How about now is that any better there? I know but I'm also it might be it
Give us a minute. I just want to make sure folks can hear you. Thank you. You want to try? Yep. How is that?
I don't know. I'm having other people tell me
Okay, awesome, very good. Thank you. Okay, so
Speaking to the COVID time what we learned from that period is that we can't pause or slow our hiring efforts
and expect to recover from from that pause quickly.
To make meaningful progress against attrition, we have to continuously recruit maintain our hiring pipeline and stay competitive in the regional market.
Ultimately full staffing across sworn dispatch and CSO positions is critical. It ensures that we can maintain service levels,
support employee wellness and job satisfaction,
and also better control our overtime costs.
So looking at our calls for service,
we responded to just over 60,000 calls for service last year,
which is a slight decrease of about 2% from the year before.
And the most important number here is the 911 calls.
16,255, which is up 6% in the highest in several years.
These are our most urgent calls,
the ones that demand immediate response
and that increase combined with our staffing picture
is why efficiency and smart deployment matter so much.
Non-emergency calls dropped about 5%
and officer initiated contacts were down slightly as well
but the upward trend in emergency calls
is something that we're watching closely.
And then looking at our workload per officer,
this is one of the more encouraging data points
in the report for the first time in several years,
the average call for officer per shift is trending downward.
It was a peak of 6.3 in 2023 and just 6% in 2025.
And that didn't happen by accident.
The, there are three programs driving the improvement.
First is the patrol CSO program.
And this program embeds non sworn community service officers
into our patrol teams and they handle nonviolent emergency
calls for service and those calls previously pulled our sworn officers away
from their higher priority work. A second is in our bike unit which maintained
response coverage in district four and that's where we see our
highest call volume area and that work supported not pulling officers from
other beats. And then third our flex team which conducted targeted data driven
operations. They proactively addressed repeat offenders and patterns of crime
and we're reducing the number of calls
that cycle back to patrol with them.
And here's why this matters.
When calls per officer go down,
it means that officers have more time
to respond thoughtfully and effectively to each incident.
It reduces the fatigue that they feel,
improves decision making,
and allows for better problem solving,
instead of just going call to call reactively.
It also directly supports officer wellness
and sustainability while improving the quality of service
the community receives.
So I also want to note that our priority
won median response time with seven minutes,
and that meets our or exceeds regional benchmarks.
Even with our current staffing constraints,
we're getting to emergencies relatively quickly.
And then our next slide
is our communication center initiatives.
The communication center has operated below strength
for years, as many of you know.
And at the start of 2025,
nearly half of our dispatch positions were vacant.
And this closing the gap remains a top priority
both for the police and fire departments.
We hired nine new dispatchers in 2025
and after accounting for attrition
that resulted in a net gain of just three.
So this is a reminder that recruiting alone isn't enough.
Retention and successful onboarding are equally critical.
On the recruiting side,
we hosted quarterly virtual recruiting events
and those reached nearly 1,200 candidates.
So our partnership with All-Star Recruiting
continues to expand and diversify our applicant pool.
We've also made structural improvements.
Critical is a pre-employment assessment tool
that evaluates core skills required for dispatch work,
and the addition of a call-taker position
provides recruits a more manageable starting point.
And early results show higher training completion rates.
In 2026, we anticipate leveraging new technology
in the communication center,
including protocol-based dispatch tools
to standardize call handling
and exploring an AI-powered virtual agent
to triage non-emergency calls.
And both efforts are designed to improve efficiency
and reduce stress on our dispatcher personnel.
Beyond staffing, the communication center
is in critical need of facilities and equipment upgrades
to meet the demands of modern dispatching.
And these improvements will ensure our team
has the tools and environment necessity
necessary to perform at their best.
And so all of this work is being done in close partnership
with the fire department through an ongoing work group
focused on building a sustainable communication
center for the long term.
Good afternoon.
I'm Arnold Montberg, strategic planning and accountability
manager with the PD.
I'm going to take you through just some of the crime stats
highlights.
So overall, I'll start with group A offenses.
Group A offenses are the most serious crime categories
tracked under the Federal Reporting System, the NIBRS,
which we adopted in 2024.
They cover violent crimes like assault and robbery
and property crimes like burglary and theft
and crimes against society
like drug and weapon violations.
So in total, Berkeley recorded about 9,800 group A offenses
in 2025, which is down 11% from the year before.
But I want to put these numbers in context a bit.
Crime fell significantly across the country last year.
The US is now seeing two consecutive years
of historic drops in crime rates.
Researchers will tell you
that the reasons are not fully understood,
but generally the consensus is that
there's multiple factors at play.
Pandemic disruptions are fading and there have been
significant investments at the state and local level
in community violence prevention and public safety technology.
But for the same reasons as federal funding gets cut, researchers are not entirely confident
that this trajectory will hold.
Multiple analysts have said that they would not be surprised to see crime bounce back
up this year.
So with that context, Berkeley is part of this broader trend, but there are a couple
areas where we outperformed.
So motor vehicle thefts fell 48% here,
which has nearly doubled the 27% national decline.
Commercial burglaries dropped 31% versus 18% nationally.
Shootings fell 40% compared to a 22% drop
in gun assaults nationally.
And we had zero fatal or injury shootings
in Berkeley last year.
And we'll touch on that more a little bit later,
but that's something that we should be proud of
as a city and as a community.
And there are categories, so those categories are ones
where we deployed specific strategies.
So LPRs for vehicle theft and robbery investigations,
the FLEX team for organized retail crime,
and a number of partnerships for gun violence prevention.
So there's this national trend that helped,
but our targeted investments
pushed us beyond those national trends.
Some numbers did move in the wrong direction,
so aggravated assaults were up 16% here
while they declined nationally, felony sexual assaults
rose about 20% here in nationally, we're about flat.
And hate crimes reached 50,
which is their highest number in five years here.
And so these are areas where we continue to figure out
where we can make a difference in how we can grow
partnerships to address those specific trends.
Clearance rates improved across nearly every category
and we exceeded the California state average in every one.
So a few highlights, homicide clearance has been 100%
for at least five years.
The state average is 64%.
Robbery clearance jumped from 34 to 49%.
And a big part of that is attributed
to LPR-supported investigations.
Our detectives will tell you that.
And we'll cover a little bit more in the technology section.
Death clearances went from 17 to 20%,
which is actually a digital jump from the year prior,
which reflects when we started our flex team operations
addressing retail theft.
And so these numbers tell us that our investigative tools
in our strategies are working.
When detectives have better information,
they solve more cases.
And clearance rates aren't just a data point.
Every case represents justice and accountability
and closure for a member of our community
who was a victim of a crime.
And that's ultimately what drives this work.
Okay, so note on road safety here.
So total collisions were down 11%.
And injury collisions dropped about the same amount.
Fatal collisions rose from four to five.
So we saw an additional fatal collision last year.
It's just a reminder that even with the overall improvement,
every life lost on our street matters.
The primary collision factors are shown on the left
of this slide.
So as has been the case in previous years,
speeding is the top primary collision factor
that we've seen followed by unsafe turns,
starting and backing a DUI
and yielding to pedestrian violations.
So I want to note here the alignment between the violations
that our officers are enforcing for
and the behaviors actually causing collisions.
And that's just a reflection of our three-pronged approach
traffic safety, being a data driven strategy gets us to be targeting the
behaviors that cause the most harm. But looking ahead and focusing on those
speeding primary collision factors, we're acquiring five new handheld speed
enforcement units and expanding speed enforcement training beyond our traffic
unit into patrol which is going to increase our coverage of these speeding
violations at high-collision intersections.
Okay, and accountability is foundational to trust
with our community, and we want to be transparent
about all of this data.
This information, by the way, is available year-round
through our transparency hub, but we also conduct
a thorough evaluation of it each year
as preparation for this report.
So, use of force.
Only 0.46% of calls involved any use of force,
And of those, 93% were the lowest levels of force,
level one and level two.
And only 45 incidents or 0.07% of all calls
involved a level three or level four use of force.
We apply multiple tests for bias each year
on our stop data.
So our collision demographics closely align
with our stop demographics.
I do wanna note the version of the moving violation
to collision demographic chart
that was included in the published materials,
a user format that pulled maximum percentages
across multiple years,
which caused the stack bars to some to above 100%.
But council members have a corrected version in front of them
that just reflects 2025 data.
The Bail of Darkness test,
which compares stops in daylight versus dark,
showed consistent pattern across groups.
Our yield rate analysis showed a 61% overall yield rate
and with no indications of bias.
And our force rate by race was consistent across groups.
On stop data, we had a bit over 4,500 total stops.
61% of those were not in response to call for service.
61% surge yield rate, like I mentioned.
And according to the most recent report report,
which counts data from the previous year,
our yield rate on searches was higher than 93%
of all agencies in California.
So alongside our community, we take this data seriously,
we publish it, we analyze it, we test it,
and we hold ourselves accountable to it.
And ultimately it guides our policy decisions
in our training priorities,
and it highlights the professionalism and dedications
of members of this department.
Okay, so here's the takeaway from the numbers.
We can't hire fast enough to make changes overnight.
We know we need to do more
with the resources that we have.
We have to make best use of them.
We have to also use data to drive
the things that we're addressing.
You saw that with the collision data.
I will also say that these changes aren't accidental.
And it's not just because
of all these other societal drivers
might be affecting things nationally as well.
We're seeing improvements beyond that in our city.
And that's the result of, I believe is a result
of intentional strategy and strong partnerships
and a community to working smarter,
commitment to working smarter
with the resources that we have.
And so that's intentionally why we have this next section
of this to talk through about those partnerships
because we're seeing real change in those areas
where we're able to build those partnerships.
And so Captain Durbin is gonna talk a little bit about that.
Thank you, Chief.
So I'm Mike Durbin.
I am the Investigations Division Captain
overseeing the detectives and the traffic bureau.
The next section covers the people, programs,
and collaborations that are driving prevention
and public safety in Berkeley.
You will notice that there is a common theme
in the next four slides I'm gonna be covering,
and that's partnerships.
So we obviously have to deal with all crime
that comes our way, but we just wanna spend a moment
to discuss how we address gun violence in 2025.
