The Saga of Oakland Police Sergeant Derwin Longmire, Part One

I write this article with the satisfaction that Derwin Longmire proudly wears the uniform of an Oakland Police Sergeant. But it wasn’t that long ago that he came close to going from exalted and legendary Homicide Investigator to disgraced and unemployed ex-cop. This is a saga which could take many chapters to adequately explain, but I’ll try to be brief.

The Murder of Journalist Chauncey Bailey — the Investigation Begins

On the morning of August 2, 2007, I turned on the local news and saw an announcement of breaking news in the City of Oakland. A prominent Oakland resident had been repeatedly shot by a masked man with a shotgun in downtown Oakland, not far from the courthouse. The news reported that the victim had died from his wounds. That individual, as it turned out, was Chauncey Bailey, Editor of the Oakland Post newspaper. Mr. Bailey had been working on a story describing acts of criminality by members of Your Black Muslim Bakery in Oakland when he was killed.

The head of the bakery was Yusef Bey IV who, with some of his bakery followers, was well-known to the Oakland Police Department (OPD) for involvement in a slew of recent crimes involving everything from the vandalism of local liquor stores to kidnapping and murder.

In fact, the OPD had planned to serve a search warrant at the bakery on August 1 and to arrest Bey and some of his followers, but the service of the search warrant was delayed to August 3 in order to allow the Department’s SWAT team commander to return from a backpacking trip. Although the OPD clearly had no reason to know that Bey IV was going to orchestrate the murder of Chauncey Bailey on the morning of August 2, the former police chief and the current police chief both insisted — falsely — to members of the local and national media that there had not been a plan to serve the search warrant at the bakery the day before Bailey’s murder.

As I looked at the news on the morning of August 2, I saw several members of the OPD and the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office at the murder scene whom I recognized. Notably, Sergeant Derwin Longmire was at the scene, and I thought to myself that Lieutenant Ersie Joyner, the Commander of the OPD Homicide Section, had assigned his “A-Team” to this case.

On August 2, 2007, Sergeant Derwin Longmire had been a member of the OPD for over 21 years and had an unblemished, discipline-free record. He had served his last 10 years in a variety of investigative positions, much of it in the Homicide Section, where OPD sent its best, brightest, most capable and hardest working investigators. Derwin had received countless accolades and commendations from district attorneys for his investigative work and his testimony at trials. In 1999, the Oakland Tribune commended him in an editorial for solving a high-profile murder case. He was highly regarded for his ability to solve cases by developing information through interviews of witnesses and suspects who were otherwise unwilling to talk to other police officers. Part of that highly regarded skill was due to the fact that Derwin treated everyone — including the most hardened criminal suspects — with decency, dignity, and respect.

On August 2, 2007, Derwin Longmire had considerable knowledge about Your Black Muslin Bakery and its current leader, Yusef Bey IV. He had first gone into the bakery in 1991 working as a beat cop and assigned to the beat where the bakery was located. He met Mustafa Bey, the bakery’s counterman at that time, and would pay occasional visits to the bakery and discuss with Bey his perceptions of the distrust between members of the bakery and the police. Even after Derwin’s assignment to that Beat ended, he would occasionally run into Bey in the community and would shake his hand and say hello.

In Derwin’s earlier dealings with the bakery, he, like many others in the community, regarded the bakery as a successful, legitimate and law-abiding Oakland business. But after Yusef Bey, Sr. passed away and bakery leadership was turned over to his son, Antar, the bakery evolved into more of a criminal enterprise than a legitimate business.

In 2002, Derwin had been assigned to the OPD Intelligence Unit and, upon his arrival, talked to one of the Unit’s members who had devoted considerable time to intelligence gathering concerning the bakery and its members. Derwin learned that the bakery was involved in conduct involving fraud. He sought a commitment from the police chief at the time to obtain assistance from the FBI to conduct extensive surveillance and investigation of the bakery as a criminal enterprise. His efforts resulted in a single FBI agent working with members of the Intelligence Unit on surveillance activities which lasted until the agent was transferred.

On August 2, 2007, when journalist Chauncey Bailey was murdered, Sergeant Derwin Longmire was a member of the Homicide Section’s “A-Team” and was particularly well-situated to investigate the murder. Yet I would later learn that he came to be on call for Homicide on August 2 because his boss, Lieutenant Joyner, had been aware of the planned execution of the search warrant at the bakery on a preceding day, and Joyner did not want Longmire involved in any aspect of the execution of the search warrant. Later, in an investigation conducted by the State Department of Justice (DOJ), Lieutenant Joyner explained that he was aware that many individuals in the OPD were “suspicious” that Derwin Longmire had some kind of bond or friendship with Yusef Bey IV or other members of the bakery. This “suspicion” had undoubtedly arisen because Derwin did not display overt contempt and hostility when he would see Bey or other members of the bakery around town. Ironically, since Joyner intended to involve all the investigators of the Homicide Section during the service of the search warrant at the Bakery on August 1 with the exception of Longmire, he had placed Longmire on standby for any Homicide callouts on August 2. Thus, in many respects, and unbeknownst to me as I watched the news footage that morning, Derwin Longmire was standing in the 200 blocks of 14^thStreet inside the crime scene by both accident and assignment.

Even though Derwin had become the lead investigator in the Chauncey Bailey murder investigation by accident, Lieutenant Joyner and others familiar with his abilities still knew he was the best investigator for that case. Indeed, in the aftermath of the initial murder Lieutenant Joyner, Department leaders, representatives of the District Attorney’s Office, the State DOJ and the FBI all knew of Derwin’s assignment to the case.

