With scandals causing Oakland’s police department to implode, city officials have every right to demand reform.

Instead, they’re going after journalists’ sources.

That isn’t how to fix a beleaguered force that’s been under federal monitoring since 2003.

It’s how to fix the politics by killing access to information and keeping the public ignorant. It’s how to make it seem like they’re slamming a lid on the cauldron of sleazy corruption, but not actually slamming it.

Oakland Administrator Sabrina Landreth, with Mayor Libby Schaaf’s blessing, has hired a private investigator to go after leaks. Their very own plumber. How Nixonesque.

That decision came after scandals about sex, racist text messages, a homicide detective letting his girlfriend ghost write his reports, drunken cops breaking into the house of a probation officers and more. Police Chief Sean Whent lost his job. Two interim successors were canned within days.

We’d know little about any of this if not for good reporters doing their jobs. Because of California’s draconian police-privacy law, those working the stories, primarily Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham of the East Bay Express and my colleagues David DeBolt, Matthias Gafni and Matt Artz, have little choice but to turn to people with the guts to clandestinely provide them information about what’s really happening.

That law, which only enables and serves dirty cops, blocks straightforward access to information about police wrongdoing. State Sen. Mark Leno’s efforts to reform it died in May when the Senate Appropriations Committee, bowing to police unions, refused to take it up.

Landreth claimed in a statement about the hiring of the PI that “our intention is to root out misconduct and prevent cover-ups, not to silence critics or whistleblowers.”

You know how to tell when they want to shut people up? When they say they don’t want to shut people up.

In the world of Landreth and Schaaf, the perfect police misconduct investigation is one the public never knows about. Nothing to see here, folks. “The less you know, the better off you’ll be,” as singer songwriter Warren Zevon put it.

Schaaf has veracity problems. She’s the one who claimed that Whent simply up and resigned on his own as the sex scandal broke. Sure. People generally quit jobs suddenly by email at 9:44 p.m.

Whent was pushed out after the department’s federal overseer found that the chief’s wife had exchanged messages with the young sex worker at the center of the scandal, a scandal Whent’s administration at first glossed over, even after Officer Brendan O’Brien and his wife had killed themselves.

Reporters who deal with Schaaf tell me she’s gotten better with the media. But she’s sometimes been loath to speak sans script. Requests to interview her have resulted in written statements with canned quotes as shiny as candy apples.

When politicians do this, it often shows both a lack of intellectually honesty and a desire to “stay on message,” i.e. a political agenda.

The Oakland Police Department — aka Omega Phi Delta — is now a national laughingstock. And while Schaaf claims her agenda is to clean the frat house of the stale beer stench, you have to wonder how much more public knowledge of wrongdoing and ensuing embarrassment — like over her inability to name a competent interim chief — is survivable.

Tamping reporters’ sources is simply a defensive move. It isn’t like Schaaf’s plumber even has to do much wrench work. Just word of an investigation shuts people up, making it more difficult for reporters to bring forward the most attainable version of the truth.

We live in tough times to build sources, even with the protection of California’s strong shield law. The government can’t get anything from journalists about our sources, but it can use everything from license plate readers to cell phone records to squash them.

As I said recently, we’re back to the days of red flags in flowerpots (Bob Woodward’s signal to Deep Throat to head for the parking garage) and carrying quarters for pay phones. But try to find a payphone these days.

It’s almost as hard as finding an honest cop — or mayor — in Oakland.

Thomas Peele is an investigative reporter for this newspaper and teaches a class on public records at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Follow him at Twitter.com/thomas_peele.