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Segment 1

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Okay.
So speaking to the COVID time, what we learned from that period is that we can't pause or slow our hiring efforts and expect to recover from that pause quickly.
To make meaningful progress against attrition, we have to continuously recruit, maintain our hiring pipeline, and stay competitive in the regional market.
Ultimately, full staffing across swarm, dispatch, and CSO positions is critical.
It ensures that we can maintain service levels, support employee wellness and job satisfaction, and also better control our overtime costs.
So looking at our calls for service, we responded to just over 60,000 calls for service last year, which is a slight decrease of about 2% from the year before.
And the most important number here is the 911 calls.
16,255, which is up 6% and the highest in several years.
These are our most urgent calls, the ones that demand immediate response.
And that increase combined with our staffing picture is why efficiency and smart deployment matter so much.
Non-emergency calls dropped about 5%, and officer initiated contacts were down slightly as well.
But the upward trend in emergency calls is something that we're watching closely.
And then looking at our workload per officer, this is one of the more encouraging data points in the report.
For the first time in several years, the average call per officer per shift is trending downward.
It was a peak of 6.3 in 2023 and just 6% in 2025.
And that didn't happen by accident.
There are three programs driving the improvement.
First is the patrol CSO program.
And this program embeds non-sworn community service officers into our patrol teams, and they handle non-violent emergency calls for service.
And those calls previously pulled our sworn officers away from their higher priority work.
A second is in our bike unit, which maintained response coverage in District 4.
And that's where we see our highest call volume area.
And that work supported not pulling officers from other beats.
And then third, our flex team, which conducted targeted data-driven operations.
They proactively addressed repeat offenders and patterns of crime.
And we're reducing the number of calls that cycle back to patrol with them.
And here's why this matters.
When calls per officer go down, it means that officers have more time to respond thoughtfully and effectively to each incident.
It reduces the fatigue that they feel, improves decision-making, and allows for better problem-solving instead of just going to call to call reactively.
It also directly supports officer wellness and sustainability while improving the quality of service the community receives.
So I also want to note that our priority one median response time was seven minutes.
And that meets our or exceeds regional benchmarks.
Even with our current staffing constraints, we're getting to emergencies relatively quickly.
And then our next slide is our communication center initiatives.
The communication center has operated below string for years, as many of you know.
And at the start of 2025, nearly half of our dispatch positions were vacant.
And this closing the gap remains a top priority both for the police and fire departments.
We hired nine new dispatchers in 2025.
And after accounting for attrition, that resulted in a net gain of just three.
So this is a reminder that recruiting alone isn't enough.
Retention and successful onboarding are equally critical.
On the recruiting side, we hosted quarterly virtual recruiting events.
And those reached nearly 1,200 candidates.
So our partnership with All-Star Recruiting continues to expand and diversify our applicant pool.
We've also made structural improvements.
Critical is a pre-employment assessment tool that evaluates core skills required for dispatch work.
And the addition of a call taker position provides recruits a more manageable starting point.
And early results show higher training completion rates.
In 2026, we anticipate leveraging new technology in the communication center, including protocol-based dispatch tools to standardize call handling and exploring an AI-powered virtual agent to triage non-emergency calls.
And both efforts are designed to improve efficiency and reduce stress on our dispatcher personnel.
Beyond staffing, the communication center is in critical need of facilities and equipment upgrades to meet the demands of modern dispatching.
And these improvements will ensure our team has the tools and environment necessity necessary to perform at their best.
And so all of this work is being done in close partnership with the fire department through an ongoing work group focused on building a sustainable communication center for the long term.
Good afternoon.
I'm Arlo Malmberg, Strategic Planning and Accountability Manager with the PD.
I'll take you through just some of the crime stats highlights.
So overall, I'll start with the Group A offenses.
Group A offenses are the most serious crime categories tracked under the federal reporting system, NIBRS, which we adopted in 2024.
They cover violent crimes like assault and robbery and property crimes like burglary and theft and crimes against society like drug and weapon violations.
So in total, Berkeley recorded about 9,800 Group A offenses in 2025, which is down 11% from the year before.
But I want to put these numbers in context a bit.
Crime fell significantly across the country last year.
And the U.S.
has now seen two consecutive years of historic drops in crime rates.
And researchers will tell you that the reasons are not fully understood.
But generally, the consensus is that there's multiple factors at play.
Pandemic disruptions are fading.
And there have been significant investments at the state and local level in community violence prevention and public safety technology.
But for those same reasons, as federal funding gets cut, researchers are not entirely confident that this trajectory will hold.
Multiple analysts have said they would not be surprised to see crime bounce back up this year.
So with that context, Berkeley is part of this broader trend.
But there are a couple areas where we outperformed.
So motor vehicle thefts fell 48% here, which is nearly double the 27% national decline.
Commercial burglaries dropped 31% versus 18% nationally.
Shootings fell 40% compared to a 22% drop in gun assaults nationally.
And we had zero fatal or injury shootings in Berkeley last year.
And we'll touch on that more a little bit later.
But that's something that we should be proud of as a city and as a community.
And there are categories.
Oh, so those categories are ones where we deployed specific strategies.
So LPRs for vehicle theft and robbery investigations, the FLEX team for organized retail crime, and a number of partnerships for gun violence prevention.
So there was this national trend that helped, but our targeted investments pushed us beyond those national trends.
Some numbers did move in the wrong direction.
So aggravated assaults were up 16% here while they declined nationally.
Felony sexual assaults rose about 20% here and nationally were about flat.
And hate crimes reached 50, which is the highest number in five years here.
And so these are areas where we continue to figure out where we can make a difference and how we can grow partnerships to address those specific trends.
Clearance rates improved across nearly every category.
And we exceeded the California state average in every one.
So a few highlights.
Homicide clearance has been 100% for at least five years.
The state average is 64%.
Robbery clearance jumped from 34% to 49%.
And a big part of that is attributed to LPR-supported investigations.
Our detectives will tell you that.
And we'll cover a little bit more in the technology section.
Theft clearances went from 17% to 20%, which is actually an additional jump from the year prior, which reflects when we started our flex team operations addressing retail theft.
And so these numbers tell us that our investigative tools and our strategies are working.
When detectives have better information, they solve more cases.
And clearance rates aren't just a data point.
Every case represents justice and accountability and closure for a member of our community who was a victim of a crime.
And that's ultimately what drives this work.
Okay, so a note on road safety here.
So total collisions were down 11%.
And injury collisions dropped about the same amount.
Fatal collisions rose from four to five.
So we saw an additional fatal collision last year.
It's just a reminder that even with the overall improvement, every life lost on our street matters.
The primary collision factors are shown on the left of this slide.
So as has been the case in previous years, speeding is the top primary collision factor that we've seen, followed by unsafe turns, starting and backing a DUI, and yielding to pedestrian violations.
So I want to note here the alignment between the violations that our officers are enforcing for and the behaviors actually causing collisions.
And that's just a reflection of our three-pronged approach to traffic safety.
Being a data-driven strategy gets us to be targeting the behaviors that cause the most harm.
But looking ahead and focusing on those speeding primary collision factors, we're acquiring five new handheld speed enforcement units and expanding speed enforcement training beyond our traffic unit into patrol, which is going to increase our coverage of these speeding violations at high-collision intersections.
Okay, and accountability is foundational to trust with our community, and we want to be transparent about all this data.
This information, by the way, is available year-round through our transparency hub, but we also conduct a thorough evaluation of it each year as preparation for this report.
So use of force, only 0.46% of calls involved any use of force, and of those, 93% were the lowest levels of force, Level 1 and Level 2.
And only 45 incidents, or 0.07% of all calls, involved a Level 3 or Level 4 use of force.
We apply multiple tests for bias each year on our stop data, so our collision demographics closely align with our stop demographics.
I do want to note the version of the moving violation to collision demographic chart that was included in the published materials used a format that pulled maximum percentages across multiple years, which caused the stack bars to sum to above 100%, but council members have a corrected version in front of them that just reflects 2025 data.
The veil of darkness test, which compares stops in daylight versus dark, showed consistent pattern across groups.
Our yield rate analysis showed a 61% overall yield rate, but with no indications of bias, and our force rate by race was consistent across groups.
On stop data, we had a bit over 4,500 total stops.
61% of those were not in response to a call for service.
61% surge yield rate, like I mentioned.
And according to the most recent RIPRA report, which counts data from the previous year, our yield rate on searches was higher than 93% of all agencies in California.
Alongside our community, we take this data seriously.
We publish it, we analyze it, we test it, and we hold ourselves accountable to it.
And ultimately it guides our policy decisions and our training priorities, and it highlights the professionalism and dedications of members of this department.
Okay, so here's the takeaway from the numbers.
We can't hire fast enough to make changes overnight.
We know we need to do more with the resources that we have.
We have to make best use of them.
We have to also use data to drive the things that we're addressing.
You saw that with the collision data.
I will also say that these changes aren't accidental.
And it's not just because of all these other societal drivers, but it might be affecting things nationally as well.
We're seeing improvements beyond that in our city.
And that's the result of, I believe, is a result of intentional strategy and strong partnerships and a commitment to working smarter with the resources that we have.
And so that's intentionally why we have this next section of this, to talk through about those partnerships, because we're seeing real change in those areas where we're able to build those partnerships.
And so Captain Durbin is going to talk a little bit about that.
Thank you, Chief.
So I'm Mike Durbin.
I am the Investigations Division Captain overseeing the Detectives and the Traffic Bureau.
