July 1, 2026 the Day After the Vote on Surveillance
The drive for surveillance in Berkeley and birthright citizenship
It’s July 1, 2026 and I am trying to change my ways and get out my response to the latest happenings sooner.
It may seem strange to write on birthright citizenship and surveillance in Berkeley in the same Activist’s Diary, but the both happened on the same day or at least we heard the results on the same day, June 30, 2026 and they are in a way linked.
In a normal world, the kind of world we thought we knew before Trump, the Supreme Court vote on birthright citizenship in Trump v. Barbara would have been 9 to 0 or at least 7 to 2 since Thomas and Alioto are still on the bench. But if we really look at the history of our country we never were that normal multi-racial, multi-ethnic country. There have always been strong forces pulling in another direction. The 6 to 3 vote supporting birthright citizenship was really a 5 to 4 with Kavanaugh concurring with the majority and dissenting in part. Kavanaugh is quite willing to see it all undone in his separate opinion giving a nod to congress to enact new legislation to establish exceptions to birthright citizenship. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-365_4hdj.pdf
Gorsuch, Alioto and Thomas dissents fall into what is loosely birth tourism. Solicitor General D. John Sauer used it in his argument before the Supreme Court arguing the birthright citizenship spawned a sprawling industry of birth tourism.
Birth tourism is a theme and claim pushed by right-wing commentators on right wing media. It is often paired with the Great Replacement that immigration is a grand conspiracy to eliminate the white majority. It all gets pretty ugly.
White supremacy and the Great Replacement is never far away on the right. If you think Tucker Carlson has made some big turnaround in declaring he is through with Trump, then take a listen to the podcast The Moment with Jorge Ramos and Paola Ramos. Paola says at the start they are conducting the interview as Carlson has 30 million followers and they don’t just interview people they agree with. Jorge said near the end to Carlson there is nothing Carlson said with which he agreed.
Paola Ramos is the author of Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America an excellent read which gives a much different picture than the one painted for us so often by consultants and pundits.
When I look at the win on birthright citizenship, I think about how we celebrated the win on May 7 when through massive grassroots effort the Mater Services Agreement (MSA) with Flock was stopped. But there was more and just like we see the success of May 7 slipping away, by not focusing on the rest of the motion that evening, the win on birthright citizenship is fragile. We should expect efforts to chip away at it to continue.
In this fragile environment where we are living in an anocracy in a continual slide away from democracy it seems incomprehensible that Berkeley City Council and City of Berkeley Administration would be in hot pursuit of a massive integrated surveillance system, but that is where we are.
One of the speakers last night at council, James McFadden said to the Mayor and Council stating rather than asking have they read any books on the subject, they need to read more. I would agree.
This morning I checked my books read list for this year. I’m behind on my goal, but at least I am to a respectable twenty-seven books since January 1, 2026. I moved The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts after Communism by Tina Rosenberg up on my to read list. The book opens with a woman discovering that it was her husband spying on her for the Stasi.
It was a sparse showing last night at city council with only about half of the seats filled. AI says the seating is 192 to 240 with 7 seats on the dais. This is the problem with AI it is often not accurate. When the boardroom at the Berkeley Adult School was remodeled some years ago it was designed to hold both the School Board meetings and Berkeley City Council to more fully utilize the space. There are nine seats on the dais though only seven are used by the school board.
When you look at the $300,000,000 bond that will be on the ballot in November, you can expect renovating old city hall and building an addition so city council can have its own chamber to be in there. If that new imagined council chamber has any utilization like the old city council chamber it will sit empty, unused most of the time.
Last night only eight of the seats on the dais were filled. Councilmember Bartlett who voted in opposition to proceeding forward with surveillance on May 7 was absent.
The public seating is set up with stackable chairs which get pretty uncomfortable when meetings run for hours. How many seats are filling the room depends on how closely the rows are set up, but there is no way getting around that the number of people who showed up in person to speak on agenda items 19 and 46 on surveillance was small and speakers on zoom was maybe ten for the first round on 19 and fewer on 46.
I went to an organizing meeting about a week and a half ago on surveillance and June 30 was not high on their radar screen. Some present were working on the assumption that nothing was going to happen until after the first of the year when the renewal of the ALPRs (automated license place readers) will come due. My take on the whole thing is this is going to move fast while the City Manager Buddenhagen, the BPD (Berkeley Police Department) have a solid majority with five councilmembers Kesarwani, Taplin, O’Keefe, Humbert and Blackaby.
I wouldn’t count out Mayor Ishii voting for surveillance after watching her nodding her head in agreement with the BPD presentation and response to questions at the June 2 Policy Committee on Public Safety. Rereading the transcript from May 7 in her closing comments her objections were to Flock not surveillance.
We could have a vast surveillance system in the making in Berkeley before the end of September.
O’Keefe insisted there was nothing new in surveillance except live stream. Adding live streaming to the surveillance mix gives BPD access to private video streaming security cameras registered with the City. All of this will save time for BPD.
If any reader remembers the columnist Herb Caen, when he was asked how he got so much done, he answered he never used any time saving devices.
It isn’t just live streaming that is new, it is integrating all the various components of the system with the investigative software. Those components listed in the June 30 council agenda with a cost of $2,408,500 as item 19. Formal Bid Solicitations and Request for Proposals Scheduled for Possible Issuance After Council Approval on June 30, 2026 appear as Public Safety Technology Tools: DFR (Drones as first responders), UAS (Unmanned aircraft systems - Drones), ALPR (automated license plate readers), PTZ (fixed cameras), Private Camera Feeds Integration (accessing privately owned security cameras for live video feed), and Investigative Software (Up to 4-year, Divisible Awards).
