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.

State voters last November rejected Proposition 48, which would have ratified Brown’s and the Legislature’s approval of the proposed $350 million, 2,000-slot machine casino. Opposing the ballot measure was largely supported by the state’s editorial pages on the grounds that the casino would be built on land purchased by North Fork Rancheria that’s more than 30 miles from tribal lands. The fear was this would set up a precedent for a sharp expansion of Indian casinos in heavily populated urban areas.

But the main groups funding the push to reject Proposition 48 were Indian tribes who didn’t want to see their market share reduced, not civic activists worried about gambling expansion. U.S. District Court Judge Anthony W. Ishii’s ruling appears to clear the way for such an expansion. This is from the Fresno Bee:

Ishii said federal law requires the governor to negotiate with the tribe and conclude compact negotiations within 60 days. If both sides can’t reach agreement, the judge will appoint a mediator. The state and the tribe will then have 60 days to present a final offer for the mediator’s selection.

 

The North Fork tribe argued that under federal Indian gambling law, the power rested in the hands of a federal judge to order the governor back to the table and, if necessary, select a mediator to choose between a state-proposed compact and one from the tribe. The complaint was filed after the governor’s office sent a letter to the tribe’s lawyers declining further negotiations.

 

“The state does not now contend that any of the (Department of the Interior) secretary’s determinations were incorrect, nor does it articulate a basis for its refusal to negotiate regarding the Madera parcel,” the judge said in requiring the governor to negotiate.

Construction of the North Fork casino would be paid for by Station Casinos, the Las Vegas company that would operate the facility and share profits with the tribe.

Senate president worries about rapid gambling expansion

The federal court’s ruling is likely to be treated with alarm by some state lawmakers. State Senate President pro Tem Kevin de Leon has a history of raising concerns about off-reservation casinos. In July 2013, he wrote a letter to Gov. Jerry Brown in reaction to approval of the North Fork project.

“I am deeply concerned by the current ad hoc process of approving off-reservation gaming projects which does not sufficiently protect state interests and our residents,” he declared.

But Brown has been working much more closely with Indian tribes to advance their casino projects, at least their non-controversial ones, than his predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The Republican actor-turned-politician used his 2003 recall campaign as a platform to demand that Indian tribes share their gaming revenue with the state. Subsequent deals his administration cut with tribes were conditioned on such revenue sharing. But in 2011, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held up a trial court summary judgment ruling throwing out any such state requirements. The blistering opinion mocked the state of California’s official position that demanding a cut of tribal gaming revenue wasn’t really a tax.

“No amount of semantic sophistry can undermine the obvious: a non-negotiable, mandatory payment of 10 percent of net profits into the state treasury for unrestricted use yields public revenue, and is a ‘tax,’” the ruling held.

Brown’s administration chose not to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court. That suggests the governor, a Yale Law School graduate, expected the North Fork ruling but didn’t want to resume negotiations with the tribe until ordered to by a federal judge so as to not seem to be defying voters’ rejection of Proposition 48.