Berkeley Promised to Reimagine Public Safety, We’re Still Waiting

In July 2020, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, Berkeley City Council passed a package of proposals to reduce the scope of police responsibilities in Berkeley. The goal was to shift mental health crisis response, outreach to unhoused people, and violence prevention to service providers who are better equipped to address public health and safety concerns without violence or arrest. Councilmembers agreed on the goal of reducing Berkeley Police Department’s budget by 50%. 

The City outlined a Reimagining Public Safety (RPS) process that is now entering its last phase. Although we appreciate the work that has gone into this process, we at Berkeley Copwatch are concerned that the City is investing in superficial police reform measures at the expense of transformative change. 

The Specialized Care Unit

City Council’s 2020 proposals included creating a Specialized Care Unit (SCU) for non-police response to mental and behavioral health crises, implementing a non-police traffic enforcement department (BerkDOT), and completing an audit of police calls and responses. The SCU began accepting calls in September 2023. Other RPS projects have thus far resulted in research reports or pending plans. 

The SCU is a team of health professionals who respond to mental and behavioral health crises instead of police. The SCU is also intended to address select calls, including “disturbance” and “social disorder,” that would otherwise be routed to BPD. The SCU is funded through Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 but City support is uncertain beyond that. The City Manager’s office recommended that long-term funding for the SCU be discussed pending evaluation of program data. A series of implementation challenges have slowed the evaluation of the SCU, potentially jeopardizing the program’s longevity.

The SCU is supposed to respond to incidents without police involvement. In practice, copwatchers have observed police officers responding to incidents that should be handled exclusively by the SCU. As far as we at Copwatch know, BPD does not have a policy of yielding to the SCU if the two agencies respond to the same incident. Police co-response undermines trust in the SCU as a non-police entity. The SCU’s independence is particularly crucial when deescalating behavioral health crises involving people who have experienced police violence. 

The SCU is not dispatched through 911 and is instead reached at 510-948-0075. Neither the existence of the SCU nor the phone number have been proactively publicized in the community, although this information is available on Berkeley’s crisis services webpage. In contrast, MH First Oakland, a crisis response project of the Anti Police Terror Project, has a social media presence and several billboards advertising their number. The City will not be able to evaluate and improve the SCU if few people know to use it.  

The SCU is supposed to operate 24/7, but Bonita House, the nonprofit that runs the unit, has reportedly had difficulty hiring sufficient staff. Current hours of operation are Sunday through Wednesday 24 hours and Thursday through Saturday 6am to 4pm. In recent years, the largest number of events that resulted in a police response occurred on Friday and Saturday evenings between 8pm and 1am. If the SCU is to offer an alternative to police crisis response, it should operate during times when calls for help are most frequent. The SCU’s closure during peak hours limits the help that can be rendered as well as opportunities to gather feedback.  

Double Standards in Public Safety

The City of Berkeley is cautious when designing and funding new public safety programs. The gun violence prevention program, for example, has been four years in the making. The City aims to select a community-based organization to implement the program in Fall 2024. The 911 dispatch redesign overseen by the Fire Department has also progressed very slowly. In May 2024, after two assessments by consultants, the Fire Department planned to issue a Request For Proposals to hire a third consultant to help determine next steps. 

The City seems to apply lower standards when approving public safety proposals from BPD. For example, the FY 2024 budget included funding for six Community Service Officers (CSOs) and one CSO supervisor to join the police force. These officers receive less training and lower pay than police. They don’t have guns but are allowed to carry “propellants” and batons. The City Manager’s Office wrote in April 2022 that hiring more CSOs is consistent with Reimagining Public Safety because these officers can help “develop additional capabilities to address public safety goals with appropriate response level.” The suggestion that additional police staff will help design and implement reforms disregards the fact that the RPS process exists because police-led police reform has time and again proven incapable of halting police violence.    

The CSO role is not consistent with key promises of the RPS process. Expanding BPD’s roster adds to the scope of police responsibilities. CSOs interview witnesses and suspects and process people at the BPD jail. The CSO job description says nothing of proactively addressing conditions that lead people to commit crimes, including lack of economic opportunities and mental health disorders. In other words, CSOs help BPD conduct business as usual.

The six new CSO positions were created as temporary two-year roles and intended as a pilot program. BPD reported trouble hiring for this limited-term position. To make the position more attractive to candidates, the City Manager’s Office proposed to convert the temporary CSO positions to permanent roles. The difficulty staffing the CSO pilot program has been taken as evidence that more funding is needed. Meanwhile, as the SCU similarly struggles with staffing, its future funding hinges on proof of the program’s success. 

Recommitting to Non-Police Response 

The City is disinclined to subsidize non-police public safety programs until they have proven successful. The problem is that it’s hard to demonstrate the promise of alternative public safety programs without a commitment to a fully funded and staffed implementation. The SCU is currently caught in this kind of limbo. The City – including the city manager, mayor, city council, fire department, and of course, police – has not committed to improving and incorporating the SCU into the emergency response system, and this partial implementation may prevent the SCU from becoming tried and trusted. BPD in particular must create policies that direct officers to respect the SCU’s authority on-scene and redirect calls to the SCU. 

The need to transition responsibilities away from the police expands beyond the SCU and mental health crisis response. Embracing alternatives to policing means planning responses to a range of nonviolent calls, such as noise complaints. Berkeley needs to create alternatives to police and invest in these programs as they are dreamed and designed. Any new alternative public safety program comes with uncertainty and challenges, and we should embrace that uncertainty. Berkeley has an opportunity to create a new public safety paradigm instead of perpetuating the certain violence of policing.