Extra

Guess who voted “no confidence” for Police Chief Greenwood. It was Chief Greenwood himself. The poor man, seeking to duck that vote, ended up voting no confidence in himself. By default. 

Twice, Councilmember Davila proposed a vote of “no confidence” and got it on the City Council agenda. And twice, the Mayor put the issue at the end of the agenda, and cut it off by adjourning the meeting just before it got to that. 

How did the chief vote against himself? By hiding behind the Mayor. The Mayor just ran interference for him. Of course, it was nothing more than high school interference. Nothing flashy. No inventiveness on the Mayor’s part. He just ran the clock out on it. The meeting started at 6, and when it got to 11 pm, the Mayor simply adjourned the meeting. Bang. 

Actually, the chief was more active in this process. He knew there were people anxious to see him resign. Letters had been written, and statements brought to council to be made during the “single-minute right to free speech” that is all we have left. The letters spoke about Greenwood’s lack of connection to the people, to his ignoring continued racial profiling by his department, and to his insistent reliance on advanced weaponry (to the point of the chief joking about killing people on demonstrations). We’ve seen those letters; they’ve gotten around. 

But what was surprisingly unsurprising was the chief’s silence, his temerity, his inability to do anything trustworthy or brave. He just sat there. Twice the proposal was on the City Council agenda, and twice it was set to be addressed late at night. A confident man would have strode to the front and told the Mayor to put that “no confidence” proposal first on the agenda. Let the people see a fearless public servant. Give the people a chance to speak, give them more than a minute each so they can bring out their complaints and air them in open public debate, and “have the damn vote already.” 

But alas, that was apparently more than he could muster. This poor police chief didn’t have the temerity to step to the plate, in the public eye, and demand to allow the people to speak. He wasn’t up to letting those who had something to say to him to stare him down – through the electronic mist of some zoomy virtual stare. 

However, he still couldn’t ignore it. The issue was in the air as soon as the proposal was on the table. Once there, it sat glaring at everyone with its dare. To do nothing was to go along with it. To vote. Its call was for a vote of no confidence. Under that call, for the chief to sit silent was to agree, to vote “no confidence” in the chief. 

The man who doesn’t step bravely forward when his name is called has no confidence in himself. When the chief sat there silently, he was voting against himself. Maybe he figured he wouldn’t get a vote of confidence anyway. But that just gave the people more reason to have no confidence in him. 

If this had been 60 years ago, one could have figured that it was only a black woman making the proposal. Back then, mayors and space programs and police departments could all ignore her. For the elite in their pretend-democratic institutions, a black woman didn’t count. But this is 2020, a time when black women, and women of color, have come into leadership of the movement for democracy against authoritarianism. Stacey Abrams, Alicia Garza, Cat Brooks, Cynthia McKinney, our own Councilmember Davila, and so many more. To ignore this call and her proposal is to thumb your nose at history. So we have to ask ourselves, we who live here in this allegedly progressive little town, do we want a police chief who thumbs his nose at history? Can we afford him without thumbing our own allegedly progressive noses at history as well? 

Guess what? We actually know that is what he has been doing all along. A study and report issued by the Center for Policing Equity on the Berkeley Police Department, commissioned in 2015, found that racial profiling was rampant in Berkeley. There was egregious racial disparity in the way the Berkeley Police Department operated. So the PD actually added a clause to their manual that racial profiling was banned in the Berkeley police department. It says that now, that the BPD does not engage in racial profiling. Yet for some strange reason, the same racial disparity still exists in police operations on the street. Black people and black motorists are still stopped some four to five times as often as whites, though whites outnumber black people by eight to one. The ban in the police manual exists in words only. 

For four months in 2020, there were demonstrations in Berkeley, along with the rest of the country, led by black people demanding that the police stop profiling, end their institutional racism, and get with the program of democracy – you know, the one in which all are treated equally, with equity. 40 years after the demand was raised, 5 years after the CPE report proved it was still happening, the police are led by a man who thumbs his nose at history. 

Not only is it not a brave nose, and one that is dependent on the undemocratic and authoritarian maneuvers of the Mayor, but it indicates the Mayor’s fear, and that the Mayor is just as worthy of a no confidence vote as the chief. In both agendas, he put the issue last, in order to allow time itself to clear the room of people who would want to speak, in a subtle and disguised suppression of democratic procedure. Which means he really had no confidence in the chief either. 

Well, the suppression of democratic procedures, and the suppression of public sentiment, and the suppression of transparency in the way the City Council is "run" by the Mayor, are sufficient causes for “no confidence,” not only in the chief for his timidity, but in the Mayor as well for his authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is the mask that many public figures wear to prevent the spread of that pandemic called "democracy." You know what democracy is, don’t you? It means that those who will be affected by a policy must be the ones who make the policy that will affect them. 

When the city made itself a problem for RV dwellers, who had enough problems as homeless already, it made policy for them without including them in the making of that policy. When the city allows developers to build apartment buildings in neighborhoods like South Berkeley in which there is a crisis of housing because of rent gouging by landlords, nobody gives the neighbors a seat at the table to plan how to deal with either the problem or the development that might possibly resolve it. The city is developing an Adeline Corridor Plan, which will continue the process of gentrification that has been going on for a decade, and all that the people in the neighborhood get with respect to the plan is "input," without participation. 

Do you think this city government would allow the people to have a say in who gets chosen as the chief of police? That didn’t happen when chief Greenwood was chosen. There was no search for someone to fill the position, no discussion among the people concerning who they wanted to lead 1500 employees who walk around with guns. There were no discussions concerning what or how the police should be organized or trained, or relieved of their propensity for institutional racism. There had been planty of angry discussion in City Council meetings concerning the odious use of torture equipment (like stun guns and tear gas), or surveillance equipment used to create more profiling databases. But all that fell on deaf ears. The city just went ahead with its authoritarian moves. So now, we have a chief who ducks the question of a vote of no confidence. 

Time for the chief to resign. And for the mayor to reorganize City Council so that people get more than a minute to speak, and have the power to change the order of items on the agenda. Especially now, since we get to participate only through a Zoom screen. This is a time to provide more participation, not less.