Scott C. Johnson, a former Newsweek foreign correspondent, is a writer in Los Angeles.

Before Ferguson, there was Oakland. In the fall of 2011, as the Occupy Wall Street movement spread across the country from New York’s Zuccotti Park, Occupy Oakland quickly became one of the biggest protest sites. By early October, demonstrators had set up an encampment in front of City Hall and named the site after Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old who in 2009 had been shot in the back and killed by an officer for BART, the local rail transit system.

Oakland, with a population of roughly 400,000, may sit just across the bay from increasingly glitzy San Francisco, but it can sometimes seem a world away in poverty and race relations. The city had long been known as a stomping ground for radical activists, matched in their aggression by one of the most brutal police forces in the country. And so it was not entirely a surprise that the weeks that followed saw repeated, violent, pitched battles between protesters and police as hundreds of heavily militarized cops fought kids throwing bottles. Tear gas flowed freely through the streets. Dozens of protesters were injured, as were a handful of police. The city ultimately paid more than a million dollars to settle lawsuits over aggressive police tactics.


That settlement was not unusual: In recent years, such payouts have become the cost of doing business for the Oakland police. In 2003, the department paid nearly $11 million to settle more than 100 allegations that a group of corrupt officers, known as the Rough Riders, conducted false arrests, manufactured evidence and brutalized suspects. An independent monitor stepped in to oversee wide-ranging departmental reforms. But the reforms flopped—so much so that in 2012, after the city paid out millions more to settle additional cases, the federal courts prepared to step back in. Oakland’s cops, a legal advocate for victims of police abuse said at the time, might just be “the worst department in the country.”

Officer-involved shootings were frequent, and often fatal. Complaints of beatings, shakedowns and unwarranted arrests were rampant and cost the city dearly. All told, from 2001 to 2011, Oakland paid some $57 million for claims, lawsuits and settlements involving alleged misconduct by the Oakland Police Department—not just the largest sum paid by any municipality in California, but more than double what San Francisco, with roughly twice the population, paid in the same time frame. The police force seemed broken, brutal beyond repair.

So last November, when a grand jury decided not to indict the officer responsible for shooting dead Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and another grand jury declined to indict the officer who strangled Eric Garner to death in New York, residents of Oakland prepared for the worst. There was a perception—not just in Oakland now, but around the country—that police were getting away with murder. It came as little surprise, then, when protesters blocked the I-580 freeway, rampaged through downtown Oakland, smashing windows and destroying property, and stormed police headquarters.

Much more surprising was the response. There were no rubber bullets this time. No flash-bang grenades. No injured bystanders choking the corridors of the local hospitals. The swift, harsh countermeasures so familiar from past confrontations never materialized. “The police showed remarkable restraint,” says Jim Chanin, the Oakland attorney whose decade-old lawsuit against the OPD started the whole, long frustrating effort to reform the city’s police. “I’m not going to declare victory, but I think we’ve turned a corner.”

Open In New Window OPTICS: On the Beat in Oakland (Click to view gallery.) | Brian L. Frank for Politico Magazine

And, he says, if Oakland—with its bloody, costly history of police brutality—can change, any city can.

***

Oakland has always been a magnet for radicals, its seemingly endemic poverty ripe for social activism and civil unrest. In the 19th century, longtime Oakland resident Jack London gave the city its first famous activist

The Black Panthers got their start there in the 1960s, and it was a base for the Hells Angels in the 1970s. Yet social turbulence is only a small part of what police have had to deal with. Illegal drugs spewed money and violence into the streets, contributing to crime statistics that are among the highest in the United States. (The city still is the most violent in California, and, in 2013, it reported the country’s highest robbery rate.)

Police saw themselves as involved in an us-or-them struggle, and they were determined to prevail—sometimes by any means necessary, provoking confrontations and creating a department culture that stood apart from the people they were supposed to protect.

For decades, the city’s police patrolled and tried to maintain order even as Oakland crumbled around them. In the early 1980s, the OPD engaged in a battle with a legendary drug kingpin named Felix Mitchell who reigned over a patch of East Oakland, killing off enemies who threatened his lucrative heroin trade, even as he doled out favors and cash to families in need. When Mitchell died in 1986, his coffin was paraded through town in a horse-drawn carriage, and thousands came out to pay their respects. Theatrics aside, the moment highlighted the depth of antipathy between police and residents, and exposed stark geographical and racial divisions.

