Oakland’s police woes and crime surged in 2012

OAKLAND — Sadness and frustration washed over many who stood before 131 white wooden crosses planted outside a church in memory of the city’s homicide victims last year.

When the name of each was called, a cross was pulled up and passed to a relative, friend or onlooker.

Clutching two crosses, community activist Todd Walker hugged Oakland Mayor Jean Quan and Police Chief Howard Jordan, then shook his head in disbelief.

“This is much worse than last year,” Walker said angrily. “Somebody’s not doing their job. Whatever this city has planned has got to be better than this. It has to be!”

Battered by the highest murder rate in six years and persistent upheaval, this rugged port city’s police department is embarking on the most drastic leadership change in its history. A court-appointed director will oversee the department as it tries to complete reforms stemming from a costly decade-old brutality lawsuit.

Reporting to a federal judge, the director will have the power to overrule major department decisions as well as seek the dismissal of the police chief and his command staff.

The unprecedented oversight comes as Jordan –the department’s third chief in four years– and Quan –who survived two recall campaigns – are working to reduce crime and rebuild public trust in one of the most dangerous cities in America.

“Those are two very difficult tasks, but they aren’t conflicting priorities,” said Frank Zimring, a University of California, Berkeley law professor. “Good police management can pursue both objectives simultaneously.”

Last year, Oakland saw a 23 percent increase in violent crime from 2011. Among the homicides in 2012 were seven at tiny Oikos University, where police say a disgruntled former nursing student opened fire on students and staff. It was the deadliest school shooting of the year until the massacre last month in Newtown, Conn., that killed 28.

Recently, an Oakland grandmother was hit by crossfire as she walked from a corner store, and a young father was shot while pushing his toddler son in a stroller. A dozen children were slain 2012, including a 15-year-old girl gunned down last weekend.

The spike in homicides, much of it gang-related, is 21 more than the 110 recorded in 2011 – the year the city became the national epicenter for the Occupy movement. Police came under fire for their response to sometimes-violent protests, and now dozens of officers face potential discipline for misconduct.

“It’s no secret that Oakland’s had a tough year in crime. It’s been faced with many challenges from Occupy (Oakland), to Oikos, to street level crime,” Quan said recently. “The crime in this city is too high. And it affects everyone.”

Quan’s has been widely criticized for downplaying Oakland’s escalating violence, especially for touting the city’s arts and nightlife during her State of the City address.

“She was trying to change that consistently negative perception that Oakland has in the United States,” said Councilwoman Pat Kernighan, the public safety committee chairwoman. “City leaders do not have their heads in the sand.

“Bringing violence down is our number one issue,” she added. “It is the elephant in the room.”

Oakland wasn’t the only Bay Area city where homicides spiked last year. Neighboring San Francisco had 68 murders, up from 50 in 2011. San Jose, the area’s most populous city, had 46 homicides last year, a 20-year high. But those cities have much bigger populations than Oakland’s roughly 400,000.

To help combat the bloodshed here, city officials announced late last month that former New York City police commissioner and Los Angeles police chief Bill Bratton was hired as a consultant. Bratton is widely credited with cutting crime in both cities by double-digit percentages.

In helping Oakland reduce violence, officials say Bratton will strengthen the police department’s use of CompStat, the computerized crime-mapping system he co-created in the 1990s to direct police resources to high-crime areas.

“I’m not coming in with any fantasies,” Bratton recently told KNTV-TV. “You have a critical situation in that city.”

Bratton was hired after a federal judge stopped short of taking over the department over the city’s failure to comply with court-mandated reforms stemming from a brutality scandal.

A 2003 lawsuit alleging several rogue officers beat or framed drug suspects in 2000 resulted in nearly $11 million in payments to 119 plaintiffs.

The settlement initially called for the reforms to be completed within five years. But plaintiffs’ attorneys John Burris and Jim Chanin repeatedly said that high-ranking city officials thwarted those efforts, and the lawyers asked the judge in October to place the department under federal control.

Instead, U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson signed off in December on an agreement reached between city officials and civil rights attorneys that provides for a court-appointed compliance director with sweeping powers over the department.

The judge warned that more delays in completing reforms could result in “monetary sanctions, expansion of the compliance director’s powers or a full (federal) receivership.”

Jordan is optimistic for a better year.

“I feel very responsible for some of the things that are happening,” he told reporters recently. “I take ownership as the chief of police that this stuff is happening on my watch. We are taking a very aggressive approach toward the beginning of (2013) because we feel our efforts have to be counted on now, instead of later.”