Slain man’s mother may guide BART
BART is looking into what could be an unprecedented chapter in the police reform movement: bringing in the mother of someone killed by its own officer to train its department in implicit bias.
Although BART staff are only beginning their search for a possible trainer, Board President Lateefah Simon has someone in mind. She’d pick the mother of Oscar Grant, a 22yearold man shot to death by a BART police officer in 2009.
The training is among a
BART plans to shift police away from calls related to homelessness, drug use and mental health crises as the transit agency heeds reform calls from the Black Lives Matter movement.
Over the next three months, the Board of Directors will work with General Manager Bob Powers to change the transit agency’s law enforcement model, emphasizing social services instead of officers with guns. Four progressive directors introduced the plan as an amendment to BART’s 2021 budget, and it passed by a 72 vote, with the two most conservative directors dissenting.
Yet even as they supported the amendment, some directors tried to separate it from broader calls to defund the police.
“I don’t support defunding the police,” Director Mark Foley said. “I believe they play a critical role in our ability to keep our riders safe. But we do have to reexamine how we police on BART.”
Though the Bay Area’s rail system once provided respite from social problems, it’s now a place where riders confront them face to face. More people with nowhere else to go are seeking shelter on the trains and in the stations, and mental health crises persist. Last week, a woman allegedly pushed a man in front of a moving train at the Downtown Berkeley Station.
For months, BART’s Board of Directors argued about these issues, with the progressive wing calling for unarmed ambassadors as Powers laid out plans to hire 19 sworn police officers a year for five years — a goal he abandoned when COVID19 thrust the agency into an economic crisis. It currently has 178 sworn officers and a police budget of $91.4 million for the next fiscal year.
But the recent antipolicebrutality protests led BART to reconsider its spending plan. The budget approved Thursday includes roughly $2 million for ambassadors and antiracism training in the Police Department. Officials had originally earmarked the money for fare inspectors and police officers, hoping to increase their presence “during a time riders and employees have anxiety about new (COVID19) protocols,” spokeswoman Alicia Trost said.
The four directors who introduced Thursday’s budget amendment — Bevan Dufty, Rebecca Saltzman, Janice Li and Lateefah Simon — didn’t specify whether it would withdraw money from BART’s budget. But the goal to reimagine public safety is roughly the same. The amendment calls for “an immediate stakeholder process” that would yield a list of recommendations in October, when the board considers revisions to its budget.
“The words may not line up 100% to say, ‘Defund the police,’ ” Dufty said. “But the reality is that we’ve made grievous mistakes.” He added that BART has traditionally relied on police to tackle social issues that couldn’t be resolved with an arrest or citation.
“No officer can pull out their citation book and write a citation for a threemonth shelter stay,” Dufty said.
Officer Keith Garcia, the president of BART’s police union, didn’t take a position on the amendment. However, he had an alternate idea: pair police with homeless outreach workers, rather than strip away police duties. Also, he suggested increasing security by raising fare gates and moving elevators to the paid areas of the stations, so police don’t have to interact with transients in the first place.
“We (the police) have no problem working with city and county agencies or homeless outreach,” Garcia told The Chronicle.
At the meeting, Garcia urged directors to stop fixating on police and instead focus on “the very real crises we’re facing”: a lack of riders and plummeting revenue.
“We’ve done 10 years of (police) reform ... and we have the largest policy manual in the state,” Garcia said. “I would ask that the board please take a look at all we’ve done.”
Directors Debora Allen and Liz Ames objected to the plan to deemphasize police and voted against the amended budget. Allen, the board’s most reliably conservative voice, had pressed for additional spending cuts in light of abysmal ridership. She also tends to reject plans that replace sworn officers with community ambassadors or outreach workers.
In general, Allen wants cities and counties to deal with homelessness and other issues on transit — not for BART “to create a new department of social work.”
“I ran on a platform of accountability and transparency,” Allen said in an interview after the meeting. “I did not see that today.”