Can Oakland’s police chief survive this scandal?

OAKLAND — When LeRonne Armstrong was tapped less than two years ago as the city’s police chief, he promised “a new day” for a department that had stumbled through a number of controversies and a revolving door of top cops.

Many of Armstrong’s recent predecessors were fired or resigned early, but he is the first since at least the 1970s to be placed on paid leave — a form of discipline that required the chief on Thursday to turn in his badge and gun and be escorted out of the OPD administration building.

Now a chief who came in with the outsized ambitions of raising OPD’s standards could soon be out of a job. Newly elected Mayor Sheng Thao, who placed Armstrong on leave, has the authority to fire him without cause.

But will she? Thao hasn’t revealed her plans, although she said in a statement Thursday she anticipates “additional findings” that could reveal more about Armstrong’s role in the department’s alleged cover-up of an officer’s misconduct.

Indeed, big decisions lie ahead for a mayor who just finished her second week on the job in a city in need of an administrator — the current one is set to leave after this month — and an active police chief.

“I feel sorry for Chief Armstrong or anyone who finds themselves in a situation like this, but I do understand why the mayor has taken the step — and she acted promptly,” said former Chief Anne Kirkpatrick, whose termination in 2020 led to Armstrong’s appointment.

The decision to place Armstrong on leave came just a day after the release of a bombshell report that details how OPD officers, including an internal affairs captain and a lieutenant, helped obstruct an investigation into a police sergeant’s involvement in a hit-and-run collision with a parked vehicle.

Armstrong, the report found, had signed off on the findings without reviewing them or even fully discussing the incident. The law firm that submitted the report found that Armstrong had committed rules violations, “failing to hold his subordinate officers to account” and “allowing the subject officer to escape responsibility for serious misconduct.”

“If you discover significant misconduct, you have to chase that out to its logical conclusion,” said Sean Whent, another former OPD chief who was forced to resign in 2016 amid an officer sexual misconduct scandal. “It could be that you can’t sustain all the findings, but the record should reflect that ‘this is damn shady.’ ”

The sergeant — who was placed on leave only after a separate incident when he fired his service weapon in an OPD elevator and tried to cover up the evidence — was identified by sources close to the situation as Michael Chung, a San Francisco resident. The revelation prompted OPD to request the independent report.

Reached by phone Thursday, Chung declined to comment and quickly hung up. His attorney, John Murphy, did not respond to interview requests.

The report notes that Chung had given contradictory statements to an internal affairs investigator and failed to disclose he was in a romantic relationship with a subordinate officer who was in the OPD-issued vehicle with him during the hit-and-run incident.

For Adante Pointer, an Oakland-based civil rights attorney, the more egregious missteps were taken by Chung’s higher-ups. The report, he notes, describes “systemic deficiencies” in the department that are not limited to the chief.

If Armstrong’s “head is going to roll, it seems to me the entire command and investigation structure should also be held accountable,” Pointer said. “The flow of information goes from the bottom to the top in a situation like this.”

It is unclear if discipline has been taken against anyone in the department besides Chung and Armstrong. Records show that Wilson Lau, OPD’s internal affairs captain at the time of the hit-and-run incident, now works for the East Bay Regional Parks District police.

Armstrong, however, has his share of defenders. Dan Siegel, an Oakland-based civil rights attorney who recently settled a lawsuit against the OPD over its tactics in combatting Black Lives Matter protesters in the summer of 2020, recalled the chief as being “forthcoming and easy to deal with” in a way he had not seen in previous chiefs.

“It’s very disappointing to hear this,” Siegel said. “I had a very positive opinion of Chief Armstrong and believed we finally had a chief here in Oakland who was open and transparent and could hold people accountable.”