Police Department Has No Fingerprint Staff

Three men robbed Nina W. at gunpoint as she got into her car in Oakland's Fruitvale district. Later she went to police headquarters to look at suspect photos. She asked why no evidence technician had dusted the handles of her car; department staff told her it was pointless, because OPD has no one to read fingerprints.

The department had fingerprint experts paid with grant money. The last one left seven months ago when the grants ran out and the City failed to have permanent positions for them. Budgeting is done by the city council.

For the full story as reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, click here.

OPD: What's this?

But the City does not care about apprehending robbers, burglars, carjackers, even kidnappers. In February 2006, the following appeared in a newspaper account of a community meeting convened by councilmember Jane Brunner and attended by police chief Wayne Tucker:

A middle-aged crime victim, who had been tied up along with his partner then dragged through the house by two men with guns searching for valuables in their Lawton Avenue house Dec. 30, put it bluntly: "I feel the whole department is demoralized. I called to find out about the results of fingerprinting – they didn't wear gloves – and I was told we would be lucky if we got results in four to six months," he said. (Oakland Tribune, Feb. 5, 2006)

In 2004 voters accepted $20 million in new taxes for Measure Y, a so-called violence prevention package. The City spends the money on programs with no relation to violence prevention. The City spends the tax revenues in violation of the preconditions in Measure Y.

Deputy police chief Howard Jordan told KGO reporter Willie Monroe, "Very rarely do we get fingerprints from violent crime, violent acts. We get them mostly from property crimes which is where we're suffering the most in terms of investigative leads."

No wonder criminals operate with impunity in Oakland.

The first job of a city government is public safety. That's why the main police department of a city is its municipal police department, not the BART police, not the county sheriff, not the school district officers.

Casual disdain for maintaining a fingerprint unit is another sign that the city council does not care about public safety.

Councilmember Makes Excuses

Councilmember Nancy Nadel posted this comment on an email list:

"The city is contracting with Contra Costa County for fingerprinting while the new job classification for latent print reader is created.
"The lab manager insisted on the new classification which requires a college education knowing that there would be considerable delay due to the process for created a new job class. To create a new classification, Human Resources has to do a regional salary survey, the information has to go to the next meeting of the civil service board and then it comes to council.
"Human Resources is already working overtime on police hiring and they also must serve other departments to fill their openings (like public works to get park maintenance done, another high priority to the community). That process of creating a new classification is in the works.
"Even with the five new hires in this category, there will still need to be a prioritization of workload."

Councilmember Nadel's comment is nothing but a series of unacceptable excuses. The City knew for a long time it had no permanent jobs, only grant-funded positions with a known expiration date. In fact, an Oakland resident with no ties to City Hall says he "heard as early as August 2005 that OPD was going to soon have a shortage of crime technicians due to jobs not being filled and people leaving. If these rumors filtered down to me, why weren't people closer to the issue taking action?"

In a City where the police staffing crisis has run on for years, we are supposed to believe that the fault lies at the feet of a unit manager who is at least third level down from the top in the police department.

Hannah James, an Oakland resident who is an active citizen and who is outraged at Nadel blaming a midlevel police department manager, recalls, "For at least five budget cycles, we have gone downtown to the budget meetings to bring this very topic forward – that the fingerprint analyst jobs need to be filled via the budget and not dependent upon grant money. We were ignored time and time again."

Meanwhile, councilmember Nadel is fully up to date on a rush new project using Measure Y "violence prevention" tax money that has nothing to do with preventing violence. However, this Community Response Support Network does relate to band-aid reacting after violence occurs. More important for councilmember Nadel, some poverty pimps will get a cut of the money just as they get their cut of 40 percent of Measure Y money in general.

Finally, councilmember Nadel signals that as far as she is concerned, the remedy if any for the shocking no-fingerprint-scandal in OPD is going to be a long time coming.

Meanwhile, a long-time resident of Oakland, in response to Nadel, reported this: "After living in the Brooklyn/lower San Antonio district for 30 years, I started to get broken into a year or so ago ... my doors smashed in three times, house ransacked, precious sentimental items of my deceased mother stolen. There was a rash of burglaries, and the neighborhood finally realized it was a local career burglar. He was finally arrested; the detective said it was a 'rock solid, open shut, good as it gets' case, but it got nowhere. Why? No fingerprint processing!! No case was made, no evidence was there, because there were no fingerprints, due to no lab."

Councilmember Nadel will never have to face this person's mother whose mementos were stolen from her daughter, because that departed woman is in heaven, a place that will remain forever foreign to the councilmember.

Police Chief Tucker Misleads Residents

Police chief Wayne Tucker practiced the art of flim-flam on the residents of Maxwell Park who attended a neighborhood meeting on Jan. 10, 2007. Someone asked, "What about fingerprints?", eliciting audience laughter in embarrassment for Oakland. Tucker replied:

"I'm glad you brought that up. Fingerprints. They [not identified; presumably the press] have really kind of done us a disservice on this thing. We have forever been collecting latent fingerprints from crime scenes. We have been consistently submitting those on named people. We submit them to another agency."

Did you see the catch in his remark? You get to re-read his words; attendees at the meeting were listening to the flow. We'll come back to this.

In reality, "prints from only about 30 Oakland cases given high priority – homicides, rapes and the like – have been sent out and analyzed by the Contra Costa County sheriff's crime lab in what [crime lab director Mary] Gibbons herself calls a Band-Aid approach." So reported the San Francisco Chronicle last Dec. 11.

Meanwhile, back at the Maxwell Park meeting, Tucker went on in his style of giving scattered details about the process of hiring fingerprint analysts, about the statistics on the quality of prints found at crime scenes, and on and on. He said, "We have never not had the capacity to get latent fingerprints examined." After talking about the use of computers in analyzing prints, he droned about another difficulty, then disclosed:

"But that doesn't mean that they're not valuable. What we have to do is get a named suspect to attach to the print." (Quotes transcribed from audio of the meeting)

Chief Tucker admits that when the department is sending only a handful of prints on homicides out for analysis, a robbery or burglary print gets no attention except when the police have already identified a suspect and want to confirm a conclusion already deduced from other evidence. Of course, with an understaffed unit of robbery investigators, this rarely happens. Use fingerprints to identify the suspect? Forget about it, this is Oakland, where the city council gives public safety bottom priority – and a chief's job is to flim-flam the residents.