Berkeley hopes new tool will identify police officers’ problems earlier

The Berkeley Police Department is nearly set to start using an early intervention software system, a data tool that, in theory, identifies officers acting with racial or other bias, or who are showing aggression, signs of burnout or poor morale.

“Its purpose is to serve as a non-punitive tool that helps us provide proactive support when needed,” BPD spokesperson Officer Jessica Perry told Berkeleyside in an email. Agencies that use early intervention systems hope to catch troublesome patterns or behavior before they culminate in police brutality or civil suits.

Berkeley’s prospective program is one of several recommendations that came out of the “reimagining public safety” process Berkeley embarked on following the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black Americans at the hands of law enforcement officers.

The city will pay Chicago-based Benchmark Analytics $200,000 total for the first two years, beginning Feb. 3, with an option to extend the contract for an additional two years for $400,000 total, presuming the City Council votes to approve on Jan. 21.

Generally speaking, early intervention systems are meant to find officers within an agency with unusual numbers of or racial disparities in stops, searches and uses of force, but also officers who may be having attendance issues, difficulties with department vehicles or equipment or other work-related issues.

A 2018 study by the Center for Policing Equity found that Black and Hispanic drivers and pedestrians were stopped “at much higher rates” than white ones in Berkeley, though the researchers said that disparities did not necessarily indicate bias. For one thing, the numbers were based largely on Berkeley’s own population and did not adjust for who may be coming to Berkeley to work, shop or for other reasons, among other factors. And among the hundreds of police agencies CPE had studied at the time, BPD’s traffic and pedestrian stop disparities were the lowest in the nation, according to the researchers.

The City Council allocated money for an early warning system in 2023, but advocates have been pushing for one since at least 2021, when the Mayor’s Fair and Impartial Policing Working Group and National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform issued a report on public safety reform in Berkeley.

“During community listening sessions with Black, LatinX, system-impacted and unstably housed (or) food-insecure residents there was a common perception amongst participants that the BPD is racist and classist,” according to NICJR’s report. “They expressed feeling targeted and unsafe with a militarized, aggressive approach to policing by BPD.” Along with an early intervention system, NICJR recommended peer intervention training, which BPD has already instituted.

The city posted a request for proposals in September, asking perspective vendors for cloud-based software that could pull data directly from BPD’s own systems and that could integrate with their dispatch system as well.

Early intervention or early warning systems have existed in one form or another since at least the 1980s, when they still relied heavily on human analysts and hard-copy records. Early data-driven systems ran into issues like erroneously flagging officers without adjusting for busier shifts those officers were working. Benchmark advertises its First Sign system, the one BPD intends to use, as using a more apples-to-apples paradigm to make sure officers are not unfairly compared with colleagues in completely different circumstances. (Police departments in San Jose and San Francisco recently contracted with Benchmark.)

Berkeley police established an early warning system in 2004 and updated it in 2008.

The current system, such as it is, relies on supervisors and other higher-ranking sworn and civilian personnel to “monitor the activity of their subordinate employees to identify actual or perceived unprofessional behavior” or performance problems, according to the department’s policy manual.

“The current system lacks automated mechanisms for department management to systematically monitor and analyze officer performance data,” City Manager Paul Buddenhagen wrote to the council in support of the contract with Benchmark. “This system reinforces departmental values, particularly our core value of professionalism.”