Oakland's Summer of Discontent
The past several months have brought major developments in Oakland, particularly for the city's political landscape and police department, which is heading into its twenty-second year of court-ordered reforms with no end in sight. A number of local outlets have done a stellar job covering this story - the East Bay Times, The Oaklandside, and the Oakland Observer in no particular order (NYT, LAT, & the Hearst Paper have chased smoke & PR narratives, but that's what happens when you don't have sources). I've been caught up reporting on aspects of this broader story since the turn of the year, but wanted to unpack matters a bit in a longer post and situate Oakland's current turmoil in a regional and historical context.
In short, we're in a reactionary moment where establishment power groups like finance, real estate, and local police unions have found common cause with highly ideological new money from Silicon Valley and are flexing their muscles. This overlaps with OPD's decades-long reform saga (I hear there's a whole book about it) and corrupt East Bay machine politics that have gone decades without a serious reckoning, let alone investigation, from local, state or federal authorities.
FEDS, STRAW DONORS, CHINATOWN UNDERWORLD & DEALS DONE SOUR
The 500-pound gorilla in the room at the moment is, of course, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's sprawling public corruption investigation that surfaced in June with simultaneous raids on the homes of first-term Mayor Sheng Thao, the offices of Oakland's recycling contractor California Waste Services as well as the homes of CWS proprietor David Duong and his son, Andy. Judging from the substance of the FBI's subpoenas and a steady drip of leaks to the press, it appears the Bureau is delving into the Duongs' decades-long cultivation of political influence in the Bay Area and Sacramento. California Waste Services is a major waste services company with a sister firm in the Duongs' native Vietnam that holds major public tenders in San Jose and Oakland, where it controversially won the recycling contract more than a decade ago and recently was fined millions for overcharging residential landlords.
The Duongs came to public attention back in 2020 through an Oakland Public Ethics Commission probe into allegations that they ran a straw donor scheme to illegally funnel at least $18,000 worth of campaign contributions towards several Oakland City Council races at the tail end of the 2010s. The state's Fair Political Practices Committee also mounted their own separate investigation of the straw donor scheme. Though no charges were ever filed, the allegations almost certainly piqued the FBI's attention - the Bureau likes these kinds of cases, as evidenced by at least one of the cases they've currently got running on New York City Mayor Eric Adams. In particular, Andy Duong appeared to use a karaoke bar in Oakland's Chinatown that he claimed to own as a vehicle to launder money to his straw donors, funneling money to City Council candidates through the bar's manager, Charlie Ngo.
Undercover investigators from California's Department of Alcohol Beverage Control found illegal narcotics, including ketamine, for sale at the establishment, which lost its liquor license and shuttered in February 2019. Criminal charges were filed by the Alameda District Attorney against two hostesses who sold narcotics and offered sexual favors for cash to the undercover state investigators. Charlie Ngo was also charged in the same indictment, but the case against him was dismissed "in the interest of justice" the same day that Ngo made a $500 contribution to Alameda County Assistant District Attorney's Wiley's ultimately unsuccessful campaign for District Attorney.
The Duongs' influence in Chinatown also carries over to the Oakland Police Department: David Duong donated three drones worth tens of thousands of dollars to OPD for a specialized unit headed by Sergeant Michael Chung, the president of the Oakland Asian Police Officers Association. Duong also pressed for the creation of a Chinatown-specific task force in 2021 intended to curb a series of attacks and robberies targeting elderly neighborhood residents. A few weeks back, a couple East Bay Times reporters and I broke news that the FBI were examining that taskforce's activities for possible overtime abuse.
Per the FBI subpoenas obtained by the Bay Area press, the feds appear to be highly interested in the Duongs' dealings with Mario Juarez, a longtime East Bay political operative, onetime candidate for city council, and known con-man. Juarez apparently went into business with the Duongs through Evolutionary Homes, a 'modular housing' company that during the pandemic was angling to get city funds to house homeless Oaklanders on an unoccupied parcel at the former Oakland Army Base near the port. Juarez reportedly bilked the Duongs out of a $1 million loan related to this company, and stands accused of wage theft at Evolutionary Homes' factory in Tijuana.
The bad blood between Juarez and the Duongs took a darker turn earlier this year. In May, Mario got into a physical confrontation with Andy Duong and other CWS employees at the company's offices on the Embarcadero. On June 9, at least three gunmen fired on Juarez's home in East Oakland's Fruitvale neighborhood. Though the shooting remains unsolved, OPD are treating it as an attempted murder, and Juarez has been relocated out of state, per information I've obtained. From remarks made by his lawyer to the local press, Juarez is not so subtly insinuating the Duongs tried to have him whacked.