The wealthy and mostly white residents of the Oakland hills and certain areas close to downtown lived far removed from the largely African-American and, more recently, Latino residents in East and West Oakland, often referred to as “the flats.” Vast tracts of bleak housing, freeways and industrial sites created a particularly nasty perception, often accurate, that poor blacks were suffering in the crime-infested freeway corridors while wealthy whites remained indifferent from their perches in the hills. Oakland was the ugly stepchild of the Bay Area.

That has begun to change recently as the city has attracted a wave of tech start-ups, and as urban professionals have fled the higher prices of San Francisco. Silicon Valley millionaires have started to buy properties in previously run-down neighborhoods, leading to charges of heartless gentrification but also injecting much-needed economic energy into the city. In 2010, Oakland had nearly 850 sworn officers on the street, but budget constraints during the recession led to heavy layoffs; now the numbers are slowly climbing back up. The department today has nearly 700 sworn officers, with an annual budget of $220 million. The numbers are probably still insufficient, but the hope is that more police on the street will make it easier for the department as a whole to engage with the most alienated parts of the community—not fight them. Still, large tracts of East and West Oakland remain contested zones, where issues of race, inequality and the role of police are deeply fraught.

Although the situation deteriorated steadily in the 1980s and 1990s, it wasn’t until early in this century that a series of disturbing allegations against the police shocked the system into action. The most serious legal troubles began in 2000, when a 21-year-old named Delphine Allen alleged that police brought him to a remote location and beat him while he was in handcuffs; he described being dragged under a freeway overpass and hit repeatedly on the soles of his feet with police batons. The Rough Riders case, as it came to be known, grew to include at least 119 plaintiffs—the vast majority of whom were people of color—all with similar complaints and stories of abuse.

The Riders case eventually resulted in two extensive trials during which four OPD officers were charged with kidnapping, planting evidence and beating witnesses. Of the four, three were acquitted. A fourth officer, Francisco Vasquez, fled the country and is now believed to be in hiding in Mexico; the FBI is searching for him. The more lasting impact of the Riders case, however, is a legal and judicial marathon now in its 12th year that has required the intervention of a district court judge, two outside monitoring teams, a compliance director, six police chiefs, four mayors and tens of millions of dollars in legal fees. The goal of it all has been to reinvent the police department—to prevent another Rough Riders case from ever happening again.

Jim Chanin and another Oakland civil rights attorney, John Burris, represented the plaintiffs in the Rough Riders case and have in the years since become the department’s most vocal and strident watchdogs. Originally from New York, Chanin studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and in the 1970s helped establish that city’s first Police Review Commission, giving citizens a role in oversight. He filed his first wrongful death suit against the OPD in 1979, just two years after he passed the California bar exam. Slight, with an almost manic energy, Chanin initially heard of the Riders abuse allegations from a whistleblower and from people calling his office claiming that police had planted drugs on them. Little by little, as more calls came in, “the depth and horror of it” became clear, he says.

When I spoke with Chanin about the case and his hopes for the OPD in 2011, he told me his efforts at reform had come to nothing, that the process was “a total nightmare” and that OPD might very well be “the worst department in the country.” In January of this year, Chanin chuckled when I reminded him of this. “If you had told me then that I was going to say this to you now, I would have laughed, but I do think there are some grounds for optimism,” he said. Instead of suing the department, he is now giving crowd-control classes to its officers.

Street Sense | According to a recent study, African Americans, who make up 38 percent of Oakland's roughly 400,000 residents, accounted for 62 percent of police stops during an eight-month period in 2013. At left, men watch passersby in Deep East Oakland; at right, police detain a woman in downtown Oakland. | Brian L. Frank for Politico Magazine

“It can happen,” he said. “But it’s really hard, and you have to be in it for the long haul.”

***

Chanin originally thought the Rough Riders case was so egregious that reform would be automatic, welcomed by a department that finally recognized how broken it was. He was, unfortunately, very wrong. In fact, it wasn’t until he and Burris had forced a $10.9 million settlement in the case that Oakland’s long journey toward police reform even really began. As part of the settlement, the city compelled the police to accept what’s known as a consent decree, a bureaucratic purgatory during which the department had to implement a series of institutional changes to improve its policing tactics. Failure to do so would result in the OPD being placed into federal receivership, meaning the federal government would take over the city’s police department. To comply, the department would have to implement 51 specific reforms, including eliminating racial profiling, curbing officer-involved shootings and improving data collection. Only when it had completed all 51 would it be in full compliance and free of the threat of receivership.

