Other Bay Area police departments took charge in retail theft grant application; Oakland did not

OAKLAND, Calif. - When the opportunity for a crime-fighting grant became available through California's Board of State and Community Corrections, many law enforcement agencies in the Bay Area put in an application; Oakland did not.

In San Jose, members of the police department found out about the grant in May and started gathering elements to apply within a month. The department's fiscal unit took charge and submitted the proposal days before the deadline.

"We identified a need," said Michael Drago, a sergeant with the financial crimes unit. "We had this great solution and we thought ‘hey, we need to do this.’"

That effort earned the department $8 million from the state. 

"It's a lot of work to put into this, a lot of dedicated resources, so we did feel urgency to accomplish this," Drago said.

The Santa Clara County Sheriff's office felt that same urgency. They were awarded $11 million.

"With that grant money, we are able to utilize having more staffing outside of businesses to deter organized retail theft," said Deputy Felicia Segura. "A team is being created that, solely their purpose, is to be assigned to organized retail theft."

Segura says her team submitted their proposal to the state two days before the July 7 deadline.

"We wanted to make sure we were able to utilize the time we had to make a great proposal to submit to the BSCC," she said.

Each applicant was asked to identify a lead public agency, as well as a project leader, meant to be the main point of contact. Most agencies in the Bay Area that submitted an application identified the police department as the lead agency applying for the grant.

According to records obtained by KTVU, not only did the city of Oakland not submit a full proposal before the deadline, the city also struggled to identify a department to take lead of the application.

 It's unclear who Oakland identified as the lead agency, because the city's application never registered with the BSCC.

In an earlier report, KTVU learned the timeline in which the city found out about the grant and began working on it. 

The first notification to the police department came in April. Officers and police personnel, including interim chief Darren Allison, emailed about the grant in May. Those emails, however, didn't appear to show what work was done to get the grant done.

One email from a police lieutenant on June 15th read "OPD is in a bit of a time crunch (I apologize but our team was given this really late)."

About a week before the July 7 deadline, an employee of the city's economic workforce development department reintroduced the idea to police and city officials and assigned herself to become the lead. 

Emails showed that employee, and the people she recruited to work on the grant, delayed meetings due to conflicts. 

On deadline day, they still did not have all the materials uploaded to the state's submission portal. Text messages show those involved blamed a city-wide 911 outage.

In September, city administrator Jestin Johnson said the EWD would take blame for dropping the ball. 

However, an email from the department's director, Sofia Navarro, to Johnson and Mayor Sheng Thao questioned why the department was to blame, and not the police department.

Navarro argued since OPD knew about the grant in April, their lack of action "lacks transparency and accountability for their role in this process." 

She also addressed a member of staff taking the lead, calling it a "personnel issue."

KTVU requested interviews with Oakland Police on the matter, asking to clearly explain its work from April to June, before the EWD stepped in.

Interviews were denied, but the department offered the following statement: "A substantial amount of work went into this process, some of which was not captured in emails, providing only a partial account of the extensive efforts."

For the agencies in the South Bay, there was no question who should be responsible for working on the grant proposal; since this would become crime fighting dollars, the crime fighting agency should handle it. 

"We had support from the city," Drago said. "But the plan, the actual execution, was the financial crimes unit and the grants unit."

Since the blunder, Thao said the city is hiring a full-time centralized grants coordinator. 

Oakland's city auditor added the retail theft grant to its list of investigations for next year.