Update: Here’s where new BPD cameras to combat retail theft are likely to go

Update, March 20: Berkeley’s City Council has approved a new set of 16 locations where the Berkeley Police Department can install surveillance cameras, a reconfiguration BPD says will help avoid logistical holdups and avoid redundancies with automated license plate readers the city has already installed.

The council’s initial go-ahead is just one bureaucratic hurdle of many, since a city ordinance on surveillance technology requires several levels of review, including by the Police Accountability Board, before the city can begin installation, which itself can be a lengthy process. For context, It took almost two years to hammer out a use policy for cameras the council first funded in 2021 and now, another two years later, only one has been installed, at Sixth Street and University Avenue.

Opponents of the camera network are not convinced that the vendor will honor Berkeley and California’s mandates not to share data with federal immigration agents, and took issue with increased surveillance in general.

Hansel Aguilar, Berkeley’s director of police accountability, said at the council’s meeting Tuesday that the city should perhaps have considered other vendors before settling on Flock Safety to replace Edgeworth Integration, and that city ordinance “contemplates a very deliberative process.”

“I’m just concerned right now that we’re conflating the need for a new vendor and a very specific vendor that they’ve identified already,” Aguilar said.

Several UC Berkeley students objected to the placement of a camera at Telegraph Avenue and Dwight Way, for fear that federal agents might somehow get their hands on footage in order to track students from other countries or who belong to protected classes, or to suppress student protests and activism.

Councilmember Cecilia Lunaparra, who represents the Southside neighborhood, proposed dropping that one location from the list, but failed to sway enough of the council. Lunaparra ended up the lone dissenting vote on the proposed list of locations.

If a federal agency were to ignore state law and Berkeley policy and somehow seize data from city cameras, “even as sensitive as that information might be, we’d have much bigger problems on our hands than giving them that data,” Councilmember Brent Blackaby, who represents Northeast Berkeley, remarked.

Original story, March 13: Thieves and burglars who prey on Berkeley’s stores and restaurants get creative, from dropping down from skylights to driving stolen moving vans between heists. Berkeley police are hoping a redrawn grid of fixed surveillance cameras will help them put a dent in retail theft, among other crime trends.

The police department has sent the City Council a new proposal indicating where it wants to place video cameras around the city, with most of the new locations within commercial districts and downtown. The proposal also recommends switching camera vendors from Edgeworth Integration to Flock Safety, the company currently contracted to provide Berkeley’s network of automated license plate readers, or ALPRs. Only three of the 16 proposed intersections remain the same from the department’s previous proposals, the most recent of which was last year.

The original proposed camera locations “were selected to address vehicle-related crime patterns,” according to a letter to the council from Berkeley Police Department Chief Jen Louis and City Manager Paul Buddenhagen. But with the department’s grid of ALPRs recording how vehicles move into, through and out of the city, some of those camera locations would have been redundant.

And even if they were not, there are two major logistical obstacles to installing cameras where the city initially intended. First, a number of the locations are on Caltrans rights of way, and dealing with the state invariably means delays. Second, the Edgeworth cameras aren’t compatible with the city’s existing contract with PG&E and would require installing dedicated meters, which would be “prohibitively expensive,” according to the summary. Flock cameras, unlike the Edgeworth ones, run on solar power and can be mounted on any of the city’s utility poles — and feed into the same network as the ALPRs.

Berkeley budgeted $600,000 in the last fiscal year for Edgeworth cameras and, so far, has paid them $290,000, according to Buddenhagen and Louis’s summary. The city will try either to have that credit applied to other projects or “recover” it, and apply for grants to supplement the Flock cameras, which will cost a projected $75,000 a year.

If funding allows, BPD also suggested the council consider new cameras at Ashby and Domingo avenues, Ashby and San Pablo avenues, Ashby Avenue and Sixth Street and University and San Pablo avenues.

Commercial burglaries dropped from 570 in 2023 — the highest they have been since BPD began publishing data in 2016 — to 396 in 2024, a sharp drop but still higher than any year before 2022. Felony thefts rose in Berkeley while COVID raged, then began to wane in 2023 and 2024. Robberies — differentiated from thefts because they involve physical violence or threats — fell off precipitously during the pandemic years before rebounding in 2023 to pre-pandemic highs, but then dropped again in 2024. 

Thefts, burglaries are constant worry for Berkeley businesses

In the Gilman District, the main concerns are retail thefts and burglaries, said Julie McCray, the district’s acting secretary.

Workers at some larger chain stores, including security guards in some cases, are instructed not to try to interfere when they spot thieves snatching items, McCray said.

Thieves have made several visits to the Blue Willow Teaspot on 10th Street in recent years, “and one of those times the people went in through her skylight and took the register and numerous other things,” McCray said. Thieves used the same tactic, going through a skylight, to make off with thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise from the North Face Outlet on Fifth Street, she said.

Thieves frequently use stolen cars, stolen license plates or a combination of both to camouflage their movements.

At her own business, the SHOH Gallery on Gilman near the Union Pacific rail line, McCray said she and several other people watched as a motorist pulled into the parking lot, quickly swapped out the license plate on the back of his car and drove away.

In South Berkeley there has been an uptick in after-hours burglaries along the Adeline Street corridor, said Liz Lisle, managing director for the Shotgun Players and co-chair of the Lorin Business Association, which represents shops, restaurants, arts and theater groups, schools and social service agencies along the corridor.

Lisle said Lorin had not taken part in selecting the new camera locations but that business owners in the area do their best to share information amongst each other.

Damages from the burglaries mostly entail “broken glass, windows getting smashed, that kind of thing,” Lisle said. Milyar Cafe and Red Bay Coffee, with large windows fronting Adeline and Alcatraz Avenue, had been burglarized over and over again, she said. Whether or not it was the same person or group hitting the same spots, “there was definitely a pattern emerging,” she said.

Cameras and quick-thinking workers already helping BPD

In one spate of thefts, Berkeley police said a group of rip-off artists hit the Lululemon store on Fourth Street twice in as many days in January, stealing almost $3,000 worth of merchandise before fleeing, at least once using a stolen U-Haul to get away, according to court records. A store security guard was able to grab a photo of the U-Haul’s license plate and Berkeley police arrested three people in connection with those thefts later that month after a California Highway Patrol officer spotted the truck in Richmond.

In South Berkeley, a team of two thieves walked out of a Walgreen’s with hundreds of dollars’ worth of soap, Axe body spray and toiletries as employees took pictures with their phones. Police were later able to identify and arrest at least one man through the photos, according to court records.

That same man was previously arrested in connection with a February 2024 theft at the Apple Store on Fourth Street, when he and another man allegedly snatched $32,413 worth of hardware before fleeing in a car, only to be pulled over four hours later in Vacaville.

In January, security workers at a Target in Emeryville called police there to arrest a woman police said walked out of the store with a cart full of stolen merchandise. Private cameras inside a different Target, on University Avenue in Central Berkeley, had caught the same woman walking through the self checkout area with $826 dollars’ worth of merchandise she hadn’t scanned in 2022, according to court records. And earlier this month, the same woman went back to the Central Berkeley Target and stole another $250 worth of merchandise, according to a court document from Berkeley police. A store employee recognized her from an earlier theft over the store’s surveillance system, police said.

In February, cameras inside the Sephora store on Fourth Street captured two people stealing over $5,000 worth of cosmetics, and Berkeley police arrested one of them two days later after identifying her from the footage, according to a court document from city police.