San Francisco Chronicle-
Anne Kirkpatrick had nearly finished packing up her downtown Oakland apartment Sunday evening when she stopped to discuss her unceremonious exit as Oakland’s police chief. She’ll soon be moving back to Seattle, she said, but Kirkpatrick’s not leaving the Bay Area without a fight.
Speaking for the first time to The Chronicle and other outlets since the Oakland Police Commission voted Thursday to dismiss her without cause, Kirkpatrick fired back at her critics and said she’s weighing her legal options. She also intends to ask the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate a federal court’s oversight of the city’s force.
Kirkpatrick, 60, became the latest Oakland police chief unable to shake the now 17-year hold federal monitors have had on the department, ever since the “Riders” scandal of the early 2000s exposed pervasive racial profiling and abuses by a group of officers in West Oakland. The oversight, which was supposed to span five years, has now outlasted 10 police chiefs and 500 officers. Four mayors, two federal judges and two monitoring teams have also taken part in the process.
The California Right 