We are particularly proud of the data that's in front of you.
For the first time in over a decade,
we had zero fatal or injury shootings last year.
Gun arrests were up 31%.
We recovered 114 firearms.
Shootings were down 40%.
Those are the numbers,
but let me talk to you about what's actually behind them.
Our approach to gun violence is built on two pillars,
enforcement and prevention.
They work together.
On the enforcement side,
our officers and detectives work under the premise
that any investigative lead connecting to violence
deserves our utmost attention.
We believe that those who illegally possess weapons,
brandish individuals with weapons or are involved
in shootings should be held accountable,
regardless of if there is even a victim that comes forward.
Therefore, we investigate those crimes
with the same resources and seek prosecution
with the same intensity as those incidents
involving great bodily injury or death.
We do this because we believe that those involved
with those crimes today may be involved
in future cases of violence or death.
But we don't stop an enforcement.
Over the last year, we have increased the use
of two prevention resources,
gun violence restraining orders
and the gun violence intervention and prevention program.
So also known as GVRO and GVIPP.
GVROs are focused on taking guns out of the hands,
bless you, of individuals who have shown
they are danger to the public or themselves.
This is a civil proceeding that occurs in collaboration,
a partnership with the city attorney's office.
GVIPP is focused on intervening with individuals
who are most at risk for being involved in gun violence.
Through the city manager's office,
we partner with LiveFree and on the ground
community-based violence intervention and mediation group.
We make referrals to LiveFree knowing
that they have the ability to reach people
in the community at a different level,
additionally connecting them to support services
that address the underlying causes of violence.
The overall goal is community support, accountability,
and prevention working together.
The CSO is in patrol.
The CSO patrol program is one of the most successful
programs I have ever watched come together
in my nearly 25 year career.
It stems from the city's broader
re-imagining public safety initiative in 2020,
designed to shift work that doesn't require
a sworn officer to a more appropriate resource.
In their first year, we added three patrol CSOs.
We put them on the busiest teams,
the busiest shifts with the highest call volume.
The result, they handled over 1,500 calls for service.
those are non-emergency calls, routine calls,
traffic related calls.
Every one of those calls is a call that previously
would have pulled a sworn officer away
from higher priority work.
At the same time, even though sworn staffing numbers
declined and we're on an all time low,
our response times to those high priority calls,
priority one, priority two calls, they remain the same.
So we kept the same level of service.
Looking ahead, we'll be adding two additional CSOs
to patrol in 2026.
We're expanding the roles of the CSOs into investigations, evidence collection, report
preparation, and we're continuing to identify work that they can more effectively handle
in this manner.
An additional benefit, I wouldn't call it an unintended consequence, but it was a bonus
is that one of the CSOs that we hired in 2025 is off to the academy.
So we've struggled to hire police officers, as you're all aware, but we know that a lot
of people want to work in law enforcement.
They want to work for the city of Berkeley,
and we think that through the CSO program,
if we give them that exposure,
that it's creating a pipeline
for the next wave of those officers.
The Flex Team.
So as opposed to CSOs,
they were assigned to specific days and hours,
the Flex Team must be exactly that.
They must be flexible.
Flexible to address the most acute crime problems
facing the city.
In 2025, the Flex Team focused on organized retail theft.
So the numbers.
We did 23 operations.
We made 141 arrests and 72% of those arrested
faced additional criminal charges beyond the retail theft.
Things like, and we were able to support this
through things we found on the arrestees,
like stolen credit cards, burglary tools.
So narcotics, they also had outstanding warrants
for very serious crimes like kidnapping and carjacking.
Two of those arrestees also had firearms on them.
42% of those arrested were either on probation
or parole at the time.
So the approach of the FLEX team is proactive.
Rather than responding to just shoplifting calls
one by one after the fact,
the FLEX team used crime data and partnerships
with loss prevention teams to catch suspects during that.
That made a significant difference
for prosecution as well.
Based on these results,
we're allocating three dedicated officer positions
to the FLEX team in 2026.
At the moment, we just have a sergeant assigned
and we used officers from different teams
to supplement that work.
This allows the team to run more operations,
respond faster to emerging crime trends
and build stronger cases.
Let me see, I did it.
The Vision Zero and Traffic Partnership.
Our traffic safety work is built on collaboration and data.
Collaboration consists of city departments working together
to holistically address traffic safety through,
we call them the three E's,
engineering, enforcement, and education.
Those internal city of Berkeley partners
included the city's public information team
and public works transportation team,
including their Vision Zero coordinator.
We also work with regional law enforcement partners
on the enforcement side.
The high intensity traffic team, or HIT,
brings together law enforcement agencies
for joint operations.
They are then dedicated
to our most problematic thoroughfares for collisions
to look for the leading violations.
Although I already touched on what those violations are.
One February operation last year brought 11 agencies
and 17 officers to Berkeley streets
and produced 185 citations in five hours.
We also continued our Drive Safer, Drive Longer program
with four classes at the North
and South Berkeley Senior Centers,
helping aging drivers stay safe and independent.
We are gonna continue those programs this year.
All of this is informed by the transparency hub
and our public facing traffic concern survey.
In 2025, we also began to give feedback on that survey.
So the public was able to say,
hey, this is the streets or the areas I'm concerned with
and our traffic sergeant and lieutenant
would then circle back and say,
here's what we did about those concerns.
So we're gonna continue that in 2026 as well.
Guided by that community input and data,
we use OTS grant funding to increase DUI checkpoints
and conduct targeted enforcement
on the primary collision factors
that led to the most serious injury collisions.
So the result, also numbers we're very, very proud of.
We had an 11% decrease in total collisions,
which I looked over 14 years,
that's the only double digit decrease
we've had outside of the two COVID years.
And we had a 25% drop in serious injury collisions,
which is really the goal of Vision Zero.
So we're gonna talk about technology a lot
a little bit later tonight,
but I do wanna talk a little bit about how we,
in what last year did leverage technology
as a resource multiplier,
how it helped us provide public safety,
increased our ability to de-escalate,
and also ensure we had the right resources attached
to the issues that we're seeing.
So we're gonna talk about ALPRs first.
Like Captain Durbin, I've been in this business
for a really long time.
ALPRs, no tool that I've experienced in my career
has done more for precision-based policing than the ALPRs.
It's about having a vehicle
that you know is connected to something
and being able to stop that vehicle.
And that kind of connection means
that it's not casting a wide net
and just stopping every car that's driving down the street
and doing this.
It allows you to use precise data, hot list,
stolen vehicle information to guide your stops.
And it's human-driven.
It's not a computer telling you to make a stop
and you just make the stop.
Officers are verifying that the plate that they see
is a plate that's reported on the hot list
and taking enforcement action on that.
So we looked at the data that we saw in 2025.
And I will tell you that a lot of this information,
like you see 58 arrests.
That's the times when predominantly when an arrest
actually happens as a result of an ALRP and lifetime.
And you see 38, seven vehicles recovered.
What you also see is 121 cases supported.
What does that mean?
It means that an arrest might have happened later.
It led to an investigation.
It led to verifying an alibi.
It created a case history and allowed us to connect cases.
So it's not just, you know,
or it's oversimplified to suggest that
just because you had 58 arrests compared to all your arrests,
it's not a work tool that's worth happening.
It's a tool where we've seen cases where there is no lead,
except in AOPR hit,
or where we hit a dead end in our investigation
and then we're able to piece things together
from other jurisdictions.
And so we talk about what the value is in three ways.
One for patrol, having that real time alert
when a stolen vehicle comes into our city.
We've had cases where a vehicle has come in,
victimized our city, they're put on a hot list,
they leave town, we don't get them that day.
And when they come back the next time to repeat offenses,
we're able to arrest them.
And also, like I said, helps our investigations.
And this is the historical data,
looking where our vehicle traveled
to be able to recreate that they were in the area of crime
when all these individual crime series happened
to build that case.
And if you can't talk about ALPR
without talking about the value of the regional network.
So it's us understanding the tying together regional cases.
We all know that offenders
do not respect jurisdictional boundaries.
And so the idea that you can understand
that something that happened in Oakland
is actually connected to something that happened
in Berkeley and Hayward,
and build those cases and have chargeable cases
and combine different pieces of information
that allow you to understand who the offenders are
and build a case.
But it's also that a person can be,
the suspect can be apprehended.
So when they alert in a different city
because there's a felony warrant on a vehicle,
then we're able to apprehend that person
instead of having to wait for them to come back
to our city to further victimize us.
So, you know, it's looking at all of them together.
And I know I will talk about this a lot more detail,
but we did wanna talk about what we've experienced so far
with technology that we are actually leveraging right now.
So what's next?
We'll talk about, I'm gonna hit this really briefly,
we'll talk about the Realtime Information Center,
how we synthesize data and information
in the feeds that we have.
We know research has shown us
that it increases odds of clearance a lot.
That's what matters.
Crime occurs, we're able to clear,
we're able to identify that they're responsible.
Our fixed video cameras, again,
with Council's approval, really focus those
in high pedestrian intersections
where a lot of our crime and calls happen,
so we can have that investigative tool
and real-time awareness.
And the drone is a first responder.
We talked about what our staffing levels do
and right now we're maintaining response times,
but having information on the level of seriousness
of a crime and knowing what resource to get there
and being able to get a drone resource there
in less than two minutes means a lot for better outcomes,
safer outcomes, getting the right resources to a call.
Okay, so looking forward, I'm gonna close with this.
When all officers have better tools and better information,
outcomes improve.
The games we showed you today, fewer shootings,
fewer robberies, vehicle thefts cut nearly in half,
came without adding additional sworn personnel.
CSO program, able to accomplish things
without additional sworn personnel.
We understand the challenging staffing situation,
the challenging budget situation that we're in,
we're looking to ways to do our work smarter
and more fiscally responsible.
So our priorities for 2026 are clear.
keep sustaining our gun violence efforts
through both GRVRS and GVIPP with those kind of partnerships,
expand our CSO program, and work with our FLEX team
to be deployed in a manner consistent
with what data's telling us.
Continuing building our sustainable communication center.
None of this works without a strong communication center.
That is the heart and soul of us getting
the right resources out there too,
making sure that our community members
are able to report incidents as they're occurring.
