By Harry Harris
San Jose Mercury News
OAKLAND — Two years into his three year contract, Oakland Chief of Police Anthony Batts announced Tuesday he is resigning.
Batts said a lack of officers and resources to make Oakland safe and crime-free contributed to his decision to leave a struggling department that at the time he was hired had 796 officers, 150 more than it has now.
Batts will leave his post sometime between Nov. 5 and Nov. 15 to take a position at Harvard University where he will do research and work on executive policy-making in police departments.
Although an email was sent by Batts to the rank-and-file saying he was resigning, he clarified later Tuesday that he’s retiring.
In a brief interview with The Tribune, Batts said the most critical thing about his tenure was the lack of resources and enough officers “to get the job done. ... We can talk about tactics, but until you have the numbers it is hard to get the job done.”
When Batts was hired away from Long Beach where he had been police chief for seven years, Oakland’s force numbered more than 830 officers. Then budget cuts forced the layoffs of more than 100 officers and attrition had taken even more of a bite out of the department. Recently the city began rehiring officers, but the current number of 651 is the lowest in decades. Batts frequently said that Oakland needs more than 1,000 officers.
He had also asked for additional tools such as more gang injunctions and a curfew, but so far a majority of Oakland City Council members had not approved the requests.
Mayor Jean Quan, who joined Batts, City Administrator Deanna Santana and other city officials at an afternoon news conference, said that when she took office in January, she had asked Batts if he wanted to leave, saying she understood he had been hired by former Mayor Ron Dellums.
“At that point, he said no, he wanted to stay,” Quan said. “But things here were not what he thought it was going to be. I appreciate he has other opportunities, but now we have to focus.”
Quan said the city needed to keep working to meet the conditions of the settlement to a lawsuit stemming from the evidence-planting scandal involving a group officers known as the Riders several years ago.
In an email to rank-and-file officers obtained by the Oakland Tribune, Batts said that when he was hired in 2009, “I answered the call for a reform-minded chief; a leader with a focus on community policing and high professional standards. I was told Oakland residents were looking for a strong, visible leader to engage the community and reduce violent crime. My goal was to help rebuild a once proud, professional department, geared toward crime reduction and community services.”
But he said that recently that had begun to change.
Now, he said, “rather than a chief managing a diverse department of law enforcement professionals making the streets of Oakland safe, I found myself with limited control, but full accountability.”
He added, “The landscape has changed radically over the past two years with new and different challenges.”
City Administrator Deanna Santana announced the resignation in a letter to to the City Council on Tuesday afternoon and said she regretted the chief’s departure. “Chief Batts and I are in process of settling on a departure date and, in the interim, I will be exploring my options on how to proceed.”
Sgt. Dom Arotzarena, president of the Oakland Police Officers Association, said, “This comes as a shock and we wish him well.”
He said Batts had called him earlier in the day to say he was retiring.
“I wished him well in his future endeavors,” Arotzarena said. “I hope we can find a replacement that can handle the challenges facing the Oakland Police Department.”
Council President Larry Reid, who said he’d begged the chief to stay, and had pleaded with him not to take leave when he was up for the police chief job in San Jose earlier this year, said he was done begging.
“I’m not mad at him,” Reid said. “I understand. Elected officials need to stop micromanaging our law enforcement professionals.”
Copyright 2011 San Jose Mercury News