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Segment 1

Hello everyone.
Good afternoon.
I'm calling to order the special meeting of the Berkeley City Council.
Today is Tuesday, November 18th, 2025.
And clerk, could you please start us off with the roll? Certainly.
Council member Kesarwani is absent.
Taplin is absent.
Bartlett is absent.
Tregub? Present.
O'Keefe? Here.
Blackabee? Here.
Lunaparra? Here.
Humbert? Present.
And Mayor Ishii? Here.
All right.
Thank you very much.
So this is a special meeting, so we just have one item on our agenda, the 2024 Police Accountability Board and Office of the Director of Police Accountability Annual Report.
And so I'm going to just turn it over to you all, just so folks know the way we're going to do this is they're going to make a presentation and then we'll ask questions and then we'll do public comment.
If there's any public comments only on this item, and then any comments that we have left, we'll come back to the Council.
Okay.
All right.
Turning it over.
Thank you, Madam Mayor, members of Council, colleagues who are tuned in, present and in Zoom, and members of the public.
We appreciate the opportunity to be here today.
My name is Hansuel Aguilar.
I'm the City's Director of Police Accountability.
To my right, you have our chair of the Police Accountability Board, Joshua Cayetano.
And to my left is Jose Murillo.
He's our policy analyst for our office and just tuned in at the office, ready to be on standby with tech support on our end.
We have our investigative Dan Weinberg and our data analyst, Saeed Mehdi, and we also have one of our UC Cal interns for the year, Esther Fan.
They're back in the office.
We appreciate the opportunity to come before you.
The City Charter in Section 125.16 requires us to do an annual report and it structures it very specifically.
So this is our 2nd iteration under the new model.
And we're going to just outline to you what we're going to discuss today.
Next slide please.
So we're going to do a gentle overview of the PAB and ODPA's powers and duties, our investigative processes, procedures, complaint data, overview of the PAB's policy work, our outreach that we've done in the last year.
And we'll discuss the BPD trends and patterns in vehicle and pedestrian stops and other enforcement activities and also some challenges and recommendations.
Next slide please.
One of the things that just a gentle reminder is important that we have a hybrid system of oversight in here, which is was purposeful under the enhanced oversight program.
So, when we went from the police review commission, both the staff and the commissioners were housed under 1 entity, the police review commission.
Now, we have the police accountability board, which is our 9 appointed community members and the office of the chief of police.
The office of director of police accountability.
We're interdependent entities that work together to do oversight of the Berkeley Police Department.
Our jurisdiction is the sworn police department officers.
The department does have civilian employees in our offices, not have authority or jurisdiction over their personnel activities.
It's important to note the different purposes of both the PAB and the ODPA.
The PAB has a broader sort of mandate and policy practices procedures review.
And our chair is going to go over that and some of the activity they've been doing.
Our role as the office, we're the investigative arm, but we're also the administrative arm of the entity here of the oversight system.
And we provide a day to day work that supports the PAB, and we work together, just checks and balances between our entities.
Next slide, please.
Good afternoon, council members.
First, I just want to acknowledge and apologize that this report is coming in November 2025 when it is the 2024 annual report.
So there may be things that bridge from 2024, but are still relevant today, just to acknowledge that up front.
In terms of the PAB's powers and duties, we really do have two primary duties and one power.
The first duty is to make recommendations on policy, and I think that the council has seen that over the course of this year.
And I wanted to highlight a few of those things later on in this presentation about what we did in 2024 with respect to that duty.
The second is to make findings on allegations of misconduct, and with that, we pair with the director of police accountability.
He presents findings to us, and we make recommendations to the chief of police.
If there's a disagreement, we submit those to the city manager for a final determination.
And our primary power, which is identified in the charter, is to access records of city departments, to compel attendance of sworn employees of the police department, and to exercise the power of subpoena as necessary to carry out our functions, which includes both our oversight responsibility, all of our oversight responsibilities, including the ability to make recommendations on policy.
Next slide.
Okay, and back to me again.
Our office also has enumerated powers and duties.
One of the things that I just emphasize here, although we are separate entities, our role is also to ensure that the board is being supported.
There is a sort of clause in the charter that I think is important to highlight that the office and director shall carry out the work of the board as described therein and include the day-to-day operations.
But it also has this very interesting clause that says the operations of the board office and staff.
So the board office, it's very interesting clause there because there is no separate board office.
The office of director of police accountability has been the de facto board staff.
So that has, from time to time, also limited our ability to provide them more of the sort of support that they need to carry out their important policy procedures function.
Additionally, one of the, again, I'll emphasize that our personnel investigations is one of our main functions and powers and duties here.
And the language here is timely, thorough, complete, objective, and fair investigations into the complaint.
I'll also just take the note here that we did receive some questions before this meeting, and I'll be providing some responses after the fact.
And we're also happy to provide responses to any questions that may come from this presentation.
But I highlight there that language of timely, thorough, complete, objective, and fair investigations because it will be something that will come up later today.
And the other function of our office is to meet periodically with stakeholders, included but not limited employee organizations, represented officers, organizations promoting civil rights and liberties and organizations representing communities of color, and solicit them input, solicit their input regarding the work of the Police Accountability Board and the Office of the Director.
Next slide.
And now we're going to give a gentle overview of our investigative process, procedures, and complaint data.
Our policy analyst, Jose Murillo, is going to just walk us through them.
Next slide.
Good afternoon, Council Members.
As the Director mentioned, my name is Jose Murillo.
I'm the policy analyst with our office.
Along with the Director, I've been within this position for a little bit over three years now, so I've gotten quite familiar with our investigations process.
Just as a quick overview, we are a complaint-driven system, which means that we have to receive a complaint from a member of the public and we don't have the current authority to self-initiate complaints that can lead up to a personal investigation, which is different from our policy review process where the Board can self-initiate investigations or reviews into policy.
So with that noted, complainants have to submit their complaint to us within 180 days of the alleged misconduct.
We notify officers within 28 days of receiving that complaint.
What proceeds is an investigation that we're allotted 120 days with the opportunity for an extension up to 190, if I'm correct, 195, which during that time would be interviewing our complainants, involved sworn officers, any additional witnesses along with the material such as body-worn camera, any incident reports, and other relevant material.
And that whole process is completed within the 240-day period.
This year, in terms of the complaints received, just a quick overview of what the year was like for us.
We received 53 complaints.
There are 53 complaints.
Within those complaints, there are 459 allegations which were investigated.
And out of the 53 complaints received in 2024, 51 of those complaints were closed.
Of those allegations, in 2024, 97 of them were also reviewed by the Chiefs of Police after Board consideration.
Of the 97 allegations reviewed, 6 of them resulted in sustained findings by the Board, and the Chief agreed with one of those, leading to a sustained rate of 16.67%.
In terms of the allegations that were elevated to the City Manager's Office as part of our process, when there's a disagreement between the findings of the PAB and the Chief, 7 of those were made to the City Manager's Office, and the City Manager sustained 3, which led to an agreement rate of those findings of 42.86%.
And I'll now hand it back to Chair Cayetano for the overview of the PAB's policy, practice, and procedures work.
Could you just go back one slide? So I just wanted to point out for the Council two things.
The first is that the agreement rate between the City Manager and the PAB is 42.86%.
Last time that we presented our annual report, that was at zero.
And so I think that that signals more of an alignment between the City Manager's Office and the PAB's findings than was there previously.
The second thing I wanted to note is that we have received 97 allegations, but there are a number of policies that are actually very difficult for complainants to actually submit an allegation of a complaint.
So for example, if an officer—we mentioned this earlier at a previous Council meeting—if an officer improperly muted their body-worn camera, or improperly did not activate their body-worn camera when policy says they were supposed to, there's no way for a complainant to actually identify that because they don't have access to the body camera right now.
And so these things evade public review, and so these things might not be captured by this data right here.
There are a whole swap of other policies.
And if the Council is interested, we could provide that information to you.
Okay, let's get to the next slide.
Thank you.
So I wanted to highlight for the Council some things that were only cursorily mentioned in the report, and that is our—and just to flesh it out a little bit for you.
The PAB does a ton of policy work, and in 2024, we did a lot.
But our policy work is in general constrained by bandwidth, by the members of the Board who are volunteers.
And we, in 2024, I believe we had six active Board members, and today we also have six.
And a couple of those Board members who are very active are constrained within our regulations negotiations process.
Their bandwidth is almost completely taken up by that.
But in terms of the 2024 policy work that we did—next slide, please.
Next slide, Ashla.
One of the first items that we submitted in 2024 was the texting offenses report.
And the Council heard this in April, I believe, of this year.
And I just wanted to highlight that in 2024, the PAB used its subpoena power for the first time to access the underlying records for the texting offense, and also the final report that was submitted to Council and that was reviewed by the City Attorney's Office.
We didn't have access to that for about a year, and it took us about a year for the Board to actually step up and assert its subpoena power to access those records.
So after that happened, we then submitted our final report, and it wasn't until this year, actually, that the Council heard the findings of that report.
And I wanted to acknowledge that there was a resolution that the Council issued condemning any and all racism and misconduct, affirming the City Council's opposition to arrest quotas, and asking the California Legislature to extend the prohibition on arrest quotas, which are currently limited to the California Vehicle Code.
And at that Council meeting, as a follow-on from the 2024 report, the Council also signaled maybe an interest in a future arrest quota policy.
And at our last meeting, the Deputy Chief Tate actually proposed language to us that I personally support, and I would expect that would be coming before this Council at a future meeting to you.
This language specifically would introduce into BPD policy that no member of the Department shall establish or enforce any quotas for arrest or citations.
And that is a recommendation that was directly a product of our 2024 report.
Next slide, please.
We also, another milestone achievement was the Fair and Impartial Policing Report, which was a product of a task force that was initiated in 2021 in response to a 2018 report and the unrest in 2020, and that identification that Berkeley actually had huge racial disparities in 2020 that it needed to address.
And so in response to that report, BPD implemented a number of strategies around traffic enforcement, and Council heard and actually received a joint recommendation this year accepting BPD's policy changes.
