Public Comment

Berkeley Councilmember Bartlett recently used the revelation of racist Berkeley police texts to salute himself and the people of Berkeley in an article in the November Berkeley Daily Planet[1] claiming the people of Berkeley "have committed and recommitted to defend the constitution, and our freedom by ending racist policing." 

Councilmember Harrison did the same thing on November 17, 2022, issuing a statement saying, "We do not know if these offensive comments and actions extend beyond the time period and team implicated in the text threads, but the texts validate real concerns in our community and underscore the importance of the Mayor’s Fair and Impartial Task Force and Reimagining Policing efforts on which I served." 

They're both wrong. The evidence of Berkeley's racism lies in plain sight ignored by a complicit City Council obediently passing anti-homeless legislation on cue[2]. It's obvious in our legislation[3] as documented by Berkeley Law School's Policy Advocacy Clinic's report issued in 2015 comparing the spectacular mountain of Berkeley laws targeting homeless people with that of other California cities. 

The Berkeley Law School's Policy Advocacy Clinic group issued another report[4] September 18, 2018, showing that publicly funded Business Improvement Districts "Exclude Homeless People from Public Space with Taxpayer Dollars." These well documented studies go unremarked by the Berkeley City Council. 

Harrison's statement goes on to suggest that the interim police chief be at the helm of an investigation into the racist texting glinting in the current news cycle, an investigation she is apparently content to have overseen by the same council and mayor whose blindness about decades of discriminatory police practices has been underscored yet again - by a whistleblower instead of any city agency with appropriate purview. 

The recent revision of the Police Review Commission didn't notice, let alone address, these racist practices, nor did the recent "reorganization" of the city's commissions which the current city councilmembers did not oppose. Without the whistleblower's intervention, the racist legislation, texts and the culture that enabled them would have gone unnoticed, the same way only a bystander's accidental video posted on YouTube revealed an assault on a homeless man by one of the Downtown Berkeley Association's (DBA) "ambassadors" in March of 2015.[5] 

When that video went viral, the apologies flowed like the publicly funded wine which more traditionally lubricated the Downtown Berkeley Association's yearly public event routinely summarizing its benefits to the community, a community which to this day has yet to require a serious complaint system or serious oversight of any kind. Merchants know that if they want to "disappear" a single individual or a tent group, all they have to do is signal an ambassador and the magic happens whether it is constitutional or not; the publicly funded merchant associations oversee their own complaint process - if they exist at all[6] - without objection from the mayor or council. 

District Four's Kate Harrison, in particular, played a starring role in email discussions between herself and the DBA's Director John Caner as they discussed Streetplus's "Pilot Program" arming Berkeley's "ambassadors" with pepper spray, batons, and handcuffs. No citizen commissions were included in this email discussion which turned the "Hospitality/Cleaning Ambassador services" into a group which makes its own arrests.[7] 

This recipe works for the wealthy. Courts which used to exhibit a modest obligation toward civil rights violations by police have doubled down on pressuring the poor to take pleas or face lengthy pre-trial incarceration, especially now as the pandemic backs up an already overloaded court system. Those of us routinely discriminated against by prejudice against targeted individuals, whether activists singled out for political purposes[8] or poor people pushed into public spaces for wont of any safe space to harbor, have individual stories to document the human toll taken on a community that should know better. But the systematic studies of police stops, arrest records, and discriminatory legislation ought by now to have put an end to the "bad apple" assessment both Bartlett and Harrison recommend. 

In recent decades the war on the poor, on open space, and on independent thought is so profound that the current Rent Board slate takes a "loyalty oath" to qualify for candidacy, apparently without embarrassment. Commissions are reconfigured to as to pose no challenge to a developer/status quo-driven council with no incentive to listen to constitutional issues. When the "ambassadors" were caught systematically removing legally posted public posters in the downtown area, no one got fired.[9] Even today the DBA boasts on its own website about providing unconstitutional services to remove and relocate people behaving in perfectly legal ways, such as sleeping, which is a human necessity, not a crime.[10] 

The pressure on the police to promote discriminatory practices in policing comes straight from various Business Improvement District's (BID) property owners and BID staff who don't just promote discriminatory legislation such as anti-panhandling, anti-sitting, and anti-poor laws to a complacent city council - they sit with small groups of councilmembers[11] and officials and help create the original legislation, often without bothering to allow it to visit the various commissions which in better times would have an opportunity to temper their excesses. 

Our current mayor, Jesse Arreguin, won't even allow ceremonial recognition of People's Park's admission to the National Register of Historic Places, apparently terrified to even symbolically affirm years of dedicated scholarship by dozens of historians, naturalists, students, professors, and activists. If it doesn't suit the machine, it disappears, with our current City Council's blessing. 

The police should know better, to be sure. But they don't set discriminatory policy independently. The Downtown Berkeley Association's first poster was that of an outstretched hand - surrounded by a red circle with a line through it. It went up all over town. On that day, decades ago, the same handful of us objected, protested, and continue to do so today.[12] And on that day, as today, the council searched for scapegoats and evaded its own complicity. 

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