how cool welcome to our 7pm session of the March 20th 2018 public safety study session i'd like to ask the clerk at this time to please call roll thank you mayor council member it's crone president matthews chase brown here noroyan here vice mayor whatkins here and mayor terraces here tonight we only have one item on our agenda which will be the public safety study session and this was one the last time we had a comprehensive study session was about not to say it's been about four years ago and so i'm really thankful for all those of you that are present we'll have a staff presentation followed by questions from the council and we'll have been the opportunity for public comment and deliberation so at this time i'd like to turn it over to police chief andy mills to kick off the meeting well good evening good evening mr mayor and council members thank you so much for taking the time to go through these 250 slides with me um actually it's only 40 some so we want to make you feel better about how long this is going to last uh this is a wonderful opportunity for us to be able to show you and discuss with you what direction we're headed what challenges we see and uh how do we get to uh the end game and so we'll we'll go through this this these uh slides with you i would like to acknowledge that several of my senior staff members are here and uh and acknowledge uh them for their hard work so we have deputy chief martinez and deputy chief flipo with us uh just can't say enough good things about the quality of work that they've been doing and helping with this whole process and we also have uh three over four lieutenants one lieutenant is currently at a that meeting down in los angeles uh but we have uh lieutenant um jose garcia um might help if i move my glasses lieutenant warren berry and and then lieutenant christian lemoss and as well several other staff members who have come to uh to take part in this so uh as you're aware as you're aware the staffing you got one more there arnold well that's to teach him to sit down uh and then lieutenant arnold vasquez uh our newest lieutenant and just doing a marvelous job also so as you're aware uh in 2016 there was discussion amongst city council about a staffing study and what that might be able to do uh for the city in terms of understanding the problems and the difficulties with uh crime and disorder in our city and uh and prior to my arrival a contract was agreed to with uh cpsm to conduct this analysis and uh they did so and uh that was completed in november of 2017 uh just so you understand who they are it's an experienced group of uh and team of former command staff members one uh former city manager and one former city uh chief of police as well as technical advisors to come in and really scour a police department from top to bottom and really take a good look at who we are what we're doing uh literally they left no stone unturned so the center for public safety management uh came in and uh under the auspices the umbrella of the international city and county management association and uh and took a look at us and interviewed most of our staff and uh and did a good thorough job and as a result they were uh gave us a some feedback that i'll go over in a few minutes uh just the background of the staffing study if i might so it was an analysis of the operational efficiencies of our department and the configurations that might improve our officer availability and productivity i think that's the key element that we're trying to drive at is our effectiveness and there were three phases of the study the data collection occurred first and they did a great job uh pouring over that data and then uh and then they did a site visit and then construction of the recommendations which you see in front of you uh there's 103 recommendations uh to both the scpd and parks and rec of those uh there are 13 categories for police and seven different categories for rangers and we'll again get into all of this and the full report is posted online for anybody from the community to see as well the executive summary uh states that in congratulations to scpd uh overall they've provided very high quality of law enforcement service to the city of santa cruz and i think that's something to take a look at and appreciate and understand how hard the men and women of this department work on a daily basis as well as the parks and rec staff staffing the staff is professional and dedicated they're well also well educated um the analysis was conducted to understand our strengths but also the opportunities that we have to make it better and uh so we want to take a good hard look at that and then uh one thing that jumped out at me immediately was that many of the recommendations can be accomplished by realigning our workload and when you take a look at that uh i think that one phrase sums up much of this uh this investment that we that we did and then uh also i'm quoting here recognize this process takes time not just weeks or months but perhaps years and i think that uh that's an important caution so the police department had 80 recommendations i'm happy to report that we've jumped on it with both the and 37 are done of the and then there's another 20 that are currently underway and then 23 that we are going to have to take a little bit longer look at study and figure out whether or not we can do those in terms of cost and in effort and time but many of these again will take time uh a long period of time to implement parks and recs had 23 recommendations most of those centered around or were solved by movement to uh scpd and again we'll get into that so of the uh recommendations by assignment uh 13 primary categories comprising uh the recommendations administrative uh recommendations for the chief's office two are done one is underway and you can go into the uh front part of the report and see which each of these individual recommendations are patrol there are three done uh one underway and we're gonna have to study one and then downtown unit uh one is done and that team two are done uh now having said that the downtown unit and the net team no longer exist that's why they're done they're now been merged into the neighborhood policing teams and uh and that's uh a significant movement for us um i can go through all these individually and report out you know two done one done but i think that you can read these for yourself the point is that we've really taken this seriously uh we've worked very hard to implement some of these recommendations and uh and took great care to study them and uh again you can see that there's some for the facilities some for uh transportation and booking there's a variety of things that and recommendations they made some to be frank won't just work here um but we're going to look at them anyway and make sure that we study them to understand uh whether or not these would work and and what reasons they may not work on life from implementation we're we're committed to implementing the implementing these as fast as possible as long as they're operationally and fiscally fiscally reasonable um a five-year time frame is what they suggested is to have most of these done which fits nicely with our leadership plan that we've already completed and so we were happy about that 16 of the recommendations are directly directly related to the records management system that is critical and i'm happy to report that i met on that today with netcom and the sheriff's office is strongly considering also jumping into this rfp with us so that would put almost every major police agency in the county on the same system that would be huge in terms of the ability to collect information share it with one another take a look at crime stats i mean we take a hard look at jurisdictions and location uh crooks don't they don't care about crossing over into live oak or past seventh street which the sheriff's area so this will be good information it'll be a great way to do this they'll also uh shoulder some of the cost and the burden of that system so that will be important as well uh some of these do include capital improvement project money which we will again merge in to see what the city's priorities are and figure those out as we go develop a mission statement well we were already underway and so we've got that completed and this is the mission statement and just to remind uh council uh the mission statement came uh from meeting with the communities meeting individually with community members taking all that data and then giving it to our sergeants to turn into a mission statement which went to patrol who highlighted the words that they felt were really important to them and then that went to the command staff which uh uh penciled this out and made sure that it was something that everybody could uh could understand and agree to and it was very well received i was very impressed by the amount of attention and detail and care that each of our employees took i would figure i figured that you know 50 of our employees would stand back with their arms crossing why do i have to do this i'd rather be out working but what i found was exactly the opposite they were thirsty for it they were hungry for it and they all pitched in and uh and i think the result is we have a great product uh succession planning was very important uh in uh to in the study as well as to the department that was identified ahead of time by many of our employees and so uh and we need to ensure the employees are trained and mentored to serve as future leaders that was recommendation number two well took that seriously uh we already have a spot secured for the fbi national academy in 2019 uh 2019 as quick as we could get it and uh one of the purposes of us redistricting and doing this neighborhood policing is so that these uh lieutenants who are fairly young and will probably out outlast many of us in the department will be the future leaders and so they are acting as the chief of police for the section of the city and allowing them to handle the crime control handle the personnel handle the handle the uh complaints from community members and balance all of those things and so i think that uh all of them are rising uh to that level and uh and are just doing a fantastic job and then we're also offered other schools for the mid-management and the senior management of our department to make sure that they can go and receive some of the best training in the country and that's one of the reasons bernie is down in uh in los angeles right now to develop a strategic plan part of the uh a strategic plan that was developed and there's a copy of the front page for you uh this was underway and uh but we were we agreed with everything they said about that and so we called a leadership plan instead of instead of a strategic plan it's just a semantical uh thing uh but for us it's more of a direction of where are we going and how are we getting there and where the milestones we want to accomplish and uh certainly anybody can avail themselves of that uh copy which is also on the web so but what's the priority of policing the priority of policing is to prevent and control crime appear and simple unfortunately you can look at these crime rates and see that uh it's an area that we need to do a lot better in even if you adjust our our crime rates to include the university us as a county see the center of tourism and and all of that we're still too high and uh this is something we have to deal with and we have to accept responsibility for as a police agency and as a city as a county government it's not just us it's everybody and really work on these numbers because each one of those numbers represent a citizen and uh and so we need to uh to work on that so our goal through this process is to be more effective in how we control crime you look at the trend line how we've done over the last uh you know several years this is through 2015 it's fairly close to that uh and currently the red line represents just the the average of what you take all those numbers and divide it out so it stays fairly consistent and um you know we're I asked a couple people who are here along before me what you know what was the big dip in violent and property crime in 2008 and uh we don't know um there could have been a variety of things that affected that but that seems to be the uh the aberration that goes outside of outside of standard standard deviation but for the most part it's it stayed fairly consistent over that time frame violent crime as well down the in the green line at the bottom but the point of this is it's something that we have to work on and we want to see us dipping below that that that imaginary red line rather than above it this is a hot spot map of the city of where crime and calls for service uh occur and uh you can see that clusters in five areas of the city and so uh these are the areas that we need to spend the most time and effort and energy on working and reducing those calls so we can get at the crime that's associated with it obviously the the brighter red the location the more calls for service we have this is a typical of what a crime analysis report might look like this came from the study itself these are some of the locations where we have the highest calls for service and uh our crime locations in the city and you can see that it is other than the police department we don't have that much crime occurring there but we have a lot of crime reported there and so people come into the front counter and and and say have been a victim of crime so we go and take the reports obviously um so you can see that crime clusters in locations and uh and we'll get into a