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Segment 1

the city of Berkeley city Council.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Good afternoon, everybody and welcome to the special meeting of the Berkeley city Council.
Today we have one item on our agenda.
Hello, Mayor.
Welcome.
I'm going to go ahead and introduce myself.
I'm currently absent.
Councilmember Taplin.
Present.
Bartlett is currently absent.
Han.
Present.
Wengraft.
Present.
Lunapara.
Here.
Humber.
Present.
And Mayor Arreguin.
Present.
I'm present from my home.
I'm present from my home.
I'm present from my home.
Okay.
We have a quorum.
Thank you.
Today we have a presentation from PAB ODBPA, the Triennial Report.
And Mr.
Aguilar, will you be presenting? Take it away.
Thank you, Mr.
Chair.
Thank you.
I'm going to begin today's presentation.
We call it the Triennial Report.
It's not a full three-year report, but we started a review of this report from July 2021 to the end of 2023.
And we'll discuss our activities that have been fired by the Charter.
Okay.
I do have some prepared remarks today.
I'm going to introduce myself.
I'm going to introduce myself.
And I'm going to begin my presentation for today.
Honorable mayor, esteemed members of the City Council, dedicated colleagues and valued members of the community.
Today I have more significant observations, such as mental health awareness month, Asian American and Pacific Islander community.
This report provides a comprehensive overview of our efforts, achievements and challenges we faced.
Underscoring our commitment to fostering transparency, accountability and justice within our Police Department.
This report details various initiatives and programs that have been instrumental in enhancing our oversight capabilities.
Among these, I'm particularly proud to introduce the mental health awareness month.
This initiative is aligned with our commitment to our community's mental health and well-being.
It utilizes our resident therapy, to support staff and community members facilitating emotional and psychological well-being in our interactions with the public.
Our engagement with our community is important as we celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander heritage month reminding us of the importance of cultural sensitivity and appreciation in building cohesive community.
With a special shout out to our first woman police chief, Asian American police chief and first openly gay police chief Jen Lewis.
The report outlines our strategic objectives moving forward which include enhancing our data transparency initiatives and further developing our community engagement strategies.
These goals aim to ensure that our oversight mechanisms are not only responsive, but also proactive in addressing the needs and concerns of the community.
In addition, we are committed to fostering accountable policing.
It's not just an account of what has been accomplished, it is also a roadmap to our future endeavors.
It outlines our plan steps to continue improving our services to the community ensuring that our city remains a beacon of justice and accountability for all.
With that, I'm going to put the presentation up.
May, and council members, today, again, we're going to present our report to you.
The charter requires the DPA to provide a report to the members of the public.
This report does undergo a review and is being reviewed in the spirit of the charter.
If you could advance to the next slide, please.
Here's a snapshot of our team.
And we discuss in the report we did throughout this period of review have been facing some challenges with staffing, but that's also being faced city by city.
We have offered two letters for the vacancies we have, so we expect to be within the allocated capacity in the upcoming months.
If you could please advance to the next slide.
This is the sorry, I'm seeing that window.
This is the current composition of the city's council districts.
The PAP is currently being headed, chaired by John chip Moore, who is also present virtually and will be available should you have any questions at the end of the presentation.
The vice chair is Louis P overview of what we'll be discussing today.
All these sections are provided in the report.
Overview of the PAP and ODPA.
Part of this report is a brief overview of the PAP and ODPA.
I'll go gently into that discussion.
Board activities during the period of review, personnel policy complaints, BPD activities, obstacles, setbacks, and barriers to civilian oversight in the city of Berkeley.
We have 3 general models of oversight.
I know I'm preaching to the choir because we have a rich tradition of oversight here.
For anybody else that may be tuning in today, there's 3 general models of oversight.
We have the investigative model.
We have the auditor monitor model.
We have the oversight system.
We're primarily an investigative body.
Since 1973, we're believed to be one of the first civil investigative bodies in the country.
We have other authorities as well.
Some are housed within the ODPA and some are housed within the PAP.
The purpose of the PAP is articulated in the following manner.
The PAP, the police accountability board, is to promote public trust, provide community participation in setting and reviewing police department policy, practices and procedures, and to provide a means for prompt and partial and immediate response.
Next slide, please.
The charter amendment also establishes the director of police accountability position in the office.
Our purpose is to investigate the complaints filed against the sworn members of the police department to reach an independent finance and to recommend to the PAP that the director of police accountability position in all cases is reserved for the more classified as more serious misconduct allegations.
And the director of police accountability may also serve as secretary for the PAP and assist the board in carrying out its duties.
Next slide, please.
The director of police accountability is the chief manager regarding the operation of the police department including procedures in relation to the police department to review and recommend for city Council approval all agreements letters to the chief manager.
The director of police accountability regarding complaints filed by members of public against sworn employees of the police department and I think that's an important power to enumerate here to highlight that we have different layers of accountability for the police department.
The chief manager is required to participate in the hiring of the chief police to access records of the city department and sworn employees of the police department and exercise the power of subpoenas necessary to carry out the work of the police department.
