Council Meetings Short on Duration and Legislation Under Gallo's Leadership; City Vehicular Homeless Evictions Increasingly Led by OPD; Mitchell Details Possible Pursuit Changes, Describes Lengthy Timeline

Short Meetings with Few Items Typify Gallo's Council as He Struggles to Fill President Role; Homeless Advocates Speak Out Against Increasing Camp Evictions

Oakland’s City Council continues to have a light legislative load as the body's latest meeting last Tuesday came in at 55 minutes, possibly the shortest regular meeting in memory. Few action items were considered at the meetings, but those that were—pro-forma authorization for expenditures for an on-call inspector and homelessness service providers—were listed through the consent calendar and had little discussion.

Council President Reaches Out to Clerk for Aid

During the meeting, 12-year veteran CM Noel Gallo's surprising inexperience with Council procedures continued to raise eyebrows. More than once during the meeting, City Clerk Asha Reed took over facilitating the meeting when Gallo appeared uncertain about the process.

In the past, for example, former President Nikki Fortunato Bas and other Presidents have presided over a recurring regular agenda item "modifications and procedural changes", polling CMs about their proposed changes and streamlining the meeting.

But on Tuesday, Gallo insisted the clerk handle modifications after she read in introductory items, creating a moment of confusion where Reed was unsure how to proceed. Reed looked to Gallo to take up his role, but Gallo appeared to be at a loss of what to do.

“Go ahead and get us to the consent, right? Aren’t you going to take us through it?” Gallo asked Reed, as she waited for Gallo to take over the meeting.

Reed, hesitated before replying, “Sure, I’ll do it.” and continuing with what has been for recorded memory, the role of the President to query fellow CMs on whether they’d like to move or withdraw items. The confusion was not over, however, because there was in fact a modification that Gallo had been asked to register for CM Rebecca Kaplan, apparently. Reed noted Kaplan's request to consider the new plan for Estuary Park separately from the consent calendar [likely due to a potential conflict of interest for Kaplan as she lives nearby]. Reed had to remind Gallo he was required to do this. But in doing so, Gallo misrepresented Kaplan’s recusal as an abstention. Reed corrected him verbally for the record.

Agendas Shrink at Committees and Council Meetings Under Gallo's Rules Chairmanship

Later in the week, the Rules Committee, the body also Chaired by Gallo with the ostensible task of scheduling items to committees and meetings, came to a swift conclusion as well. The legislative portion of the meeting lasted 18 minutes and scheduled few items. Two committees in the upcoming week of 1/28, Life Enrichment and Public Safety, have been cancelled due to a lack of items to consider. Several committees that will meet have bare bones agendas, with Public Works hearing the Bicycle Pedestrian Advisory Commission’s annual report only. The CED committee has one item of significance, the LDDA to build 95 100% affordable housing units on the E 12th parcel with Satellite Affordable Housing.

The final agenda for the upcoming February 4 regular meeting has no action items nor non-consent agenda and is almost exclusively composed of appointments to various bodies and approval of lawsuit settlements [though items could be added by Rule 28 as yet].

Residents Complain of Ramped Up, OPD-Led Sweeps

Tuesday’s meeting as agendized would have taken around a half an hour if not for the public comment of several homeless advocates who gave Council written statements from the unhoused objecting to renewed sweeps. Many of the statements alleged the City is not following its own Encampment Management Plan [EMP], which requires substantive advanced notice of an eviction along with offers of service and housing. Homeless advocates have noted increasing reliance on OPD to evict vehicular homeless encampments with none of those EMP services.

Homeless advocate Needa Bee read a statement from a 64 year-old Black resident named Milo, born and raised in Oakland who has several health issues, including a prosthetic leg and deteriorating hip. Milo had been housed until the pandemic, but his wife passed and he had no claim to the house, owned by her family. Milo went to live in a vehicle at a small encampment adjacent to Smart n Final in East Oakland, but is subject to regular evictions, in which he loses possessions, according to his statement. Milo claims in the statement that the city is not following its own protocols.

“They did give us notice about two weeks ago when they stickered us here at Smart and Final. The notice said they would come back in one week and tow the vehicles, if they were not moved. They came the very next day and towed them, not a week later, like the notice said,” Milo wrote.

Sources involved in providing aid to homeless residents have told this publication in the past several weeks that they see an increase in police-led evictions of vehicular homeless encampments, with no offers of services, aid, or advanced notice.