IF Mario has indeed turned state's evidence, it should be interesting to see if the feds have the connective tissue between him, the Duongs and other Bay Area politicians through a series of political mailers sent out to attack political candidates in Oakland during the 2022 election cycle, including Sheng Thao's opponent, Loren Taylor. There are also ties between a failed alternative fuels company which once employed Juarez - Viridis Fuels - which Rob Bonta steered $3.4 million in taxpayer funds towards while he was in the California State Assembly, a backdoor 'behest' flagged by the Orange County Register in 2017. Viridis is run by former Port of Oakland Commissioner Kathy Neal, the wife of former Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris. Moreover, Viridis Fuels once shared an address on High Street with the campaign office of Mia Bonta while she ran for election in 2018. Bonta, who is now California's top law enforcement official, has been photographed with his wife in Andy Duong's company several times, and appears to have taken at least one trip with the young man to the Philippines.
REACTIONARIES, OLD AND NEW
Needless to say, there are many unknowns about the scope of the FBI's investigation, particularly who may ultimately face criminal charges. However, the June raids absolutely have created the perception that Mayor Thao is up to her neck in it, particularly given the proximity of her boyfriend and longtime political fixture Andre Jones, one of the FBI's targets. Powerful vested interests in Oakland - read landlords who were incensed at the years-long eviction moratorium effected in 2020 by the city council because of Covid-19 - backed her opponent Loren Taylor and set the wheels in motion for Thao's recall virtually from her first days in office. The recall petition, along with a separate one for Alameda District Attorney Pamela Price, qualified for the November ballot earlier this summer.
The recall campaign is notable for a few reasons: campaign finance filings show it is almost entirely financed by San Francisco's far right kingmaker, tech investor Ron Conway and his kids, along with Phillip Dreyfuss, a hedge fund executive and Piedmont resident. Both the Conway clan and Dreyfuss were major donors to the successful 2022 recall of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin. Dreyfuss has also contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the recall campaign against Price.
Furthermore, the recall campaign appears to have set up a blended 501c3/c4 'gray money' network that effectively masks the source of many campaign contributions and allows donors to bypass state limits on political expenditures. Longtime readers might recall my February investigation for the Guardian into the gray money network that comprises Neighbors Together SF, Grow SF, Stop Crime SF, Together SF, Abundant SF, and more. Similar 'voter education' entities - Empower Oakland, Abundant Oakland - have now cropped up in Oakland, founded by residents of wealthy suburban Lafayette and Piedmont (it's always fucking Piedmont) and explicitly patterned off the SF network.
I'm a criminal justice reporter by trade, and generally steer far clear of politics. However, the current state of affairs in Oakland stands out for a larger reason: it is the third prong of a regional effort by a group of highly ideological, tech-aligned Silicon Valley types to solidify power bases in Northern California. Journalist Gil Duran has written extensively about the network state ideology and what he terms the 'Nerd Reich' - a future vision of society where the private sector has supplanted all government functions barring police, who have been ideologically yoked to the ruling tech oligopoly of 'grays' (I shit you not, this is real). SF has already partially undergone this process, while the failed 'California' Forever' libertarian paradise in the Sacramento River Delta showed the limits of this movement in the face of organized community opposition. Unsurprisingly, Peter Thiel & the Trump campaign are very involved in this push as well: just think about that the next time you hear the phrase "Freedom Cities."
Like Together SF, Empower Oakland is pushing a 1990's-style policing agenda through a weekly 'voter education' email blast, and will endorse candidates for at least three open city council seats, as well as the city attorney's office. On public safety, they caution voters of 'signals to watch' for their preferred policy: "filling sworn police officer vacancies vs. investing solely in violence prevention programs." This is a clear shot at Ceasefire and MACRO, two pillars of Oakland's public safety strategy. Ceasefire is the only policing/public safety strategy that led to sustained reductions in Oakland's violent crime over the past twenty years, from 2013 through 2019. However, former Mayor Libby Schaaf and OPD Chief LeRonne Armstrong allowed the program to fall into decrepitude around the turn of the decade, and it all but stopped functioning during the pandemic. You'll never hear about this from Oakland's reactionary crowd, because they don't want to admit that anything but mano duro policies work.
Lord knows how I ended up on Empower Oakland's list, but I've read through their last few posts, including a very interesting ride-along that in all likelihood was arranged by the Oakland Police Officers' Association and might pose a bit of a problem for OPD, given that Empower Oakland is an explictly partisan organization. That writeup, which was full of errors and hilariously written, contained a litany of complaints familiar to anyone who lived through the Jerry Brown era, studied it, or read RIDERS: fully staff OPD (900 to 1,200 cops), remove a 'restrictive' chase policy, end corrupt court oversight that has 'demoralized' OPD, and so on. Blame is placed on Mayor Thao, and ample attention given to OPOA's demand the mayor resign.