We have a lot of different models throughout the country and not all of them have the abilities and the broad powers that the ODPA has particularly when it comes to records and subpoenas.
Next slide, please.
Now I'm going to turn it over to the chief manager of the police department.
He has been with the city for 1.5 years.
He has been an integral part of our team.
He has played many different roles.
He has recently become a permanent member of our department.
He will be taking over the board activities.
I will be providing a brief overview of the board activities.
As the director mentioned, I have been with the city for over a year and a half now.
I have gotten to play an integral part whether it be staffing meetings or processing data requests.
I feel in a good position to do that.
The city's fiscal year requires the police accountability board to schedule at least 18 regular meetings each calendar year.
2021 was a bit of an exception because they started that fiscal year in June.
It was a six-month period.
During that period they had seven regular meetings.
In 2021, they hosted four.
In 2022, they hosted nine of those meetings.
In 2023, six.
A lot of the work, I'm sure you are aware, our sub committees have also been very active.
In 2021, there are 14 notice of public engagement.
They did a lot of work for a lot of the policy reviews they were undergoing.
In terms of our public engagement, at our committee meetings, we have seen overall healthy numbers, although we saw a decline in 2023.
Our most active time period was the transition of back-to- in-person meetings.
We have been incorporating a hybrid system, but even that in itself required a bit of time for us to perfect.
We're still working on perfecting it.
This image provides a general overview of the number of speakers you receive at each meeting.
We hope that as we perfect our hybrid system, we'll be able to collect even stronger data for the following years.
And with that, I'll pass it to the director for personnel and policy.
I just want to emphasize that point a little bit.
We're working on a hybrid system.
That's mostly from our metrics that we had, but we are developing ways to make sure that we're really fully collecting the data.
The board members are highly engaged in this activity and this work beyond the meetings.
They do a lot of work to make sure that the board is being supported in their work.
Next slide, please.
Now we're going to discuss personnel policy complaints.
These are the 2 general activities that the board has.
The personnel complaints, they're largely the investigations that the board is involved in.
There's no opportunity in the city of Berkeley to self-initiate investigations, so we have to receive a complaint form that's filed by a member of the public that has been agreed to or a recipient witness.
So the committee has received a complaint form that states that the 180 days might not apply.
To give specific examples, if there's pending criminal litigation or there's any hearings that the person is being subjected to or the officer, then that 180 days shall be told.
We also receive a complaint form that states that the city of Berkeley charter allows us to investigate complaints against sworn members, and as you know, the department has both sworn and non-sworn.
Examples of non-sworn members would be the CSO or the jail officers, and we do receive complaint forms against those officers.
The next phase would be the investigation.
This has to be completed within 120 days of the city's discovery of the complaint.
I do want to stop here and briefly emphasize how challenging this is and how difficult it is to investigate these cases.
I also want to emphasize how challenging this could be.
120 days is very restrictive.
The state law actually allows for 365 days to finish the investigation in the post-discipline barring tolling provisions, but 120 days does create a lot of strain for our office.
The state law allows us to be able to do thorough investigations, but because we're not fully staffed yet, it does bring most of our attention to the investigative division, so we're making sure that we're complying with that 120 days.
We are able to extend it to 195 with a minimum of 240 days, and that includes the hearing if one is done in that case.
And after we finish our investigations, we present it to the board.
Under the charter, the board doesn't have to have a hearing.
That's under their discretion.
They get to make the final decision.
If there's a complaint in the subject officers would provide more information for them to render their decision, and their decision could be either to affirm, modify, or to reject the findings of the ODPA.
After they make that determination, we hand it off to the chief of the city manager.
If there's a complaint in that case, I can elevate it to the city manager.
As you will see in the report, though, the agreement between the chief and the city manager is at 100, so essentially the chief's tentative decision has been the final decision, statistically speaking.
If we didn't administratively close a case, that means we didn't go through the full investigation.
This is something that we try to really stray away from.
It can't really impact the trust that community members have in our system if we're administrative closing cases all the time, so we do this every once in a while.
The interim regulations provide some guidance under some of the circumstances.
Some of the ones that you see before you are that it does not allege misconduct or might be frivolous or retaliatory in nature.
There might be a request for closure by the complainant.
Now, we take that one.
We really have to make sure that when we have a complaint and we have an investigation, we're not required to close a complaint upon the complainant's wishes.
What our office has done, if a complainant does communicate that to us, we bring it to the PAB who makes a decision to close the complaint.
If we have a community member engaged, we make sure we reach out to them, we explain the process and we continue the investigation.
If after 3 attempts we're unable to contact the person, then we make the recommendation for administrative closure and the PAB to make available such evidence to attend a hearing or similar action.
And also the last one is the failure of the ODPA staff to timely complete the investigation.
I do want to be transparent with you that that has happened a few instances.
It certainly happened within my transition into the city.
We had a lot of cases, a backlog of cases and I was debriefed by our investigator at the time of where we were.
Some of them unfortunately ran out of time.
Again, these are things that we tried to make available to the public.
