Fall ‘23 Safety Update

Written By Victoria Cole

In April 2023 a group of Cal parents concerned about student safety organized as SafeBears. Just six months later, and now 1,000+ parents strong, SafeBears has had dozens of private meetings and countless email exchanges — with campus administrators, student organizations, local law enforcement, and safety experts at other universities, among others. We’ve advocated for safety measures not just with Cal but also at Berkeley city council meetings and before the UC Regents.

We’ve had some important successes, but there is still so much more to be done. And, like you, we are alarmed by increasing rates of crime and public disorder affecting Cal students and the entire community.

Below is our comprehensive Fall ‘23 Safety Update with the latest information about local crime trends and the issues that affect Cal students, from residence hall security to travel after dark.

Click on each section to read more. +

And . . . Go Bears! 🐻 💙

  • Here are some ways you can immediately make a difference:

    ✅ Connect with SafeBears:

    ✅ Connect with UC administration:

    • Email your safety concerns to the appropriate Cal administrator(s) using this contact info. (Personalized messages, however short, make a huge impact on decision makers.)

    • Suggest safety priorities for the next chancellor here. (Cal’s current chancellor retires in June, and the committee searching for her replacement has invited public input.)

  • “Berkeley police said they have been seeing an uptick in armed robberies,” reports The Berkeley Scanner, a local online newspaper, which adds that “robberies in Berkeley are up 22 percent” compared to last year, with more than 290 robberies so far in 2023 according to BPD data. Cal parents have been alarmed by the brazenness of recent robberies, involving multiple perpetrators with guns, sometimes during daylight. Here are just a few examples near campus this academic year: 👇

    • Daytime armed robbery: a woman was robbed of her tote bag at gunpoint at 4:20 in the afternoon at the entrance to Clark Kerr Campus, where many first-year students live. (9/23/23)

    • Armed robbery spree: Two male students walking home from the gym around 11:00 pm were robbed at gunpoint; the four-person crew committed five robberies on and near campus that evening. (9/26/23)

    • AR-15 brandished: A female pedestrian was threatened with a semi-automatic rifle while being robbed at dawn one block from Unit 2, a dormitory for first-year students. (9/21/23)

    • Armed carjacking of student: A 19-year-old Cal student had just parked on a street adjoining Unit 2 when another car boxed her in; two men jumped out and stole her car at gunpoint. (10/9/23)

    👉 We believe that first and foremost Cal must immediately increase the visible presence of security personnel on and near campus. In practice, this means getting private security foot patrols, which we are actively working to make happen. Cal provides private security guards for special events – like Regents meetings – and Cal should also do so to keep students safe day to day. That said, we are at the same time taking steps toward hiring private security as a parent-funded program.

    • While the UCPD would ideally provide all of Cal’s security, the reality is that they are short staffed, and building the department back to full strength after Cal’s long running defunding of UCPD will take years. To put this in context, with two new officers joining in October, the UCPD now has 46 sworn officers (with one additional officer in the academy), compared with about 80 officers a decade ago. While nearly every other UC campus has increased police funding after a dip during the pandemic, Berkeley has seen fit to continue the steep cuts to UCPD’s budget that began in the ‘19-’20 fiscal year.

    • Moreover, the city of Berkeley police department is in the midst of a staffing crisis, with 30+ current vacancies. “BPD is authorized to hire 181 officers but has had closer to 125 officers available for full duty over the past year due to injuries, training and leave,” reports The Berkeley Scanner.

    • SafeBears is extremely grateful for the professionalism and bravery demonstrated by UCPD and BPD during recent challenging incidents, including the successful pursuit and arrest of the four persons responsible for the robbery spree mentioned above. We will continue to engage with both departments and support them however we can.

    🔥 Our advocacy with the city of Berkeley yielded important safety wins that should reduce the number of robberies long term. Due in part to SafeBears members sending emails and speaking at city council meetings over the summer:

  • In September, a convicted felon made his way to a sixth floor shower in a first-year residence hall before being arrested by UCPD, just one of multiple trespasses that have already occurred this academic year. This continues a pattern from 2022-2023, when such trespassing occurred with distressing frequency, including one incident at 1:30 pm in which a female employee was sexually battered, and another in which a trespasser made his way to a women’s shower.

