Berkeley taps Mary Opler as new police oversight director

The city of Berkeley has chosen Mary Opler as its new director of police accountability after removing the prior director early this year.

The Berkeley City Council is set to appoint Opler at its Sept. 29 meeting as part of the consent calendar.

She would start Oct. 5 at a salary of $230,000.

The full council agenda has not been posted, and the city has released no information about Opler's background. She appears to have no LinkedIn page or public social media profiles.

The Scanner has asked the city of Berkeley and the Police Accountability Board for more information.

Opler worked as a police officer in San Francisco in 2013 and 2014, according to public payroll records.

She quit that job because of concerns about a partner who had an "unconstitutional" approach to policing, a Madison, Wisconsin, radio station reported late last year, when Opler was a finalist for the role of independent police monitor in that city.

After working as a police officer, Opler attended law school at the University of Washington, where she was the president of the Student Bar Association in 2017.

She began working as a criminal prosecutor in King County in 2018 and was there for several years, according to public payroll records.

In a finalist forum in Madison last year, Opler said her work as an attorney would prepare her well for the top police oversight job, where she planned to close open cases and "speak truth to power," local news site Isthmus reported.

"Opler said she has personally overseen more than 1,000 internal review cases," the news site reported.

(Another candidate ultimately got that job and is now in an "ongoing dispute" with the Madison city attorney's office over possible violations, according to Wisconsin State Journal.)

Opler was also a finalist to run Denver's Citizen Oversight Board in 2022.

At the time, she oversaw "police and fire department internal affairs investigations at the Sacramento Office of Public Safety Accountability," The Denver Post reported. "In that role, she investigates police shootings and serves as a liaison with the local civilian police review board."

She also "worked in emergency response for the Red Cross and the Federal Emergency Management Agency," the newspaper reported.

The selection processes in Denver and Madison both included public meetings where candidates spoke directly to the public and fielded questions.

That didn't happen in Berkeley.

Earlier this year, the city held public meetings about what the director of police accountability should do and the skills they should have, but the finalists were never public.

The city held finalist interviews in July with a community panel that included several Police Accountability Board members, with city staff and with a council subcommittee comprising Mayor Adena Ishii, Cecilia Lunaparra and Mark Humbert.

The full City Council informally selected Opler as its top choice in a closed-session meeting July 24, according to an individual who was not authorized to speak publicly about the process.

At the time, the city said there was no official action to report from the meeting.

As of 2025, Opler was listed as an investigations supervisor with Seattle's Office of Police Accountability.

The Scanner has asked Seattle officials whether Opler still works for the city and will update this story if information becomes available.

Berkeley's former police accountability director, Hansel Aguilar, sued the city in May for wrongful termination after issuing a public statement in his defense when he was removed in February.

As of this week, the city had filed no response to Aguilar's lawsuit and said it had not been served. The initial hearing, a case management conference, is set for Oct. 20, according to court records.

Watch: Mary Opler in Madison in 2025

Her segment begins about 55 minutes into the recording.