Center for Policing Equity

The Berkeley city auditor’s office released an audit of the city’s police department focusing on racial disparities in stops and response times to incidents involving mentally ill or unhoused individuals Thursday.

BART police is adopting six recommendations after an outside study showed racial disparities in police stops and use of force.

After almost 10 hours of discussion, Berkeley City Council approved a revised version of the Berkeley Police Department’s use-of-force policy, among other items, at its Thursday meeting.

An examination of the Berkeley Police Department’s stop data reveals significant disparities between stops involving white and Black individuals.

Berkeley's Police Review Commission, or PRC, discussed its collection and analysis of stop data, or data relating to police stops and searches, and the passage of Lexipol policies at its regular Wednesday night meeting at the South Berkeley Senior Center.

The Berkeley Police Association, or BPA, has spent more than $15,000 campaigning against City Council candidate Kate Harrison — more than twice as much as the association has spent in support of candidates Lori Droste and Rashi Kesarwani, combined.

While Black people constitute 12 percent of BART customers according to the most recent data, which is from 2015, the report presented to the BART Police Citizen Review Board at its June 11 meeting found that among all the use-of-force incidents in 2017, 50.9 percent involved Black males and 14.7 percent involved Black females.

Berkeley Police Department will incorporate the recommendations for approaching racial bias in policing set forth in a report by the Center for Policing Equity, or CPE.

The report catalogues disparities in stops, searches and arrests among Black, Hispanic, Asian American and white populations and provides recommendations for BPD practices to address the concerns raised by the report’s findings.

Berkeley City Council unanimously voted to create a task force that will address racial disparities suggested in data on the Berkeley Police Department.