force, regardless, for the meeting. The group will demand that the Port be held accountable to community calls for transparency about the airport's proposed name change and expansion project. Youth vs the Apocalypse is one of 75 organizations that have opposed the Port's proposed expansion project. In a press release, the group says that a recent decision to change the airport's name to San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport is an attempt to poach travelers from SF airport and achieve the growth necessary for expansion in absence of projected growth which has failed to materialize.


And also at Council Tuesday:

Finance

Contract for IT Temporary Contractors

Proposed Changes to Consolidated Fiscal Policy

Consolidated Fiscal Report

CED

Informational Report On Progress To Date On The Black Arts Movement And Business District (BAMBD)

The report details proposed zoning changes that could amplify and limit uses in the BAMBD

Public Safety

OPD Crime Report as of March, 2024:
The crime report is already out of date, but captures the beginning of what has become an apparent prolonged drop in many crime areas into mid-May, especially homicide.

*the County's online charter document still lists the old charter rules for recalls.

**OPD and the City of Oakland do not currently have a master data list of academy graduations. The data for this reporting was culled combining a previous report on academy graduation from 2010, news reports and City of Oakland website announcements.