And we wanna continue like one of the primary things
we talk about all the time, right?
What you hear about me from the most is not just crime,
but collisions and serious collisions.
And so we have to continue those partnerships,
keep up our enforcement efforts,
but work in partnership with the Vision Zero goals.
So all of this is about advancing our technology
and our resources and serving our community in a way
that makes us a vibrant and thriving community.
And so, you know, thank you for the time.
Thank you for your patience today.
and we're happy to answer any questions that come up.
Thanks, Chief.
Thanks, team.
Can I see, let me see if my council member colleagues
have questions to start us off.
I know you do, okay.
Council Member Traka.
Oh, I'm happy to call after Council Member Humber.
No.
I'll just start, okay.
Thank you so much for the presentation.
I will ask my questions in rapid fire to save time.
I have six questions.
Question one, can you say more about what's in the data
for around hate crimes?
The increase has been of concern to me.
Question number two, can you remind me,
I know you mentioned this last year,
but if you could just refresh my memory,
the difference between not sustained,
exonerated, unfounded, admin closed,
and active complaints in how complaints are dispositioned.
Question three, how does one assess
the success of DUI checkpoints?
On the one hand, be successful, I assume, if they are yielding in more stops for DUIs,
but then on the other hand, we actually want to reduce DUIs, and can you speak to also
With that question, are there mechanisms to prevent someone
for just not using the main intersections?
And especially if they hear that there might be a DUI stop
at that intersection.
Question four.
In my district, district four, can
you just generally speak to what are the most common types of calls for service that you
receive. Question five, what feedback have you received from the community, if any, regarding
the transparency hub now that it has been in use for some time? And the final question
is can you discuss what trends are driving the nearly 20 percent increase in crimes against
society including nearly a 50% increase in drug equipment violations. Thank you.
Chief, if you wouldn't mind just telling us which question you're
responding to so we can track a little bit because I know that was a lot at one
time. Thank you. So a couple things, let's see. Hate crime, like what's driving the
increase. Like with sexual assaults that are up and aggravated assaults, sometimes we're
not exactly sure. What I can tell you is that many of our offenders in reported hate crimes
over the last several years are those suffering from mental health crisis. It tells us a little
bit about where these crimes are occurring mostly in public. There's a variety of instances
is where, as you know, we capture hate incidents
and hate crimes.
Primarily, the hate incidents that we see are flyers
and things like that.
They're coming out where it's on that threshold
but it's really important for us to capture that data
and being able to understand it.
We are seeing things trend in line
with what has happened internationally
and we continue to see that.
And we've done efforts in the past
sort of work with the community to stand up together
with our community.
But those are the things we're kind of immediately seeing.
Same thing with partnerships around sexual assault.
I know you didn't ask me that, but it's the same thing.
It's like how do we leverage our relationships
knowing who the offenders or the victims are predominantly
to get the right resources to address that?
And so for sexual assaults, it's about
increasing our relationships in collaboration
with the university, if that makes sense, right?
Around those kinds of crimes.
That's number one.
Number two, I will send you,
So you have it, the precise exact definitions
of the allegations, but admin close typically happens
if a reporting party is no longer interested in proceeding.
We lack evidentiary value to move forward.
There's lack of prima facie of wrongdoing.
You'll see an admin closure in those kinds of instances.
Sustained means the thing was a violation
and we believe that it occurred.
Not sustained or exonerated is the thing happened,
an action happened, but it's not a violation.
And then not sustained is there's not sufficient evidence
to say whether the thing happened or not,
or whether it was a violation of policy or not.
So it's a little bit of gray area, right?
So that's what you'll see for that.
Let me grab,
or the success of DUI checkpoints,
I will say that by and large, DUI checkpoints
are meant to be an educational tool.
So if you think about it from that lens,
we are going out and we are touching the community
in a way that we don't any other time.
So as we pick a high collision or high DUI traffic area,
and we focus our attention there,
everyone who comes through,
we're handing them mad flyers and pamphlets,
and we're saying, hey, hi, this is who we are.
And we're also looking for signs and symptoms of impairment.
So that being said, if you look at it as our success
are the number of people that we have been able
to interact with, provided information and resources
to combat the impaired driving.
And then the second piece of that is if folks are going
to avoid the checkpoint, they're gonna avoid the checkpoint.
We intentionally advertise it.
And that being said, we have all kinds of signs up.
And if people want to avoid it, they will.
Sometimes there are folks who are patrolling
around the area of a checkpoint.
And if they see someone and there's a reason to stop them,
they may have a conversation with them,
provided there's probable cause for the stop,
to assess whether or not they're impaired.
So that being said, there's really nothing we can do
for the folks who are avoiding it.
One more kind of interesting comment
we discussed earlier today as a group
is we're seeing a lot of DUI serious injury collisions
regarding scooters, e-scooters.
And so that's one of those areas, again,
you wanna really lean into community education.
We already are working on some social media
and engagement posts with the community
about how to be safe and do that.
So that's one of those areas that you've never,
we haven't recently seen the rise or DUI making that list
and we're seeing that's driven in part by that.
So that's when we lean into those efforts.
Just to add one last thing to,
now we're really staying on this question,
but the DUI checkpoints are also funded
by the Office of Traffic Safety
and they're done in collaboration
with DUI focused patrols as well.
So it's really kind of a broad program for DUI reductions.
Yeah, I'll take the two transparency questions.
So one that calls for service in the downtown district.
District four, most common call by far
is a disturbance, 415.
That could actually end up being a wide range of things
from a fight or somebody stopping traffic in the street.
There's also a number of thefts, alarm calls, batteries.
So that information is on the transparency hub
and leads me to the biggest piece of feedback
that we've gotten on the transducer that I really agree with is just the intuitiveness
of where to find everything and in particular I'm always letting people know that there's
a second dashboard if you scroll down on the number of the pages and a lot of questions
get answered that way. People are looking for some more customizability or filters that
are available. You scroll down but it's not obvious that you have to do that. So that's
really concrete thing that we're gonna work on but in general we've gotten
positive feedback but there's plenty to do in terms of just like the user
experience. Okay I think the last question was why do we think crimes
against society are up? I don't know exactly I mean we can we can we can you
know guess that maybe our street patrol is having out there more are able to
address quality of life issues. We know that some of those cases came out of
of some of our flex team approaches
where there was narcotics or other ones
that fit into that crime category, Aunty.
Sorry, can you explain what crimes against society is?
I think some of us are looking at each other.
It's the definition category that's
created by neighbors that places weapons charges
and narcotics or drug cases in that section.
Because it's like, that's how they separate it.
crime against society versus an individual person that affects the
quality of life in the community and the work that we did leaning into gun
violence intervention right can also drive that number up right you see more
arrests or it seems like it's up it's because we're doing more proactive
enforcement around gun seizures. Sorry can I just jump in really fast I believe
Councilmember Triggeb asked specifically about the 50% increase 49% increase in
drug equipment violations which is part of it and I was curious about that too so I wanted to
I'm just, it seems to be driving the 20% increase,
like a 50%, almost a 50% increase in that subcategory.
So these are often secondary charges
that come from other enforcement activity that we're doing.
And this is one of the innovations of NIBRS
is that now those aren't subsumed
in the more serious crime type.
They're separated out into their own individual offense.
So a lot of the work that we're doing,
if it also involves a narcotics violation,
that will get counted there.
And that's kind of also an interesting point.
We've only been using it since 2024.
So as this changes, it's a significant change
in the way we report data.
Before, those things would never have risen
to the level of UCR reporting, and so now we're seeing them.
So that's why we're anxious to have two or three
or five years worth of data to really understand
whether something is going up or going down
or what that number is.
Yeah, so what I'm hearing you say basically,
and obviously more years of data would help us assess
whether it's a trend, but it could be that
just because there is better or more accurate fidelity
of the data, it may look like an increase in crime,
but what it actually is is kind of a combination
of your department clearing more cases
and being able to more accurately account
for the types of crimes.
Yeah, that's certainly possible.
Yeah, I'll just say that's especially true
with the lower level crimes that previously
would have just not been reported to the FBI
under like a hierarchical rule.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, okay, Council Member Bartlett.
Thank you, and that was impressive.
You answered all of his questions.
I've never seen that in a video before.
I have about nine questions myself.
Just kidding.
Just kidding, just two.
So one is the, first off, great work is always wonderful.
You know, it'd be amazing to see the work that you do.
You're the best.
I see, I'm really enthusiastic about the response times.
Very good, really, really, really good.
I'm curious about the GVIP.
Is that what you call it, the GVIP, GVIP?
The Gun Violence Intervention Prevention Program.
This is something, of course,
that we've focused on for a long time
and worked it out and got it funded.
And so I'm really curious if you have any information
about it beyond the sort of high level report.
Yeah, I'd love to talk about that.
You know, that was stemmed from you, Council Member Bartlett,
and from Council Member Tapplin.
And, you know, we thought we needed to force Berkeley
into the ceasefire peg and then realize
that wasn't appropriate for what our data showed us
about the number of shootings we had, that kind of crime.
And that partnership, you know,
having LiveFree in our community,
those deep connections, the relationship
that we've been able to build of trust
and working together in collaboration,
but also understanding we have individual
and different lanes we need to be in at times.
That is one of the most tremendous programs
that I've seen, and I know I've mentioned that
to the mayor before, it's been an incredible tool
for our community, where we haven't made it
just about shootings, but about the aftermath,
and special events or funerals and other types
where people are still raw in a community
and be able to get the right resources there.
And to also humanize the law enforcement response
around those spaces and build those connections
has been incredibly meaningful.
Oh, that's great, thank you, I really appreciate that.
That's it, thank you.
Thank you, Council Member Humbert.
Thank you, Madam Mayor.
And actually, some of Council Member Trigub's questions
We're also on my list, so I don't need to challenge you to speed-writing exercise or
a cognitive test to remember them all, but I do have one just follow-up question about
the hate crimes reaching a five-year high.
Does the department have any planned initiatives or outreach efforts to respond to this?
I think we are still in the space of trying to determine what the best partnerships are.
I will tell you that we're very connected
to a number of communities that have been affected
by the specific types of crimes that have gone up.
