Moore, a 41-year-old transgender Berkeley resident, died of an accidental drug overdose while in police custody in February, but the details of her death did not come to light until the release of the report on May 3 — nearly 3 months after her death.

A death in police custody is inherently an extremely sensitive situation — one which the department needed to communicate with the public about quickly and extensively.

Instead, not only was an autopsy report not released in a timely manner, but the police failed to provide a meaningful reason for the delay to the public.

Furthermore, before the death occurred in police custody, the autopsy should have been done by an outside agency other than the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office Coroner’s Bureau to ensure its validity and rid the police department of unnecessary suspicion.

Employing an outside organization to complete an internal investigation is not unheard of. Following the events of Occupy Cal in November 2011, an independent review of police actions were ordered to make certain that no bias was involved.

Although department spokesperson Jennifer Coats apologized for the lengthy delay and noted that the department wanted to ensure a “proper and thorough investigation for Moore,” an apology is not enough.

If Berkeley Police Department expects to be valued and trusted by the people it aims to protect and serve, it needs to be prompt and accountable regarding its own conduct.

The department should learn from this incident and create a better procedure for the future — one in which it moves forward with transparency as a fundamental value.

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When I was a child, we would go to Tijuana to visit family, and on our way back from Mexico, the officers at the border would ask us the standard questions regarding our citizenship: On what business were we crossing the border, what was our citizenship status … the list goes on. And, as always, they would address my brother and me directly. They would ask a separate set of questions, each designed to, as I now know, figure out whether my brother and I were being illegally taken into the United States. And on more than one occasion, we completely refused to answer these questions. It was only after the officer asked why we couldn’t respond that we would answer, “Our parents told us never to talk to strangers.”

Now, clearly I made it back into the United States somehow, but this issue persisted regardless of country; I would simply refuse to speak to anyone I didn’t already know.

Needless to say, it’s a terrible way to go about making friends.

It took a lot of effort to get over this problem. It was parenting gone too far, and, even consciously knowing that, I couldn’t figure out how to just get out there and talk.

While I know that I’m not completely over my communication problem, I will say that Berkeley has been an incredibly effective start to a solution. Yes, there is that initial crazed rush to make friends (kind of similar to being thrown into a pool in order to learn how to swim), but while that certainly helped to get me over my problem, it’s more of a quick fix than any real change. It’s just being here at Berkeley, meeting people I normally wouldn’t meet, getting to know them and realizing that maybe strangers aren’t all that strange.

Take, for example, a new friend of mine who I met in a cafe I now frequent. He’s an older man, somewhere in his 60s, the kind of person who is instantly associated with a lifetime of experiences. Normally, I see these kinds of people, label them as “other” and resume my day in a typical fashion, mostly pretending they don’t exist.

Except, on one of my usual evenings of caffeine-assisted studying, I noticed that the man was drawing the people in the cafe — and absolutely beautifully. As someone who enjoys drawing, I took a lot of interest in his manner of practice and decided to try it myself. It was after seeing a few of my sketches that the older man asked if I wanted some tips.

He sat down at a table adjacent to mine, began giving me warm-up exercises, tips with what materials to use how to hold my hand. Noticing my interest in Batman and comic books in general, he even began showing me techniques that comic book artists use, always relating back to his own time working on similar art projects. He gave me one of his pens, a pencil and paper, all with the promise of teaching me more.

And that’s how I came to know an incredible artist, one who has worked story-boarding movies, designing cartoon characters and is currently writing his own graphic novel — none of which I would have known had I sat there in silence, frozen by the idea of an unknown person approaching me.

It’s not even about being a cripplingly shy person (that’s an entirely different beast); it’s the idea that anyone you haven’t met yet falls automatically into the category of “stranger,” a word with unfavorable connotations. It’s a prejudice based solely on the fact that this person hasn’t accidentally been happened upon before.

Having realized this, I’m trying to get around these preconceived notions about strangers and boil them down to the facts: There’s nothing inherently weird or strange about someone being unknown. Being someone unknown doesn’t make a person any less worthy of your time. Most importantly, there isn’t anything necessarily negative to someone unknown. In fact, the only thing that can really be deduced about someone unknown is the fact that you don’t really know them.

While I’m not advocating going out there and talking to every single stranger on the street — not only would that be exhausting, but there is still some merit to that “don’t talk to strangers” adage — keeping an open mind is essential. It might be important to starting a career path, crossing over into another country or just making a new, helpful friend. And, rather than looking at it as talking to strangers, think of it as tapping into one of Berkeley’s — or anywhere else’s — greatest resources.