After the settlement, in early 2003, Chanin appeared side by side with then-Police Chief Richard Word and announced a new era of cooperation and civility. But it didn’t take Chanin long to conclude that the department wasn’t interested in reforming much of anything: A few months later, on April 7, Oakland police responded with overwhelming force to an anti-war protest at the Port of Oakland. Officers used rubber bullets and wooden pellets to quell the protests, shooting several longshoremen who were waiting to go to work. Chanin sued the city and won a $2 million settlement for those injured in the police response.

Other incidents of police misconduct continued to occur on a regular basis, even as the department declared its commitment to change. In 2005, 16 Asian-American women filed a suit claiming that an Oakland officer named Richard Valerga had pulled them over in 2004 and 2005 and sexually groped them while they sat in the front seat of his patrol car. Valerga eventually pleaded no contest to charges of false imprisonment and civil rights violations, and the city paid another $2 million settlement fee. Valerga resigned and spent six months in jail, a sentence Chanin found “woefully inadequate.”

Brooklyn by the Bay | One of America's busiest ports, Oakland has seen an influx of tech money in recent years, spawning hip new restaurants and business downtown, above. But the city remains divided between wealthier neighborhoods in the hills and poorer ones like in East Oakland. | Brian L. Frank for Politico Magazine

More cases followed. There was one in which several African-Americans filed lawsuits, claiming that the police were strip-searching them in public. (Chanin’s partner Burris won that case, too.) Then there were the officer-involved shootings, more than he can remember. There was the guy an officer shot in the back, the guy police shoved over a fence who broke his neck and became a quadriplegic. From 2000 to 2012, in fact, there were 87 officer-involved shootings in Oakland, 39 of them fatal. (San Francisco, by contrast, recorded 83 officer-involved shootings in the same time frame, despite the significantly larger population and larger police force.) At least 19 of the Oakland victims were unarmed, and nine were shot in the back while fleeing the scene. More worrisome than the sheer numbers, however, was the fact that two dozen Oakland police were involved in more than one shooting, suggesting an unaddressed pattern of abuse.

None of this was particularly secret in the city: At the time, I was a reporter at the Oakland Tribune and contributed to the compiling and reporting of this data. It seemed clear that the police were out of control—and the reform efforts were going nowhere.

“All these killings and beatings, all that was during the consent decree,” Chanin says. As part of the oversight process, two different monitoring teams were embedded within the department, and they gave periodic progress reports. “The monitor would put out reports, they’d be very negative, the police would promise not to do it anymore, and then they’d do it again,” Chanin says. “It was just continually repeated over and over and over again.”

By the time the Occupy protests began in 2011, the police department seemed no further along on its path to internal reforms than it had been when Chanin and Word announced a new dawn seven years earlier. Then, one night that October, an Oakland officer fired a beanbag at close range from a 12-gauge shotgun into a swollen crowd of Occupy protesters, hitting a 26-year-old Iraq War veteran named Scott Olsen in the head and shattering his skull. The surgeon who worked on Olsen later said that reconstructing his skull was like “trying to put a jigsaw puzzle together.” Chanin sued again, and again the city settled to avoid a lawsuit, this time for $4.5 million. “I never thought I’d work this long,” Chanin told me. “But it was disgusting, you know? Scott Olsen got part of his brains blown out. That was completely unacceptable and inappropriate, and the abuses just wouldn’t end.”

The next month, an officer beat a protester repeatedly with a baton, resulting in a $645,000 settlement. Chanin began to consider the merits of filing a motion that would finally send Oakland into full-blown receivership, which would make it the first police department in the country forced to surrender its command structure to federal oversight.

The Beat | After allegations of misconduct and more than a decade of federal monitoring, the Oakland Police have made an effort to engage more with the community. Above, an officer assists in a traffic stop near a housing project in West Oakland. | Brian L. Frank for Politico Magazine

Then, in 2012, Chanin visited Detroit. That city’s police had also come in for harsh criticism and had its own monitoring team. Chanin wanted to see it for himself. He also wanted to see what Robert Warshaw, a former Rochester, New York, police chief who had been appointed as the monitor in both cities, was accomplishing somewhere else.

As soon as he arrived in Detroit, Chanin realized that Oakland was far worse than he had imagined. The monitoring agreement in Detroit was much more stringent than in Oakland, yet the Detroit cops seemed to have embraced it fully. The compliance rate there was much higher than in Oakland—86 percent completion compared with 59 percent by the end of 2012.

Sitting on the plane heading home, Chanin, who is now 67, suddenly thought to himself: I just can’t do this anymore, I may not even live to see the end of this. “When I went to Detroit, I saw a city with less money, more crime, that they could get it done, and I realized that all the stuff I’d been told in Oakland—that I didn’t understand the crime, or that the problems couldn’t be solved—was simply not true.”

