Berkeley police text scandal final report vote could bring ‘closure.’ Will it change anything?

The Police Accountability Board has asked the City Council to codify the board’s access to police internal affairs files. A council committee has recommended against the request in the absence of proposed ordinance languge. Image: Zac Farber

What could be the final chapter in a years-old texting scandal in a Berkeley Police Department unit could be written by the City Council on Tuesday.

Berkeley’s civilian police oversight body, the Police Accountability Board, made a slew of policy recommendations to BPD and other requests of the council after investigating racist and anti-homeless text messages between members of the department’s bike team. 

But the proposed reforms may not go anywhere, at least in the near term, after the department argued its existing policies already address concerns raised by the board, and a subcommittee of City Council members recommended against adopting other changes.

The texts came to light in November 2022 through Corey Shedoudy, a former BPD bike officer appealing his own firing for deliberately crashing into a car while on duty and then lying about the circumstances of the crash. Shedoudy also alleged that the bike unit’s sergeant, who purportedly sent many of the offensive text messages, pressured members to meet arrest quotas.

The scandal led to Sgt. Darren Kacalek, who at the time was also the president of the union that represents Berkeley police officers, being temporarily put on leave. It also briefly derailed the confirmation of police Chief Jen Louis, though then-City Manager Dee Williams-Ridley later reversed course and opted to send Louis’s confirmation to the council before outside investigators completed their inquest. (Louis and Williams-Ridley both said Louis had not known about the texts bike unit officers were sending, and would not have stood for them if she had.)

The city hired San Francisco-based law firm Swanson & McNamara for $200,000 to investigate Shedoudy’s allegations. The attorneys authenticated the messages Shedoudy brought forward, but ultimately found no evidence of any practice of bias, nor of arrest quotas, a city spokesperson said in 2023 at the end of that probe.

The full substance of the investigation was kept confidential, however. It also remains unclear whether Kacalek was ever disciplined in the matter. A city spokesperson previously told Berekeleyside that state law forbade the city from disclosing which officers, if any, faced discipline.

The Police Accountability Board, meanwhile, began its own policy review on the bike team in November 2022. But it took months of effort and, finally, serving BPD with a subpoena to access the records it sought, including tapes of interviews from the Swanson & McNamara investigation and internal affairs records related to it. The board issued its findings in July 2024, listing a half-dozen areas where it said BPD “fell short of best practices”:

Expectations, however informal, of certain arrest statistics “Racially charged and discriminatory text messages” Using personal phones for BPD business Lax oversight on overtime for bike squad officers Vague or non-existent policies “that could prevent violations of law or compromise fair and impartial policing” Poor education on BPD policies and state law, particularly around enforcing stay-away orders

The PAB report listed several policy recommendations directly to BPD:

More formal prohibition on arrest quotas, whether explicit or implicit (BPD’s policy manual prohibits “ticket quotas,” and prohibits the the department from using arrest or citation numbers in officer evaluations) Ensuring fair and consistent enforcement of stay-away orders Increased training for officers and supervisors, both on policy and state law Updates to BPD policies on fair and impartial policing, standards of conduct, early intervention system, employee speech and expression, personal phones and overtime requests

The city took first steps to fund an early intervention system 2023 and finalized the funding in January, contracting with Chicago-based Benchmark Analytics for a software suite the department hopes will flag problematic behaviors.

The board report went so far as to propose new language that BPD could incorporate into its policy manual.

Police, council committee cool on proposed changes

In a February response memo, Louis said BPD had updated several of the policies in recent years as part of the city’s Fair and Impartial Policing initiative, and was in the middle of several other policy reviews with the PAB, but had “no additional substantive policy changes planned from the list provided.”

The board also made several recommendations to the council, including that it affirm the board’s authority to access BPD records and order city administration to generate a database of sustained allegations of racist and other discrimination-related misconduct at BPD.

The Public Safety Policy Committee issued a negative recommendation on the PAB’s requests of the council in February. Without specific language for a proposed ordinance or declaration, “we have sort of limited options in terms of what we’re being asked to do,” said Councilmember Brent Blackaby, himself a former PAB member who now sits on the committee.

“There was no language to ask the City Council to adopt in what came to us; it was a report with some recommendations,” Blackaby said.

As a partial substitute, Blackaby authored a resolution that, while lacking the authority of a city policy or ordinance, nevertheless expressed support for many of the causes the PAB espoused.

Hansel Aguilar, the city’s director of police accountability, made a series of recommendations of his own to BPD and the council, including that the council formally apologize to residents “for the improper messaging displayed by this incident.” 

Aguilar also recommended new charter amendments to provide independent counsel, separate from the City Attorney’s Office, for his office and the PAB, and also to allow his office and the board to start personnel misconduct investigations of their own accord rather than just in response to specific complaints.

For the most part, “each of these proposals carries distinct operational and fiscal trade-offs that should be properly weighed,” Louis wrote in response.

‘Over a year to get access to records’

Kitty Calavita, who led the PAB’s policy review into the Downtown Task Force, said the workload had been the same as a full-time job, even though she, like the other PAB members, are volunteers.

“It was a huge amount of work, and we tried really hard to be objective in the face of the egregious text messages,” Calavita said. She said she “was really taken aback by just the rejection, without considering the recommendations individually … that was pretty demoralizing.”

Josh Cayetano, who chairs the PAB, said he was “surprised” at the negative recommendation from the council committee.

“I thought that the PAB’s proposals were fairly middle-of-the-road for the misconduct that we uncovered,” Cayetano told Berkeleyside in a phone interview. “We spent … over a year to get access to records that, under a very clear reading of the charter, we should have had access to immediately.

“I  don’t think that the difficulties that the PAB faced were properly appreciated at the (committee) meeting,” he added.

Blackaby’s proposed resolution condemns racism and misconduct and urges the police department and PAB and, in certain cases, the police officers’ union to work collaboratively to flag any possible future personnel issues. It also expresses support for a statewide ban on arrest quotas.

“Most people believe there already is a ban on arrest quotas, but they don’t realize it’s only in the Vehicle Code,” and not the state’s Penal Code, Calavita told Berkeleyside.

‘Closure’ on texting scandal

Aguilar said he was optimistic that, even though his and the board’s recommendations were not likely to move forward right away, the door was not shut on the reforms they championed, particularly as far as quotas — implicit or explicit — are concerned. He also said the final delivery of the PAB review should at least provide some “closure” on the whole affair.

“There’s a general sense of it that we all want to be on the other side of this, but that doesn’t mean that we forget about the gaps that were exposed in our system,” Aguilar told Berkeleyside.

There has been a reshuffling of the city administration’s top management since the texts came to light, and Aguilar said the new city manager, Paul Buddenhagen, had made more proactive overtures to the PAB than his predecessor, Williams-Ridley, making a point to come to PAB meetings his first month in office.

“That signals that there is a more intentional partnership there,” Aguilar said.