The are eight million stories in The Naked City, and some of them really, well, suck. The East Bay Express has brought us an incredible—in the fullest sense of the word—story of alleged police misconduct of the most grotesque kind.

The OPD and other East Bay law-enforcement agencies have positioned themselves as national leaders in the fight against human trafficking and the sexual abuse of children. But O'Brien and other East Bay cops betrayed this reputation with their exploitation of Guap. Officers trafficked her among their ranks and used the minor for sex for half a year. The scandal is unprecedented: According to multiple sources close to the department and the city of Oakland, and documents obtained by the Express, at least fourteen Oakland police officers, three Richmond police, four Alameda County sheriff's deputies, and a federal officer took advantage of the teenager. (The Express is not publishing her real name because she was a minor when her abuse began.) Three Oakland police officers committed statutory rape of Guap when she was under-age. By the state's legal definition, they engaged in human trafficking. The victim says every law-enforcement agent who had sex with her knew she was a sex worker.

By all accounts, the Oakland P.D. has done a great job trying to break the back of the child sex-trafficking industry in the Bay Area. But this seems to be one of those problems that have bedeviled vice cops since the dawn of time, the morals-division equivalent of narcs who get into peddling the product. And, of course, once the scandal begins to break, there is the traditional covering of the hindquarters, the big blue wall goes up around the brothel.

Even state officials' eyes are now on Oakland and the East Bay. "The allegations of misconduct, if true, are disturbing and reflect a serious breach of the trust placed in law enforcement by the communities we are sworn to serve," said Kristin Ford, a spokeswoman for California Attorney General Kamala Harris. "There must be swift accountability for any wrongdoing." But OPD has dragged its feet. Multiple department supervisors knew about Guap's abuse by Oakland cops last year, yet did not report it. In fact, according to interviews with the victim and other city and OPD sources, department higher-ups repeatedly failed to report Guap's exploitation.

Now, the police chief has quit, and there are ominous rumblings about the feds coming in to run the department.

The attorney argued that the scandalous behavior and botched investigations show that OPD is not remotely close to completing its federal reforms. "Without the [Negotiated Settlement Agreement and federal oversight], none of this would have happened and this poor woman would have been exploited without any consequences to the officers who did it," Chanin said…"In my 38-and-a-half years of litigation involving the Oakland Police Department, I've never seen behavior like this," he said. "One or two outliers is understandable in a large organization. But the number here is completely unacceptable." He said the first step for the city is to try to correct the hiring and recruitment process. If that doesn't happen, he said, "The next step is to ask for this to be put under the compliance director and court oversight." If this happens, the OPD would be the biggest local law-enforcement agency in the state to go under federal receivership.

Sometimes, I wonder how the good cops, all of them, get up in the morning and go to work. There's something amazingly selfless in there that's beyond my understanding.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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