Berkeleyside and Berkeley Speaks: On police accountability

Comparison and comment

On November 5, 2025, Berkeleyside.com published a revealing article by Alex Gecan titled “Civilian oversight of Berkeley police is hitting a wall.” Berkeley Speaks appreciates the Berkeleyside investigation.

In our article below, we compare selected passages from the Berkeleyside article with our own investigation.

Part One: Police refusal to turn over records to Police Accountability Board as mandated by city charter.

Berkeleyside reported:

Several times in the last year, the city’s police department refused to turn over records to the Police Accountability Board (PAB) and police accountability director unless subpoenaed. 

Accountability board members spent years reviewing racist, anti-homeless text messages between members of a Berkeley police unit.

Berkeley Speaks comment:

It is good that Berkeleyside continues to follow this story.

The refusal of City staff to turn over information requested by the PAB or the Director violates the plain language of the city charter. The charter is the highest level of municipal law. The police accountability structure was voted in by a very high margin–almost 85% of the electorate.

There is some confusion about why the PAB and the Director cannot get the BPD data it needs for its investigation. Some point to the ongoing, seemingly unending negotiation between the city management and the police association. This “meet-and-confer” process is about establishing the PAB’s permanent regulations. It is NOT the reason for delay in the Department turning over files for the texting scandal investigation. Here’s why:

The PAB, and the Director as well, have two main duties under the law. One is to investigate and make advisory judgments on charges of officer misconduct and discipline. The second is to conduct policing policy investigations.  PAB regulations are specifically concerned with officer misconduct investigations. They have nothing to do with policy investigations.

The information that the police department would not turn over was for their policy investigation. That kind of investigation examines whether the BPD is following its own policies, and if so, whether department policies need to be changed. Policy investigations do not lead to officer discipline. Therefore the officer association has no role in that discussion and there is no need for a meet-and-confer with them. And the PAB’s regulations do not apply to policy investigations.

No, the difficulty getting information from the City for use in policy investigations is entirely on City staff: the Department, the city management, and probably the City Attorney’s Office.

The City blocked officer misconduct investigations due to their own failure to wrap up meet-and-confer with police

On the other hand, regarding officer misconduct, there is a separate issue. The problem here is that the PAB was prevented by city management from conducting any disciplinary investigation of the texting scandal at all. (We’ll get into that in Part Two of this article, below.) This is a violation of the city charter section that established the PAB.

There is an apparent conflict of interest in city management, which oversees the police department, having veto power over what information is disclosed about the department’s practices, to an oversight body. That’s particularly the case when the oversight body, the PAB, has unconditional authority of this access guaranteed by the city charter.

How the PAB was eventually able to get BPD records for the policy investigation

It is interesting to hear that city management began cooperating with the PAB’s request for information when PAB issued a subpoena. According to the charter a subpoena should not be necessary, but its success indicates a path for the Board’s future investigations, in cases where there may be a need for both officer misconduct and policy investigations:

The officer investigation is the most time-critical, because there is generally a limit of 120 days after the City’s discovery of alleged misconduct for the City to complete its investigation. That’s about four months. After that, the officer is off the hook.

Therefore in the future, it would be best if the PAB, first, move as quickly as possible to initiate the officer misconduct investigation; second, request all the relevant information from the City; third, if the City does not immediately comply, PAB should issue a subpoena; fourth, conduct the disciplinary investigation; and fifth, establish and conduct a policy investigation.

The police accountability structure, composed of the Board and the office of the Director, must be seen as a part of the public safety system. For the administration to refuse to comply with the charter is not only self-serving but illegal. It is also harmful to public safety.

Part Two: Never-ending story of meet-and-confer on permanent regulations

Berkeleyside reported:

“Meanwhile, the accountability board has been trying for more than two years to negotiate its own working rules with the city police officers union. Without them the board has been working under interim regulations since 2021.

“And now the City Council, which several PAB members have accused of ignoring their oversight work and recommendations, has waded into the negotiations to tell everyone involved to hurry up and get the regulations done.”

Berkeley Speaks comment:

Some context is important here.

