Who's Job Is It?
[June 5, 2008]

            I read the comments by Pete Barnett and San Sebastian, and the separate post by Brain Thiem [all pasted below].  Both seem to have one commonality... that a Chief should be able to do his/her job.  In fact, it should be fairly easy to rate any Chief's effectiveness by simply seeing whether, given certain factors to be taken into account, like demographics and secular crime trends, the City is safer, the same, or worse off with respect to the crime rate... particularly the violent crime rate.

            While in previous essays I've gone into excruciating detail from many perspectives to demonstrate that our current Chief has not been up to the job, the two posts highlight the obvious.  In the first (Barnett and Sebastian), they only scratched the surface of the "oversight" debacle at OPD.  How about the 14 members of the Office of Inspector General devoted full time to oversight?  They have been actually doing the day to day "auditing" that the NSA Monitors were hired to do.  How about the various assignments of sworn personnel who are charged with full time and part time Internal Affairs work who are not part of IA? Then, how about all the people working on specifically catering to the wishes of the NSA Monitors with respect to General Orders and other documentation?  It took almost two years to come up with a Use of Force Policy, 68 separate renditions, some as many as 143 pages, and over a dozen people having direct hands-on.  If that isn't enough oversight for you, how about every Sergeant, Lieutenant, Captain and Deputy Chief who must daily take part in more active investigations of other officers than for a homicide case.  They listen to many hours of audio tapes, pore through documents, conduct interviews, make out reports, and the result is to put a huge damper on general initiative.  All eyes of OPD are on a very small ball, while distracted from seeing the huge expansion of violent crimes. 

            The sad part is that there are no metrics presented by anyone concerned.  The first thing any Chief should have done is establish a baseline of "corruption, brutality, and racism" that the Judge and the NSA lawyers and Monitors surely believe was rampant.  After all, why should the taxpayers pay $50 million to $60 million to "reform" the OPD unless this was the case.  What does any doctor do after hearing complaints that might be serious or become more serious?  Tucker could/should have ordered such an action the first day in office.  Instead, he jumped on the "assumption" band wagon.  Everyone should recall that the "consent decree" had no acknowledgement by the OPD that such behavior was factual. Talking of metrics?  Why aren't the semi-annual reports of the monitors talking about progress in terms of "corruption, brutality and racism?"  It is an entirely secret inquisition.  Most informal discussions seem to indicate that they haven't found any indication of prevalent or even problematic misbehavior.  There are reports that most of the complaints are trivial, unsubstantiated, anonymous, ambulance-chased, and that many of them are even one employee angry at another.  Troublesome are reports that bad people in the streets know the routine of the exaggerated complaint process and use it as a nefarious tool against police officers.  This has been reported by many on OPD.  How about a report card of quantitative and qualitative results of the NSA work over the past 5 years?

            As for all the committees, including the City Council, who are constantly engaged and distracted trying to find out what the Chief is doing, they are that busy because they can't get a handle on what's going on.  The Chief makes unsubstantiated generalized claims and double-speaks with rationalizations.  We could double the task forces, outside consultants, oversight committees, and it wouldn't do any good because there is no informed data or staff apparatus to compile it.  There is silent but serious consternation at the highest ranks that Chief Tucker can't intellectualize any significant writing, planning or direction himself.  If that isn't convincing enough, the current Chief has demonstrated that he knows so little about OPD, Oakland, and urban policing issues, that his role has been abdicated to an ineffective committee that has formed in the vacuum.  Because he hasn't done his job, there is now an Assistant Chief and a Public Safety Director.  Also, there's the City Administrator's staff and her hired attorneys who write the major works for this Chief and dictate the muddled direction of OPD.  There's also the City Attorney who has taken a substantial bite out of the OPD pie to do their work.  There are lots of visiting Indians and no Chief for Public Safety in Oakland.

            The NSA bungling is just another indication of the ineffective leadership, gross mismanagement of resources, and results that completely missed the mark.  I've written that the NSA is in fact not an onerous burden on OPD by any means.  In fact, private business has to contend with infinitely more and increasingly meddlesome interference such as environmental edicts, lawsuits, many layers of governmental and regulatory prescriptions and proscriptions, and endless activist groups with influence, not to mention stockholders and public opinion.  OPD has had only one minor Negotiated Settlement Agreement to contend with and Chief Tucker inflated it as if trying to graft a St. Bernard tail on a flea problem.  There are many who say that all of Chief Tucker's excuses are running out except one.  All of his excuses (short-staffing, powerful police union, lack of money, insufficient facilities, etc.... have been debunked).  The one excuse he still has is the NSA.  He apparently has the full support of Judge Henderson and the NSA lawyers and staff.  However, if they only knew how ineffectively and contrarily Chief Tucker has administered their expectations they would drop him like a hot potato.  It is safe to say that almost all on OPD are not injected at all with the NSA vaccine.  They simply feel it has been a waste of time, irrelevant, and incredible.  They also feel that the mismanagement of the NSA, not the intent of it, has led to extreme lack of initiative and thus severe de-policing.  I'll get into more of this in a follow-up essay specifically on the NSA, but if this is the last straw that is keeping Chief Tucker in office, it is a very frail one.

            Suffice it to say, that the failure of the NSA to effectively and constructively influence OPD is actually another indication of Chief Tucker's failures [similar to the Paradigm Escalation of Violent Crimes], and certainly not reason to keep him on.

            We don't need an Assistant Chief, a Public Safety Director, a meddling City Council, many oversight committees, task forces, a City Attorney, a distracted Mayor, and many frustrated and desperate citizens all wondering what to do about how OPD should be organized and deployed.  That's one person's role, and considering the extent of the maelstrom of oversight taking place, Chief Tucker is certainly not doing his job.  How many fans and shareholders in outside settings would have put up with such a losing record?

            As for Brian Thiem's post, he is the utmost in par excellence at OPD.  He's retired now, but as a revered homicide commander and watch commander (and hero at Iraq), he is the consummate resource for taking the pulse at OPD.  He's retired in Connecticut, and I've only met him in person once, but I have a doting affection for him as having intimate, relevant, and credible insight.  He's an intellectual warrior.  I read his post as indicating that we should have only one Chief of Police in Oakland.  I agree wholeheartedly.  There are now many hands in the kitchen, tearing at pages for recipes, fingers in the ingredients, and broken eggs all over the floor.  When Chief Tucker told the Mayor that he has to break eggs to make an omelet, and I told them that first the lights must be turned on in the kitchen, I was right.  The lights are out, everyone is hungry for public safety, all are groping in the dark, and Oakland citizens are left starving for Public Safety. 

ronoz

From: PSA3@yahoogroups.com [mailto:PSA3@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Peter D. Barnett
Sent: Wednesday, June 04, 2008 9:56 PM
To: PSA3@yahoogroups.com; glen friends
Subject: Re: [PSA3] From Jeff Loman to the City Administrator

I went to the community summit meeting last Saturday.  It was a nicely organized affair, with a fair number of participants and a variety of programs presented throughout the day.  One of the programs I attended was presented by the Community Policing Task Force(CPTF) on the subject of, you guessed it, community policing.  Don Link provided a excellent summary of the history of community policing in Oakland, including his impression that the current OPD administration does not entirely support the concept.

But listening to the people on CPTF I started thinking about the number of oversight committees and the impact of these on the OPD.  There are the CPTF, the Community Policing Advisory Board, the Measure Y Oversight Committee, the police watchdog committee established by the consent decree, the 24 member internal affairs unit of the police department, the council's public safety committee plus the normal amount of executive, legislative, judicial and command oversight of the police department that exists. 

This amount of oversight must be nearly paralyzing to the poor cop on the street.  On the one hand, there are groups who want community policing; on the other had there are groups who want quick response when they call the cops.  You can't have both.  The community policing officers do not respond to calls for service, except in extreme cases.  If the calls for service are given priority, the community policing suffers, and vice versa.

As Ronoz pointed out in an essay recently, OPD does not suffer from short staffing - it suffers more from inefficient deployment and poor prioritization.  But with all of the oversight from outside the department, deployment and prioritization are no longer the prerogatives of the professional police, they become mandates by political or judicial imperatives.

The recent stories out of the Chicago Police Department, which mimic closely the "Riders"  activities in Oakland (and are not too much different from what Saint Bratton did in NYC) demonstrate the  cost  of effective law enforcement.  It seems to me the solution to these problems situations, like Chicago and Oakland, resides not with oversight committees and consent decrees, but with effective police management and city government.

Two things I did NOT get out of the program by the CPTF was a description of typical response of community policing officers to situations that they might encounter (like a sudden spike in some crime type) and any criteria by which the success of community policing is measured.  It would seem to me that to function as an oversight committee (by whatever name), there must be some way of measuring the success, or lack thereof, of whatever is being overseen.  If  measures of success are not spelled out, how can anyone determine priorities, determine deployment strategies, or evaluate the success of any prioritization or deployment decisions.

Pete Barnett
San Sebastian


--- In PSA3@yahoogroups.com, "Brian Thiem" <brian.thiem@...> wrote:
>
> In my humble opinion, the last thing OPD needs is another person, committee,
> task force, board, judge, attorney or other entity to tell the Chief what to
> do and hold him accountable. The Chief reports to the City Administrator.
> She is his boss. The City Administrator reports to the Mayor and the
> Council. If the City Administrator is not holding the Chief accountable to
> the satisfaction of the Mayor and Council, then fire her and get someone
> there who can do it. If the Chief is not performing to the satisfaction of
> the City Administrator, then she should fire him and get someone there who can.