May 2025 marks five years since the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, spurring the national examination of race and policing, and a movement to reimagine public safety.
As we’ve reported in this space in previous issues (see “Berkeley City Administration Absolves Itself of Racial Bias in Policing,” Vol 1, Issue 3, September 2023), the City government has blocked real police oversight in a number of ways.
A year and a half after Berkeley Speaks published that article, its conclusion remains accurate:
“In short, the biggest obstacle to civilian oversight of the police in Berkeley at this time is the City’s delay of the permanent regulations intended to express the will of the voters who overwhelmingly approved the charter amendment in 2020. For police accountability to finally come to Berkeley, the City Attorney’s Office and city management will have to unblock the process.”
Unfortunately, the City’s will to empower the Police Accountability Board (PAB) seems absent. While meet-and-confer between city management and the police association, now in its third year, trundles on in secret, the Board is denied its Charter powers. These include the power to accept complaints from non-involved community members, and to receive information from City departments related to policy investigations.
Judging by the outcome of the Bike team texting investigation, the city council—which should be driving the police accountability train—is instead part of blocking it.
The unsatisfying conclusion to the Berkeley “Textgate” Scandal
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….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.
Only Councilmember Lunaparra dissented, saying that the Blackaby measure “took away the teeth” from the PAB proposal. She also stated her discomfort that:
“[a provision in the measure that] references our community’s full faith and confidence in the police department conveys that, even though some police officers committed predatory acts of racism and classism, this body still has full confidence in them and supports them uncritically, especially given that some of them are still part of our police department.
“This sends a bad message to those who were directly impacted by this behavior.”
The abrupt halt to the long investigation left a long list of other questions unanswered. These include:
- How could this team, which was led by a sergeant, have carried on so long with candid displays of inhumane attitudes about the unhoused, and against African Americans, and establishing de facto arrest quotas and other improper behavior, without discovery by any leading officers?
- If none but Officer Shedoudy reported this behavior to department management, this would be a violation of the requirement to report biased policing. What other officers in or outside the department participated in or were aware of the behavior that the council condemned? (Judging from the nine other departments cited for inappropriate texting as shown in the graphics on this page, it is highly likely that officer misconduct crosses city lines.)
- Were any of the arrests or citations delivered by the Bike Team tainted by the anti-homeless and racist attitudes, and the improper arrest quotas, displayed in the published texts?
- The sergeant responsible for the Bike Team was also the president of the police association. What does this imply about the culture of the association, and its member officers, regarding their level of respect for the humanity of the unhoused and the Black community?
- The official City-sponsored investigation was supposed to be focused on individual officer conduct and was therefore deemed confidential. The City’s spokesperson selectively leaked a statement that went beyond individual conduct to allege that the secret investigation found the department does not have a practice of racial bias and does not have any arrest quotas.
Yet the little hard evidence the public does have, due to its release by the whistleblower, clearly indicates such practices in at least one team. If the BPD as a department does not condone these practices, it does not seem to actively prohibit teams or units from engaging in them. One more unanswered question: what if anything has changed since Shedoudy’s revelation?
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.
PAB: Oversight without Access is Not Possible
Eureka Police captain and sergeant retire from department amid texting scandal
Another line in the council resolution “affirms the PAB’s ability to access relevant information to conduct specific investigations, under authority granted by the Charter.” (The limitation to “specific investigations” is not found in the Charter, but was apparently created for this resolution, so this statement appears misleading.)
The resolution continues to “urge the PAB, OPDA, and BPD to adopt their final regulations as expeditiously as possible, after completing the ‘meet and confer’ process with the BPA [Berkeley Police Association, the police union], to clarify how investigations will be conducted with appropriate information provided by BPD.”
The council’s statement reflects a misunderstanding of the role of the PAB. The meet-and-confer process covers one type of investigation the Board conducts: complaints against individual officers. It’s understandable that the police association would claim an interest in the process of investigations of their members.
The “Textgate” investigation, however, focused on policies, practices, and procedures.“ Policy investigations are another activity assigned to the PAB in the City Charter. Policy investigations do not focus on individual behavior, and do not result in recommendations for discipline. Therefore, policy investigations are not included in the regulations. Those regulations, when they are finally approved, will have no effect on issues of the PAB‘s access to information when it conducts a policy investigation.
The changes that the PAB seeks are solely to implement the access to departmental records that the City Charter mandates.
Put simply, the staff knows better and is misleading Council members. Neither the regulations, nor the meet-and-confer, are the reasons for staff’s years of defiance of the City Charter mandate to deliver department records needed for policy investigations to the PAB. No valid purpose was served by the many months of delay in turnover of the required/subpoenaed records. They simply didn’t want to. This is willful defiance of the law and the will of the voters, and it obstructs police accountability.
Responsibility for bringing the transparency of BPD records up to the Charter’s requirements rests, again, with City management and ultimately the council.
As we stated in our prior issue (October 2024):
“There are limits to the City’s responsibility to meet and confer; for example, it is not required if the change ‘arises from implementation of a fundamental managerial or policy decision.’
“In addition, those with long memories will recall that the entire text of Measure ii 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.
“It’s also noteworthy that while meet-and-confer is a negotiation, there is no requirement that the parties keep conferring until they agree. Under state law, after a good-faith attempt to come to agreement, the City may declare an impasse. The police may not use the meet and confer process to indefinitely stall the legitimate policy decisions of the government, for example meaningful police accountability.”
Eight months after we wrote these lines, little has changed. Implementing the overwhelming will of the people as expressed in 2020’s Measure ii is in the hands of City management, and by extension their boss, the city council.