 100vw, 780px”/>Police cordoned off several blocks around Eighth and Harrison streets on June 4. Someone has complained to the Office of the Director of Police Accountability that police officers at the scene acted improperly to someone filming the sweep. Credit: Adahlia Cole for Berkeleyside</p>
<p>Hansel Aguilar, Berkeley’s director of police accountability, is suing the city’s police chief, Jen Louis, over her department’s refusal to release records from a June sweep of a longstanding homeless encampment.</p>
<p>It is the latest escalation in an increasingly testy relationship between the Berkeley Police Department and the city’s civilian oversight apparatus, with the lawsuit filed just a week after the City Council met to discuss Aguilar’s job performance.</p>
<p>A primary duty of Aguilar’s agency is to investigate civilian complaints of police misconduct. In June, shortly after Berkeley city workers cleared several people and some property from the area of Eighth and Harrison streets, someone complained to Aguilar’s office that several officers had improperly meddled with people recording the sweep. (A federal judge put a temporary halt on the sweep the same day.)</p>
<p>Aguilar asked BPD for records in July, and BPD turned over some, including some body cam recordings; Aguilar upped the ante with a subpoena in August, according to a petition filed Dec. 8 in Alameda County Superior Court by his attorneys, Jason M. McEwen and Addison G. Kahn of Costa Mesa-based Woodruff & Smart.</p>
<p>Several councilmembers gave Aguilar a public dressing-down in late September after he forced two agenda items onto their calendar. Aguilar requested, but not allowed, to join the closed-door council session where the members discussed his performance.</p>
<p>Aguilar’s office, and the Police Accountability Board, were created in 2020 with the support of 85% of city voters, but since then many of their policy recommendations have been ignored by the council and they have regularly relied on subpoenas to get records from BPD, all while negotiating on two fronts — with the city administration and police officers union — in order to finally set their own operating regulations.</p>
<p>BPD has already turned over some of what Aguilar subpoenaed, including an operations plan and a computer-assisted dispatch (CAD) log, as well as body camera recordings from officers at the scene. But Louis wrote back in September that the rest of what he asked for, which included radio transcripts and other investigative reports, either did not exist or was not his place to demand.</p>
<p>The records BPD withheld “are not relevant to this specific misconduct complaint investigation,” and giving them to BPD’s civilian overseers could undermine ongoing investigations and compromise the privacy rights of people involved, Louis wrote to Aguilar Sept. 12.</p>
<p>Aguilar’s attorneys countered that the charter doesn’t give a police chief the discretion to determine what is or is not within the scope of a police accountability director’s authority, since that director is specifically meant to be independent of other city agencies. As for privacy and security, the director and all PAB members are required to keep those sorts of records confidential.</p>
<p>Without the as-yet unspecified records, Aguilar cannot meet his duty under the charter to “ensure a timely, thorough, complete, objective and fair investigation” of the underlying civilian complaint, his attorneys wrote.</p>
<p>Aguilar has asked the court to order Louis to turn over whatever records she has withheld, or to hold a hearing as soon as possible to hear arguments on whether Louis should or should not turn the records over.</p>
<p>Aguilar has also asked for a judicial declaration that Louis “has failed to comply with her duties” and that she must turn over the records Aguilar asked for unless prohibited by state or federal law.</p>
<p>BPD’s policy manual includes several pages of instructions for how and whether officers should act when members of the public record police activity. It is unclear what policy precisely the officers involved are accused of having violated.</p>
<p>City Attorney Farimah Brown said her office would “defend the city against the lawsuit.”</p>
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The City Council has urged the Police Accountability Board, police union and city administration to finish hammering out the PAB’s regulations. Image: Zac Farber
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