The city of Oakland is paying a consultant $99,900 to study problems within the police force, city officials said Friday - a late bid to comply with court-ordered reforms and avoid a federal takeover of the department.

The hiring of Strategic Policy Partnership of Massachusetts was approved by City Administrator Deanna Santana. She can agree to contracts of up to $100,000 without a vote of the City Council.

City and police officials did not respond to requests for details about the contract, including when it was signed and when the work is supposed to be done.

The Police Department has been trying for a decade to make reforms ordered by a federal judge after four officers who called themselves the Riders were accused in 2000 of beating and framing suspects in West Oakland.

The officers were never convicted, but a lawsuit filed by more than 100 of their alleged victims resulted in a civil judgment against the city of $10.9 million, as well as the ordered reforms.

The plaintiffs' attorneys are preparing to ask U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson to place the department under federal receivership for failing to implement all the reforms. A hearing is set for Dec. 13.

Santana and Mayor Jean Quan said in a May budget proposal that the city would commission a "department-wide assessment" to improve policies, training and performance at the department, which has lost about 200 officers since 2008.

Santana echoed the need for such a review the next month after another outside expert, the Frazier Group of Baltimore, said systemic failures in the police force led to flawed handling of an Occupy protest last Oct. 25.

But Jim Chanin, one of the attorneys who sued in the Riders case, said the city was wasting time and money by hiring Strategic Policy Partnership, and instead should listen to the court-appointed independent monitor overseeing reforms.

The monitor, Robert Warshaw, has been highly critical of Oakland's progress.

"To me, this consultant situation is an unending search for someone who will tell them what they want to hear," Chanin said. "I think they want someone to tell them they're doing a good job. But there's a cheaper solution: They can actually do a good job."

The consulting deal was revealed this week by Judge Henderson. He has expressed concern about the city spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to outsource investigations of claims of officer misconduct during Occupy demonstrations.

Henderson ordered the city to produce a list of all outside contracts by Friday that the city has signed or modified this year and are related to the court-ordered police reforms.

Strategic Policy Partnership is led by Robert Wasserman, former chief of staff of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President Bill Clinton. Wasserman did not return a call left at his office Friday.

He has advised police departments around the country, including San Francisco. In Oakland, his firm headed up the search for a police chief in 2009 that resulted in the hiring of Anthony Batts, who quit two years later.