We routinely interact with organizers for events
to make sure that they have the sense of security
that feels most appropriate to whatever the venue is.
That's ranged from Holy Days to extra presence
around a certain event or a certain celebration.
And that's the way that we really reflect
what our community needs and wants from us.
so we're always very aware and dedicated to that work.
And so those are the initiatives I know in years past,
we've stood with United Against Hate programs
and started to talk about some of that collaboration
and did some of that other work
with both Berkeley High School students,
the school district around that,
and with our city PIO about information.
But it's absolutely someplace I'd love to hear more ideas
as a community about how we speak vocally about,
against hate, I think we do a lot of that
in our sanctuary city work, right, as a whole.
But we'd love to collaborate and partner
on that more deeply.
Thank you, Chief, that's really helpful
and interesting, thank you.
Just a quick follow up question
about the drug equipment violation issue.
What does drug equipment violation mean exactly?
that term, that large increase in crimes in this category.
So what I would love to do is now that that's,
this seems like a really question
that we wanna dig into a little bit more,
that particular crime category.
Let us go back, let us dig into
whether we can get any data from pre-2024
around that type of arrest and look at that in comparison.
And we're able to do some side-by-side comparisons
with some of our other data for historical data
to see whether we're seeing a trend increase.
Let's give you a broad range.
I don't wanna name two or three things
that are in that category and they had more.
Let us go back and do the deep research into it
now that we know this is an area of interest
to a handful of council members
and then we'll get together on a agenda member
or something like that and share it back out.
Yeah, no, I appreciate that.
I just was wondering what a drug equipment was,
what drug equipment is.
You would know it if you saw it.
Pardon, okay.
It could be a pipe to use for something.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thank you.
I said that makes sense, drug equipment.
What is the, do you think, is the overtime budget impact of operating at 144 officers
against 174 authorized?
That's a great question.
I will tell you that we dove into our overtime expenditures
and looking at how we're on budget right now,
and I will tell you that the biggest place
that we're seeing some overages right now
are in our communication center,
where as you saw we're well below a minimum staffing level,
and so that's requiring a lot of overtime.
And the other place where we see a lot of overtime
is our overtime around patrol,
and meeting our minimum staffing levels around patrol.
One of the things that we're looking to in,
we just launched a new timesheet was in agreement
with the union, dropped the minimum staffing level
on patrol, which means that we'll have to sell
less overtime to meet that coverage.
At the same time, we're deploying things
like focus bike patrol, flex team.
So we have personnel available and on the street,
but dedicated to different work unless they're needed
for priority calls.
And all of that to say, that's one of the reasons
why I think we'll be able to address our current
overtime budget and bring it down with tools like the technology we're going to be talking
about later tonight and with this change in minimum staffing, again, we're going to be
assessing these with quality of service response times and things like closure rates and things
like that.
Right.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And then finally, and I know this is sometimes included in other reports, but do we have any
additional information on the five fatal traffic collisions?
how many were DUIs, maybe how many occurred at night
versus during the day, those kinds of details.
I do know that we've seen increases
in motorized scooters and bicycles,
but I don't know offhand,
but that's something that would be easily looked up.
Okay.
And as you're, I'm sure aware about our business
your partnership, that rapid response review.
So when they occur, we move immediately to a posture
of understanding whether it's a traffic engineering issue
that needs to be resolved that caused that collision.
And then we look deeper into whether there's
criminal matter having to do with DUI or inattentiveness.
A lot of these, as you know, are pedestrian fatalities.
And again, DUI and e-scooters have been,
has been a predominant thing that we've
seen raised up in these.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, I really appreciate the existence
of the rapid response team.
It's a great thing.
Thank you, that's all I have.
Thank you, Council Member.
Vice Member Napara.
Thank you, and thank you for all your work on this
in the presentation.
I have two quick comments before I go into questions.
On the slide with the chart with workload
per patrol officer, there's no y-axis,
and it'd be really helpful to have a y-axis on there
so that we can understand what the chart, yeah, thank you.
And then on page 30 of the annual report,
there's a chart showing the calls for service
versus use of force incidents.
And just in my opinion, it would be much more useful
to see percent of arrests that use use of force
instead of calls for service or maybe in addition to.
So those are just two quick comments.
My first question is around hate crimes.
Last year, the police department found that anti-Jewish
and anti-LGBTQ plus hate crimes were the main reason
for the increase in hate crimes last year.
Do you know if those trends have continued?
yeah, largely the composition of hate crime, anti-hate bias motivation have been relatively
stable and so yeah, there hasn't been like a giant shift in the types of the crimes we're seeing.
Okay, thanks. I have two questions on ALPRs. The report notes significant crime declines
across multiple categories in 2025 and the ALPR program was also deployed alongside the
flex team and the CSO team program and the GVIPP partnership which you all noted.
Do you distinguish which programs drove which outcomes?
Do you know how to separate those basically?
Yeah.
Well, so in general it's a really difficult thing to put causation in these interventions
And it's just true across, you know,
crime prevention literature in general.
And so I want to be careful not to say
that we can definitively say X caused Y.
But what I can't say is that we know
that our robbery detectives have been,
and Kevin and Dervin can speak to this as well,
our robbery detectives have been
some of the most productive users of the LPR technology.
They've solved upwards of 20 pieces directly
using LPR information, which accounts
for a large jump in the clearance rate,
but they're, and then we've seen the scene
with the flex team operations in our increase
in clearances on thefts, you know,
we can look at those numbers and see that, you know,
they match up in a way that we would expect them to.
And so these are things that we, I can see,
that the numbers move in the direction
that we would expect them to, quantitatively.
And qualitatively, we're hearing this incredible feedback
from our officers and detectives doing the work
that these are tools that have fundamentally changed
how they do their job.
And so what we have to do is make decisions
and assessments based on imperfect information.
That's just the predicament that we're in.
And everything is pointing towards these
just being profoundly helpful tools.
Thank you.
A similar question is around robbery clearance
that improved substantially.
Were there other changes in detective staffing
or case prioritization or investigative practices
that could have also contributed to the clearance?
I think the main thing is that the numbers dropped
in addition, like there were fewer robberies.
And Mike can speak to the investigative practices, but.
Is it on?
Yeah.
So no, there wasn't a change in the number of detectives.
So it makes it easier for us to say that,
hey, what did change?
the ALPR and the thing that wasn't touched on earlier it's the it's the
speed of which they identify the suspects at that which we believe then
prevents further victimization they're also not throwing out any other
investigative leads those all still exist and those are used as additional
tools to point that we have the right suspects so they're still doing nybin on
shell casings they're still doing area checks for witnesses looking for
or stationary video, touch DNA,
all those other things are still happening.
They're just getting to the right suspects quicker.
Okay, thanks for that.
On the officer per shift declining,
I'm curious what the department's benchmark
for a sustainable workload looks like.
What is the correct amount of calls per officer per shift?
So I don't think that there's a particular benchmark per se,
It's based on the number, the type of call,
the amount of time that they spend on it,
as well as, so it's more than just the volume.
But what we see in the way that it's trending
is that it allows more time for proactivity
and offers officers to spend more time
with the community and triaging their cases.
There's a qualitative piece to working a case.
And if you're a patrol officer
and are going from call to call to call
because the calls are stacking up,
you have less time to go back and check on a victim
and make sure they inventory their stolen property correctly.
You have less time to spend explaining
a restraining order process.
You have less time to just slow down and empathize
what they're experiencing, right?
You may have less houses you can hit for a canvas.
Like all the pressure of having so many cases stacking up
means those things are less possible.
Those are, that's work the TSOs can do.
It's obviously, but that's the nature, right?
Like what's a goal?
The goal is that an officer has enough time to do that
to give the quality of care we expect in Berkeley.
And a little bit of free time to have downtime, right?
That emotional time between those challenging calls, right?
And some time to engage to support our traffic bureau
on the traffic enforcement things that we know
make a big difference in safety in our city also.
Like we're putting a lot into their day.
Thank you.
So for example, in 2023 when there was a 6.3 average calls
handled per officer per shift,
it still could theoretically be shorter calls.
Like this number doesn't tell the full story.
No, because basically,
yeah, exactly, it's a proxy
and it's a proxy for the quality of service
that an officer's able to provide on those calls.
Okay, thank you.
The report proposes measuring the drone success
by four metrics.
I'm curious if the department has identified
baseline figures for those metrics
so that council can evaluate whether the program
is working once it launches.
Yeah, one great example is response times.
Looking at response times.
We shared with you that for an officer in a car,
their response times are around seven minutes.
We see what happens in the region,
what happens nationally.
We know that's a little bit ahead of what you might see
with regional partners,
especially with higher or lower priority calls.
You'll see numbers from Oakland that are in the hours
where it might take us 40 minutes
or 30 minutes to get to something.
What we would then use as a benchmark, right,
is once we launch DFR, we know that jurisdictions
of our similar size are reporting about two minutes
to get to any call.
Ones that are in larger jurisdictions might say
three or four.
And for me, the question is,
you wanna look at speed that they can arrive
to then get the right resources to a call.
And so setting a benchmark about how many minutes it is,
Little challenging because it depends on the jurisdiction size, right?
Unless you only compare like jurisdictions, but for me, the bigger drivers are going to
be things like how many calls did we never send personnel to so that we had free time
available?
How many calls were they declared like that?
How many calls did they go to that we could step down or needed to step up our response?
Right?
That tells us whether that's giving us actionable evidence, you know, or calls that we sent
a different resource.
Fire department went instead of the police or a mobile crisis went out instead, right?
So until we start to really flesh out what council's desire is about having this tool
and the kind of calls we go to, then that's when we'll be able to set some benchmarks
of expectations about service levels and things like that.
What we're sharing are what we hear is kind of some common ways that they assess programs
and the efficiency and effectiveness of programs are some of the things we've risen.
Thank you.
I want to ask a little bit about the use of force and accountability piece.
The report notes two sustained findings of misconduct
out of 10 completed investigations.
Are those the consequences of those cases public?
Is that information public?
No, they're not their personnel records.
So the outcome of those,
the outcome that I can share is that there was an allegation
and there was a sustained finding.
Okay, thank you.