The next section covers the people, programs, and collaborations that are driving prevention and public safety in Berkeley.
You will notice that there is a common theme in the next four slides I'm going to be covering, and that's partnerships.
So we obviously have to deal with all crime that comes our way, but we just want to spend a moment to discuss how we address gun violence in 2025.
We are particularly proud of the data that's in front of you.
For the first time in over a decade, we had zero fatal or injury shootings last year.
Gun arrests were up 31 percent.
We recovered 114 firearms.
Shootings were down 40 percent.
Those are the numbers, but let me talk to you about what's actually behind them.
Our approach to gun violence is built on two pillars, enforcement and prevention.
They work together.
On the enforcement side, our officers and detectives work under the premise that any investigative lead connecting to violence deserves our utmost attention.
We believe that those who illegally possess weapons, brandish individuals with weapons, or are involved in shootings should be held accountable, regardless of if there is even a victim that comes forward.
Therefore, we investigate those crimes with the same resources and seek prosecution with the same intensity as those incidents involving great bodily injury or death.
We do this because we believe that those involved with those crimes today may be involved in future cases of violence or death.
But we don't stop at enforcement.
Over the last year, we have increased the use of two prevention resources, gun violence restraining orders and the Gun Violence Intervention and Prevention Program, also known as GVRO and GVIPP.
GVROs are focused on taking guns out of the hands, bless you, of individuals who have shown they are a danger to the public or themselves.
This is a civil proceeding that occurs in collaboration, a partnership with the City Attorney's Office.
GVIPP is focused on intervening with individuals who are most at risk for being involved in gun violence.
Through the City Manager's Office, we partner with Live Free, an on-the-ground community-based violence intervention and mediation group.
We make referrals to Live Free knowing that they have the ability to reach people in the community at a different level, additionally connecting them to support services that address the underlying causes of violence.
The overall goal is community support, accountability and prevention working together.
CSOs and patrol.
The CSO patrol program is one of the most successful programs I have ever watched come together in my nearly 25-year career.
It stems from the City's broader reimagining public safety initiative in 2020, designed to shift work that doesn't require a sworn officer to a more appropriate resource.
In their first year, we added three patrol CSOs.
We put them on the busiest teams, the busiest shifts, with the highest call volume.
The result? They handled over 1,500 calls for service.
Those were non-emergency calls, routine calls, traffic-related calls.
Every one of those calls is a call that previously would have pulled a sworn officer away from higher-priority work.
At the same time, even though sworn staffing numbers declined and we're on an all-time low, our response times to those high-priority calls, priority one, priority two calls, they remain the same.
So we kept the same level of service.
Looking ahead, we'll be adding two additional CSOs to patrol in 2026.
We're expanding the roles of the CSOs into investigations, evidence collection, report preparation, and we're continuing to identify work that they can more effectively handle in this manner.
An additional benefit, I wouldn't call it an unattended consequence, but it was a bonus, is that one of the CSOs that we hired in 2025 is off to the academy.
So we've struggled to hire police officers, as you're all aware, but we know that a lot of people want to work in law enforcement, they want to work for the city of Berkeley, and we think that through the CSO program, if we give them that exposure, that is creating a pipeline for the next wave of those officers.
The FLEX team.
So as opposed to CSOs, they were assigned to specific days and hours, the FLEX team must be exactly that.
They must be flexible.
Flexible to address the most acute crime problems facing the city.
In 2025, the FLEX team focused on organized retail theft.
The numbers.
We did 23 operations, we made 141 arrests, and 72% of those arrested faced additional criminal charges beyond the retail theft.
Things like, and we were able to support this through things we found on the arrestees, like stolen credit cards, burglary tools, so narcotics.
They also had outstanding warrants for very serious crimes like kidnapping and carjacking.
Two of those arrestees also had firearms on them.
42% of those arrested were either on probation or parole at the time.
So the approach of the FLEX team is proactive.
Rather than responding to just shoplifting calls one by one after the fact, the FLEX team used crime data and partnerships with loss prevention teams to catch suspects during the act.
That made a significant difference for prosecution as well.
Based on these results, we're allocating three dedicated officer positions to the FLEX team in 2026.
At the moment, we just have a sergeant assigned, and we used officers from different teams to supplement that work.
This allows the team to run more operations, respond faster to emerging crime trends, and build stronger cases.
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All right.
Vision Zero and Traffic Partnership.
Our traffic safety work is built on collaboration and data.
Collaboration consists of city departments working together to holistically address traffic safety through, we call them the three E's, engineering, enforcement, and education.
Those internal City of Berkeley partners included the city's public information team and Public Works transportation team, including their Vision Zero coordinator.
We also work with regional law enforcement partners on the enforcement side.
The high-intensity traffic team, or HIT, brings together law enforcement agencies for joint operations.
They are then dedicated to our most problematic thoroughfares for collisions to look for the leading violations.
I already touched on what those violations are.
One February operation last year brought 11 agencies and 17 officers to Berkeley streets and produced 185 citations in five hours.
We also continued our Drive Safer, Drive Longer program with four classes at the North and South Berkeley Senior Centers, helping aging drivers stay safe and independent.
We are going to continue those programs this year.
All of this is informed by the Transparency Hub and our public-facing Traffic Concern Survey.
In 2025, we also began to give feedback on that survey.
So the public was able to say, hey, this is the streets or the areas I'm concerned with, and our traffic sergeant and lieutenant would then circle back and say, here's what we did about those concerns.
So we're going to continue that in 2026 as well.
Guided by that community input and data, we used OTS grant funding to increase DUI checkpoints and conduct targeted enforcement on the primary collision factors that led to the most serious injury collisions.
So the result, also numbers we're very, very proud of, we had an 11% decrease in total collisions, which I looked over 14 years.
That's the only double-digit decrease we've had outside of the two COVID years.
And we had a 25% drop in serious injury collisions, which is really the goal of Vision Zero.
All right.
So we're going to talk about technology a lot a little bit later tonight, but I do want to talk a little bit about how we, last year, did leverage technology as a resource multiplier, how it helped us provide public safety, increase our ability to de-escalate, and also ensure we had the right resources attached to the issues that we were seeing.
So we're going to talk about ALPRs first.
Like Captain Durbin, I've been in this business for a really long time.
ALPRs.
No tool that I've experienced in my career has done more for precision-based policing than the ALPRs.
It's about having a vehicle that you know is connected to something and being able to stop that vehicle.
And that kind of connection means that it's not casting a wide net and just stopping every car that's driving down the street and doing this.
It allows you to use precise data, hot list, stolen vehicle information, to guide your stops.
And it's human-driven.
It's not a computer telling you to make a stop and you just make the stop.
Officers are verifying that the plate that they see is a plate that's reported on a hot list and taking enforcement action on that.
So we looked at the data that we saw in 2025.
And, you know, I will tell you that a lot of this information, like you see 58 arrests.
That's the times when, predominantly, when an arrest actually happens as a result of an ALRP in a lifetime.
And you see 38, 7 vehicles recovered.
What you also see is 121 cases supported.
What does that mean? It means that an arrest might have happened later.
It led to an investigation.
It led to verifying an alibi.
It created a case history and allowed us to connect cases.
So it's not just, you know, it's oversimplified to suggest that just because you had 58 arrests compared to all your arrests, it's not a tool that's worth happening.
It's a tool where we've seen cases where there is no lead except an ALPR hit.
Or where we hit a dead end in our investigation.
And then we're able to piece things together from other jurisdictions.
And so we talk about what the value is in three ways.
One, for patrol.
Having that real-time alert when a stolen vehicle comes into our city.
We've had cases where a vehicle has come in, victimized our city.
They're put on a hot list.
They leave town.
We don't get them that day.
And when they come back the next time to repeat offenses, we're able to arrest them.
And also, like I said, helps our investigations.
And this is historical data.
Looking where a vehicle traveled to be able to recreate that they were in an area of crime when all these individual crime series happened to build that case.
And you can't talk about ALPR without talking about the value of the regional network.
So it's us understanding the tying together regional cases.
We all know that offenders do not respect jurisdictional boundaries.
And so the idea that you can understand that something that happened in Oakland is actually connected to something that happened in Berkeley and Hayward and build those cases and have chargeable cases and combine different pieces of information that allow you to understand who the offenders are and build a case.
But it's also that a person can be, the suspect can be apprehended.
So when they alert in a different city because there's a felony warrant on a vehicle, then we're able to apprehend that person instead of having to wait for them to come back to our city to further victimize us.
So, you know, it's looking at all of them together.
And I know we'll talk about this in a lot more detail, but we did want to talk about what we've experienced so far with technology that we're actually leveraging right now.
So what's next? You know, we'll talk about, I'm going to hit this really briefly, we'll talk about the real-time information center, how we synthesize data and information in the feeds that we have.
We know research has shown us that increases odds of clearance a lot.
That's what matters.
Crime occurs, we're able to clear, we're able to identify that they're responsible.
Our fixed video cameras, again, we, with council's approval, really focus those in high pedestrian intersections where a lot of our crime and calls happen, so we can have that investigative tool and real-time awareness.
And the drone is the first responder.
We talked about what our staffing levels do, and right now we're maintaining response times, but having information on the level of seriousness of a crime and knowing what resource to get there and being able to get a drone resource there in less than two minutes means a lot for better outcomes, safer outcomes, getting the right resources to a call.
Okay.
So looking forward, I'm going to close with this.
When our officers have better tools and better information, outcomes improve.
