The Oakland Police Department has lost its seventh head of police in as many years after an investigation found the city’s top cop mishandled two officer misconduct cases.
“I am no longer confident that Chief Armstrong can do the work needed to continue much needed reforms,” Oakland’s rookie mayor Mayor Sheng Thao said Wednesday after she fired Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong, who was hired less than two years ago.
The move is the latest setback for a department struggling with violent crime, staffing issues and an inability to complete court-ordered reforms in decades past.
During a news conference, the mayor said she fired Armstrong after a probe concluded the chief and the department failed to properly investigate and discipline a sergeant involved in a hit-and-run with his patrol car in 2021 and – in a separate incident – fired his service weapon inside an elevator at police headquarters.
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The firing comes exactly one month after the mayor and the city’s administrator announced they had placed Armstrong on paid leave, citing a report by an independent law firm saying Armstrong had violated department rules because he didn’t review evidence from the misconduct cases before closing the investigations.
The probes by the San Francisco-based law firm of Clarence Dyer and Cohen concluded Armstrong failed to investigate and discipline Sgt. Michael Chung after he was involved in a hit-and-run with a parked car in 2021 at his apartment building in San Francisco, according to a report first obtained by KTVU-TV and made public by Oaklandside, a local news site.
Thao, who took office in January, said she wants to be confident the police chief in the city of 400,000 people will be effective “in making improvements that can be recognized by the federal monitor, the federal court and the people of Oakland.”
‘Profoundly disappointed’
The mayor said the federal judge overseeing the city said he “was profoundly disappointed in the evidence he’d seen “and that the report “demonstrates significant cultural problems in the department.”
“In response to a public report that concluded that OPD had repeatedly failed to rigorously investigate misconduct and hold officers accountable, Chief Armstrong said these were not incidents where officers behaved poorly,” Thao said during a news conference Wednesday.
“He stated that he did not believe these incidents reflected systemic problems …he said that officers made ‘mistakes.'”
Thao said it would be “inappropriate” to publicly discuss the discipline cases that prompted Armstrong’s firing. “But I can say that it is clear to me that there are systemic issues the city needs to address, and that we cannot simply write them off as “mistakes.”
Armstrong, a native of Oakland, was appointed in 2021 with promises of enacting all the court-ordered reforms within a year.
He said he was deeply disappointed in Thao’s decision and that once all the facts are evaluated, it will be clear he committed no misconduct and his termination was “wrong, unjustified, and unfair.”
On the heels of a former firing
Armstrong’s firing comes after the department fired its former chief Anne Kirkpatrick in 2020 after three years on the job.
On Feb. 20 that year, the police commission voted unanimously to fire Kirkpatrick without cause.
Kirkpatrick said the police commission voted to fire her because she complained that its members were pressuring officers to give them special treatment and bullying department employees.
A history of reported abuse of power
Oakland police have been under federal oversight for more than two decades, yet critics say legitimacy remains elusive.
In 2000, the department made national news after a rookie officer came forward to report a famed misconduct case by a group of four officers known as the Oakland “Riders.”
The former officers, accused of abusing their power, were charged with making false arrests, planting evidence, using excessive force, falsifying police reports and assaulting people in west Oakland, a predominantly Black area. Three of the officers were acquitted after two separate juries deadlocked on most of the charges. The fourth officer is a fugitive and is believed to have fled the country.
The case resulted in the department coming under federal oversight in 2003 and being required to enact 52 reform measures and report its progress to an outside monitor and a federal judge.
Contributing: Associated Press.
Natalie Neysa Alund covers trending news for USA TODAY. Reach her at nalund@usatoday.com and follow her on Twitter @nataliealund.
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