little bit more of that later so one of the selected recommendations i'm not going to go through all the recommendations would take forever in a day but one of the selected recommendations is they say is to consider other strategies and i think that that is important so in the chart that you see here here are some of the strategies and if you if you could take that bar and scroll down screenshot so you won't be able to do that but if you could take that bar and scroll down you'd see a variety of strategies to reduce crime on the right side is what happened in with crime through neighborhood policing the strategy that we have chosen as well as com stat model and and departments throughout the nation now these are obviously much larger cities this is also coming on the end of the crack cocaine epidemic so it's probably disproportionately a reduction however the point is there's two main strategies and policing that have been used and one is this com stat model the other is neighborhood policing and problem solving i have chosen for our department to move towards neighborhood policing problem solving for a variety of reasons which we'll get into but uh this is our goal our goal with this is to let our heroes the guys and women in blue to do their job and right now they seem stymied and calls for service crowding out the opportunity to police and again we'll get that further excuse me so the focus of how we police is enforced is important and if you look at the at the data it would suggest that 61 percent of crime occurs in 10 percent of locations so the theory then would be to police the problems that are the most problematic the location is the most problematic um 54 percent of crime approximately is committed by 10 percent of criminals rather than focusing on everybody you focus on those who are most problematic i just got this uh the next bullet down here 3.4 miles of the streets of santa cruz account for most of our fatal and serious injury collisions and um that came from vision zero uh and uh that's being done through the county and uh as well as her uh smart streets program so rather than randomly running traffic on streets that we don't have problems it makes a lot more sense to focus on where the problems are and you do that through either finding the right handler to to control the offender bringing the right manager to control the place or uh their guardian to uh to protect the victims so um overall if you know it's a pretty small font but a comp stat model versus neighborhood policing model i think down at the bottom is this is the most salient point comp stat model is kind of viewed as an occupational force where um a stop and frisk and uh and uh zero tolerance policing was the uh was the was the cry and it wound up in federal lawsuits whereas the other side it was neighborhood policing is more of a relational uh responsibility between the police and the community working together to solve community problems we cannot solve these problems without community it's as simple as that and so our choice has been to move forward with this uh in a problem or in a policing model where we look at crime we analyze why it's occurring at a specific location and solve those problems it's like when you have a neighborhood and you get a dope house in that neighborhood well what starts happening in the neighborhood that cancer you know metastasized throughout the community and then you start getting car burglaries and then you get noise complaints and you get all these other things so if you can take out that cancer that that node it can bring that community back to to normalcy and that's the purpose of problem-oriented policing we get a lot of um people who are addicted to alcohol hanging out at front and uh socal where we have a lot of calls for service so we're working with that business on making sure that they secure the alcohol there so that they can't get it and steal it that would just makes a little bit of sense and you watch if we're able to successfully do that the calls for service the crime will in that neighborhood will drop significantly that diffusion of benefit is is what we want to get in each of these neighborhoods and it's going to be addressing those problems one by one what we've asked our lieutenants to do is to be thoughtful about prioritizing the calls prioritizing the problems excuse me in each neighborhood be responsible for that and figure out how to drive those crimes down in that neighborhood and so when they focus and prioritize those the bigger problems first we can stay on top of those and start having that benefit of other crimes being addressed just because we dealt with that one cancer cell if you will neighborhood policing is decentralized we also have redeployed every staff member to the field that we could possibly redeploy there's a couple people that we didn't want as a staff sergeant to help the lieutenants and the sergeants run the organization the other is a our school resource officer which right now we think is really important and then the third person is our gang officer who is doing a stellar job and keeping on top of the gang problems as part of the countywide gang task force which is Watsonville CHP capital and ourselves and then we want to make sure that we're doing two other things that are important to me one is that we're accountable for our crime control is crime going up or down in the neighborhood and how does the how does the community know we want to make sure that we're posting that in a in a location where every community member can come on and see what's going on in their neighborhood more than just dots but looking at heat maps looking at crime percentage totals looking at the incidents of crime before you know the application of our response and then the last one is community engagement we want to make sure that we're getting feedback from the community as well as building that relationship with the public where we can employ their help to to deal with many of these problems for instance we're having a car broke a problem in the upper west neighborhood community members can help us by walking the neighborhood with flashlights at a certain time at night if we can analyze that that that deep into the data I know of one city for instance that got flashing collars for all their dogs I read in blue flashing collars and they took the dogs out for a walk at nighttime when they're most likely to have car broke where problems in the neighborhood didn't confront people it's just that visual presence of a community that cared and people outside so I think there's many things and innovative ideas that we can do so what gets in our way why can't that why can't the police do this and if you look to the left side of the screen here this is this came directly from cpsm departments average between 400 and a thousand calls per 1000 residents the lower the number suggests a better policy on triaging non-emergency calls for service top of the page you can see what santa cruises we're above the highest that we're the highest they've ever seen so we're averaging almost 1100 calls per 1000 residents and in my opinion coming in from the outside and just taking a look at this it's far too much and we can get into the specifics of that but the question is then how do we triage better and that becomes a I think a discussion point in a policy matter so this is kind of you know tongue-in-cheek but if you remember seeing this lucy episode where there the chocolate's going down the conveyor belt and at first that's oh that's just fine there's you know she eats one and then packages two and then the conveyor belt gets going faster and faster and faster and then she's stuffing in her hat and in her mouth and and then the lady comes in and yells speed it up that's what our officers feel like right now that the chocolate is on the call for service around a high-speed conveyor belt and then somebody else speed it up and it's to the point where many of them feel like they're at the they're at the water level and so this is something that my responsibility is to help them fix so our mantra has been for many years no call too small you call us will come and according to cpsm that this is uh characteristic of a small town mentality of a small town uh you know thought process now Santa Cruz is not a san francisco but we are an urban area and certainly an area with urban problems and so somehow we have to take a look at this and figure out what can we do to provide them the opportunity to to actually police because in that margin between proactivity and reactivity is where we can find the greatest crime control and and I think that's what's important I mean some quotes from the thing it's an enormous misuse of emergency personnel is what these experts were telling us and here's just some of the areas that they that they took a look at and the frequency of calls so you know we can't certainly not avoid taking reports on 1500 crashes every year but there are some that we shouldn't go to ordinance violations it takes us on average 130 minutes to get there and the reason for that is there's so many calls stacked up of those kind so rather than just saying we're not going to go to them the question becomes well how do we manage them and how do we deal with them in a thoughtful way and then you can see the other ones for yourself so we respond physically to about 68,000 calls a year and a couple of you had had asked me well wait a second I thought the number was over 100,000 and and we took a good hard look at the data and what we found out is that a lot of those calls are information only calls in other words fires running code 3 to through town there's a person who's wanted from San Jose might be in the area a Bolo be on the lookout so the calls were actually responding to our 68,000 CPSM estimates that we could reduce up to 22,000 of those calls I don't think we can reduce that many from looking at the information but if we can reduce several calls a day that gives our officers that margin that time to be to be proactive so calls for service are kind of a domino effect the average wait time for non-emergency calls for service the benchmark that the CPSM says is acceptable is 15 minutes we're at 25 minutes on average and then dispatch hold times are 16 minutes in and of themselves so the dispatchers are sitting on that call for 16 minutes the reason they're sitting on that call there's no units available so what I hear frequently is the dispatcher telling the officers or the sergeant we just sent you to a burglary of progress by also holding a camping call a disturbance at such such location this location that location and it's it's kind of like when your mother tells you to clean your room and sweep the garage and wash the car and it's just so overwhelming that sometimes you just give up and I don't want to put our officers in that position and we're dealing with the broadcasting too much at once however these numbers the more the more backed up it gets is that domino effect of it continues to elongate and then and people just get again fatigued listening to that um priority calls for service the benchmark is five minutes uh we're at almost seven minutes and dispatch hold time is 2.3 minutes so if we can get rid of that hold time because we're more efficient we can get pretty close to those numbers without really making too much of a stretch and um and I think that's something we certainly want to head towards call miss management so it slows response times and stacks more calls it shortens the benchmark time of calls when when officers are there so what this means is when officer is on scene in most departments they're there for almost 30 minutes 28.7 minutes here we're there for 25 minutes because you're constantly thinking I got to get to the next call the next call citizens waiting the next call is holding yes we want them to do a slow down a little bit take take their time to actually talk to people and do a little bit more thorough investigations when you have the opportunity it's also a little bit dangerous because on on average the average city sends 1.7 officers to a call we send 1.6 which means that uh often we're not sending enough officers to these calls and that's more dangerous for the citizens it's also more dangerous for our officers so they came up with a policy uh many cities use called the rule of 60 and that is 60 percent of your officers should be in patrol and that's 60 percent of their day should be consumed by calls for service in other words 40 percent of the day should be available for proactive policing for handle administrative duties for having lunch uh for you know if this isn't uh take a break thing uh right now most of our officers don't don't take lunch during the day and they certainly don't get breaks so this is called the saturation saturation index and um you can see the uh the numbers as it speaks here and uh very frequently there's we're well above that those numbers and so we got again this is what we need to fix um when officers experience a workload of greater than 60 percent as that middle box says they become increasingly reactive waiting for the next call um and through much of the day our si surpassed the threshold so 60 percent of our officers should be designated to patrol so here's our current numbers we have 94 funded positions however the city manager has approved us to go up to 99 positions uh if we could fulfill these numbers and we're not there right now right now we have seven vacancies this has been tough to hang on to people and uh and we're interviewing people i'll get into that in a second but one of the things we're hearing is