The difference was that the cops in Detroit had decided they wanted to reform. In Oakland, Chanin said, “They just didn’t want to do it.”

His hunch was confirmed a few weeks later when Chanin ran into Richard Word, the former police chief with whom he had settled back in 2003.

“Hey, are you guys still doing that consent decree?” Word asked. When Chanin replied that they were, Word just shook his head. “God,” he said, “we never thought you’d do it.” Chanin thought about the exchange for a long time and eventually concluded that Word and the other police brass in charge at the time of the consent decree thought the case would fizzle out—that Chanin and Burris would never follow through. (Word recalls the moment slightly differently. “I probably said something like I never believed it would go so long. ... I still think it’s a good agreement. I just think its implementation and oversight has been a challenge; it’s difficult to change the culture of an organization.”)

No one questioned that the resistance was real; the police rank and file at times seemed to delight in sticking their thumbs in the eyes of city leaders and those whose job it was to enforce the monitoring regime. In 2012, photos inside police headquarters depicting Mayor Jean Quan, a Chinese-American woman, and Judge Thelton Henderson, the African-American overseeing the decree, were defaced in a manner that internal affairs “found to be racist, insulting and inappropriate,” according to a report from the independent monitor. The report said such action struck “at the heart” of the negotiated settlement agreement.

Chanin and Burris had had enough. In October 2012, the two lawyers filed the necessary papers to put the police department into full federal receivership with Judge Henderson. But before he had a chance to rule, Chanin and Burris finally reached a compromise with the powerful police union, allowing stronger oversight powers. In the settlement, the lawyers agreed to limit their disciplinary action to the top brass of the police department, and in exchange, the union—which represented the rank and file—agreed not to oppose them. The city could now hire a compliance director with the power to fire the chief and his deputies.

Line of Fire | In 2014, homicides in Oakland declined for the second year in a row, to 86, but gang activity and street shootings remain a problem. Above, mourners visit the memorial of Bay Area rapper “The Jacka,” who was shot by an unidentified gunman in February, reportedly while he was rapping with friends in a van. | Brian L. Frank for Politico Magazine

***

Change finally arrived at the top of the Oakland police in the unexpected form of a baby-faced young internal affairs officer named Sean Whent. In May 2013, Chief Howard Jordan had taken early retirement, and all but one person on his command staff was demoted. Then, in early 2014, the judge overseeing the consent decree fired Thomas Frazier, the compliance director he had hired the year before, and gave monitor Robert Warshaw full control over the department. That set the stage for the new chief, 39-year-old Whent, who quickly made it clear that compliance with the consent decree was going to be a priority.

Chanin had dealt with Whent before and was impressed with his courage while investigating officers during his time in internal affairs. “All of a sudden, I heard this guy who turned out to be Sean Whent, and he was asking really probing questions, and I went, ‘Who was this?’” Chanin told reporters when the new chief was chosen in 2014. “He wanted to know the truth.” Whent had also worked in criminal investigation, patrol and the office of the inspector general. Straight-talking and blunt, the 19-year veteran of the department beat out 27 other candidates from around the country for the job of top cop, and was promoted from interim chief to chief in 2014. He told the San Francisco Chronicle that he was inspired to become a police officer by listening to his grandmother’s scanner as a boy. “Oakland is a complex and colorful city full of possibilities,” Whent told reporters when his new promotion was announced, “and the Oakland Police Department must play a key role in the success of the city.”

The new leadership helped, but Chanin and Burris also finally started playing hardball. The department had owned lapel cameras for years but never used them much. Now Chanin said that unless cops began using them more, and more effectively, he would talk to Henderson about “creating a scenario where if you didn’t use a camera, the presumption was that you did what the complainant said you did.” In other words, the cops would be guilty until proven innocent.

Lapel camera usage quickly shot up—exactly the kind of critical reform that President Barack Obama would mention months later in the wake of the Ferguson shooting. There were other changes, too. New training procedures, both in the academy and on the job, stress de-escalation of potentially violent interactions. There are more frontline supervisors deployed in the field, and many officers have started attending a procedural justice course in which community members and police can interact. “It took a few years to adjust and get everybody doing the right thing,” Whent told me. “Now it’s more of an organizational philosophy, and we’ve made it one of the highest priorities.”