Threatened Sweep of E12th Street Vehicular Encampment Led Solely by OPD

A significant proposed sweep on E 12th between 25th and 28th avenues in mid-January, for example, gave three day notice via stickers on individual vehicles, and was conducted by Oakland police, according to residents.

Several vehicular residents were stickered by OPD—the violation appearing to be solely exceeding 72 hour parking limits. One resident told this reporter that OPD officers claimed they’d run out of stickers but would still tow all vehicles remaining on E 12th Street from 24th to 28th Avenue on Sunday.

City spokesperson Sean Maher confirmed to this publication that no encampment evictions had been scheduled for the area, but that "there are several reports of vehicles and RVs illegally parked on the street, sidewalks, and blocking egress to properties, as well as reports of illegal electrical tapping. Such violations are subject to abatement and enforcement without the EMT."

Maher "looped" in the OPD media team, according to his email response, but no response from OPD has been forthcoming.

No closure has occurred to date, however, although many residents left the area. The threatened sweep was overseen solely by OPD, no Human Services personnel or third party organizations contacted residents or offered them services. No notices were posted other than stickers on vehicles, according to statements made to this publication by residents and visible confirmation by this reporter.

OPD Chief Mitchell Proposes Lengthy Vehicular Pursuit Policy Process With Multiple “Stakeholder” Review and OPOA Meet and Confer

Thursday’s Oakland Police Commission [OPC] meeting agendized a status update on OPD’s vehicular pursuit policy, causing some local public safety-focused groups to expect long-anticipated changes to the policy. But at the meeting, Oakland Police Chief Floyd Mitchell laid out potential changes that he said would need to be vetted by a long list of stakeholders—including Oakland’s police officer union—and could be changed regardless. Mitchell suggested a lengthy process that might even end with residents voting for changes on a future ballot.

Historical Overview of Pursuit Policy Changes

Mitchel gave background into the process, and emphasized that many of the decisions to limit Oakland’s pursuit policy began around 2011. Prior to then, OPD’s pursuit policy was expansive, according to Mitchell, and had actually been relaxed around 2008, allowing pursuit for felonies of any kind. OPD’s policy changes moved the other way in subsequent years, limiting pursuit, in 2011. Mitchell told Commissioners that he didn’t know what triggered OPD and the NSA court's move to limit pursuits beginning around that time.

“Either a number of crashes occurred or something occurred from a community standpoint or political standpoint,” Mitchell, who only arrived in Oakland in 2024, said.

OPD pursuits come up frequently in Negotiated Settlement Agreement [NSA] Independent Monitor reports from the period between 2008 and 2011 along several vectors of concern. One area of concern for the monitor was risk assessments, where the number of high speed pursuits by officers was not being adequately assessed as a potential red flag of officer behavior, for example.

A specific area of focus in these years in the monitor's reports was the performance of force review boards in the evaluation of pursuits-related injuries and deaths, due to the sheer number of use of force related to pursuits. Prior to tightened policies on vehicle and foot pursuits, vehicular pursuits often ended in collisions and segued into foot-chases on side streets, backyards and alleys, with subsequent shootings, and often-times killings, of a suspect a common occurrence.

During this span of time, OPD reconsidered its foot pursuit policies—which were inextricably linked to vehicular pursuit policy. Monitor’s reports from this period list multiple suspect deaths and/or bystander injuries resulting directly from both vehicular and foot pursuits.

Mitchell told residents and commissioners that in 2012, the Independent Monitor under then-judge Thelton Henderson, "ordered" the OPD to focus on improving outcomes from pursuits. This eventually led to the 2014 vehicular pursuit policy, he said. Changes were also made in foot pursuit; these changes are widely given credit for the reduction of use of force and fatal outcomes in OPD encounters.

No Written Proposals Offered

Mitchell noted that he’d sent a memo to the OPC listing potential and provisional updates he might make to the policy in early January, but neither that memo nor a report from OPD with the proposed draft changes were included in the agenda. Another OPD staffer had already highlighted many of these proposed changes in general at the townhall meeting, as this publication reported, but Mitchell went into more detail about the proposed changes Thursday. As suggested by OPD staff, Mitchell would throw out Armstrong’s Special Order 9212 that limited speeds to 50 MPH without authorization. Per OPD statements, 9212 has long been considered ineffective and a needless administrative load.

