Lovelle Mixon was a 26-year-old parolee from Oakland, California, whom the Oakland Police Department held responsible for the deaths of four of its officers on Saturday, March 21, 2009. It was the deadliest day in the department's history and the first time in the city's history that four of its officers had died in the line of duty on a single day. Mixon was killed by police in Oakland that same afternoon. He was never charged with the deaths and never stood trial, so no court ever heard evidence about them or reached a verdict.
At the time, Mixon was a fugitive in the eyes of the state. He had missed a mandatory meeting with his parole agent a month earlier, a warrant had been issued, and he was listed as a parolee at large, wanted on a no-bail warrant for violating his parole. That fact turned the case, within days, into an argument about how California supervised the people it released from prison, and the state's own Inspector General was asked to answer it. A second argument followed over the Oakland Police Department's conduct of that afternoon, examined by an independent Board of Inquiry whose public report, dated December 2009, called the police response "an ineffective and poorly managed operation." The department demoted two commanders over it in 2010. An arbitrator gave both men their ranks back in 2013, more than four years after the deaths, and found that they had been singled out.
What survives of the case, then, is not a trial record. It is a parole file, a state review of that file, an outside board's long reckoning with a police department's command structure, and an arbitration that turned the board's conclusions back on the department that had commissioned them.
Mixon was 26 in March 2009, and Oakland was his city.
His adult record began across the bay, in San Francisco. In 2002 he was convicted there of a felony assault and sentenced to six years in state prison. He served about five years of the six-year term and was released on parole.
He did not do well on it. Within a few months, state corrections investigators later said, he had committed several parole violations. Because of the nature of his commitment offense and those violations, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation classified him as a "high control" parolee, the category the department kept for the people it judged to need the closest supervision. High control meant more visits to the place he lived, more frequent reporting, and more services than an ordinary parolee received.
In February 2008 he was arrested again for a parole violation. He served nine months for it and was released once more, on November 1, 2008, to an Oakland parole office. The agent assigned to him carried a caseload of 70 parolees, 18 of them classed as high-risk.
For three and a half months the supervision ran its course. Then, on February 19, 2009, Mixon failed to appear for a mandatory meeting with his agent. The agent lost track of him. Under the department's practice, a parolee who missed a required meeting and could not be found was declared a parolee at large and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Both things happened in Mixon's case. Of about 2,200 parolees then living in Oakland, roughly a tenth were listed as at large, and he was now among them. A month later he was still wanted on that warrant, and no one had found him.
The officers who died on March 21, 2009, were Sergeant Mark Dunakin, Officer John Hege, Sergeant Ervin Romans and Sergeant Daniel Sakai. All four were veterans of the department, and the Board of Inquiry, which identified no officer by name, referred to them throughout its report simply as "four veteran Oakland police officers."
The Oakland Police Department attributed all four deaths to Mixon, and the Board of Inquiry concluded that he "was solely responsible" for them. The deaths came in two separate encounters in East Oakland over about two hours that Saturday afternoon. One of the officers died in the days that followed, and a fifth officer was wounded. Mixon was killed by police in Oakland the same afternoon.
The response that day drew in far more than one department. A city-wide call for assistance brought more than 115 police units to East Oakland, from the Oakland Police Department and from outside agencies including the California Highway Patrol and the Alameda County Sheriff's Office, which supplied air, canine and personnel support. Within the afternoon, investigators had identified Mixon from state corrections records, printed his most recent photograph, and confirmed his criminal history and the outstanding parole-violation warrant.
The department's acting chief, an assistant chief who was running the department at the time, identified Mixon to the public that evening. A deputy chief confirmed that he had been on parole and was wanted on a warrant for violating it.
Because Mixon was dead, there was no one to charge, and the work that followed was an inquiry into what had happened rather than a prosecution. The department's Homicide Section investigated the deaths, and its Internal Affairs Division opened a separate investigation into the decisions its own commanders had made that afternoon. Both sets of reports later went to the Board of Inquiry, along with interviews of the officers involved, audio recordings and the evidence gathered that day. The department's criminalist and evidence technicians reconstructed the events in a body of work the board later singled out as reflecting "a high standard of professional excellence."
The investigation also reached backward. Within days of the deaths, Oakland police investigators said that evidence linked Mixon to an unsolved offense committed in East Oakland on February 5, 2009, about two weeks before he stopped reporting to his parole agent. Investigators had learned of the link the day before March 21. No arrest warrant had been issued in that case by the time of his death, and with his death no charge could ever be brought.