But one thing that was a recommendation in our Fair and Impartial Policing Report that we still recommend this action, that it's still a pending action that we recommend Council take, is to really measure the effectiveness of BPD's three-pronged approach, because we understand that it's been put into policy, but narrowing the racial disparity gaps is a goal of that policy, and it should be measured against the policies that BPD implemented.
I also want to acknowledge that one of the implementation pieces from this Fair and Impartial Policing Report was the early intervention system, which the Council approved earlier this year and is currently set to be rolled out next month, I believe.
And there is an entire policy that will be dedicated toward identifying and supporting officers before misconduct could even take place in a non-punitive manner.
And I appreciate the Council for supporting that measure as a result of this report.
Next slide, please.
The next is our regulation negotiations, which, believe it or not, we're also continuing in 2024 and in 2023.
Just for a little bit more historical context, we passed our final regulations, our draft final regulations, in April 2023.
And we began to engage in the meet and confer process in June, November 2023, all the way through November.
And then in November, the City let go our first labor negotiator, dismissed him, and in March, the City hired a second labor negotiator.
March 2024, excuse me.
After the second labor negotiator was hired, there began a different process and the PAB entered a different process where we began internal City stakeholder negotiations, not with the Union, but also with internal City stakeholders, including the City Manager's Office, the Chief of Police, and the HR Department, in order to come to a more consensus-driven model.
And, you know, I really would encourage Council to set the closed session that will decide some issues that even the internal City stakeholders are struggling with right now, because right now our members are meeting, you know, two days a week, three-hour meetings each, and it really hampers our ability to get other policy work done, which I think is important to the City as well.
And so I know that Council is aware of the prolonged negotiations, and I'm looking forward to passing the final regulations when they come before you.
Next slide, please.
We also did two other pieces of work, of policy work.
The first happened in our Policy Subcommittee, and I wanted to highlight this because I thought it was a great example of the PAB and BPD working together.
For nine months, BPD and PAB met to revise BPD 307 Vehicle Pursuits Policy, and we really came to a meeting of the minds on most of the provisions, in fact, all but one provision in the policy.
And I thought that there was a very productive discussion where it was an exchange of reasons, exchange of best practices, and we really developed a trust in that relationship.
And this all happened before BPD actually issued its policy 307, so it didn't issue this policy until it had gone through, you know, in this case, nine months of discussions with the PAB.
At the end of that process, the PAB had one recommendation around the use of forcible pursuit intervention techniques that this year the PAB submitted to the City Manager's Office, and I expect that we will, you know, come back to that in the future because the recommendation that came out of these negotiations was really to heighten the standard before which Berkeley police officers could initiate a forcible pursuit intervention technique on the streets of Berkeley.
Because right now it's subject to a reasonability balancing test, which is very difficult to apply in the heat of the moment.
Instead, we just, the PAB in 2024, we recommended that BPD adopt what many other jurisdictions, including San Francisco, adopted, and that is applying the use of deadly force standard.
So if there is an immediate apprehension of reasonable, excuse me, apprehension of bodily injury or a death, something like that.
And so that recommendation will likely be coming before Council in the future as well.
The other recommendation that we made came out of our budget subcommittee, which one of the Council members was actually on, Council Member Blackaby.
And we recommended a transparent budget process because one of our powers, permissive powers, is to review BPD's budget.
Now the difficulty with that is that every budget cycle, only the additions to BPD's budget are actively reviewed by Council.
And so we're really looking forward to ask Council to allow the PAB to review not just the additional requests, but also the other 99.5% of BPD's budget that isn't normally reviewed year to year in order to make a recommendation in light of resource constraints that the city is facing.
Turn it over.
That's me again, our office again.
Well, I'll just quickly over there.
That was that take back the night or whatever it was that you recall.
National night, excuse me.
This was a, I was at the national night out event.
That's one of our former investigators, Keegan and myself.
We make it an effort to be out to community events, even considering our personnel resources.
We want to make sure that community members know about our office and the work that we're doing and that they feel comfortable coming to us.
So that's usually our setup that you see at these events.
Juneteenth is another keynote event that we, that might actually be Juneteenth, but I don't think about it.
But those are the events that we try to be at with the community members and have a dialogue and conversations with them.
I'll briefly also just highlight a few of the engagement activities that we did.
1 thing that we need to celebrate and the council did celebrate with us, excuse me, was that we're 50 years into our program.
And even this year, council passed the recognition of the police accountability, which will celebrate on April 16 moving forward, April 15, rather moving forward.
50 years in a lot of communities, not only in the Bay Area in California, but across the region or across the country, rather reach out to us because of our expertise in our experience in civilian oversight.
And I think it's important to emphasize that which tradition that we have here.
The other thing that we did last year in preparation for our annual review of the use of force policy, we had use of force forums.
We didn't during the summer be transparent.
It weren't well attended, but they gave us the opportunity, these virtual forums to have conversations and go over the policy on use of force.
And I would say there's a lot of, I think, areas where we're leading the way and use of force.
We have 1 of the most robust use of force policies in comparison to other communities.
In fact, at our recent NACO conference, former Commissioner George Perez-Velez was highlighting how robust our use of force policy here at Berkeley is.
So, again, in that regard, I think we are a national sort of model for other police departments and oversight entities to look at.
We have participated in different conferences, both regionally and nationally, and presented at them.
One of the unique opportunities we got presented this past year was I got the opportunity to sit in to collaborate with other public safety practitioners, police and practitioners with the Commission on Peace Officers Standards and Training, which is POST, on a learning domain on police officers' interactions with diverse communities.
And it was focused particularly in our LGBTQ community and police officers.
And I was really proud of the work we did there.
That work is actually used as a product to train officers across the state.
So our office gets tapped into those opportunities and want to make sure that we're representing the city well.
We're continuing, as you see there, Lucky, who's not present with you before today.
My mom's in town, so he spent some time with her.
He's our therapy animal.
We're happy to keep expanding on that program.
We keep taking him to a community outreach.
He was at this POST training as well.
And there was a lot of petting that was taking place there and continuing to expand the work on animal-assisted interventions.
And I'll go ahead and now turn it over to another immediate part of our report, which is our BPD trends analysis on patterns in vehicle pedestrian stops and other enforcement activities.
Again, this is charter-bound language that we're required to report on for our annual report.
And I would say, again, to uplift another element of our oversight duties, that this work is done very—this is one of the areas of the work that is done more—with less effort, because the data is very available through Transparency Hub.
So that's very helpful.
I've been in other jurisdictions, and I know other practitioners that, when it comes to getting basic data, they really struggle with it.
And they're like, how are you doing it? How did you get the Berkeley Police Department to do the Transparency Hub? And I wish I could take credit, but we didn't.
And it's helpful that that data is available for this part of the report.
Thank you, Director.
An overview of the stop data for 2024.
We do provide a comparison of the tri-annual period we presented to Council last year.
As an overview, in total in 2024, there are 4,773 stops.
In terms of the patterns that were observed, some of the racial disparities that have been highlighted in previous reports and the PAB's FIP work continue to persist at about the similar level.
Again, one of the questions that gets brought up is in terms of how we make this assessment.
In our report, in comparison to the BPDs, we use a population-based comparison compared to the BPDs' veil of darkness and the other methods that they used in their report.
In terms of the levels of citations, arrests, and psychiatric holds, which were highlighted in our previous years, and in this current report, the level remains consistent to prior years.
A majority of stops were observed to be around Districts 1, 2, 3, and 4, primarily along major roadways, as one would expect for this kind of stop.
In terms of use-of-force trends, there were 294 use-of-force incidents reported by the BPD in 2024.
Folks from the Black and African-American community were involved in 154 incidents, which is roughly 57.83 percent.
Folks identified they're perceived to be as white were 96 incidents, which constitutes about 29.81 percent.
And then the Hispanic and Latinx community were about 45 incidents to about 13.98 percent.
And the other categories, which include Asian, biracial, Native American, Indian, or unknown, constitute 16 incidents with 5.44 percent.
One question that we received and comes up to us frequently from members of the public trying to understand the data is why, if there is only 294 incidents, we see 742 officers or 322 subjects, or in other instances, just a number of use-of-force.
The reason for that is that each incident could involve multiple officers applying different types of force.
So that's why you get the disproportionate numbers, which might be confusing at an initial glance.
In terms of an overview, the charter also requires us to report on BPD's training.
In the calendar year 2024, officers completed a total of 7,065 hours of training.
The most frequent training topics included supervisory skills, firearms training, crisis management and response, specialized equipment training, traffic enforcement, and specialized investigative techniques.
Particularly within those, in terms of the categories specific, those were the topics.
Tactical and operations were 2,800, approximately 2,860 of those hours, followed by management leadership, which made up 2,390 hours.
Conference and seminars were 1,437.
Technology and systems were 198 and a half.
Legal and legislative update training were 180 hours.
And I'll now pass it back to our director.
One thing that the department noted in their annual report this year was that they're going to eliminate the level one use-of-force reporting requirements.
So, you know, next time this year or in March, you may see a decrease in the number.
And that, too, was a policy change that was made without any input from really this council or the PAB.
And so, you know, our desire is to look and make a recommendation on that prior to them implementing that, which I believe has not happened yet.
And if the council's interested in that, we can proceed along those grounds.
This is the final stage of our presentation here, where we just talk about some of the challenges and recommendations.
So in 2024, as a continuation of the sort of narrative and discussion we had in the training report, we talked about some of the challenges that we faced.
I'll also caveat by saying that in transition.

Segment 2

the Council on Charter Programing.
I would like to start off by saying that a lot of the problems that we are facing going from one model to another one iteration of the model to another is not uncommon for programs and jurisdictions to face some of these growing pains.
So I think part of it is associated with that the other thing is to really ensure that we are institutionalizing the independence of the program here in a way that respects the Charter language.
So just generally speaking there are some issues regarding the scope of authority some operational constraints on staff and in classification challenges, infrastructure and IT delays.
