Public Comment

The Berkeley Police Department report “Response to Civil Unrest December 6th and 7th, 2014” identifies a series of bad decisions, system failures, skewed priorities and lack of mission clarity that Berkeley Copwatch feels are numerous enough to justify a call for Chief Michael Meehan to resign. The report will be presented tonight at the South Berkeley Senior Center at 6pm tonight and will begin with public comment. 

Access the report here. 

According to Berkeley Copwatch, “The report states that, ‘The event turned to violence and looting once police blocked the roadway at MLK and Addison St.’ However, this conclusion ignores the fact that a protest which had been peacefully marching along the streets was not only blocked for no reason, but individuals were struck by officer batons for simply walking too close to the officers. When one elderly man was struck and knocked to the ground, the crowd grew angrier. After a couple of projectiles were thrown (one of which was a piece of fabric), officers decided to deploy smoke grenades without issuing a dispersal order or a warning to the crowd. This police provocation set events in motion for the next few days. 

In addition, this report identifies failures of leadership that include an inability to manage mutual aid forces, an inability to effectively distinguish between the need for crowd management and crowd control, an inability to identify a clear mission for local and mutual aid forces and an inability to gather and usefully employ information about what was actually happening in the streets on those nights. 

We must remember that the inability of the leadership to establish an effective command structure capable of assessing a rapidly changing situation and prioritizing incidents exposed many of our citizens to unnecessary violence, caused hundreds of people to be needlessly exposed to CS gas and may have cost one man his life on December 7th when officers took over 20 minutes to respond to a medical emergency even though the protest was not violent and was moving away from where the dying man was. 

A more detailed critique of the BPD report will be available from Copwatch early next week.