Police hiring is on the rebound as crime rates in Berkeley have fallen, BPD says

Crime in Berkeley fell in most major areas from 2023 to 2024, reflecting a nationwide trend and “a return toward historical norms,” the Berkeley Police Department reported Tuesday to the City Council.

And while crime fell, the agency may finally have gotten some traction in its yearslong struggle to recruit and retain more personnel.

According to BPD’s annual report, shootings dropped 26%, robberies 43%, sexual assaults 25%, commercial burglaries 30% and auto thefts 23% from 2023 to 2024. Thefts of catalytic converters have dropped as well, from a peak of 847 in 2022 to 457 in 2023 to 312 last year. The final figures for 2024 reflect trends Berkeleyside reported in December.

Though infrequent, hate crimes remained relatively high for Berkeley with 45 reported in 2024. There were 42 reports in 2021, 38 in 2022 and 46 in 2023. Hate incidents — acts of prejudice that do not actually run afoul of any law — dropped by roughly a quarter, from 50 in 2023 to 37 in 2024, which is still higher than the 22 incidents in 2021 and 31 in 2022. Berkeleyans who identify with the LGBTQ community were targeted most frequently, or roughly 31% of the time, in 2024, followed by Black and Jewish victims, according to police data.

Total calls for service dipped roughly 3% from 63,791 to 61,666. Non-emergency calls, the most frequent type of report, dropped 14%, but 911 calls rose 9%, from approximately 14,100 to 15,300, police said. The downtown area saw the highest call volume of any part of the city.

The average number of calls an officer handled in a given shift dropped slightly from 6.3 to 6.2, but those figures remain well above what officers averaged each shift the two years prior — 5.6 in 2021 and 5.7 in 2022.

Applications to work for BPD quintupled in 2024

Low staffing levels at BPD and the city’s dispatch center has been an issue for years. The agency’s numbers never fully recovered from a mass exodus that peaked in 2018. Likewise, the city’s dispatch center is barely above half strength, with 21 total dispatchers and supervisors out of 41 total positions, police said.

BPD currently has 154 sworn officers and supervisors despite being authorized for up to 181, but that’s a marked increase from just six months ago, when the department only had 147 sworn officers.

Applications to work for BPD quintupled in 2024 compared with previous years, an increase the agency attributed to Sacramento-based All-Star Recruiting, whom the city hired last year for a four-year, $1.3 million contract to attract new police officers and firefighters.

The department is also working to beef up its roster of community service officers, non-sworn personnel who can take some tasks off sworn officers’ hands. Three new candidates are currently in training, police said.