Editorials

Even though I watched the Berkeley City Council’s last meeting on Zoom , I appreciate Councilmember Kate Harrison’s post-session explanatory letter to her constituents and supporters, which she has given the Planet permission to reprint here. It was about an issue I hadn’t really been following very well, and as I watched I found it truly hard to believe what I was seeing.

In her letter, Councilmember Harrison graciously proffers some possible explanations for the City Manager’s proposal that the acting chief, Jennifer Louis, be summarily promoted, less than two months before the conclusion of an outside investigation into charges of police misconduct by Louis and others. The manager's request had been endorsed by a council majority, but Harrison declined to vote for it, and explained why.

Let’s get this straight: I have had approximately no opinion on Acting Chief Louis herself. Her statements on her own behalf on Tuesday were overloaded with bureaucratese, but otherwise her qualifications seemed appropriate on paper.

However, last fall there was a series of expose-type articles in the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere regarding a couple of questionable incidents in her record. One, a sexual harassment charge against her from another woman on the Berkeley police force, was internally investigated and has been dismissed.

The other involved Louis only tangentially: misbehavior by a group of officers in a special bicycle unit: racist texting, use of impermissible quotas and other offenses. Louis’s defenders point out that she was not chief at that time and had no interaction with the accused officers.

The first time the City Manager tried to get council approval for promoting Louis to the regular chief appointment, the resulting uproar caused her to walk back that recommendation. In November she told the council she would not ask the council again to approve Louis’s appointment before getting an outside consultant to investigate the charges. But she didn’t do what she promised.

Instead, she persuaded the council’s agenda committee to add confirmation of Jennifer Louis to last Tuesday’s consent calendar. This is the part of the agenda is where councilmembers are asked to unanimously approve non-controversial items without debate.

What? There is no way that a decision which is opposed by the League of Women Voters, the ACLU and the NAACP belongs on the consent calendar. Even worse, a decision about the Berkeley Police Department which is questioned by the city’s newly chosen Police Accountability Board should never be brought to the council before the PAB completes its duties, as explained in this issue by Councilmember Harrison. At last Tuesday’s meeting Councilmember Ben Bartlett did an excellent job of explaining why as a Black man he must insist that charges like those brought against the bicycle unit be treated with the utmost seriousness, so the investigations by the outside consultants and the PAB should be completed before a chief is confirmed.

While I appreciate the analyses articulated at the meeting by the two councilmembers who refused to vote to confirm Louis, I think they didn’t really get to the root of the problem. What I see is a deeper-seated management question. Unless I’ve missed something, I think that City Manager Dee Williams-Ridley really dropped the ball on this one in a number of ways.

She (and the councilmembers who voted to endorse her motion to confirm Louis) did not deal in good faith with the impressive array of community members who relied on her November statement that she’d wait until the investigations were complete before bringing the appointment back to the council. After this, how can any of us (and I include myself here) rely on her promises on other matters?

Besides the question of the Manager’s credibility, there’s an important practical matter. As a hypothetical, consider that if further research turns up anything questionable in the two situations under study, there could be reasons that the city would want to terminate the chief’s employment.

It’s a lot more difficult and expensive to fire a confirmed employee than it is to decline to promote an acting one. As it should be. Just saying.

Anyone who’s been in a management position with HR responsibilities knows that. In such situations, there’s usually a termination payment sum agreed on, and this promotion would inevitably result in increased cost to the city if that happens.

Also, if said employee is the best that can be found after a real national search, there’s a good chance that the search was never necessary or that it was inadequate. It’s puzzling that the L.A. Times was able to turn up these old charges, though of course it seems that Williams-Ridley knew about them all along but chose not to mention them to the electeds.

The fact that Jennifer Louis has been enthusiastically endorsed by the police officers’ union is not necessarily a plus.

According to the L.A. Times,

“The Berkeley Police Department was in turmoil … following the leak of text messages that allegedly show the president of the police officers’ union making racially charged remarks and calling for arrest quotas.

“The growing scandal resulted in the union president, Sgt. Darren Kacalek, being placed on administrative leave … city officials confirmed. He also stepped down from his position as union head..”

Berkeley’s city councilmembers should take a look at Antioch, where the police union is deep inside a scandal over racist texting. They should also take a hard look at the City Manager’s role in this debacle.

Seven out of nine of them voted to approve the Louis promotion. Five of the seven gushed over her. Two (Arreguin and Hahn) expressed reservations, but voted yes after counting the house. Probably the most noteworthy number in this whole analysis is the number of councilmembers reportedly angling for higher office: Arreguin for state senate, and for Berkeley mayor Hahn and Robinson.

Perhaps all these councilmembers think that backing Jennifer Louis will garner votes from what used to be called Berkeley’s “moderate” faction if they appear to be pro-police and anti-crime, but I doubt if they’re right. For other reasons, Wiliams-Ridley and Arreguin just don’t have a lot of fans in the Hills, and most Hills-dwellers have never heard of Robinson, who needed only a few hundred votes in the last election to win unopposed in his phony gerrymandered “student” district, where most of the eligibles don’t bother to vote in local races.

Hill folk, and also many of the rest of us, do have a number of major beefs with Berkeley’s city management, both elected and employed, however.

Current number one is the catastrophic Hopkins Street rerouting scheme in North Berkeley, now probably sunk, hopefully without trace. Whose idea was that? 

Then there’s the plan to “monetize” Cesar Chavez park, stopped, at least for the time being, thanks to quick response by former District 8 Councilmember Gordon Wozniak and allies. And a not-small demographic, both in the Hills and in the Flats, is outraged by ex-ASUC lackies Arreguin and Robinson’s obsequious endorsement of UC Berkeley’s plans to pave over People’s Park. The area formerly known as Downtown Berkeley is a constant reproach to anyone crossing the wasteland of empty storefronts, vacant movie houses and big ugly dorms it’s becoming. 

And that’s just for starters. Civil rights watchdogs are outraged by the city manager’s shenanigans over confirming the police chief, yes, but there’s much more not to like in the way the city’s managed.