California city votes to remove cops from traffic stops, aims to slash police budget
The Berkeley City Council approved a proposal on Wednesday morning that removes police from traffic stops and seeks to slash the police budget by half.
The council approved $100,000 to go toward creating a unit that handles police calls and $160,000 toward an auditor to oversee the calls, according to KTVU.
“I want you to know that we are listening to what you are saying, that we agree that we need to seize the opportunity to look at transforming public safety in Berkeley,” Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin, who crafted the bill, said, according to Bay Area News Group. “And for far too long, public safety has been equated with more police.”
The proposal creates a Department of Transportation that takes traffic enforcement out of police jurisdiction and replaces officers with “civil servants that would manage traffic and parking enforcement, crossing guards, and collision response,” NBC Bay Area reported.
“I feel they abuse their privileges and really harm us rather than protect us, so I think everything Berkeley is doing to cut back on funding and those kinds of things, I’m totally in favor of,” resident John Drinnon told NBC.
The proposal comes as attention has focused on police brutality and racism in policing after the death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man who died in Minneapolis police custody on May 25.
McClatchy News has reached out to the Berkeley Police Department for comment.
“Within a day, an L.A. City Council member was messaging me on Twitter about it,” Berkeley Councilman Rigel Robinson, who introduced the proposal, said according to The San Francisco Chronicle. “As far as we know, something like this hasn’t been meaningfully attempted before.”
Black drivers are stopped more than white and Hispanic drivers, according to data from the Stanford Open Policing Project. Black and Hispanic people are also more likely to be searched than white drivers.
The last police shooting for Berkeley’s Police Department was in 2012, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
White people comprise 54% of the population in Berkeley, with African Americans at 8%, Asians at 20%, and Latinos at 11%, according to the Associated Press. Of the 608 traffic stops between mid-March and mid-June of 2020, Black people made up half of them, the Associated Press reported, citing a City Council memo.
The city manager will start a “community engagement process” to create the transportation department, according to the Associated Press.
This story was originally published July 14, 2020 at 12:52 PM with the headline "California city votes to remove cops from traffic stops, aims to slash police budget."