I'm also curious because there's no mention of it
in the report of what efforts did the police department
partner with the PAB on throughout, throughout the year.
Related to the complaints or as a whole?
Generally.
Yeah, so PAB has regular meetings.
The departmental liaison, deputy chief, deputy chief,
well, or myself or president,
we always have a watch commander at those meetings
to provide answers about procedural questions,
policy related questions.
We regularly meet, I meet regularly
with the director of police accountability
on a monthly basis.
We're talking about having a regular meeting
with the PAB chair, the DPA once seated,
and our office as well.
We regularly participate either at the deputy chief level
or with the sergeant policy at subcommittee meetings
on policy work.
They come over to our office and we go through
and walk through the transparency hub
and look through policies and talk through policies together.
we attend meetings co-jointly sometimes
and things like that.
I know they use some of our data
and our report they report out in theirs.
There's a number of places both in our policy
and by ordinance we share reports over to the PAB
or they review our things before we submit them
to council or move forward on processes.
So there's a lot of work.
It's not laid out here where we had a very clear focus
on like reporting the crime data and things like that.
I didn't lay that out in detail here,
but certainly if it's the Council's interest,
we can add a section on that in years follow
about the ways we've collaborated.
Thank you, thank you.
I just think it's helpful for the community
to know how the PAB and the Police Department interact
and what they work together on.
And my last question is,
because I don't fully understand it,
can you go into a little more detail
about the anatomy of the complaint process
and how, what that process looks like
and what the timeline looks like also?
Sure, so there's some parallel processes that occur
and that's laid out in the charter.
But if there is an allegation of wrongdoing
by a community member,
then if it comes first to the department,
then we institute and begin an investigation
and it starts a clock running
as soon as the city becomes aware.
Complaints can also come directly to the PAB.
If they come to the PAB,
they notice that we run a parallel investigation.
So there's never a point in time
where we are not running an IA
if a PAB investigation is occurring.
If and when we receive a complaint,
we advise the complainant like,
hey, there's this only separate process
that you can get involved in with the PAB.
And so there's communication
about how to get connected into that process.
That starts the timelines running.
Based on the information we get from a complainant
that sets what the allegations are in a complaint
and who the subject officers, if they're known are,
or on an individual call,
that sets record preservation as soon as that occurs.
So we know an incident is occurring,
we'll preserve all records related to it,
and then we start a process.
There's a 240 day time limit on the process
from when misconduct, the city is notified of it.
That could be either the PAB
or the police department is notified of it
that starts the clock.
That can be told for certain things
like an active criminal case and other things.
There's a government code sets out when that can be told.
So sometimes you'll see things extend beyond the 240,
depending on that.
You will see sometimes at the end of the year
where we have cases that are active
and that may be cases that came in in October, November
that are still on this, like, long clock.
And, yeah, and that's,
happy to talk more about it if you want,
or maybe we could meet and go through that
if you wanna hear more detail.
That's really helpful.
Thank you so much.
Those are all my questions.
Thanks.
Thanks for your questions.
Council Member Blackaby.
Thanks, Madam Mayor.
First, just Chief Lewis, Deputy Chief Tate,
Captain Durbin and Mr. Malmberg,
thank you for the presentation.
Thank you for the report.
And more importantly,
for the work you do every day to keep the community safe.
Really appreciate it, and thank you for your service.
Just a couple of questions.
A lot of my questions have been asked, not surprisingly,
so I'll just touch on a couple of things.
On the calls for service number, you'd mention,
and again, I had to step out for a minute,
so I apologize if you already addressed this.
I can get it later, but you mentioned
that the 911 call volumes sort of been steadily increasing.
Do we have any kind of conjecture
as to why that's happening?
anything we can you know you know what's going on there you know from 12,000 in
2021 to 16,000 2025 just it is an interesting trend that you know callers
are getting more are calling with more urgent calls and they're calling with
fewer non-emergency calls yeah I don't have a great explanation for exactly why
that's occurring but it's certainly a trend that we've seen over a couple of
of years now.
Okay.
Again, I was gonna, the second question was gonna be,
and then the downward trend on non-emergency calls,
which is great.
Do those also get routed through the communication center?
So it's at least less, a little less traffic on that side.
I also wonder if there's more self-service
through the website, if there's other tools
that people are just, you know,
things where they might otherwise be calling for information,
they're actually getting themselves.
It's possible with some of the changes
that we've seen to the online services and portals recently.
I mean the city, we do receive calls sometimes
to the police department about something
that's outside of our department.
That's one of the reasons why we're exploring an AI agent
that would take those non-emergency calls
and better direct them and route them in that manner
so that we could then assess whether we were able
to change our staffing level in the communications center
based on a reduction of calls with that support.
Yeah, makes sense.
And then on the crime highlights,
we mentioned good news on the fewer shootings,
fewer robberies, fewer vehicle thefts, fewer burglaries,
but more a 23% increase on sexual assaults,
16% increase on aggravated assaults.
How do you look at that data
and then think about deploying resources?
Like what do you do, what do you do things,
how do you respond to that and account for that
to sort of over the next year try and stem that tide?
How do you think about that?
Well, for aggravated assault specifically,
you were taking a look at those geographically
and seeing that a high concentration of those occur
in our business districts, especially downtown.
And so we have a bike team that responds primarily
to calls in that area,
but we're looking at some of these other tools
that we're talking about that can help us
get eyes on those occurrences earlier
and help solve those situations earlier.
It's not a point to be lost.
The reason why we requested the fixed cameras
in those areas where those things were happening
is because we know having video evidence
is something that's critical for the DA
when they're considering charging.
It's critical for us when we're identifying
responsible parties and seeing,
there's a big difference when someone tells you
something happens and when you can see it happen.
Right, and so that's why we're anxious
to get those tools and those technologies
active in our business communities.
Okay, because that was, yeah, one of the questions
I was gonna ask, when you were talking about
ALPRs in particular and looking at the connection
to clearance rates, that's one of the things
I was gonna ask is, are there other places,
So, ALPRs to robbery, are there other places
where we could see the value of that?
We talked a little bit about auto theft clearly,
but places where the technology might,
if approved, might start to show up in the numbers?
I think it could show up in the aggravated assaults,
and it could show up in the sexual assault,
especially who we know are most often victimized, right?
As people that are at bars or in that environment,
there's video evidence, and having that
and being able to build chargeable cases is critical.
we absolutely would expect to see there
to be some kind of measurable impact in that area.
Cool.
One thing for future report, just a little asterisk,
because we're talking about impact of ALPR, 58 arrests,
another 121 supported cases.
I also wonder if there's something about improved
percentage of successful prosecutions or something,
to your point, because we have better data,
better documentation.
More likely that, not only is an arrest made,
but there's some sort of adjudication after the arrest,
as opposed to other things where we don't have
the same information.
You still may make an arrest,
but it may be hard to actually.
It can be a little challenging.
It could depend on focus of a district attorney who's in
and whether they have a certain initiative
that they're working on.
It can also be that linking that up,
we don't have the same data access
in the way that we could cleanly say.
You just follow a case and you know
you'd have to manually go in and enter an offender number
and a send number and be able to track back
and see what happens.
Some things are resolved as probation or parole violations
instead of a criminal case.
and some things languish in the court for a really long time
and so it makes it a little challenging,
but certainly it does matter.
And again, we are one piece in the justice system
and my responsibility is to ensure
that we're providing direct public safety
and that we're building cases that are based
on actionable evidence to bring to the DA.
What happens after that, we have a little less control over.
Makes sense, okay.
On the dispatch, we've talked,
I know we've talked about it in previous years too
how that is a challenge.
That's a particular area where we do have constraints.
I like this idea of thinking about how to in a
Relatively risk-free way using the AI to sort of help with non-emergency calls cuz I think that could be a real important factor there
But it feels like you know, we're recruiting and then also seeing some attrition and it's you know
It's it's it's it's hard to sort of maintain staffing there any thoughts about is there a retention thing that?
Do you need council support? How else can we be helping? Yeah, there's a couple big things going on
One is the infrastructure and facilities,
improvements that are needed in there.
That makes it a more welcoming and inviting place
for people to stay and be well in.
The other thing is the changes in critical, right,
which you saw, which meant we brought people
that were more likely to have the capacity for the job
in through the testing process early.
We are moving very close to scripted dispatching
and launching both for police and fire.
So one of the reasons why our attrition rate is what it is,
is it's a hard program.
It's a hard job.
It's hard to get through the training program.
And so we think we'll see really a great improvement
once we get those things up and running.
So we will need funding support
for a lot of these projects moving forward
as we then assess what it looks like to have this.
And making measurable impacts on our staffing level
and the communication center,
one, it would significantly drive down our overtime costs,
two, it would significantly improve the quality of life
for our dispatchers who have been working
constrain environment for a really long time. Last question just it picks up a
little bit on where Councilmember Luna Parr was asking about some of the internal
affairs the stats on complaints and closed complaints. I remember this from
last year and didn't bring it up but kind of strikes me again this year that
just given the calendar like you get much better data on all the crime data
from the previous year because you there's there's finality all those
numbers the trick obviously is with a lot of the 2025 data on complaints and
and kind of where are we in the process.
There's always a large number of active cases
that haven't been resolved by the time
that you complete the report.
I wonder if for future years it's worth
not just having the previous year,
but two years ago in terms of having more accurate,
because you'd actually know probably better disposition
with 100% accuracy of everything at that point
where now we only get partial
because things are still running their course.
Right, that's correct.
And actually what I think we might explore
is having a space on the transparency hub
because we report this information publicly
what we can report publicly,
but it's a living thing, right?
Right.
I have to talk to Arlo about what we can make to automated
because I'm trying to also avoid creating new staff work,
but certainly looking for ways to be able to report
so you can kind of track ongoing outcomes,
I think could be very useful.
And maybe, or maybe the simple care
is just to do two years at a time
so that we capture all the ones that happen the year prior.
Arlo AI or something like that for that.
Okay, great, that's all of my questions, thanks again.
Okay, can we go to council member O'Keefe.
Thank you, I really wanna thank my colleagues
for such thoughtful questions.
This is really a lot of things I hadn't thought of,
a couple of things, questions I had that were answered,
but just really great all around.