that uh why do i want to do this here for the same or less money than somewhere else i can work literally half as hard and um and i understand that uh but i'm thankful for the ones who want to be here because they want to work hard and that's what most of our department is we have five currently in training we have five unable to work because of injuries that's actually risen in the last couple days to seven so we can take away from that but they'll be back shortly we hope 47 in patrol that includes sergeants and lieutenants and then if we have 14 neighborhood policing teams that can augment patrol if the need be and then five administrative assignments such as the chiefs i a sergeant and a staff sergeant we have 10 investigators and uh in nine cso's the one officer there is not not correct so um that's where our current staffing is we also have a lot of civilian not a lot of civilian staff we have uh i think 15 additional civilian staff working at different functions in the department such as records and property and and uh so forth we've also extended three job offers in the last week uh to new people who are going to go to the academy but we're also trying to find people who are lateral transfers because they can hit the ground running and i think that's that's kind of important this is a spattle representation of officer initiated calls for service you can see where the officers spend their time being proactive in the city and where they're calling out that they're contacting people almost mirrors exactly what you saw in the crimes for service and this is where they're at the central question becomes the levels of service and santa cruz desires do you desire greater crime control by allowing officers time to be proactive then how do we do it we can do it one of a couple ways add officers or first try to reconfigure the staffing that we have in the in the current calls for service to meet those numbers and um and i think that's as we're going to push forward here so this is again a look at the the current budget as it stands right now and then as we move forward now one of the things that uh staffing comparison that we need to take a look at is over the last decade we've added about 9 000 residents to the city we've not added more officers that'd be like taking a city the size of scott's valley and not having any officers to patrol it so we're currently at one point four six officers per thousand residents uh with council approval if and the over hire if we could fill those positions we'd be at one point five two that would be a huge blessing if we could get up to that level and get all those positions filled i mean that would be a gigantic relief um available for duty because of injuries we're down the one point three area uh the national target which cpsm talks about is two point zero officers per thousand but i i want to be honest with that california is normally much lower um most cities in california are not at the two two per thousand level uh but that doesn't mean that uh that's not a goal to achieve someday so what are staffing concerns about three out of one hundred are hired for every hundred people that take the test we wind up uh you know going through the funnel and hiring three it's tough um and then uh attrition is high um burnout is a substantial risk for injury rates i think that's one of the reasons we have several people on light duty so here's the tough part of the last nine hired uh dan flippo has been doing a great job getting people through the door and he's really worked on a marketing campaign and we've been finding the bodies but at the last nine we've hired two fail the academy one quit during the academy three quit during training and they the x interviews where this is too busy i can't keep up with the workload and then for now the other three are doing well um so there's three wrong three wronged approach uh one is reduce the demand eliminate some of the calls for service through differential response that doesn't mean we won't respond to them we have to find different ways to respond to them increase patrol resources by reconfiguring the patrol schedule which we're currently working on or hire more police officers to get fully staffed and um and all three of those are are underway we've been paneled a committee inside the department to look at calls for service and how to reduce those unnecessary calls to be more in line with what other police agencies are doing around the country and around the state um i can go into a lot of examples of this but for the sake of time i think we'll we'll hold off on that considering consider a different staffing configuration such as 12 hour shifts or 10 hour shifts with more squads and so uh arnold vasquez under the direction of deputy chief martinez has been working on that diligently this uh it's important for us to take a look at these and uh we're we're heading down that road um deputy chief lipo has been doing the calls for service they've already met with uh members of the department now the next step is to meet with members of the community uh to make sure that we're in line with what the community expects and then leverage all department resources to address these hot spots uh these hot spot locations uh as they come up including the hot people one of the things we've implemented is a as a program we're using one of our cso's as a crime analyst to discuss um uh some of the most people who are most problematic in the city so we've identified top people 10 top people who are getting arrested the most are causing most problems focusing on them and really working with the da's office the sheriff and the chief of probation to solve to solve the problems uh with those people i met with them had lunch with them we all discussed it we agreed and then then very next week i just want to give credit to the da sends me an email hey this is one of your guys i want you know we're taking this to the mat and um so one individual has been arrested over 200 times is on probation multiple times and uh and then he threatened to kill some of our officers and uh and it was a real threat so long story short the da took that seriously we're working together focusing on those things and i think that we can hopefully have some impact on that um examining staffing levels i think we've covered this uh this whole idea of no call too small but the point is we gotta think a little bit differently um so i think it becomes a choice a political choice to be very honest uh do we continue to provide police services as they are now or take steps to restructure how to respond to the demand and um and this is going to be a tough a tough thing to to walk through but i think it's important for us to understand uh what cpsm said said what their ideas are what others are doing so that we can we can push forward in this in this thing the re-engineering process um we went through the talk with our staff the community the city leadership and then boiled it down to get our mission statement uh and that was what we were was reflected earlier the mission statement went for our sergeants the officers and then ultimately the command staff to come up with this document i would again encourage uh any community members to read it so they know what we're about and this all came from them at those meetings that we did initially for the first several months and then look for the diffusion of benefit as we march through these uh these problems and make sure that we're solving them uh we're examining the staffing formulas as i mentioned earlier um i think this is this uh an important point for every 1700 calls we manage better it's the equivalent of of adding one additional police officer and uh this is a cost savings measure as much as a a better way to police uh we especially when you take a look at the cost of a fully benefited officer is 183 000 and a fully benefited sergeants 208 000 so if you're adding a dozen officers you're talking an enormous amount of money and then lastly this is what our new neighborhood um uh map looks like this is the uh community and uh and each lieutenant is noted up in the upper left corner and in the proper color coded part of the map and uh any community member can click on the map on our website and find out who the lieutenant is and uh and shoot them an email or get them information about what's happened in their neighborhood and lieutenants will respond pretty quickly so i submit to you this report and i certainly answer any questions that you might have at your leisure well at this point is there any council member would like to ask any questions regarding the report i'll ask one before we go to public comment and that she mentioned that um their external forces that hinder the police from doing their job you know it looks like when i saw that statistic over the last eight years that our crime rate has been relatively constant and so what are those things other than the fact that the council is directed over filling police staffing and resources what are those external factors that we as a council can help address to help influence that aside from the recommendations today um i think there are several things that you that uh council can take a look at um and and help us with uh one is that uh for many years we have sold to the community to pick up the phone and dial 911 on everything so unfortunately the expectation of the community becomes i pick up the phone i call 911 i want to cop right now well it may not be an emergency call for service and we're not going to be there for two hours walls that does set us up for failure at the city up for failure in the community member up for failure so we've got to retrain and rethink that of of using the non-emergency number when it's not an emergency uh the second thing is um we certainly understand the dynamic of of the court system the justice system here in santa cruz as well as california and for crime for crime control to be effective it has to be certain swift and fair um i don't think we can reach those two numbers the the certain and swift um and and the reason for that is when we put people on probation for five times over they didn't learn the first time i doubt they're going to learn the second or third time so this really has to become a public policy matter for our entire community of how do we how do we deal with that and this lays you know the courts have to help us and understand and i think the courts are willing to understand if the community uh lets them know what the desire of this community is is to whether it's to be a little bit tougher on sentencing when we arrest a gang member or a felon with a firearm multiple times um that person at some point needs to go to prison uh to to learn the lesson to be rehabilitated you know because of that the third thing i think is important is um you know much of the homeless thing has been thrust on the shoulders of the police department as a solution i think we've really come to the realization this is not a solution and that we need to work and we are working in concert with the rest of city government to really work on solving these problems and i couldn't be more proud of the other department has the manager's office of how we've all taken this task on together but this also has to come from the county this is a county responsibility they have the budget in the funding for it they also have the legislative mandate and they and we could really use their assistance in helping drive the policy forward on how we collectively deal with these problems as a city so it was just some really quick things that might be able to be done from a from a legislative perspective thank you uh council member brown and then council member crown thank you for being here this evening and for all the work you do and i appreciate the report it's helpful to and i've read through the report in detail so um many of the things that you talked about have been talking about resonate with the the statistics that i have seen i um i'm wondering about a couple of things one um in terms of the recommendations that are coming to us just a little if you could talk a little bit about the community service officer model versus the role of the rangers and you know just to help us and others in the room have a better understanding of why we're we've increased our and again some of you have been involved in these discussions over the years that i haven't been on the council previously but just a little bit about that and then a second question is um you know i really appreciate the uh direction to move in uh to neighborhood policing and setting up the the regions and teams and i've been to a couple of the events where uh lieutenants have spoken to uh very energetic audiences and so i think it's great to be moving in this direction i do wonder if you've considered a model that includes some kind of satellite i'm just thinking about places on in different parts of the city that people can go to um you know either be part you know just communicate their concerns you know maybe having some satellite offices might reduce um some of the calls that go in through central dispatch i don't know but i just would be interested to hear if you can thought about that at all sure um first of all the community service officer model uh that has been done in many police permits to relieve the workload that is experienced by officers taking reports some accident reports some minor theft reports and and so forth um uh it's been used effectively here and i think it's an important model we also have them in positions where we decide the department where we don't want to have sworn officers doing that