Oakland Police Department can’t escape oversight—one man stands in the way

Federal monitor Robert Warshaw has a long history of exploiting distressed cities for personal financial gain. Is he doing it to Oakland?

In the past five years, Oakland Police Department (OPD) has cycled through five different police chiefs. It has one of the lowest crime clearance rates in California by a large margin. Its 911 emergency response time, which averaged one minute last year, remains far worse than the state standard of 15 seconds. Two of its recent former police chiefs (Anne Kirkpatrick and LeRonne Armstrong) have sued the city for wrongful termination. And Governor Newsom, who has repeatedly lambasted the department for poor performance, has extended California Highway Patrol deployment to Oakland—underscoring just how dramatic is OPD’s underperformance.

What explains this near-total collapse of operational effectiveness? Oakland’s ongoing budget crisis—which has severely cut police staffing—and its long-running crime wave are certainly accelerants. But a deeper explanation is the debilitating loss of internal morale, which OPD’s new chief, Floyd Mitchell, recently described to the Oakland Police Commission: “The culture and conditioning of our police department is one of fear…[OPD officers] fear doing their job.”

Data source: California Open Justice Portal

This culture of fear is not incidental. It is the product of a deliberate effort to strip OPD of its ability to self-govern, and to place it under a regime of adversarial external oversight. That effort is conducted through a decades-long federal monitorship and at least seven competing layers of community, council and mayoral control.¹ Its officers operate under constant scrutiny, aware that even minor procedural missteps could trigger lengthy third-party investigations and disciplinary action. In 2024 alone, there were 1508 cases filed against OPD’s force of 710 sworn officers—nearly all of which were eventually dismissed.

The man at the helm of this external oversight regime is Federal Monitor Robert Warshaw. Under an OPD misconduct settlement reached in 2003, Warshaw has authority both to set various reform tasks for OPD and judge its compliance with them, even though he reportedly spends almost no time in Oakland. The City of Oakland pays Warshaw over $1 million annually—lucrative compensation that ensures he has no incentive to remove OPD from oversight as long as he is professionally active.

To keep OPD indefinitely under his thumb, Warshaw deploys tactics that he has perfected over decades of consulting work in police departments nationwide: pedantic enforcement of compliance with intentionally subjective criteria like “cultural change,” and direct retaliation against department leaders who challenge his near total authority.

Origins of the compliance regime

OPD’s compliance regime dates to 2003, when Oakland agreed to a Negotiated Settlement Agreement (NSA), a broad list of OPD procedural changes, as part of its resolution of the civil rights lawsuit stemming from the “Riders” police misconduct scandal of the late 1990s. Hundreds of plaintiffs complained that a clique of four veteran OPD officers (the “Night Riders”) had systematically planted evidence on, kidnapped, and/or beaten them without cause—abuses which had reportedly come to administrators’ attention after a rookie officer reported them to OPD’s Internal Affairs Division. The scandal exposed a dysfunctional internal culture in desperate need of reform.

The NSA—composed of 51 tasks spanning internal affairs, officer supervision, use of force, training, personnel and community policing—laid the groundwork for that reform. Conceived as a cooperative partnership between a team of independent monitors, a federal judge, and OPD, it was expected to end in 2008. The City of Oakland agreed to pay its implementation costs, which most thought would exceed no more than a few million dollars. The agreement built in checks and balances to assure aligned incentives; OPD’s internal affairs unit would investigate allegations of officer misconduct, the judicially appointed internal monitors would assess its progress on the NSA tasks, and the federal judge would use this assessment to determine whether OPD was ready to exit oversight.

In practice, none of this worked out as intended. Two decades hence and Oakland remains under federal oversight, spending tens of millions of dollars on compliance costs with no finish line in sight. It is still technically out of compliance with the NSA, according to Warshaw, despite having repeatedly completed all but one or two of the given tasks.

The supposedly robust system of checks and balances is non-existent. Warshaw both sets the compliance requirements for OPD and determines whether the department has met them—a clear conflict of interest. In this capacity, he can fire police chiefs (as he has on multiple occasions²), intervene directly in OPD hiring decisions, and invoke even minor claims of misconduct to extend compliance indefinitely. The longer he extends the oversight, the longer he gets paid.

How Warshaw gained unchecked power over OPD

Warshaw has served as OPD's sole independent monitor since 2010, when he replaced the NSA's original four-person monitoring team and promised to help OPD “quickly and professionally overcome” the remaining compliance roadblocks.

By 2014, Northern District Judge Thelton Henderson, who oversaw the NSA agreement, had grown frustrated with OPD’s slow progress toward compliance.³ He considered placing the department into a federal receivership—a dramatic move that would have given a court-appointed official complete control over OPD’s personnel, budget, and operations.

Instead, Henderson decided to create a new position, “Compliance Director”, to which he initially appointed Thomas Frazier, a former Baltimore Police Commissioner. But after Warshaw released a report claiming that the NSA reform effort had actually regressed since Frazier’s appointment, Henderson fired Frazier, declared that the dual monitor and compliance director roles were “unnecessarily duplicative,” and assigned Warshaw to a new post that consolidated both positions. This consolidation granted Warshaw unprecedented authority to both define OPD’s reform targets and judge compliance—extraordinary power that quickly lent itself to extraordinary abuse.

Warshaw’s tactics

Warshaw maintains control over OPD through two tactics: (1) application of deliberately subjective criteria like “cultural change” to postpone NSA compliance and indefinitely extend his oversight, and (2) direct retaliation against department leaders who criticize his methods (eliminating threats to his authority.

