The Berkeley City Council will vote on whether to reinstate the Berkeley Police Department’s ability to use tear gas in its July 14 meeting.

The recommendation, authored by District 1 Councilmember Rashi Kesarwani, aims to amend the City Council’s June 2020 decision to permanently ban the use of tear gas under any circumstances and place a temporary moratorium on the use of smoke and pepper spray.

Kesarwani’s recommendation proposes that the council allow BPD’s Special Response Team to use tear gas in circumstances in which there is a “significant risk of injury or death.” It would also maintain the June 2020 ban on using tear gas solely for crowd control and lift the temporary moratorium on the use of smoke and pepper spray.

“I support keeping the tear gas ban in place,” said Mayor Adena Ishii in a written statement. “I understand that the Berkeley Police Department needs effective tools, and I believe they can keep our community safe using other less-lethal methods.”

Kesarwani did not provide comment by press time.

The June 2020 ban was driven by health concerns associated with COVID-19 which are “no longer present,” making it appropriate to reevaluate the decision, according to Kesarwani in the resolution.

However, Syrak Micael, a UC Berkeley alumnus and candidate for City Council District 7, noted that tear gas was banned as a weapon of warfare in the 1925 Geneva Protocol, nearly a century before COVID-19.

“We shouldn’t have our police department use weapons that are banned in war,” Micael said.

Micael raised concerns about introducing this resolution at a time when the Trump administration has been authorizing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to deploy tear gas against protesters in sanctuary cities such as Minneapolis and Los Angeles. Berkeley also holds sanctuary city status.

In February, the council’s Public Safety Committee sent Kesarwani’s proposal to the council with a positive recommendation. In response, the Police Accountability Board, or PAB, sent a memo to the council expressing concerns about the use of chemical agents.

Kesarwani’s recommendation restricts the use of tear gas to Special Response Team deployments and “non-crowd critical incidents.” Those restrictions, she says in the recommendation, address the PAB’s concerns.

However, in a letter to the City Council, PAB Chair Josh Cayetano said that the language of the recommendation does not actually prevent the use of tear gas for crowd control.

“The proposed resolution contains ambiguous standards and exceptions (‘circumstances in which there is a significant risk of injury or death’) that would effectively authorize the use of tear gas in crowd control contexts despite its intended purpose,” Cayetano wrote in the letter.

Cayetano claimed that tear gas is almost always used for crowd control. He pointed to the controversial use of the chemical agent in Berkeley’s history.

That history dates back to the 1969 People’s Park riot. In what became known as “Bloody Thursday,” a student protest against UC Berkeley’s seizure of the park turned violent, and different police forces fired tear gas into the crowd.

In December 2014, BPD deployed tear gas in response to a protest in Berkeley that was part of nationwide demonstrations against grand juries’ decisions not to charge the police officers who killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner, both Black men, in acts of police brutality and racial profiling.

In May 2020, during a Black Lives Matter protest in response to the murder of George Floyd, BPD used tear gas on demonstrators trying to force their way into the Oakland Police Department.

Aidan Hill, a candidate for City Council District 7, said the tear gas proposal is “creating a climate of fear,” especially since the City Council renewed its contract with Flock Safety.

“By the police doing this and doing surveillance items at the same time, it’s showing people that their freedom to exist in public, their freedom from surveillance by the government, is not being honored,” Hill said.