Again, I mentioned earlier in the presentation that the Charter talks about board staff but then also distinctly talks about the ODPA staff and in practice this has just been one set of staff so I think the framers of the Constitution had envisioned at least the way I read the Charter where there was at least board dedicated staff that was separate from the ODPA staff given our distinct duties and powers and responsibilities.
Some of the recommendations we noted in the report was to finalize and adopt permanent oversight regulations our Chair discussed that process in history and that's underway.
Address racial disparities in police stops and use of force our policy analysts discussed our differences in benchmarking and why we may see talking about the same thing in different ways between us and the police department we're utilizing residential population as a benchmark the department may be utilizing other techniques like surveillance or darkness and this is also part of an ongoing public safety conversation and criminology of how we assess disparities in policing we noted that we need to enhance public engagement.
There have been times where we see a lot of community engagement in the work that we're doing and other times where we wish that there were more folks available to engage with us and we note our responsibility we're trying to make these community relationships and be at places where we need to be and engage with the community.
Strength and oversight of surveillance and specialized units that was related mostly to the downtown task force report and some of the conversation regarding there support subcommittee engagement and policy reform capacity okay next slide okay and we also provided our office some additional recommendations as well and noted in the report established oversight specific civil service classifications and that is one of the questions that we or it would be related to one of the questions we received ahead of this presentation enhanced infrastructure and IT coordination for charter compliance standardized complaints categorization and improve trends analysis ensure adequate resources for civilian oversight operations invest in youth engagement inclusive outreach and I will say from our part we're undergoing a lot of that relationship building this past year which is not presented in this report but will be next year's report we had the opportunity to host a youth works cohort so we're really proud of that relationship and we planned on expanding it at this time I want to stop the presentation here I don't know if our chair wants to add any concluding remarks no we're just happy to answer any questions I think that for the next annual report I think it would be beneficial if we were to present at a time at or around the department's annual report to have that alignment there and we could commit to that in one quick question madam mayor we did have some of the responses available for the questions we received ahead of time I don't know if you wanted us to start from there or if you had a different flow yeah we can just ask them I mean so just so folks know some of us sent questions ahead of time just to give them a heads up and in that way you could prepare some of your responses so hopefully that was helpful and we'll just ask them and you can answer them then sure so speaking of does anyone have any questions I know you do but oh sorry well if I turned on the parliamentarian it would tell me who had questions so starting with council member Lunapara and thank you all so much for the presentation thank you so much I have a couple questions the do you can you outline the requirements and procedures for PAB involvement in BPD policy discussions as it is explained in the charter there's no criteria it says that we are able to review BPD policies practices and procedures and so we are able to either initiate our own review or we receive policy complaints from the public that the board can accept or reject and we have built out a criteria a criteria of factors to consider public interest board member capacity BPD interests and accepting or rejecting those members of the public complaint I think one thing that is evident from this presentation is that there are two types of policy reviews that we undertake one is reactive where there's an event that happens and those resulted in the downtown task force report and the fair and impartial policing report the others are proactive that are of interest to the board and are largely drawn from best practices from around other jurisdictions and I think both are of interest to the city thank you I have a more specific question the report references both internal and external complaints and both were reported to be PD internal affairs so I'm just curious if you can explain the difference between the two in terms of so one of the aspects of our complaint process which so whenever we receive a complaint again we're complaint driven so we could only have external complaints but the BP on the other hand they could receive complaints from their internal staff or within other departments within sorry with other staff within the department itself and members of the public so they make that distinction of the external which is coming from the internal versus the external which is coming from the internal which is coming from the external member community member versus internal where it's coming from the inside but one caveat that we've talked about is that unlike our process where we send our complaint forms to the BP and they conduct a parallel investigation the PAV and the ODPA when BPD receives a complaint we don't get that report to initiate a parallel investigation I think the chief actually referenced internal complaints at her last presentation she talked about during the course of an investigation when there's an external complaint that is made she will initiate an internal complaint when they identify a separate violation of policy and that's sort of what that is referring to which is why there's a higher sustain rate for internal complaints as opposed to external ones okay that's really helpful I'm also curious for Chair Cayetano how you think that the City Council can broadly support the PAV yeah I think there are a couple ways the first is as I mentioned the PAV is a board of volunteers and we are constrained by our resources we rely a lot on staff who is not technically our staff to do a lot of the labor but we currently sit at six members and I would really encourage council to continue to even like to put out in your council newsletters that the PAV is a body that serves the public and those members of the public who are interested in public service and public safety in the city have an opportunity to contribute to the city and to have a running list of people who are interested in the case of openings you know we have an opportunity or we have an option availability for staff to contribute to the city as well and so I think that it's really important given the breadth of the work that we do for us to be fully staffed in that sense second thing is I learned recently that the council has a four by four with the housing board and I think that there could be a benefit to a similar committee with the chief a couple members of the PAV and a couple members of council in order to keep abreast of what the council has seen this year just to clarify did you mean rent board yes rent board sorry great thank you those are my questions thank you council member moving on to council member Blackby thanks madam mayor and thanks to the team of the PAV and for fielding the questions in advance via email I did go through the report it's a really thorough report I think I spent some time with it maybe on the other end before I can't remember but anyway I appreciate the work so just a couple of things just to tick through on the public engagement part I totally support the idea of how we of enhancing public engagement do you have some ideas of how we can broaden participation I do if you know when we do that want to make sure we broaden it and include as many voices as possible have you thought about how we might do that yes there are different models and different ways that you can do engagement work one of my concerns and I have been attempting to communicate this with council is the infrastructure and the resources constraints there's a lot of statutory deadlines and timelines that we have and given that the sort of bulk of our work is the investigations that's where a lot of our priority goes and one of the things that gone a few budget cycles is a request for sort of a dedicated person that can assist us with this because we can build out a program in different ways to do sustainable engagement often our engagement work has been very reactive we get invited but we're not proactively seeking opportunities although in some places we are to give an example Jose is an alum of our the regional network leadership public schools I always get it wrong of Hayward and we get invited to participate in their career fair we're actually in talks and discussion with having a more sustainable internship program with that network and other nearby high schools to be able to do that and through youth works so that's one element we're also building our relationships with the other oversight programs in the region making sure that we're addressing the issues that they're facing and also speaking to sort of broader issues that we're all facing and even something like vehicle pursuits as a policy we need to be engaged sometimes we get vehicle pursuits from other jurisdictions that end up coming to Berkeley so that is part of our engagement work and being knowledgeable about that.
Okay one suggestion I just make is lean into more of I think the policy work just looking at what could come ahead drones other surveillance technology I mean I just think there's an opportunity to bring people and ask for public input through your process on the policy side I think that's something that would actually be more engaging than just a general event but say hey let's have a discussion about what the community thinks about the drone policy and make sure we inform what the department's thinking about what council's thinking about I would just lean into that I just think there's a lot of opportunity there and you could be a good kind of convener of community discussion on some of this stuff which could be useful again as long as I think as long as you're getting broad perspectives it could be actually really useful.
Let's talk about the personnel complaints I appreciate the detailed kind of the table one of the things that does kind of concern me when we look at all of the numbers is just it's not even the agreement or disagreement rate with the city manager with the department because that certainly there's progress being made there but it's just the fact that you know of the you know whether you look at 53 complaints you know we've had three sustained complaints or 459 allegations you know six sustained allegations and again this is through no fault of your own but it's saying like look there's 95% of cases that are resulting in either administrative closure or something or an allegation not being sustained which is a lot of staff work that's going towards work that isn't materializing in something that's a sustained so I guess my question is how do we you know we don't want to discourage people we want to encourage people to make complaints but we also want to triage and make sure that we're not encouraging frivolous complaints that then require your staff time require BPD staff time every time there's a complaint we notice the officer right so I mean there's a whole process that happens so how do we how do we how do we manage that you have some ideas because I you know I think we should be getting much closer to 40 50 percent right like the ideal should be half the time you find something half the time you don't just for the sake of argument but a 6% sustained rate is just really small and again do you have evidence other jurisdictions to compare but my mind is going there like that just feels like there's opportunity there to figure out how to improve that improve the targeting of it a chair wants to say a few remarks and if he doesn't I have three quick comments Councilmember Blackley the first is that you know at the last annual report which was in March 2024 there was a comment by Councilmember Humbert about repeat repeat complainants and I think one thing that the board is working on is implementing a regulation around vexatious complainants in the same way that there are vexatious litigants and to prescreen vexations and to hold them to a higher standard that would reduce the workload because there are there are instances in the city of vexatious complainants and we think that does burden the director's office.
The second thing is the board really does think and this will come up in the regulations discussion that access to body worn camera can actually facilitate a quicker and more efficient process because complainants can see sometimes they misremember what happened and once they see what happened they're like oh that actually didn't play out the way that I wanted to I'm going to withdraw my complaint and that can actually also lead to a more efficient process.
The third thing is that I know that our sustain rate is low and there are a few different reasons for that but I do want to point out something that wasn't highlighted during the presentation is that there are sort of what I mentioned that there are a wide swath of complaints that are serious complaints that our board doesn't hear because there's pending criminal investigations like officer involved shootings.
There are also instances that the PAB has seen although hard to quantify where the most serious allegations are sometimes voluntarily withdrawn by the complainant and that is a concern to the PAB and we think that a process that subjects complainants to a very rigorous standard where they are being cross examined like there's a lot of things that go into that actually dissuades people from making complaints that are actually more serious.
I think one thing that as I've been reflecting on why there's such a low sustain rate is because sometimes the serious allegations that we've seen been not pressed.
The complainant may cite to a lack of there being any result and I think it's true if I were a complainant I would want to know what would happen at the end of this process and I would not want to know that there was a resolution and what the resolution was and I don't think in my time here at the board there's ever been a resolution that has found the complainant's favor where they've actually received the recommendation that has found in their favor and they understood that in this case they were vindicated and that's a concern for the city's complaint process but I just wanted to highlight those three things for you and then pass it back to the director.
I also want to just caution the sort of rabbit hole we're going utilizing, and not that you were Council Member Blackley, but sustain rate is a sort of metric of how successful or how effective a program is being.
I think some oversight communities and even jurisdictions can focus on that in a way that may not be helpful or productive.
At the very least, at the baseline level with oversight in this complaint process is allowing community members to exercise their constitutional rights to bring about their grievances to the government.
So we are able to do that through this independent process.
Yes, they can always go through internal affairs but there are historical barriers that may prevent that.
So independently we're able to do that and I think that in and of itself is something that we need to highlight and emphasize.
I also just want to emphasize too the concern about the vexatious complaint and part of the language in our interim regulations there has to be if it's prima facie alleged misconduct then that's what allows us to go forward.
But then after a cursory review of the evidence, body-worn camera mainly like the Chair just mentioned we see that what was being described is not necessarily what is being observed here.
To the body-worn camera point, in other jurisdictions there's direct access to body-worn camera by the oversight entities.
I've been in a model where that was the case and that could also streamline the process if we don't have to go through administrative process of doing the records waiting for it to come back we can really get ahead of being able to close out some of these cases.
And the other thing in terms of comparators there are some entities and groups that are looking at these sustained rates.
There's a website and I'll share with you in the rest of council police scorecard where they're looking at these rates and there are rates in there are jurisdictions that mirror our rates so for example LA is listed as their sustained complaint rate to be 6% which mirrors ours but then there's other jurisdictions like New York is at 26% so we also have to be mindful about what their legal standards may be.
Are they using the preponderance of the evidence and they may or may not be so that when we're doing these comparisons we got to be mindful about the sort of legal thresholds.
I appreciate that.
I just encourage that the sooner the pipeline that we can at least apply some sort of filter before you go too far is helpful and I think that's just something we should continue to work on because as you're talking about needing staff time to do all this other work there's a huge amount of staff time that's going into this that if you can figure out how to triage and prioritize a little bit, right, I mean I think that frees up a lot of other time to do some of these other things.
Let's pivot over to the policy side.
I appreciate the detailed review.
You mentioned there's another 14 reviews currently in the pipeline for the coming year.
What issues are you expecting to complete this year? Do you have some priorities for what you're trying to bring forward on the policy side? Thanks, Council Member.
Many of those 14 have been closed this year so this is kind of the awkwardness of presenting a 2024 report in November 2025.
There are only very few of those 14, I believe like three or four that are still open.
In terms of the policy recommendations Council can expect coming from the PAB, I think you will see recommendations around surveillance, as you mentioned.
We have been vigilant around the changes to BPD surveillance policies and as it relates to ALPR data I do want to flag, I believe that BPD's pilot program with the ALPR project is coming to a close in 2026 and I think that is an opportunity to review the ALPR policy, its effectiveness.
The Council just heard the surveillance technology annual report and I would really encourage Council, as it reviews the efficacy of the ALPR program and the policy therein, to understand when the Chief says that the ALPRs assist in identifying and solving crimes, is that true if they were not present as well? Is that true if the officers also be able to solve? These are questions that the PAB asks the Chief for evidence supporting a lot of the policy changes around surveillance.
Is it true that you would not be able to solve crimes without this data? That is a question that I haven't really heard this Council ask the Chief or I haven't seen evidence to that effect and we're asking BPD to provide that evidence and we will continue to do so.
The other one was the vehicle pursuit policy but I believe I already mentioned that so I won't take up more of your time on that.
On the trends and patterns and stops, I just want to share because I'm really interested in the methodology we use to look at bias here and I wanted to share, if I could, the BPD annual report methodology.
I wanted to make a comment about it.
You mentioned the data you're presenting is sort of the absolute stops, arrests, just basically the racial makeup of those people who were stopped against the entire population and the frequency and how much more frequent or less frequent it might be.
I do find the way the BPD has presented these three analyses on the at-fault collisions where they basically are looking at collisions and the racial breakdown of collisions versus moving violations and looking to say, this is actually representative of who's driving on the roads versus who's being pulled over is sort of a very interesting comparison.
The yield rate analysis here, which is basically percent of searches that turn up contraband, so again, if you assume that some racial group is being stopped much more frequently and doesn't yield a successful search, there's more harassment, there's more intimidation happening, they're not actually generating fruitful searches.
Or this veil of darkness test where you're looking at a certain time of day and at some times of the year, that's at 6 p.m.
that's light and 6 p.m.
it's dark and looking to see, again, given all else being equal at the same time of day, whether it's light or dark, you should be seeing, again, a similar kind of breakdown if you don't see bias.
And at least according to these three tests that they've presented in their annual report, you know, you see pretty good evidence that you don't see much bias in these numbers, is I guess what I'm trying to say.
And we know there's a lot of other factors that contribute to the racial breakdown of the absolute numbers in terms of stops in these statistics.
So I guess my question is why should we, you know, what's the right set of analyses here? I find the BPD analysis to be pretty compelling because they seem scientifically valid in terms of trying to control for all these other factors, and I'm curious your response and why we should look at those metrics in your report versus these, or how you would put these together.
So I'll just say that I think that's a million-dollar question, what's the right analysis, and it's part of a broader sort of conversation in criminology and criminal justice and policing.
There are different benchmarks.
There is no identified one best benchmark or a set of benchmarks that are best to analyze.
We're dealing with social phenomena that's highly complicated, and there's also an element of the qualitative version of this.
We're looking at the numbers and statistics, but let's look at the body-worn camera and look at qualitatively how these interactions play out and what happens at the next level when they go to the courts.
Are these yielding convictions? I think there's a full life cycle of criminal justice.
The spectrum here that may or may not necessarily be represented, I think that we want to just highlight that there are, at least from the basic standard of utilizing the residential population benchmark, that those numbers don't seem to necessarily agree with what we would sort of expect on the different proportionalities of the demographics.
And I hear your point, what you're saying, and I also think we have a very qualified data analyst in Arlo Momberg who explores it.
I had a lot of conversations.
Again, I go back to the FIP conversation where they really scrutinized the veil of darkness conversation because how we designate a twilight period I think matters.
I'm giving you I think a more broader answer, but I think it's important to say that there are limitations with the statistical data, that this is mixed method sort of reports that we need to look at this phenomenon and also just understand that the numbers may suggest one element of it, but when you look at qualitatively in the interactions, like you're saying that the numbers suggest potentially there's no bias, but when you look at the interactions and look at how the demeanor of the officer may be from one racial background to another, and Stanford did a great analysis on this where they did it in Oakland, and they were looking at all of these police interactions and officers were talking differently to different community members based on race.
So I think that's where we have nuances in this conversation here.
My time's up, so I'll wrap up.
I'll just say that I understand what you're saying, but I think our concern really is around bias.
These are at least some of the best tests I think we have to establish that.
We know that when you look at the absolute numbers, there's all sorts of other factors in there, and so I think when you use the global data in terms of stops, you're wrapping in lots of other things into that analysis.
This I find, again, I'm free to be correct, please correct me, but I find this to be closer to the actual piece that's within our control, which is what is the police department doing in terms of how they're conducting their stops as opposed to all the other socioeconomic factors that are involved in what those racial disparities are.
And I'm not minimizing the disparities, I'm just trying to say how is our department acting? And I find these analyses closer to that.
So I guess my ask would be over time, I would love to arrive at a more common set of measurements that we can agree on, so we're not all using our own analyses, but we're trying to find the same analyses and speak a common language.
So that's I think for another time.
A couple last things, and I will.
Thanks, Councilmember Taplin.
On the early warning system, in the report you mentioned there were four departmental actions that arose from those audits, which I thought was really interesting.
Can you describe how that process worked, how the process of doing the audits worked, and you identified some problematic situations, and there were some remedies.
Can you just talk about how that works? Yeah, we don't handle the early warning system audits.
That happens internally within the department.
The department selects randomly, and under its audit system, four random officers, and it evaluates them against the criteria factors, and those factors are not clearly laid out to the PAB.
And then they come to a qualitative assessment of that officer's compliance with policy, and then they make certain recommendations, and you saw a couple of those in the report.
With the new early intervention system, instead of only randomly selecting four officers, it will evaluate 80 different factors across the entire Berkeley Police Department sworn officer staff, and so that will allow for more targeted interventions that you see in these reports, as opposed to there just being four.
You might see many more, and there will be a more laid out process in the early intervention policy that will be rolled out next year.
Yeah, I'm really encouraged by the new system.
It was more kudos that it feels like that the audit was identifying some issues.
There were some remedies that were being kind of put against those issues, and I was just kind of curious how that process works and support.

Segment 3

How to Use the Technology to Identify Problems, and then coming up with a solution to those problems.
Last couple of things on the annual report.
At the end of the report, there was a section where you were talking about the production of the annual report.
And I know that in the charter, it's sort of the ODPA drafts the report and then the board approves it.
And there's sort of some question about should there be two reports, one report, what's the deal? I would just say, you know, from my perspective as a council member, I mean, I felt like the charter is fairly clear, and that it's like, you know, the ODPA is authoring it, but at some point it's authoring a report that the full board has to approve.
And so there's, you know, there's an advise and consent kind of responsibility there.
And I sort of support that continued process, which is rather than having two separate reports, or here's the ODPA one and here's the PAB one, there is a police accountability board report with multiple authors.
And so you were asking for some feedback in the document, at least in this particular council member.
My feedback is I like having one report, and it's a collaboration between your office in terms of producing it, and the board in terms of approving it, and there's some give and take in terms of edits and strategic direction.
I mean, I feel like that's part of the process of producing the report, again, to me.
So, you know, we'll see how it goes, but that would be my feedback in terms of what you're asking for.
And I think this current process could work, and you wrestle out the issues with the board to get to a finished product that the board is comfortable with.
Council member, can I ask if you just have other comments that you keep them for later so we can get through our questions? Sure, sounds good.
Last question, looking forward, is what are your top three to five goals for the year? That's kind of, I guess, the college interview question, but, like, what are you trying to do in 2025 and into next year? What are your top priorities? Is that for the tab or for ODP? For each of you, then I'm officially done.
Sure.