    🔥 Residence hall security has improved this year with the hiring of more students (150 in all) to monitor Southside building lobbies from 9pm to 2am, and with increased evening foot patrols on the Clark Kerr Campus by student Community Service Officers.

    👉 But the university must do more, with urgency. We are advocating for measures like fencing, dedicated foot patrols by professional security personnel, and realtime monitored cameras. We also want more lobby monitors (known as Residential Safety Ambassadors) and Community Service Officers, as experience shows that not all trespasses occur at night. 🔥 We can report that both Berkeley Residential Life and UCPD have committed to expanding the service hours for these programs. We’ll be monitoring the situation closely.

  • 🔥 Getting all three night shuttle buses back in service by the end of the 2022-2023 academic year was our first big victory, and we are pleased that the night shuttles this year appear to be running fairly well. We’ve also seen improvements since last year in BearWalk, a free walking escort, though unfortunately long wait times are still being reported at peak hours. 🔥 UCPD states that as of October 2023, it has 58 Community Service Officers (the students who provide both BearWalks and roaming foot patrols) and will hire until it reaches 100 CSOs. We’ll hold them to their word.

    👉 We continue to advocate for discounted rideshares for students after dark, and we hope to have an update soon on this commonsense measure offered by other universities, including UC San Diego.

  • The Cal community has been shaken by recent violence and threats of violence on the streets of Southside, the neighborhood where most students live, shop and socialize. Incidents include:

    • Students were chased and menaced by a man wielding a pickaxe in the Unit 2 courtyard and on the streets

    • A student was assaulted with a pipe

    • A person was robbed and assaulted steps from the Durant entrance to Unit 1

    👉 We support efforts by Cal and the city to provide help and long-term solutions for Southside residents contending with addiction and unmanaged mental illness. Unfortunately, meaningful change will take months, if not years. In the meantime, Cal and the city of Berkeley must prioritize putting more boots on the ground to keep everyone safe, including members of the vulnerable unhoused population who themselves are preyed upon and victimized.

  • Students deserve to learn, work and relax in safety and peace in campus spaces like classrooms, libraries, and the student union. But disruptive, sometimes criminal, behavior by non-affiliates happens almost daily, harming student learning and mental health. Berkeley staff too have recently expressed serious concerns about this issue. Here are just a few recent examples of behavior by non-affiliates in just one building, the MLK Student Union:

    • Man on probation slaps one person and steals the laptop of another

    • Man in the women’s restroom, trying to look into the stalls

    • Man on probation “waiving a knife around”

    👉 We are urging Cal to do more to secure its property and buildings from dangerous non-affiliate behavior and from threats generally. This is an area where additional unarmed personnel, such as UCPD’s Security Patrol Officers, could make a significant impact. We are also calling on Cal to consider closing more buildings to the public, at least on a temporary basis. Finally, we continue to monitor Cal’s progress in fulfilling its promises to improve building security after a frightening incident last year revealed serious flaws in training and infrastructure, including students and faculty unsure of what to do in response to a perceived active threat, classroom doors not locking, and students and staff unable to call for help from rooms with no cell phone coverage.

  • Cal must do better with the timeliness and content of WarnMe alerts, which are supposed to help the university community avoid ongoing threats. With the assistance of our members, we’ve reviewed examples of these federally mandated notifications from other universities and found that Cal’s WarnMe system lags far behind.

    Among other issues Cal’s alerts often come too late and with too little information to be useful. As just one example: Cal’s alerts typically contain little if any descriptive information about suspect(s), even in cases where we know from our monitoring of police frequencies that the victim(s) gave detailed descriptions of multiple characteristics like height, weight, age, clothing, hair, gender, race, etc. This refusal to provide suspect information makes UC Berkeley an outlier not only against other major universities, but compared to other UC schools including UCLA, UC Davis, and UC San Diego. It is vital that suspect description be regularly included every time the suspect is at large to help potential victims (like students) avoid crossing paths with them.

    👉 View the WarnMe presentation we recently made to Cal’s Clery Act compliance office.

  • 🔥 In September, 16 students attended our first self defense class near campus – a private, discounted workshop for Cal students only. Better safety training is one of the most popular requests from both Cal parents and students.

    👉 We expect to have updates soon on our other priorities, including a permanent corp of full-time Safety Ambassadors on and around campus, and better lighting where students learn and live.

    ✅ Have ideas about how Cal can be safer for students? Email us!

Victoria Cole
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