So we want to make sure we're diligent with our work.
Other dispositions that our categories that we have, if it's not administrative and closed then we do the investigation and our allegation dispositions that we have and the evidence that we have.
The allegation that occurred in action is not justified so that means that the officer violated either their policy or law or some other provision that they were expected to follow.
The allegation could be not sustained or not sustained.
The allegation that the alleged act did occur but it was lawful justified and proper and I just went over the admin closures.
Now again for hearing procedures, the board, they're not required to have a hearing.
It's upon their discretion but here are some limitations.
The hearing procedures are no longer public.
But upon a lawsuit that was filed by the police Association a few decades back, they're no longer public so those hearings are done in closed session and they do allow the complainant to attend the subject officers in the case.
The final deliberations that's done out of view of both the complainant and of the subject officers in the case.
Next slide, please.
Okay, so again some of the steps within the hearing procedures, there's a question sequence.
The question sequence is the question sequence to board members and then the subject officer.
This is the question sequence of the complainants.
So the board members and the subject officer representative and the follow-up by the board members.
The board members are entitled to a representative.
They have the option to have a representative.
We have throughout the years established a partnership with the University of California law school police review department.
The board members are entitled to a representative.
They're not going to that process especially if they have limited resources and might not be able to hire an attorney to go with them.
Again, after this hearing process completed, we give the findings to the chief officer.
That is chief officer.
Next slide.
Next slide, please.
Mediation.
Mediation is also codified within the charter.
It's a really important tool that's aligned with the overall mission of improving trust within the police department and the community.
We just had our contracted mediator for mediation and we have been able to send cases to mediation.
We do screen every case for mediation but for one reason or another, a complainant may not wish to participate.
One particular reason may be because once they agree to mediation, they're also agreeing that our office will no longer investigate the matter unless the subject officer does not participate in mediation.
So both parties are do sign an agreement, both the complainant and the subject officer.
But it really is a neutral venue where they can talk about the incident and come to an understanding about what happened.
And it could be a neutral venue for mediation.
So in the city of Berkeley, it's not necessarily the same way that other jurisdictions may practice it, particularly in D.C.
where I served as an investigator a few years back.
We also had a mediation program, but if it was not resolved through mediation, the case was sent to the State Attorney's Office.
Thank you for your time.
Thank you.
** Okay.
Now I'll go ahead and turn over to Mr.
Murillo again.
** In terms of the statistics for the complaints we have received, again, since the start of the PAB and the ODPA, there have been a total of 152 allegations that were investigated.
And again, based on the timelines of the 240 day, within those 30 complaints that were closed, there were a total of 152 allegations that were investigated.
And again, based on the timeline of the.

Segment 2

across those complaints.
Historically, the number of complaints we received, even going back to 2012 during the time of the PRC, the average has been 18 complaints approximately over the years and that has remained consistent over the last three years of the ODPA PAB.
Where we have seen an increase in recent, particularly in 2023, it's with the number of policy complaints that we have been receiving as community members become more familiar with that process.
In 2021, we had only received one policy complaint.
In 2022, we received three, but then in 2023, we received nine policy complaints.
As the director mentioned, given the resources and where we were at during that time, we haven't necessarily fully completed a lot of that work, but in collaboration with our board members, we have been making progress.
And just to provide an overview, one of the questions we often receive is which allegations we receive most often.
Among the top three for at least the complaints that we receive, discourtesy we have with 28 allegations, inadequate investigation at 27, improper procedures at 26, improper use of force is one of the allegations that we often get asked about as well.
On the complaints that we have closed, 14 of those allegations have been investigated.
For the Berkeley Police Department is also required by the charter mandate.
We do keep track of how many complaints they have received.
We do have the data for 2021 to 2023 as part of the appendix in our report.
Here, we just focus on 2023 to provide an example of the type of data that we received from the department in terms of their numbers over the last 3 years.
In 2021, they received 43 complaints.
In 2022, they received 24.
And in 2023, they received 36.
One of the common questions we receive is why is there a difference between those numbers? Part of the reason is that when complainants come before us, once they file a complaint with us, we also send it over to internal affairs that begins a parallel investigation, but it doesn't work the other way around.
So if someone files with the Berkeley Police Department, that complaint isn't sent to us to investigate.
Hence, the difference between those numbers.
And again, similar to the data that we provided, we provided the last 3 years of BPD data in terms of allegations they received within their complaints.
Again, improper use of force for them in 2021 had 4 allegations, 19 in 2022, and 25 in 2023.
Their higher numbers come similar to ours in terms of the discourtesy, improper investigation, and improper procedures.
And returning back to the terms of the policy complaints, the work does engage in a lot of policy work, and they have established several committees to look in different cases.
As part of the interim regulations of the board, when a policy complaint comes to our office, and we present it to the Police Accountability Board, one of the options they have to do is either to delegate it to us as staff to conduct the research behind it, or the board can assign an individual board member to conduct a review of the policy or conduct further research, or the board can establish a subcommittee.