Chanin and Burris now say they’ve seen confidential data indicating that complaints against the police have fallen at least 40 percent in the past year. What’s more, the department went nearly two years without an officer-involved shooting from May 2013 until early in February this year. There were no shootings at all in 2014, whereas from 2000 to 2012, there was an average of eight such shootings a year. Two shootings occurred this February. In one, early on the morning of February 7, two Oakland officers responded to a call about a psychiatric crisis and encountered a man who tried to strike them with two golf clubs; the officers fired at him—but didn’t end up injuring the suspect. He was successfully restrained, the officers’ body cameras were on and functioning correctly, and police leaders quickly released detailed information to the public. It really did seem like a corner had been turned.

New Chief | “This is not something that we are going to fix in a couple of months,” Police Chief Sean Whent, left, said after taking over in 2014. “But ultimately I think that a lot of this has to do with the community's trust in the police department—we've really started to work on that.” At right, a commuter walks up the escalator at an Oakland BART station. | Brian L. Frank for Politico Magazine

Even so, critics maintain that too much of the change in OPD is merely cosmetic, that the fundamental character of the police department remains hostile to the community and overly reliant on force. “The culture of the department has reinforced the traditional code of silence so that even officers who really disliked what the current guys were doing had a complete inability to change it or squash it,” says one former OPD officer who requested anonymity, fearing for his well-being. “The management is pushing for reform and trying to get things done, but the officers think they know better. They think they know what’s best … and that any attempt at oversight is an attempt to prevent them from doing what they’re supposed to do.” When I asked former chief Word whether the OPD’s culture was resistant to change, he still harbored some hesitations about the effectiveness of the consent decree. “I don’t know if you change a culture if you’re standing over somebody with a hammer over their head,” he said.

The intersection of race and policing remains tense—even in a city focused closely on reform. On the long list of compliance tasks, only one now remains, and it concerns racial bias: “test 34,” which refers to the “stop data” that police gather after traffic stops, arrests and detentions. Late last year, a study revealed that African-Americans, who make up roughly 28 percent of Oakland’s population, account for about 62 percent of police stops. But the “yield” from those stops—the amount of contraband—was no higher for African-Americans than any other group. “It means a large number of African-Americans are being stopped and searched without any recovery,” Burris says. “We’re trying to get to the roots of that because the mandate is to reduce racial profiling.”

While racial tensions clearly exist in the OPD’s force, which is 18 percent black, many firmly believe the color that overrides everything is blue—that the police will protect their own no matter what. Whent, the new chief, disputes that and other criticisms, saying the culture of the OPD is slowly but surely changing for the better. “In the past, chiefs would say compliance is one of our top priorities. But we don’t talk about compliance [now]. We talk about improving our relationship with the community,” he told me recently. “A lot is about treating people with respect, being fair in how you deal with people and situations. We stress that instead of compliance for compliance’s sake. So yes, there’s a culture change going on.”

Not long ago, the Reverend Harry Williams Jr. attended a hush-hush meeting with police and community members at the Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church. An outspoken advocate for the mostly African-American and Latino residents of his own neighborhood, he had been invited by police to the church to participate in a quarterly “Call-In,” a key element of Operation Ceasefire, an anti-violence initiative that had been underway in Oakland since 2012.

Every few months since the program’s inception, a group of city leaders, attorneys, police and community activists like Williams had been meeting face-to-face with the targets of Operation Ceasefire—usually high-profile suspected criminals, known as “shot callers”—in a bid to end inner-city bloodshed. The shot callers were given assurances they wouldn’t be arrested or harassed at the meetings. The assembled city leadership, in turn, delivered a carrot-and-stick message: Help stop the killing, and we will help you succeed in life, with jobs, training and financial aid; ignore our offer, and we will come after you with everything we have.

Oakland's City Hall. | Brian L. Frank for Politico Magazine

On this particular July night, Williams recalls, Assistant Police Chief Paul Figueroa took the podium. Unlike the majority of Oakland’s police force, Figueroa is a native of the city. “This is a final opportunity for you to change who you are,” he began. “We’re gonna come after you. We’re committed to stopping violence, and we understand you may be at the center of that violence.” He paused and then continued. “Our goal is not to just lock people up, we want people to thrive, and we care about you and your children. And I love you,” he said. “I love you.”

Williams, along with nearly everyone else in the room, looked on in stunned silence. Never before had they heard a cop address anyone—least of all known criminals—so thoughtfully, or tenderly. Eventually, a few people started clapping. “Wow,” Williams remembered. “That cop said he loved us. I was shocked. And it didn’t make him appear weak. It made him appear strong. … He wasn’t an outsider speaking to people he didn’t know. He was speaking as an officer of the law and as someone who grew up in the community, as someone intricately involved in the community itself.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story said incorrectly that Jim Chanin won a lawsuit against the OPD for public strip searches. It was Chanin’s partner John Burris who won the case.