Oakland Police Department sets good example, Obama official says

The Oakland Police Department is an example of what police agencies across the nation should emulate in the post-Ferguson era, the executive director of President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing said Thursday. Ron Davis, the former East Palo Alto police chief who spent 20 years as an Oakland police officer, told The Chronicle editorial board Thursday that the Oakland Police Department is on the right path to building a stronger relationship with the community, change that was initiated by a court order stemming from the Riders police abuse scandal in 2003. [...] he pointed out that Oakland has found ways to repair the strained relationship it long had with the community it served, in part by using community leaders to talk with officers about community relations and by changing police tactics to avoid violent, if not fatal, confrontations. Obama created the task force by executive order in December in the wake of mass demonstrations across the U.S. against police brutality and killings of civilians that were video-recorded by passersby and shared through social media. The chief and mayor brought along a delegation of clergy and community activists, including members of the Ceasefire Violent Crime Reduction Strategy, which offers services to divert people from crime. Ceasefire is one in a slew of changes to Oakland’s police culture, and it dovetails with other measures, such as the near-universal use of body cameras, a new foot-chase policy that bans officers from chasing suspects who jump backyard fences, and a “pipeline project” to set aside up to 40 seats in the cadet program for graduates of Oakland public schools, beginning in October. [...] Whent wants those officers to meld seamlessly into the community, getting out of their cars to meet people rather than just stopping in to make arrests.