Court Orders Oakland Police to Expand Review of 'Deadly Force' Incidents

A federal judge on Friday ordered the Oakland Police Department to implement an expanded system of reviewing officer-involved shootings to ensure the department looks at how it might avoid using deadly force in such incidents.

U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson issued a three-page order that rebuked department and city leaders for delays in implementing the expanded review process, which was first recommended by a court-appointed monitor in July.

Henderson oversees the settlement of a lawsuit arising from the Riders case, in which Oakland police officers were found to have abused suspects and violated their civil rights. Under the settlement agreement, the department is required to undertake an exhaustive series of reforms and must report on its progress to both a court-appointed monitor and compliance director.

In July, after the department's first fatal officer-involved shooting in more than two years, the monitor, Robert Warshaw, recommended that the department's review of such incidents be widened to look at "whether the use of deadly force may have been avoided, and to identify tactics, strategies, and opportunities as events unfolded that may have avoided such an outcome.”

According to Henderson's Friday order, Warshaw's recommendation began a process in which Chief Sean Whent signed off on the expanded review concept, developed language for a new policy and, in November, conferred on the new policy with the Oakland Police Officers Association, the union representing rank-and-file members of the department. After that "meet and confer" process, Henderson wrote, Whent said the new policy would go into effect this week.

But the judge says the department put the new policy on hold because the police union is insisting on further meetings. In his order, Henderson questioned whether those meetings were required under the union's contract, as the city has apparently suggested.

"Even if the city was required to meet and confer, the union cannot unilaterally decide when the meet and confer process should be
deemed complete," Henderson wrote.

Saying "this process has gone on long enough," Henderson effectively ordered the Police Department to implement the new policy on Dec. 21 -- with or without the union's agreement.

Henderson noted that the negotiated settlement of the Riders case aims in part “to enhance the ability of the Oakland Police Department . . . to protect the lives, rights, dignity and property of the community it serves.”

"The Court can think of nothing that goes more to the heart of protecting lives," Henderson wrote Friday, "than a policy that requires the Department to consider whether loss of life could have been avoided."

The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Henderson's order. But in a statement quoted by the Oakland Tribune, Chief Whent said the department takes police shootings "very seriously."

He continued: "We have been working with the OPOA to memorialize our current practice into the policy and we expect that will be completed very soon. A meeting has already been scheduled with the OPOA to hopefully bring resolution to this issue."

Oakland police have shot and killed six people, all African-American men, since June. Four of those killings involved subjects police say had, or opened fire with, guns. One fatal shooting involved a man who brandished what turned out to be a replica pistol. In one case, an officer shot and killed a man who police say had struck her in the head with a bicycle chain.