OAKLAND — Mayor Barbara Lee appointed a longtime assistant police chief Friday to temporarily helm the Oakland Police Department while the city prepares to search for a permanent hire.
James Beere, who has worked at OPD for nearly three decades, will be the interim police chief. The veteran’s name previously had been floated as a potential chief hire before Floyd Mitchell was selected last year.
“We’re going to focus on the people who are driving the violence in this city,” Beere said, “and we’re going to continue to build trust in the community.”
Mitchell announced last month he was resigning after hardly a year and a half on the job. His last day is Dec. 5. The outgoing chief flanked Beere at a news conference Friday, expressing full confidence in the assistant chief’s capabilities.
“We have a lot of good leaders in the Oakland Police Department,” Mitchell said. “Jim Beere stood above them all.”
In the backdrop, however, awaits a likely much longer process of finding a permanent chief.
On Friday, Lee described a recruitment process that will effectively mirror how the search went last time around. The Oakland Police Commission, a volunteer civilian oversight body, will establish a shortlist of candidates, interview them and send the names of three finalists to the mayor, who will make the final decision.
The search that yielded Mitchell’s hiring took over a year and encountered numerous roadblocks, most notably former Mayor Sheng Thao’s hostile relationship with the police commission. Lee did not offer a specific estimate Friday of how long this latest process might take.
“We will move swiftly to provide stable leadership for OPD,” she said.
Lee also said Friday she would appoint Michelle Phillips, an assistant city administrator, to a new position intended to ensure OPD follows constitutional policing practices. Phillips, who was previously the city’s first inspector general, will be tasked with setting up better “internal accountability” for police officers.
Specifics of Phillips’ job were unclear on Friday. But city leaders are keen to bring an end to a federal court’s oversight of OPD’s affairs, which has persisted for more than two decades.
Crime is down by 28% overall and violent crime by 20% through mid-November compared to the same time period last year — a cause for optimism among Beere and others. But the press event Friday took on a somber tone; hours earlier, longtime Laney College athletics director and coach John Beam had been pronounced dead from a gunshot wound he suffered a day prior.
“My thoughts are with the Beam family and all victims of tragic gun violence,” Beere said, noting that police had already arrested a suspect in Beam’s killing, as well as two suspects in another shooting at Skyline High School earlier in the week.