Editorials

Elections are over for the moment, and what, you may ask, have we learned?

Well, first, don’t trust either polls or the pundits who dote on them.

As Michael Moore presciently pointed out before the election: “…not only were the Republicans not going to clobber us in the House with 30 to 50 new seats, they might be in for an upset because it’s gonna be so dang close. And Trump’s mob of election-denying candidates were going to go down in flames. There would be record numbers of young voters, and women were on a rampage over the abolishment of Roe. The sword of vengeance would be theirs.”

Yes. And lo, the waves parted and we walked on water. Or something like that. The naysayers were wrong. But how about Berkeley?

Here in Berkeley, the only polls we have are those paid for by promoters, either for potential candidates or for proposed ballot measures. Apparently locals have lost interest in the city. There’s something very wrong with the way Berkeley is governed these days, which turns out to be a self-fullfilling prophecy. The only real race was in District 1, where the people most likely to be impacted by the Big Bart Boxes mounted a creditable attempt to unseat an incumbent, but failed, as is almost always the case.

In District 8, the race was to the swift, with attorney Humbert rounding up the usual suspects to pre-endorse him before the incumbent had even announced in public that she wasn’t running. 

Now, that’s the way we’ve always done it around here. Everyone’s a Democrat, so no one complains much. These back room deals sometimes produce good results, e.g. Barbara Lee, a veteran of Congressman Ron Dellums’ office, but also poor ones, e.g. Buffy Wicks, a Democratic operative who parachuted into Rockridge from D.C. with national backing and has not done much for the municipalities in her domain since then.. 

Then there’s Berkeley’s “student district”.  

Unlike the state of California, the city of Berkeley doesn’t have an impartial re-districting commission, though it has the appearance of one. Districts must be based on population, not voter registration or participation. The earnest folks on Berkeley’s commission established after the 2020 census made an honest effort to be fair, but they tried to preserve existing boundaries, which perpetuated past injustices. That included District 7, which was engineered a decade ago to create a district where student votes would dominate so that there would always be a student representative on the council.  

It turns out that students, especially undergraduates living in dorms, who can register to vote when they turn eighteen, don’t much care to vote in Berkeley city elections. With an apathetic electorate, incumbents rule, and after one four-year term they’re no longer students anyway. 

Rigel Robinson, the current District 7 councilmember and former student government activist, got plus-or-minus 200 votes this time from those who bothered to color in the oval next to his name. There’s something wrong with a system that gives two hundred students as much voting power as close to 5000 voters in District 1. Even the other unopposed incumbent, Kate Harrison in Distict Four, got more than 2,000 votes.  

Meanwhile, Berkeley Measure L, a bond measure for $650 million which would take 48 years to pay off, went down to defeat. As far as my personal informal poll could determine, No on Measure L had come to be viewed by many as a vote of no confidence in the current city administration. That includes the mayor, councilmembers, and especially the city manager. 

Gripes with the way Berkeley’s being run materialized this week with an uproar over media messages allegedly sent by a police officer which denigrated unsheltered residents and people of color. The POCs who are immediately and personally affected by police disrespect are obviously angry, but even Berkeley’s comfortable who live in “nice” neighborhoods would like to be able to believe that “we’re better than that”. However sincere or hypocritical they might be, the vast majority of Berkeley citizens simply don’t like hearing about such stuff.  

The uproar in organizations that speak for the former group started building over the weekend. The vice chair of the newly organized Police Accountability Board felt obliged to put out a strong press release over his personal signature, since the PAB was not scheduled to meet before Tuesday. Timing was important, since in a Tuesday Berkeley City council agenda consent item the city manager proposed appointing a Berkeley Police Department veteran, Interim Chief Jen Louis, to the permanent chief position. 

Not so fast, the community said. So a special meeting was quickly called by PAB staff and after discussion that body voted to ask the council to postpone voting on approving Louis until the charges could be investigated.  

On Tuesday, a public defender spoke in the public comment part of the council meeting about problems he’d had dealing with Louis. Three councilmembers then asked that the item be pulled from the consent calendar to the action calendar, and shortly thereafter the city manager, “in consultation with” Louis withdrew the item altogether, her prerogative since she initially proposed it. 

If the charges against the officer in question do prove to be founded in fact, the way the situation evolved will look like a serious management failure to the public and at least a couple of the councilmembers. As Ms. Richie Smith, sometimes called the Mayor of South Berkeley, is fond of saying, “city employees need to remember that they work for us.” People in her neighborhood complain that they get both too much and too little attention from the Berkeley Police Department. When allegations like this are made against a police officer, resolving them as fast as possible is crucial.  

Her councilmember, Ben Bartlett, said in a statement yesterday: 

“We … have allegations of arrest quotas. Arrest quotas distort incentives for law enforcement, causing aggressive policing, poor closure rates, and the manufacturing of crimes where there are none.  

When I was on the Police Review Commission, we pushed for new public safety metrics that focus on positive outcomes and results for our communities for a simple reason: what you focus on is what you get. Instead of counting arrests, let's count the number of service calls and reward officers for decreases in calls. “ 

Promoting a current manager from within a troubled organization is not the best way to address systemic problems if any are identified. A thorough, unbiased investigation is needed. There are calls from critics for two different kinds of probes: one by the PAB using its latest protocols and the other by an external authority of some sort. Both are needed, and new management from outside the department might be the best remedy if one is required. 

Meanwhile, all the other very real needs which provided talking points for advocates of Measure L still exist. The electorate simply didn’t trust the officials in power to actually spend the bond proceeds as advertised. Revenue measures with real citizen oversight are needed. 

All of this adds up to Berkeley’s city government being in general decline. What can be done? How about a new city manager, a new police chief, a new mayor, and district boundaries that have not been rejiggered to serve a lethargic student voter population? For starters…