Page 2 of the Formal Bid Solicitation and RFP document ends with “[S]cope includes hardware, installation, cloud hosting, training, maintenance, CJIS complaint data retention, and policy audit support”. It also includes July 8, 2026 as the RFP release date and August 7, 2026 as the opening bid date.
CJIS stands for the Criminal Justice Information Services Division of the FBI
https://www.fbi.gov
Anywhere you see CVS that stands for Cloud Video services.
Item 19 passed unanimously with forty other items on consent. There were forty-two in total.
Kesarwani withheld her vote for item 40 on consent. Item 40 from Tregub supports former mayor and current state senator Arreguin’s SB 1383 written to prevent developers from using a density bonus to waive or reduce local labor standards, benefits or working conditions. SB 1383 is in response to Berkeley developers using state density bonus concessions to evade the Berkeley Hard Hat Ordinance which requires projects within City limits of 50,000 square feet or more of floor area to pay prevailing wage, cover health care benefits and participate in apprenticeship programs.
Kesarwani said SB 1383 made construction too expensive and projects infeasible. Kesarwani is the author of the local density bonus for condominiums going through the City review process which gives developers all the same goodies as the state density bonus without the requirement of inclusionary affordable units. Developers buy their way out of including affordable units by paying the in lieu fee. At least one known developer sees those affordable units as cutting too much into his profits.
The state density bonus encourages affordable housing within new housing developments by giving a bonus to build bigger and taller projects beyond what zoning would allow based on the proportion of affordable units within the project. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=GOV§ionNum=65915
Kesarwani leaves office at the end of her term in December.
Agenda item 45 the Initiative Ordinance Amending the Rent Stabilization Ordinance was postponed to the July 7 council meeting. Everything else listed under action passed.
The recording of Tuesday’s council meeting is not posted yet and I didn’t make a note of who said that the PAB (Police Accountability Board) had a representative(s) participating in the RFP. A representative of the PAB is not the same as bringing the RFP to the PAB when the full PAB has the opportunity to review the draft RFP with discussion and recommendations.
No discussion of the RFP at the PAB with all board members has occurred. And the RFP according to the documents in the agenda from Buddenhagen, City Manager, is scheduled to be released on July 8, 2026 when the next scheduled PAB meeting is that evening at 6:30 pm if the PAB stays on schedule of meeting the 2nd and 4th Wednesday of the month.
I would say this does not fulfill the council motion for the City Manager to initiate “an RFP process in consultation with the Police Accountability Board and the BFD for each of the components in the MSA and for their integration”.
The PAB was down to four members. Since City Council fired the former Director of Police Accountability at the beginning of the year, councilmembers have been naming recommendations to fill the empty posts to bring back the full board to nine. I know nothing about the PAB candidates being presented to council to fill the empty posts.
Since I embarked on attending City meetings including as many commission and board meetings as I can fit in back in November 2014, I’ve noticed a change that is more than just the dismantling and merging of commissions that started under former councilmember Droste before she left office in 2022 and accelerated under former councilmember Sophie Hahn.
The writing was on the wall to dismantle public participation through commissions when former City Manager Dee Williams-Ridley presented to the Agenda and Rules Committee with Arreguin’s blessing as mayor a plan to create six standing council policy committees with three councilmembers and one alternate for each policy committee. The six committees were established on December 11, 2018.
I call it the olden days when I started attending Berkeley public meetings in November 2014. In the olden days I was incredibly impressed with knowledge and skills of the members of commissions and boards. There might be one or two of the members who were a little off the wall so to speak, but the majority came with not just degrees but years of experience.
Think about it. Berkeley used to have 36 boards and commissions if my recall is correct with over 300 Berkeley residents most of whom were experts in their field volunteering their time to contribute their expertise to advising the city council. Dismantling this vast wealth of experience and knowledge was proposed as a cost saving measure. There are still boards and commissions left, but their influence diminished as advisors and we have a parade of paid consultants.
I’ve noticed another change as I attend meetings. It feels like more councilmembers are choosing their appointees for boards and commissions for their views on issues rather than their expertise.
Now we have six policy committees composed of the mayor and eight councilmembers who depend on city staff to advise them and community experts get one minute to speak at council meetings if they attend at all. And here, I often observe that city staff who depend on their City employment present reports to support what the City Council has decided. I have yet to see a staff report that identifies problems with referrals/assignments from city council.
The PAB has been independent in their analysis and that appears to have been a problem for some of the councilmembers. The PAB analysis of the Flock Master Services Agreement was totally impressive.
Can we expect that same independence from the new members, I don’t know? We shall see in the coming months.
One of the last public speakers of the evening prior to the council vote noted how social media came with so much promise and asked the council to consider how social media has harmed a whole generation and not to move so fast on surveillance. That followed so many other comments including if the vendor could turn facial recognition off they could turn it on and how facial recognition can be added. The alternatives Axon, Motorola and Vigilant were described as no better than Flock.
It is a slippery slope when vendors have a vision of surveillance everywhere and our community includes mixed status families and green card holders.
City Council approved 46. -Surveillance Technology Ordinance Submissions for Community Video Streams and Investigative Software, Pursuant to Council Direction of May 7, 2026 in a 6 to 2 vote. Lunaparra voted no and Tregub withheld his vote until after first watching to see how the rest of the Council voted. Then he abstained. Kesarwani, Taplin, O’Keefe, Blackaby, Humbert and Ishii voted yes.