The Berkeley City Council will vote on whether to reinstate the Berkeley Police Department\u2019s ability to use tear gas in its July 14 meeting.<\/p>\n
The recommendation, authored by District 1 Councilmember Rashi Kesarwani, aims to amend the City Council\u2019s June 2020 decision<\/a> to permanently ban the use of tear gas under any circumstances and place a temporary moratorium on the use of smoke and pepper spray.<\/p>\n Kesarwani\u2019s recommendation proposes that the council allow BPD\u2019s Special Response Team to use tear gas in circumstances in which there is a \u201csignificant risk of injury or death.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI support keeping the tear gas ban in place,\u201d said Mayor Adena Ishii in a written statement. \u201cI understand that the Berkeley Police Department needs effective tools, and I believe they can keep our community safe using other less-lethal methods.\u201d<\/p>\n Kesarwani did not provide comment by press time.<\/p>\n The June 2020 ban was driven by health concerns associated with COVID-19 which are \u201cno longer present,\u201d making it appropriate to reevaluate the decision, according to Kesarwani in the resolution.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWe shouldn\u2019t have our police department use weapons that are banned in war,\u201d Micael said.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> status.<\/p>\n In February, the council\u2019s Public Safety Committee sent Kesarwani\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Kesarwani\u2019s recommendation restricts the use of tear gas to Special Response Team deployments and \u201cnon-crowd critical incidents.\u201d Those restrictions, she says in the recommendation, address the PAB\u2019s concerns.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThe proposed resolution contains ambiguous standards and exceptions (\u2018circumstances in which there is a significant risk of injury or death\u2019) that would effectively authorize the use of tear gas in crowd control contexts despite its intended purpose,\u201d Cayetano wrote in the letter.<\/p>\n Cayetano claimed that tear gas is almost always used for crowd control. He pointed to the controversial use of the chemical agent in Berkeley\u2019s history.<\/p>\n That history dates back to the 1969 People\u2019s Park riot. In what became known as \u201cBloody Thursday<\/a>,\u201d a student protest against UC Berkeley\u2019s seizure of the park turned violent, and different police forces fired tear gas into the crowd.<\/p>\n In December 2014, BPD deployed tear gas in response to a protest<\/a> in Berkeley that was part of nationwide demonstrations against grand juries\u2019 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n