Additionally, Mitchell’s current draft proposals if adopted would allow pursuits:

–when there is reasonable suspicion that the occupants of the vehicle are actively involved in the act of residential, commercial or auto burglaries, or in situations where the subjects are fleeing the immediate area of such activity

—when there's probable cause to believe that the occupants of the vehicle have been involved in recent residential, commercial and/or auto burglaries, or in situations where the vehicle has been identified as being used in a series of burglaries.

—Mitchell also noted that a new policy might give more specifics around “exigent” circumstances pursuits. In current policy, an officer can request a pursuit from a superior under special circumstances where issues of public safety are involved. Mitchell suggested these could now specifically include sideshow activity where suspects are driving dangerously and pose immediate threat to the public and all other means of apprehension have been deemed ineffective.

Though pursuits would likely increase dramatically if Mitchell’s draft changes are enacted, he seemed in no hurry to concretize a proposal at the meeting. Mitchell remarked that Governor Gavin Newsom’s press conference last month has accelerated what he believed should be a longer, more thorough and deliberate process given the many considerations involved in pursuit policies.

“I am not asking you to take an action at this point in time, I would like to hear your comments, and that goes to the process. One, it is time—because our policy is almost 11 years old—to review and either reaffirm, revalidate or revise our policy. To do that, it's important that we follow established processes, and I think that's the piece where we have been hurried…because of the governor saying ‘this needs to change’, [we have been rushed] to forego some of our processes, to properly look at every asset, every piece of this policy, and to have everyone who is a stakeholder in it the opportunity to look into it,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell said he’d only update the policy after his suggestions have been thoroughly vetted by a long list of “stakeholders” including the OPC, the NSA judge and plaintiff's attorneys, the City Attorney, Office of the Inspector General, the Citizens Police Review Agency and others. Mitchell also noted that changes of this magnitude have to be reviewed by the union representing the affected workers, a process otherwise known as meet and confer. The Oakland Police Officers Association [OPOA], which has so far been silent on the pursuit policy, would review the policies and could reject them or add requirements. Mitchell observed that the end policy could differ from his proposals.

Mitchell Suggests Possibility of Pursuits Ballot Measure

Mitchell even suggested that he might not change the policy at all, allowing residents to make the choice with a ballot measure as was done in San Francisco last year.

"The Oakland community has a right to provide their voice, up to and including, potentially their vote if we decide [the pursuit policy] is that important to change," Mitchell said.

"Recently, our neighboring city, San Francisco, changed their policy in regards to pursuit. They provided the community the opportunity to vote…to say, this is the direction that we as a community want to go in to address this specific problem,”

At points in the meeting, both Mitchell and OPC Chair Ricardo Garcia-Acosta suggested confusion about jurisdiction over the policy, given that the NSA court has associated pursuit in the past with use of force reporting and policies. The Commission has charter-powers to initiate policy on issues before the NSA, including use of force and use of force reporting. But the OPC has not been involved in the policy in the past—the 2014 changes were created before the Commission existed. Even after the founding of the Commission via ballot measure, the special orders from former Chiefs Ann Kirkpatrick and Armstrong were not brought before the body either. For some time before 2015, the Monitor required data on the number of pursuits, but the data disappeared from reports around the time of the 2014 policy changes and long before the OPC was founded—likely because deaths, injuries and shootings declined as a result of vehicular and foot pursuit policy changes. The monitor's focus on vehicle pursuits has been in the past solely focused on deaths and injuries and in the way those are evaluated by the administration in review boards, not enhancing pursuit efficacy.

Garcia-Acosta said that city leaders are researching the issue further.

“Ultimately, we will defer to our city leadership, to OCA [Office of the City Attorney], and we'll further explore our charter powers…some folks are interpreting that we do have the charter powers to be involved in this, others are not,” Garcia-Acosta said during introductory comments.

To wrap up the item, Garcia-Acosta moved a resolution, unanimously approved by Commissioners, to advise Mitchell and OPD in considering changes. The resolution states that OPD should take into consideration NSA tasks related to use of force, use of force review boards and training, as well as the consistency of discipline task of the NSA. The resolution also suggested OPD investigate ways of increasing technological aids, like GPS tracking, license plate trackers and cameras as well as an MOU with CHP on its policies. And it calls for an examination of policies around wrongful deaths as a result of pursuits, as well as increase of insurance premiums and other costs that it may create for the city. Garcia-Acosta as chair will keep in communication with the Chief through the process.