The gains we showed you today, fewer shootings, fewer robberies, vehicle thefts cut nearly in half, came without adding additional sworn personnel.
CSO program, able to accomplish things without additional sworn personnel.
As we understand the challenging staffing situation, the challenging budget situation that we're in, we're looking to ways to do our work smarter and more fiscally responsible.
So our priorities for 2026 are clear.
Keep sustaining our gun violence efforts through both GRVRS and GBIPP, with those kind of partnerships.
Expand our CSO program and work with our FLEX team to be deployed in a manner consistent with what data is telling us.
Continuing building our sustainable communications center.
None of this works without a strong communications center.
That is the heart and soul of us getting the right resources out there, too, making sure that our community members are able to report incidents as they're occurring.
And we want to continue, like, one of the primary things we talk about all the time, right, what you hear about me from the most is not just crime, but collisions and serious collisions.
And so we have to continue those partnerships, keep up our enforcement efforts, but work in partnership with the Vision Zero goals.
Also, this is about advancing our technology and our resources and serving our community in a way that makes us a vibrant, thriving community.
And so, you know, thank you for the time.
Thank you for your patience today.
And we're happy to answer any questions that come up.
Thanks, Chief.
Thanks, team.
Can I see, let me see if my council member colleagues have questions to start us off.
Okay.
Council Member Draco.
Oh, I'm happy to go after Council Member Humberto.
No, I'll just start.
Okay.
Thank you so much for the presentation.
I will ask my questions in rapid fire to save time.
I have six questions.
Question one.
Can you say more about what's in the data for around hate crimes? The increase has been of concern to me.
Question number two.
Can you remind me, I know you mentioned this last year, but if you could just refresh my memory, the difference between not sustained, exonerated, unfounded, admin closed and active complaints in how complaints are dispositioned.
Question three.
How does one assess the success of DUI checkpoints? On the one hand, be successful.
I assume if they are yielding in more stops for DUIs.
But then on the other hand, we actually want to reduce DUIs.
Can you speak to also with that question, are there mechanisms to prevent someone for just not using the main intersections? And especially they hear that there might be a DUI stop at that intersection.
Question four.
In my district, district four, can you just generally speak to what are the most common types?.

Segment 2

of Calls for Service that you receive.
Question five, what feedback have you received from the community, if any, regarding the Transparency Hub now that it has been in use for some time? And the final question is, can you discuss what trends are driving the nearly 20% increase in crimes against society, including nearly a 50% increase in drug equipment violations? Thank you.
Chief, if you wouldn't mind just telling us which question you're responding to so we can track a little bit, because I know that was a lot at one time.
Sure, thank you.
So a couple things, let's see, hate crime, like what's driving the increase? Like sexual assaults that are up and aggravated assaults, sometimes we're not exactly sure.
What I can tell you is that many of our offenders and reported hate crimes over the last several years are those suffering from mental health crisis.
That tells us a little bit about where these crimes are occurring, mostly in public.
There's a variety of instances where that we, as you know, we capture hate incidents and hate crimes.
Primarily the hate incidents that we see are fires and, you know, things like that.
They're coming out where it's on that threshold, but it's really important for us to capture that data and be able to understand it.
We are seeing things trend in line with what has happened internationally, and we've continued to see that.
And, you know, we've done efforts in the past to sort of work with the community to stand up together with our community, but those are the things we're kind of immediately seeing.
Same thing with partnerships around sexual assault.
I know you didn't ask me that, but it's the same thing.
It's like how do we leverage our relationships knowing who the offenders or the victims are predominantly to get the right resources to address that.
And so for sexual assaults, it's about increasing our relationships and collaboration with the university, if that makes sense, right, around those kinds of crimes.
That's number one.
Number two, I will send you, so you have it, the precise exact definitions of the allegations, but admin closed typically happens if a reporting party is no longer interested in proceeding, we lack evidentiary value to move forward, there's like a prima facie of wrongdoing, you'll see an admin closure in those kinds of instances.
Sustained means the thing was a violation and we believe that it occurred.
Not sustained or exonerated is the thing happened, the inaction happened, but it's not a violation.
And then not sustained is there's not sufficient evidence to say whether the thing happened or not or whether it was a violation of policy or not.
So it's a little bit of a gray area, right.
So that's what you'll see for that.
Let me grab, yeah.
For the success of DUI checkpoints, I will say that by and large, DUI checkpoints are meant to be an educational tool.
So if you think about it from that lens, we are going out and we are touching the community in a way that we don't any other time.
So as we pick a high collision or high DUI traffic area and we focus our attention there, everyone who comes through, we're handing them mad flyers and pamphlets and we're saying, hey, hi, this is who we are and we're also looking for signs and symptoms of impairment.
So that being said, if you look at it as our success are the number of people that we have been able to interact with, provided information and resources to combat the impaired driving.
And then the second piece of that is if folks are going to avoid the checkpoint, they're going to avoid the checkpoint.
We intentionally advertise it and that being said, we have all kinds of signs up and if people want to avoid it, they will.
Sometimes there are folks who are patrolling around the area of a checkpoint and if they see someone and there's a reason to stop them, they may have a conversation with them provided there's probable cause for the stop to assess whether or not they're impaired.
So that being said, there's really nothing we can do for the folks who are avoiding it.
One more kind of interesting comment we discussed earlier today as a group is we're seeing a lot of DUI serious injury collisions regarding scooters, e-scooters.
And so that's one of those areas, again, you want to really lean into community education.
We already are working on some social media engagement posts with the community about how to be safe and do that.
So that's one of those areas that you've never, we haven't recently seen the rise or DUI making that list and we think that's driven in part by that.
So that's when we lean into those efforts.
Just to add one last thing too, and now we're really staying on this question, but the DUI checkpoints are also funded by the Office of Traffic Safety and they're done in collaboration with DUI focused patrols as well.
So it's really a kind of a broad program for DUI reductions.
Yeah, I'll take the two transparency questions.
So one, the call for service in the downtown district, District 4, most common call by far is a disturbance, 415.
That could actually end up being a wide range of things from a fight or somebody stopping traffic in the street.
There's also a number of thefts, alarm calls, batteries.
So that information is on the Transparency Hub and leads me to the biggest piece of feedback that we've gotten on the Transparency Hub that I really agree with is just the intuitiveness of where to find everything and in particular I'm always letting people know that there's a second dashboard if you scroll down on the number of the pages and a lot of questions get answered that way.
People are looking for some more customizability or, you know, filters that are available if you scroll down, but it's not obvious that you have to do that.
So that's a really concrete thing that we're going to work on, but in general we've gotten positive feedback, but there's plenty to do in terms of just like the user experience.
Okay, I think the last question was why do we think crimes against society are up? I don't know exactly.
I mean we can, we can, we can, you know, guess that maybe our street patrols having out there more are able to address quality of life issues.
We know that some of those cases came out of some of our FLEX team approaches where there was narcotics or other ones that fit into that crime category.
Sorry, can you explain what crimes against society is? I think some of us are looking at each other.
It's a cat, it's the definition category that's created by NIBRS that places weapons charges and narcotics or drug cases in that section because it's like, I mean, that's how they, that's how they separate it.
It's a crime against society versus an individual person that affects the quality of life in the community and, and the work that we did leaning into gun violence intervention, right, can also drive that number up, right? You see more arrests or it seems like it's up.
It's because we're doing more proactive enforcement around gun seizures.
Sorry, can I just jump in really fast? I believe Council Member Trigub asked specifically about the 50% increase, 49% increase in drug equipment violations.
Yeah, that was part of it.
And I was curious about that too, so I wanted to just..
It seems to be driving the 20% increase, like a 50%, almost a 50% increase in that subcategory.
So these are often secondary charges that come from other enforcement activity that we're doing, and this is one of the innovations of NIBRS is that now those aren't subsumed in the more serious crime type.
They're separated out into their own individual offense.
So a lot of the the work that we're doing, if it also involves a narcotics violation, that will get counted there.
And that's a kind of also an interesting point.
We've only been using it since 2024.
So it's a significant change in the way we report data.
Before, those things would never have risen to the level of UCR reporting, and so now we're seeing them.
So that's why we're anxious to have two or three or five years worth of data to really understand whether something is going up or going down or what that number is.
Yeah, so what I'm hearing you say, basically, and obviously more data, more years of data would be help us assess whether it's a trend, but it could be that just because there is better or more accurate fidelity of the data, it may look like an increase in crime, but what it actually is, is kind of a combination of your department clearing more cases and being able to more accurately account for the types of crimes.
Yeah, that's certainly possible.
Yeah, I'll just say that's especially true with the lower level crimes that previously would have just not been reported to the FBI under like a hierarchical rule.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Okay, Council Member Bartlett.
Thank you, and that was impressive.
You answered all those questions.
I've never seen that in a meeting before.
I have nine questions myself, just kidding.
So one is the, first off, great work as always, wonderful, you know, amazing to see the work that you do.
You're the best.
I see I'm really enthusiastic about the response times.
Very good, really, really, really good.
I'm curious about the the GVIP.
Is that what you call it? The GVIP? The Gun Violence Intervention Prevention Program.
This is something, of course, that we've focused on for a long time and worked it out and got it funded, and so I'm really curious if you have any information about it beyond this sort of high-level report.
Yeah, I'd love to talk about that.
