The Oakland Police Department lost its third police chief in eight days as it struggles with allegations that a number of officers had sex with a teenage prostitute and exchanged racist text messages.Has to be something else there for him to resign only two days on the job.
Mayor Libby Schaaf said acting Police Chief Paul Figueroa was on the job for two days before stepping down on Friday but said his decision was not connected to the two scandals.
At this rate, the governor's going to have to send in the staties and the National Guard to patrol the streets.
4 comments:
Not only the sex part, it's the black officers sending racist messages... It's a TOXIC department, to put it mildly...
Doubt we'll see the guard, but don't rule out judge Thelton Henderson getting fed up with them and throwing the department into receivership, as he has threatened to do more than once. Don't know whether it would do any good, and probably neither does he, or he already would have done so. Picking the replacement from the BART cops probably wasn't the smartest choice the mayor could have made, but she may not have had any better options. I don't know much about police work, but I assume OPD has a fairly difficult job, and they are held in higher esteem than the smaller forces surrounding them by virtue of having actual crime to deal with, and thus being less likely to fuck with you out of boredom or misplaced machismo. That said, Oakland is changing fast, and even a less corrupt force might have had problems keeping up. Gentrification has been underway for decades, but has suddenly accelerated with the tech boom happening across the bay sending decidedly non-inner-city folks very deep into impoverished neighborhoods in search of housing. The rents have skyrocketed and low and mid income families are being displaced, creating hostilities in places Oakland is famous for lacking. Wouldn't want to be a cop here right now, but I never would want to be a cop anywhere, so what do I know? The area the real estate websites call "deep East Oakland" is being billed as one of the last places in the Bay Area where you can buy a house for less than half a million dollars, and all of the problems you would think to associate with that scenario are manifesting themselves. That does not excuse the OPD for the wrongdoing they have been accused of. Or the wrongdoing they haven't been caught at yet. Hopefully the mayor is serious about improving things, because even as much as I love Oakland, I have to say they really need it.
-Doug in Oakland
Doug:
Greg Suhr is available.
3383: At this point I wouldn't be surprised. The mayor got word today that it wasn't legal under California law for the city manager to run the police department, meaning she needs to appoint another chief of police...
-Doug in Oakland
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