SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — Anne Kirkpatrick defended her three-year tenure as police chief for the city of Oakland under tough questioning Wednesday in her federal jury trial on whistleblower retaliation claims.
Violent crime and shootings went down while she was chief, Kirkpatrick testified on cross-examination. But Jonathan Bass, an attorney representing the city of Oakland, drew the jury’s attention to other problems in the department, homing in on tensions between Kirkpatrick and federal monitor Robert Warshaw.
The Oakland police department has been under Warshaw’s oversight following the “Riders” scandal of 2000, where a squad of police officers were accused of kidnapping, beating, robbing and planting evidence on residents of an impoverished neighborhood in West Oakland.
Warshaw was hired to ensure that the department was making progress on court-mandated reforms under the terms of a negotiated settlement in the Riders case.
Kirkpatrick and Warshaw seemed to get along at first, but their relationship curdled following the fatal police shooting of Joshua Pawlik, a homeless man found sleeping with a gun at his side in a West Oakland alley in 2018.
The five cops who fired 22 rounds at Pawlik said he was alert and awake, and that he pointed a gun at them, a version of the event that conflicts with video footage.
Just after the shooting, Kirkpatrick called Warshaw to tell him that the officers' actions appeared justified because Pawlik had pointed a gun at them. “Looks good,” was the language she used.
Warshaw later released a critical report saying Kirkpatrick handled the shooting with “an appalling measure of incompetence, deception and indifference.”
On the stand Wednesday, Kirkpatrick said Warshaw had misunderstood her. She meant that the shooting did not appear to have violated a citywide policy on police shootings. "Nothing was shared with me in that moment that we had something that stood out,” Kirkpatrick said. “I assume he would have known what I meant. Apparently, he did not.”
“You felt this conflict with Mr. Warshaw posed a potential threat to your job?” Bass asked.
“Mr. Warshaw certainly had the authority to remove me,” Kirkpatrick replied. “He was not pleased with my decision at all. He was very critical. I actually called and asked him if he intended to remove me. He said no.”
She also said the department created a new policy after the Pawlik shooting. "As a result of Pawlik, we were the first in the country to create a policy specifically about unconscious people who are armed,” she said.
Kirkpatrick also clashed with the Oakland Black Officers Association, an organization founded in 1970 by Black police officers "who felt they were not treated the same as everyone else in the organization,” according to testimony by its president, Lt. Aaron Smith.
Smith met with Kirkpatrick in October 2018 to discuss an issue he had with his commander, who led the department’s unit on recruiting. He said the commander inappropriately screened out qualified applicants who had attended technical schools.
Smith said applicants from Oakland, women and people of color “were rejected for minor reasons.” He added, “I was concerned it would look as if we were being discriminatory in our hiring practices.”
He said he’d hoped Kirkpatrick would remove the commander from that unit and that biased and unfair treatment of applicants and Black officers would cease. But Bassett remained in the position until January 2019.
Unsatisfied about the pace of change, Smith and the executive board published an open letter in the Oakland Post. “A culture remains in place at Oakland Police Department (OPD) and in senior leadership that could be perceived as unfair, racist, inequitable and not in line with the Oakland Police Department’s core values,” they wrote.