There is one area I do have some lingering curiosity about,
which is the crimes against society section,
and I acknowledge you already said
that you would look into the drug equipment violations
and see, look, pull that apart more
and see what that's about.
So I appreciate that, I'm interested in that.
But in general, this category is concerning to me
because I view most of these offenses
as sort of like none of your business crimes.
That's just a personal philosophy.
I'm glad to see that gambling and prostitution were zero.
That's good, and I'm assuming the pornography
is material that was objectively harmful in some way.
I'm just assuming that it's like child,
something involving children or something like that.
That's what the statute requires.
Right, right.
It's not the end, it's not illegal otherwise, right.
So I just, I'm gonna give the benefit of the doubt
on that one.
And then, and weapons, sure.
I guess I am still curious,
and if you have to come back with this information,
that's okay, but if you could just help us understand
what is the department's philosophy
around drug crimes by themselves?
Like if an officer is driving down the street
and they see somebody in their car with the engine off,
just smoking something.
Do they, are they instructed to stop
and do something to the person,
or should they, do they look the other way?
Like sort of by itself,
the only crime that is being committed is a drug crime.
Is there a department of philosophy around that?
Well, I do just want to clarify that
these counts are not separate incidents necessarily.
So a single incident might involve a more serious charge
as well as a drug charge.
And so that will get separated out into these numbers.
That's what I was hoping.
Like if somebody's acting violently
and had some methamphetamine,
yes, it would make sense to report that.
But do any of these represent
just the act of doing drugs by themselves?
I mean, that question is probably not something
you can answer, but in general,
is that something that happens in Berkeley?
I mean, it's possible it could happen.
You have to remember also that driving well
under the influence of any drug, right,
creates risk for our community.
And sometimes the combination of alcohol and drugs
can make it even worse.
And I think to Arlo's great point,
we arrest somebody for something
and they have paraphernalia
and they have usable amounts, right?
Then you start to stack things.
So it's not like you can just look at this number
and say 300 times you went out
and did that kind of enforcement.
We don't have a let's go out and arrest people
that are smoking marijuana policy
or practice as a department.
Typically when you see something like that,
it's a usable sales amount quantity,
using in a way that's causing this other risk DUI,
being arrested for a different charge
and that's something else that you have, right?
Our officers are also obligated if a felony schedule
type of drug is found in someone's possession
to take enforcement action or to document that, right?
We can't just put in the gutter or something, right?
So there's some spaces where if you engage with you
for that reason, we have to take that kind of action.
And just to be clear, this is not a category of offenses
that we identified as things that matter to us.
And that's why we've risen it up with our Group A offenses.
We're reporting on the structure with which
the national collection of crime data has collected.
This is one of the categories in some of the things.
Correct, it's not us saying,
I understand.
Hey, here's the things that really matter us
that we're dealing with.
Right.
I just may be curious about that,
and I assume drug sales is part
of the drug narcotics violations.
Somebody who's clearly dealing drugs,
that would fall under that.
Okay, thank you very much.
I remember moving to Berkeley and people saying like,
they don't ever stop you for smoking weed on the streets,
because I would walk around and smell weed everywhere,
and I was like, oh, we're clearly on an issue here.
So anyway, I do have some questions.
I'm sorry, I was amused by the line of questioning.
So I'm curious to ask about the recruitment efforts.
If you could speak to, I mean, this seems like
it's been very successful in terms of getting interest.
Have you seen that translate over
to people actually applying?
And what did you find was most successful?
Is that job fairs or direct connections
with organizations or what did that look like?
So I think our partnership with All Star Recruiting
has been huge.
With our virtual recruiting events,
we're able to show up and give individuals
and sort of an introduction to the department
and we have officers, detectives,
special units available to sort of talk through
some of the exciting things happening at our department
and opportunities for individuals.
So with that, I think leaning into All Star
in those events have been very successful.
We are doing some of the recruiting fairs.
we're a little more selective with the ones
that we go to just because we haven't in the past
necessarily seen a huge return on investment for those.
So we certainly appreciate doing the ones locally
in any way that we can expand our diversity.
Thank you.
And then, calls for service,
I think that you've addressed this,
the automated service, that's the,
is it, does it involve AI?
I know that Council Member Black
could be asked a similar question.
Are you talking about the dispatch tool?
Yeah, so it's basically like a phone tree,
but it has some artificial intelligence built into it
so it can direct you based on what you're saying to a call
and there's places where you can opt out.
We're still in reviewing vendors
and looking at those to see what makes the most sense.
Okay, thank you.
And then Arlo, you mentioned a potential increase
in crime that might be expected.
Can you speak to why researchers think that might be?
Yeah, so there's, so the last two years
we've seen the biggest drops in crimes
that we've essentially ever seen on a national level, right?
And so it's really difficult to explain a trend like that
with a really simple explanation,
but the best researchers in the space
have noted that that crime drop has matched closely
the investments that came from the COVID era.
Federal funding that came into local governments
and funded all types of services
in public safety technology.
And as those things have been adopted
and implemented, crime rates have dropped.
So there's nothing definitive on that,
but certainly the best theories are kind of tied
those additional investments that were made, as well as the lessening of the COVID disruptions.
And so as that federal funding runs out, it's possible that those crime rates might come
back up accordingly, depending on how communities continue to invest in those initiatives.
Thank you.
That's really helpful.
Could you speak to going to the ALPR systems?
Were there any false positive hits generated in the ALPR system alerts?
Like where the officers would review it and then it didn't match up with the license plate
that the system had set it would?
Well, so not so no, and I'll tell you why, is because they don't take that next step
of acting on that and if it doesn't match.
It can be as simple as, when they went by the plate reader,
they thought it was Sam, one, two, three,
and the officer gets closer and realizes,
because of lighting, it was actually Sam, one, two, eight.
And so they don't take enforcement action.
And so, and the outcomes drop down.
There's not a space to capture that,
because you don't engage in the stop.
In the same way that if you didn't go and find the car,
you wouldn't engage in the stop.
Right, now that makes sense.
I guess I was curious to know,
I imagine we don't track that, if it isn't correct.
Is that right?
We don't track that.
Yeah, that's correct.
Just for precisely the reason that the chief mentioned
is that there would be nothing to report at that point.
Just, it goes to how accurate the ALPRs are.
That's, I think, why I was interested in that question.
And then you mentioned that you're deepening
your collaborations with Vision Zero stakeholders,
which is really exciting.
could you speak more to what that looks like?
Well, I'll talk about our inter departmental collaborations
and Kevin Dervin can talk a little bit
about our traffic enforcement.
So yeah, we have now regular meetings
as part of a regular Vision Zero working group
that include myself, our traffic lieutenant,
our traffic analyst.
So we are really deeply engaged in everything
that's happening in public works around Vision Zero
in traffic engineering, and we're giving our feedback,
they're giving us feedback.
And so we are finding additional ways
to be a part of all the traffic safety initiatives
that are happening in the city
that kind of revolve around that Vision Zero crew.
We're a part of that fully.
Before Mike talks, another great example too
is the daylighting efforts, right?
That was a Vision Zero initiative
that helped safety in streets.
When that rolled out,
was a lot of meetings with the police department
on how we would notice first
and when we would move to enforcement
and working in partnership with,
when the curbs would be painting all of that work was done
in that kind of partnership,
directly related to Vision Zero.
And I'll just add that the traffic lieutenant now
regularly meets with the Vision Zero coordinator.
We were looking at, we were like,
why are we only talking when we have
a serious injury collision or a fatal collision?
You're doing construction projects
all around the city, major ones, major thoroughfares.
How can we support you?
What enforcement can we be doing?
What should we be informing and educating the public on
to make the streets safer in addition to engineering?
So that's a regular meeting.
I don't know how frequently they meet,
but I know it's a regular meeting between those two.
Thank you.
Yeah, I was particularly concerned
by this University Avenue and West Frontage,
total collisions 15.
And I think that there's some work
that's being done there on that intersection.
I don't know if someone could speak to that a little more.
Okay all right maybe not one that you talked about in your in your meetings
that's okay no worries I'll follow up about that one later and then the drive
safer drive longer classes for our older adult drivers I think that's super
great and I know I asked a lot of questions about this last year but could
you speak to a little bit about how the attendance has been looking for those
classes and how we can connect folks to those classes are they going well they
are going really well. Their attendance is ticking up. There's been a little lull because
our traffic analyst, we just got a new traffic analyst. That class was conducted by the previous
traffic analyst who's not rotated back to patrol, but the new analyst knows that's part of his
responsibility. We will be doing them quarterly, but last year in 2025 they did tick up in attendance
And the city's PIO has helped us get the word out on that.
What was attendance like?
I don't wanna just throw a number out there.
You're not sure, yeah.
Okay, so we can, yeah.
25 to 30 per class?
Oh, that's good.
I think last year was around 20 or something.
I think it's better towards the latter ones, though.
That's good.
Okay, great, thank you.
We'll follow up with you,
because I'm really interested in helping the community
know more about those classes.
I think they're really important.
And we also wanna de-stigmatize this training
and asking for help earlier.
Okay, and then the other, my last question
is about our early intervention system.
I know that that was something we talked about last year
and I didn't see it mentioned in this year's report.
Could you speak to what's happening with that?
Yeah, yeah, that's a really exciting program
that we've been working hard on with the vendor
that the PAB and ourselves and council landed on.
And so we are up and running with that program.
We're running it alongside our current or our existing protocol
to compare results and make sure that we're not missing anything
as we transition.
But that's been a really exciting project
that we're now in the exciting part,
where we're starting to get some functionality out of it.
That's great.
I'm really looking forward to seeing the data from that
and learning more about that for the next year's report.
Yeah, and certainly 2025 was us about getting into contract
and getting it built.
In early 2026 is when it went,
we first started piloting it actually out
with our data, our local data.
So I expect that next year's report
would cover that much thoroughly.
That's great, thank you.
Okay, all right.
So I think we're finished with the questions now.
So I wanna open it up for public comments.
This is for public comments
on the 2025 Berkeley Police Department annual report.
Come up.
On hate crimes and incidents,
it would help, if we're gonna address these,
it would help to know more specific information.