because a person who's sworn uh and fully trained post certified all that kind of thing really can do can only do things that nobody else can do and so we really want to save them for the stuff they need to be used for so it has been effective in doing that i think also some of the city's thinking in the past has been it's pretty difficult to hire and find police officers and this is a little bit less expensive model uh the CSO so they're and they're hardworking employees so maybe we've gone towards that and i think that was in my opinion a very proper thing to do the rangers um i think fulfill a fantastic role and done a great job in this city and um and i think that we can't speak highly enough of the of the uh of the people that have you know have done that again they can't do the full scope of things and so part of the problem becomes um if they tell somebody hey you got to leave the park no i'm not uh there's nobody to stand behind them part of the idea to bring them over the police department is they have somebody a team of officers standing behind them now in each area of the city and working with that team and be embedded in that team allows them to do their jobs would be a little bit more effective and then as you saw from the report there's a lot of back uh backstory information stuff that has to take place with people who are 832 pc certified which would mean that the police department's really in the best position to do that and so we think that the rangers can continue to do a stellar job uh providing a great high level of service throughout the uh throughout the city but mostly focused on the parks hey the second question on uh satellite offices yes outside of the downtown yeah one of the things we have discussed is uh having the uh maybe some of the libraries for instance have a spot where the officers can go and write reports and uh so we have discussed that uh we've also discussed fire stations i know they've tried that in the past but we've also the lieutenants have been pretty committed to making sure that they're meeting with community members on a regular basis so that they can have face-to-face contact in each neighborhood with community members uh and i know that they've been responsive i've already been to several meetings with uh several the lieutenants meeting with community groups and so they've been doing a fantastic job and i know that i'm hearing from community members hey i spoke with lieutenant lemas and he did a fantastic job thank you so much so i know that they're doing it on their own as well and uh so that's i think that's the step in the right direction council member crown then council member chase yeah um i wanted to follow up on council member brown's uh question because it's not still not clear to me um when when a cso tells somebody to leave the park are they gonna leave the park or they also need backup well cso's normally aren't in that position they can write some citations like rangers but cso's are also embedded on those teams so i was looking at this the differences there's a little bit more for cso's it seems like as far as pay goes over i was looking at the city manager look different uh pay ranges um and i'm just wondering do you see a future at all of going say we had 30 or 40 cso's and would that cut down on the number of sworn officers i don't see us being able to just go that direction uh because you still have a lot of crimes that need to be responded to um we do see a path however for uh rangers should they choose to go into the cso or sworn side uh or a staff position inside the department that this is a career path that they could take uh should they want to but i don't see us changing the ratio a whole lot because again it takes a a sworn officer to do much of the workload that we're tasked with could you talk a little bit about um the use of force and there's i'm looking at page seven of the recommendations but also it's page 77 and then there's also some recommendations on use of force uh for park rangers on page 105 and i'm just wondering you know one is begin tracking all uses of force by officers as defined by department policy begin tracking uh use of force proactive data by uh individual officer and not only by incident beginning i was just wondering have we been doing this already or is this all new these recommendations from 57 to 61 yeah most of what we've been doing already um and i we're we're really we were kind of puzzled when we saw this um because we actually do report this out as you know on our website as well as to the public safety committee i think what they were looking for is a um a review process of a use of force expert on all these cases well most of our sergeants are use of force experts and every sergeant reads every single use not every sergeant reads everyone but a sergeant reads every single use of force that we do in the city what they suggested is that go into i a pro where it could where we can track that use of force um we certainly can do that um my thought process on that is there's been some recent research that would suggest that the eis system early warning systems are not that effective that we should look more at trauma that the officers experience rather than um the number of citations or that kind of thing that the that the officers are involved in so the greater chance of a complaint or a systemic problem with the officer is more related to the trauma they've experienced as part of their duties as far as the rangers are concerned um if you're a 32 pc certified which they are uh you have to report that out to the state every year and so uh we have to report out every use of force that results in injury to the state and um there is no mechanism in place to do do those kinds of things currently for the rangers and uh but that will uh that will take place under us because that that's something we understand that we just do regularly thanks and also just um the uh use of force for the um rangers it says that there's been three incidences in past 18 months is that would you know of to be true as well um and and i was under the impression that maybe park rangers don't get into use of force issues that that they're calling for for backup um i know of i know one for sure but if they say three then i would i would suggest that that probably is the case um actually you know of two one was a ranger did a stellar job officer was fighting a guy the same guy that went into the school with the machete as we're fighting him downtown and the officer was in a tough fight and the ranger helped our officer out and had a use force in the process the other another one that i'm aware of a ranger was punched in the face and um and the rangers you know foot pursuit and tackled the guy so those are considered use as a force i don't know what the other one is because it might have happened before i got here but so they they can use force they have been trained to do arrest and control uh to use in but now at the police department are what we want to make sure is that we use the minimal amounts of force possible to overcome the resistance that they're they're facing and that is uh in house training that we will provide on an ongoing basis to the rangers uh to make sure that they're in line with uh what's common uh throughout policing last question is about complaints on page um six of the of the recommendations professional standards um or have these been implemented too because develop a protocol for at least monthly contact with complainants to advise them of the status of the investigation of their complaint this would come as great news to many people who have filed complaints and then it sort of falls into a black hole and they never heard even when they ask a year later um there is no response and how are we doing now we are going to be notifying people every month we'll have a make sure that a letter is written to them uh that they will that they will have some type of documentation in their hand um i think some of the issue is sometimes people want more information than we can give them by law but we'll still make contact with them and make sure that they're informed of what's uh whether they're complaining lies a lot of times people just want to know that you're somebody cares and you know taken seriously yeah and i can tell you these all are taken seriously one of the other um suggestions with the i a sergeant meets with the chief regularly well his office is about 20 feet from mine um so he walks in there literally three times three times a week uh so we're working on those suggestions thank you and i'll just say as someone who's a member and been on the public safety committee for the i think since the time i've been on the council i can guarantee you that these complaints are taken with the utmost of seriousness and investigated thoroughly um there's reports that take place annually and the officers that are in charge and assigned to investigate those through internal affairs they are available to take calls and will respond upon request by any um constituent any member of the public that that submits a a concern or even wants to follow up so i mean on that point i would say maybe it's a matter of having some information if someone's uh sent made a comment to you that information is available and um i think those people can readily follow up so i i'm not sure if you're speaking to something in particular yeah it hasn't happened in several cases but you know we can follow up he's assuring us that monthly reports will take in place because i know folks who have made complaints and it's been a year and i just want to add nothing i just want to add to on the public safety committee we do get a list of um you know accounting of use as a force too so it is taken you know taken seriously there is a tally and those of us on that committee do see those detailed reports city manager um the other layer of oversight that we have just to point out is the independent police auditor who also reviews the complaints and uh uh provides recommendations to the police department and to the public safety committee related to uh those complaints as well and also is available to the public as well christie don't just if i can just finish and if you have somebody that has not heard from us if you can give me their name i'll make sure when they hear from us okay thanks appreciate it is that it accounts move chase yeah i wanted to thank you for the report which is data driven and i really appreciate that and i think what's interesting about that is that 16 of the recommendations mentioned the rms system and the records management system which is what provides a lot of the data and is incredibly problematic so i know that that is a big budget request and so i think it would be helpful to let council knows what we can anticipate in terms of what you think that would be what your request would be and the timeline of that so that we can consider that because i think it's incredibly important if we want to continue to see this type of analysis and these types of improvements sure um please take this with a grain of salt because we haven't done the rfp so we can't really know for sure what's going to cost the the systems will range about a million dollars but again we're dividing that between multiple agencies and if you stretch it out over a multi-year period it becomes very reasonable and um so what we heard today was that our year our annual costs for running the system the maintenance upkeep and all that kind of thing including servers in the future and and so forth is should be around seventy thousand dollars maybe a little bit more and then the actual cost of the system is about two hundred thousand dollars for everybody per year so we should be able to do this for around a hundred hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year i appreciate that that actually isn't very much considering the improvement and what we would get for it and to be connected with the other law enforcement agencies or at least one of them i think is critical as well yeah all four are in yeah that's great and just correct me if i'm wrong but it's been in our capital improvement program budget for some time now right yes okay council member i said one last comment i just wanted to also thank you for just mentioning in response to council member crone's question um the impact of trauma and how that impacts um well really everybody involved in public safety so i am interested to hear more about that one of the recommendations just to go on to that is officer wellness and so one of our strategies in the in the in our leadership plan is really working on officer wellness and employee improvement and so including succession planning and all that and i just really again dan felipo well before i got here had already started mentoring program and so we're really trying to mentor our people keep an eye on things like abuses of substances because this is there's so much trauma in the job so um i just want to you know we want to head that direction but it had even even more so there council member ryan and then council member matthews oh i can't help but you know be just completely stunned about the level of crime that really jumped out at me at the report you know we've all had numbers we see different numbers in terms of where santa cruz is in comparison and uh it doesn't really matter what scale whether it's the fbi or somebody else collecting data we are always end up being um on the top in an area that i'd rather rather like to be average and so you know i you look at those numbers and you know you're doing these different plans but are there plans to go