You know, that was stemmed from you, Council Member Bartlett, and from Council Member Taplin, and, you know, we were, we thought we needed to force Berkeley into the ceasefire peg and then realize that wasn't appropriate for what our data showed us about the number of shootings we had, that kind of crime, and that partnership, you know, having Live Free in our community, those deep connections, the relationship that we've been able to build of trust and working together in collaboration, but also understanding we have individual and different lanes we need to be in at times.
That, you know, that is one of the most tremendous programs that I've seen, and I know I've mentioned that to the Mayor before.
It's just, it's been an incredible tool for our community where we haven't made it just about shootings, but about the aftermath and special events or funerals and other types where people are still raw in the community and be able to get the right resources there, and to also humanize the law enforcement response around those spaces and build those connections has been incredibly meaningful.
Oh, that's great.
Thank you.
I really appreciate that.
That's it.
Thank you.
Council Member Humbert.
Thank you, Madam Mayor, and actually some of Council Member Tragoob's questions were also on my list, so I don't need to challenge you to speed writing exercise or a cognitive task to remember them all, but I do have one just follow-up question about the hate crimes reaching a five-year high.
Does the department have any planned initiatives or outreach efforts to respond to this? I think we're still in the space of trying to determine what the best partnerships are.
I will tell you that we're very connected to a number of communities that have been affected by the specific types of crimes that have gone up.
We routinely interact with organizers for events to make sure that they have the sense of security that that feels most appropriate to whatever the venue is.
That's ranged from holy days to extra presence around a certain event or a certain celebration, and that's the way that we really reflect what our community needs and wants from us, so we're always very aware and dedicated to that work, and so those are the initiatives I know.
In years past, we've stood with United Against Hate programs and started to talk about some of that collaboration and some of that early work with both Berkeley High School students, the school district around that, and especially PIO about that information, but it's absolutely someplace I'd love to hear more ideas as a community about how we speak vocally about against hate.
I think we do a lot of that in our sanctuary city work, right, as a whole, but we'd love to collaborate and partner on that more deeply.
Thank you, Chief.
That's really helpful and interesting.
Thank you.
Just a quick follow-up question about the drug equipment violation issue.
What does drug equipment violation mean exactly, that term, that a large increase in in crimes in this category? So what I would love to do is now that this seems like a really question that we want to dig into a little bit more, that particular crime category, let us go back, let us dig into whether we can get any data from pre-2024 around that type of arrest and look at that in comparison.
We're able to do some side-by-side comparisons with some of our other data for historical data to see whether we're seeing the trend increase.
Let's give you a broad range.
I don't want to name two or three things that are in that category and and they had more.
Let us go back and do the deep research into it now that we know this is an area of interest to, you know, a handful of council members and then we'll put it together on an off-agenda member or something like that and share it back out.
Yeah, no, I appreciate that.
I just was wondering what what a drug equipment was.
What drug equipment? You would know it if you saw it.
Pardon? Okay, it's not, okay.
It could be a pipe.
It's used for something.
Okay, yeah, yeah, thank you.
I said that makes sense, drug equipment.
What is the, do you think, is the overtime budget impact of operating at 144 officers against 174 authorized? That's a great question.
I will tell you that we dove into our overtime expenditures and looking at how we're on budget right now and I will tell you that the biggest place that we're seeing some overages right now are in our communication center or as you saw we're well below a minimum staffing level and so that's requiring a lot of overtime and the other place where we see a lot of overtime is the our overtime around patrol and meeting our minimum staffing levels around patrol.
One of the things that we're looking to in, we just launched a new time sheet, was an agreement with the union, drop the minimum staffing level on patrol which means that we'll have to sell less overtime to meet that, to meet that coverage.
At the same time we're deploying things like a focus bike patrol flex team.
So we have personnel available and on the street but dedicated to different work unless they're needed for priority calls and all of that to say that's one of the reasons why I think we'll be able to address our current overtime budget and bring it down with tools like the technology we're going to be talking about later tonight and with this change in minimum staffing again we're going to be assessing these with with quality of service response times and things like closure rates and things like that.
Right, thank you, thank you and then and then finally and I know this is sometimes included in other reports but do we have any additional information on the five fatal traffic collisions? How many were DUIs? Maybe how many occurred at night versus the day versus during the day? Those kinds of details.
I do know that we've seen increases in motorized scooters and bicycles but I don't know offhand but that's something that would be easily looked up.
Okay and as you're I'm sure aware about our business partnership that rapid response review.
So when they occur we move immediately to a posture of understanding whether it's a traffic engineering issue that needs to be resolved that was that caused that collision and then we look deeper into whether there's criminal matter having to do with DUI or an attentiveness.
A lot of these as you know are pedestrian fatalities and again DUI and e-scooters have been has been a predominant thing that we've seen raised up in these.
Thank you very much yeah I really appreciate the existence of the rapid response team.
It's a great thing.
Thank you that's all I have.
Thank you Council Member.
Vice Mayor Nunapara.
Thank you and thank you for all your work on this in the presentation.
I have two quick comments before I go into questions.
On the slide with the chart with workload per patrol officer there's no y-axis and be really helpful to have a y-axis on there so that we can understand what the chart.
Yeah thank you and then on page 30 of the annual report there's a chart showing the calls for service versus use of force incidents and just in my opinion it would be much more useful to see percent of arrests that use use of force instead of calls for service or maybe in addition to.
So those are just two quick comments.
My first question is around hate crimes.
Last year the police department found that anti-Jewish and anti-LGBTQ plus hate crimes were the main reason for the increase in hate crimes last year.
Do you know if those trends have continued? Yeah largely the composition of hate crime, anti-hate bias motivation have been relatively stable and so yeah there hasn't been like a giant shift in the types of crimes we're seeing.
Okay thanks.
I have two questions on ALPRs.
The report notes significant crime declines across multiple categories in 2025 and the ALPR program was also deployed alongside the FLEX team and the CSO team our program and the GVIPP partnership which you all noted.
Do you distinguish which programs drove which outcomes? Do you know how to separate those basically? Yeah well so in general it's a really difficult thing to to put causation in these interventions and that's just true across you know crime prevention literature in general and so I want to be careful not to to say that we can definitively say x cause y but what I can say is that we know that our robbery detectives have been and Kevin Durbin can speak to this as well our robbery detectives have been some of the most productive users of ALPR technology.
They've solved upwards of 20 cases directly using ALPR information which accounts for a large jump in the clearance rate but they're and then we've seen the scene with the the FLEX team operations in our increase in clearances on thefts you know we can look at those numbers and see that you know they match up in a way that we would expect them to and so these are things that we I can see that the numbers move in the direction that we would expect them to quantitatively and qualitatively we're hearing this incredible feedback from our officers and detectives doing the work that these are tools that have fundamentally changed how they do their job and so what we have to do is make decisions and assessments based on imperfect information that's that's just the the predicament that we're in and everything is pointing towards these just being profoundly helpful tools.
Thank you.
A similar question is around robbery clearance that improved substantially were there other changes in detective staffing or case prioritization or investigative practices that could have also contributed to the clearance? I think the main thing is that the numbers dropped in addition like there were fewer robberies so that and Mike can speak to the investigative practices but is it on yeah so no there but there wasn't a change in the number of detectives so it makes it easier for us to say that hey what what what did change in the ALPR and the thing that wasn't touched on earlier it's the it's the speed of which they identify the suspects that which we believe then prevents further victimization.
They're also not throwing out any other investigative leads those all still exist and those are used as additional tools to point that we have the right suspect so they're still doing knive-in on shell casings they're still doing area checks for witnesses looking for stationary video touch DNA all those other things are still happening they're just getting to the right suspects quicker.
Okay thanks for that.
On the officer per shift declining I'm curious what the department's benchmark for a sustainable workload looks like what is what is the correct amount of calls per officer per shift? So I don't think that there's a particular benchmark per se it's it's based on the number the type of call the amount of time that they spend on it as well as so it's more than just the volume but what we see in in the way that it's trending is that it allows more time for proactivity and offers officers to be to spend more time with the community and triaging their cases.
