Public Comment

When I was four years old my parents would sneak me into Shelley's Manhole to hear Milt Jackson's quintet or guitarist Bill Evans. Musicians were welcome at our house the next afternoon, Sunday, for a loose day of barbecue and low-key jamming where I learned my first chords and my first stories of Los Angeles' racism. More than one band lost a player driving through the wrong community trying to get to a gig while touring. A joint would typically be "found" in a clean car pulled over for no reason. The band would be forced to spend money bailing out a player, or finding a pick-up player to complete a date, and some of them, including Herb and Lorraine Geller, moved to Europe to find someplace receptive to jazz culture and respectful of musicians. 

My father used to say, "There's the law, and then there's what really happens." He told me while we washed the car one Saturday morning when I asked why we didn't have any bumper stickers like other people do, that the only bumper sticker one should ever have on one's car was "Support the local police." 

It took a whistleblower to expose Berkeley's horrifying "textgate," the scandal of racist texts revealing the downtown bicycle police patrol joking about their efforts to hit a quota of arrests of homeless people. Even getting documentation of the whistleblower's allegations was a struggle, such that the Police Accountability Board (PAB) produced a report last week suggesting some obvious reforms regarding data the Police Department has, but doesn't like to share. 

The current city council, with the notable exception of District 7's Cecelia Lunaparra, sidestepped April 15, 2025's opportunity to provide the board with the necessary tools to avoid future cover-ups and squarely address racism. The PAB's suggestions were watered down or erased. The council majority had not one word of substantive discussion about the racism casually embedded in the police department. And they were unmoved by passionate public comment calling for change. 

It took years for a scandal this overt and undeniable to carve even this far into the firmament of the Berkeley Police Department's rock solid perspective on police accountability, which has always been and remains that any implication of police wrongdoing is suspicious and probably the spawn of kneejerk prejudice against police by people who don't have clarity about police procedure or the courts or both. It will clearly take even more years for the Police Department to find leadership willing to admit that racism as casually traded between members of the bicycle patrol is unlikely to be unique to the department, and that the comic salute to the concept of police accountability, which passed not quite unanimously, was unlikely to create meaningful change. 

Those of us who are routinely targeted watched this municipal kabuki in the cold light of a national struggle with the tides of white supremacy. Our leadership is apparently just that thin-skinned and Just that willing to opt for a bit of theater over setting aside the hide-and-go-seek games over public documents in order to maintain a broad posture of disrespect for anything but a quick, cursory look at the fact that the Berkeley bicycle police patrol's racist, discriminatory behavior is not unique. And that we still don't have the leadership we need to address it.