A tumultuous year in Bay Area law enforcement continued last week when Berkeley Police Chief Michael Meehan abruptly resigned after six years on the job.

Meehan won national attention — and rebukes — for a 2012 decision to send an officer to an Oakland Tribune reporter’s home after midnight to try to get him to make changes in an unflattering story. He was also in the news that year for treating the theft of his son’s stolen iPhone as a department priority, assigning 10 officers to the case.

But the years since have seemed quiet — until last month. That’s when an online publication, berkeleyside.com, obtained emails that revealed Meehan was facing withering internal fire from individual officers. A survey completed by more than half of employees of Berkeley PD featured complaints about “weak leadership, low morale, insufficient staffing and inconsistent communication,” berekeleyside.com reported.

Meehan took the criticisms hard, according to the publication, telling staffers he was plainly not doing his job well. Captain Andrew Greenwood will fill in as chief while Berkeley elected leaders decide how to name Meehan’s replacement.

San Francisco loses one chief; Oakland, three

Meehan’s exit comes after months of turmoil in larger neighboring cities.

In May, San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr resigned at the request of Mayor Ed Lee following the third police killing of an unarmed African American since December. Deputy Chief Toney Chaplin was named interim chief.

San Francisco police are also facing a federal probe over the discoveries last year and earlier this year that a total of  17 different officers had sent racist and homophobic text messages.

In June, the Oakland Police Department went through three police chiefs in nine days — aftershocks from a sordid scandal involving a teenage prostitute who goes by the name Celeste Guap (pictured). She told the Bay Area News Group that she had sex with two dozen police officers from five different local departments, in some cases while she was underage. A majority of the officers were from Oakland, including one who committed suicide in 2015 and left a note that triggered an internal probe.

The first chief to go was Sean Whent, who left the Oakland force after 19 years after being viewed as botching the investigation of his officers’ relationship with Guap. Assistant Chief Paul Figueroa lasted two days as interim chief before leaving for unspecified reasons, although Oakland Mayor Libby Shaaf indicated he was not caught up in the scandal and would resume his previous role as an OPD lieutenant. Schaaf then named Bay Area Rapid Transit Deputy Police Chief Ben Fairow as interim chief, but he was gone after a week after city officials learned of a sex scandal from Fairow’s past.

The Oakland Police Department has been run since mid-June by a civilian: City Administrator Sabrina Landreth.

Teen prostitute sues Oakland for $66 million

Guap has sued the city of Oakland for $66 million, likening her treatment by officers to “modern day slavery.” Her sexual encounters with city officers while underage “constitute unlawful forced labor, trafficking into servitude and sex trafficking of a child by force, fraud and coercion and have caused [her] to suffer unimaginable abuse, pain, and suffering that she and her family will endure for the rest of her life,” according to a report on the lawsuit by NBC Bay Area.

Guap was also in the news earlier in September after she pleaded no contest to assaulting a worker at a Florida rehab center that treats drug abuse and sex addiction.

The Oakland police force has been under federal oversight since 2003. The oversight was a requirement stipulated in the settlement of a massive civil rights case involving four OPD officers who allegedly assaulted and planted evidence on 119 plaintiffs. All but one was black.

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.