There's there's a there's a qualitative piece to working a case and if you're a patrol officer and are going from call to call to call because the calls are stacking up you have less time to go back and check on a victim and make sure they inventory their stolen property correctly you have less time to spend explaining a restraining order process you have less time to just slow down and empathize what they're experiencing right you may have less houses you can hit for a canvas like all the pressure of having so many cases stacking up means those things are less possible those are that's work that CSOs can do and it's obviously but that's the that's the nature right of like what's a goal a goal is that an officer has enough time to do that to give the quality of care we expect in Berkeley and a little bit of free time to have downtime right that emotional time between between various challenging calls right and some time to engage to support our traffic bureau on the traffic enforcement things that we know make a big difference in safety in our city also like they were we're putting a lot into their day thank you so um for example in 2023 when there was a 6.3 average calls handled per officer per shift it still could theoretically be shorter calls like this this number doesn't tell the full story no because basically yeah yeah exactly it's a proxy and it's a proxy for the quality of service that that officer is able to provide on those calls okay thank you um the report proposes measuring the drone success um by four metrics i want i'm curious if the department has identified baseline figures for those metrics so that council can evaluate whether the program is working once it launches yeah one great example is response times looking at response times we shared with you that for an officer in a car uh their response times are around seven minutes we see what happens in the region what happens nationally we know that's a little bit ahead of what you might see with regional partners especially with higher or lower priority calls um you'll see numbers from oakland that are in the hours where it might take us 40 minutes or 30 minutes to get to something uh what we would then use as a benchmark right is once we launch dfr we know that jurisdictions of our similar size are reporting about two minutes to get to any call ones that are in larger jurisdictions might say three or four and for me the question is um you want to look at speed that they can arrive to then get the right resources to a call and so uh setting a benchmark about how many minutes it is real challenging because it depends on the jurisdiction size right unless you only compare like jurisdictions but for me the bigger drivers are going to be things like um how many calls did we never send personnel to so that we had free time available um how many calls were they able to clear like that how many calls did they go to that we could step down or needed to step up our response right that tells us whether that's giving us actionable evidence you know or uh calls that we sent a different resource fire department went instead of the police or a mobile crisis went out instead right so until we start to really flesh out what council's desire is about having this tool and the kind of calls we go to um then that's when we'll be able to set some benchmarks of expectations about service levels and things like that what we're sharing are what we hear is kind of some common ways that they assess programs and and the efficiency and effectiveness of programs are some of the things we've risen thank you um i want to ask a little bit about the use of force and accountability piece the report notes to sustain findings of misconduct out of 10 completed investigations are those the consequences of those cases public is that information public no they're not that personnel records so the outcome of those of the the outcome that i can share is that there was an allegation and there was a sustained finding okay thank you um i'm also curious because there's no mention of it in the report of what efforts did the police department partner with the pab on throughout throughout the year related to the complaints or just generally so um pab has regular meetings um our departmental liaison detective detective deputy chief tatewell um or myself or president we always have a watch commander at those meetings to provide um answers about procedural questions policy related questions we regularly meet i meet regularly with the director of police accountability on a monthly basis we're talking about a a having a regular meeting with the pab chair the dpa once seated and our office as well we regularly participate either at the deputy chief level or with the sergeant policy at subcommittee meetings on policy work they come over to our office and we go through and walk through the transparency hub and look through policies and talk through policies together we attend meetings co-jointly sometimes and things like that i know they use some of our data and our report they report out in in theirs there's a number of places both in our policy and by ordinance we share reports over to the pab or they review our things before we submit them to council or move forward on processes so it was a lot of work um it's not laid out here where we had a really clear focus on like reporting the crime data and things like that i didn't lay that out in detail here but certainly if um it's the council's interest we can add a section on that um in years in years follow about the ways we've collaborated thank you thank you um i just think it's helpful for the community to know how the pab and the police department interact um and what they work together on and my last question is i'm because i don't fully understand it um can you go into a little more detail about the anatomy of the complaint process and how what that process looks like and what the timeline looks like also sure so there's some parallel processes that occur um and that's laid out in the charter uh but uh if there uh if there is an allegation of uh wrongdoing by community member uh then uh if it comes first to the department then we institute and begin an investigation it starts a clock running as soon as the city becomes aware complaints can also come directly to the the pap if they come to the pap um they notice us we run a parallel investigation so there's never a point in time where we are not running an ia if a pap investigation is occurring if if and when we receive a a complaint we uh advise the complainant like hey there's this only separate process that you can get involved in with with the pab and so there's communication about how to get how to get connected into that process that starts the timelines running um uh based on the information we get from a complainant that sets what the allegations are in a complaint and who the subject officers if they're known are or you know on an image you will call um that sets record preservation as soon as that occurs uh so we know an incident is occurring we'll preserve all records related to it and then we start a process there's a 240 day time limit on the process from when a um misconduct is is a the city is notified of it that could be either the pap or the police department is notified of it um that starts the clock that can be told for certain things like an active criminal case um and and other things there's a government code sets out when that can be told so sometimes you'll see things extend beyond um but uh 240 depending on depending on that you will see sometimes at the end of the year where we have cases that are active and that may be cases that came in in october november that are still on this like this like long clock um and um yeah and that's that's happy to talk more about it if you want or maybe maybe um we could meet and go through that if you want to hear more more detail that's really helpful thank you so much those are all my questions thanks um thanks for your questions council member blackaby thanks.

Segment 3

First, just Chief Lewis, Deputy Chief Tate, Captain Durbin, and Mr.
Malmberg, thank you for the presentation, thank you for the report, and more importantly, thank you for the work you do every day to keep the community safe.
We really appreciate it, and thank you for your service.
Just a couple of questions.
A lot of my questions have been asked, not surprisingly, so I'll just touch on a couple things.
On the calls for service number, you'd mentioned, and again, I had to step out for a minute, so I apologize.
If you already addressed this, I can get it later, but you mentioned that the 911 call volume's sort of been steadily increasing.
Do we have any kind of conjecture as to why that's happening? Anything we can, you know, you know what's going on there? You know, from 12,000 in 2021 to 16,000 in 2025.
Just..
It is an interesting trend that, you know, callers are getting more, are calling with more urgent calls, and they're calling with fewer non-emergency calls.
Yeah, I don't have a great explanation for exactly why that's occurring, but it's certainly a trend that we've seen over a couple of years now.
Okay.
Yeah, and I was going to, the second question was going to be, and then the downward trend on non-emergency calls, which is great.
Do those also get routed through the communication center? So it's at least less, a little less traffic on that side.
I also wonder if there's more self-service through the website, if there's other tools that people are just, you know, things where they might otherwise be calling for information, they're actually getting themselves? It's possible with some of the changes to the, that we've seen to the online services and portals recently in the city.
We do receive calls sometimes to the police department about something that's outside of our department.
That's one of the reasons why we're exploring an AI agent that would take those non-emergency calls and better direct them, and route them in that manner so that we could then assess whether we were able to change our staffing level in the communication center based on a reduction of calls with that support.
Yeah, makes sense.
And then on the crime highlights, we mentioned good news on the fewer shootings, fewer robberies, fewer vehicle thefts, fewer burglaries, but more, a 23% increase on sexual assaults, 16% increase on aggravated assaults.
How do you look at that data and then think about deploying resources? Like, what do you do? How do you respond to that and account for that to sort of, over the next year, try and stem that tide? How do you think about that? Well, for aggravated assaults specifically, we've taken a look at those geographically and seen that a high concentration of those occur in our business districts, especially downtown.
And so we have a bike team that responds primarily to calls in that area, but we're looking at some of these other tools that we're talking about that can help us get eyes on those occurrences earlier and help resolve those situations earlier.
It's not a point to be lost.
The reason why we requested the fixed cameras in those areas where those things were happening is because we know having video evidence is something that's critical for the DA when they're considering charging.
It's critical for us when we're identifying responsible parties and seeing, there's a big difference when someone tells you something happens than when you can see it happen.
Yeah.
Right? And so that's why we're anxious to get those tools and those technologies active in our business communities.
Okay.
One of the questions I was going to ask, we were talking about ALPRs in particular and looking at the connection to clearance rates.
That's one of the things I was going to ask is, are there other places, so ALPRs to robbery, are there other places where we could see the value of that? We talked a little bit about auto theft, clearly.
But places where the technology might, if approved, might start to show up in the numbers? I think it could show up in the aggravated assaults and it could show up in the sexual assault, especially who we know are most often victimized, right? It's people that are at bars or in that environment.
There's video evidence and having that and being able to build chargeable cases is critical.
We absolutely would expect to see there to be some kind of measurable impact in that area.
Cool.
One thing for future report, just a little asterisk, because we were talking about impact of ALPR, 58 arrests, another 121 supported cases.
I also wonder if there's something about improved percentage of successful prosecutions or something, to your point, because we have better data, better documentation, more likely that not only is an arrest made, but there's some sort of adjudication after the arrest, as opposed to other things where we don't have the same information.
You still would make an arrest, but it may be hard to actually..
It can be a little challenging.
It could depend on focus of a district attorney who's in, and whether they have a certain initiative that they're working on.
It can also be that linking that up, we don't have the same data access in the way that we could cleanly say, you just follow a case and you know you'd have to manually go in, enter an offender number and a sent number and be able to track back and see what happens.
Some things are resolved as probation or parole violations instead of a criminal case, and some things languish in the court for a really long time, so it makes it a little challenging, but certainly it does matter.
Again, we are one piece in the justice system, and my responsibility is to ensure that we're providing direct public safety, and that we're building cases that are based on actionable evidence to bring to the DA.
What happens after that, we have a little less control over.
Makes sense.
Okay.
On the dispatch, I know we've talked about it in previous years too, how that is a challenge, and that's a particular area where we do have constraints.
I like this idea of thinking about how to, in a relatively risk-free way, using the AI to sort of help with non-emergency calls, because I think that could be a real important factor there.
But it feels like we're recruiting and then also seeing some attrition, and it's hard to sort of maintain staffing there.
Any thoughts about, is there a retention thing that you need council support for? How else can we be helping you there? Yeah, there's a couple big things going on.
One is the infrastructure and facilities improvements that are needed in there.
That makes it a more welcoming and inviting place for people to stay and be well in.
The other thing is the changes in critical, right? Which you saw, which meant we brought people that were more likely to have the capacity for the job in through the testing process early.
We are moving very close to scripted dispatching, launching both for police and fire.
So one of the reasons why our attrition rate is what it is, is it's a hard program.
It's a hard job.
It's hard to get through the training program.
And so we think we'll see really a great improvement once we get those things up and running.
So we will need funding support for a lot of these projects moving forward as we then assess what it looks like to have this.
And making measurable impacts on our staffing level in the communications center.
One, it would significantly drive down our overtime costs.
Two, it would significantly improve the quality of life for our dispatchers who have been working in a constrained environment for a really long time.
