In taking the reins of Oakland's Police Department this morning, Chief Anne Kirkpatrick said she has one goal; to make Oakland safe.

“When a city is safe, it is truly prosperous,” Kirkpatrick said at a swearing-in ceremony at City Hall packed with police officers and reporters.

“Oakland is a city on the move,” Kirkpatrick said. “It is a city with a rich history and a vibrant culture and a city with a national promise.”

A national search for a new chief began in June 2016 after three chiefs stepped down in eight days after news broke of a scandal involving the cover-up of officers sexually exploiting a teenager. Eventually, 12 officers were disciplined, and three were charged with crimes.

In the wake of the scandal, Mayor Libby Schaaf called the department a “frat house” and put City Administrator Sabrina Landreth directly in charge of the department while searching for a new police chief.

In swearing in Kirkpatrick this morning, Schaaf thanked Landreth for her work in leading the department, as well as Assistant Chief David Downing, who became OPD's highest-ranking member in the absence of a chief. Downing had already delayed his retirement when asked to step in, Schaaf said.

To Kirkpatrick, Schaaf said, “we chose you for your deep experience both as a chief and for the very skills that matter to Oaklanders,” like in procedural justice and training for implicit bias.

Kirkpatrick was most recently working in Chicago for six months, where she was hired to help oversee department reforms and was a finalist for the police chief position. Prior to that, she had 15 years of experience as a police chief in Washington, including a six-year stint heading the Spokane Police Department.

Like Oakland, Kirkpatrick came into Spokane at a time when its department was embroiled in controversy — in 2006, Otto Zehm, a man with a developmental disability, was killed in an altercation with an officer who was later indicted and convicted of excessive force and lying to investigators.

Months after Kirkpatrick left Spokane in 2012, her successor, Chief Frank Straub, requested a review of department practices by the U.S. Department of Justice Community Oriented Policing Services office.

The DOJ findings, released in 2014, stated that Spokane PD was making "positive progress" to improve accountability and training, "it has undergone an extended period of over eight years during which leadership and organizational structure was lacking.”

In a questionnaire she submitted when applying for the Oakland job, Kirkpatrick said she advocated for more civilian oversight and transparency while in Spokane, bringing in the city’s first civilian police ombudsman and strengthening the investigation of officer-involved shootings.

Schaaf cited Kirkpatrick’s answers to these questions as well as when interviewed as the reason Kirkpatrick impressed her, citing a question about broken windows policing, a controversial law enforcement practice to focus on low level crimes and disorder in an effort to prevent more serious crime.

According to Schaaf, Kirkpatrick’s answer was nuanced, and she said that while blight must be addressed, “law enforcement should not make the disadvantaged even more disadvantaged.”