Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra, and welcome to The Bay. Local news to keep you rooted. No other law enforcement agency has been undergoing the process of police reform longer than the Oakland Police Department. For the last two decades, OPD has been trying to get in line with a consent decree, a binding set of reforms laid out by the federal government. But officials say a new scandal that’s led its police chief, LeRonne Armstrong, to be put on administrative leave is a sign that OPD still has a long way to go.
Ali Winston: In the city’s desire to kind of clear the decks and get out from under the court oversight, they treat it as a box to be checked rather than lasting reforms that are meant to reshape the way that policing is done in Oakland.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Whether or not Chief Armstrong will keep his job is still up in the air after investigators say he failed to hold officers accountable for misconduct. Today: what this latest scandal reveals about what’s changed, what remains the same at the Oakland Police Department.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: What was your initial reaction when you heard the news that Chief LeRonne Armstrong has been placed on administrative leave?
Ali Winston: All that’s old is new again.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Ali Winston is an independent journalist and coauthor of The Riders Come Out at Night, a book about corruption and brutality within the Oakland Police Department and its two-decades-long attempt at police reform.
Ali Winston: This is not a new situation, and sadly, it’s the kind of feature of the Oakland Police Department’s 20-year saga to come into compliance with modern practices of policing. They’ve been under a consent decree, a binding reform program, since the year 2003 as a result of an egregious civil rights scandal and abuses by a group of officers known as the “Riders.”
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: What prompted Chief LeRonne Armstrong to be put on leave last month?
Ali Winston: Exactly two years ago, roughly a sergeant named Michael Chung was driving in an OPD takeover vehicle, a police issued car in the parking garage of his luxury high-rise apartment building in downtown Oakland. His passenger was a another Oakland cop, I believe, his partner or girlfriend at the time. Sergeant Chung clipped another car while in the parking garage. We don’t know why he did not report this accident. And the Oakland Police Department learned about it only when the department received an insurance claim from the driver of the damaged vehicle. So, the Internal Affairs Division opened up a case to look into the accident and the lack of reporting, which is a matter that could rise to the level of discipline. And during the course of this investigation, the officer assigned to the case found that Sergeant Chung had left the scene of a crime, had not reported the accident, and had engaged in a relationship with a subordinate officer and had not reported it. Sergeant Chung was found to have committed these incidents of misconduct by the investigator who then presented his findings to the Captain of Internal Affairs. Wilson Lau. And Captain Lau overruled the investigator’s findings and reduced discipline down from potential termination to instructions which are basically a talking to by a superior officer. And he removed the partner, the female officer, from being a subject of the investigation, who also didn’t report the crime, to being a witness. Sergeant Chung is a very popular individual in the police department. He’s the current head of the Oakland Asian Police Officers Association. And the captain in this incident Wilson Lau was his immediate, past predecessor as president of the Asian POA.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So, there’s this hit and run that Sergeant Chung does not report – what happened after that?
Ali Winston: This case made its way up to Chief Armstrong’s desk, and he signed off on the final discipline, the verbal instructions in the file. There was the discrepancy between the initial recommendation and Captain Lau’s justification of the downgrade of discipline. This went unnoticed for about a year – until Sergeant Chung is riding in a freight elevator in OPD, I want to say in early 2022. He’s in headquarters and for whatever reason, fires a round from a service-issue pistol which creates a strike mark in the elevator. He doesn’t report this. He picks up his casing – the brass casing that ejects from the pistol – takes it with him, and on his way back from San Francisco while he’s driving, he rolls down his window and tosses it off the Bay Bridge. Another cop notices the strike mark in the elevator, reports it, and there’s a very serious investigation to find out what exactly happened in this elevator. Somebody fired a round in police headquarters and didn’t report it. Couple weeks go by and Sergeant Chung eventually comes forward and says, Hey, it was me. I did this.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: After Michael Chung came forward, he was placed on administrative leave. But word about these incidents got back to the Federal Monitor, Robert Warshaw. He’s the court-appointed official who oversees Oakland’s police reforms. And Warshaw decided that OPD wasn’t capable of handling this investigation into Michael Chung. So, the city hired an outside law firm to do its own report, and on January 18, Judge William Orrick ordered that report to be made public. This is the moment when Oakland’s new mayor, Sheng Thao and the city administrator decided to place Chief LeRonne Armstrong on administrative leave. Where does the chief sort of fit into this? What exactly is he accused of?
