Okay.

Hello, everyone.

Good evening.

Gonna have you quiet down, please.

Thank you.

Okay.

I'm calling to order a special meeting of the Berkeley City Council.

Today is Thursday, May 7th, 2026.

It is 5:09 p.m.

Clerk, can you please take the roll?

Okay, uh Councilmember Kessarwani.

Taplin present.

Um Bartlett is currently absent.

Trego present.

O'Keefe here.

Here.

Lunapara.

Here.

Umvert present.

And Mayor Ishii.

Here.

Okay, quorum is present.

Okay.

So folks, tonight we have two items on our action calendar.

One is the public safety technology, surveillance technology ordinance and police equipment, ordinance approvals, policy updates, and contract authority.

And one B is the social justice implications of contracts with immigration data broker Flock Safety, which came from the Peace and Justice Commission.

This is a continuation from a meeting that we had on March 24th, 2026.

A few things I want to say before we get started.

One, I know there are a lot of folks here, and there's a lot of energy in the room, but I really want to ask you all to continue to be respectful as people are speaking and allow them to speak.

Of course, you're welcome to cheer and clap and stuff when someone speaks and says something you want.

It's both disrespectful and against our rules of procedures.

So the other thing is that as we are going this evening, if you have public comment and you're coming with a group, we encourage you, you don't have to, but we encourage you if you're speaking in a group that you speak maybe have one person and then the other folks come up if you agree already with what they're saying, because that will allow for more people to speak this evening.

Okay.

So last meeting, one of the things that we did was we heard from our Berkeley Police Department, we heard from the from our PAB, our police accountability board, and then we heard all of the different supplementals that were presented from the last meeting.

So we don't have any presentations tonight.

What we're gonna be focused on are first the questions, first the questions from the council, and then we'll take public comment, and then we will have council comments and any motions that happen.

So just so folks have a sense of what's gonna happen this evening.

Um that's our little roadmap.

And so what I do want to do is just go ahead and start if anyone from the council has any questions, come on, I know folks have questions.

Okay, so I I will start with a question, and um one question that I had from last time was that um oh sorry, my question list got adjusted.

Um if you could uh if BPD, if you could speak to the difference between our current, our current uh community registry program and the proposed um CVS.

Yeah, absolutely.

Uh so CVS, community video streams, it's our proposal to uh it's really an expansion uh in a deepening of our current camera registry program.

So currently what we do is if a uh business has a set of cameras that they want us to be aware of in the case that we're investigating a crime that occurs nearby, uh then we know that that camera is there and we can more quickly obtain the evidence that we need to to do the investigation.

So the uh community video streams proposal uh would build on that and would give uh businesses the uh opportunity to opt in uh to a system where we could directly access that video footage um if they if they allow us to.

And so our proposal for that program would be that we um go through an inspection process of the cameras uh before we would connect to them uh to make sure that they're not pointing anywhere that um we shouldn't be able to have access to.

Uh we would publish on our website the location of all those cameras, and we would uh require appropriate signage near those cameras so that the public is aware that they are connected to to our system.

Can I just want to add one one more thing?

One of the challenges we have with our current camera system, the way it works is that uh a lot of times we'll be investigating a crime, we'll be in the moment of investigating the crime, and the manager is the only person that has access to the room that has the camera, or there's a reader that's associated with being able to download the file and then view it once it's once it's taken.

Um so this would allow us to both have that access um regardless of whether or not there was a manager on site, uh, but also not run into the challenges we have with evidence collection.

Uh, right now we're forced sometimes to use a phone and videotape the screen as it's playing.

Obviously, there's a degradation of the evidence when we do it that way.

Thanks, Chief.

And uh follow-up question on that.

Can you speak to the community video surveillance uh process?

What has been done so far to help the community understand what uh this system would look like?

Yeah, we've got we've gone through uh the surveillance technology ordinance process um as required by um uh 2.99.

Um, and we've submitted uh use policies, our acquisition report, um, and that's what uh council is considering today.

Yeah, and if you remember we talked about it at both two community meetings, uh additionally, we covered it um in a presentation talking to Pab about what that technology looks like.

Uh we've had a number of neighborhood watch meetings where we've gone and talked about the different technologies, uh, really, and and we uh showed that in the uh March 24th meeting with council when we talked about that technology.