after specific types of crimes like when i look at property crime it's so high uh is there a strategy aside from looking at it you know piecemeal through the city but to have an overall um i guess strategy in how to lower that number well that's uh that's very important uh just let me throw a word of caution uh and when you look at crime data uh one is uh you have to take a look at our city the reality of our city again as the county seat the center of this region um a tourist attraction i mean three to four million people a year go through the boardwalk all that really affects the amount of people and the amount of crime uh in in a city including the jail being here and all these things so you can't compare this to for instance lincoln california um you know they're gonna it's a bedroom community it's completely different now having said that it's still too high and we need to we need to figure out how to get that down so if you if you took this a look at this and actually figured this was a city of a hundred thousand um probably be a little bit more realistic uh in terms of the crime rate however it's not what we have so we're gonna we're gonna fix that so the strategy is this each community told us what their priorities were theft theft and theft in many of these communities and so um each lieutenant has set their priorities for their communities and their job is to figure out based on the micro problem solving side how to fix each of those problems so i'm studying an overall department wide philosophy of policing which is neighborhood policing and problem solving now their job is to drill down for the each of those communities and figure out what specific tactic are they going to use to reduce those problems so for instance um just go back to cvs 189 thefts or crimes at that location in one year that's unacceptable and so what we need to do is we can drive the crime down there it frees up officers to be more proactive so his what he did is he went and looked at the environmental conditions that are allowing that crime to take place at that location talk to the owners or the managers worked with them you know they're going to go through a stage of for and carter jones is here carter was with him doing this going through the stage of locking up the alcohol first that that doesn't work putting a security guard at the front door demanding backpack to be left at the front you know let me see your receipt before you get out like eric cosco so the more they do that the more that impacts that crime and drops it down and that's that's the goal that we're after so i can't give you the specific overall strategy other than we're focusing on the constant the constant criminals that we're dealing with and in really trying to if we have to give them 365 days in jail one day at a time then we're going to do it with those 10 but 10 is a pretty small number and when you take a look at the amount of of thieving that we have in the city but we have to start someplace and and the first 10 we put out i asked my crime analyst today all 10 were contacted all 10 were arrested and and you know and the first group you know so we want to make sure that we're going to hold them accountable at some level if probation can't do it because they're overwhelmed then we'll do it as best we can and so taking this you know put employing these strategies do you have an estimate on when you think we might see a difference i might see crime drop or these these figures improve i understand we're an outlier as a city and it's hard to compare ourselves to anybody else we're a town of 65 000 that has a university and a major tourist attraction there aren't a lot of other cities to be able to to look at at that and compare but i i still do think it's important and you point that out to acknowledge that our crime rate is pretty high and so i i'm glad you do acknowledge that but do you if if these things we're putting in place are successful how long does it take to see a difference well it's going to take some time you know i would hope that as we get our teams in place and they and i was just you know looking at with the the statistics of what they were doing already and they've just been nailing it i mean they've been they've been all over it they've made a lot of arrest taking a lot of guns off the street already those things are going to have an effect and and i can't give you a percentage of decrease i can't prognosticate that however i can tell you that if they continue to do their jobs focused on the major problems first and take care of those problems you will see a reduction at some point citywide and that people can look at now i think what you know what we wanted to be able to do is say okay look we took care of this problem therefore this problem we can know for sure that this problem was taken care of this was you know 100 crimes and then the community can look at that there are so many things that influence the actual crime rate you know if economy takes a left hand turn we could see more problems at the heroin addiction level you know more thefts i mean these are all things that influence the crime rate that we may or may not have control of it but we can take a look at these problems and say we solved this problem here's how we know that and here's what we did to do that and then be accountable to the public for that okay and um you know you mentioned several ways we could address improving staffing you were saying um that possibly hiring more officers do you have an actual number of officers that you think we should we should hire like when you look at those rates of like the average of california cities um how many more would that mean well i would like to just get up to what the city manager's already approved um and my thinking on that council member is uh once we manage the resources that we've already been given well and it's not working then i don't have any problem coming back to council and saying i need more officers and and figuring that piece out but i want to get up to full staffing first and then use those extra five bodies that we've been graciously given get those folks uh running on all cylinders and then we can take a look at that reduce the attrition levels and uh and get people healthy which is a another significant issue for us uh there's two officers i've never met they've been off that long and um and it's your workman's comp issues i mean there's there's all kinds of things boiled into this that's very complex so once we get that done and and finish up to that 99 level that we've already been authorized then i have no problem coming back to council and saying i need more okay and then um can you give examples of the types of calls for service that we can handle differently i know you've mentioned a few in some of the community meetings you know i heard one time someone called from a restaurant demanding the police show up to to make the restaurant give them their food for free because they had bad service so i was at a table i'm like oh my dear god they're calling 911 for this so how um what types of calls do you think i mean that was a ridiculous one which i hope isn't very common but how would you take some of the more common calls that are coming and redirect them so i think yeah so there's a lot of of i'd rather look at bigger categories i mean i can go into a lot of antidotal yeah stories that i have in the past and you've all heard those but um we do follow up phone calls somebody calls and then we'll call them back and the people are sometimes like why are you calling me i just handle the problem well that takes time a lot of information stuff you know let let's have an officer go to this location just provide information not injury collisions that's really a civil matter it's not a police matter it's between two insurance companies and um and so frequently what happens is people say i want a cop to come anyway and then we send them and sometimes we'll send two officers so these are um and frequently when we write those reports the insurance companies will now call us back and say i don't like how you wrote this report i want to change to have this person be responsible and try to put us in the middle of it um we do there's a lot of those types of calls uh again i don't want to say we're just gonna not respond to them but somebody we can manage it better how it's responded to i like for instance uh maybe it's gonna have to wait for the neighborhood policing team when they come in on their monday uh rather than having patrol respond to it if it's if it's not an emergency uh so let's let patrol do the emergency stuff let's let neighborhood policing and the teams or other city uh members handle the other the other things that maybe don't need to be handled by a police officer just before he came to talk to chief raleigh about medical responses so if a person's laying on the front yard someplace they may be having a seizure they may be high they could be a variety of things and we send two police officers to handle that a thousand times a year and so why isn't paramedics doing that um because what we're going to just look at them and say yep they need paramedics um so those are the kind of things i think that we can be a little bit more thoughtful about and jim agreed completely uh chief raleigh did and uh but now the devil's in the details how do you work that out we don't want to send an engine of four you know four firefighters to do that so this becomes a conversation great i do have other questions but i this is fascinating right yeah there'll be time afterwards also so maybe councilmember matthews this will be the final question before we open it up for public comment and it may be covered later but you had these kind of broad sections here and i think those are pulled from the big report priority talking to mic oh the priority tasks you set before you those seem to be some of them internal operation changes but some of them uh are either um some of them involve significant changes in the way we operate with our partners whether it's the courts or the county or whatever and some of them are capital and what triggered this question was your referral to the um records management and and technology so um at what point will you be telling us aside from the internal stuff where you need maybe some more um assistance from us whether it's budget or engagement sure um i think that's a an ongoing dialogue uh to have with each of you and um and to the council in general uh my way of trying to handle these things is to try to do it uh myself and sit down for instance and work things out with the chief probation the da the the sheriff and have those conversations if i reach a wall that i can't that i can't overcome i have no problem going to city manager and working with council to uh to say we really need your help on this this is now it's time to throw down and if i could just respond to that um as this evolves and i always consider this uh a process of evolution but um it's helpful for us to know where you are because those are a lot of the complaints we get why we did a little email exchange today on this what's going on why is this happening and to the extent we know progress is being made or not that just helps us to respond to the public sure i appreciate that and we can certainly do better in that area making sure the council is fully informed of what we're doing and why you know just like that conversation we had this morning about the you know the gun thing um those are you know those are the things that really need to be focused on here locally at what point you know we're gonna allow certain people who are dangerous to society continue to walk around and that does become a a pinch point part of this is education because i get a lot of complaints from people that you know why'd you let this guy out of jail and i'm like well i don't control the jail and the sheriff if he had a choice he wouldn't let him out either um so these are those are the things education can be a hugely important matter that uh the council could help us with okay do you have a follow-up yeah to that i was just going to ask are you going to be sharing this report with your um colleagues at the county level um you know with the city manager i guess be showing this report as well to to your colleagues as i i think that you know they're a community partner we really need their help in this and so i hope that there'll be meetings about this report with our county officials yeah certainly we could do that i know you've already shared it with the sheriff at least because there's some some recommendations related to the sheriff's uh in here as it relates to the the processing of the prisoners and that sort of thing so yes okay and that's an area where city council members could help too we could go talk to our elected colleagues at the county level as well sure i'll just say before we open up the public comment i thought those neighborhood meetings were outstanding in terms of like bringing out a category how to um one of the west side residents nathaniel told me that he said it was the best public meeting he'd ever uh attended in terms of having the number of uh folks that were engaged in it um participating in the process so i thought it was a good roll out and it's nice to see this more uh kind of more robust discussion about how we're moving forward so before we um before we have any further questions from council may i like to make this opportunity to open it up to the public for comment and the first speaker is uh a representative of huff who wanted to take some additional time so you have four minutes uh mr norse um and