OAKLAND — Few public figures in this town seem to represent its political complexities better than LeRonne Armstrong, the former police chief now running for City Council.
Armstrong was unceremoniously fired from his job as Oakland’s police chief in February 2023 over an explosive internal affairs scandal. He has denied wrongdoing and is suing Mayor Sheng Thao and the city for wrongful termination.
More recently, he was linked to a separate controversy involving a problem cop that led a federal court last week to order new changes to the department’s internal affairs process.
And the former chief has garnered his share of opponents simply by partnering with Sam Singer, a public-relations consultant labeled in the Bay Area’s political circles as a sworn enemy of progressives.
But beyond all the public squabbles, Armstrong is also the highest-profile prospect to succeed Rebecca Kaplan in the “at-large” City Council seat, which — unlike the other seven council members — represents the entire city and not an individual district.
A Black native of Oakland, he has proven to be both popular and widely respected in the community, and his promise to renew the city’s focus on robust policing marks a shift away from earlier efforts by the city’s leaders to rethink how public safety could be achieved.
Still, there are nine other candidates who hope to siphon away attention from Armstrong before the blockbuster Nov. 5 election, where five City Council races and a recall effort against Thao could thoroughly reshape Oakland’s political landscape:
Rowena Brown, a staffer for Assemblymember Mia Bonta and a former City Council aide;
Shawn Danino, a housing planner employed by the city of San Jose;
Kanitha Matoury, who co-owns the Howden Market store just west of Lake Merritt;
Fabian Robinson, a pastor at the local Miraculous Word Christian Center;
Mindy Ruth Pechenuk, a Republican admirer of former President Donald Trump;
Nancy Sidebotham, a perpetual candidate for public office who has never won;
Selika Thomas, a seamstress based in East Oakland;
Cristina “Tina” Tostado, a board member on the Oakland Library Commission;
Charlene Wang, a former U.S. Department of Transportation official.
It’s unclear who might emerge as Armstrong’s biggest threat; a would-be progressive opponent, Tonya Love, was disqualified from running after she attempted to switch from the at-large race to challenging for a District 7 seat.
Armstrong has promised to boost Oakland’s police staffing by several hundred positions, though he acknowledges this may take several years in a cash-strapped city.
Getting there, he says, may require slashing overtime pay for cops and forcing alternative non-emergency response programs, like the MACRO program, to rely on outside grants instead of city money. MACRO aims to move nonviolent, nonemergency 911 calls away from police over to a team of mobile responders.
Multiple controversies have kept OPD under federal oversight two decades after a series of brutality cases, but Armstrong doesn’t believe the department is fundamentally broken — rather, he says, it’s as flawed as any other institution made up of people.
“If you have a thousand cases and one of those cases comes up with a problem, that doesn’t mean there’s a systemic issue,” Armstrong said.
By November, a significant challenger to Armstrong could be Rowena Brown, a staffer for Assemblymember Mia Bonta who previously worked in the office of former Councilmember Loren Taylor.
Brown, who grew up in Richmond and graduated from Mills College, said she helped the state legislator’s office draft Assembly Bill 2851, which would mandate new requirements for monitoring specific air-quality impacts at metal-shredding facilities, such as Radius Recycling in West Oakland.
Her plans for Oakland differ in key ways from Armstrong’s: She wants to actually increase MACRO’s public funding so the program’s unarmed workers could replace police response for more non-emergency 911 calls on a 24/7 basis. Currently, the program covers just part of the day.
“I don’t think of solving crime as being a one-track solution,” said Brown, who served on the city’s Reimagining Public Safety task force, established in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. She opposes the recall effort against Mayor Thao.
Armstrong could find a boost in votes from Kanitha Matoury, a co-owner of the local Howden Market who is discussing a ranked-choice voting alliance with the former chief.
Matoury, a Cambodian immigrant whose parents were persecuted human-rights activists, also owns Spice Monkey, a temporarily shuttered restaurant next door to the market.
Her campaign is relatively light on policy but similarly focused on promoting police, and with personal anecdotes that other business owners may find relatable: Matoury’s store has been robbed several times in recent months, she said.
Three longtime Oaklanders with little political experience in the mix are pastor Fabian Robinson, local library commissioner Cristina Tostado and seamstress Selika Thomas; they share sentiments that public safety in Oakland has become markedly worse. Thomas, an East Oakland native, wants the city’s privacy laws amended to add more camera surveillance.
A pair of candidates, Charlene Wang and Shawn Danino, boast far more policy experience than their peers, but they are also rookies in Oakland’s tightly woven political arena.
Wang grew up in Albany and worked for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign and under Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Although she only started living in Oakland early last year, Wang noted her help securing a federal grant to study the impacts of dismantling Interstate 980, the highway whose construction in the 1980s cut through predominantly Black neighborhoods in West Oakland. Her vigorous campaigning has raised $65,000 in contributions.
While working as a California policy specialist, Danino reviewed Oakland’s housing element — a blueprint for future development — and led plans to densify the Rockridge neighborhood with 5,000 new homes.
Danino has a full list of policy plans, including four-day work weeks for city employees to match a model in Alameda, but his campaign has so far attracted little attention.
Rounding out the list are two fringe candidates: Mindy Ruth Pechenuk, an avowed Trump supporter and an acolyte of the late far-right political leader Lyndon LaRouche; and Nancy Sidebotham, who has run for council numerous times but never made a dent in election results.
Shomik Mukherjee is a reporter covering Oakland. Call or text him at 510-905-5495 or email him at shomik@bayareanewsgroup.com.