Ali Winston: Chief Armstrong is on leave because he signed off on Mike Chung’s reduction of discipline in the vehicular accident without properly reviewing the report and noticing the disparity in discipline. So, as the chief of the Oakland Police Department, one of his main responsibilities is ensuring that the Oakland Police Department is in compliance with the reforms of the consent decree. And by failing to review and discern the issue in that case, the offense is on its own, not reporting the accident. The fact that he did not notice that disposition and that he signed off on Captain Wilson Lau’s decision to reduce that – that was, in a way, a dereliction of duty. The second incident, the discharging a firearm in police headquarters: that posed an immediate threat to someone’s life, and unfortunately, you know, the current back-and-forth over the police chief should be reinstated [or] he shouldn’t be reinstated. Well, the bottom line is that the failing happened at a level kind of below him. He failed to do his job and make certain that that failure didn’t happen. And the real issue here is that the same problems – the same type of problem keeps repeating itself in OPD every two, three, five years. Failing to ensure the integrity of the internal affairs process in the Oakland Police Department is the reason for the departure of LeRonne Armstrong’s immediate predecessors, Anne Kirkpatrick and Sean Whent. If we go back, it’s also the grounds for the dismissal of Howard Jordan, who is the last police chief with a significant term before Whent in, I believe, 2013. There are even some periods where there have been two or three police chiefs in a week just because of the sheer amount of tumult in the Oakland Police Department as a result of several past scandals. You know, history will come back to bite you.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I feel like Chief Armstrong has sort of become the principle person, as you’ve just been talking about, who’s really taken center stage in this scandal. But it seems like the problem is, in fact, deeper than him. So, what are the issues within OPD that this latest scandal has revealed?
Ali Winston: There are many issues that come up here. Consistency of discipline and the integrity of the internal affairs investigation is critical and at the center of all this. But there are bigger issues with the quality of people who OPD have brought in, their screening process for recruits, how they determine who should be promoted to a supervisory position or not, and then potentially whether or not there is outside influence in terms of Sergeant Chung being in his position. And if there was interference with – like, hey, look, this guy is…he’s our boy, don’t mess with him. Give him a slap on the wrist. Sergeant Chung made Sergeant within six years of joining the police department. He joined in 2013. There’s questions as to how someone rose that fast, but there are many, many issues here that deal with broader, not just cultural problems, in the department, but what the federal judge overseeing OPD’s consent decree called “rot” in his remarks a couple of weeks ago.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Do you think that there’s just too much attention being given to just Chief Armstrong as sort of the main character in this new story about OPD?
Ali Winston: Yes, I do. It’s unfortunate. It’s quite typical because the shiny dime kind of leads the news. What actually happened, the true incident at question here and the real problems are at a level below the chief. And in some ways, police chiefs are actually – this is going to sound funny, but they’re not really that important in some respects because they come and go within five years at the longest. And a lot of them kind of are keepers of the flame. They don’t really change much around their subject to political shifts as well. Mayors like to bring in their own chiefs, their own people. But what really happens, kind of [at] the captain- and deputy chief- and lieutenant-level is really more important for the day-to-day functions of the department. So, I do think that as time goes on and more information comes out about the incidents at the heart of this, the narrative will start to shift. But right now, there is way too much attention being focused on kind of the top-line issue.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: One thing you’re also sort of alluding to is the idea that some of these problems are problems that should have ideally been fixed as a result of federal oversight, right, which has been going on for decades? And that is supposed to lead to reform and changes within the police department. So, has anything actually improved within the department?