Some of the subcommittees that you all might see here from other source requirements, other requirements, for example, surveillance cameras, the ALPRs, which are part of the requirements set forth by BMC 299, which is our surveillance technology and acquisition.
It's a minor correction.
The positive practices and procedures that's housed within the standing rules is not the interim regulations.
Those are strictly for personnel complaints.
There is a difference in terms of the methodology and the timelines.
The charter does not provide any restrictions on when policies, practices, and procedures can be completed in.
And that's, I think, it acknowledges that some of these things will take a long time to acquire the data, to review it, to do the research.
The board has been taking a very evidence-based approach.
I know that's part of this.
And we discussed it in the past retreat.
They're really trying to structure themselves in a way that can enhance their efficiency.
And one of that is to provide a manual source for their policy practices and reviews.
They currently don't have one.
So it really depends on the subcommittee and the composition.
But I think standardizing this process is going to be very beneficial to the point that you can do it.
Again, any scientific investigation, it really starts with the research question.
But you can still have a framework that you utilize across the different inquiries that you do.
So I think that's important work that they're undertaking.
And at the last retreat, they also indicated that they want to delegate a lot more to the initial review and work to our office.
And we're eager and excited to do it.
Again, we have a policy analyst here, a data analyst on the way.
And we're advancing in our efforts and abilities.
And we want to make sure that we're providing robust knowledge to the PAP so they can give you very thorough recommendations on policies and practices.
I'll highlight the AOPR process that was very engaged.
We did host our office in a virtual discussion.
And we were able to attract upwards to 100 community members.
And they expressed a lot of their concerns and supports for the technology.
And the board was able to utilize all that information to present to you a recommendation.
Next slide, please.
OK.
I'm going to turn it over again to Mr.
Murillo.
But I did want to, if you could advance.
I just wanted to highlight.
I know it's been done in different settings and circumstances.
Even when the police department came before you, they talked about the transparency hub.
It certainly made our analysis and our review very easy when we were looking at the data.
That is something positive to highlight at every opportunity we get to have in that transparency hub.
That is something that not all communities have.
And it's something that is important work that the department is doing.
And it allows us to be able to look at this data a little bit more critically and give you a different perspective as well.
Excuse me.
Before you go on, I know that you have prepared a really comprehensive and extensive presentation.
We have another meeting at 6 o'clock.
And I know that both the public and my colleagues here on the dais have many questions.
So I'm trying to figure out how to do everything and give people time to ask questions and get to our meeting in a timely fashion.
I think they're very interested in the data.
Is there a way to jump to just focus your presentation on data right now? Yeah, we can do that.
Okay, that'd be great.
Thank you.
Okay.
So again, the charter requires us to provide an overview of the stop data collected by the BPD.
During the period of review, we had 12,914 total stops.
As we could see in the figure up on the board, it's pretty consistent with the number of stops and some variations across seasons.
In terms of the demographics, the three largest groups as part of our stops, the white demographic is at 34.4%, Black or African-American at 32.45%, while Hispanic and Latinos make up 15.97%.
The primary reasons for stops are from traffic stops followed up by a reasonable suspicion that a person was engaged in criminal activity.
In terms of the outcomes of these stops, there were 4,034 citations, 2,444 arrests, 592 psychiatric holds, and 4,366 warnings issued.
And the image presented provides general distribution of the stops.
As you could see, a majority of those stops are made at the downtown area.
In terms of use of force over the period of review, there were 894 total incidents within those incidents.
And I know this number could be a bit deceiving in terms of there being noted 2,243 officers.
This is, again, it's portrayed on the data portal this way because in each one of those incidents, there are various officers that may respond to each one.
And the way that it's presented on the portal aggregates that total.
And within it, 913 subjects.
Again, the way that it's presented doesn't necessarily identify unique subjects for each incident, but in aggregate, in the overall number, that's how many individuals they dealt with.
172 of those incidents involved alcohol, 193 involved drugs, and 165 as cited by the data portal were in regard to mental health issues, and 138 were labeled as having no altered state detected.
And again, in terms of the general distribution of the demographic, 47.04% were Black or African American, 23.46% were White, 16.23% were Hispanic or Latino.
As you may know, officer-involved shootings is a relatively rare event, certainly the case in the city of Berkeley.
However, in the past year, we have seen at least two Berkeley officer-involved shootings.
Again, our office is only authorized to investigate any incidents where we receive a complaint.
We have communicated to the community that we will be investigating one of these incidents.
We cannot do that until the DA or any criminal investigations have been completed, so we're on standby.
We are communicating with those authorities.
We have a brief note about obstacles, but if you have in the council members any questions, we're happy to take it.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Before we go to council questions, I'd like to go to public comment.
And do we have any speaker cards, Mr.
Clerk? Oh, there's no speaker cards.
If anybody wants to speak to the presentation or the report, they can just come forward and line up.
So, Mr.
Mayor, I'm with us.
You have until..
Mr.
Mayor and council, my name's Nathan Mizell.
I suspect you know why I'm here.