One of the things we're excited about, again, continuing relationships on our internship program side.
We just had a conversation this week with youth folks.
We're in the early stages of exploring an RFP process that would enhance our ability to host more interns and collaborate with that department a little bit more.
We're continuing to expand our relationship with the university and also exploring opportunities to do some work study opportunities with both the Berkeley College and the university.
And we've piloted it with social media, mostly LinkedIn is more of a bandwidth thing.
It's low hanging fruit, but we really want to expand that program.
We know the benefit and value of it.
We just want to make sure it's a sustainable program.
Yeah, I think our number one goal is to pass our regulations that create a process that's fair for both officers and for members of the public.
That's efficient and that's that facilitates a just process and that should be coming to completion soon.
The second is to continue to be a resource for council to rely on to provide recommendations around best practices and to provide recommendations around public safety, specifically in Berkeley.
And that that goes across a number of areas.
The third thing is to really hold.
I mean, our job is to hold the department accountable.
And so when we, when the department produces a report, our job is to analyze that report and to provide recommendations to council based on that report.
And so, really, part of that third prong is it's furthering the relationship that we have with the department.
I think the council council member has pointed out many times that there's an opportunity there for us to continue to work on relationships with the department.
And I really personally have been pushing for that when it comes to joint policy and reporting efforts.
Great.
Thank you.
And thanks, Council Member Taplin, for your indulgence.
And thanks to my colleagues for their indulgence.
Thank you.
Thank you.
No, you had great questions.
I just.
So, Council Member Traigup is next.
Okay, thank you, Madam Mayor.
And this is questions only.
So, I will limit it to that.
To save time, I am going to go rapid fire, so I will ask all the questions right now.
Some of them are just for my own edification in reading the reports.
Question one, can you describe the difference in the report? It mentioned certain complaints were not sustained and others.
The marker used was exonerated.
Could you describe the distinction? Number two, I know we are, you know, it's well, maybe what what is the projected date for the next report that you will be presenting? And if you have been able to see any trends right now that may be distinct from the trends noted in or the conclusions or patterns noted in 2024.
I was interested in the report.
It was mentioned that one of the flags was for AI assisted report writing.
There was a pending item on AI at the council, so I was curious if you could speak more about what that would entail.
I wanted to know how is the level of adjudication determined, such as whether the police chief or the city managers determines or investigates a violation or determines whether one is sustained or not sustained.
I, on page 32 of the report, it does mention that districts one through four have the highest geographic number distribution of highest number of stops.
But on page eight, it says D1 through three and district seven.
So I was curious if that was a typo or if if I'm missing a distinction here.
I would love to learn more about who has the authority to deem a violation or an allegation rather administratively closed and what may be the reasons for administrative closure of a case.
And lastly, what specific recommendations do you have to reduce racial disparities in police stops? Thank you.
I'll start with that last question, and then I'll also engage with some of the earlier ones.
And then I think our data analysts are tracking the questions, which we might not be able to answer all of them at this time.
But I think that's a great question.
The last one, what recommendations we have for one is more research, engage in more conversation and analysis about what is going on.
Why some of these disparities discrepancies may be taking place again.
The qualitative piece, I think, is an important element of this.
When we're talking about bias, we just need to understand more.
Black could be alluded to bringing the community in more and it'll be in our next report.
But we did have senior citizen focus senior citizen focus groups where we were looking at particular policy reviews.
So those are sort of engagements we would like to have when we bring in community members a little bit more and bring them in to share their conversations.
And we also have a pending task, which is to do a public survey to get a better understanding of where we are with these interactions.
I think the last one that was done was a little bit near around.
The other element, the more technical one about the definitions that comes right now, we're in need of a more robust, robust community engagement survey regarding public safety to find out more about these interactions because complaint rates are in the data from the police interactions are only going to get us.
But so far, the other element, the more technical one about the definitions that comes right now, the definitions we're utilizing are from the interim regulations.
We have those right now.
So for exonerated, we have that is founded is the evidence fails to support the allegations, but the allegations cannot be shown as false.
The finding shall be not sustained.
That should be not sustained.
If the evidence shows that the alleged act did not occur, the findings shall be unfounded.
If the evidence shows that the alleged act did occur, but was lawful, justified improper, the findings shall be exonerated.
And if the evidence shows that the alleged act did occur and the action was not justified, the findings shall be sustained.
So we have very set definitions we're working off and I'll give to the chair if he wants to take any questions on the question of how to reduce racial disparities and police stops.
I think whatever metric the council wants to use, there's an opportunity to reduce the disparity that both the department and the has identified.
And I think one of the recommendations that we made in our report was for the which is being implemented.
The second thing, which was not implemented, but could be taken up next year is the profiling by proxy policy.
And the profiling by proxy policy governs when BPD should be investigating complaints made by members of the public that appear to be motivated for reasons other than crime.
So, if a member of the public calls BPD and there's a call for service, but there is an indication in the call for service that there is a racial motivation by the caller, then BPD policy directs specific steps for the department to take before responding to that and to also verify on the scene the story that is being told.
And I think in those instances, because even under BPD's traffic model, one of the prongs is community calls, I believe.
And the PAB has seen repeated instances of community members in Berkeley who have called BPD on Black Berkeley residents.
And it turns out that the call for service resulted in a really big miscommunication because the person was just living their life and they didn't know what was happening.
And the officers were only relying on what was a faulty description or narrative at the time.
And so, I think the policy around profiling by proxy can be strengthened.
It can be enumerated better.
And I think there could be more training around that policy specifically.
So, that's the recommendation from our FIP report.
Thank you.
And just to clarify, which recommendation did you say was already being implemented? The EIS.
EIS.
Sorry, excuse me.
The Early Intervention System.
Early Intervention System.
Okay.
And with apologies, I do have two more that I just caught.
This is based on your presentation.
I was curious.
You mentioned that external investigations may trigger internal investigations, and that is on the same incident.
So, what controls are in place to avoid double counting in those cases for statistical purposes? And lastly, it was mentioned that there were some challenges getting laptops, other IT challenges.
And have those been resolved? Or are they still challenges? Double counting.
Double counting? You want that? Sorry, I was focused on the second one.
I think, I mean, like, the director can weigh in.
He's more robust in the preparation of the complaint form.
But the allegations are presented on the same form in the PAB.
So, there's no double counting of allegations.
It's the department's.
The department separates external versus internal complaints.
We don't.
And so, the complaint is submitted to the PAB as one complaint with multiple allegations.
And none of those allegations are duplicative.
Does that answer your question? So, with the percentages, there's a distinction between internal and external, how many are sustained.
That, basically, it's the same universe of complaints, but maybe looking at the data slightly differently.
Is that basically it? Yeah.
So, in terms of our complaints, when we're thinking about the sustained rates, or even the agreement rates between our office, the chief, and the city manager's office, that follows within our own data set of the complaints known to us.
So, for example, if 10 of our allegations get forwarded to the chief, but we only disagree with 7, then those would be the ones that would go to the city manager's office and to our discretion.
But they follow our same sort of data set.
They're all accounted for within the same set of data.
In terms of the external versus internal, this is more of a BPD process.
We, as we mentioned, we're complaint driven, so we don't necessarily initiate our own investigations.
So, whatever our number is, it sort of doesn't really change because we would consider that complaint as its own separate incident.
The allegations may change, and Director Aguilar could speak a little bit more to what that process looks like with the complainant.
But for double counting, having worked with that data, it doesn't really come, at least for us, it doesn't really present an overlap because the data sets are sort of separated.
So, BPD will send us their numbers.
We can't really cross verify them apart from knowing how many we sent them.
So the internal one doesn't really overlap, but I'll pass it to Director Aguilar for more context.
I don't have additional context, but I do want to address also the other question, which is the IT.
I just had a recent conversation with the city manager, so it was an ongoing conversation.
Just a background on that, we used a snow ticket in the city.
One of my first snow ticket requests, who may add it in, was that we want to make sure that I was transferring information to the path in a very secure and confidential way, utilizing the city's infrastructure.
And I've been in other jurisdictions where I was able to procure laptops for our commissioners.
It's been, for me, a very exhaustive sort of conversation over years in here regarding the importance of that, and I've spoken with several city managers, deputy city managers, and the IT director on this.
I'm hopeful that we are getting to a closer place, but it has not been fully resolved yet.
I think where it actually matters to the DAB is we don't have access to ShareDrive or the ShareDrive for the Microsoft systems that Berkeley uses, and so BPD maintains all of their records on a ShareDrive, and we would be able to create a joint folder to share data, but we're not able to because we're not able to use actually ShareDrive, and so that's prevented us from accessing certain data that we would be able to otherwise.
And so they have to take it down to PDF and send it to us, but it's not very collaborative.
Is that the subject of, like, is that a policy decision, or is that just something that's a point of agreement but hasn't been implemented yet? I think it's a city IT and appropriations question, not a policy that we have to really adopt as a board.
Okay, thank you.
And then I did want to make sure, I'd love to get a response on the AI question using AI to enter citations, or if I'm just for my own edification, I was trying to understand what this was getting at.
I'm sorry, which element of the AI part? I know, but which part? Was it the body-worn camera sort of AI use? It was the report writing.
Oh, the report writing, AI-assisted report writing.
Yes, and for this, part of the history there, we were tracking the different technologies, Axon, the company that our city utilizes for body-worn camera, they had launched at the time, and they were promoting the AI-assisted report writing.
And the department, had that made any indications that they were looking into it? This was sort of an example where the PAB and the office were being proactive on looking at an issue before, or emerging technology before it could be adopted or even contemplated.
So we were able to partner with the Brooklyn Bureau, the department that's being headed by Chasen-Boudin, and we did a very thorough, robust analysis on this and looked at what were the benefits and the trade-offs.
We're utilizing this technology very early in the stages.
It could be promising.
It promotes being able to get officers off the desk and back on the street, but it is not necessarily without issues, and it could be potentially legally contested.
And so we're tracking this issue.
I think it's still in its early phases.
There's a few recommendations that came out of that analysis.
