OAKLAND — With two decades of federal oversight likely to be extended next week, new data reveal that efforts by the Oakland Police Department to diversify its ranks are falling significantly short.
A recent internal survey found that nearly half the women officers in the department said that they had personally experienced harassment or discrimination. The same number of respondents, 45%, said they had witnessed others being harassed or facing discrimination, and close to a third of those officers said it happened “often” or “very often.”
More than half of those officers, meanwhile, said they are not satisfied with how well women are represented at OPD.
The survey, published last month, is part of the “30×30 pledge” that police departments across the country have adopted internally to reach 30% female academy recruits by the year 2030.
Only 14% of OPD officers last year identified as women, though that’s still a percentage point higher than the national average in 2021. And they occupy only 10.5% of current supervisor positions.
“It’s a cliché, but (OPD) is a good-old-boys club,” said Cat Brooks, an organizer with the Anti Police-Terror Project. “In addition to being a racist institution, it’s one that’s borne out of white-male patriarchal violence.”
Results of the survey, conducted late last year by OPD’s office of internal accountability, were made public by the city ahead of a court hearing next week where Judge William Orrick is expected to extend federal oversight of the embattled department, which has gone through a slew of police chiefs over the past decade.
“The Department aims to increase its sworn female ranks generally, as well as increase the representation of women in supervisory and commander roles,” reads the city’s pre-hearing statement.
Diversity within OPD’s ranks has been a concern ever since a settlement in the infamous Riders brutality cases — which included issues of racial profiling — first brought the department under oversight 20 years ago.
Civil-rights attorneys for the plaintiffs in the Riders’ case have championed the cause. So have the city’s political leaders, who often tout officer diversity as a favorable alternative to more radical measures, such as large cuts to public spending on police budgets.
OPD had once been on its way to regaining local control, but those hopes were dashed in January when the cover-up of a police sergeant’s hit-and-run collision came to light. The debacle eventually led to the firing of Chief LeRonne Armstrong.
It was the latest in a series of scandals to hit OPD in recent years. Others included an officer-run Instagram account that featured racist and misogynistic posts and the sexual exploitation of a teenager by a group of East Bay police — a number of them Oakland cops.
In all of these cases, the officers directly responsible were men.
“The Department continues its strategic outreach efforts to attract and actively recruit officers who reflect the diversity of Oakland, racially and otherwise, and who live in or have meaningful ties to the (city),” the joint statement reads.
Other survey responses by women officers reflect somewhat more positively on OPD. In response to the statement “I feel respected by my supervisors,” about 57% agreed, 13% were neutral and 31% disagreed.
The majority of respondents said they felt either satisfied or “neutral” about representation of “racial and ethnic minorities” in the department. About 37% of sworn female OPD officers are “Hispanic or Latino,” 27% are white, 22% are Black and 9% are Asian.
“While some of the numbers are comforting, others are very upsetting,” said Jim Chanin, the attorney who helped litigate the Riders settlement through the entirety of OPD’s federal oversight.
“I’m not surprised that there’s still discrimination and harassment going on; that’s one of the reasons that police in general can’t get women,” Chanin added. “But it’s not like the ’80s and ’90s where I had lots of sexual harassment cases — it was horrible back then.”
This content was originally published here.