For example, on race, authenticity and national origin,
are these individuals black?
Are they white?
Are they Asian?
At the Latino national origin is in the same category
of these anti-immigrant hate crimes and incidents.
religion saying sexual orientation of the person's trans,
gender may be too broad of a category,
and that's why probably nothing has been captured.
Perhaps it has been captured in larger offenses.
A disability of these persons with physical disabilities
or mental disabilities,
and also from the Homeless Commission,
Council had passed a recommendation,
have a category on hate crimes against the homeless.
And I recall reading about a situation
where someone associated with a business
stabbed a homeless man while he was irritating
and that would seem to be false.
Other public comment?
Hi, Kit Saginaw, one minute.
Okay, so note the fact that you have not been able
to fill all of your officer slots
and have not been able to for years,
This is not a new statistic at all,
but that does bring to the point that the unfilled slots
are not in fact costing the city real dollars.
They're in the budget, but in the end,
you don't have the officers so they can't be paid.
So any kind of suggestion that decreasing that number
of slots will free up a great deal of money
for some other program is not really the case
because they're not in fact empty,
they are in fact empty, so they're not costing money now.
And I'm very happy to hear about the CSO program
and the other kinds of violence intervention programs.
I had seen an article saying that the Live Free program
is running out of funding and I didn't hear anything
that says that that funding has now been increased
or will be continued.
So I'm wondering about the future of that.
I think that's a really important one
for violence prevention.
Thanks Kit.
Good afternoon council.
I have a couple minutes.
I have two minutes yielded to me.
I wanted to just share with you some statistics
from the human rights data analysis group, Tarek Shah.
In 2025, black people were six times more likely
per capita than white people to get stopped while driving.
Black people were more than nine times more likely
to be stopped on foot than white people.
Black people were stopped for equipment violation
11 times more than expected
from their representation in the population.
Black people were pulled over for seatbelt violations
10 times more than expected
from the representation in the population.
That these statistics should be part of this report
and that the long time effort of this community
to try to address racial profiling
and its impacts on the community is not a small thing.
I also want to talk about this notion
of community service officers.
For those of you who are here,
some of you council members were here
during the reimagining process.
And I take some offense to the idea
that CSOs represent reimagining policing.
That's not what we were talking about five years ago.
What we were saying is that CSOs actually are quite expensive
compared to what we're asking them to do.
That looking at that,
you know, when you hear there's somebody
sleeping on my doorstep.
That there's a disturbance, you know,
somebody's yelling or somebody's, you know, drunk
or somebody's passed out in the doorway.
That's what the special care unit was supposed to do.
And we know that had they been allowed,
had the police actually relinquished their power that much,
that we could have had a civilianized response
at a fraction of the cost.
That all that overtime, all those extra hours,
that they could have, they could have, what can I say?
That this idea of care, not cops, of care first, jails last.
some of us still hold the torch for that.
And when I hear that they're talking about budget numbers,
and you realize that since 2000,
that their budget has gone up about 20%.
So, and I'm also just wanna say that
who is checking those clearance rates?
Because, you know, as of 2024,
it was reported in the San Francisco Chronicle
that in fact, Berkeley PD's clearance rate
was not at the state average.
I'm not sure who's right,
but I wonder what outside agencies
are actually able to check those clearance rates,
to check those definitions.
Certainly the PAB has not been allowed to do that.
So who will do that?
So those are my concerns, thank you.
Thank you.
Okay, other public comments online
for the 2025 Berkeley Police Department annual report?
you'd like to make public comment please raise your hand. First speaker is Kelly
Hammergren. Kelly can you hear us? Yes I can hear you. Can you hear me? Yes. Yes.
Okay so I just had a couple of questions I know you don't answer them but I'm
gonna place them out there anyway. We just had the meeting on March 10th
about pepper spray and pepper spray reporting so I looked for that when I
read the annual report you know was there we got use of force but we don't
know whether pepper spray was used in the last year and so I was hoping that
someone might answer that or one of our council members might might ask what
what the status of that was since people were so interested
in the reporting.
And then I wanted to know if the definition
of hate crime had changed.
And then I also wanted to know if with the auto theft
and the reporting to solve cases.
Thanks Kelly.
I'm sorry, you're out of time,
but thank you for your questions, your comments.
The next speaker is first name, Yick, Y-I-K.
Hi, I'm a student from UC Berkeley.
I'm speaking on behalf of the Cali CMU.
We're a student chapter
of the American Civil Liberties Union.
We're mainly here to talk about floc,
which I know we'll discuss later,
but for now I wanna comment on the BPT claim
that ALPRs are somehow necessary
for their function in Berkeley.
I wanna raise a study that ALPRs in T-Bont
found that less than 0.3% of hits
actually translated into useful investigative leads.
So the hundred or so success stories
that were brought up today are actually only a bucket
or drop in the bucket of all the other data
that ALPRs are unnecessarily capturing.
I recognize the department's concerned about staffing
but this is not the right technology
to be remedying that with, thank you.
Thank you.
Okay, next is Alana Auerbach.
Hello, based on the police stop data
from their own open data portal,
In 2005, this is, I'm not sure if this is in the report
because I haven't had a chance to read it,
but just to make sure this is in the public record.
In 2005, racial, 25, excuse me,
racial disparities were worse than reported
by the Center for Equity and Policing in 2018.
Okay, so in 2025, black people were six times
more likely per capita than whites
to get stopped while driving,
nine times more likely to be stopped on foot.
black people were stopped for equipment violations
11 times more than expected
from their representation in the population
and were stopped 10 times more for seatbelt violations.
Even though the BPD,
based on a unanimous Berkeley City Council directive in 2021
was supposed to eliminate low level offenses.
Meanwhile, in 2025, 489 equipment violations
and 45 seatbelt violations.
In short, the BPD stop data demonstrates very strong,
Statistically significant evidence of racial.
Thanks for your comment.
Next is Angeline.
Hi, good evening.
I'm also here on behalf of UC Berkeley's Cal ACLU.
And I'd like to expand on how floc cameras negatively
impact the immigrant community and goes against the notion
that Berkeley is a sanctuary city.
So our laws are meant to prohibit local police
from assisting federal immigration enforcement.
But Floc's network creates a loophole
that these laws cannot close.
So we already know that federal agencies
are using the service as audit logs
from departments across the country,
as audit logs from departments across the country
show officers listing ICE or immigration
as the reason for running searches.
And this means that local police are conducting searches
on behalf of federal agencies.
And Berkeley is home to thousands of undocumented residents
and students who are a part of this community.
And block cameras interfere
with the safety of these individuals
and puts them at risk of unjustified detention
and bridges on their privacy, and also has the potential
to create a system of mass surveillance
that impacts the lives of everyone in our city
and not just those of undocumented residents.
And so the city is now considering.
Thanks.
Thanks for your comment.
Your time is up.
Next is Leslie.
Yes, I'm sorry.
Can you start my time over?
Trying to get my thing.
Thank you.
I want to speak also on behalf of a community who does not want to see any flock expansion
or any flock contract for any reason for that matter.
They have been known to share their information.
Several police departments around the country have canceled their contracts in cities and
counties and we should be doing the same.
We don't need to be surveilled.
you don't need to have more surveillance.
And this is not a way that helps police,
it only hurts our community.
And again, as others have said,
we're supposed to be a community that is a sanctuary city
and Flock is not in line with that.
Continuing to take away our rights
is not what Berkeley should be about.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And the last speaker is Wendy Alsen.
In the documentation, there's mention
of a July 2025 flock access to Berkeley's data.
I assume that's either a LPR or fixed video
was not mentioned in the public report.
And I don't know whether council has asked for
received a report as to exactly what happened at that time and what data was taken and accessed.
We do know that Mr. De La Garza, a Berkeley resident, is wrongfully detained at San Francisco
immigration based on a wrongly completed INS report, based on his criminal record, including
expunged record. And I don't know what. Thank you. Thanks for your comment.
That concludes the online public commenters. Okay. All right. Thank you all for your public
comments. I will now take any comments from council members. No comment? No, I have comments.
Would you like to go then? Yes, yes, I can. Alrighty, thank you Madam Mayor. I want to
thank our Police Chief, Deputy Chief Tate, Captain Durbin. I was going to say Urban for some reason,
I apologize, and Mr. Malberg for your presentation.
It was very, very comprehensive as always.
And, you know, I didn't have questions,
but I did just want to note some of the really important
stats that you presented.
One that really jumped out at me were the clearance rates.
I can't find, oh, okay, here, I see the slide,
but I don't, it doesn't have a number on it.
But, you know, on every category I see,
We have clearance rates, and that's the percentage
of cases closed within one year of being reported.
On every single one of those,
our percentage exceeds the state average.
So I just wanna note that we have been very successful.
I didn't actually look at all of the prior years
to compare how we're doing.
I do see some increases though, just scanning it right now.
So I think that that's a very positive sign.
And as a preview for what we will be discussing later
this evening, I think what you had to say
about leveraging technology,
I think will be really important
for our later conversations.
I just wanted to note, do you think
that there's a relationship between having
the full year of citywide deployment
of the automated license plate readers
and the higher than average clearance rates?
I don't know if you've looked at that specifically,
that relationship.
Can you comment on that at all?
Yeah, I think that's absolutely one of the things
that we would point to, to that.
And I'll share an example later tonight, again,
but with what Richmond experienced
when they paused their AOPRs for a period of time
for a couple months.
And what they saw was that incidents went up
and closure rates went down as a result.
And so we look to understand that there may be things
that drive clearance.
And I appreciated council member Lilpar's comment about,
or a question about, did you get more detectives?
Did you tell them to focus on this work?
Did something else change?
And because we try to limit or understand what drove change
and we didn't have those things that occurred.
What we did have was a full year of ALPR data.
Okay, thank you very much for that.
And then the other thing I wanted to note,
It was on the accountability slide that you showed
in terms of the tests for bias.
I think you've shown that every year for several years now
and I think those results speak for themselves
and I can just repeat what you reported, right?
For the collision demographics,
there's a strong alignment with stops,
the veil of darkness,
it's been consistent across light and dark.
The yield rate analysis showed no indications of bias
and the force rate by race was consistent across groups.
