Bay Area

Kaplan Proposes Law to Protect Police Commissioners From Official ‘Intimidation and Harassment’

Published

6 years ago

January 30, 2020

Reacting to reports that the City Administration secretly spent $50,000 to hire an outside contractor to investigate a member of the Oakland Police Commission, City President Rebecca Kaplan is proposing an ordinance that reaffirms that the City Charter gives investigative author-ity solely to the Police Commission and the City Council.

The proposed ordinance “reiterates the importance of an independent police commission and that neither the City Administrator nor the Chief of Police are authorized to engage in any action against commissioners, nor are they authorized to assume the powers granted to the Council, the Ethics Commission or the Police Commission.”

This conflict between the authority of the council and the administraor authority has been brewing for a while, focusing on repeated moves by the Chief of Police Anne Kirkpatrick and the City Administrator Sabrina Landreth against Oakland Police Commission Vice Chair Ginale Harris.

“Several meetings ago, I requested a copy of the contract between the City Administration and the outside project investigator who apparently was hired to investigate a police commissioner without notice to council, without a vote of council,” said Kaplan, speaking at Tuesday’s Public Safety Committee meeting.

This administrative action “was felt by police commission members as intimidating and harassment of them,” said Kaplan.

She never received the copy of the contract from the City Administrator but was eventually given a copy this week by a blogger, known as Hyphenated-Republic (hyphenatedrepublic.com), who had obtained it through a Public Records Act request to the city.

The contract confirms that the administrator in November 2018 hired a company to investigate “a specifically named member of the police commission,” Kaplan said.

“I believe that what was done was illegal,” she said.

“The charter of the City of Oakland states that it is the City Council that has the power to remove a commissioner for misconduct,” said Kaplan. “I don’t see any authority anywhere for the city administrator to independently decide to undertake an investigation.”

In a memo accompanying the proposed ordinance, Kaplan noted that Measure LL, which estab-lished the police commission, specifically quoted the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement about the key importance of creating a commission with “independence from the executive branch of government.”

According to the City Charter, as quoted in the memo, “The City Council may remove members of the commission for cause as provided in Section 601 of the charter, or members of the commission may be removed by a majority vote of the commission, only for conviction of a felony, conviction of a misdemeanor involving moral turpitude, a material act of dishonesty, fraud, or other act of moral turpitude, substantial neglect of duty (and) gross misconduct in office.”

A more recent incident involving an attempt to remove Harris took place in November 2019 when OPD Chief Anne Kirkpatrick complained about Harris to Police Commission Chair Regina Jackson by phone and email. In the email dated Nov. 19, Kirkpatrick mentioned an “anony-mous” call to internal Affairs concerning a verbal dispute between Harris and an administrator at her child’s school in San Francisco.

“While Harris’ style is more ‘sharp’ than some, her observations have often been proven to be accurate This sort of treatment feels like bullying,” said Jackson in an email to the Oakland Post.

“The Police Commission was voter approved by 83 percent of the citizens of Oakland,” Jackson continued. “We are volunteers seeking to understand and improve structures and policies in order to support OPD in being more emotionally intelligent and transparent in their accountability to communities they serve. We take our jobs seriously and have been resisted since we started.”

This latest incident, which led to coverage by the Bay Area media, predated the City Administrator’s hiring of the investigator by one year and involved different allegations.

The city administration also has filed two or three Public Ethics Commission complaints against Harris, and she was exonerated in all these cases, according to Commissioner Henry Gage.

“The question of who investigates the commission is an important one,” Gage said. “We don’t want someone who is too close to the police department to turn around and investigate the commission.”

“The administration should be on the side of increased police oversight,” he said.

The criticisms of Harris “seem very trivial,” said civil rights attorney Dan Siegel, who is repre-senting Harris.

“The city administration does not have the authority under the charter to be investigating members of the police commission,” said Siegel. “It does not seem like the City Administrator is justified in dealing with this like she is an employee.”

Representatives of the City Attorney and the City Administrator who attended the committee meeting said they didn’t have the information to be able to comment on the issue.

This conflict over the police commission reflects a broader problem: the city administration ignores, subverts or buries City Council decisions that the administration does not like, according to Rashidah Grinage of the Coalition for Police Accountability.

“Basically, Oakland is replicating Washington, D.C.,” said Grinage. “We have an administration that basically thumbs its nose at the City Council and decides what decisions it wants to implement.”