Ali Winston: Yes, the Oakland Police Department is not the same police department it was in the 2000s. The police department no longer shoots 12 to 14 people a year. That was the case when I first started covering Oakland in 2008. Now, because of a huge modification in the chase policy, as a result, now we’re down to maybe one to four, which is still too many. But that in and of itself is a massive change. The department also engaged and overhauled its policy of strip-searching people in public. At one point that was very common. They’d engage in cavity searches in public streets of people for narcotics. The department also engaged in a massive study of racial profiling efforts. They studied the traffic stops and the walking stops that the Oakland Police Department engaged in. And in conjunction with Jennifer Eberhardt, a professor at Stanford, [they] were able to discern a pattern of vastly overpolicing African-Americans. And they’ve tried to readjust, readdress that racial balance. So, there have been big changes in the Oakland Police Department’s policies in their composition. The problem with the internal affairs process is that in the city’s eagerness to get out from under the consent decree, in the city’s desire to kind of clear the decks, they treat it as a box to be checked and something to be dealt with and filed away rather than lasting reforms that are meant to reshape the institution and reshape the way that policing is done in Oakland. I think that LeRonne Armstrong may have fallen into the same trap. I know that when he assumes his role as the head of the police department, he basically said, we’re going to get this consent decree done and we’re going to do away with it, and we need to make certain that nothing goes wrong. But again, we have to wait for the full shape of the alleged incident and the way in which it was disposed of to come to light.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Where do things stand right now for the police chief, and how has he responded to being put on leave?
Ali Winston: Well, LeRonne Armstrong hired a high profile PR consultant named Sam Singer, who’s worked for some of the more colorful characters in the Bay Area when they come under fire, including Chevron. And they’ve gone on the offensive.
Cable news anchor: Now at eight, embattled Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong continues to push for his reinstatement.
Ali Winston: And mounted a number of press conferences.
Unknown: LeRonne is a man of integrity. He is a man of honesty, of commitment, and most of all.
Ali Winston: To put pressure on Mayor Sheng Thao to reinstate LeRonne Armstrong as police chief and blames Robert Warshaw, the current federal monitor of OPD.
Unknown: I’m from West Oakland. I won’t pick a fight, but I ain’t running from none. I’m not running from none.
Ali Winston: There have also been a number of really nasty racial tensions that have evolved from this, especially if you look at some of the message boards and the comments that have been made on social media about his suspension. There are tensions growing now between some elements of the African-American and the Asian community in Oakland. So, that’s where we stand. Right now, he’s still on administrative leave. Darren Allison, the assistant police chief, is now in temporary charge of the police department. And it remains to be seen what the federal court will do with regard to LeRonne Armstrong’s position, because in the end, they have the ability to determine whether or not he should or should not be in charge of the Oakland Police Department.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So, if you could shake someone’s shoulders and tell them what this story is really about, what would you say?
Ali Winston: It’s about police culture and the kind of reactionary nature of it. You know, the inability of that culture to change itself from the inside. And frankly, one thing that my colleague and I, in our book, really – one of our bigger conclusions is that change and reform for police departments only comes with relentless outside pressure. Be that through protest movements, court monitors, independent oversight bodies, politicians who actually pay attention to what’s happening in the city rather than going along with what a lobbying group wants or what a particular institution wants. That’s really where change comes from. This is a problem generations of Oaklanders have been dealing with for a long time. It’s grave, and I want to reemphasize that these seemingly episodic problems, they have a much longer tale and they echo out.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Oakland city officials say there are still more details of the investigation that have not been made public, including confidential interviews with OPD officers. Meanwhile, yesterday, Armstrong and his supporters held another public event, this time outside OPD headquarters to demand that he get his job back. That was Ali Winston, an independent journalist and coauthor of “The Riders Come Out at Night,” which was co-written by him and Darwin BondGraham of the Oaklandside. This 45-minute conversation with Ali was cut down and edited by senior editor Alan Montecillo. Producer Maria Esquinca scored this one and added all the tape. And our intern is Jehlen Herdman. And that’s it for The Bay. I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra. Thank you so much for listening. Talk to you next time.
