OAKLAND — Nearly a year after he was fired, Oakland’s ex-police chief has filed a lawsuit against the city and Mayor Sheng Thao alleging he was wrongfully terminated over a cover-up scandal involving a problem cop.
LeRonne Armstrong’s widely expected lawsuit will let a judge decide if he should’ve been fired over an internal cover-up by officers of a sergeant’s hit-and-run — misconduct that an independent arbitrator in September said did not warrant the former chief’s punishment.
But the city’s attorneys are likely to argue that Thao had no choice but to fire Armstrong after he suggested publicly — after initially being placed on leave — that the mayor’s decisions are being controlled by a federal official who oversees the Oakland Police Department’s affairs.
The lawsuit’s argument centers around Armstrong’s rights to free speech, but the larger legal battle could be seen as a referendum on Thao, whose firing of Armstrong is among the factors that set off a political rift through Oakland.
The local chapter of the NAACP has been a strong ally of Armstrong’s, and has critiqued the mayor’s job performance at every turn, while the independent, civilian-led Oakland Police Commission has pushed for the ex-chief to be rehired despite Thao’s repeated refusal to do so.
In an interview, Armstrong’s crisis spokesperson Sam Singer said the ex-chief’s focus at this point is on monetary damages rather than being reinstated. Armstrong has found work as an assistant high-school basketball coach in recent months.
Bishop O’Dowd High’s assistant coach and former Oakland police Chief Leronne Armstrong reacts on the bench during their MLK Classic game against Capital Christian High at De La Salle High School in Concord, Calif., on Monday, Jan. 15, 2024. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
The mayor’s office did not immediately provide a response to Armstrong’s lawsuit. The city has not hired a permanent chief since Armstrong was fired last February.
Armstrong’s lawsuit also takes aim at the federal official, Robert Warshaw, who monitors OPD’s affairs as part of two decades of court oversight following the infamous Riders brutality scandal.
The lawsuit makes explicit Armstrong’s intimation that may have gotten him fired — that the city’s annual payments of $1 million to Warshaw and his staff has motivated him to keep the money flowing, even if that means inventing new reasons to keep OPD under his watch.
“Despite good intentions of monitoring generally, the practical financial realities of a monitorship incentivize the monitor to continue to find ‘systemic problems’ and ‘leadership failures’ because the monitor personally benefits by requiring further supervision under the monitor’s well-compensated gaze,” the lawsuit states.
Warshaw, who also monitors several other police departments in the U.S., has never agreed to be interviewed by a Bay Area news organization.
He serves at the behest of federal Judge William Orrick, who has kept the OPD under oversight after various scandals in the past decade, including a sex-trafficking case involving East Bay cops and racist Instagram posts by officers.
At several hearings last year, however, Orrick noted that the department was making progress to emerge from oversight.
In September, an arbitrator reviewing Armstrong’s firing said the initial scandal — a sergeant’s hit-and-run with a parked car, and a watering-down of that wrongdoing by the officers in charge of an ensuing internal affairs probe — did not justify his firing.
“The discipline imposed on Chief Armstrong should be reversed and removed from his personnel record,” the hearing officer, retired Judge Maria Rivera, said in a report compiled after the ex-chief had appealed his termination.
This story will be updated.