“Once something passes the City Council, it goes into a black hole. It is really quite astonishing,” she said.

The decision on Kaplan’s proposed ordinance was postponed to the Tuesday, Feb. 11 Public Safety Committee meeting, to give the City Attorney a chance to look at the proposal.

Kaplan Proposes Law to Protect Police Commissioners

From Official ‘Intimidation and Harassment’

Ken Epstein

Posts by Ken Epstein

Activism

Diabetes in Black California: Turning the Tide from Crisis to Control

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System data, nearly 17.9% of Black adults in California have been diagnosed with diabetes — above the national Black adult average of 16.8%, and nearly five points higher than California’s overall adult rate of 12.6% across all races. California ranks 24th out of 39 states with available data for Black adult diabetes rates.

Published

6 days ago

July 5, 2026

Oakland Post

Dr. Khadijah Lang is a family physician with a clinic in Los Angeles who specializes in several family medical practices, including prenatal care. Lang believes in family medicine. She says it is important to treat all members of a family. Thursday, June 5, 2026. Photo by Solomon O. Smith/California Black Media.

By Charlene Muhammad, California Black Media

Crystal Lambert knew something was terribly wrong with her three-year-old granddaughter as she sped down the street trying to get her to the hospital.

“I thought she got a hold of some poison,” Lambert recalled.

Doctors found Lambert’s granddaughter had a blood sugar level over 800, diagnosing her with Diabetic Ketoacidosis(DKA), a state in which the body, starved of insulin, begins to shut down.

Lambert said she was born with a pancreas that was not fully functioning — it lacked the specialized cells required to produce insulin.

Her granddaughter survived and is five years old today. Now, she gives herself insulin shots, asks endless questions about her condition, and runs like the spirited child she is. But the terror of that night transformed Lambert — and ultimately inspired her to launch the We Fight Back Organization, a mobile health and food access initiative serving underserved communities across California. Lambert is the executive director.

The Crisis by the Numbers

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System data, nearly 17.9% of Black adults in California have been diagnosed with diabetes — above the national Black adult average of 16.8%, and nearly five points higher than California’s overall adult rate of 12.6% across all races. California ranks 24th out of 39 states with available data for Black adult diabetes rates.

Nationally, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Black Americans were 24% more likely than the overall U.S. population to have diabetes in 2024. They also died from diabetes 78% more often than the general population in 2022. Black Americans are also more than twice as likely as the overall population to develop kidney failure caused by diabetes.

According to the California Health Care Foundation’s 2024 Health Disparities Almanac, Black Californians have the shortest life expectancy in the state at just 74.6 years — due in part to chronic conditions like diabetes and its devastating complications.

Leon Rock, co-founder of the African American Diabetes Association, believes statistics, though revealing, only tell part of the story.

“There are a whole bunch of Black folks that don’t tell you that they have diabetes — or don’t know,” he said.

And the disease itself, Rock is careful to note, is not what kills. “They die from the complications. That’s heart attack, that’s stroke, that’s amputations of legs, of feet. Going blind. All those complications are inherent in a system that has impacted Black folks with diabetes in California and across America.”

Crystal Lambert, creator and executive director of We Fight Back. She started the organization out of a need to learn more about diabetes on behalf of her granddaughter. Now she is looking to spread the impact of her organization to the valley. Friday, June 6, 2026. Photo by Solomon O. Smith/California Black Media.

Crystal Lambert, creator and executive director of the We Fight Back Organization, started out of a need to learn more about diabetes on behalf of her granddaughter. Now she is looking to spread her organization to the valley, on Friday, June 6, 2026 Photo by Solomon O. Smith/ California Black Media

An Information Gap Fuels the Crisis

For Rock, part of the solution is diagnosis. He says the medical and public health systems are failing Black Californians by the absence of information designed for them.

“That is the bottom line. We need good information. Information that is culturally specific,” said Rock.

Telling people to eat healthy or exercise, he added, falls short when culturally specific alternatives are not provided, and when many residents of urban communities do not feel safe exercising in some neighborhoods – or outside at night.

Dr. Khadijah Lang, a family medicine physician and president of the Golden State Medical Association, agrees that the roots of the crisis run deeper than individual behavior — and blaming patients misses the point.

“We are not genetically predisposed to diabetes,” Lang said. “But the system under which we live increases the likelihood that we will develop it.”

