OAKLAND — Seven current Oakland police officers have been disciplined for their involvement with an Instagram account that featured racist, misogynists posts or violated department policies in other ways online, according to an announcement from the city.
Although three other officers also were found to be involved, one was a former officer who had been fired and started the account afterwards and two had since left for other departments
“Sexist and racist behaviors are far too prevalent in our culture and have no place in our public safety institutions,” Mayor Libby Schaaf said in a written statement. “I wholeheartedly and strongly condemn any behavior, including online communications, that supports or engages with sexist or racist tropes.”
Discipline for the officers, whose ranks go all the way up to lieutenant, ranged from a three-day unpaid suspension to a 25-day unpaid suspension, Schaaf said. The officers weren’t identified.
According to the probe conducted by a third-party investigative firm and Oakland’s Community Police Review Agency, the Instagram account “@crimereductionteam” — the name of a specific Oakland Police Department entity — posted multiple memes and captions that mocked efforts to curb police brutality.
The account was created by a former Oakland police officer shortly after he had been fired for violating department policy, the investigators discovered.
Two officers have since left Oakland for other law enforcement agencies. The city notified those agencies of the investigation’s findings.
Public revelation of the account’s existence early this year thrust the police department under intense scrutiny not just of residents and city officials but also of the federal monitor and judge who oversee it through a two-decade-long federal court agreement.
U.S. District Court Judge William Orrick recently said the police department’s handling of the investigation into the Instagram scandal will have a significant bearing on whether he deems it ready to lift the federal oversight.
“To the extent that this report shows that racism, misogyny and cultural rot exist in OPD or that there are officers who do not respect and treat equally all the people they serve…that will affect the five issues I went over and make it impossible for the OPD to fully comply,” Orrick said during a hearing earlier this month.
The court will determine which parts of the investigation to make public.
The Instagram account has been taken down, but according to court filings from civil rights attorneys John Burris and Jim Chanin, who have represented the plaintiffs in the civil lawsuit that sparked the ongoing court monitoring, one image that had been posted “depicts a scene from a pornographic film.”
The photo, included in the court filing, labeled a woman “Cop that just wants to fight crime,” and the men looming over her as “Internal Affairs,” “Police Commission,” “Command Staff,” “Spineless Cops” and “Criminals taking advantage of the situation.”
Other posts poked fun at the idea of lying about beating up people in custody and the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in May 2020.
Although the department learned of the Instagram account as early as September when an email about it was circulated, the attorneys said in court filings they were disturbed that no thorough internal investigation began until after The Oaklandside published a story about it in January. It was also revealed then that some officers signaled their support for a former Oakland police officer’s posts from the scene of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
In her Friday statement, however, Schaaf called the investigation “unprecedented” in “size, scope and thoroughness,” adding that it held officers accountable and “created new policies that raise our standards and expectations.”
The announcement described the investigation as beginning with every officer who served in crime reduction team units and those who interacted with them. The investigators seized more than 140 work phones from the officers and scraped their content and online histories.
The investigators’ directive was to use IT records to expose the account creator, according to the city’s announcement, and to see whether any current Oakland employees had “engaged” with the offensive content or violated any department policies.
“The independent investigators cast a net as wide as legally and constitutionally allowable,” the announcement said.
The mayor’s office also promised that the police department will review and strengthen its policies for department-issued technology, create extra training sessions on using department technology as well as on sexual harassment and cultural competency, require employees to report work-related social media accounts to the police department’s Office of Inspector General — which would be required to collect department social media account names and passwords — and regularly audit the content of department-issued technology.
The police department also must forbid employees from having personal social media accounts attached to their department phones and other technology.