Yeah, so I had the good honor, the great honor of being vice chair, the initial vice chair for the PAB over the first, I guess, roughly year, year and a half of its existence.
I'll be brief on my comments.
I would really suggest focusing in on certain parts of the report, especially those around the city manager's unanimous agreement 100% of the time with the chief over the PAB when it comes to investigations of misconduct, when there's disagreement between the chief and the PAB.
I don't think we're able to fully protect and insulate public trust with a city manager who agrees with the police 100% of the time.
Again, the folks on this board, as you know, are made up of many very experienced attorneys, many folks who have worked diligently in our community.
Whether folks think I know anything at all in this community, whether they think, oh, it was this Nathan guy that funded this board.
He was 20 when they put him on.
What does he know? There's a lot of experienced folks.
And our decisions have been more or less thrown away by the current city manager.
I know that's a strong statement.
I'm one of the few people who've had the opportunity to see the response from city manager's office to some of these policy, or excuse me, misconduct complaints.
And they just don't add up, quite frankly.
And I think we're going to have to think, you know, I got 20 seconds.
So I think we're going to have to think more deeply about the type of leadership we have in the city as we look for a new city manager.
I think we're going to have to find someone who understands, yes, you must work with the department.
Obviously, you want to build good relationships.
I know the PAP understands that, as long as LDPA.
But you also need someone who's willing at some point to hold them accountable, who has some good grasp, probably of constitutional law and other things, and is willing to ensure that when we have complainants in communities coming forward, and, you know, under such duress and stress of being willing to speak out against police misconduct, that their voices will actually be heard.
And there's a lot more in this report.
I'll let y'all keep listening.
But yeah, thank you.
Thank you.
Next speaker, please.
Good evening.
Good evening.
Can you hear me? My name is Kit Saganar, and I've been following the work of the PAP for some time.
I think they're doing such excellent work.
I want to mention that in response to their fair and impartial policing implementation report, Chief Lewis wrote that, we suggest the subcommittee develop a theory of change linking each recommendation to specific factors contributing to disparities.
For example, socioeconomic inequities, institutional practices, individual bias.
This will allow us to better assess.
That's not work that can be undertaken by a subcommittee of the PAP.
That's work that needs to be undertaken by the entire city.
And a really important step to doing that is to acknowledge disparities and to highlight the disparities that occur and not to immediately look to, oh, well, there's some reason other than there could be bias, but we don't want to look at what those other reasons might be.
I'm always struck by the wonderful land acknowledgement statements.
And every time I hear that, I think, yes, this is really true.
And the Ohlone peoples are not the only peoples that have suffered from historical discrimination with roots continuing down through the present and that need to be continually looked at.
One example, one might say, well, there's a lot of stops of African-American people because we're targeting the high traffic roads.
And well, why is it that African-Americans are a larger percentage of the population down in the flats than they are up in the hills, right? There's reasons behind that, but we can't just say, well, that happened in the past, red lining, blah, blah, blah.
There's nothing we can do about it now.
That's something we need to continually look at and continually work on if we want a truly wonderful community, which provides equal treatment and equal opportunity to everyone and really disparities rather than saying they're not important or they don't really exist is a really important thing to do for that.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Are there any other people in the boardroom who would like to speak on this matter? Okay.
Seeing none, we'll go to speakers on Zoom.
Kelly Hammergren.
I just want to speak to the procedure of this meeting.
It was scheduled to start at 4.30.
So the PAB is being cut short because the council members didn't show up on time.
And then the captioner's record has not been working for most of this meeting.
It is finally working now, but that should have been set up at the very beginning.
So those are my comments.
Thank you.
Thank you, Kelly.
Next speaker is Eva.
Thank you.
I didn't catch the name of the woman who spoke to speakers before me, but I did want to piggyback on her comments about how these disparities impact everyone.
And one thing that comes up in The Writers Come Out at Night, which is a book by two local journalists about Oakland police, is that many of the policing disparities that and abuses against Black residents in the Bay Area really started as abuses against Asian Americans and very specifically Chinese Americans.
And there's a very long history of this.
And it's one of those things you want to keep in mind is that just because it's happening to another group, it doesn't make you safe.
All of our civil rights are linked and that I think it's something that's really important to keep in mind because we're seeing resurgence of serious attacks against Palestinian Americans.
And unfortunately, we're also seeing a lack of attention from law enforcement and prosecutors about that.
I've been writing about a case in Marin County where the Islamic Center of North Marin was attacked on the first night of Ramadan and it wasn't even investigated as a hate crime.
So all of these issues are linked and I appreciate that City of Berkeley is at least trying to address some of these things.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay.
Seeing no further comments on Zoom, commenters on Zoom, we'll bring the discussion back to the board.
Let's see.
I think Council Member Ahn, you are first in the queue.
Thank you.
We were having a little trouble with this here and with your permission, I'd like to switch places with Council Member Bartlett who was trying before I got lucky.
I'm sure of mine.
We'll all have an opportunity.
Yeah, I just didn't want to jump ahead just because I got lucky with pushing the button at the right second.
Thank you.