What the Body Needs — What Communities Are Denied

Type 2 diabetes, which accounts for 90 to 95% of all diabetes cases, according to the CDC, develops when the body can no longer use insulin effectively to regulate blood sugar. Left unmanaged, it damages nerves, kidneys, eyes, and the cardiovascular system. The hemoglobin A1C test is a blood draw that reveals how the body has processed sugar over the previous three months — not just at the moment of the test. It is the standard tool for both diagnosis and ongoing monitoring.

That distinction matters, Lang emphasized, because patients cannot manipulate three months of blood sugar history the way they might fast for a day before a single blood draw.

“The pill is not meant to undo or control a sugar level that’s being constantly stressed,” Lang said. “It’s meant to work in conjunction with a low-carbohydrate diet and exercise.” She recommended at minimum 30 minutes of physical activity five days a week — breakable into 10-minute sessions for those who need it.

Lang stressed that education must be delivered in language people recognize and can relate to. The goal is to inform them of the choices that serve their health best, she said.

But for many Black Californians, even those informed choices remain out of reach, Lambert said.

“They need access to healthy foods and medication, too” she said.

California has made some critical policy advances. The state has expanded access to the Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM), which has transformed diabetes care for state residents. Assembly Bill 365, introduced in 2024, proposed requiring Medi-Cal to cover the costs of CGM and other related medical equipment but it failed in the State Senate. Since then, the California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) reports that the core Medi-Cal CGM benefit now available to eligible patients was solidified through previous budget actions and pharmacy policy updates.

These measures, while meaningful, have not closed the gap for the communities most at risk, according to advocates.

Control Through Community

Health care advocates conclude that the solution must be communal, culturally grounded, and sustained — not a fad, not a celebrity moment, not a single clinic visit. For example, observed Lang, lifestyle shaped by shared values and collective accountability can move the needle where individual prescriptions have not.

Rock is building infrastructure to match the urgency, establishing local chapters of the African American Diabetes Association across the country, with California next.

“We have to do for self, period,” he said. “Health is wealth. We have to eat to live.”

And Lambert, whose granddaughter unknowingly started all of this for her, keeps showing up.

“Diabetes advocacy is about dignity, education, prevention, and hope,” she said.

Video: Diabetes Disparity Exposed in California

This article is supported by the California Health Care Foundation

(CHCF). Visit www.chcf.org

Oakland Post

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Activism

Oakland Post: Week of July 1 – 7, 2026

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of July 1 – 7, 2026

Published

6 days ago

July 5, 2026

Oakland Post

To enlarge your view of this issue, use the slider, magnifying glass icon or full page icon in the lower right corner of the browser window.

Oakland Post

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Arts and Culture

Prescott Circus Theatre Presents Free Summer Performance Series

Now in its 41st year, the Prescott Circus Theatre is a nationally recognized performing arts education program for Oakland youth. The circus offers safe environments that challenge Oakland youth, through circus arts training, to develop the skills and confidence to thrive on stage, in school, and in life.

Published

2 weeks ago

June 26, 2026

Oakland Post

Prescott Circus showcase pathways pyramid. Photo courtesy of Prescott Circus.

By Post Staff

The Prescott Circus, Oakland’s longest-running youth circus, is returning this summer with its free shows. Join the Prescott Circus’s young stars as they share their joys and talents through stilt-dancing, tumbling, juggling, and more.

At the heart of this one-hour show, which demonstrates teamwork, pride, and joy, are Oakland Unified School District students ages 8 – 17 from more than 10 different schools

This is accomplished through no-cost school and community programs for more than 300 Oakland youth each year. Performing company members from Prescott, where the program began, perform and make appearances at as many as 40 Bay Area events each year.

The summer program is funded in part by Oakland Fund for Children and Youth, California Arts Council, Port of Oakland, and the West Davis & Bergard Foundation.

Performances will be held Tuesday, July 14, 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. (ASL interpreted) and Wednesday, July 15, 11 a.m., at the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts, 1428 Alice St., Oakland. For free reservations go to

https://PrescottCircusSummerShows.eventbrite.com

For group reservations for camps, childcare centers, senior centers, go to www.prescottcircus.org

A community show will be held Saturday, July 18, 2 p.m. to 3 p.m., at DeFremery Park,1651 Adeline St., Oakland.