Oakland Unified School District Police Chief Pete Sarna has been placed on administrative leave while the district investigates a complaint that he repeatedly used a racial slur and threatened to kill a black subordinate while driving home from a nonschool sponsored charity event last month.
After a golf tournament, the 4 officers drove home together, and Sarna went off on a racist rant against one of the officers in the car, a black sergeant. Sarna told the subordinate that he should be lynched in the town square, and the meltdown was so horrendous that one of the two other officers filed the complaint.
Sarna was a lieutenant in the Oakland Police Department when he was tapped by then Attorney General Jerry Brown in December 2007 to become deputy director of the state Department of Justice Division of Law Enforcement, where he commanded a 1,300-strong force. But Sarna resigned in August 2007 after he crashed his state vehicle in Walnut Creek and was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence.
Sarna's father, Peter Sarna, Sr., was a former captain in the Oakland Police department.
-Inside Bay Area
As the saying goes, "the bad apple doesn't fall far from the tree."
OUSD police are already under fire for the assassination of Raheim Brown, who was shot 5 times (twice in the head) because his car smelled like marijuana and he was trying to hotwire it during a high school dance.
Tamisha Stewart, the only civilian witness to the killing, who was in a car with Brown outside Skyline High, spoke for the first time publicly about the event. The screwdriver Brown was accused of using as a weapon, according to Stewart, was being used in an attempt to hotwire the car, and it “never left the ignition.”
While hotwiring a car might be cause for police attention, it is not cause for five bullets, including two to the head. Stewart added, “There was nothing that Raheim did that he deserved to die.” According to statements at the press conference, after Brown was killed, Stewart was beaten badly and jailed for almost a week.
-SF Bay View