The first official reviews looked at the state, not the city.
The question of Mixon's own supervision went to the Office of the Inspector General, the independent body that oversees the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. In March 2009 its Special Investigations Unit carried out a preliminary review of the department's Division of Adult Parole Operations and of how it had monitored Mixon after his release from custody in November 2008. The stated purpose was to find out whether any violation of corrections policy or procedure had contributed to the deaths of the four officers.
The answer was no. The Inspector General found that Oakland parole agents had been diligent in monitoring and testing Mixon, in keeping with his status as a high-control parolee, and that they had promptly placed him on parolee-at-large status after he failed to report as directed. Based on its preliminary inquiry, the office found that staff of the parole division and of the department's Office of Correctional Safety had followed corrections policies and procedures, both in supervising Mixon after his release and in their attempts to locate and apprehend him. The finding was issued as a letter in March 2009 and listed the following year in the Inspector General's 2009 annual report as the "Mixon Preliminary Review."
The finding settled the narrow question and left the broad one open. Mixon had been supervised by the book, and the book had still allowed a high-control parolee to go a month without being found. Only 21 percent of Oakland parolees completed their parole successfully at the time, about half the national average, and a recent sweep in Oakland and neighboring Hayward that targeted some 200 parolees at large had picked up only a few of them. The warrant had made Mixon a wanted man, and the agents had done what the rules asked of them, but nothing in that process had put an agent or an officer on his trail in the month that followed.
The department's own review began under the acting chief, who ordered an independent inquiry into how the events of March 21 had happened and what could be done to prevent a recurrence. He convened a board of outside experts: senior leaders from other agencies who were considered authorities on tactical procedure and on investigating large critical incidents. The panel had five members, among them high-ranking officials of the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and an official of the U.S. Department of Justice.
The board reviewed hundreds of pages of documents, audio recordings, interviews with the officers involved, and the reports of the Homicide Section and the Internal Affairs Division. It met by teleconference and video conference several times and held three days of hearings in person. Its stated purpose was to identify the factors that contributed to the deaths, to make findings on specific actions and decisions, to review every use of force, and to offer recommendations, which it called "advisory and non-binding," to the department's leadership and to the wider law enforcement profession.
The public version of its report, an 18-page document titled "Independent Board of Inquiry into the Oakland Police Department March 21, 2009, Incident," was written for the board by a senior fellow at the CNA Institute for Public Research and dated December 2009. At the department's request it identified none of the officers, or Mixon, by name, only by number and rank or as "the suspect." It carried a note that it did not reflect the official position of the City of Oakland or of the department. Its detailed recommendations, its training proposals and its findings on individual compliance were kept in a fuller report that was not made public. The National Policing Institute, then the Police Foundation, posted the public version on December 15, 2009, and the department released it in the first week of January 2010, together with the police dispatch recordings from that afternoon.
The board divided the afternoon into four phases and found faults in each, but its central findings were about command. The officers who responded first, it said, had acted quickly and well, and the outside agencies that came to help had done so promptly. The failures began above them. No commander set up a command post. No commander announced himself as the Incident Commander, as department policy required, so that the officers on the street did not know who was in charge. Senior leaders of the department, captains and deputy chiefs, did not reach the scene for about 90 minutes, which the board called "a serious deficiency." The watch commander who first took charge had been newly promoted and had not yet attended command school.
The board traced most of what followed to that gap. With no command post, there was no central point where information could be gathered and passed on, and the information that mattered most did not travel. Mixon's identity, his photograph, his criminal history and the fact that he was wanted on a parole-violation warrant had all been established well before the department's final decisions that afternoon, but they never reached the officers on the perimeter or the teams sent to find him. A required call-out procedure for the department's specialist units was not followed, which delayed their arrival by about 45 minutes.
Its gravest criticism went to the final decisions of the afternoon, which, it found, the senior commanders present had approved instead of stopping. The board said the episode raised questions about how the department selected the officers who held tactical command, and it found that the commanders' statements showed "a fundamental lack of understanding" of the law of search and seizure.
Against those failures the board set its other findings. It examined every use of lethal force by officers that afternoon and found that each was within department policy. It commended the officers' discipline under the worst conditions. And it concluded that Mixon "was solely responsible" for the four deaths, crediting the department for having gone outside its own ranks for an inquiry that was bound to be painful.
