Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf told reporters Thursday that Police Chief Sean Whent was resigning, with the chief vaguely citing “personal reasons.” But the East Bay Express on Friday broke the real reason Whent was leaving after three years on the job:

According to interviews with the victim, elected officials, and sources close to OPD, in addition to documents obtained by the Express, at least 14 Oakland police officers, three Richmond police officers, and four Alameda County sheriff’s deputies had sex with the girl who goes by the name Celeste Guap. (The Express is not publishing Guap’s real name because she was a sexually exploited minor when the abuse began.)

Three Oakland police officers [allegedly] committed statutory rape of Guap when she was under-age. She says all of the law-enforcement agents who had sex with Guap knew she worked as a sex worker.

According to text messages between police officers and the victim, at least three OPD officers leaked her confidential information about undercover prostitution stings. One Oakland cop obtained police reports and criminal histories and shared them with the victim, which is against department policy.

Guap also said she slept with cops as a form of protection.

Officer’s 2015 suicide triggered internal probe

Other news agencies scrambled to corroborate the account. The Associated Press reported that four Oakland officers are on leave because of their dealings with the sex worker.

Meanwhile, the young woman at the center of the case gave an on-camera interview to KPIX in which she repeated the allegations the Express reported. 

She only named one officer, however: Brendan O’Brien, an Oakland patrolman who committed suicide in September 2015.

O’Brien’s suicide spurred on the internal investigation of officer misconduct whose details have been emerging for the past month.

In San Francisco, Police Chief Suhr was willing to defend most of  his officers even as allegations grew. But in Oakland, officials described themselves as shocked and heartsick — and prepared to clean house.

“The Police Department is supposed to protect those young kids,” Councilman Larry Reid told The Los Angeles Times. “As a father with four daughters – that something like this could occur in our city and with some members of the Oakland police – it makes me sick to the stomach.”

“We continue to be disgusted and outraged by the idea that anyone could abuse an underage victim of sexual exploitation – particularly those who have sworn to uphold the law and protect our communities; we are sickened to think anyone could even know of such abuse and not bring that information forward,” Mayor Schaaf said in a prepared statement.

“To think that officers were engaged in the sexual exploitation of a child: It’s heartbreaking,” City Council President Lynette Gibson McElhaney told the Bay Area News Group. “And if it’s true, it’s criminal, and they should be prosecuted.”

Sex worker contacted police chief’s wife

While not offering broad corroboration of the Express scoop, the Mercury-News reported Sunday that Schaaf demanded Whent’s resignation because of her belief he had badly botched the investigation. It also reported an unusual detail: Guap had contacted the police chief’s wife, Julia Whent, via Facebook in June 2015 and that she knew Guap was dating an officer.

What makes the Oakland scandal particularly embarrassing is that the local police force is in the 13th year of having a federal monitor review its activities because of past officer misconduct. In 2012, “Oakland became the first U.S. city Wednesday to willfully surrender authority over its command staff to a court-appointed director,” the Oakland Tribune reported.

The new scandal would appear to raise basic questions about the value of this extended federal oversight.

Senate Bill 1021, introduced by state Sen. Lois Wolk, D-Davis, would allow school districts to impose different parcel tax rates on different types of property. That means commercial, industrial, residential and multifamily residential could see different tax bills for properties of equal value.

SB1021 is essentially split-roll at the local level, Jennifer Barrera, a policy advocate for the California Chamber of Commerce, explained on CalChamber’s website. It would allow school districts to pass parcel taxes just against commercial property.

Alameda County’s parcel tax overturned by courts

The bill comes in response to a controversial parcel tax adopted in Alameda County that was ultimately thrown out by the courts. In 2008, more than two-thirds of Alameda County voters approved Measure H, which imposed a $120 parcel tax on residential and small commercial properties and a substantially higher parcel tax — up to $9,500 a year — on large commercial parcels.

Last June, a unanimous state appeals court overturned the parcel tax. In Borikas v. Alameda Unified School District, the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco found that the parcel tax violated the requirement that taxes “apply uniformly to all taxpayers or all real property within the district.”

The bill’s author said that the issue is one of local control, granting local districts the power to set different tax rates for each community’s needs.

“Under the recent court decision, school districts can no longer apply higher or lower rates to parcels based on commercial, industrial, or residential classification of the parcel,” Wolk’s office argued, according to the Senate’s legislative analysis. “SB1021 restores this needed local control by allowing school district boards to structure its tax according to local values and priorities.”

CalChamber: Unfair job-killer bill

Opponents of the bill include CalChamber, the California Business Properties Association, the California Association of Realtors, the California Grocers Association, the California Mortgage Bankers Association, the Family Winemakers of California, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, the California Manufacturers and Technology Association and the California Building Industry Association. The opponents are worried SB1021 will lead to school districts targeting parcel taxes on businesses and commercial property owners.

“At a time when California officials should be doing everything in their power to attract and retain jobs, this legislation takes exactly the opposite approach by targeting employers for even higher taxes if they stay here,” said David Kline, vice-president of the California Taxpayers Association. “This bill would allow a free-for-all parcel tax system, with no limits on what rates school districts could levy, and would create opportunities for massive tax hikes targeted at businesses of all sizes.”

The state’s business leaders and taxpayer advocates also say the bill is an end run around Proposition 13, the state’s landmark 1978 initiative that placed a cap on property taxes. With other “add-on” property taxes and fees, such as parcel taxes, Mello-Roos fees, and assessment districts, many property owners pay substantially more than Prop. 13’s base rate of 1 percent of the property’s value.

Higher rate applied to different properties

In addition to applying different tax rates to commercial and residential properties, SB1021 authorizes school districts to target individual owners for higher tax rates. Under the bill, school districts would be allowed to treat multiple parcels of real property as one parcel for tax purposes.

“Under this provision, a school district could aggregate multiple, smaller parcels owned by one owner to capture all the properties under a square footage parcel tax,” CalChamber warned in a recent legislative alert. “Additionally, a school district could impose a parcel tax based upon the use of one parcel within multiple parcels owned by the same owner, even if those other parcels are not used for the same purpose.”

Despite recent national headlines of the state’s declining business climate, the legislature is expected to pass the bill, in part because it only requires majority approval of the Legislature. Traditionally, most tax increases are subject to two-thirds approval. However, SB1021 isn’t technically a tax increase, according to the legislature’s attorneys.

However, Gov. Jerry Brown is running for re-election and likely would veto the tax increase. In his 2010 campaign, he promised that no new taxes would be imposed without voter approval. And when he campaigned for Proposition 30, which increased taxes $7 billion, he insisted it would be temporary. SB1021 would allow permanent tax increases.