Berkeleyside31%
Council gives Berkeley police easier access to other agencies’ dogs, helicopters 48%
By Alex N. Gecan28%
7/16/2026, 2:00:00 PM
Keywords: Berkeley City Council, Berkeley Police Department, Dogs, Helicopters, Policing, Public Safety, Crime, Police, Politics
BS Summary: This article contains 20 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Negativity Bias, and Confirmation Bias, with Framing Effect as the most egregious example at 18.4% saturation with 173 hits. Analysis detected 1,212 faulty-reasoning hits from 940 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 49.3% and a BS Rank of 48% (11,061 of 21,166 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 52.30% of the article peer group.
In a narrow vote Tuesday the City Council gave the Berkeley Police Department more latitude to ask other agencies to <a href="https://www.berkeleyside.org/2026/02/02/bpd-reporting-requirements-pepper-spray-tear-gas">send dogs and helicopters into the city</a>.
The vote rescinded a 44-year-old resolution that required BPD to run their requests all the way up to the city manager; under the new rules, a watch commander, usually a police lieutenant, can make the decision without seeking approval from the city’s civilian bureaucracy.
The council was scheduled to vote on another rule change for BPD, <a href="https://www.berkeleyside.org/2020/06/10/officials-ban-tear-gas-in-berkeley-approve-other-police-reforms">overturning COVID-era limitations</a> on pepper spray, smoke and tear gas, but that vote was postponed.
The council’s vote does not empower BPD to buy its own aircraft or train its own dogs; rather, it reduces the steps the agency has to take to ask a neighboring agency to help out in an investigation, standoff, search or pursuit.
Berkeley police have said that while their requests for air or canine support are rare — four or five times a year for helicopters, eight to 10 for dogs — they are vital, and supervisors on the ground only make the asks when “the resource is operationally necessary to protect life,” according to the proposal from Northwest Berkeley Councilmember Rashi Kesarwani.
The 20 to 30 minutes it currently takes a request to go up and back down the current chain of command are minutes victims may not have, police said.
“When lives and public safety are on the line, that is not the moment to be teeing up a required choke point and potential conflict between the city manager and the police chief or watch commander,” Councilmember Mark Humbert said Tuesday.
“The heat of the moment is not the time to be adjudicating the finer points of our use policies.”
Over several hours of public comment, dozens of Berkeley residents and activists asked the council to deny BPD’s request, citing reductions in crime rates, the violence dogs in particular can inflict, concerns of possible racial disparities in policing and worries over the wellbeing of the dogs themselves.
“There’s been several references by the police to the need for more modernized policing, but modernized policing across the U.S. has mostly meant billions more dollars to law enforcement instead of to the programs that we know that significantly decrease criminality,” <a href="https://www.berkeleyside.org/author/micky-duxbury">Micky Ducksbury</a>, a central Berkeley resident, said over Zoom during public comment.
“I thought the city was moving in a different direction.
Aren’t we supposed to be looking at policing through a social justice lens?”
BPD’s civilian watchdog opposed loosening restrictions
The Police Accountability Board, the police department’s civilian oversight body, wrote to the council urging it not to loosen restrictions.
The request for easier access to dogs and aircraft is the latest effort to dial back civilian oversight and restrictions on the department.
BPD has over the last year <a href="https://www.berkeleyside.org/2025/10/29/bpd-radio-encryption">begun encrypting its radio calls</a>, gotten permission to <a href="https://www.berkeleyside.org/2026/03/11/berkeley-pepper-spray-use-reports">cut reports on uses of pepper spray</a> and tried unilaterally to overhaul its entire use-of-force policy before the City Attorney’s Office <a href="https://www.berkeleyside.org/2026/04/03/bpd-use-of-force-policy-update-pab-city-council">ordered the agency to get the council’s approval first</a>.
All this has happened “without sufficient justification or oversight,” the board’s chair, Josh Cayetano, <a href="https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/2026-07/Supp%202%20Agenda%20Material%20Item%2023a%207-14-2026.pdf">wrote in the letter to the council</a>.
Cayetano told the council Tuesday that BPD “provided exactly zero instances where prior approval negatively impacted BPD’s ability to achieve their objectives, which is ultimately what matters.”
“Accountability is not an inconvenience; it is essential to public safety,” he said.
Cayetano’s letter also pointed out that drones, which BPD is looking to purchase, could perform several of the functions that helicopters would.
Berkeley police Capt.
Joe Okies said that while drones are quicker to deploy, they have shorter maximum flight times and tighter ranges compared to helicopters.
“For events that are either long and protracted, or an event such as a fleeing suspect in a vehicle, a helicopter is a better option and provides a level of coverage that drones do not,” Okies said.
<a href="https://www.berkeleyside.org/2026/06/29/golden-gate-bridge-protest-gaza-a15-felony-trial-san-francisco">Rocky Chau</a>, a longtime volunteer with the Berkeley Animal Rights Center, said using dogs in police service was “animal cruelty.”
“If cops want to chase someone down or gain compliance, they should just try doing that themselves,” Chau said Tuesday.
“Animals do not deserve to be exploited.”
The package passed by a single vote, five votes to four, with Councilmembers Ben Bartlett, Cecilia Lunaparra and Igor Tregub and Mayor Adena Ishii opposing.
Kesarwani, Humbert and Councilmembers Brent Blackaby, Shoshana O’Keefe and Terry Taplin voted in favor.
BPD will be allowed to request canine support to find or arrest suspects who are wanted for violent felonies, residential burglaries or those who are carrying deadly weapons, or when serving warrants on suspects in violent felonies.
They can also ask for dogs to sniff out crime scenes, physical evidence, missing persons or explosives.
They are forbidden from calling in canine support for crowd control, to close encampments of unhoused people or to pursue suspects in most less serious crimes.
Police can ask their law enforcement colleagues for helicopters for disaster response, rescues, missing persons cases, to chase dangerous fleeing felony suspects, for air support in car chases and when air support might reduce danger to officers.
The council will take up the request to loosen restrictions on tear gas, smoke and pepper spray on Sept.
15.
The proposal would only allow BPD’s Special Response Team to use tear gas, but forbid its use for crowd control.
Tear gas has been banned outright in Berkeley since 2020; at the same time, the council prohibited BPD from using pepper spray or smoke for crowd control.
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