So I mean, obviously we could delve more into that.
We could have a whole session about that,
but that's not what we're doing this evening.
But I just wanted to highlight that
because I think that that's very important
and I think that's something we must continue to monitor
as with all of these stats.
So thank you again for the presentation.
Thank you, Council Member Humbert.
Thank you, Madam Mayor.
And I want to thank everyone present on the other dais
here tonight.
I really appreciate all the presentation, all the work
that you've done on the report, and all other folks
who worked on the report.
I also want to thank officers Ladun McGee and the remainder
of folks at BPD that have been supporting your efforts,
and all the staff who do the day-to-day work
on our streets to keep our city safe.
I'm very pleased by most of what I see in this report.
I don't want to jinx anything, but it seems right now
we've turned a major corner on the increase in crime
that we saw after the pandemic.
And while I'm sure that a notable portion of that
is due to external factors, I also
think it really reflects the hard work of the department
and that some of the more recent trends
likely reflect the effectiveness of the new tools
we're using, especially the license plate readers.
I understand it can be hard to separate out
different causes and effects, as Arlo mentioned,
and that we have national and state crime trends
that are also going down, but we have enough
local examples at this point of ALPR
approving instrumental and solving crimes
that I think it is reasonable to conclude
there is a very significant benefit.
I think the strongest evidence of this
is perhaps in our increase in solved robberies.
that increase would not be as closely associated
with national trends, because whether we solve robberies
or not is much more locally determined.
So again, I think the evidence
that the tools are working is strong.
I'm concerned by the increase in sexual assaults.
Though it's not clear if that reflects a worrying trend
or whether we're doing a better job
of encouraging people to come forward,
I hope this is something that BPD will monitor
and may be able to report back on later.
Unfortunately, we're having a national moment
where hateful people feel enabled and empowered,
and I think this is likely responsible
for our increase in local hate crimes.
So likewise, I hope that BPD might explore ways
that it can even more effectively respond to those
and prevent these crimes and let the community know
that they should report them
and that victims will be supported by the city
and by the department.
I also want to laud BPD on the fact
that the recovery rates and veil of darkness test shows,
frankly, no broad systemic bias.
That's something to be proud of, the yield rates as well.
So again, I really wanna thank everybody, Chief Lewis,
all the folks at BPD for their excellent work
on the streets and on this report.
And I hope that positive trends continue
and that we can reverse the negative ones.
Thank you.
Thank you, council member.
Council member Trig up.
Thank you so much.
Actually, many of my laudatory comments were echoed
by council member Humbert.
So I just wanted to say,
and I've said this before on the dais and it's true.
Every time I travel to conferences with elected officials,
I am sure to mention the professionalism
of this department.
I will hold it up against any other department.
You do an incredible job day in and day out,
and I want to thank you for demonstrating
the utmost professionalism.
I will keep my comments very brief.
I very much support the initiatives
that you're taking, particularly around standing up the CSO
program and the Transparency Hub.
There's always going to be continuous improvement.
But this is something that has been incredibly helpful
and valuable for the sake of transparency
with the public and everyone.
And I want to thank the work that you are continuing to do
to build that out and share it with the public.
Like others, I am concerned about the reported increase
in both sexual assaults and hate crimes.
I look forward to digging in more
to see how we may be able to support your efforts
to reduce those instances.
And of course, we look forward to continued engagement
as the district for council office
with the highest number of calls for service.
I've been deeply appreciative of the opportunities
to connect with you and get additional detail.
We look forward to doing that.
Also, very interested in hearing more
about how we can partner to reduce not just traffic
violence, but, um, collisions, uh, between, or injuries related to micromab- the use,
the improper use of micromobility devices. Um, so thank you so much.
Thank you. Vice Mayor Nunapara.
Thank you. Um, I just wanted to appreciate and acknowledge the work that went into this.
And so thank you for the report.
Thank you. Okay. Uh, Councilmember Blackaby.
Thanks, Madam Mayor. Um, I know we're going to be spending a lot of time together tonight.
So again, I just want to thank you for being here.
Thank you for answering our questions.
And I look forward to working with you over the next year
to make material progress in all these metrics.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Councilmember Bartlett.
I agree.
I also want to thank you for your service and your work here.
12 years ago, I saw one of our members
here deescalate potential knife attack.
I saw it with my own eyes.
It was amazing.
It was a brilliant response.
And you cooled someone down.
That person's alive and well today.
Going back to the GVIP, the Gun Violence Intervention
Prevention Program, do you say GVIP when you say this?
Say GVIP, what do you say?
OK, GVIPula here.
But we run the GVIPula, the GVIP.
I do want to, I love that you love it.
Of course, we fought for this for years.
And so, I guess, rolling into the next conversations
outside of this particular instant,
budgetary conversations, I look forward
So we're here to help build out the case to refund it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Councilman Metapplin.
Thank you, and good evening.
I offer my thanks as well.
It's great to see a lot of the work that we set out together
come to fruition.
OK.
Well, I really want to thank you all so much for the report.
Thank you, chief.
I really want to, there's so many things I really
want to comment on, so apologize.
In advance, it's going to be a longer comment
than I normally give.
I really wanna comment on the strategic way
of using the right resources, right people for the job.
I just think that this working smart approach,
data-driven approach is incredibly effective,
and so I know Arlo, you do a lot of their data crunching,
so I wanna thank you as well,
because I think it makes for really good policing.
And I really appreciate also the increase
in the on-street, on-the-street patrolling.
We hear from a lot of community members.
they wanna see officers more out in the community
interacting with folks, the community policing piece,
so thank you for that.
I really wanna comment also on the importance of reporting.
I think there are a lot of folks in the community,
when stuff happens, they'll tell their neighbor,
they'll tell their friend, but they don't always report it,
and those reports are so important,
so I want the community to make sure that they know
that you all change what you do
based on the different reports and the numbers
in different neighborhoods,
and so I hope that also my council colleagues,
We can also encourage the community members
to report when things are happening
because that enables us to figure out
what resources we need to support
solving those crimes or preventing them in the future.
A lot of times when people are thinking about
what is the success of a police department,
they talk about response time
and they talk about clearance rates,
and both of those are really excellent.
So I really wanna commend you for that
and the work that you're doing there,
especially given, as we've talked about,
a decrease in staff.
And something that wasn't mentioned on here
that I think should definitely be mentioned
is your attendance in the sanctuary city task force.
I know that that has meant a lot
to our sanctuary city task force members
and the community to see you all
be part of those conversations
to answer some really challenging questions
and just show up.
I know that that means a lot to folks.
And just generally
the increased connection communication collaboration
with PAB and ODP over this past month.
I know that we've had many conversations together.
I saw Jose come in somewhere.
But just to say that I really appreciate
that we're trying to be more proactive
in that communication,
and that's something that folks don't get a chance to see,
especially because this is about 2025
and not this past, this year.
And really wanna appreciate the community partnerships,
especially around addressing the rise in sexual offenses.
That is really concerning to all of us.
Most of us have commented on it.
And I love the idea of partnering more with the university.
We know that that might lead to an increase of reportings,
which because, of course,
This is a highly underreported crime,
along with, of course, human trafficking
and anything that involves a sexual offense.
But I think that those partnerships will really,
hopefully, increase the information, the knowledge,
the just understanding of how often this is happening
and how we can address sexual crimes.
And I'm really glad, of course,
to see across all the categories, as I mentioned,
the drop in crime trends.
just wanna highlight a few things here.
Shootings are down 40%, robberies down 20%,
vehicle thefts nearly cut in half,
commercial burglaries down 31%.
I mean, that's really incredible news
that I think it's important to highlight.
And I also wanna comment on what you all commented on
as well, but I think it really shows the success
of partnerships between BPD
and some of our reimagining public safety programs
like Live Free who runs our gun violence
prevention programs.
this partnership is really just done, been amazing.
I just really incredible and I really appreciate
that we have the kind of police department
that is excited about those partnerships,
that you all are really engaging in a real way
and it's not like, oh, we have to do this.
I really see the enthusiasm from the department
and I want the community to know about that.
And also this CSO position, that is really exciting to me
to have folks out in the community,
making those connections, showing up for the community,
you know, unarmed, I think that that makes a big difference.
And as you commented on as well,
also a good kind of training platform
for folks who might be interested
in becoming sworn officers later.
And then they have that real community connection
and hopefully they stay with our department, right?
We want that to happen.
We want our police officers to be embedded in the community,
know the community, have that community trust,
already know kind of our usual cast of characters
that's really valuable for community policing.
And yes, as I mentioned already,
really pleased to see the clearance rates
are rising all across all types of cases.
This is huge when crimes occur in Berkeley
and it's good to know that we have higher self-rates
than California average.
That's something we should be incredibly proud of.
And that given that infrastructure and public safety
are two of my policy priority areas,
I'm really concerned about all of our road safety issues
in Berkeley.
I know that's not something you're responsible for,
but in terms of working together really closely
with the Vision Zero team,
I really love that collaboration across departments.
I think that's excellent,
and we need to be doing that more.
And also just appreciate that BPD is citing folks
on the road who are creating hazardous conditions
for everyone, drivers, pedestrians, cyclists.
And I think that that is just really excellent
and important work because I hear from folks sometimes,
I said this last year too,
but that they think that BPD doesn't do anything
around traffic safety, and that's really not true.
So I want to do as much as we can to highlight that.
I want folks to know that you all are paying attention
and giving tickets too, so especially on the day lighting.
I wish the day lighting was really highlighted here
in this report, because I think that's
another excellent opportunity.
I'm wondering if there could be like a section of like cross
departmental community collaborations or something,
because there are so many ways that you all do that well.
Coffee with a cop, I don't know if that,
I think that's within your not BPA, but in the department,
right?
So I think that's excellent.
I would love to see all that stuff highlighted,
because I think it's something that you all do very well.
So OK, that was my gushing.
I'm done.
Thank you.
I really appreciate you all for this.
And given that this was just a presentation
and we don't have to vote on anything,
I will see if there is a motion to adjourn.
It's OK.
OK.
And as long as there is no opposition to adjourning,
we will adjourn for our special meeting.
opposition then we are adjourned. Thank you very much.