then uh anyone else who wishes to speak on this matter please line up um to my left and uh we'll uh allow to begin so mr norse you have the floor members of the community mayor city council first of all uh david silva i'm sure if he could be here today would like to maybe join in some of my comments maybe make some different ones as most of you may know uh he died about a week and a half ago in maputo mozambique probably of pneumonia and he was buried there a few days ago um the problem with this report for me is that is what it doesn't say although i can i'll talk a bit about what it does say and my concerns about that i mean i'm really speaking to people who want to see some fundamental changes in how uh the priorities of mass incarceration policing the drug war treatment of the homeless take place not sort of you know shifting around the deck chairs or even making substantive changes in a focus which is not necessarily bad but if you have criminalization of the homeless as a priority this is the group i'm concerned about then no matter how you change it you don't really change it at all folks outside who were forced away from the san lorenzo campground by its closing on february 28th who had no real place to go the river street campground that is say the barbed wire locked boneyard campground with fewer spaces that are who are tents are shoved cheek by jowl with each other and you can't leave freely uh it is not is not in any way equivalent to the even replacing what the san lorenzo campground provided so if you're then going to go after people with increased citations masquerading as a census uh or doing this in more intensely than before you're simply re reverting to the old policies i asked uh andy who has been occasionally responsive to my questions not always and not recently really but a number of questions we have a dialogue huge amounts of money have come from this council and prior councils and have gone into harassing the poor to the ordinances that you have created will the money you save by cutting back on massive infraction enforcement of sleeping ban and night time park bans go into real social services are we hearing more oh i wonder why the county isn't helping us with this kind of stuff as we usually do um drug war money the asset seizure money is being used to buy the police department andy writes me why is that i thought we're beyond this asset seizure stuff you know you can use all kinds of rhetoric this is a lawful byproduct of criminal activity there's nothing about that in this report um how much money has been seized from folks accused of what crimes what are the records here now as of use of force which was discussed here and it's good to hear that people are interested in knowing when are the police doing the chokeholds the tasers the drawing of the baton the drawing of the weapon these are important issues but the public doesn't really get to know about this i asked andy for stats on this he didn't give me specifics about when these things were done and this is discretionary the police department decides to keep these stats under wraps so i don't see any of this changing either uh what about the issues of well quality of life downtown that means of course don't sit next to my business even if it's closed if you're sitting outside a closed store like alphagraphics and three individuals were doing in the rain about a week ago you'll get forced out into the rain by police officers from andy's police force or at least that was their account and i don't necessarily discount it we have the unconstitutional stay away laws will they continue to be enforced and i see that i'm out of time already do you want to finish your sentence i need to finish more than that you can just hand it out and we'll be happy to take a look at it next speaker i may send it into you hello my name is jane becker i have lived and worked in santa cruz for 35 years what has struck me about what is going on with the public safety committee and city council is that no one seems to really be in addressing what is the elephant in the room and the elephant in the room is the fact that we have over a thousand homeless people in santa cruz people that come with no money no savings no place to live no job and they come here to live on the streets many of them are doing drugs and as much as i feel for these people the reality is that many of these people are stealing to support habits they're breaking into cars they're stealing bikes and dropping the parts they are committing home burglaries they are walking into businesses i see this downtown quite a bit and taking what they want to take and leaving what i'm going to suggest is that the city make a shift from anybody that wants to come here can come here to if you come here with no money no job no place to live we will give you immediate food attention to any immediate medical condition and the next question is how do we get you home how do we get you bus fare how do we get you airfare there is no housing here for you not realistically there are very few jobs here santa cruz is not a place just to come just to hang out because you're going to be living on the streets we need to have a shift says this is where we stop as a town and then perhaps we will see the lessening of service calls to the police because we've eliminated a source of causation of crime thank you thank you next speaker please hi um thank you for the presentation i think i was very informative and i appreciate all your all the work that was was put into it i have i think maybe four questions and maybe one observation i uh and i don't you know much more than i than i do and maybe most of you do but i know in some communities there's um non-emergency number is a 411 number that people can call which seems like a very simple way and that may not not be possible here i don't know but that seems like that could be a possible easy fix to the police department getting or 911 getting having to field a lot more calls than that than they are so i guess i just have a question regarding that um i don't know if there's been any consideration again just cost and expense reduction and increased community policing in terms of having more police on bicycles i stancus i've been here since the late 70s and you know probably like 15 years ago it seemed like we did have a number of police on bikes but that has doesn't seem like that's happening much and i see police police on atvs and that type of thing but that's not you know it's hard to talk to somebody when the atv is running and they've got the helmet on and that's the whole nine yards um so that's just another question of mine um uh i know you were you said uh in your presentation that uh i think you i don't know how many um community forums we had in different parts of stancus um i was curious if there was any community forum in beach flats whether there was did you have i just i feel like i i guess because you said as i just part of that you said um that each community um sort of forum told you what the issue was which is uh theft theft theft i guess my concern is is that isn't the whole community those are people who feel comfortable coming to a community forum with the police there are people who don't feel comfortable with that you know that's it's just it's a problem and you know that um but i feel like um if the only people you're speaking responding to are the people that they come to the forum that's not the entire community um thanks grant okay i have one last thing to say you wrap it up okay i will thank you um and i noticed and this is just a broader question but i noticed that often when we have these things there's like at the moment there's seven uh uniformed officers here i never know when when that's going on are those are those officers on pay right now they're in uniform so there's and there's ununiformed officers and staff here from the police department so that's another question thank you thank you grant thank you okay um is there any member of the public that would like to speak on this after the report prior to bringing it back to council okay the um sir you're you're up next hi guys my name is gary taylor i've been living in sankers counting for 30 years speaking to the mic please my name is gary taylor i've been living in the county for about 30 years um i got into an automobile accident about two years ago and i'm just gonna tell you the background i was homeless in this city for about a year almost a year and a half so i know what it's like out there i know exactly what it's like i also without any help no one got out of it i worked took a lot of hard work i have some suggestions that you guys might be interested in i don't really know i'm not familiar with the way the system works um if i see you in the future here i hope that you do anyone that has any advice you'll have to talk to me if you could speak directly into mic and face out please anyone that wants to help me out or give me advice you know the the procedures and policies how things work told you open to that please do let me know now in the streets there's a lot of violence going around people stealing people's things but i think that anyone hold on nervous excuse me anyone that has the motivation to get up and get a job and get themselves out of the situation i think we should provide some resources so they can do that you know the easiest ways the now look at the homeless population is all the same but see the ones that got put there by a situation that are working to get out of it and the ones that's just kind of idling stealing and you know drug use um i know that one issue i had i lost multiple jobs over this was a place to put my things when i got up to go to work where there would be when i get to come back to have clothing to have shelter to have warmth to have hygiene things these are things you have to have to succeed other than that unique communication you must have there's challenges there businesses don't want you in their business not spending any money in charging your phone you can't even get your phone on you can have 10 people calling you to give you a job you can't get on your phone but there are people too more they're gonna charge a fine where are they you know so it's not a huge deal um you know one one little idea happens can run a buy a i'm i'm not very organized you could just wrap it up you say last sentence please uh yeah the two ideas that basically have is one of them is a a day storage when people that are motivated can come to store the things for the day so they can progress and get out of there and not be homeless anymore the other is an outdoor low budget structure where qualified homeless can enter to live and um thank you sir thank you for your comments i appreciate you being here and if you want to put your name uh and write down okay thank you sir next speaker thanks greg for speaking and i'm sure you don't need to hear this but many of the people living on the street were born and raised here or lived here for decades and it's not actually statistically according to a point in time survey uh magnet for people living on the streets and whenever i ask offer a free bus to get out of here the response is usually i was born here i don't need a free bus to get home um the thing that i found most interesting in the um presentation was the unusual drop in property crimes in 2008 and i think that highlights what our definition of property crimes because we know that the um that was the year of the most property crimes but those property crimes were actually committed by wells fargo chase bank of america where they stole literally dozens and dozens of people that i personally knows um their homes and so uh there is a direct correlation between the lack of enforcement against the theft of our community by bankers and and outside interests that come here and steal people's property and the amount of people living on the streets because i know a lot of people who had a place to live but the banks stole their landlord's house and now they live outside and you know many of those people too you probably uh are your friends so i think the definition of crime is one of the issues that we could face as a community and um there's a well respected um professor named alex vitally who is uh just i just saw he gave a presentation about his book in uh in uh wales uh about three days ago and his book is called the end of policing and he has done uh decades of research in changing the policing ideas and how it impacts the community and i certainly encourage you to invite him to come here and speak thank you thank you um this is the final speaker unless someone else steps up this is a final speaker um and we'll bring it back to council thank you mayor and council members and chief mill thank you so much um i really appreciate the the ongoing work that you and your department have been doing to meet with a variety of community members and kind of i see it as sort of coming out of some sort of a shell so i'm wondering and hoping that this is going to bring a lot of reassurance to the community that that you're accessible that you're easy to talk to um it felt in my experience that maybe the prior police department was meeting with a couple community groups and not a wide variety of people um so and something that you said is sort of setting your department up to fail it's sort of resonated with me is um i i'm wondering if referring to your officers as heroes um and i have love for the santa cruz police department my uncle was a police officer a hundred years ago but i think that that could possibly set up the community for disappointment because maybe they're