Others, particularly Jaime Omar Yassin, have deconstructed Empower's sophomoric foray into Oakland's public safety debate. I'm not going to linger long on it except to make a few points to demonstrate this organization and their ilk do not know Oakland's history, don't understand the current state of play regarding the police department or municipal government, and are not reliable custodians of the facts:
-OPD's court reforms are in their 22nd year, not their 15th. They are binding and the compliance director, Robert Warshaw, has the power to fire the chief of police and determine final discipline. This has been the state of affairs since 2013. OPD Chief LeRonne Armstrong lost his job in 2023 because he decided to start attacking the monitor and accusing him of corruption (more on LeRonne later).
-Oakland's restrictions on police chases (not a ban) was implemented a decade ago by Chief Sean Whent to reduce the number of police shootings. OPD once averaged 8-11 police shootings (lethal and nonfatal) in the 2000s and early 2010s, and a 2011 internal audit found many of the most egregious shootings (e.g. Mack Woodfox, Derrick Jones, see Chapter 8 of RIDERS) were the direct result of police pursuits. within a few years of this policy going into effect, Oakland went more than a year without a police shootings, all while seeing sustained reductions in violent crime. Governor Gavin Newsom is now urging a revision of this policy, much like San Francisco's recent decision to loosen their own use restrictions on SFPD's drones and chases - even though SFPD itself didn't want to loosen pursuit restrictions.
-Police staffing is not a metric of violent crime rates in Oakland. OPD reached its modern staffing peak circa 2007-08, when the department employed more than 800 officers. Violent crime was still higher than a decade later, when the agency's headcount never broke 750.
-The doom loopers don't want you to believe it, but crime is down in Oakland this year, as it is nationwide. While certain categories of property crime (notably grand theft auto and burglaries) are up notably since 2020, even the robbery spike of 2023 pales in comparison with a decade earlier, when there were 1,000 more robberies in Oakland (4,800 total). That, however, was at the beginning of the most recent tech boom and the city's demographics have changed (i.e. wealthier residents move in, poorer residents move out) in the interceding ten years. Murders topped 105 from 2020 through 2023 - that's bad, but not outside of Oakland's sad history for the past few decades.
DO YOU REALLY TRUST THIS MAN IN GOVERNMENT?
Why does this sort of revisionist politicking matter? Because Empower Oakland are almost certainly going to endorse LeRonne Armstrong in his revenge mission against Mayor Thao and city council campaign this year. Armstrong, who (along with OPOA) employs PR dark arts specialist Sam Singer to curry favorable coverage in both the local press outlets receptive to his message as well as national outlets, not only oversaw the dismantling of Ceasefire and a major increase in violent crime during his tenure, but is also up to his neck in a still-unfolding scandal involving a disgraced homicide investigator whose name should be familiar to Bleeding Edge subscribers.
In 2022, an Alameda County Judge freed Oaklanders Gionvante Douglas and Cartier Hunter from state prison and overturned their convictions for the December 2011 killing of Charles Butler. Their convictions at trial had depended on false eyewitness testimony from a woman bribed by Sergeant Phong Tran into fingering the two men and testifying at trial. Tran, who investigated murders from 2011 through 2023, was charged with felony perjury and bribery last summer and currently awaits trial, while more than two hundred of his past cases are currently under review by the Alameda County District Attorney. More overturned convictions are likely, if the pattern of shoddy casework and forced confessions Darwin BondGraham and I unearthed last June from a handful of Tran's old investigations proves to be consistent.
OPD cleared Tran of misconduct after a cursory investigation of the bribery allgations, reaching an 'unfounded' finding that means the alleged misconduct never took place - which is impossible, since Douglas and Hunter were freed from prison on a writ of habeus corpus signed by a county judge. Oakland's independent police watchdog agency also took notice of that finding and dug into the process that returned Phong Tran to work for several months after OPD and the Alameda DA were first notified about the bribery and perjury allegations. This Spring, the Citizens Police Review Agency found Armstrong, his former second in command Darren Allison, Armstrong's wife Deputy Chief Drennon Lindsay, and five other supervisors and cops culpable for derailing the IAD investigation into Tran. Lindsay is facing termination, while Armstrong had already been fired a year beforehand.
This is the calibre of candidate Oakland's reactionary right are seeking to put into power. I intended this post as a way to summarize a chaotic few months, and elucidate how Oakland's current moment is informed by the broader revanchist narrative in Northern California. None of this is an endorsement of Mayor Thao: but recalls are fundamentally undemocratic. And opportunistic actors never let a good crisis go to waste.