A summary of the Bratton Report released today (the full report is due tomorrow) contains numerous basic criticisms of the Oakland Police Department.
One particular finding that stood out to us:
"Effectively, burglaries are not investigated in the City of Oakland with only one part-time investigator assigned to more than 10,000 burglaries last year."
Other findings from the report:
- OPD did not use data effectively.
- The captains and other field managers at CompStat were not being held accountable for knowledge of crime in a designated district.
- Captains, investigative commanders and special unit commanders should all be expected to come to CompStat meetings with a thorough familiarity with the crime patterns and crime conditions in their areas of responsibility, which is achieved by reading the incident reports about individual crimes.
- Under the existing process there was no sense of coordination, information sharing or support from the centralized Criminal Investigation Division (CID). (Note: In January the chief of staff recognized in an interview with KQED that they are using unreliable data, and often could not accurately report crime numbers.)
- Effectively, burglaries are not investigated in the City of Oakland with only one part-time investigator assigned to more than 10,000 burglaries last year.
- Crime-scene technicians in Oakland work without direct supervision and therefore with little systematic organization.
- The OPD’s digital photo file access, which could be a key tool in identifying robbery suspects, is extremely slow and is rarely used in current robbery investigations. Fingerprint evidence gathered at burglary scenes is not generally used in burglary investigations or submitted for comparisons by the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS).