Oakland police meet 51 settlement goals, move toward leaving two decades of federal oversight

The Oakland Police Department may be four months away from independence, after a federal judge in San Francisco on Wednesday found it had met all the goals spelled out in 2003, when a federal monitor was assigned to oversee a cultural shift in a police force then known for discrimination and brutality.

“It’s never going to be mission accomplished,” U.S. District Court Judge William H. Orrick said at the case management conference, which was attended by Mayor Barbara Lee, interim police Chief James Beere and other city leaders. “It is something that just has to be done every day.”

Orrick was satisfied that the department had fulfilled the final three sticking points, which pertained to the requirement that most internal affairs investigations be completed in 180 days; that citizens’ complaints be quickly brought to supervisors’ attention and documented; and that discipline be meted out fairly to officers, regardless of race or gender.

But the department isn’t in the clear yet. Orrick set what may be the final case management conference for Sept. 29.

The goals were established as part of a negotiated settlement agreement between more than 100 plaintiffs in a lawsuit that alleged Oakland officers Matthew Hornung, Jude Siapno, Francisco Vazquez, and Clarence “Chuck” Mabanag, a group known as the “Riders,” were responsible for kidnapping and brutalizing people and planting evidence. All four were fired and criminally charged. Three of the officers were acquitted of most counts. The alleged ringleader, Vazquez, fled before the trial and is still sought by the FBI. 

In addition to agreeing to reform its Police Department, the city paid $10.9 million to settle the case.

“This forward progress belongs to the entire city,” Lee said in court, crediting the Police Department, civilian oversight of the department, city leaders past and present, and residents who fought to hold the department accountable.

The two attorneys who brought the case — John Burris and James Chanin — were more cautious in their remarks.

Chanin pointed out that just two years ago, the federal monitor found great disparity in the way internal affairs investigators discplined officers, with nearly half of the cases against Black officers and more than a quarter brought against Hispanic officers sustained, while no cases were sustained against white officers. While there was less disparity in the 2025 report, Chanin said a “double standard” remained.

Burris stressed that it took longer than anyone expected to meet the settlement goals, which are intended to sustain the department well into the future.

‘What we tried to do here is pave the way for the next generation of people,” he said. “And I hope, hope, hope, that when this is done, whenever that is, we have done exactly that.”

Lee, who has been mayor for less than a year, said the current department is very different from the one that sparked the case. Changing an institution, she noted, takes considerable time.

She added that if something “unfortunate” occurs, the city will be transparent about it. “We’re here to prove to this court and to every resident of Oakland that these charges are not a snapshot in time,” she said.

Orrick, who has been overseeing the case for the past nine years, inheriting it from U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson, said that city leadership has made the biggest difference in the case, “for good or ill.”

In 2023, he said there remained a “cultural rot” keeping true reform from happening in the department. That year, then-Mayor Sheng Thao took office, only to be indicted on federal corruption charges to years later. And then-Chief LeRonne Armstrong was fired over his handling of two internal investigations.

On Wednesday, Orrick said that in the past year, the city’s commitment has been clear.

“Things will go wrong, and that’s just part of institutions,” he said. “But it is having the structures set up, having the accountability to ensure that the city knows what’s going on at OPD and vice versa, and people aren’t pointing fingers at each other but are trying to meet those goals — all of that is critical.”

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