The People's Park redevelopment in Berkeley created a politically charged, operationally complex scenario — a high-visibility public space at the intersection of university, city, and community interests, with a history of civil unrest and the likelihood of future mass gatherings, protests, and potential confrontations.
Berkeley PD, UC Police Department, and city agencies would all have roles in any significant incident at the site. But those agencies had different protocols, different command structures, and different operational assumptions about how a coordinated response would actually work. Nobody knew where the gaps were — until they tested it.
Working as a subcontractor to Tamarack Management, TLR contributed the exercise design and facilitation for this engagement — building a three-module tabletop specifically for the People's Park operational context, with scenarios that reflected the realistic range of incidents the site might produce: civil unrest, mass gathering management, and an escalating multi-agency response situation.
Each module was designed to stress-test a specific dimension of coordinated response: communication and notification protocols in the first module, command authority and decision-making in the second, and resource coordination and public information in the third. The scenario progression was deliberate — starting with manageable complexity and escalating to force participants into the decisions that reveal where real gaps exist.
TLR helped to facilitate the full exercise, managed the pace and pressure of each module, and documented observations throughout — building toward an executive summary that translated the exercise experience into specific, prioritized improvement recommendations.
The exercise surfaced 10+ operational gaps across the three modules — concentrated in three areas: notification and alert thresholds (when does each agency call the others, and what triggers escalation?), unified command establishment (who leads, and when does the command structure shift?), and public information coordination (how do two different agencies communicate with the public without sending contradictory messages?).
None of these gaps were obvious from a document review. They emerged because the exercise put real decision-makers in realistic scenarios and gave them space to discover — in a low-stakes environment — where their assumptions about coordination didn't match reality.
Berkeley PD, UCPD, and city agencies left the exercise with something they didn't have going in: a documented map of where their coordination assumptions didn't hold. The 10+ gaps aren't surprises anymore — they're known, prioritized, and assigned for resolution.
The executive summary translated exercise observations into a specific action set, sequenced by impact and scoped to each agency's role. Coordination problems that would have surfaced during a real incident at People's Park are now being addressed before one requires them to.