Berkeley’s City Council has picked six new locations for fixed surveillance cameras to possibly install in the years to come, even as progress on the last round of 10 cameras has languished for several months. Five of the proposed locations were along Berkeley’s southern border.
The council’s decision Tuesday was a budget referral for the next fiscal year, meaning budgetary considerations could still scupper the actual installation, and it will be months before the council discusses it in practical terms. The proposed locations for the cameras are:
- Alcatraz and College avenues
- Woolsey Street and Telegraph Avenue
- Woolsey Street and Shattuck Avenue
- Alcatraz Avenue and Adeline Street
- Alcatraz Avenue and Sacramento Street
- San Pablo Avenue and Gilman Street
Sophie Hahn abstained from the vote, Susan Wengraf was absent from the meeting and Kate Harrison left before the final vote. Mayor Jesse ArreguÃn, Terry Taplin and Rashi Kesarwani voted in favor, as did the proposal’s sponsors, Mark Humbert and Ben Bartlett.
The cameras are meant to address rising rates of some violent crimes, including robberies, with police officials saying the cameras can help them track crime suspects on their way into, out of and through Berkeley. Proponents have said cameras at San Pablo Park helped reduce gun violence there. But skeptics on the City Council have said there is not enough data from existing cameras to justify expanding the Berkeley Police Department’s surveillance network.
Representatives from the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce and Downtown Business Association praised the proposal for new cameras, citing rising rates of commercial burglary, retail thefts and robberies in the city. Opponents who spoke during public comment, concerned with privacy and civil liberties, decried mass surveillance as a tool of apartheid, imperialism and fascism.
“An 80-year-old woman and her niece were violently mugged at Alcatraz and College, and the muggers came back later that night to steal her car on a nearby street,” Humbert said during the discussion of the item before the vote. “This follows other similar attacks in the Rockridge and South Elmwood areas, and in the area that is the margin between my district and the district of Councilman Bartlett.”
Bartlett said several of his constituents, mostly older than 70, from the area of Woolsey and Shattuck had suffered “violent, vicious attacks.”
Hahn backed a more cautious approach, asking for more input from the City Attorney’s Office and information on how precisely the locations were chosen.
Harrison, who spoke on the surveillance cameras before abruptly resigning her seat on the council, effective Feb. 15, and leaving Tuesday’s meeting, expressed concern at the referral’s proposed costs and suggested the funds that could, in the future, pay for the cameras could be better used to hire patrol officers, detectives or civilian emergency responders.
“One of our biggest problems, and I’ve heard this repeatedly from the department, is we have inadequate investigatory staff. So even if we had a camera and something were captured, we need someone to investigate it,” Harrison said. She also said she had doubts about the cameras’ effectiveness, among other reservations.
While staffing remains a perennial issue for BPD, as with several other city agencies, the police department is already funded this year for 181 sworn officers and supervisors, and police officials confirmed Thursday they have already been recruiting for the more than two dozen vacancies in their ranks.
The city identified 10 intersections to install earlier cameras last summer. But the city’s Public Works Department, which is responsible for installing and maintaining cameras, has been so understaffed, and their workload so backed up, that only one, at Sixth and University, has been installed so far.
