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 Today, as an outcry over police killings and excessive force
spreads across the country, Oakland's police are becoming known for
something else: restraint and reform.
Under scrutiny by a court-ordered external monitor and threatened
with federal receivership, Oakland's 14-year journey from notorious
law enforcement agency to reform-minded department illustrates the
difficulty of changing the way police operate at time of national
soul-searching over heavy handed police tactics.
Using a new computer system to monitor police, Oakland may be an
indicator of what lies ahead for Ferguson, Missouri, and other U.S.
cities whose officers face mounting public mistrust and the
perception that they operate with impunity in the shooting of black
suspects.
In Oakland, no one has been shot by its police in 18 months, a sign
of change in a city that averaged 13 police shootings a year between
1993 and 2003, and nine per year between 2004 and 2012, according to
Oakland Police data provided to Oakland Police Beat, a news website,
and analyzed by Reuters.
 Federal civil rights lawsuits over police abuses have also
plummeted, according to Westlaw data compiled by Reuters.
"People have noticed," said Rev. Damita Davis-Howard, a community
activist in the ethnically diverse city of 400,000 on San Francisco
Bay. "People are talking about the fact that given what happened in
Ferguson, there has not been an OPD incident in 18 months,"
Davis-Howard said, using an abbreviation for the police department.
But change has been painfully slow since the four officers in the
"Riders" case were accused of robbing suspects while working the
night shift in West Oakland, a crime-plagued area that was the
historical birthplace of the Black Panther Party, a radical black
rights group, in the 1960s.
The officers were never convicted of a crime but the city paid 119
victims a total of $10.9 million to settle damage suits and agreed
to reforms in 2003, overseen by a federal judge.
Over the next decade, Oakland police chiefs struggled to meet reform
benchmarks amid several high-profile police killings that fanned
black-white racial tensions, some with similarities to the case of
Michael Brown, the unarmed 18-year-old whose shooting in Ferguson
sparked weeks of protests.
TIPPING POINT
Like Ferguson, Oakland's police have long faced accusations of
racial bias. Between 2004 and 2008, 16 of 24 people killed in police
shootings were black; none were white. And while blacks represent
about 30 percent of Oakland’s population, they made up 67 percent of
fatal police shootings in that period.
A tipping point came in 2012 when a San Francisco federal judge
threatened to place the entire Oakland Police Department under
receivership in response to nearly a decade of inadequate attempts
to comply with the Riders settlement.
In December 2012, the judge appointed a compliance director with
broad oversight powers. Five months later, the department went
through three police chiefs in three days. Out of that chaos emerged
Chief Sean Whent, an 18-year department veteran who launched a
series of reforms.
Whent introduced a computer system that can track the activity of
police officers, including all uses of force, citizen complaints and
lawsuits. A special board now reviews instances where officers use
force and determines whether they followed policy. It is also trying
to tackle data about the race of people stopped by police.
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Police shootings stopped. And a long wave of lawsuits accusing the
police of misconduct appears to be receding. In 2012, the city was
named as a defendant in 19 new federal civil rights cases involving
the police, but that number has fallen to just six so far this year,
the Westlaw data show. "We have gotten fewer calls of concern
about the Oakland Police Department," said Michael Haddad, a civil
rights lawyer who sued the OPD over police strip searches of
suspects on the street. "We used to get more calls about shootings
and just incidental use of force."
Robert Weisberg, a criminal justice professor at Stanford Law
School, said Oakland's experience illustrates how police departments
often need strict controls, tough scrutiny and even threats of
punishment to change the behavior of officers.
"Once a police department feels it has a complicated compliance
formula to obey, and once it translates that down to street police,
police tend to act more responsibly, they really do," he said.
"There really has to be a threat."
After writing three years of critical quarterly reports on the OPD,
independent monitor Robert Warshaw noted a "slight improvement" in
July 2013. His latest report on Dec. 1 commended the department’s
"steady progress."
"But the efforts must go on," Warshaw wrote, cautioning that the
Oakland Police Department must, for instance, make sure it does not
stop and detain black and Latino residents at disproportionately
higher rates.
Sustaining the change could be difficult. While some of Oakland's
neighborhoods are rapidly gentrifying, thanks to a tech boom in the
Bay Area, crime remains endemic in other areas and some members of
the police say the reforms could undermine their ability to fight
that.
 Michael Rains, an attorney who represents police officers, has
openly criticized reforms. He said the intense oversight has made
Oakland police much less aggressive in proactively going after
criminals, due to the fear of second guessing from the court and
arbitrary discipline.
"I don't think you're seeing, today, an enthusiastic attitude by
officers to jump out of the car," Rains said.
On Oakland's streets, suspicions run deep. Taylor Johnson, 24, said
some police officers can be friendly but not always. “I think it’s
about how they feel in that moment,” she said.
(Additional reporting by Howard Schneider and Jason Szep in
Washington. Editing by Jason Szep and Ross Colvin)
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