Acting Chief Paul Figueroa said Friday that he is stepping down after only two days — the latest casualty of disarray in a department that is now on its fourth head in a little over a week.
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said that Figueroa had offered his resignation and that assistant chiefs will report to City Administrator Sabrina Landreth while a new replacement is found.
There was no immediate reason given for why Figueroa is withdrawing from his position, though a KTVU reporter said that it involved racial texts and emails.
A visibly frustrated mayor told reporters that she and her city administrator will “root out what is clearly a toxic macho culture.”
“I am here to run a police department, not a frat house,” Schaaf said at the beginning of her conference, later saying repeatedly that she was not giving details because she does not want to jeopardize getting the “strongest punishment allowed.”
A racist text scandal previously rocked the force in the city across the bay, San Francisco, during a span of a few months where top police officials in the area have not been not long for their jobs.
Oakland’s trouble started last month, when an investigation into the suicide of an officer last year revealed his and other officers’ involvement with a teenage prostitute known as Celeste Guap.
The scandal widened when the sex worker, now 18, told the East Bay Express that she had sex with more than 20 officers from Oakland and other nearby departments, including three while she was underage.
Guap, the daughter of a police dispatcher, claimed that officers would give her inside information about anti-prostitution raids. She also said she would talk to the wife of Oakland chief Sean Whent about “dating an officer.”
Whent resigned last Thursday, after what local outlets reported was criticism of the way he handled the investigation into wrongdoing by his officers.
Ben Fairow, an assistant chief of the police for the BART mass transit system, was picked as a replacement by Schaaf and was originally supposed to hold the title for six months.
Sean Whent (pictured) resigned last week and Ben Fairow (right) was fired from the police chief job on Wednesday.
However, he was fired on Wednesday after the mayor said she received information that caused her to lose confidence in her choice. She said then that she had made a mistake in not vetting him properly.
BART Chief Kenton Rainey said in a statement that Fairow had admitted to having an affair with a woman a decade ago when he was married.
He said his former employee would go back to his old position at the transit system, and that Fairow had done anything that would disqualify him from doing his job.
Schaaf said that Figueroa was not involved in the sex scandal, which now appears to be another commonality that San Francisco and Oakland’s departments share in addition to racist texts.
KRON reported Thursday that Guap said that she “hooked up with like 2 from SF but one was ex OPD.” SFPD said that it is conducting a review to see if there was any wrongdoing by its own officers
The Golden Gate City’s Greg Surr was asked to resign last month — at the end of a scandal-filled career — after an officer shot an unarmed woman who had crashed a car.
Racist texts were not the only wrongdoing alleged of Oakland officers on Friday. The East Bay Expres reported that homicide detective James Michael Gantt is accused of letting his mistress have access to police files so she could write up his reports.
The girlfriend reportedly became mad and posted on social media about the cases after learning that Gantt, a New York City native who investigated murder cases that are still ongoing, was married.
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