Last question, just it picks up a little bit on where Councilmember Luna-Parr was asking about some of the internal affairs, the stats on complaints and closed complaints.
I remember this from last year and didn't bring it up, but it kind of strikes me again this year that just given the calendar, like you get much better data on all the crime data from the previous year because there's finality to all those numbers.
The trick obviously is with a lot of the 2025 data on complaints and kind of where are we in the process.
There's always a large number of active cases that haven't been resolved by the time that you complete the report.
I wonder if for future years it's worth not just having the previous year, but two years ago in terms of having more accuracy.
Because you'd actually know probably better disposition with 100% accuracy of everything at that point where now we only get partial because things are still running their course.
That's correct and actually what I think we might explore is having a space on the transparency hub because we report this information publicly and we can report publicly, but it's a living thing, right? I have to talk to Arlo about what we can do to automate it because I'm trying to also avoid creating new staff work, but certainly looking for ways to be able to report so you can kind of track ongoing outcomes I think could be very useful or maybe the simple cure is just to do two years at a time so that we capture all the ones that happen the year prior.
Arlo AI or something like that.
Okay, great.
That's all of my questions.
Thanks again.
Can we go to Council Member O'Keefe? Thank you.
I really want to thank my colleagues for such thoughtful questions.
This is really a lot of things I hadn't thought of, a couple of questions I had that were answered, but just really great all around.
There is one area I do have some lingering curiosity about which is the Crimes Against Society section.
I acknowledge you already said that you would look into the drug equipment violations and see, kind of pull that apart more and see what that's about.
So I appreciate that.
I'm interested in that.
But in general, this category is concerning to me because I view most of these offenses as sort of like none of your business crimes.
That's just a personal philosophy.
I'm glad to see that gambling and prostitution were zero.
That's good.
And I'm assuming that pornography is material that was objectively harmful in some way.
I'm just assuming that.
That's something involving children or something like that.
That's what the statute requires.
Right.
It's not illegal otherwise.
So I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt on that one.
And weapons, sure.
I guess I am still curious, and if you have to come back with this information, that's okay, but if you could just help us understand what is the department's philosophy around drug crimes by themselves.
If an officer is driving down the street and they see somebody in their car with the engine off just smoking something, are they instructed to stop and do something to the person or should they look the other way? Sort of by itself, the only crime that is being committed is a drug crime.
Is there a department philosophy around that? I do just want to clarify that these counts are not separate incidents necessarily.
So a single incident might involve a more serious charge as well as a drug charge.
And so that will get separated out into these numbers.
That's what I was hoping.
If somebody is acting violently and had some methamphetamine, yes, it would make sense to report that.
But do any of these represent just the act of doing drugs by themselves? That question is probably not something you can answer, but in general, is that something that happens in Berkeley? I mean, it's possible it could happen.
I remember also that driving under the influence of any drug creates risk for our community.
And sometimes the combination of alcohol and drugs can make it even worse.
And I think to Arlo's great point, we arrest somebody for something and they have paraphernalia and they have usable amounts, right? Then you start to stack things.
So it's not like you can just look at this number and say, 300 times you went out and did that kind of enforcement.
We don't have a let's go out and arrest people that are smoking marijuana policy or practice as a department.
Typically when you see something like that, it's a usable sales amount quantity.
Using in a way that's causing this other risk, DUI.
Being arrested for a different charge, and that's something else that you have.
Our officers are also obligated if a felony schedule type of drug is found in someone's possession to take enforcement action or to document that.
We can't just put it in the gutter or something.
There's some spaces where if you engage with you for that reason, we have to take that kind of action.
And just to be clear, this is not a category of offenses that we identified as things that matter to us and that's why we've risen it up with our group A offenses.
We're reporting on the structure with which the national collection of crime data has collected.
Correct, it's not us saying, hey, here's the things that really matter to us that we're dealing with.
I just may be curious about that.
And I assume drug sales is part of the drug narcotics violations.
Somebody is clearly dealing drugs.
That would fall under that.
Okay, thank you very much.
I remember moving to Berkeley and people saying like, they don't ever stop you for smoking weed on the streets.
Because I would walk around and smell weed everywhere.
And I was like, oh, well, clearly not an issue here.
So anyway, I do have some questions.
I'm sorry, I was amused by the line of questioning.
So I'm curious to ask about the recruitment efforts.
This seems like it's been very successful in terms of getting interest.
Have you seen that translate over to people actually applying? And what did you find was most successful? Is that job fairs or direct connections with organizations? Or what did that look like? So I think our partnership with All Star Recruiting has been huge.
With our virtual recruiting events, we're able to show up and give individuals sort of an introduction to the department.
And we have officers, detectives, special units available to sort of talk through some of the exciting things happening at our department and opportunities for individuals.
So with that, I think leaning into All Star and those events have been very successful.
Having some of the recruiting fairs, we're a little more selective with the ones that we go to just because we haven't in the past necessarily seen a huge return on investment for those.
So we certainly appreciate doing the ones locally in any way that we can expand our diversity.
Thank you.
And then calls for service, I think that you've addressed this.
The automated service, does it involve AI? I know that Council Member Blackaby asked a similar question.
Are you talking about the dispatch tool? Yes, so it's basically like a phone tree, but it has some artificial intelligence built into it so it can direct you based on what you're saying to a call.
And there's places where you can opt out.
We're still reviewing vendors and looking at those to see what makes the most sense.
Okay, thank you.
And then Arlo, you mentioned a potential increase in crime that might be expected.
Can you speak to why researchers think that might be? Yeah.
So the last two years, we've seen the biggest drops in crimes that we've essentially ever seen on a national level, right? And so it's really difficult to explain a trend like that with a really simple explanation, but the best researchers in this space have noted that that crime drop matched closely the investments that came from the COVID-era federal funding that came into local governments and funded all types of services and public safety technology.
And as those things have been adopted and implemented, crime rates have dropped.
So there's nothing definitive on that, but certainly the best theories are kind of tied to those additional investments that were made, the lessening of the COVID disruptions.
And so as that federal funding runs out, it's possible that those crime rates might come back up accordingly depending on how communities continue to invest in those initiatives.
Thank you, that's really helpful.
And could you speak to, going to ALPR systems, were there any false positive hits generated in the ALPR system alerts? Like where the officers would review it and then it didn't match up with the license plate that the system had said it would? So no.
And I'll tell you why.
It's because they don't take that next step of acting on that if it doesn't match.
And it can be as simple as when they went by the plate reader, they thought it was SAM123, and realized because of lighting it was actually SAM128.
And so they don't take enforcement action.
And so when the outcomes drop down, there's not a space to capture that because you don't engage in the stop.
In the same way that if you didn't go and find the car, you wouldn't engage in the stop.
Right, no, that makes sense.
I guess I was curious to know, I imagine we don't track that if it isn't correct.
Is that right? We don't track that? That's correct.
Precisely the reason the Chief mentioned is that there would be nothing to report at that point.
It just goes to how accurate the ALPRs are.
That's why I was interested in that question.
And then you mentioned that you're deepening your collaborations with Vision Zero stakeholders, which is really exciting.
Could you speak more to what that looks like? Well, I'll talk about our interdepartmental operations, and Captain Durbin can talk a little bit about our traffic enforcement.
We have now regular meetings as part of a regular Vision Zero working group that include myself, our traffic lieutenant, our traffic analyst.
We are really deeply engaged in everything that's happening in public works around Vision Zero and traffic engineering.
We're giving our feedback, they're giving us feedback.
And so we are finding additional ways to be a part of all the traffic safety initiatives that are happening in the city that revolve around that Vision Zero crew.
We're a part of that fully.
Before Mike talks, another great example, too, is the daylighting efforts.
That's a Vision Zero initiative that helps safety in streets.
When that rolled out, there was a lot of meetings with the police department on how we would notice first and when we would move to enforcement.
When the curbs would be painted, all of that work was done in that kind of partnership directly related to Vision Zero.
And I'll just add that the traffic lieutenant now regularly meets with the Vision Zero coordinator.
We were looking at why are we only talking when we have a serious injury collision or a fatal collision.
You're doing construction projects all around the city, major ones, major thoroughfares.
How can we support you? What enforcement can we be doing? What should we be informing and educating the public on to make the streets safer in addition to engineering? In addition to engineering.
That's a regular meeting.
I don't know how frequently they meet, but I know it's a regular meeting between those two.
Thank you.
I was particularly concerned by this University Avenue and West Frontage total collisions 15.
I think that there's some work that's being done there on that intersection.
I don't know if someone could speak to that a little more.
Okay.
Maybe not one that you talked about in your meetings.
That's okay.
No worries.
I'll follow up about that one later.
And then the Drive Safer, Drive Longer classes for our older adult drivers.
I think that's super great.
I know I asked a lot of questions about this last year, but could you speak to a little bit about how the attendance has been looking for those classes and how we can connect folks to those classes? Are they going well? They're going really well.
Attendance is ticking up.
There's been a little lull because our traffic analyst, we just got a new traffic analyst.
That class was conducted by the previous traffic analyst who's now rotated back to patrol.
But the new analyst knows that's part of his responsibility.
We will be doing them quarterly, but last year in 2025 they did tick up in attendance and the city's PIO has helped us get the word out on that.
What was attendance like? I don't want to just throw a number out there.
You're not sure yet.
25 to 30 per class.
That's good.
I think last year was around 20 or something.
Better towards the latter ones.
That's good.
Great.
Thank you.
We'll follow up with you because I'm really interested in helping the community know more about those classes.