also expecting that and i personally like to have coffee with a real person i want to i want to have a beer with a police officer i want to really relate to them on a one-on-one level and i don't want to have you feel like you have to be my rescue or my hero um and i'm just wondering if that's sort of a cultural misunderstanding that could be addressed um i really appreciate your addressing some of the complex issues that feed crime like the economic disparity that we're experiencing public health crises climate weather freeway interchanges it's all very complex it's not as simple as um we sometimes like to think and um lifting a variety of people up in the community that aren't in this room would do us all a lot better and i really appreciate you mentioning that and um and just in closing i'd like to say that your the website is amazing there's so much more information for people that can't meet with you or can't come to a meeting um i look forward to seeing stop data i look forward to seeing more information from the rangers i looked forward to seeing that the rangers are getting some de-escalation training because they're dealing with you know a troubled population that needs assistance and i just want to thank you and i want to thank all the officers here in this room that i find very accessible and easy to talk to and let's continue to build relationships in the community and hopefully it'll ease some of the balloon that you feel is is sort of thank you thank you okay this will be the final speaker unless the person in the back of the room standing wants to speak this is the final speaker of the evening before it goes back to council good evening damon brooder concerns citizen uh thank you chief mills for being here um i've heard through the grapevine you know the rumblings underground that your officers are upsetting people because your officers are starting to do their job um these are law-abiding people or generally law-abiding people that have gotten tickets for various things um yay i'm glad uh if i deserve a ticket right one to me if anybody deserves a ticket right one catch and release i know that's the situation right now your hands are tied please keep catching um as far as the release part well that's up to the laws that govern the judges there is an initiative going around right now the keep california safe initiative it closes the loopholes in prop 47 and 57 to help you do your job if you want to sign that petition or hear about it see my wife after the meeting um and i do want to applaud the rangers and the scpd for the way that they handle situations that could quickly escalate i saw a situation on pacific avenue last week where a ranger uh talked to a gentleman and actually ended up getting him at that moment a bus ticket home to san francisco to get out here because that's what he wanted even though the person was fun to deal with the rangers they handled it very professionally and very patiently and uh you know that's what i see when i see the rangers and i see the scpd when they deal with people like that they deal with them compassionately professionally and patiently and i thank you for that thank you okay i'll bring it back to council i know there was someone who mentioned the issue of the charging um and storage and he's left and so those of you either sythia or rachel who are on the public or the homeless um coordinating committee can email him and talk about what that work's done i'd appreciate it um and i think i i just like to say you know this is an opportunity for comments but also questions if there are still that come after the public speakers i want to um say that this is the first time we've ever had a comprehensive report since i've been on council that went into the staffing and organizational issues that you know that i feel are just essential to say how we can move forward i mean we have what i feel is a public safety kind of crisis when you look at the statistic that we've seen over the past 10 years um the report that you've showed us goes up through 2015 but it looks like we've had just a consistently high level of crime that's existed in this town and we cannot just continue to tolerate the way things have been it's got to change and so by having a restructured apartment that looks at how we manage those i think is essential for our city's future one of the things that i really want to speak to is the fact that how we're measuring what constitutes safety in this town also has to change if we're taking information that comes through where we're treating all crimes the same way you know everything becomes you know an urgency and i know you're speaking to that in your in your comments but when this uh consolidation of all the 911 um non-emergency and emergency calls took place it was about in 2007 and it was a means to track that and the number you shared as the one that's kind of more of the emergency level is kind of consistent what it was at the time that they merged them then and so when we look at whether or not officers are responding at this time it seems as though we're kind of at that same place and there's been kind of a static so i i want to just make sure that one when we look forward that we're measuring how we are going to be making improvements if it's by neighborhood then i think we should be looking at the types of reporting that comes back to us not the reports that we've seen recently but what are the types of crimes that are taking place in the beach flats area or the downtown or in the upper west side or east side so that we're seeing where we can go from there because they're not um right now they're i don't know how we as a city can say to invest more um will we get that result if it's not a monetary thing in my mind i think there's some other policy issues at play that we need to really focus on and i i read the report thoroughly and i thought that um their comments that they had about um having the police department advocate with the electeds on where those are was for me like a critical thing and i don't think we hear enough as far as well what are those barriers that we that we have that go beyond our staffing levels that we need to focus on as a city um those are just some initial comments but i'd love to hear from the council as far as you know how we can better prioritize the safety issues that um you know that are outlined in the report as well as kind of the ultimate staffing recommendations that are included council member crone yeah i'd like to first run through really quickly and i know you're a big guy because we've talked about these questions i i noticed five questions came up from the public police on bikes oh we have them and uh in fact uh brand alima you're still here how many miles you put it in a week ah come on no uh reaching out to beach flats residents there was no forum i know one of them i guess was included in the uh was it bayview no it was gall school both of them but how do we reach out to beach flats residents well we frequently are down there on foot talking with residents uh leo we have several spanish speakers who go door to door down there on a regular basis and work with people uh we did not break it down to every single small neighborhood in this city that had just been way too many meetings um it was a push as it was so uh they were included in uh several of those meeting areas seven uniformed officers here tonight are they all on duty most of our because i've asked my uh deputy chiefs and my lieutenants to be here as managers who are representing their service areas in case you had questions for them uh so yeah they're most of them are on duty and just to respond to the hero's comment they are heroes okay we'll leave it at that and um and but they can't drink beer on duty and maybe this is uh i know that the city manager and i talked about this the two questions came up with non-emergency number and um the bus ticket home and how do we get people home uh with respect to the non-emergency number um there is a there is one that the netcom has in place and i think part of the change might be to i think before the rationale was it goes to the same place uh but however the distinction here though is the response needs to be different so it does matter so i think we'll we'll start work with netcom to make that change the other thing that i've mentioned to you too that we're working on is we are looking at implementing a uh three three one one system uh an app where people can uh with their phones you know submit complaints and so that's uh gearing up here to get going pretty soon so hopefully by the fall we should have that up and running to make it easier for people to report crimes and related to that too is uh as we look at this data and we look at alternatives to responding to calls i think working with all the other city staff we can for example their areas where it makes more sense to have you know public works for example respond to certain calls of a certain variety we'll we'll we'll make that change as appropriate so we'll be looking at all of that and the bus ticket home oh we do have a homeward bound program uh that an individual alluded to that is offered to individuals and actually we do make quite use of that we actually expanded the budget for that so people do regularly choose to to go home um through that program and the last question for chief is the ticketing of homeless campers is that continuing is it is it any different than before the bench lands took place no my policy still stands from a night at night to six in the morning if people are sleeping we don't issue a ticket when there's not a complaint and uh if there is a complaint then we take care of business but during the daytime uh it's still legal to uh to camp thank you mayor uh council member chase yeah i i just really appreciated the approach that the report took basically talking about realigning resources and i think that's really smart looking at what we have and utilizing it better the way i describe it to people often is they're putting the right response to the right situation at the right time and i think referencing actually the conversation with chief frally is really important too is how much time officers are going out to respond to public health issues when it's really a public health response that's needed and i think that's a huge part of what we see in this community and was referenced many times tonight whether it be really relating to homelessness or substance abuse or behavioral health those are really public health issues um and so i just appreciate the approach you're taking and i'm looking forward to see what it does to realign the resources that you have now and and continue to encourage um every possible creative way to get more staff and know that i think council has consistently been behind that doing whatever we can to support that absolutely you have them thank you vice mayor walkins thank you for your presentation tonight and for all the folks that are here in the audience um i i just want to say um how much respect i have for the work that you do in our community and having worked alongside a number of the officers in my other capacity in education i know how dedicated um you are to our community and and um we feel that and we know it i i really want to say how much i appreciate that this report is data driven and is looking at how our systems are um functioning and how they can improve and i think systems change is challenging and it takes time and i um but i i believe it's necessary and i think you know law enforcement and criminalization and um there's a place for that and also a bigger sort of picture of the health and well-being of our community and the health and well-being of your officers are tied to that i think um bless you one of the components that i just really appreciate you bringing up and what i feel really passionate about is prevention i think we foster what we feed and if we feed more preventative activities and preventative strategies then we will see results and so i'm really um all for that and supportive of that i um believe that this is a bigger community conversation and i really look forward to more um partnerships and collaborations community strategies diversions neighborhood accountability boards whatever it may be to start saying how is we how can we as a community rise up to be supportive of the health and well-being of all of our community and and that and then um results and less criminal activity often i i am um i'm interested in workforce development and i know i've mentioned that to you also i think we can build our own and i think there's a lot of beauty in that and the connections and ties to the local community and then also just the sort of logistics of how expensive it is to live in this community and so if we can work on workforce development and trying to recruit and engage and create that that pipeline that would be fantastic in a consideration for succession planning um and then just you know just really the alignment of resources i think is a really incredible takeaway i think when we know um information we have to do something about that and what the takeaway in terms of how to more proactively look at what we have and how to best utilize that um it's incredibly important so i i have you know a number of observations is somebody who really appreciates criminal justice and and public safety and health and well-being of our community um but i'll leave it at that and um just really thank you for the work and i look forward to periodically hearing updates on where we are so we can measure our success and and sort of check in and see where we can go