The chair of one of the country’s strongest police oversight bodies was voted out last week by the people she had filed a lawsuit against a few days earlier.
OAKLAND — Once hailed as the city’s best option for holding police accountable, the volunteer-led Oakland Police Commission has, with its soon-to-be former chair suggesting in a new lawsuit that she has been unfairly targeted by power-hungry external forces.
Days before the vote, Milele and two other commissioners — one former, another on his way out — filed a lawsuit accusing one of the selection panelists, civil-rights attorney Jim Chanin, of being ethically compromised in that role. “Once any commissioner votes based on his or her independent judgment, once any commissioner moves the Commission closer and closer to having civilian oversight of the Police Department … they are targeted for removal from the Commission,” the suit states.
“I don’t agree that I shouldn’t be on there,” said Chanin of the selection panel, to which he was first appointed by City Councilmember Nikki Fortunato Bas, also named as a defendant in the lawsuit. “And I think if I stepped down at this time, it will give credence to the argument that I shouldn’t have been on to begin with.”
The majority of commissioners, with support from outside legal counsel, had been prepared at the time not to fire the chief before Thao stepped in and axed him instead. Instead, they argue, the commission should have first tapped its investigative arm, the Community Police Review Agency, and waited to see if its findings differed from those of the outside report.
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