Oakland Police Department Falls Short of Goal to Investigate Complaints Against Officers

The Oakland Police Department appears to be backsliding in its efforts to investigate officer misconduct, according to new court filings this month.

From January to March of this year, OPD investigated just 65% of severe misconduct allegations lodged against officers within six months — falling 20% short of a court-mandated threshold. The requirement is one of three remaining reforms the department needs to make to end more than two decades of federal oversight stemming from a major police brutality scandal involving a group of officers known as the “Riders” in 2000.

“We’ve been on this journey for many, many years, and so hopefully, we were getting closer to closure,” said civil rights attorney John Burris, who represented the group of Oakland residents who brought the Riders misconduct case against the department. “However, this sort of puts at bay the possibility that it will happen very soon. These are still significant issues.”

OPD has been under federal oversight since 2003, when it reached a settlement with Burris’ clients, and was tasked with making 52 operational reforms.

It’s come into compliance with the vast majority of those, but before a district judge could release the department from court monitoring, it must come into compliance with three remaining “tasks” regarding the thoroughness and timeliness of misconduct investigations, and consistency of enforcement of disciplinary policies.

In his most recent report, issued last week, court monitor Robert Warshaw said OPD is out of compliance with its mandated 6-month investigation timeline and another task related to the more general procedures for fielding and investigating complaints against officers. It is only partially compliant with the requirement related to disciplinary enforcement.

Warshaw noted that in regard to timely investigations, “there has been an unacceptable backslide” in recent months.

In July, Burris and Jim Chanin, another civil rights attorney who litigated the Riders case, raised alarms after investigators took 15 months to resolve a misconduct complaint. In his recent report, Warsaw found that in the first quarter of 2025, investigators missed the six-month time limit in 19 cases.

“The timeliness requirements for the completion of investigations are intended to ensure that members of the community who file complaints, or OPD personnel who are the subjects of complaints, can get redress in a six-month period of time,” Warshaw said. “[The task] has a lower compliance threshold than do the other tasks, so it is disappointing to note this backslide.”

The court’s six-month window is more strict than the state’s mandated yearlong timeline for investigating such complaints.

Warshaw reported that the department is in partial compliance with the reform regarding consistent discipline, but that ongoing timeliness and procedural issues have direct and indirect impacts that are keeping it from meeting full compliance.

Burris noted a “concerning” point in the monitoring report: African American officers are being disciplined at higher rates than white officers.

“We need to figure that out as to what’s causing that,” the attorney said.

The monitoring report said OPD is also out of compliance with the third remaining reform task related to the general quality and thoroughness of investigation procedures. But Warshaw was less specific about why that is.

He wrote that his monitoring team did not find non-compliance with many of the specific subtasks in the complaint process, but that “there remains in the Internal Affairs Bureau a number of issues, concerns, and developments” that cannot be discussed publicly.

Burris said these appear to be issues in how the Bureau operates, more than the conclusions that they reach when they investigate misconduct allegations.

Oakland has been plagued by turnover in department leadership in recent years, among other controversies, which Burris said has made it challenging to ensure that leaders — especially those who come to Oakland from outside the department — understand and are committed to the reform work.

“It is not our intent to single out any of its leadership, or its hardworking investigators,” Warshaw’s report continued. “But that said, there are matters of serious concern that remain unresolved.”

Burris said Police Chief Floyd Mitchell, who came to Oakland from Texas in 2024 and announced that he would step down in December, had not seemed fully aware of how involved and central to the chief’s role the settlement compliance work would be, nor particularly interested in leading it.

“I didn’t think he understood the significance of the various reforms that we had agreed to and why they were important,” Burris told KQED at the time. “I think he was something he dealt with because he had to do it, and so I didn’t think he’s a willing participant in that process — a reluctant participant.”

Warshaw said in the conclusion of his report that he is optimistic about the direction the department could move now under the leadership of Mayor Barbara Lee, who took office in May.

“The noncompliant tasks are a result of personnel and systemic failures not of her making,” Warshaw wrote. “Mayor Lee has immersed herself into [settlement agreement] matters and has been striving to ensure that the department is staffed with the best qualified leaders that are available.”

In the coming months, Lee will select a new Police Chief to replace Mitchell, who will helm the reform work and oversee the Internal Affairs Bureau.

“This is an opportunity for the mayor to really put together a futuristic team that not only covers the next couple of years, but into the next administration, and that [has] a vision and appreciation for the [settlement agreement] and what it’s trying to do,” Burris said.