Berkeley City Council members debated racial disparities found in the city’s annual Police Accountability Board report at a special meeting last week.
The report showed that while Black residents make up less than one out of every 13 Berkeley residents, they account for one in three police stops.
Councilmember Mark Humbert said the disparity in the rates at which Black residents are stopped for traffic issues in Berkeley is likely a result of residents from other nearby cities being pulled over within Berkeley’s city limits.
Berkeley director of police accountability Hansel Aguilar and Police Accountability Board chair Josh Cayetano, who presented the report to the council Tuesday, said that is not the case when questioned by Councilmember Ben Bartlett, one of only two Black residents serving on the council.
“It does analyze non-Berkeley versus Berkeley residents, and for Black people residing in Berkeley, they were 6.55 times as likely to be stopped as their white counterparts,” Cayetano said.
Hispanic motorists were also 1.7 times more likely to be stopped by police than white motorists, according to the report.
Black Berkeley residents were the subject of 45.8% of arrests and 47.8% of police use-of-force cases in the city between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31, 2024, according to the Police Accountability Board report.
More than just race, police say
A Berkeley Police Department report released in March explained racial disparities in data for things like searches by breaking the data down by time of day, alleging that policing decisions had more to do with circumstance than race.
Councilmember Cecilia Lunaparra addressed Humbert’s assertion that racial disparities shown in the report are a result of people of color coming from other cities into Berkeley.
“I find that insinuation to be dangerous and dismissive of the very real experiences of many of our residents of color here in Berkeley, and does not do anything to build trust between our government and our communities of color, especially our Black and brown residents, which is kind of the goal of all of this,” Lunaparra said, noting she did not believe Humbert’s comment was intended to be offensive.
Districts 1, 2, 3 and 4 in Berkeley experienced significantly more frequent police stops. Districts 5, 6, 7 and 8 — all of which have a significantly lower concentration of Black residents than Districts 1 through 4 — saw significantly fewer traffic stops, the report said. Data on police patrol routes and the frequency of their use was not included in any available reports.
When asked by Councilmember Igor Tregub for ways that the city can reduce racial disparities in policing, Aguilar and Cayetano talked about collecting more data from community-wide surveys to understand the issue, as well as clarifying policy on “profiling by proxy,” when a biased caller’s report to police can affect the law enforcement response.
“(The board) has seen repeated instances of community members in Berkeley who have called BPD on Black Berkeley residents — and it turns out that the call for service resulted in a really big miscommunication, because the person was just living their life and they didn’t know what was happening,” Cayetano said. “The officers were only relying on what was a faulty description or narrative at the time.”
Cayetano called for the policy around profiling by proxy to be clarified and that police officers receive more training in that regard, noting that these changes were requested in another report the Police Accountability Board presented to the City Council last year.
Taplin calls for better policies
Councilmember Terry Taplin expressed interest in strengthening the city’s policies regarding profiling by proxy.
“From both an equity perspective as well as a dispatch perspective, I think it’s important that when we get calls for service, we are able to triage calls that don’t require deployment,” Taplin said.
This year’s Police Accountability Board report shows higher rates of racial inequity than was shown in a three-year-long study released in 2024, in which Black residents made up 32.45% of police stops and 47.7% of use-of-force cases.
Police Accountability Board and Berkeley Police Department representatives will meet in a closed City Council session for negotiations to establish shared police conduct regulations in the upcoming months, according to the council.