Berkeley Speaks wrote in September 2023, in “Berkeley City Administration Absolves Itself of Racial Bias in Policing; Denies Practicing Arrest Quotas”: 

Meet-and-confer in Berkeley becomes “Meet-and defer”

Bringing the discussion back to Berkeley, the meet-and-confer began after the overwhelmingly approved charter amendment. Full implementation of the amendment has been frustrated by the very limited interim regulations that were forced on the PAB pending the negotiation on the permanent regs. This puts the City in an untenable situation, compounded by the extremely long conferring, now in its fourth year. 

To blame the PAB for the length of the meet-and-confer is deceptive, as it is not the responsible body in this labor-management process. The responsibility is on the City Manager to protect the decisions of the electorate in the charter amendment, hold the conversation for a reasonable amount of time, then pull the plug on meet-and-confer if it comes to an impasse. That should have happened years ago.

It bears repeating, as we wrote in October of 2024, “that the entire text of Measure ii (the charter amendment creating the PAB) was negotiated for over a year in a previous meet-and-confer process starting in 2018, meaning that much of the proposed permanent regulations had already been negotiated with the police association, before the Measure went to the voters.”

And this unending delay on implementing permanent regulations that match the intent of the voters is the reason that the PAB was prevented from pursuing police misconduct investigations in the texting scandal.

But there is one more example of legalistic game-playing that needs to be explained. The City Charter provides that “any member of the public” may bring an officer misconduct complaint to the PAB. The interim regulations do not provide for that latitude, saying that only an aggrieved party or an eyewitness may do so; but the interim regs also allow that “Complaints may also be initiated by the Board upon a vote of five Board members to authorize an investigation.” However, city management states that, since the PAB is not the public but a government entity, it would violate the Charter for the Board to take that action. So the City is relying on the same Charter provision that they have suspended to bar the Board’s power to lodge a complaint, and to rely on the interim regs–except for the provision that allows the Board to complain. It would be humorous if the end effect was not to deny the PAB the ability to investigate the officers involved in clearly racist and anti-homeless behavior–the primary purpose for which civilian oversight was created over fifty years ago.

Part Three: The frustrating sidelining of the Police Accountability Board

Berkeleyside reported:

“‘It’s sometimes frustrating that our recommendations are not accepted, sometimes feel dismissed, but we are an advisory board, so they can take our advice or leave it,’ Kitty Calavita, who has been on the board since its inception, told Berkeleyside in a phone interview.

“‘That advice comes from board members with lifetimes of experience in policing and oversight,’ Calavita added. 

“‘We have attorneys on our board, we have Ph.D.s on our board, we have people with a lot of relevant experience, so it is often frustrating that our advice is not taken.’”

Berkeley Speaks comment:

The Board members’ frustration is valid.

We wrote in our May 2025 article:

The investigation of the Downtown Street Team / Bike Force texting scandal has come to a dead end. On April 15, 2025, the city council voted overwhelmingly to completely reject the PAB’s investigative report and its recommendations.

Community members who went all out to pass Measure ii in 2020 were stung by the blunt rejection of the PAB report, first by the council’s Public Safety Committee and finally by the full council. Committee members accepted the staff position that there were no larger problems outside the Bike Team, that the BPD does not tolerate arrest quotas, and that there are no continuing problems. As police officers often say, “Move along, nothing to see here.”

The Council did approve, on a vote of 8-1, a mild statement offered by Council Member Brent Blackaby. This resolution condemns “any and all racism and misconduct….and affirms its strong opposition to arrest quotas and supports BPD’s existing practice against using arrest quotas.” It urges the state legislature to extend the prohibition on arrest quotas to from the vehicle code to apply to all types of arrests in California.

Our May article then detailed a number of serious but unaddressed questions that may never be answered due to the abrupt rejection of the PAB report.  These included: how could the extensive texting go undiscovered by anyone outside the text group? What other officers participated in the texting? Was it not a violation for officers to fail to report misconduct? Were enforcement actions tainted by the anti-homeless and racist behavior? What are the implications of the improper behavior being headed by the president of the police association?

We concluded with the following:

“City management and the council appear content to rely on formalities such as stated policies to assure the public that there is no issue with the conduct of policing in Berkeley. Council and management are the only bodies with the authority to ensure truly fair and impartial policing.”

Unfortunately, this conclusion still stands. On June 26, the Office of the Director of Police Accountability (ODPA) sent to Council a “Statement on City Council hiring freeze and impact on Investigative operations,” stating: