•   The first problem is that Kensington historically had a combined GM/COP position. A police officer had always been hired for this position. The position represented an obvious conflict of interest, as the GM supervised himself. This led to ongoing problems with staff who ultimately sued for various issues, i.e. wrongful termination, or harassment. After the 2016 election, after the residents became aware of this major issue, the new board voted to separate the 2 positions and create a part time GM, and COP. The GM, Tony Constantouros is a retired manager, and our COP is Interim Chief Hull.
•   Because there had never been professional management of the board, for fiscal and budget planning, many areas had not been addressed leading to long term mismanagement of the budget which encompasses primarily police services, parks and waste management services. The bulk of the police budget goes to salaries, benefits, equipment and pension benefits. The solution in the past has been to bail out the district by raising property taxes with assessments. The board presently is faced with huge pension liability costs, and high benefits costs for current employees and retirees.
•   The park and community center presently get very little funding, and the waste management contract is an afterthought, which resulted in a recent 50% increase in fees for residents.
•   The second problem is that Kensington has a stand alone police dept, with bloated management positions, and excessive salaries, pensions and benefits. It does not have the infrastructure – human resources, benefits administration, internal affairs – thus these tasks are left to a volunteer board who generally lacked the expertise to deal with these issues. This resulted in issues of abuse of power by the former police chiefs; several current police staff were involved in charges of misconduct and harassment. There has been a high turnover of staff due to harassment and morale problems. In 2016 a scandal involving a trip to Reno by 5 staff, a lost gun, badge, ammo, and cuffs to a prostitute, followed by a cover up by the police chief and no discipline of the officer. This ultimately led to the firing of the police chief. Another scandal in Berkeley led to the demotion of an officer and discipline for another.
•   When a Kensington police officer is out on medical or administrative leave (currently three of our nine officers are on leave) the District has no backup personnel so overtime is given to the remaining officers. This seriously impacts the KPPCSD’s budget. Overtime has added $75k or more to the budget in the past few years.
•   With a contract for services, a model that has been very successful with the fire district, the contracting agency would guarantee a full complement of police officers at all times without the necessity of paying overtime. The contract can stipulate that Kensington police staff will be Kensington identified (uniforms, police car logos) and can begin to define appropriate community policing policies that meet the needs of our community.
•  This option will be studied to determine what option will work best for Kensington.
•  The KPD is now led by the COP and the GM oversees all staff.

•   Cleaning up Kensington’s broken police culture will require the professional assets – human resources management, benefits administration, internal affairs, staff attorneys to deal with powerful police unions — that are only found in more sophisticated departments. The fire district figured this out 20 years ago, and it works very well for Kensington.

•   The last time the contracting of police was seriously considered by the KPPCSD, the board majority sabotaged the discussions by revising the report of their own consultant (Brown Taylor Report) in order to eliminate the potential savings.