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The Berkeley City Council has rescinded a 29-year-old directive on pepper spray reports it says duplicate work police officers already do. Credit: Emilie Raguso\/Berkeleyside<\/p>\nThe Berkeley City Council has rescinded a 29-year-old directive on pepper spray reports it says duplicate work police officers already do. Credit: Emilie Raguso\/Berkeleyside<\/p>\n
Berkeley police now have to file less paperwork after they use pepper spray. The City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to repeal a 1997 bureaucratic directive that the department report every use of pepper spray to the council<\/a>, on top of requirements to document all uses of force elsewhere.<\/p>\n The change takes place in the middle of a months-long and ongoing rollback of restrictions on the department\u2019s uses of weapons and expansion of its access to surveillance technology<\/a> and other equipment<\/a>.<\/p>\n While Berkeley Police Department officers use pepper spray only a handful a times of year if at all, several people who spoke out Tuesday said the excruciating experience of being on the receiving end of it merited the additional layer of scrutiny.<\/p>\n \u201cThe question we\u2019re asking is not, \u2018Will police have less time to do whatever other important work they do?\u2019 But whether on a handful of occasions a year, officers are willing to write two paragraphs about the use of a chemical weapon,\u201d said Nathan Mizell, a former Police Accountability Board member.<\/p>\n As is typical in law enforcement, BPD officers are required to report all uses of force, pepper spray included. BPD voluntarily publishes data from those reports on its online Transparency Hub. But the 1997 council directive, mandating separate \u201cuse of pepper spray reports,\u201d predated that portal by several decades.<\/p>\n And while Tuesday\u2019s vote rescinded that mandate, it did nothing to change when and how BPD officers are allowed to use pepper spray<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThe two processes run side by side and track nearly identical information, which creates extra work without adding anything meaningful to the record,\u201d Councilmember Rashi Kesarwani, who authored the rescission, wrote in her summary.<\/p>\n First aid is a sticking point<\/p>\n The pepper spray reports were meant to go straight to the City Council within a week of an underlying incident, and required greater detail, such as whether officers render first aid. But like most of the more common use-of-force reports in California, they were not considered public records.<\/p>\n BPD Chief Jen Louis said her officers are already required to render first aid every time they use pepper spray. Council members asked about getting data on first aid into the Transparency Hub. Since the portal automatically populates by pulling data from officers\u2019 use-of-force reporting system, Louis said, \u201cWe will have to check with the vendor and ask them to rework the system to allow us to have that.\u201d<\/p>\n Berkeley adopted its 1997 directive after a state law the year before de-regulated the use of pepper spray, and its use expanded in California .<\/p>\n Compared to other types of force, Berkeley officers only rarely use pepper spray, deploying it between zero and four times per year over the last five years, according to BPD\u2019s Transparency Hub. By comparison officers used less-lethal ammunition like beanbags between five and 13 times per year. Several unarmed uses of force \u2014 strikes, takedowns, holds \u2014 were more common still.<\/p>\n As an added backstop, and at the urging of the Police Accountability Board<\/a>, the council ordered City Manager Paul Buddenhagen to prepare an amendment to the city\u2019s ordinance on military equipment that will require BPD to include pepper spray deployments in its annual report on martial hardware.<\/p>\n Barbara Atwell, a Berkeley Friends Meeting representative, backed the PAB\u2019s recommendation Tuesday.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cTransparency and police accountability matter,\u201d she said during public comment. \u201cDo not make the police use of pepper spray a secret.\u201d<\/p>\n Berkeley cops are rewriting rules, seeking new hardware<\/p>\n That ordinance itself represents another recent paring-back of BPD\u2019s bureaucratic oversight and administrative responsibilities. Previously, the department had to compose two similar but separate reports on military hardware, one mandated by a 2021 city ordinance<\/a>, the other by a state statute enacted just five months later<\/a>. Earlier this year the City Council voted to sub out Berkeley\u2019s specific requirements for the ones the state uses<\/a>, condensing BPD\u2019s reporting requirements.<\/p>\n Last week, police supervisors rolled out a thoroughly rewritten use-of-force policy over the objections of the Police Accountability Board, which has asked the City Council to weigh in.\u00a0<\/p>\n And later this month the council is tentatively scheduled to vote on a proposal to expand the city\u2019s contract with Georgia-based Flock Safety, the vendor whose automated license plate readers are already in Berkeley<\/a>, to include drones, fixed surveillance cameras and new software to link police systems.<\/p>\n Tuesday\u2019s vote, and the ones scheduled for later in March, come at a particularly trying time for BPD\u2019s civilian oversight bodies. The Police Accountability Board is down to fewer than half of its intended<\/a> nine regular members plus one alternate. And the city is currently without a director of police accountability since the council fired Director Hansel Aguilar last month<\/a>.<\/p>\n “*” indicates required fields<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Berkeley City Council has rescinded a 29-year-old directive on pepper spray reports it says duplicate work police…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":215632,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[7981,7872,2465,2466,143,145,144,7985,8763],"class_list":["post-215631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-berkeley-city-council","tag-berkeley-police-department","tag-home-highlight","tag-home-lead","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-police-accountability-board","tag-policing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215631\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/215632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}