Once he became involved in the investigation on August 2, Derwin wasted little time trying to solve the murder. In light of the murder, Longmire interviewed Bakery member Devaughndre Broussard, who admitted to killing Bailey. However, he denied that he acted at the direction of Yusef Bey IV, who was unhappy about Bailey’s impending article critical of the bakery and Bey’s leadership. In light of Broussard’s claim that he acted alone, there was initially very little evidence directly linking Bey IV to the murder, as no one had seen him at the location where Bailey had been gunned down by Broussard. Derwin continued to try to develop enough evidence to convince District Attorney Tom Orloff to charge Bey IV, but in an article in the San Francisco Recorder (legal newspaper) dated July 2, 2008, Orloff claimed that he did not presently intend to charge Bey with the murder. Longmire continued to work to develop additional evidence.

But Derwin Longmire’s investigation of this murder came to a crashing halt shortly after a front-page story initially appeared on October 26, 2008, in newspapers in the Bay Area entitled “Evidence Ignored in the Chauncey Bailey Case.” The story began with the following statement: “The lead detective assigned to investigate journalist Chauncey Bailey’s killing ignored evidence linking Yusef Bey IV, former leader of Your Black Muslim Bakery, to a role in the killing, and interfered in two other unrelated felony cases involving Bey IV.”

The article accused Longmire of engaging in a series of actions and/or omissions to ensure that Bey IV, with whom Longmire allegedly sympathized, would never be charged. This article, which included a large photograph of Derwin, was written by several Bay Area journalists who had founded the Chauncey Bailey Project. As one of the stated objectives, the project was “to expand upon Bailey’s work, probe the circumstances of his death and its investigation by the police.” The article, citing Longmire’s rapport with Bey IV and other bakery members, accused him of bungling the interview with Broussard which led to his confession by failing to record it, failing to include “tracker” information from Bey’s vehicle in his report and failing to include in the report potentially incriminating statements made by Bey IV to other bakery members while they were in custody.

The front-page, critical, inflammatory and entirely misleading newspaper article spurred the Department management to initiate a formal investigation of Derwin. About the same time, he was transferred from Homicide to Patrol, with Department management stating that he had served the maximum amount of 10 years in investigative assignments and was required by Department policy to return to a Patrol assignment.

In the following months, the Chauncey Bailey Project reporters and others following in their tracks continued to snipe at Longmire and his “friendship” with Bey IV and often rehashed earlier stories which had falsely described Derwin’s efforts to ensure that his friend did not get criminally charged or prosecuted. The acting police chief, who had attended a number of high-level meetings with Lieutenant Joyner and other law enforcement officers concerning the Bailey murder investigation, had seemingly embraced Derwin’s assigned role until the wave of publicity. Then, he was quoted as saying that “putting Longmire on the Bailey case was a mistake.”

It wasn’t long before Derwin and I talked, shortly after we learned he was under investigation for “compromising” the investigation of the murder of Chauncey Bailey. As we would later discover, the OPD, at first, assigned the Internal Affairs (IA) investigation of this case to one of its IA sergeants. After several months of investigative work (which we obtained as part of a Skelly package), I was advised that the OPD was bringing in an “outside” investigator by the name of Wendell “Pete” France to conduct the investigation. Thereafter, inexplicably, we were told that the Department was going to use investigators from the State DOJ to conduct the internal investigation of Sergeant Longmire’s
alleged misconduct.

Eventually, two assigned DOJ investigators contacted me and arranged to interview Lieutenant Joyner and, thereafter, Sergeant Longmire. Lieutenant Joyner’s interview lasted a little over three hours, while Sergeant Longmire’s interview lasted approximately six. After the interviews had been completed, I was confident that, despite the continuing attempts of the Bailey Project media misrepresenters to tarnish Derwin and his investigation of this murder, the Department would see the light, do the right thing and determine that Derwin Longmire had done nothing whatsoever to “compromise” the murder investigation relating to Chauncey Bailey. As it turned out, I was horribly wrong

Longmire Receives the Notice Recommending His Termination

In a letter dated May 1, 2009, the Police Department’s acting chief (and its current chief) proposed to terminate Derwin Longmire for “compromising” the criminal investigation of the Chauncey Bailey murder and for allegedly failing to obey an order by Lieutenant Joyner to maintain notes of conversations he had with Bey IV.

Shortly before receiving this Notice of Proposed Termination, Sergeant Longmire was advised that he was the subject of a second investigation initiated by the newly assigned Homicide Section lieutenant (Joyner having been transferred to Patrol) alleging a failure to complete certain investigative steps/procedures on several homicide cases which had been assigned to Derwin before being transferred from the Homicide Section. I represented Derwin in the interview concerning that complaint, and what became crystal clear during that investigation was the fact that Sergeant Longmire was literally the first OPD Homicide Sergeant who had not been allowed to complete investigative steps on open cases after being reassigned from the Unit to other duties. Some former Homicide investigators had taken up to a year to complete these additional investigative steps on their homicide cases after being reassigned to other duties, but Sergeant Longmire’s request to complete some of these activities and steps had been denied before he became the subject of the complaint and ensuing investigation.

After receiving the Department’s May 1, 2009, Notice of Intent to Terminate Derwin, I requested and obtained a copy of the DOJ report, together with the Preliminary Investigative Report prepared by the IA sergeant who had initially been assigned to the investigation. Much to my surprise, even the Department’s supposed “outside” investigator, Pete France, had completed a report, which was very cursory, superficial and appeared to have been largely disregarded by Department management in making the recommendation to terminate Derwin’s employment.

Look for part two of this article in the May issue of the PORAC Law Enforcement News.

About the Author

Mike Rains is a Principal and Founding Member of Rains Lucia Stern. He heads the firm’s Criminal Defense and Legal Defense of Peace Officers Practice Groups. Mike is one of California’s top trial attorneys. He has over 25 years of experience representing peace officers and other high-profile clients in civil and criminal litigation.