Oakland Police Department
January 24, 2013
Read a brief summary of some of the problems facing the Oakland Police Department. This story raises issues of racism in departments, attempts at reform and the overall costs to departments of dealing with “rogue” officers.
Your thoughts?
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CJS-360 Diversity Issues 
I think the Oakland police department needs to get overhauled, from top to bottom. This department needs ethical and diversity training. The reform has to come from the top. In order for reform to happen and stay the chain of command has to believe in it and be behind it 100%. Nothing will work and stay in place without the support of the chain of command. Funding for ethical and diversity training have to be available. This type of training needs to be on going not just a onetime thing. Punishment has to be harsh and fast, like with those pictures that were found, the cops that did those should be punished. It seems that police department in Oakland is out of control. It took two days for those pictures to be taken down; that’s not right, too many people looking the other way, the code of silence needs to be broken down. The failing to make the 51 steps to reform, is not good. This failing should not be over look but enforced with punishment for the failure, jobs should be lost. I know it’s easier said than done.
The Oakland Police Department has had so many problems for so long that I don’t know if anybody really knows how to fix it. I don’t know much about their inner workings, but it appears from an outsider’s point of view that the command staff doesn’t want to or can’t change anything. If the command staff doesn’t institute change and reform then no officer is going to do it on their own. Like the previous respondent posted; there needs to be reform from the top and the brass needs to get behind it fully in order for change to occur. For this to happen you will also need to show that disobedience will not be tolerated. That means you’re going to have to fire some officers. If you have “rogue” officers out doing whatever they want that’s not going to end well for anybody. Maybe there needs to be a higher standard of learning for the cadets coming in to their police academy. Requiring a 2 or 4 year degree would be a good start. Both of those degrees would require some diversity and ethics courses. Maybe that’s really what’s needed, some training on how to better serve your diverse community. At the very least there needs to be tighter restrictions for that department or it will never get the confidence of the public and it will be federally regulated soon. They have been given a chance in the past to take steps towards reform, but failed. At some point you need to say enough is enough and overhaul the department. There’s no excuse for the way some of those officers are behaving. Something needs to be done in that department real soon to bring back the integrity that the badge requires.
Mike,
This article doesn’t tell us a whole lot about the inner working of the police department. It only gives us one or two instances of issues of racism, and it makes no attempt to mention any others. It does specify exactly what happened. As far as we know, this could be an isolated incident involving a few “rogue” officers. It may not speak for the department itself at all. As far as instituting a college degree, I’ve spoken with other departments outside of Minnesota (Minnesota is one only of a handful of states that requires a minimum of two years and a license to be a peace officer) that only require a high school education to be a police officer. It really doesn’t make a difference. An agency is only as good as those who enforce policy and procedures Studies have shown that diversity training is informative, but doesn’t change a cops behavior on the street.
It seems like this department needs new management and more diversity training. Minorities groups are already at a disadvantage in our criminal justice system. They are arrested more often, under represented by quality defense attorneys, and prosecuted more often. It is officers, like the ones from this article, that make breaking the cycle of minority discrimination within the criminal justices system more difficult.
I too agree that the police department either needs more diversity training or a change in management. The easiest solution to this would be to find a better more fitted chief from another location to manage the department. Under the new chief, less favoritism and a stricter tolerance policy is more likely. If these conditions are satisfy, minorities should have a much more fair trials.
There’s no doubt that something needs to be done to improve and make amends of the what was done to the photographs and possibly going further into a complete overall of the system. There are a couple of questions I had as I was reading this article. While it mentions that three photos of elected officials were defaced even though it did occur in the OPD I wonder if it is possible that it was not done by an OPD employee but a citizen coming into the building. Many departments hang photos of their elected officials in the lobbies with 24 hour access. I also wonder what was done to the photos. Whatever it was it had to be quite serious if a federal judge had to get involved. I understand that this is a serious matter and think any kind of racism is wrong. The newspaper articles states that the department is looking at a Federal take over for the department, but the article doesn’t mention any more specifics regarding from the lawsuits form the 2000’s except that the article cites a source that states that the Oakland Police Department hasn’t lived up to the reforms. That doesn’t tell us a whole lot but it does excite people and make people believe that the whole department is corrupt and needs an overhaul. This could just be an isolated incident involving one or more people and the rest of the department has an excellent standard which is comes to race relations. I haven’t gone ahead and looked at any follow up information about it yet but in order to find out what the true cause of an act of racism you have to ask yourself what questions the article is not answering.
By just reading this article it’s quite obvious that the OPD needs some major changes all the way from the chief of police to the patrol officers and the recruits they hire to become police officers. Stuff like this happens in almost every large police department in America, but a lot of these departments will stop this illegal action before it becomes a major problem, OPD has not stopped any of this action and it seems like it is even getting worse. This goes hand in hand with chapter 6 in our “Color of Justice” book. In chapter 6 it states how juries can be even racially discriminated against. When attorneys pick members to be a part of a jury they will exclude people by just the color of their skin, these people who were exclude were otherwise qualified to be a part of this jury. The reason why they did this was they believed that if they picked these members racial bias would be a part of their decision when it came time to reach a verdict. This may or may not be true, but it seems like the attorneys were just as racially bias as they believed the jurors would be. One reason why OPD possibly hasn’t done anything is because many of the officers involved in these illegal acts were white and the person making the major decisions about their future were also white. OPD needs to find more people who want to operate a righteous police department.
This is an interesting case to keep an eye on. Police departments are the subjects of complaints and investigations, sometimes on a daily basis. What is different in this case is that the point of investigation has reached this far. Relationships with the communities the police work in are so important to the work being done. For even the mayor to go on and say that he knows certain parts of the police department need reform is a big step. But he is also against a federal take over. The big question here would be if it is better to try and let OPD sort it out or get it done and have it taken over federally. If it hasn’t been done up to this point, maybe a federal take over is best.