It's fine.
Thank you.
Director Aguilar and Mr.
Morillo, thank you for coming and a really wonderful presentation.
You know, I happen to know a lot about your body.
It's previous iterations.
You know, I served on it for some time during a really intense moment of time where we were confronted with the aftermath of some serious street demonstrations that turned violent and new policies that came into play.
It was really interesting.
And, you know, one of the things that struck our attention back then was the sort of institutional intimidation factor for the complainants, right? But I'm pleased to see you have this law school assisting these people.
Yeah.
Because I guess, how does it work? Because before no one could go with them, they were alone.
And a lot of times they were cowed into expressing their story.
So now the UC law is helping.
What are they called now? They're not BOLT anymore.
California law.
California law? Okay.
What's the state law doing over here? Real quickly, tell me how it works.
The program that we, the relationship we have with it? Yeah.
So upon receiving a complaint form, we informed a complainant that we assessed it, that we have accepted their complaint and we provided the resources we give them information about the program, the police review project.
And we have met, we meet throughout the semester a few times to coordinate with the student leadership there to ensure that we have an understanding about the intake process.
And we give the information to the complainant and they can either contact directly the students or we facilitate that conversation.
And they help them from the moment that they filed a complaint.
In some instances, they can actually go to the student representatives before they filed a complaint to walk them through the complaint form and all the way to the point of case disposition.
That's great.
Thank you.
That's wonderful.
I'm glad that it happens now.
What was the, what is a policy complaint? I just don't know what that means.
Sure.
So that's, again, they have the track for personnel complaints against an individual officer and policy complaints is probably a misnomer because it could also be a review of policy, practice and procedures.
So that's what allows us to look at more broader interactions that may be happening.
The downtown task force policy and practices review is an example of that.
Under the charter, the board can self-initiate under those circumstances.
So they can look at trends and say, this is something we want to look at further.
I see, okay.
And I noticed there's, and this is probably very promising.
I think there, it seems to be somewhat of alignment between the internal affairs, I guess, adjudications and the PAB adjudications for the most part.
If I read that slide correctly, fairly similar results, right? Did I see it wrong? I, there is some, which you want to speak more to it, Mr.
Muneer? No question.
There is some parity in a part of the conversation that board members have had and our notice has, and our office has noticed the allegation is that a majority of the parity tends to be on unfounded or not sustained cases.
Board members have, in some instances, recommended that certain allegations be sustained.
But for the most part, those allegations have not.
Just a quick reference, and as we referenced in terms of the board statistics on complaints, the board has recommended 21 allegations to be sustained.
But the BPD out of those allegations has only sustained four.
In terms of not sustained, exonerated and unfounded, we do have similar numbers in that regard.
Yeah, so I think that part's really interesting because in our imagination, that's the crux of your board, right? To get these complaints and help get us toward a more perfect public safety paradigm.
So I'd be curious, I mean, next time, I guess, I'd ask you to focus more on the nitty gritty there to help us understand, like, what it means when you recommend one thing and BPD recommends another and what happens after that and the nature of the disagreements at play.
We heard a bit about the city manager and the 100% alignment with the chief.
I don't know if that relates to it, but next time, let's get more into that stuff because that's interesting.
And I'm curious, in your conversations today, you didn't mention the racist text messaging debacle of last year.
I'm curious, what's the PAB's take on that? Were you involved in that? What's your experience with that? Because that was obviously pretty intense and very dramatic and very clearly an example of unconstitutional policing.
That report is forthcoming.
The PAB's subcommittee is finalizing that report.
There were some setbacks in there in terms of the access to information, different interpretations of the charter that did delay some of that work.
We are at a point where we have received the information or the PAB has received information that they feel they need to proceed forward.
So they're finalizing that report.
Again, we have, in some regards, restricted or facilitated access to some records.
So it takes some coordination with our office and the PAB to make sure that they have access to these records.
But there are some inconsistencies we found and they'll make some recommendations about some ways that we can fix some of the systemic issues that we're observing that incident.
Good, that'd be helpful.
Because your board was created 52 years ago, I think, 52 years ago, after many years of advocacy by the people in the community coming after the 60s and just the movement of peoples and the police response and the whole intensity and the awakening of people and the calling for a constitutional policing.
And so your charge is very important.
And in Berkeley, of course, we are the first, I believe, first or second.
And so in moments like this one, that you just mentioned, are super important because on the one hand, your job is to help ensure constitutional policing, but also to create trust so that no one's afraid to call the police, right? No one's afraid to go for help.
And when your officers are texting racist things to each other, it makes you as free to call them.
So next time, please, please bring more recommendations and teachable moments because that's really what the community at large, besides this body, what the community at large that deals with police wanna hear.
Thank you.
Okay, thank you.
We'll go to Council Member Humbert now.
Hey.
We've worked it out.
There are certain things that weren't working.
So take it away.
Okay, thank you, Madam Vice Mayor.
And thank you, Director Aguilar and Mr.
Murillo for this report, really interesting.
I have a number of questions, not in any particular order, really.