And I think this is my last clarificatory question, but in the context of there were some complaints that were made and that was the category, is that the contention by a complainant is that allegedly someone improperly used AI technology or didn't use it for policy to write up the report? I don't think there was a – I mean, the director can correct me if I'm wrong.
I don't remember a complaint about AI.
I think there are complaints that we receive about failure to write a proper report or putting false information in a report, but I don't – the department doesn't use AI for its reporting process, and so that would be surprising to me.
Okay.
I think I maybe conflated the policy review oversight section with report writing later on.
Okay.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Council Member Humbert? Thank you, Madam Mayor.
And thank you all for the presentation, and thank you for this very thorough report that you've provided us.
A lot of work went into it.
And I appreciated Chair Cayetano's reference to my comments, I guess, a year ago about vexatious complainants, because that's the first thing on my – the first question on my list here.
And you mentioned that you're looking into ways maybe to sift out the vexatious complainants from the complainants who have righteous complaints.
What have you been doing in that regard? So we are amending our – not our regulations, our operating procedures to introduce a vexatious complainant provision.
There is an open question about whether that provision needs to go through meet and confer, and so that is something that is holding up part of the process.
There is another question about the interaction with our charter, because the charter does require complaints to be submitted to the board.
And so we could do a quick look, so to speak, of complaints that are – that the director considers to be fall under the vexatious complainant standard, submit them to the board for adjudication – for a quicker adjudication before actually engaging on further fact-finding.
But I think the thing that's holding it up right now is this question around meet and confer, and also – yeah, that's the primary location.
All right.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
But that remains a concern of mine.
I'm convinced there are – you know, there's a small group of people out there that are generating a disproportionate number of these complaints, and it sounds like that's correct, but, you know, even courts have a hard time dealing with vexatious litigants because, you know, you want people to be able to exercise their constitutional rights to make these complaints.
So here's another relatively specific question.
The report notes that the category of discourtesy is one which your office is targeting – and I guess this is to the DPA – your office is targeting for disaggregation to increase analytical precision.
However, I noted that of 107 allegations of discourtesy, only one was sustained in 2024.
Given the extremely low absolute numbers and percentage of complaints sustained in this category, why do you think it's worthy of analysis via some process of disaggregation rather than, for example, you know, an analysis of complaint sources? If I may.
Okay.
Sure.
The BPD's policy actually disaggregates discourtesy as a separate – by itself, and so we're following what BPD does there.
Okay.
But does it merit, you know, a lot of energy and time when we're talking about one out of 107? I mean, that seems de minimis to me.
I don't think there would be much energy and time into evaluating just one.
All right.
Okay.
No, that's fair.
Another question.
Since 2021, the total number of allegations has tripled or quadrupled while sustained findings have remained relatively flat.
In your view, what explains this widening gap between allegations and sustained findings of police misconduct? One thing I will say is related to your previous question in light of inquiry, 2024 was a very unusual year.
I'm happy to go into closed session and talk more into the weeds of it, but it was – a lot of our numbers were driven in part by certain community members.
And one thing I would just say in caveat that each of these complaints generated by a few individuals, they were corroborated with actual interactions.
So it wasn't like they were – there wasn't any prima facie threshold met there, and I think that's what complicated.
We were now forced to look at this more closely because it was getting through the complaint intake phase.
But then when we got to the other side of it, we got body-worn camera footage and said, whoa, it's not what's being described here.
We also did interact a lot with the city attorney's office to make sure that we were properly utilizing the framework, the interim regulations in the charter, to be able to properly come up with dispositions for that in a way that respected the rights of the complainant, the due process rights, and also of the officer.
So we've been having these conversations.
What can we do with the assistance framework? But again, 2024 was unusual in that regard that a lot of our numbers were driven by particular individuals, but there were also verified instances with those complaints.
Okay.
Well, I appreciate that.
Another relatively specific question, the report notes that you, the ODPA, or the DPA, applied for multiple grants, but you weren't awarded any.
How many grants did the office apply for? Can you answer that question? Yeah, we were suing for defenses.
There were two big grants, close to a million dollars over multiple years.
One was through the U.S.
Department of Justice, and the other one was the Mayor's Bloomberg Challenge.
Did you work with the city attorney and the city manager's office to create these grant proposals? We did screen, so at the stages where they were, they did not require that interaction, and we would utilize the city's framework for that.
At some point, if we proceeded with them, we would have to naturally interact with those offices.
At the stage where we initially applied, we did not, but we did reach out for collaborations, like with the BPD, because it did impact that, and it would require that collaboration.
Okay, you just didn't get there, is that right? Correct.
And then this reflects something that Council Member Blackaby mentioned, this bifurcated reporting model with separate reports being issued by the office of the DPA and the Police Accountability Board itself.
And I guess, just quickly, I want to respond to that.
I think, likewise, that I would only want to see one report.
The charter created both offices, both the board and the office, together.
And what I'd like to see, personally, is what we've been seeing, which is a report drafted by the office of the ODPA and then approved by the board.
Okay, Council Member Blackaby covered the issue about recovery rates, yield rates, and metrics like day versus night traffic stops.
In my view, those are the best practices, and I have real concerns that, for example, the comparison of the traffic stops to the demographics of Berkeley don't really get at the real issue, because our borders are porous.
Our city boundaries are porous, and the demographics of our surrounding cities are very different from ours.
So, I don't think that's a good stat, in my view.
Okay, I think that's it.
Let me just double check here.
No, that's it.
Thank you.
If I may, because you had a question about this, I think maybe the question was also, what was unclear? Because it said that the process is ambiguous and unclear in regards to the report, and I was curious to know what was unclear.
We're talking about the production of the report? The bifurcation question.
Yeah, and I'll take lead on this, and I don't know if the chair has the same sentiment.
So, there's definitely, let's take a step back.
What I was proposing here, there is precedent in other jurisdictions, so the oversight where the board writes a report and the office writes a separate report.
I understand the sort of bandwidth concerns about all these different entities about doing more work than necessary.
So, I want to acknowledge that.
I think what my concern was that in writing and putting together these different elements of the report, there's an editorial element that I think is sometimes difficult to reconcile.
We're asked to produce this report, but sometimes it's being editorialized in a way that may or may not be within sort of what the office's philosophical standpoint is and how the charter is seeking a report.

Segment 4

We're looking at it from a very technical, like, these are the things, but the language behind how we present it, that's where sometimes the difficulties come into place, how to say, and how to present the data.
The data speaks for itself, and I don't want to get in trouble with that, but how we talk about it, I think matters.
And sometimes council members may ask questions.
Why did you say it this way? And why did you not say it that way? And then that's where the different authors coming into place, that's where the sort of challenges could present themselves.
But I don't know if that answers the question neatly, but I just think the editing process is spelled out in the way that other processes are spelled out in the charter.
Okay, so it seems like part of the issue is really in agreeing on how to present the report, perhaps.
That part is unclear, but maybe also more clarity might be helpful from the charter itself.
Or council's direction, like, what is intended in terms of, like, patterns and what is it that you want us to report on? Some things that the office believes fit within the framework of patterns may or may not make it to the report or get edited out.
And is that the, what is the intent? What is the council and the public and when they're consuming this report? I see.
Okay.
Thank you.
Council Member Bartlett.
Thank you, Madam Mayor.
Thank you for your very comprehensive report here.
Quickly, just to hone in on a couple of points, looking at the stops data.
Do you have access to the information as to of the pullovers who lived in, who are residents of Berkeley and who are not? Is that captured at all? Within our report or in general? In general, any report? I don't have the director.
I'll just verify that.
But, yes, the stop data does, the Transparency Portal does, in fact, include whether a person or someone being pulled over is a resident of Berkeley, not Berkeley.
It's actually analysis I believe we presented in the Fair and Important Policing Report earlier this year, where we did a similar analysis for residents of Berkeley and those coming from outside from other cities, noted jurisdictions passing through, if I recall correctly, and we can certainly get back to your office about that.
But when we did that analysis, when we compared the population of residents versus non-residents, the patterns and distributions were relatively the same.
So, if we presented, we had a slide on this in our presentation, but it does analyze non-Berkeley versus Berkeley residents.
And for Black people residing in Berkeley, this is in our report, they were 6.55 times as likely to be stopped as their white counterparts.
And that is for residents of Berkeley specifically.
So I would reference our FIP report there.
Okay, yeah, so that, okay, so that sort of brings a very clear picture.
And honing in on the reasons for the stops, the top two, of course, are violation of traffic and reasonable suspicion.
And so, reasonable suspicion, of course, is a pretty low threshold.
I don't know the exact, I'm not a criminal lawyer, I don't know the exact threshold, but that is for pondering.
It's low, right? Yeah, and so this is where the bad mindset comes through, and reasonable suspicion, you know, but I know we've taken steps to sort of categorize the metrics that lead to the, at least quantify your suspicion via these reporting tools they have.
Can you talk about that at all? You know, like, he was hanging out, he was hanging out the seat, he was waving his, you know, waving what appeared to be a gun out the window, I don't know, this kind of thing.
I don't know if there's been an effort to quantify in that sense.
However, I think there is an emphasis in the department on report writing and the act of report writing, which is going to Council Member Trigov's question about AI-assisted report writing.
There's something that AI does where it consolidates and it makes report writing uniform, such that it will input those key words that take away from the officers, that don't show what the officer was actually seeing or deciding in that time.
And so I think we haven't evaluated, like, systematically what those reports say and whether they're, whether they are inserting those phrases that are, from our perspective, suspicious or like sort of red flags.
But if that's something that the Council's interested in, we can do that, especially as it comes to evaluating BPD's three-pronged traffic approach, because really what they're trying to do with their three-pronged traffic approach is find race-neutral, to allow them to guide their enforcement mechanisms.
And so the way that we can reconcile or to analyze that is to analyze how the officers are actually reporting and to match up what they say is what they're using as their criteria with what the officers are actually reporting.
But that is a labor-intensive process.
There's not like a system to evaluate that that's currently in place.
Okay, that'd be something to consider in your recommendations going forward, possibly future ARs or policies around some of these information-gathering tools that I know we do use and are available to us.
