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Anthony Batts arrived as police chief in 2009 in a whirlwind of excitement and promise.
He quit this week in an announcement met with disappointment and frustration, leaving behind a short-staffed department mired in a decadelong effort to reform and rebuild ties with a skeptical community.
Some observers now say the city wasted its shot at making the most of an intelligent, inspiring public safety leader, holding him back with micromanagement and anti-police stonewalling, failing to "let the chief be the chief."
Others say Batts was too ego-driven to stick around when limited resources made the job tough, or when he didn't get his way in a liberal, progressive city that demands teamwork and compromise.
Opinions on both sides raise common questions: Is Oakland an environment where police leadership can thrive and succeed? If it is, what kind of personality will it take? With Batts exiting the picture, interim Chief Howard Jordan will join Mayor Jean Quan on Saturday ?to unveil a public safety plan both he and the mayor describe as holistic and comprehensive. Will Jordan's leadership mesh better with Quan's, and who can succeed as a crime-fighting champion in a city of many leaders with conflicting and intersecting values?
It may be hard to lead in any one direction with so many power factions in the city: Quan, the oft-conflicted City Council, the conservative Oakland Police Officers Association, the progressive
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Stop the Injunctions Coalition, the reform demands of federal monitors overseeing the department and the wide-ranging opinions of neighborhood crime prevention councils, or NCPCs, which residents form in districts both safe and crime-ridden.
"As a new chief, you've got to anchor yourself somewhere," said Pamela Drake, an Oakland resident long active in local politics. "You're probably going to have to take a long time to do it. I don't think Batts gave it enough time."
Several Oakland residents, including City Council President Larry Reid (Elmhurst-East Oakland), have said the city lost Batts because politicians have too heavy a hand in setting policy.
"Nobody but Chief Batts can tell you why he left," said Bruce Nye of the advocacy group Make Oakland Better Now. "What I can say is the environment that's been created over the last two years, in which public safety policy seems to be set by whoever can show up at City Hall and yell the loudest, is one I can't imagine anybody wanting to operate under."
Last week, following angry public comment from more than 100 people, the council stalled in granting the police department power to enforce anti-loitering and youth curfew policies or research new anti-gang injunctions in the city's most violent neighborhoods.
"There's this argument that the police are some occupying army, like they're the enemy," said Geoff Collins, 70, a resident and former member of the Community Policing Advisory Board. "The ideology here is far left, politically, and that's fine, that's the way it is. But you pay a price for that."
Drake, however, defended the process.
"I don't understand how people have this attitude," she said. "We elect people to make policy. A chief only gets appointed, over one department -- a life and death department -- and they don't get to make the policy. This is a democracy."
Councilmember Jane Brunner (North Oakland) said she doesn't believe Oakland is necessarily unique in its policing challenges.
"Oakland is a city that is careful about what it's implementing. I think that happens in many cities," Brunner said. "The chief has to be able to work with the police department and running it, but he or she also has to be able to work with what the philosophy is of the city residents."
Collins blasted local politics as dysfunctional.
"There are so many ideological divides on each side, they make it impossible to have a consensus. There has never been a consensus on public safety," he said.
But what's most important is not agreement at the top, but building community from the bottom, argues Don Link, chairman of the Shattuck NCPC. Link said it falls on neighborhoods to organize themselves and commit to taking a stand, working with police and organizing to make criminals feel discouraged. That, Link said, is the critical difference that will temper Oakland's violence.
"Without that, I don't know how an outside force, including the police, is going to stop it," he said.
Link also said he's confident the city's progressive politics are coming around to understand its people need a strong, supported police department.
"I think even the progressives, to the issue of violence, I think even they are at the point they're beginning to feel OK, we need to take action to get this to stop, by just about any means we can," Link said.
He said he thinks law enforcement policies that have stalled in the City Council could pass if they were written to include "a six-month, hard-knuckle review of how these things have performed, whether they've delivered. If they haven't, let's try something else."
As questions of leadership, temperament and the city's political landscape unfold, lives are still on the line in a city that sees about 100 murders a year. Councilmember Pat Kernighan (Grand Lake-Chinatown), who heads the public safety committee, said this week she's hoping the top cop shake-up will result in a stronger sense of direction coming from City Hall.
"We had the greatest guy we could have had in the bold leader style, in terms of having his own style, his own ideas, a strong personality and all that. And it totally didn't work in this environment," Kernighan said. "I'm a pragmatist: Let's try something different. We need a chief who's more comfortable being part of a team. And I would rather have clear decision-making, and then the person who makes the decisions is held accountable for the results."