But the first one that occurs to me is to ask you whether you have any stats on whether there are certain individuals who've made multiple complaints.
I mean, we have a list of complaints and I'm primarily interested in personnel complaints.
Are there kind of, are there folks who complain more than once or are these all unique individuals? These are not all unique individuals.
I do appreciate the question.
We have that number.
What are we available at this time? I don't believe we reported it, but we don't have that information.
We can get it back.
Yeah, I'd love to know that.
Just, it seems to me to be relatively important.
And this may have been answered.
It may have been answered by Mr.
Murillo.
And if it was, it went past me pretty quickly.
And I'm gonna ask again.
Figure four of the report, which is the graph, shows 54 personnel complaints and 13 policy complaints for a total of 67 over the reporting period.
The paragraph immediately below the graph states that ODPA recorded 52 complaints during the reported period.
The numbers don't match.
Just wondered why.
And maybe you answered that already.
We can certainly get back to with an exact question once we review the data.
But 2021 in particular, that was the year where we're still receiving PRC complaints.
The chart does account for one, there were some complaints that were exonerated, or not necessarily exonerated, but they weren't accepted to my recollection.
And of course, mediation, it also included the fact that to my recollection, and of course, mediation, it also plays a factor into complaints that may not be recorded.
But again, 21.

Segment 3

Segment 4

that are occurring.
Yes.
So if I'm new, how would I, looking at the report, how would I tell? So there is, on page 30 of the report, we talk about the levels that you're referring to, level 1, 2, 3, and 4.
It talks about the level, level 1 is for example, the level, level involves un-injurious techniques such as grabs, control holds, the leverage, it also includes the use of an officer's body weight to gain control.
Level 4 would be the level of force applies when an officer uses a firearm when there's an in-custody death.
Is there a level that we're seeing more common than other levels during stops? I don't believe that we, to my recollection, went in-depth there in terms of the particular levels.
I do want to say, though, that the use of force policy as written requires an annual review.
At the retreat, the board members did delegate an initial review to our office.
So what we have planned out of the office is to have a host community forums where we're going to have these discussions about use of force.
And we are going to be pulling some of that data to discuss where we're seeing more force than others.
Wonderful.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Council Member Taflin.
Council Member Lupara.
Thank you so much, and thank you so much, Director Aguinaldo and the Department of Police Accountability for that thorough presentation and report from the Police Accountability Board.
I really appreciate your presentation, and truthfully, I wish that we had allowed more time for this.
As an hour and a half for the full presentation and all of our questions was not a sufficient amount.
I have a few questions specifically around public trust of our Police Department.
And first, to go back to Council Member Bartlett's comments, in November of 2022, the PAB requested all records related to the bike team investigation to be retained.
Has the Police Department submitted these records, and if so, how long after they were requested were they submitted? We did receive some of the records.
I can't give you the specific time frame at this time.
That will be part of the forthcoming downtown task force report.
Thank you.
As pointed out by Mr.
Mizell, in the section on complaint dispositions, the report states that in situations of allegations sustained by the PAB, when the police chief disagrees, the city manager agreed with the chief 100% of the time.
Do you believe that there are concerns around public trust and how people perceive the ability or efficacy of submitting complaints with our existing police oversight system? Anecdotally, we have heard commentary from members of the public that they don't believe it's going to go anywhere.
We try to reassure them that our office and the PAB is doing a thorough review, but do tell them the limitations that ultimately the decision is either done by the chief or the city manager.
So, yes, we have heard that.
I can't.
One of the things that we indicate in this report, some of these things we don't have a true pulse on, so we don't know how many community members are feeling this way, and those are some of the anecdotes I mentioned.
Thank you.
And my last question.
The report in the section on barriers to civilian oversight, it describes how at least 2 cases were closed due to a lack of access to records in a timely manner.
Could you go a little more in depth into these difficulties and how that might impede the public's perception and trust in the police department's oversight? Sure, so we're part of a national network of, you know, we're not operating in a vacuum.
There is a community of civilian oversight practitioners, the National Association, civilian oversight of law enforcement.
They have 13 principles in this work.
One of them is having unfettered access to information.
I would say we have facilitated access.
I've served in other models of oversight where I had direct access to body worn camera.
I have no way to independently assess that.
And there are instances where sometimes we receive body worn camera a few weeks after we had requested it.
So some of these obstacles have prevented us from being able to do a thorough, timely investigation.
Thank you so much.
Those are all my questions.
I have a very quick question.
I'm looking at the stop data and following up on Councilman.
You use population and percentage of population.
Do you track how many of those stops are of non Berkeley residents.
The bad information is available and the report, I do believe discusses out and optimism would be able to expand on that.
I don't remember reading it, but I may have missed it.
It is not included within this specific report again, because it's being covered by the subcommittee.
And at this time, the report had not been completed.
What I can briefly say about that work is that again, that subcommittee is currently reviewing that difference and making analysis based on Berkeley residents.
And non residents, and just again, providing an overview without the specifics in front of me.
