OAKLAND — As ailing police departments across the U.S. struggle to solve systemic problems of excessive force, officer accountability and community distrust, many chiefs are now looking to Oakland as an example of an agency that’s ahead of the curve.

Yes, that’s right: Oakland.

Chief Sean Whent and Assistant Chief Paul Figueroa lately have become go-to sources of information on police reform, making stops the last few months in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Sacramento, Oregon and even Massachusetts to explain how other agencies can duplicate Oakland’s progressive programs, which stress de-escalation and community engagement over old-fashioned hard-line tactics.

It’s an unfamiliar role for a department that’s long been maligned for its not-so-distant history of police brutality scandals and multimillion dollar payouts to settle lawsuits.

But Whent, at the helm for about two years, has been quietly chipping away at the agency’s cowboy culture reputation. He’s pushing Oakland’s new image as a forward-thinking department that’s trying to mitigate harm, instead of the “warrior cop” mentality that many cities adopted during the violent drug wars in the ’80s.

The turnaround in vision has impressed even the police’s starkest critics.

Jim Chanin, a civil rights attorney whose police brutality lawsuit led to federal monitoring in 2003, said the department ramped up reform efforts after Whent and Figueroa took over. Their reign followed years of troubling turnover in the chief’s office.

“I think there’s much more of a consensus now then there ever has been,” Chanin said. “It’s something I didn’t think we’d ever see, frankly.”

Franklin Zimring, a criminologist and law professor at UC Berkeley, said police and city officials largely skirted their responsibilities during the first decade of federal monitoring in Oakland, only committing to reform after U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson “all but threw a tantrum” a few years ago. A full takeover by the Department of Justice seemed possible.

“Now they have a good administration in the department and a mayor’s office that is supportive of change,” Zimring said. “It’s a late start for Oakland, but prospects are better now.”

Whent, who made his mark as a no-nonsense supervisor in the department’s Internal Affairs Division, may not be the boisterous showman best suited to marketing Oakland police’s new philosophy.

The chief stressed that he’s not in the marketing business; he’s in the policing business. But Oakland clearly is an agency that wants to be “out in front.”

“We recognize the way we’ve done things in the past has not always been successful for us, so we’re trying to learn from our mistakes,” Whent said.

And now other departments are trying to learn from Oakland, too. Much of the focus has been on the agency’s advanced body-worn camera program. Oakland introduced body cameras five years ago and expanded it to include all uniformed officers in 2013, a rarity for a large city. Officials in San Jose, Los Angeles and Baltimore — the latest U.S. city to experience rioting after a police-involved killing — are only just considering body camera pilot programs.

If Oakland’s numbers are predictive, other cities might want to speed up their efforts.

Use-of-force incidents in Oakland dropped to 611 last year after more than 2,000 incidents in both 2008 and 2009, and the department has seen steady decreases every year since cameras were introduced.

Citizen complaints dropped to 1,052 last year, almost 500 fewer than in 2013 and well below the peak in 2012, when the agency took 2,598 complaints during a year of frequent Occupy Oakland protests.

Police shootings are down, too. Oakland historically has had about eight police shootings a year, but had none last year. The department hasn’t had a fatal shooting since 2013.

“Those are some pretty amazing numbers,” said Samuel Walker, a University of Nebraska professor and national expert on police accountability.

“And it’s happening in Oakland, which has had a very troubled past. To me, those numbers indicate that they may have turned a corner.”

Rank-and-file cops initially doubted the cameras, but the chief said the video evidence has “really supported them almost every time.”

“For one, cops behave better when they know they’re being recorded, but it works on the other end as well,” Whent said. “People behave better when being filmed.”

Oakland’s numbers were so striking that Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, asked Whent to testify recently in support of her bill to establish statewide guidelines for California cities’ body camera programs. The guidelines in Weber’s bill largely mirror Oakland’s policy.

The White House is also interested in Oakland’s camera program, partially because of the work Stanford University is doing with Oakland on racial profiling. Oakland’s own data revealed that 60 percent of police stops in the city involved African-Americans, despite the group only making up 28 percent of the city’s population.

Instead of relying on just the raw figures, the department also has allowed Stanford professor Jennifer Eberhardt to dig into officers’ camera footage so she can review individual officers’ justification for their stops.

Most cities don’t even track stop data, Whent said, and no other agency is conducting in-depth inspection of its camera footage.

Frequent police critic Rashidah Grinage acknowledged the department’s progress but said it comes with a caveat: The agency was forced into reform under a federal monitoring agreement that’s been in place for 12 years.

“I don’t want to deny anyone the credit they deserve, but remember that whatever progress has been made happened with a gun pointed at their head,” Grinage said. “It’s not like they woke up and said, ‘Why don’t we start looking at our stop data today?’ “

Chanin knows all about the oversight in Oakland — it was his police brutality lawsuit that brought federal monitoring to the city in 2003. He said the department should be proud of its achievements in those 12 years.

But officials can’t rest on their laurels, he said.

“It takes constant vigilance and supervision,” he said. “But it shows that there’s no hopeless situation at any department.”

Figueroa said the department is determined not to backslide. Oakland has implemented new training for officers on topics such as procedural justice, which focuses on officers being more respectful and courteous to citizens, even when issuing tickets or making arrests.

California Attorney General Kamala Harris is modeling a state training program on Oakland’s procedural justice initiative, and Figueroa is part of her policy task force.

“The more people who believe in the legitimacy of the police, the higher the voluntary compliance with the law is,” Figueroa said. “That’s what this whole thing comes down to.”

Not everyone is convinced Oakland’s reform efforts are completely authentic. Grinage is skeptical of marketing “buzzwords” such as “procedural justice,” which she said has replaced other terms like “community policing.”

“We’re not talking about rocket science here or anything that innovative. We’re talking about the kind of policing that should have been here all along,” Grinage said.

There’s a reason local residents still protest police violence, even if it’s happening in other cities, Grinage said. The story of Baltimore’s underserved is not unlike the story of black people in Oakland, she said, and the city is poised to erupt the next time there’s a controversial police incident here.

“The part of this community that is ready to erupt has never heard of procedural justice,” she said.

Figueroa and Whent both acknowledged the challenges of building trust after years of negativity from the community and disruption in a department.

The department is still struggling to rebuild its ranks after massive layoffs just several years ago. And the initiatives in Oakland are new — changing the culture of an agency takes more than putting policies on paper.

“Trust takes a lifetime to earn but can be lost in a moment,” Figueroa said.

“For some people, it will never happen,” Whent said. “The scars are too deep, and we’ll never win them over.”

Mike Blasky covers Oakland City Hall. Contact him at 510-208-6429. Follow him at Twitter.com/blasky.