Berkeley to pull police from traffic stops
Unarmed city workers to issue citations as part of public safety reforms
BERKELEY >> In a landmark decision, the Berkeley City Council has launched a series of moves that will significantly reduce interaction between its police force and residents — a response to the local and national outcry against police brutality.
Among the changes expected to take effect in the coming months, police will stop issuing traffic citations and hand those duties to unarmed city workers. Officers also will cease responding to calls involving homeless outreach or people having mental health episodes, though it’s unclear who will.
The City Council voted for the series of changes early Wednesday morning at the end of a virtual nine-hour meeting that started Tuesday evening and saw more than 300 people
call in, most of them calling for partial or full defunding of the police department.
The council also set a goal of eventually cutting the police department’s budget in half but balked at doing so outright, as proposed by Councilmember Cheryl Davila.
“I want you to know that we are listening to what you are saying, that we agree that we need to seize the opportunity to look at transforming public safety in Berkeley,” Mayor Jesse Arreguin, who proposed the bulk of those changes, told the audience. “And for far too long, public safety has been equated with more police.”
In addition to creating a Department of Transportation to enforce traffic laws, the council agreed to assess and analyze police calls and responses to ensure racial profiling and biases don’t factor into stops and arrests and to establish a community safety coalition made up of residents.
Arreguin said in his proposal Berkeley would be the first city in the nation to remove traffic citation duties from police. New York City has civilian employees handle its traffic enforcement, but they are part of the police department.
The mayor’s proposal calls for spending $160,000 from the city auditor’s budget to assess police calls and responses and $200,000 to hire consultants to guide department policies toward alternative and restorative justice models.
The council will review the consultant’s recommendations as early as November, Arreguin said.
Police Chief Andrew Greenwood and Berkeley Police Association president Sgt. Emily Murphy did not respond to requests for comment on the council’s actions.
Two weeks ago, Berkeley became the latest city to partially defund its police department — slashing $9.2 million, or 12%. The cuts helped offset a city budget deficit of $39 million, and Arreguin described them as “a down payment in reimagining public safety in Berkeley.”
Davila, who abstained from voting on Arreguin’s proposal Wednesday, urged her colleagues to slash 50% of the police department’s budget now, saying “This is the time to have courage … please honor this request of the people.” She was referring to the hundreds of residents who spoke at the meeting and hundreds more who wrote emails.
Arreguin, Davila and the other council members repeatedly have said their actions followed increasing calls by Berkeley residents to change the fundamental way of policing following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the Black Lives Matter movement that arose from it.
Davila also asked the council to issue a vote of no confidence in Greenwood for his remarks during a June 9 council meeting about the Black Lives Matter movement. Asked at that meeting what officers would resort to if their lives were threatened and they didn’t have tear gas, he replied, “Firearms. We can shoot people,” according to Berkeleyside. Greenwood added, “If you are being attacked with lethal force, if we don’t have less-lethal that can drive it back, then we’re absent a tool. That’s my concern. I’m not trying to be overly dramatic and I apologize.
“But when projectiles are being thrown at you, when Molotov cocktails are being thrown at you, you need to be able to do something. And I — these less-lethal tools that we have now, that we use according to our policy, those are important tools for us.”
Councilmember Rigel Robinson, who proposed creating a new city department of transportation to write parking citations and handle traffic violation stops, justified the move by noting that Black and Hispanic drivers are disproportionately pulled over.
Police stop more than 20 million motorists a year nationwide, making traffic stops the most common interaction Americans have with officers, according to Robinson’s office. A 2015 U.S. Department of Justice report found that Black drivers were more likely to be stopped than white and Hispanic drivers.
And a 2018 report by Center for Policing Equity found that Berkeley police stopped Black and brown drivers and pedestrians at even higher rates. In 201216, for example, 36% of drivers stopped by police were Black, even though Black residents make up only 8% of the city’s population. The report also said Black drivers were 6.5 times more likely than white drivers to be stopped by Berkeley police.