Under a blue sky and before a line of trees, stand four people on a city street — two white men in gray suits on the left, a shorter Black woman next to them with a green jacket and dark slacks and a brown man in a black suit on the far right.

Oakland Police Department leaves two decades of federal oversight, shifts to sustaining reforms

A federal judge on Tuesday lifted 23 years of federal oversight of the Oakland Police Department, returning full control to the city and ending the longest-running federal oversight case of a police department in U.S. history. U.S. District Judge William Orrick said the department had sufficiently complied with 52 court-ordered reform tasks agreed to in 2003, which stemmed from a civil rights lawsuit brought by 119 plaintiffs that alleged brutality by four police officers known as the “Riders,” including beatings,…

By on September 30, 2026