After 23 Years of Oversight, Oakland’s Police Reform Offers New Hope

In the spring of 2014, civil rights lawyers John Burris and Jim Chanin invited me to Oakland, California, to serve as a subject matter expert. They represented a group of plaintiffs seeking justice in a city enduring an especially brutal version of a well-known story: a police department that many perceived as a hotbed of illegal tactics, violence, and discrimination directed largely at the Black community. As I heard one Oakland native put it at a public meeting shortly after I arrived: “People are damaged. People are heartbroken. People have fear. People are scared of the same people that’s supposed to protect them.”Since revelations of a pattern of wrongdoing first came to light 23 years ago, the Oakland Police Department (OPD) has been under federal court oversight—the longest for any American city. This week, a federal judge is expected to decide whether that oversight can finally come to an end, after years of progress toward reforms required by the court. Whatever the outcome, Oakland has undergone a substantial transformation over the past two decades. What changed over those years is a remarkable story about what can happen when we finally have the tools we need to see pol...