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Oakland Police Department history
Oakland Police Department company history timeline
October 20, 1966 - Thomas D. Strong is hired as OU's first Director of Public Safety.
April 20, 1967 - OU hires four Public Safety Officers.
March, 1974 - OU Department of Public Safety announces the Student Marshal Program.
August 10, 1975 - Opening of the new Public Safety and Service Building.
December 14, 1976 - Earl N. Gray resigns as Public Safety Director to accept a similar job at the University of Detroit.
April, 1977 - Richard W. Leonard becomes the third Director of Public Safety for OU. Leonard served as a Lieutenant for Wayne State University Police for eight years before coming to OU.
He filed his first wrongful death suit against the OPD in 1979, just two years after he passed the California bar exam.
120, Public Acts of 1990, the Board of Trustees votes to assume the responsibility of granting police power and authority directly to Public Safety Officers.
October 7, 1993 - The Department of Public Safety and Police introduces the first emergency blue light phones.
1993 - Patrolman David Birkholz and Sergeant Douglas Godwin captured first place in the 14th Annual Michigan College and University Police Pistol Match held in Lansing.
1994 - The Department of Public Safety and Police teams up with Student Congress to establish the SAFEwalk escort program.
June 6, 1996 - The Department of Public Safety and Police officially changes its name to the Oakland University Police Department.
The most serious legal troubles began in 2000, when a 21-year-old named Delphine Allen alleged that police brought him to a remote location and beat him while he was in handcuffs; he described being dragged under a freeway overpass and hit repeatedly on the soles of his feet with police batons.
December 5, 2001 - Adam Garcia becomes the fourth Director of Police for OU following the retirement of Chief Richard W. Leonard.
2002 - Dallas Schneider is named Interim Director of Police following the resignation of Adam Garcia.
His hunch was confirmed a few weeks later when Chanin ran into Richard Word, the former police chief with whom he had settled back in 2003.
By early October, demonstrators had set up an encampment in front of City Hall and named the site after Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old who in 2009 had been shot in the back and killed by an officer for BART, the local rail transit system.
By the time the Occupy protests began in 2011, the police department seemed no further along on its path to internal reforms than it had been when Chanin and Word announced a new dawn seven years earlier.
In October 2012, the two lawyers filed the necessary papers to put the police department into full federal receivership with Judge Henderson.
But the reforms flopped—so much so that in 2012, after the city paid out millions more to settle additional cases, the federal courts prepared to step back in.
Then, in 2012, Chanin visited Detroit.
What’s more, the department went nearly two years without an officer-involved shooting from May 2013 until early in February this year.
April 2, 2014 - Mark B. Gordon becomes the sixth Chief of Police for OU following the retirement of Chief Samuel C. Lucido.
Line of Fire | In 2014, homicides in Oakland declined for the second year in a row, to 86, but gang activity and street shootings remain a problem.
Then, in early 2014, the judge overseeing the consent decree fired Thomas Frazier, the compliance director he had hired the year before, and gave monitor Robert Warshaw full control over the department.
November 23, 2016 - OU Police establishes a Support Services Division to include the Office of Information Technology and other support functions.
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Oakland Police Department competitors
| Company name | Founded date | Revenue | Employee size | Job openings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department | - | $280.0M | 20,159 | - |
| U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement | 2003 | $420.0M | 15,000 | - |
| Memphis Police Department | 1827 | $213.7M | 2,605 | - |
| LAPD HQ | 1869 | $21.0M | 12,000 | 6 |
| Atlanta Police Department | 1853 | $17.0M | 350 | - |
| Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department | 1973 | $1.7M | 5,000 | 18 |
| NOPD | - | $22.0M | 1,457 | - |
| Police Department | - | $25.0M | 350 | 3 |
| Syracuse Police Department | - | $360.0M | 50 | - |
| Aurora Oh | - | $4.1M | 125 | - |
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