in the right direction from there that's a moment ryan i know and your goal of getting more officers um out on patrol that you're looking at some changes and um when vice mayor watkins mentioned the prevention side of things which i believe we're all very passionate about um i know that you do uh you know we have the citizens police academy which is an education component of the community and something i went through several years ago and i just find invaluable in terms of bringing that here as a council member and also the pride program which gets involved with at-risk youth that are at the mission or junior high uh oh junior high just dated myself middle school age level so i'm wondering will those um programs still exist and um if so how if most of the officers are going to be out in the field well the person running those programs was leo gomez who everybody just you know raves about and i i rave about him as well i've redeployed him to the field however today i met with a group of volunteers and uh to try to transfer the much of the responsibility to a cadre of volunteers who can run these same programs with the help and the assistance of sworn personnel now that's a huge lift to ask of volunteers this is a very robust program um a lot of time commitment so what we're probably going to do is continue these programs as much as we can tailoring them back just a little bit so that we can continue with the programs however move it forward uh council vice mayor wattkins gave me a grant the other day to deal with tobacco and so we see this as a way to work with the pride program and so i've got a person writing that grant it's due i think at the end of this week so we're pushing a deadline and uh we think we might be able to bring that person on should we be successful in that grant application to run the program completely so we're we're trying to find ways to to push forward continue these programs we see them as hugely beneficial to uh to the department to the city i'm not interested in backing away from those uh we just we're just going to have to figure out what's a reasonable balance because they i need every boot on the ground right now to deal with the crime issues all right and i know what's great i know with the pride program because i'm involved with it's with my other hat on right um our interns want to continue our uc santa cruise interns who work with pride definitely want to continue helping so look to that as a resource as well and maybe there's an opportunity to step it up um from that end as well great thank you that's one brown i would just echo the comments from my colleagues about um the tremendous respect that uh i also have uh for the work that you all do understanding it's very difficult i mean i guess i would just highlight my appreciation for a couple of the um the ways that you've talked this evening and have been um engaging with the public around this question of um one police officers being kind of tasked with the job of social services within our city and the challenges and the frustrations that i imagine uh officers face i mean we i really appreciate the data-driven you know the report but it it doesn't necessarily give you the picture of what people experience on the ground and so i think it's really important for all of us to stay in touch with that and um i'll be talking with you about ride-alongs and then you're very near future i haven't done one in quite a while but you know i think that so i think just you know uh really pay being mindful of that and i i appreciate that you are and that you really are supporting a team of officers and personnel who have the best interest of our city at heart and also your your position on uh enforcement of the the camp our camping ordinance or sleeping ban and um i hope that that has taken some of the pressure off of officers but i'm not you know i don't really know so if you want to say anything about that now that would be great but otherwise we can talk about that in the future so thank you for for everything you're doing and i'm really excited i think a lot of people in the community are excited i know at my neighborhood meeting uh at galt school you know i saw people who live on my street who are you know we're really inspired and want to get involved in community policing in a way and feel really um uh they feel that the police department is becoming more accessible and um so i just appreciate that and thank you to um our deputy chiefs who are here as well i know you're committed to that too thanks you know i just would follow up on something that was included in the report there was a recommendation that the consultants made about um considering the establishment of a dedicated team that dealt with the social services issues that are really being handled by the police department i know we've seen in city san jose where they have groups that are assembled to deal with some of the issues that come up so they're signed um directly and they're budgeted um we as part of our work plan have set up a group that's um you know one tasked with issues of homelessness and others have you thought about why that wasn't in their recommendation the final recommendation to to have that type of group assigned to deal this so that we are kind of furthering that realignment to you know have maybe non-officers handle those types of tasks well i think that is an important issue to look at and one of the things i'm i think i'm really proud of of the city is that our neighborhood services team and the entire city is kind of unified in dealing with these problems together and uh i it's one group of people all pushing the same direction and i and that's so important for us to be successful that way i you know we have as you know um mental health liaisons who who ride with their officers in the cars and from the county and they do a great job dealing with some of these bigger uh mental health issues but i would be very in favor of a team that is a county wide uh team to that that assesses this that works with city employees as well as county employees mostly county employees this is a responsibility i just don't think that should be a police responsibility we got to dig ourselves out of this problem rather than get further entrenched and now having said that we're the only game in town right now and um and that's that becomes kind of tough until let's say we the city um is the only game in town well i mean i'll just say we have uh funded programs to kind of address that in a comprehensive way and we do have some council members are on various committees that kind of are looking at those i would like maybe our public safety committee to look at that very issue about how we can kind of continue to shift some of those responsibilities to non you know pd assignments so that they can be freed up even further sure we did that earlier in the year with some of the public works into and traffic enforcement i don't know if that's still continuing like in terms of the parking um in different parts of the city and i think there's opportunities for other areas to deal with that and other kind of programs that maybe could be peeled off to further free up officers and i'd like to hear from you know the pd and city manager's office on where those might you know be the other thing is i feel like there should be you know realignment with results that's important that we say that you know hey we are doing this and there's a reason why we're moving forward is to to see a positive change and you outlined a five-year kind of period of time that you see these results taking place i think it would be good to to at least indicate what kind of expectations the community would be seeing in each of those periods over time so we know exactly you know the direction we're going and we can have the opportunity to comment on it but you know the realignments with results i think is a strategy to make our community safer and i like the idea of making sure that we're identifying where in our neighborhoods we're able to prioritize to make our our city safer agreed uh you know one of the things that i'm having my lieutenants do is meet with the deputy chiefs and myself monthly to give us an update on what they're doing what their priorities are in their in their neighborhood policing areas and and how we're doing in terms of the data associated with that now creating that data at this point is a little bit rough i have to be honest because of the rms system however we're going to do the best we can and move forward i would hope that community members would start to see relief and uh and it shouldn't take you know five years to see that kind of relief we need we need to you know as i said before listening time is over now it's time to get at it and we're getting at it just one final comment and that is i know carol scurridge from parks and recs is here we it would be good if the parks and rec commission were able to hear the recommendations on the ranger issues that came up we got an email on that i'd like to make sure that's rolled out i i haven't heard any feedback from the parks but i mean i i think the program's been very successful in terms of prioritizing some of park safety issues and and keeping them well maintained in parts of the city and i think having something that's reorganized might even kind of expand it to new parks and other areas so it'd be good to get their feedback on what this proposal means to the parks department from one of our subcommittees as well so i hope you'll plan to do that sure council member crone three quick issues that are kind of leftovers that have been part of our community discussions and then a couple comments but um hsi are they have a desk no longer at the police department and what's our relationship there oh my security investigations yeah no i know okay for the for the public um they do not have a desk in the police department they are completing a uh that large case where you hopefully will see indictments in the near future but there is no activity in terms of immigration enforcement period okay and inflammation point from the uh santa cruz police department thank you and ice what's our relationship right now with them well it's kind of ice's division of hsi and um there's the relationship is if you have information that we need intelligence on terrorism or something we'll take it but we're not working with them and crisis intervention training there was a goal to get all the officers trained is that been realized it has we gave a de-escalation training to our entire department had members of the community come and watch it to make sure that it was something that was in line with what their thinking was and it was uh successful and i think we can chalk up a save from the other day just with that okay i just want to say that um i really appreciate all of your efforts um that what you've been doing reaching out the first day when i met you going to um cafe pergolese for a coffee you know and just your jumping in my leaf and taking a tour of uh places around santa cruz um i want to say thank you to the deputy chiefs too i saw those though i was at three of those meetings um recently i thought you uh uh was lieutenant garcia as well i thought you guys did a stellar job um reaching out to people and i think that's what it really is about it's that that contact people want a voice we don't have the all the answers and uh when we're looking to the public for some answers but i really thought you you all did a just a bang-up job at those meetings you stayed for a while after every for every question to be answered as people left and stuff um this report i'm i read a lot of reports and this is a better report and it's it's much more professional but it's also um sort of in your face it's it's pointing out the warts as well as what you do well so you know a lot of reports are written for people who pay for the report to be written and there's a little bit of that in here but there's also some criticism and some like hey um you know this is how to do better and i and i really appreciate seeing that in in print as well um lastly just to underline what councilmember wacken said about public health issues really important that you know we pursue that that that line of you know uh with the public and not everything's not a police intervention it's a there's a lot of public health interventions going on and we need to like you know make that happen and i really appreciate teaming up with chief frolly and anybody at the county too who wants to be part of that uh to address those issues so thanks a lot appreciate it okay do you have any comments no okay there's um action that's on the floor that we need so can i get a motion i'll move that we accept the recommendation as written in the report second council vice mayor vice mayor walkins um i'll do the chair of the public safety committee uh councilmember noroyan so that's a motion in a second and also i hope that we have a referral kind of to the public safety committee to go into more detail in terms of some of the discussion points that we had today and um also um kind of continue to follow up on this i appreciate um the that not only the format of the presentation but the reporting as councilmember crone mentioned that was provided and i could see how this would be beneficial in other parts of the city to see stuff like this to know hey how we can move the the um move the needle on um our public safety needs in the city so thank you okay there's a motion to second on the floor all those in favor please say aye aye those opposed say no that passes unanimously have a good evening the meeting is adjourned