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What does the number 10 billion mean, really? It’s basically incomprehensible, like a googol, like Google. Supposedly in your mouth there are 10 billion bacteria, but my jaw gets sore every time I try to count in the mirror. The number of observable galaxies is apparently numerable in the 10s of billions, but I can’t really notice them when I’m looking for the Big Dipper. In his Running the Numbers series, photographer Chris Jordan attempted to visually represent this kind of unimaginable mass production, but he could only fathom images of a few million cigarette butts, packing peanuts and bottle caps. Ten billion is a few million million, and I shiver at the thought of that many devices held by hands with access to “Axel F” by Crazy Frog, the ringtone-turned-song that Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren called “the death knell of the traditional music industry.”

Where do all these cellphones come from? Are they coming out of the woodwork, like the termites of lore? Are they dropped from the sky by a nickel-poisoned stork? As any Berkeley student who carries as much weight on their conscience as in their backpack knows, the wondrous gleaming square of data congeals in one of Foxconn’s fluorescent factories, each bit tended by an assembly-cubicle Chinese man or woman dressed similarly to a milkman. The phone’s input materials are metals of the pencil and coin variety — lead, copper, zinc — along with metals of the Beyonce variety — gold and silver — and the final PVC component is donated with bug-eyed insanity from the Blue Man Group. With the cellphone recycling rate estimated at about 10 percent by the EPA, the phone likely ceases its vibrations and chimes in a plastic garbage can: The embarrassing old RAZR or Chocolate is soon covered with Gillette and Toblerone. If you turn out to be one of the elect few who toss their mobiles into the recycling, either by choice or divine accident, as per Jobist theology your cellphone will join the e-waste current, floating in a container on one of Charon’s trans-Pacific barges (the purgatorial phones riding the Mobro 4000), ending up in a land of burning waste — the 10G of hell, Guiyu, China.

Been taking my bandwidth? I’ll see you in Guiyu. I’ll watch your wretched device torn apart and melted by 5,500 ravenous enterprises just waiting to line their pocketbooks with your uncharged remains. Don’t think it hasn’t happened before: 1.5 million pounds of computer castings, keyboards, phone cases and the like pass through this barren land every year. The air swims with record levels of cancer-causing dioxins, the water oozes black with ash like one of the La Brea tar pits and the children have lead poisoning like chicken pox: Shantou University professor Huo Xia blood-tested 167 children under age six from the town in 2010, and it turned out 88 percent of them were lead poisoned. And for those Guiyu children whose IQ’s and central nervous systems remain “four bars” strong, headaches, skin damage, gastritis and ulcers await — the body’s complaints against breathing an atmosphere of sublimated rubber and paint. This is the graveyard of globalization, the anomalous blight on techno-capitalism’s shiny surface, a bizarre and altogether new phenomenon: a city of, by and for garbage.

Guiyu residents undoubtedly perform e-waste breakdown because the business is more profitable and thus luxurious than their former daily routine of waking up with a backache, working all day with a backache, and going to sleep next to a sweaty water buffalo, itself nursing a nasty backache that keeps it up all night, bleating. A “standard of living” is, after all, an inherently relative concept. Nevertheless, if Guiyu exists in its toxic state at our current level of electronic mass production, what further toxic villages are yet to be realized? Is there not some imperative to rethink the first principle of the Information Age — that new is improved and therefore we must determine what is obsolete as soon as it is feasible to do so? What I’m really asking here is: What are we doing with 10 billion phones?

The phones get manufactured, of course — but then they get sold. And they get sold through outstanding marketing campaigns from the telecommunications giants. What truly surprises me is the tone that these advertisements sometimes take — while attempting to sell a cellphone, they often sardonically portray the cellphone user himself. When Samsung, itself a propagator of the Celltaceous era, derides Apple users in its “The Next Big Thing is Already Here” TV commercial as the type who would see the release of the next iPhone as our generation’s Woodstock, does it indict just the Apple users or, actually, our whole generation? When I see Apple’s iPhone ad campaign depicting a happy 4S owner lying in her car asking her Siri app about the night sky, am I supposed to take this as an example of the many valuable uses of the device or as a mockery of the type of person who would be in a car by themselves talking to their phone — in other words, the prospective Apple customer? And when in the same commercial, the chick sitting in the diner asks her phone, not her friend, where exactly they are, I’m a little curious myself.

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