Public Comment

If it isn't the longest article ever written for Berkeleyside, the article "As staffing crisis continues for Berkeley police, officers who left reveal why" by Emilie Raguso in Berkeleyside dated December 20th, 2018, has to be in the running. It's a breathtakingly lengthy description of what Berkeley police officers consider their "morale" problems, which they blame on Black Lives Matter, the rush to police accountability, and what they consider a bewildering inability for the public to trust them.  

Those of us who've been unaccountably stopped, searched, arrested, and repeatedly falsely charged would have no difficulty helping them appreciate the "trust" issue. Some of us come from communities where the idea of trusting the police to play fair is simply laughable, but only a ratio of East Bay voters realize Berkeley is one of those communities. 

The police department's own data documents its racial disparities. The police department's own report on the 2014 Black Lives Matter march illuminated its own ham-handed interpretation of unsigned fliers to decide that everybody present had violent intentions, even those on their way to and from the Berkeley Repertory Theater.  

You don't have to stray far to find the stories of the police officers who helped themselves to the drugs in the property room, indulged in racist or homophobic language, or had no idea of changes in local laws years after they were enacted. The Berkeley City Council and the Berkeley City Manager usually eat the piles of excuses or justifications the police offer with gusto; just watch the hearings on the crying need, according to the Berkeley police, for bigger, better canisters of industrial strength pepper spray for crowd control and the eagerness with which the majority of the Berkeley City Council caved. Without those bigger, better canisters they would be helpless, the police claimed, even though studies show that capsicum is not reliably effective, sometimes kills, and sometimes aggravates the situation. Using such a weapon in a crowd control setting where wind, distance, and the proximity of innocent bystanders is probable is beyond ill-advised. And sometimes it's lethal. 

But most of the City Council ate the pile. Most reporters eat the pile once they've gone on a ride-along with the police. But the current leadership at the Berkeley Police Department didn't just get everything they wanted from the current Mayor and City Manager - they tried to tip the election in 2018 to undermine the election of a sitting council representative who supported a police accountability measure, a measure which only an extremist would argue put police at risk. 

Police accountability builds cooperation between police officers and the community they are supposed to serve and sensible police departments know it; if this were not the case, internal review, the arm of a police department which examines actions of and potentially disciplines its own officers, would not exist. Most police officers support fair policies which do not disproportionately target the poor, the black, the transgendered, and the homeless.  

A police department so frightened of rational accountability measures that it would target a sitting council representative ought to have the entire city council and the city manager rock back and have hearings, neighborhood by neighborhood, so that the police, the voters, and those who represent them are clear about the purpose of police accountability measures. So that nobody just eats the pile and thinks that's all there is to it. You can always tell who ate the pile in this town. Don't let it be you.