I think they're really important and we also want to destigmatize this training and asking for help earlier.
My last question is about our early intervention system.
I know that that was something we talked about last year and I didn't see it mentioned in this year's report.
Could you speak to what's happening with that? Yeah.
That's a really exciting program that we've been working hard on with the vendor that the PAB and ourselves and council landed on.
We are up and running with that program.
We're running it alongside our current or our existing school to compare results and make sure that we're not missing anything as we transition.
But that's been a really exciting project that we're now in the exciting part where we're starting to get some functionality out of it.
That's great.
I'm really looking forward to seeing the data from that and learning more about that for the next year's report.
Certainly, 2025 was just about getting into contract and getting it built.
2026 is when we first started piloting it actually out with our data, our local data.
So I expect that next year's report will cover that more thoroughly.
That's great.
Thank you.
All right.
So I think we're finished with the questions now.
So I want to open it up for public comments.
This is for public comments on the 2025 Berkeley Police Department annual report.
Come up.
On hate crimes and incidents, if we're going to address these, it would help to know more specific information.
For example, on race, ethnicity, and national origin.
Are these individuals black? Are they white? Are they Asian? Are they Latino? National origin is in the same category.
These anti- immigrant hate crimes and incidents.
Religion, same.
Sexual orientation.
Are the persons trans? Gender may be too broad of a category.
And that's why probably nothing has been captured.
Perhaps it has been captured in larger offenses.
Disability.
Are these persons with physical disabilities? Or mental disabilities? And also from the Homeless Commission, council had passed a recommendation to have a category on hate crimes against the homeless.
And I recall reading about a situation where someone associated with a business stabbed a homeless man while he was urinating.
Thank you.
Yes.
Hi.
One minute.
Okay.
So I note the fact that you have not been able to fill all of your officer slots and have not been able to for years.
This is not a new statistic at all.
But that does bring to the point that the unfilled slots are not in fact costing the city real dollars.
They're in the budget, but in the end you don't have the officers so they can't be paid.
So any kind of suggestion that decreasing that number of slots will free up a great deal of money for some other program is not really the case because they're not in fact empty.
So they're not costing money now.
And I'm very happy to hear about the CSO program and the other kinds of violence intervention programs.
I had seen an article saying that the Live Free program is running out of funding and I didn't hear anything that says that that funding has now been increased or will be continued.
So I'm wondering about the future of that.
I think that's a really important one for violence prevention.
Thanks, Kit.
Good afternoon, Council.
I have a couple minutes.
I have two minutes yielded to me.
I wanted to just share with you some statistics from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, Tarek Shah.
In 2025, black people were six times more likely per capita than white people to get stopped while driving.
Black people were more than nine times more likely to be stopped on foot than white people.
Black people were stopped for equipment violation eleven times more than expected from their representation in the population.
Black people were pulled over for seatbelt violations ten times more than expected from their representation in the population.
That these statistics should be part of this report and that the long time effort of this community to try to address racial profiling and its impacts on the community is not a small thing.
I also want to talk about this notion of community service officers.
For those of you who are here, some of you Council members were here during the reimagining process.
And I take some offense to the idea that CSOs represent reimagining policing.
That's not what we were talking about five years ago.
What we were saying is that CSOs actually are quite expensive compared to what we're asking them to do.
Looking at that, when you hear there's somebody sleeping on my doorstep, that there's a disturbance, somebody's yelling or somebody's drunk or somebody's passed out in the doorway.
That's what the special care unit was supposed to do.
And we know that had they been allowed, had the police actually relinquished their power that much, that we could have had a civilianized response at a fraction of the cost.
That all that overtime, all those extra hours, that they could have, what can I say, that this idea of care not cops, of care first, jails last.
Some of us still hold the torch for that.
And when I hear that they're talking about budget numbers, I realize that since 2000, their budget has gone up about 20%.
So, and I'm also just want to say that who is checking those clearance rates? Because, you know, as of 2024, it was reported in the San Francisco Chronicle that in fact Berkeley PD's clearance rate was not at the state average.
I'm not sure who's right, but I wonder what outside agencies are actually able to check those clearance rates, to check those definitions.
Certainly the PAB has not been allowed to do that.
So who will do that? So those are my concerns.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay, other public comments online for the 2025 Berkeley Police Department annual report? If you'd like to make public comment, please raise your hand.
All right.
Next up for speaker is Kelly Hammerman.
Kelly, can you hear us? Yes, I can hear you.
Can you hear me? Yes.
Okay, so I just had a couple of questions.
I know you don't answer them, but I'm going to place them out there anyway.
We just had the meeting on March 10th about how to look for that when I read the annual report.
You know, was there, we got use of force, but we don't know whether pepper spray was used in the last year.
And so I was hoping that someone might answer that or one of our council members might ask what the status of that was, since people were so interested in the reporting.
And then I wanted to know if the definition of hate crime had changed.
And then I also wanted to know if with the auto theft and the reporting solved cases.
I'm sorry.
You're out of time, but thank you for your questions, your comments.
Next speaker is first name Yik.
I'm speaking on behalf of the Cali CLU, we're a student chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
We're mainly here to talk about FLOC, which I know we'll discuss later, but for now, I want to comment on the BPD claim that ALPRs are somehow necessary for their function in Berkeley.
I want to raise a study that ALPRs in Piedmont found that less than 0.3% of hits actually translate into useful investigative leads.
So the 100 or so success stories that were brought up today are actually only a bucket, a drop in the bucket of all the things that ALPRs are unnecessarily capturing.
I recognize the department's concerned about staffing, but this is not the right technology to be remedying that with.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Next is Alana Auerbach.
Hello.
Based on the police stop data from their own open data portal, in 2005, this is, I don't, I'm not sure if this is in the report because I haven't had a chance to read it, but just to make sure this is in the public in 2005, racial 25, excuse me, racial disparities were worse than reported by the Center for Equity in Policing in 2018.
Okay? So in 2025, black people were six times more likely per capita than whites to get stopped while driving, nine times more likely to be stopped on foot.
Black people were stopped for equipment violations 11 times more than expected from their representation in the population, and were stopped 10 times more for seat violations.
Even though the BPD, based on a unanimous Berkeley City Council directive in 2021, was supposed to eliminate low-level offenses.
Meanwhile...

Segment 4

In 2025, 489 equipment violations and 45 seatbelt violations.
In short, the BPD stop data demonstrates very strong statistically significant evidence of racial.
Thanks for your comment.
Next is Angeline.
Hi, good evening.
I'm also here on behalf of UC Berkeley's Cal ACLU, and I'd like to expand on how fog cameras negatively impact the immigrant community and goes against the notion that Berkeley is a sanctuary city.
So our laws are meant to prohibit local police from assisting federal immigration enforcement, but Flux Network creates a loophole that these laws cannot close.
So we already know that federal agencies are using the service as audit logs from departments across the country.
As audit logs from departments across the country show officers listing ICE or immigration as the reason for running searches, and this means that local police are conducting searches on behalf of federal agencies.
And Berkeley is home to thousands of undocumented residents and students who are a part of this community.
And fog cameras interfere with the safety of these individuals and put some at risk of unjustified detention and bridges on their privacy.
And also has the potential to create a system of mass surveillance that impacts the lives of everyone in our city and not just those of undocumented residents.
And so the city is now considering Thanks.
Thanks for your comment.
Your time is up.
Next is Leslie.
Yes, I'm Sorry, can you start my time over? Trying to get my Thank you.
I want to speak also on behalf of community who does not want to see any flop expansion or any flop contract for any reason, for that matter.
They have been known to share their information.
Several Police departments around the country have canceled their contracts and cities and counties and we should be doing the same.
We don't need to be surveilled.
We don't need to have more surveillance.
And this is not a way that helps police.
It only hurts our community.
It only hurts our community.
And again, as others have said, we're supposed to be a community that is a sanctuary city and flock is not in line with that continuing to take away our rights is not what Berkeley should be about.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And the last speaker is Wendy Elson.
In the documentation, there is mention of a July 2025 flock Access to Berkeley's data.
I assume that's either a LPR or fixed video was not mentioned in the public report.
And I don't know whether council is asked for received a report.
It's to exactly what happened at that time.
And what data was Taken access.
We do know that Mr.
Dela Garza, a Berkeley resident, was wrongfully detained at San Francisco Immigration based on a wrongly completed INS report Based on his criminal record, including expunged record.
And I don't know what Thank you.
Thanks for your comment.
That concludes the Online public commenters.
Okay.
All right.
Thank you all for your public comments.
I will now take any comments from council members.
No comments.
Would you like to go then.
Yes.
All righty.
Thank you, Madam Mayor.
I want to thank our police chief Deputy Chief Tate, Captain Durbin.
I was gonna say urban for some reason.
I apologize.
And Mr.
Malberg for your presentation.
It was very, very comprehensive, as always.
And, you know, I didn't have questions, but I did just want to note Some of the really important Stats that you presented one that really jumped out at me where the clearance rates.
I can't find.
Oh, okay.
Here I see the slide, but I don't, it doesn't have a number on it, but, you know, on every category.
I see we have clearance rates and that's the percentage of cases closed within one year of being reported on every single one of those are percentage exceeds the state average.
So, you know, I just want to note that, you know, we have been very successful.
I didn't actually look at all of the prior years to compare how we're doing.
I do see Some increases, though, just scanning it right now.
So I, you know, I think that that's a very positive sign.
And, you know, I as a preview for for what we will be discussing later this evening.
