SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — Testifying Friday in former Oakland Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick’s whistleblower retaliation trial, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf defended her choice to stand with the civilian police commission in firing Kirkpatrick “without cause.”
Kirkpatrick claims she lost her job because she reported corruption within the Oakland Police Commission, a seven-member civilian board established by voters in 2016 to oversee some department policies and review officer misconduct. The city argues Kirkpatrick was an at-will employee who could be fired by the mayor for any reason, or no reason at all.
Kirkpatrick says she was blindsided by her firing since the mayor had repeatedly sang her praises in public. But on Friday, Schaaf said she started to believe around 2018 that Kirkpatrick was no longer fit for the job.
"At first she did very well," Schaaf said. "In particular, the rank and file felt she was a leader — that she cared about them in a way they had not felt with previous chiefs.”
Schaaf testified she had grown concerned that under Kirkpatrick’s leadership, the police department was backsliding on reforms mandated by a negotiated settlement in the 2003 civil rights lawsuit Delphine Allen et al. v. City of Oakland, which stemmed from the “Riders” scandal in which four officers were charged with kidnapping, beating, robbing, and planting evidence on residents of an impoverished neighborhood in West Oakland.
Schaaf said the settlement, also known as the NSA, represents “a promise city of Oakland made to the people to achieve certain standards of professionalism, of integrity, of constitutional policing."
Kirkpatrick came to the job at a time of upheaval in the department, having run through eight different chiefs of police within the eight years before Kirkpatrick started in 2017. It was also reeling from yet another disgraceful incident, as multiple officers had been accused of sexually exploiting an underage girl.
Schaaf said exiting federal oversight, for which the city was paying court-appointed monitor Robert Warshaw and his team $1 million a year to ensure compliance with the settlement, was of paramount importance. By 2016 the end was in sight, but the sex abuse scandal upended that goal.
When Kirkpatrick was hired, the department was in “partial compliance” with three of the NSA's remaining “tasks.” These were related to racial disparities in discipline among officers, the timeliness of internal affairs investigations of public complaints against officers, and a requirement that the department collect data on every vehicle stop, field investigation and detention to curtail racial profiling.
Schaaf testified Warshaw was “extremely difficult” to work with. “I have found him to be very opaque and not clear in his direction about how to get in compliance,” she said.
Warshaw also clashed with Kirkpatrick over 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.
Warshaw later released a critical report saying Kirkpatrick handled the shooting with “an appalling measure of incompetence, deception and indifference.” He was also unsparing in his criticism of Schaaf, who described the shooting as “awful but lawful” — a phrase he said “trivialized an avoidable tragedy.” Warshaw’s report excoriated Schaaf for her silence after reviewing video footage of the shooting.
Kirkpatrick’s handling of the shooting caused Warshaw to downgrade the department’s NSA compliance on tasks related to reporting and investigating officers’ use of force.
But Schaaf said she also began to question Kirkpatrick’s commitment to reform when she made comments Schaaf took as dismissive of the NSA.
Heading into an August 2019 case management conference where the parties would update U.S. District Judge William Orrick III on their progress, Schaaf said she was determined to “prop up” Kirkpatrick, whom she saw as “beleaguered.”
Follow @MariaDinzeo