The public report paired each finding with a recommendation, and its recommendations described the department the board wanted to see. It asked for training for every commander and supervisor in setting up a command post and in the basic principles of emergency incident management, and for pocket-sized field guides to the Incident Command System so that those steps became part of the department's daily culture. It asked for a formal procedure for the transfer and announcement of command at the scene of any critical incident, and for procedures that would put a suspect's photograph and record in the hands of every officer on a perimeter.
It asked the department to review how it called out its specialist units, to audit every operation those units carried out, to re-evaluate how it chose their leaders and its tactical commanders, and to test those leaders in field exercises under stress. It asked for training in the law of search and seizure for all commanders, at every rank. It asked for an audit of the system that routed emergency calls from cell phones through the California Highway Patrol to the Oakland police, to find out whether it could be overwhelmed. It asked the department to review how it notified the families of officers killed or wounded, and to consider a designated team for that duty.
A year after the deaths, the department had put about half of the panel's 24 recommendations into effect. All of its commanders, not only the leaders of its specialist units, were by then studying crisis management, and officers were being retrained in searching buildings and in traffic stops.
The Internal Affairs investigation reached its own conclusion before the board's report was public: that three commanders had committed "gross dereliction of duty" in the decisions of that afternoon. They were a deputy chief, the captain who had served as area commander, and the lieutenant who had been the tactical decision-maker. The deputy chief retired, and was no longer with the department by January 2010, so no discipline was imposed on him.
In the fall of 2010 the police chief, who had taken over the department after the events, recommended that the other two be demoted, and the city administrator agreed. The captain was reduced to sergeant and the lieutenant to officer, two steps each, on the single charge of "gross dereliction of duty," a term the department's policy manual did not define. They were the only officers disciplined for the decisions made that day.
Both men appealed through grievance arbitration with the support of the police officers' association. The hearing ran for seven days in June 2011 and heard 23 witnesses before the arbitrator closed it, and the City of Oakland hired two outside lawyers to present its case. The arbitrator's 124-page decision came about a year and a half after the case was submitted, in May 2013.
He restored both men to their former ranks, with back pay and benefits. He found that the department had acted improperly in singling them out when other officers, some of them senior, had shared in the decisions and had not been disciplined, and he found the Internal Affairs report flawed in several important respects. Above all, he found the department's own regulations and training for incidents of that kind grossly insufficient, and that the two commanders had acted in line with what the department had trained them to do. The decision did not dispute that the afternoon had gone badly. It moved the fault from the two men to the institution that had trained them.
No court ever ruled on the deaths of the four officers. They are attributed to Mixon by the Oakland Police Department and by the Board of Inquiry, and he died before any charge could be filed.
The link investigators drew between Mixon and the unsolved offense of February 2009 was never tested in court, and no charge was ever brought.
The two commanders maintained that they had not had the information the board said was available to them that afternoon. The board found that it had been disregarded. The arbitrator's decision did not adopt the board's view of their individual responsibility, and held the department's training to account instead.
2002: Convicted in San Francisco of a felony assault; sentenced to six years in state prison.
February 2008: Arrested again for a parole violation; served nine months.
November 1, 2008: Released on parole in Oakland as a "high control" parolee.
February 5, 2009: An unsolved offense in East Oakland, later linked to Mixon by investigators; never charged.
February 19, 2009: Missed a mandatory parole meeting; declared a parolee at large and a warrant was issued.
March 21, 2009: Four Oakland police officers died in two encounters in East Oakland, deaths attributed to Mixon; he was killed by police in Oakland the same afternoon.
March 2009: The state Attorney General criticized parole supervision; the Inspector General's preliminary review found that Mixon's supervision followed corrections policy.
December 2009: The Independent Board of Inquiry's public report was completed; it was posted by the Police Foundation on December 15.
January 2010: The department released the report and dispatch recordings; a deputy chief criticized in it had retired.
March 2010: About half of the panel's 24 recommendations were in effect.
June 2010: The Inspector General's 2009 annual report listed the Mixon preliminary review.
Fall 2010: A captain and a lieutenant were each demoted two ranks for gross dereliction of duty.
June 2011: A seven-day arbitration hearing on the demotions.
May 2013: The arbitrator restored both commanders to their former ranks with back pay.