Do you want to speak? Yeah, you can consult with Chief Lewis on this, but we have experienced extreme pushback when it comes to being able to access these records.
And so if we were to engage and to do the sort of policy work that you're envisioning, there would have to be buy-in from the Department on that.
Okay, something we can work on together.
The other element I want to address my colleagues about the racial makeup of people outside of Berkeley versus Berkeley.
I'm not surprised that you say that the evidence is the same, because if you look at our neighborhood to the left, to the south and to the north, it probably evens out in terms of our makeup.
To our north, it's very, very, I guess, you know, white, essentially.
To our south, less white.
Richmond's past our immediate neighbors.
But overall, if you look at the overall, I guess, distribution, probably we'll be in a similar picture, racially.
Okay, and then the last piece is just, I guess, in terms of the yield per pullover, that's another example, another indicator, what are your thoughts on our yield ratios compared to other cities of similar disposition? Yes, so I could read from a paragraph of our report on the yield.
It says that city auditor's data analysis shows that only 13% of calls from community members resulted in a citation or arrest compared to 42% of officer initiated stops to effectively reduce the potential for profiling by proxy, which I mentioned earlier.
Analysis of this 13% should be conducted to determine what types of community calls are most likely to yield a law enforcement response, crucial to public safety.
And so I think when it comes to yield rates, what we see is that when members of the community, which is a prong that BPD uses in its enforcement, actually results in a lower yield rate.
And so that's something for the council to keep in mind as it analyzes the effectiveness of what BPD has put for its policy here.
And then when I was in the Police Review Commission in its prior iteration, that was a key policy element that kept coming up.
And BPD was very proactive in engaging with us on trying to craft some process to minimize sort of racism by proxy, and so it's distressing that it's still active, but I'm glad you're on it and please keep at it.
Thank you.
Thank you, Council Member Lenoir.
Did you have a follow up question? No, I have a comment, so I'll wait.
Thanks.
All right, I have three questions, and then I really want to move on because it's already 540.
So the report lists that there are 12 active subcommittees.
I know it seems like maybe there were fewer when you just had it up on the screen, but this seems like a lot of work for 6 folks who I know are currently there, so I'm curious, what are the priorities for the subcommittees, and how are you measuring their outcomes? So these are, many of them are ad hoc committees.
So the Regulations Committee, for example, I mean, they meet consistently, but they're not a standing committee internally, but they meet with external city stakeholders.
The Fair and Impartial Policing Committee was an ad hoc committee, and that has been dissolved since the report has been published, and all the action items are finished.
And so in terms of what our priorities are, we really wanted to, and we have a, we implemented a plan this year to standardize our committees, and one of them was to establish a policy committee and to streamline all policy requests through this policy committee.
And so the department has a consistent partner to collaborate with as well, and so they know who to go to, and when they're thinking of revising policies, who they should communicate with.
And so the policy subcommittee is really one of the 3 anchors.
The other one is, I believe, the Budget and Operations Committee, but that comes up every 2 years, and it's coming up now, and so that's something that, you know, as the process kicks up, kicks, begins internally within the city, that's something that we are also aligned on with the city's processes.
That's really helpful, and I'm glad to hear that you're consolidating.
I think that makes a lot of sense.
This question just came up for me during the presentation.
How does the amount of time and training for BPD compare to other departments? I'm not sure if you looked into that.
Is that high, low, average? That's one area of the report that was new for us this year.
We didn't do that analysis.
There was more that we can do on that.
This was very surface level, just compilation of the hours, so we don't have the response for you yet, but we are actually interested in expanding our analysis there because they provide a lot of data points for us that I think is important, especially as we're going into budget season.
Thank you.
And can you clarify your community engagement objectives? What kind of deliverables are you trying to achieve? Do you keep track of how many people you talk to or reach out to? What kind of metrics do you keep? One of the things we want to do is raise awareness about the program, so being at the visible community events, both internally and externally, is important to us, but also making sure that we're mindful of our bandwidth.
So we're identifying those events.
We do normally have sign up sheets because we are actively increasing the number of folks that we add into our listserv.
So that's that's something that we do.
We also field a lot of inquiries online, whether through email or through also through phone call through our office.
So those are sort of engagement pieces.
Last year, or we highlighted in the last year's report, we did have a number of folks that we were able to reach out to.
We just haven't been able to merge all the data and we're planning to be able to provide that information out to counsel in our next meeting.
I think from the board's perspective, I think we don't we don't metrics are hard, but by and large, we're trying to make sure that we're able to reach out to as many folks as we possibly can.
So that's one of the things that we're trying to do.
I think from the board's perspective, I think we don't we don't metrics are hard, but benchmarks are something that I try to set for our board.
One of them is I've tried to instill a sense in every board member that has come on to connect with the local community organization that's in their districts.
And I think sharing the public safety perspective to a local community organization is something that's important.
And it's something that roots us in the community, something we should stay connected to.
And the 2nd thing is another benchmark that we try to set every year is to host a community event and specifically around a policy that's of community interest.
And so 1 of the 1 of the priorities for the board this year has been around immigration policy.
And so we've been we're working on hosting a community event to bring in different stakeholders to bring in different jurisdictions from around the country to explain best practices when it comes to implementing sanctuary city policy.
Thank you.
And then also, I'm just curious, has ODPA partnered with BPD to do community outreach or actually neither PAP or ODPA? We have partnered in different ways, and I know 1 of the board members, board member Wells did go out to coffee with a cop event.
So there are times when the department taps into us.
We didn't do national night out this year, but that's typically an event that we partner with them.
So we try to have these conversations.
I know with Arlo also, we're exploring 1 of our things for our work plan in our office was to have a sort of geek out day where we would talk about data and teach them about the trans community members about the transparency hub.
And that is a natural partnership with Arlo in that segment of the BPD.
And I'm on a steering committee put together by Dr.
Arlo on the gun violence prevention program, and that's both us and BPD are on that and we collaborate with the community there.
That's great.
Thank you.
Okay, so moving on to public comment, I think we've got all of our questions now.
Do we have any public comment on this item? This is a special meeting, so this is the only item on our agenda and are there folks online to.
I'm interested in the development of the vexatious.
Complaining policy and what the consequences would be to the complainant.
I can see where that would arise and it would be an issue of concerned.
But would they be barred from making a complaint in the future? And what if they did make a series of unmerited frivolous complaints, but they actually.
Then have a valid complaint, and I'm concerned about persons with mental health issues who might be complainants because that you sometime have to filter through what they're saying and sometime it may not be valid, but within it.
They can actually have a valid underlying complaint, particularly in the way that they're treated and that goes for not only complainants, but witnesses that they have to be given some credibility.
You have to work through that.
So it'd be interesting to see how the policies proposed.
Are there common issues and the vexatious complaints that are being alleged? Is there a common officer involved? Do we look at those because of those issues? I was interested in the when the chair stated about, there was a particular black resident in the community about how repeated unfounded complaints were made against him.
And I, I'm very curious to know the nature of that.
And what's that all about? If he was just as the chair said, living his life where they look at something he was doing in his yard and just complaining unnecessarily.
Was he a homeless person because.
I've heard or been told people of people who observe a homeless person, and they literally follow them around to watch what they're going.
And if.
Thank you, thanks.
I really like coming up here, so thank you for being there.
And in case I need an extra minute, Steve, I'm going to ask you a question.
I'm here at the moment because I really want to thank these people.
I've been to a bunch of their meetings because transparency and accountability.
We'll be just so gloriously helpful in these perilous times.
I want to thank all of you.
I'm here at the moment because I really want to thank these people.
I've been to a bunch of their meetings because transparency and accountability.
We'll be just so gloriously helpful in these perilous times.
I was in Chicago back in the 60s and had plenty of interactions with the non-accountable and non-transparent police department there.
So I really appreciate it, especially with cop cities arising everywhere.
And the question is, is Berkeley going to be of, for, and by the people? So thank you, Mayor, because I feel some confidence that we're going to try to stick to that, so thank you.
Yeah, because I also was happy to report a police officer that literally de-escalated a situation so exquisitely I had to call it in, because it's like, wow, that was beneficent.
So I've been to some de-escalation trainings, because again, y'all know I'm a hippie, and I much prefer peace and love to war.
So, yeah, because we're also utterly, in Oakland and almost everywhere, totally, I don't have an appropriate polite word about the drones and surveillance that is mushrooming and exploding.
All with the intention of protection, just like we have nuclear bombs, mutually assured destruction.
It's like, let's stick to peace.
Because this really matters to me.
It's the only reason why my bones are still standing here.
I want everyone to be well, but that doesn't mean I should carry 50 machine guns, so please, please, please.
I heard you mention the program for kids.
If we supply what people need, they will not be desperate.
I've been desperate.
I've sold a steak up my sleeve.
However, I put it back when I saw another woman, looking at the prices that obviously go up when people steal.
My point is, let's care for each other.
Please, let's guide each other.
I want to thank you again for the excellent years of service that you have provided to Berkeley and to the larger community.
As I've always said, the city of Berkeley struck gold when it brought you on as mayor.
I've always said that.
I have been a Berkeleyan for a lot of my life.
Not right now, I don't live in Berkeley, but either I have attended university and or high school or have lived in Berkeley for many, many decades.
And I have never felt compunction, as I told you when we first met.
I don't know if you recall, I was here a few weeks ago, about two months ago.
Because of a situation regarding a business, a relatively new business, which is so extreme.
I have, unfortunately, had a rather negative interaction with our friend here, District 4 Councilman Igor Tragoob.
I have been carbon copying you on all the emails that I've been sending to his executive assistant, Mrs.
Olga Bolotina.
It doesn't seem that based upon my preliminary interactions with Mr.
Tragoob.
So are you making a comment on this report that was just had? No.
This is actually a special meeting on a specific report, so unfortunately this isn't the comment period.
Based upon the itinerary, which I saw online, that this was a general agenda.
It's 6 o'clock, we're supposed to, but I think we're running a bit late.