The subcommittee has in their initial analysis, seeing that the pattern between stops of Berkeley residents and non residents, the individuals coming in and out of Berkeley is about the same in terms of the distribution with some minor.
I guess minor differences for specific categories, but the general pattern is the same.
Okay, be interesting to see the actual numbers.
Also, do you track gender when you.
When you track traffic stops, that is under the ripple.
Those are part of the reportable data points that the department does put out.
Okay, great.
Thank you.
And I want to thank you so much for the presentation.
I really appreciate that you took the time and trouble and produce this beautiful report.
So, thanks very much.
Are there any other questions from the guys to the mayor? Okay, yes, we have the mayor participating remotely from Washington, D.
C.
Mayor, please.
Thank you very much.
Well, I 1st, want to thank director and his staff for their work to launch the office of the director of police accountability.
I think it's customer Honda mentioned the voters established this in 2020.
And this is a new agency.
It has independent powers under the city charter.
And that was specifically because we felt it was important that this office be independent of the city city manager.
And the city council, we appoint the board members and we appoint the director of police accountability, but they have very specific roles as outlined in the city charter.
And so I really appreciate the work that's been done to try to, you know, to launch this new agency and admittedly, there've been challenges.
1 thing I want to highlight is the.
Misalignment between tabs recommendations on policy.
And, and the departments, and I think that's rooted in 1.
I think flaw in the current language of the city charter, which I, which I.
Think was an oversight, but the plain language of the charter says that.
The department presents any new policies, the board 30 days.
Before implementation, so there is no role for the board to play.
To help develop in partnership with the police department, police department policies and procedures before they're adopted by the police department.
So, you know, the, the previous police police review commission had a role of proactively working with the police department and reviewing and developing policies and procedures.
And I think that was a good process.
And I know our chief has committed to, to trying to do this, but, you know, it.
It creates conflict and it creates a situation where we're not getting the expertise of the board and we're not getting the expertise of the director.
So I think this is an issue.
We're going to have to address, either through a charter amendment or the implementing ordinance.
To just clarify the timeline and the role of the board.
In reviewing and providing recommendations and department policies and procedures.
I also want to touch on community engagement, which I know is something that Mr.
Aguilar touched on when we had met with him and appointed him to this role.
And I'm curious about how we can implement more robust community engagement.
That not just reaches more residents to inform them about the.
The police accountability board and the complaint process.
Thank you, Mr.
mayor.
I think 1 of the 1st steps is something that I.
Try to communicate at the budget finance.
We need somebody that's dedicated to do this work because of the.
Very specific requirements that are provided to our office and to the path.
We get pulled in a lot of different directions, having somebody dedicated that can do this work and organize this work for the path and the board is going to be essential.
I've seen different ways that communities have done it.
I myself participated in DC where you are, sir.
We had a public affairs specialist, but we organized the work of our office.
We partner with.
The local law schools to do street law type community engagement where we went to the high schools and middle schools had no, your rights conversations with the students had role playing in situations where they can learn about.
They were stopped by an officer and have conversations about how to build community trust.
We had targeted engagement, but I spearheaded in DC where we reached out to migrant communities.
And we discussed ways that we can improve community relations with the police and myself.
I serve as a partnership specialist with the U.
S.
Census Bureau.
We did a lot of new things there in terms of community engagement.
I think we can replicate.
Yeah, I'll just say that.
I mean, I think this is extremely important because people cannot take advantage of their rights that they don't know that they have rights.
And I think this is particularly important.
To make sure that communities that have been disproportionately impacted by our criminal justice system, as well as people who have been impacted by our criminal justice system.
You know, doing focus outreach to them so they know about their rights and about this process.
And I think at the end of the day, it's about making sure that we're increasing trust in our police department.
But I think one aspect of having a good police department is having good accountability and oversight systems.
And we have had a very robust system of civilian oversight since the 1970s.
And so, I think that's a big part of what we're doing.
And I think that's a big part of what we're doing.
And I think that's a big part of what we're doing.
And I think that's a big part of what we're doing.
But I think one aspect of having a good police department is having good accountability and oversight systems.
And we have had a very robust system of civilian oversight since the 1970s.
And so, I want to make sure that the voters voted over 80% to establish this new board and this new office.
And I want to make sure that we are helping support the implementation of the Charter Amendment to make sure you have the resources and the ability to do this important work, to do it independently, to do it objectively.
And I think to make sure that you have a role in helping inform and develop departmental policy before the policy is implemented.
Otherwise, you know, your input is an afterthought.
And I think that's a disservice to the input that you and the board could provide.
And to help ensure that we can get robust committee input before the department is implementing new policies.
So, thank you very much, and I'll turn it back over to the chair.
Thank you, Mayor.
Okay, if there are no further comments, I move to adjourn this meeting.
Okay, please call the roll.
Council Member Castorwani? Yes.
Kaplan? Yes.
Bartlett? Yes.
Khan? Yes.
Lengraff? Yes.
Lunapara? Yes.
Humbert? Yes.
And Mayor Artie? Yes.
Thank you, this meeting is adjourned.