You know, I think the what you had to say about leveraging technology, I think will will be really important for our later conversations.
I just wanted to note.
Now, do you think that the that there's a relationship between having the full year of citywide deployment of the automated license plate readers and the higher than average clearance rates.
I don't know if you've looked at that specifically that relationship.
Can you comment on that at all.
Yeah, I think that's absolutely one of the things that we would point to to that.
And I'll share an example that is tonight again.
But with what Richmond experienced when they paused their LPRs for a period of time for a couple months.
And what they saw was that incidents went up and closure rates went down as a result.
And so we just look to look to look to understand that there may be things that drive clearance.
And I appreciated Councilmember Lopar's comment about or a question about did you get more detectives? Did you tell them to focus on this work? You know, did something else change? And because we try to limit or understand what drove change.
And we didn't have those things that occurred.
What we did have was a full year of LPR data.
Okay, thank you very much for that.
And then the the other thing I wanted to note was the on the accountability slide that you showed in terms of the tests for bias.
I think you've shown that, you know, every year for several years now.
And I think those those results speak for themselves, you know, and I can just repeat what we what you reported, right.
For the collision demographics, there's a strong alignment with stops the veil of darkness, it's been consistent across light and dark, the yield rate analysis, I've showed no indications of bias, and the force rate by race was consistent across groups.
So, I mean, obviously, we could delve more into that we could have a whole session about that.
But that's not what we're doing this evening.
But, you know, I just wanted to highlight that, because I think that that's very important.
And, you know, I think that's something we must continue to monitor, as with all of these stats.
So thank you again for the presentation.
Thank you, Councilmember Humbert.
Thank you, Madam Mayor.
And I want to thank everyone present on the other diets here tonight.
I really appreciate all the presentation, all the work that you've, you've done on the report, and all other folks who worked on the report.
I also want to thank officers LeDoux and McGee, and the remainder of folks at BPD that have been supporting your efforts.
And all the staff who do the day to day work on our streets to keep our city safe.
I'm very pleased by most of what I see in this report.
I don't want to jinx anything, but it seems right now we've turned a major corner on the increase in crime that we saw after the pandemic.
And while I'm sure that a notable portion of that is due to external factors, I also think it really reflects the hard work of the department, and that some of the more recent trends likely reflect the effectiveness of the new tools we're using, especially the license plate readers.
I understand that it can be hard to separate out different causes and effects, as Arlo mentioned, and that we have national and state crime trends that are also going down, but we have enough local examples at this point of ALPR approving instrumental and solving crimes that I think it is reasonable to conclude there is a very significant benefit.
I think the strongest evidence of this is perhaps in our increase in solved robberies.
That increase would not be as closely associated with national trends, because whether we solve robberies or not is much more locally determined.
So again, I think the evidence that the tools are working is strong.
I'm concerned by the increase in sexual assaults, though it's not clear if that reflects a worrying trend or whether we're doing a better job of encouraging people to come forward.
I hope this is something that BPD will monitor and may be able to report back on later.
Unfortunately, we're having a national moment where hateful people feel enabled and empowered, and I think this is likely responsible for our increase in local hate crimes.
So likewise, I hope that BPD might explore ways that it can even more effectively respond to those and prevent these crimes and let the community know that they should report them and that victims will be supported by the city and by the department.
I also want to laud BPD on the fact that the recovery rates and the veil of darkness test shows frankly no broad systemic bias.
That's something to be proud of, the yield rates as well.
So again, I really want to thank everybody, Chief Lewis, all the folks at BPD for their excellent work on the streets and on this report, and I hope that positive trends continue and that we can reverse the negative ones.
Thank you.
Thank you, Council Member.
Council Member Trajko.
Thank you so much.
Actually, many of my laudatory comments were echoed by Council Member Humbert.
So I just wanted to say, and I've said this before on the dais, and it's true.
Every time I travel to conferences with elected officials, I am sure to mention the professionalism of this department.
I will hold it up against any other department.
You do an incredible job day in and day out, and I want to thank you for demonstrating the utmost professionalism.
I will keep my comments very brief.
I very much support the initiatives that you're taking, particularly around standing up the CSO program and the transparency hub.
There's always going to be continuous improvement, but this is something that has been incredibly helpful and valuable for the sake of transparency with the public and everyone, and I want to thank the work that you are continuing to do to build that out and share it with the public.
Like others, I am concerned about the reported increase in both sexual assaults and hate crimes.
I look forward to digging in more to see how we may be able to support your efforts to reduce those instances.
And, of course, we look forward to continued engagement as the District 4 Council Office with the highest number of calls for service.
I've been deeply appreciative of the opportunities to connect with you and get additional detail.
We look forward to doing that.
I'm also very interested in hearing more about how we can partner to reduce not just traffic violence, but collisions or injuries related to improper use of micromobility devices.
So thank you so much.
Thank you, Vice Mayor Lunapara.
Thank you.
I just wanted to appreciate and acknowledge the work that went into this, and so thank you for the report.
Thank you.
Okay, Council Member Blackabee.
Thanks, Madam Mayor.
I know we're going to be spending a lot of time together tonight, so again, just want to thank you for being here.
Thank you for answering our questions, and I look forward to working with you over the next year to make material progress in all these metrics.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Council Member Bartlett.
Great.
I also want to thank you for your service and your work here.
Twelve years ago, I saw one of our members here de-escalate a potential knife attack.
I saw it with my own eyes.
It was amazing.
It was a brilliant response, and you cooled someone down, and that person's alive and well today.
Going back to the GVIP, the Gun Violence Intervention Prevention Program.
Do you say GVIP when you say it? Let's say GVIP.
What do you say? Okay, it's like a GVIPula here, but around the GVIPula, the GVIP, I do want to, I love that you love it.
Of course, we fought for this for years, and so I guess rolling into the next conversations outside of this particular instant, you know, budgetary conversations, I look forward to working with you to help build out the case to refund it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Council Member Kaplan.
Thank you, and good evening.
I offer my thanks as well.
It's great to see a lot of the work that we set out together come to fruition.
Okay.
Well, I really want to thank you all so much for the report.
Thank you, Chief.
I really, I want to, there's so many things I really want to comment on, so I apologize.
In advance, it's going to be a longer comment than I normally give, but I really want to comment on the strategic way of using the right resources, right people for the job.
I just think that this working smart approach, data-driven approach is incredibly effective, and so I know, Arlo, you do all, a lot of their data crunching, so I want to thank you as well because I think it makes for really good policing, and I really appreciate also the increase in the on-street, on-the-street patrolling.
We hear from a lot of community members.
They want to see officers more out in the community interacting with folks, the community policing piece, so thank you for that.
I really want to comment also on the importance of reporting.
I think there are a lot of folks in the community, when stuff happens, they'll tell their neighbor, they'll tell their friend, but they don't always report it, and those reports are so important, so I want the community to make sure that they know that you all change what you do based on the different reports and the numbers in different neighborhoods, and so I hope that also my council colleagues, we can also encourage the community members to report when things are happening because that enables us to figure out what resources we need to support some of the things that are happening.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And I also want to comment on what you all commented on as well, but I think it really shows the success of partnerships between BPD and some of our reimagining public safety programs like LiveFree who runs our gun violence prevention programs.
This partnership has really just been amazing, just really incredible.
And I really appreciate that we have the kind of police department that is excited about those partnerships, that you all are really engaging in a real way and it's not like, oh, we have to do this.
I really see the enthusiasm from the department and I want the community to know about that.
And also this CSO position, that is really exciting to me to have folks out in the community making those connections, showing up for the community, you know, unarmed.
I think that that makes a big difference.
And as you commented on as well, also a good kind of training platform for folks who might be interested in becoming sworn officers later.
And then they have that real community connection and hopefully they stay with our department, right? We want that to happen.
We want our police officers to be embedded in the community, know the community, have that community trust, already know kind of our usual cast of characters, that's really valuable for community policing.
And yes, as I mentioned already, really pleased to see the clearance rates are rising across all types of cases.
This is huge when crimes occur in Berkeley and it's good to know that we have higher solve rates than California average.
That's something we should be incredibly proud of.
And that given that infrastructure and public safety are two of my policy priority areas, I'm really concerned about all of our road safety issues in Berkeley.
I know that's not something you're responsible for, but in terms of working together really closely with this Vision Zero team, I really love that collaboration across departments.
I think that's excellent and we need to be doing that more.
And also just appreciate that BPD is citing folks on the road who are creating hazardous conditions for everyone, drivers, pedestrians, cyclists.
And I think that that is just really excellent and important work because I hear from folks sometimes, I said this last year too, but that they think that BPD doesn't do anything around traffic safety and that's really not true.
So I want to do as much as we can to highlight that.
I want folks to know that you all are paying attention and giving tickets too, especially around the daylighting.
I wish the daylighting was really highlighted here in this report because I think that's another excellent opportunity.
I'm wondering if there could be a section of cross-departmental community collaborations or something because there are so many ways that you all do that well.
Coffee with a cop, I think that's within your, not BPA, but in the department, right? So I think that's excellent.
I would love to see all that stuff highlighted because I think it's something that you all do very well.
So okay, that was my gushing.
I'm done.
Thank you.
I really appreciate you all for this and given that this was just a presentation and we don't have to vote on anything, I will see if there is a motion to adjourn.
Okay.
And as long as there is no opposition to adjourning, we will adjourn for our special meeting.
No opposition, then we are adjourned.
Okay.