Well, now that you have me here, why don't I just go ahead and finish? I'm sorry, I can't let you finish.
Can I set up an appointment with the mayor's office? You're welcome to start completely fresh in the next meeting and share your comment there.
Okay.
I'm going to go ahead and submit an off agenda public comment card for the next meeting.
Yeah, thank you.
Yeah, you don't need to stand in line, though.
You'll submit this comment and then show what she does is she'll pull names out from there.
Okay.
One of your minutes.
Okay.
Does anyone else want to make a comment that's here in person on this item? I just want to make sure.
Are you going to make a comment? One minute.
We are supposed to start at 6, but we're in the special meeting still.
Yes.
Okay, go ahead.
Okay.
I don't have a chance to look through this detail yet, but a few things kind of jumped out at me.
Under reasons for a stop, it would be good to have a disposition breakdown.
Under traffic violations, type of violations would be useful.
Big difference under disputes regarding scope of authority numbers would be helpful there.
How often does this happen? Break that down.
Under administrative closure.
Basically, this is so broad.
It's basically the dog ate my homework.
Thank you.
Are there any comments online? Yes, there's 1, 1 hand race, so this is for public comments on the.
Special meeting agenda for the police accountability board and report.
1 speaker that's Leah Wilson.
Hi, I'm Leah, the vice chair of the pub, and I wanted to just hop on.
Our chair has done an incredible job.
This afternoon, and I'm sorry that I can't join you.
There was a lot of discussion about the metrics for stop reporting and test for bias.
And I wanted to emphasize that appendix 1 of the report that we submitted last year detailed all of our concerns with the collision test.
The yield rate analysis and the veil of darkness.
I was reminded of that when council member Bartlett asked his question, I think it's important for council to be aware that the at fault collision metric does not include.
Discretionary stops based on equipment violation registration or license plate infractions or other low level offenses that make up about 19% of all stops.
And those are the precisely the kinds of discretionary stops that lead to, or that can stem from, or be impacted by the types of biases that council member Bartlett alluded to.
So, I do encourage the council to look at that appendix 1 of the report and also really welcome as our chair mentioned council, establishing metrics that both the pub and the BPD would use going forward.
I think that would benefit both entities as well as the public.
Thank you, thank you Leah.
That's very helpful.
Appreciate your comment.
That's it.
Okay.
All right.
Very good.
Coming back to council for our comments on this matter, starting with council member Luna Par.
Thank you.
I just, I really, I wanted to briefly push back on the notion or insinuation that the reasons for these racial disparities is due to people of color coming from other cities into Berkeley.
And I appreciate council member Bartlett's question and chair Cayetano clearing up what the data on Berkeley residents, but I just don't really want to let that comment go on.
I know that that's not what was meant, but I find the insinuation to be dangerous and dismissive of the very real experiences of many of our residents of color here in Berkeley and does not do anything to build trust between our government and our communities of color, especially our black and brown residents, which is kind of the goal of all of this.
So that's, that's all I wanted to say.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Council member Taplin.
Thank you Madam Mayor and thank you Chair Cayetano and Dr.
Aguilar and everyone.
I just wanted to say that when council adopted or approved the three prong stop policy, a large part of that was to deprioritize those low level equipment violations to address some of the disparities and stops.
And then I also wanted to say that I am interested in the policy questions around the profiling by proxy policy, both from a equity perspective as well as a dispatch perspective.
I think it's important that when we get calls for service, we are able to triage calls that don't require a deployment.
And we'll get to this later with drones, but that is one of the things I have been thinking about with respect to dispatch over the last few years.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Council member Bacabi.
Thanks Madam Mayor.
Three quick points.
One, just thank you all.
Thank you for being here.
Thanks for the report.
Thanks for indulging our questions, answering so many of our questions and fielding them.
And thanks for the discussion.
I think it was really enlightening and helpful for many of us as we, as we talked through.
So thank you.
Second point, I totally agree and we're doing everything we can on this side, but wrapping up the regulation negotiation is, I know it's a priority of yours, a priority of mine, a priority of ours.
And we're looking forward to the upcoming closed session soon where hopefully we can try and get significant movement.
Just in terms of the time that is being spent by all parties, the sooner the better.
So we're looking forward to that and then kind of having a clean slate to move into the new year.
And then third, I think a lot of the comments and questions and the discussion to me is also around just encouraging ongoing prioritization and triage.
You know, you're a small but mighty team and to the extent that you can focus on a few key policy priorities and knock them out of the park.
I think that's going to serve you and all of us much better than, you know, mile wide, inch deep.
So the extent that, you know, as a team, you're prioritizing those things, a few of those key policy areas and going deep, I think we'll all be better served by that.
And then at the same time, being able to triage some of those personnel complaints, whether it's the vexatious complainant policy or what have you.
Again, just in the spirit of finding a way to make effective use of limited resources, both on your side as well as the BBD's side and officer's time.
So I think those are my three comments, but, you know, again, thank you for participation.
And with that, I'd like to move that we accept and certify the presentation of the report with our thanks.
Second.
This is just we don't need a motion for this.
We're not we don't need to vote to accept it.
We're giving a presentation, but thank you for your motion.
I withdraw my motion.
Okay, thank you.
All right.
Council Member Trago.
And folks, I know there's some talking going on.
If you all could take your conversation outside, please.
Thank you.
Thank you, Madam Mayor.
I wanted to echo my gratitude to the chair, the director and staff that presented on this report and prepared this report.

Segment 5

I'm going to echo some of the comments.
I will add a couple of my own, but I agree that, with those who have said, it would serve, I think, the Council a little more if there was one single integrated report, and if there are differences around language and, you know, charter mandated limitations, perhaps the PAB could do an addendum to that report from the PAB, but it would be great to get it at a predictable time of year, every year going forward.
I also wish to echo the comment on my desire to see you focus on upcoming issues of high interest, which could be high priority for you, for what's going on in the community, but also some of the matters that the Council is taking up where we could really benefit from your input.
On recommendations, I really appreciated the ones in this report as maybe just a suggestion going forward, which is we benefit the most from recommendations that are specific and actionable and where ongoing work is already being done to also recognize, so that we can look at the gap in the spirit of continuous improvement.
Lastly, I appreciated the comment made by Commissioner Wilson and others about looking at some, maybe developing some joint metrics, and I understand that some of this may be a policy conversation for us as well, and I look forward to having that conversation on this dice.
And I'm very interested in, and will be digging into the report on use of AI when you're ready to bring it to the Council, since, as I mentioned, we do have a pending item on AI regulations.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Other comments from Council Members? Yes, Council Member Casarwani.
Thank you very much, Madam Mayor.
I just want to thank you for your presentation, and I don't have any further questions.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Anyone else? I know you, yeah, go ahead, Council Member Humbert.
Yeah, I just want to thank you again for the report.
A lot of work went into that.
Much appreciated, and thank you for your presentation here tonight.
Thank you.
Council Member Lunapar.
I realize I didn't do this earlier, so thank you very, very much.
Okay, yes, I'm going to add my thanks as well, but also just take a moment, because I think it's important to recognize the importance, generally, of PAB and ODPA.
It's crucial that we have transparency in government, including our Police Department, and collectively, you all are a tool to promote that type of transparency.
So I really want to appreciate the work that you're doing.
I know this is a lot of work to do a report like this.
And also a lot of unpaid work, so I just want to acknowledge that.
On reading the Charter, and, you know, based on some of the comments that were given today, there really is no ambiguity in my perspective on the process of how the report is created.
The Charter tells us that the ODPA is to create the report for the PAB to approve, and the PAB has the discretion to approve or not approve what's put in front of them.
So I don't see the need, either, for a bifurcated report, given that the Charter outlines the requirements and the process for approval.
And in terms of the editing piece, the separate piece, I'm hoping that you all are able to figure that out, you know, moving forward, because I feel like those kinds of disagreements, they shouldn't be major things, right? Something that I'd love to see, to give you some more feedback for how those reports might look in the future, is around metrics.
I noticed that there was a strategic planning session that happened in 2023.
I'm not sure if there's been one since then.
But I think having an overarching strategy would kind of help provide that structure and maybe more of a lens that might be useful.
And I'm particularly interested in metrics surrounding community engagement.
I think that's a really important part of the work.
And I want to know, you know, how you're reaching the community, how many folks were reached, you know, what was the impact of that? Just having more metrics and quantitative measurements, I think, in that area would be really helpful to see.
And I was glad to hear that finishing the regulations is the top priority.
Thank you for bringing that up.
I know we've already asked those involved in the internal negotiations about their availability and are polling council now.
So I really want to encourage my council members, all of you.
Oh, no, my laptop just died.
I want to encourage all of the council members, if you haven't already filled out the poll for that, please make sure that you do that.
I'm going to try to pull this up on my phone.
Thank you.
No good deed goes unpunished.
Lend my charger.
My laptop dies.
No good deed goes unpunished.
Lend my charger.
My laptop dies.
Okay.
And let's see.
And finally.
Oh, my gosh.
Yeah, a couple of things.
Two more things.
So, one, I was really shocked to hear about this issue with the laptops, that this is something that's still going on.
The first time I heard about it was in this report.
And so definitely please reach out to my office.
I'd love to figure out how we can move that forward.
That was very surprising.
And just generally, I wanted to comment that I'd love to see more community engagement from Pabinoti PA.
It's super important to get out into the community beyond just tabling and career events.
I know there were some ideas that were given earlier about like, kind of deeper, deeper engagement.
And I really want to appreciate the work you've all done, especially around the use of force forms.
But there's definitely like opportunities to do more work here.
And I know that in the report, one of the operational challenges touches on your desire to expand equitable community engagement.
And I really want to encourage you all to do that.
So thank you all so much for your presentation, for taking all the time, answering all of our questions and just being here this evening.
Thank you for your work and to my colleagues for your good questions as well.
And and since we don't need an actual vote on this, I will see if there's a motion to adjourn.
Second.
OK.
Is there any opposition to us adjourning this evening? OK.
Meeting is adjourned.
Thank you.