Oakland’s mayor believes the new top cop will last. Can he survive ‘the hardest chief job in America?’

OAKLAND -– If the recent past is any guide, perhaps the first question to ask about Oakland’s new police chief Floyd Mitchell is, “How long can he last?”

Mitchell, hired after 25 years of service with the Kansas City police and a more recent, four-year stint as chief in Lubbock, Texas, will be the latest to serve full-time as the top cop in Oakland, a city that has seen several chiefs come and go over the past decade, including two separate occasions where three different chiefs were appointed in a single week.

Mayor Sheng Thao announced Mitchell’s hiring Friday, capping a 13-month search to replace LeRonne Armstrong, whom the mayor fired for his handling of an Oakland Police Department cover-up scandal.

A 56-year-old Black veteran of the U.S. Air Force, Mitchell will lead a department struggling to end a disastrous four-year stretch of high crime rates, and he will attempt to guide OPD out from under two decades of federal oversight.

But the chief will also need to figure out how to stick around in a city where most can’t seem to hang onto the job for more than a couple years at a time.

Thao says she’s confident about the new hire, noting that overall crime declined under his watch in the two previous Texas cities — Lubbock and Temple — where he most recently served as chief.

“Floyd has a proven record in his crime-reduction strategy,” Thao said in a Friday afternoon interview. “And he believes in proactive policing, where we can intervene before crimes happen. And he is very data-driven.”

Most critically, she said, Mitchell appeared most prepared among four finalists to oversee the city’s Ceasefire strategy — a violence interruption initiative that Thao has recently begun championing as a key pathway out of the ongoing crime crisis.

In job interviews with the mayor, Mitchell was not shy in addressing the circumstances around his resignation last September as chief of the Lubbock police, Thao said.

His stint there ended amid local news reports that unanswered 911 calls spiked after Mitchell reduced the number of dispatch staffers, and later tried to prevent concerns about the faulty system from being made public.

“There were no excuses from him,” Thao said of the new hire. “He talked about what he learned from the situation that makes him a better police officer, a better chief.”

Exactly how Mitchell explained Lubbock’s 911 response woes — a familiar problem in Oakland — is something Thao said would need to be answered by the new chief himself when he arrives to town sometime next week.

It’s unclear how many times Mitchell has visited before; he has never worked as a police in California, which former Chief Anne Kirkpatrick said will immediately present challenges as he attempts to get officers to buy in long-term to a department that has struggled with retention.

“I think that, as an outsider, he’s going to have to get the police department staff to embrace him and believe in him,” said Kirkpatrick, a Memphis native who was fired as the Oakland chief in 2020, and recently became the superintendent of police in New Orleans. “You don’t just walk in with that kind of legitimacy.”

In addition to Oakland, Mitchell earlier this month was a finalist for the police chief job in Flower Mound, Texas, the Cross Timbers Gazette reported. The town has a fifth of Oakland’s population, while Mitchell’s last city, Lubbock, is three-fifths as populous.

“Lubbock is not an area that is at all comparable to Oakland,” said George Galvis, who routinely advocates for more violence prevention programs as a co-founder of Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice. He was “underwhelmed” by Mitchell’s selection, adding, “I don’t have confidence that this is going to work out well.”

At an Oakland Police Commission candidate forum last month, Mitchell took care to note that he understands “all the the parties that are involved in the Oakland pyramid” of public safety.

“I feel comfortable that I’d be able to … understand that all of us have our individual parts and pieces that we bring to the table,” he said.

But others warn that Mitchell may struggle in a large, bureaucratically tangled city where the mayor often clashes with the powerful Oakland Police Commission, and where three ex-chiefs from the past decade have publicly accused OPD’s federal monitor, Robert Warshaw, of influencing the chief’s job status.

“On top of the fact that you’ve got very significant violent crime challenges, it’s also politically challenging,” said Sean Whent, the former chief fired in 2016 over a scandal involving some OPD officers and a teenage victim of sexual trafficking.

He noted a recent conversation with a New York police official who said “Oakland is the hardest chief job in America.”

Thao, though, sees Mitchell as joining to lead a ship that has already turned course: the city’s 911 dispatch system has closed from a dozen previous dispatcher vacancies to just four openings, and crime trends to start the year have been somewhat encouraging.

“Oakland is on the right track,” she said. “I’m confident Floyd can come in and continue the work.”

Staff writer Jakob Rodgers contributed reporting to this story.