The Oakland police sergeant at the heart of a chain of events that has led to Oakland’s police chief being placed on leave wasn’t just any officer. Confidential documents recently shared with The Oaklandside paint a more complete—and more troubling—picture than has been previously reported.
As The Oaklandside previously reported, Sergeant Michael Chung was in a hit-and-run collision in 2021 that was papered over by OPD. In early 2022, he shot the wall of an elevator at OPD headquarters in a bizarre incident that sparked an outside investigation into how the prior car collision case was handled by internal affairs. The Oaklandside has obtained portions of the confidential investigations conducted by an outside law firm that examined OPD’s handling of these incidents.
We have now learned that Chung was also in charge of a high-profile operation to provide extra police patrols in Chinatown, as well as OPD’s new drone unit, which was paid for by a wealthy city contractor through Chinatown’s recently established business improvement district. Chung led this work last year during a time of increased violence in Oakland’s Asian-American communities—and increased calls for policing and surveillance in those communities as the city’s elected officials and Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong debated whether calls to “defund” OPD had gone too far.
Until now, only Mayor Sheng Thao, members of the police commission, OPD command staff, the department’s federal monitor, the plaintiffs’ attorneys who are part of the police department’s federal oversight program, and a few other officials have had access to these files, which may be considered confidential under state law and protected by an order of a federal judge.
What are these secret files, and what’s in them?
Although the files we obtained are meant to remain secret,…
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