Berkeley Police Price Quote For BearCat Armored Vehicle

ha ha - I've spoken with Berkeley police before, and they often have like one officer per shift assigned to patrolling traffic. In cities in other states where there isn't such a screwed up tax to employee cost ratio, you will see traffic officers all over, writing tickets for stop signs and cutting off pedestrians.
Berkeley has a ridiculous car theft rate - particularly near campus. I got my car stolen, and when I brought it up at a party, two other people had anecdotes about their vehicle being stolen, and then they successfully set out to find it by themselves by driving up and down streets in the area.
Look at page 16 for a map of the density of cars stolen/year - something like 1/60 cars in Berkeley are stolen each year. Bicycles don't even have accurate statistics. Maybe the PD could do a couple stings where they put a GPS device in bicycles to track down the high frequency thieves.
http://www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/council8/AutoTheft.pdf

As a current Mayoral candidate and I always been critical of our so called "Peace Officers". Working with Copwatch at the time I have seen the Berkeley Police Department (BPD) go through a drug scandal (286 bags of dope) getting consumed by one officer Karry Kent, who retired with full benefits. A Justified use of Force by shooting a 54 year old grandmother (Anita Gay) in the back and killing her, she happened to be of African American decent. The BPD has also overreacted to protests in the City with the Marine Recruiters and have been caught giving mutual aid to the UC police in a non-emergency issues which is against their charter. Most recently their Chief Micheal Meehan has lied about the mutual aid packages first saying they were going to break the mutual aid because of the beating of students on Sproul (Biko) plaza and the now famous pepper spraying students on the UC Davis campus by UC police. After the winter break thinking nobody was paying attention came back to City council with Mayor Bates approval and tightened the bonds between BPD and the UC police. The Chief not done with showing how inept he is said that his police department could not respond to what turned out to be an eventual murder because he had 3 shifts (36 in total) of officers monitoring a march which had'nt left Oscar Grant Plaza in Oakland. Fearing his lying would catch up to him he said the march was going to "attack" the UC police department which is another lie as the march was in solidarity with the Cal students (Occupy). The Chief freaks out seeing the story starting to get out sends an armed office (Sargent) to an reporters house at 12.45 in the morning either to intimidate out of the story or to ask a favor. Meanwhile his own officers are having on duty sex on a desk top in the station while the chief only sees to only separate the two married (not to each other) officers. It sounds like a late night party (drugs, sex and violence) than a college town police department.