Early in his tenure as monitor, Warshaw signaled that he would use a broader interpretation of NSA compliance than his predecessors. As he wrote in his first report, “Our role as a monitoring team is not simply to wade through the particulars of the NSA… [but to] engage OPD in a critical self-examination of its policies, procedures, and operations” (emphasis mine). This psycho-social framing of compliance as “self-examination” serves a clear strategic purpose: It gives Warshaw perpetual justification for extending oversight.

For instance, in his December 2023 quarterly report, Warshaw reported that OPD was in compliance with all NSA items except for Task 45: Consistency of Discipline Policy, which requires that the “discipline is imposed in a fair and consistent manner.” Warshaw had reactivated this item (which was previously compliant) after reading a 2022 report from OPD’s Office of Internal Accountability alleging that OPD punished black officers more harshly than their white counterparts for unintentionally failing to report complaints.

In his report, Warshaw recognized that OPD had already “addressed this issue, through both analysis and policy” but insisted that “it must strive to address the cultural issues which, when unaddressed, perpetuated actual or perceived disparities.” Warshaw acknowledges OPD’s proactive and measurable self-correction but then insists that there remains intangible, unmeasurable work to be done as justification for indefinitely extended oversight.

This wasn’t the first time Warshaw used this maneuver. In early 2022, after declaring OPD was just one task away from completing NSA reforms, Warshaw abruptly extended his monitorship indefinitely when reports emerged that an off-duty OPD officer had allegedly hit a parked car without reporting it, and a detective was accused of bribery.

These sudden reversals undoubtedly demoralize officers, who repeatedly see Warshaw seize upon isolated allegations as pretexts to extend oversight.

When OPD leadership challenges Warshaw on his behavior, he retaliates harshly. In 2018, after officers fatally shot an armed white homeless man, Warshaw skewered then chief Anne Kirkpatrick’s “incompetent” failure to discipline them. In his rambling report that invoked John Donne’s poetry, Rodney King, and Black Lives Matter, Warshaw wrote: “In Oakland, beatings, unlawful detentions, and the planting of evidence that led to the 2003 [NSA] that continues to this day.” In other words, he claimed that this use of force incident proved nothing had changed in Oakland since the Riders.

After Kirkpatrick was fired, she accused Warshaw of prioritizing “his annual seven-figure fees” over public safety and sued the city for wrongful termination. Kirkpatrick won the suit, vindicated by a 9-member jury who found she was fired in retaliation for her statements.

Separately, a judge later ruled that the five officers involved in the 2018 shooting, whom Warshaw had also fired, were also wrongfully terminated. Warshaw had unilaterally fired these officers despite findings of no wrongdoing by the District Attorney, the City Attorney, a retired federal judge, two civilian investigators who worked for the Police Commission, and 10 independent attorneys.

More recently, in 2023, chief LeRonne Armstrong was fired by former Mayor Sheng Thao for allegedly mishandling police misconduct cases. Armstrong accused Thao and Warshaw of retaliating against him for his criticisms of Warshaw. Armstrong was subsequently cleared of wrongdoing by an independent arbitrator.

A pattern of exploitation

Oakland isn’t the only city where Warshaw has run this playbook. In fact, over the past three decades, he has managed to carve out a lucrative professional niche for himself as a traveling law enforcement consultant specializing in open-ended compliance work.

In 2009, after a decade of working on various DOJ police monitoring teams, Warshaw and two other ex-law enforcement officers incorporated “Police Performance Solutions,” a boutique consulting firm focused on “reducing [law enforcement agencies’] exposure to unacceptable risk while effectively carrying out their critically important mission of protecting the public.” The group immediately landed a coveted deal—an indefinite monitoring arrangement with the Detroit Police Department, which had agreed to oversight after a DOJ investigation in 2003 determined Detroit officers had illegally detained and used excessive force on suspects.

For five years, Warshaw and his firm invoiced Detroit almost $90,000 a month to produce quarterly reports documenting DPD’s progress implementing various parts of the settlement. Eventually, a federal judge intervened and released the department from oversight, overriding Warshaw’s persistent claims of outstanding concerns.

But Warshaw quickly found new monitoring jobs in Oakland, the Niagara Falls Police Department (where he quickly became the bête noire of local reporters), and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office. In Maricopa, Warshaw sparked outrage after it emerged that his firm had collected $26 million in remote consulting fees over a four year contract. Warshaw had apparently only been to Maricopa County two times in those four years.

It’s time to end the reign of Warshaw

The long decades of Warshaw’s regime have left OPD demoralized and fractured, and Oakland residents paying the price for unaddressed crime. In theory, federal judge William Orrick has the ultimate say over whether Oakland remains under monitorship, but he appears to have delegated this authority to Warshaw's team, whom he has called the "eyes and ears of the court" and said he has "complete faith in." It’s unclear what it would take to change Orrick’s perception of Warshaw, but Detroit shows that he can be removed. Almost 25 years into the post-NSA era, it’s just a question of when.

Tags: Police

1. These include the Oakland Police Commission, the Community Police Review Agency, the Privacy Advisory Commission, the Public Safety and Services Oversight Commission, the City Council Public Safety Committee, and the Mayor

2. Warshaw has been directly involved in the firing of OPD chiefs Sean Whent, Anne Kirkpatrick, and LeRonne Armstrong.

3. By 2014, OPD had achieved compliance with most of the NSA tasks, a substantial accomplishment given Warshaw’s notoriously strict standards.