 Spanish can join the Spanish channel to do so click on the interpretation icon en zoom toolbar. It looks like a globe. Once you join the Spanish channel, we recommend you shut off the main audio so you only hear the Spanish translation. Charles, would you mind please restating that in Spanish? Para los recién llegados a la reunión, la interpretación en español está disponible y las personas quienes desean escuchar en español pueden pasar al canal de español para cambiar de canal haga clic en el icono de interpretación ubicado en la barra de herramientas de zoom para ese globo terráqueo ya que según al canal de español, recomendamos que apague en el audio principal para poder escuchar la interpretación claramente. Thank you, Charles. Good morning all. Do we have. Coram today. Hi, Chair Fleming, we do have a quorum at this time. I know council membership at home is also joining us. Why don't we give it one more minute for him? OK, excellent. Well, I would like to welcome everybody to this meeting of the public safety subcommittee and call this meeting to order. Madam Zoom host, would you please do a roll call attendance? Thank you, Council Member Schwedhelm. Here, Council Member Rogers, Vice Mayor Rogers, Presidente and Chair Fleming. Here, thank you, housekeeping. The reminder to committee members keep your audio on mute unless you're speaking, staff will remain muted until they need to speak. As members of the public join the meeting today, you will be participating as an attendee, your microphone and camera will be muted. Only today's panelists will be viewed during the meeting. If you're calling in from a telephone and choose to speak during the public comments portion of today's agenda for privacy concerns, the host will be renaming your viewable phone to resident and the last four digits of your phone number. 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This icon may now look like a circle with an ES in the middle and the word Spanish underneath. You can then rejoin the Spanish channel at the conclusion of your public comment to continue listening in Spanish. Thank you, chair. Thank you. All right. Item two announcements. Do we have any announcements from the committee members today? OK. Do I need to take public comment on that? You know. No, if there were no report outs, you do or no announcements, you do not need to take public comment. All right. Item three, approval of the minutes. February 8, 2021, January 27, 2021. In November, 23rd. So I think we need to vote on these separately. Yeah, I was a president. OK. So shall we adopt a 3.1 and 3.2? To start. Yeah, I mean, I think the accurate reflected the meeting. Excellent. Great. So I'm in concurrence. So we'll adopt 3.1 and 3.2. And then Natalie, are you with us on that one? OK. And 3.3. I felt good about Councilmember Schwedheim. As did I. Excellent. Thank you. All right. Do we guess we're not taking public comment on that either? Do we need to take public comment on minutes? Yes. OK. I will open it up for public comment. Do we have any members of the public wishing to speak? Not seeing any members of the public wishing to speak during live comment. Do we have any pre-recorded video voicemail? There are no pre-recorded voice message for this item. OK, great. Moving on to item. For public comments. This is a time when any person may address matters, not listed on the agenda, but which are within the subject matter of this jurisdiction. Public may comment on agenda items when item is called. Each speaker is allowed three minutes. So do we have any members of the public wishing to comment seeing none? Do we have? Oh, there we go. Roger Montgomery. Roger, are you there? Hello, you hear me? Yeah, you have three minutes. Go ahead. Oh. I have a lot of I'm interested in the mental health response program because I have a lot of years of mental health recovery because an officer shot me in 2005 and I had to plead not guilty by reason of insanity. And it took several years to get restoration of sanity. So I'd like to know if they need any what's it called? That's all I got for now. OK, thank you. Anyone else wishing to make comment? OK, seeing none. Do we have any pre-recorded comment on non-agendized items? We do have a pre-recorded item. Comment is for item number four public comments. My name is Duane DeWitt. I'm from Roseland. I'm quite concerned that Southwest Community Park has basically become a lawless area. I'm hoping that the Public Safety Subcommittee could address the issues of people not abiding by any of the guidelines that are posted on the signs. The city has stated that there should not be vendors on the site. They're vendors who are actually practicando their trade right next to the sign saying they're not allowed. There are people drinking in the park all day long. It starts early in the morning and it goes well past dark, even though the signs say it should not be allowed. One of the things that's quite problematic to many of the local residents is that it appears the police no longer really pay attention to that area, only come when perhaps someone is called. Often they don't come. One of the things that would be really nice is if the Public Safety Subcommittee could look into having the police department enforce the laws about no public drinking, especially in these public parks, and make sure that the people in the parks are abiding by the other laws. Noise, smoking and drugs. It seems as if law enforcement has just given up on Southwest Community Park. People are urinating and defecating in the bushes because there were porta-potties in the past. While it seems those have been taken out of the library, excuse me, the restrooms are not open long enough for the people who are there well after dark. So please have a coordinated effort to enforce all the laws at Southwest Community Park as soon as possible, hoping that this subcommittee can actually have a voice in this type of activity. Thank you. All right. And that is the end of our public comment on non-agendized items. We'll bring it back to the subcommittee and we'll go to item 5.1, the police auditor update. Chief, take it away. Thank you, Chair Fleming. Good morning. Good morning, Vice Mayor Rogers and Council Member Schwedhelm. We are here to present four or have four items on the agenda and then a fifth one to seek out recommendations for future agenda items from the board or from this committee. The first one is the the first item should be the police auditor update. So if we can go to the next slide. So I'm going to give you a very quick overview of where we are. Next slide, please. So the police auditor is something that we've been looking at for several years. As you know, we had a police auditor that was contracted out by the city between 2014 and 2018. And we the auditor's contract was expired and was not renewed. Since then, we have gone out five times over the last couple of years seeking benders through RFPs to to find responses. We are currently in our fifth round of that, which was sent out in July of 2021. And we did receive two respondents and those are currently under review by a committee that was put together by the city manager. Next slide, please. And this is just a overview of the scope of the police auditor and the functions of what the auditor does for for you in the community to look at. The auditor will be looking at ongoing audits of our policies, practices and our records. They have access to our body or camera footage. It's it's it's all access. We don't restrict anything. And they the auditor, as in the past, has been able to conduct their own investigations. And if they request something to be opened, the we work very closely with them and the auditor has works directly underneath the city manager to to provide reports as to how how we are doing both in our investigations and in our policies. They the police auditor position will be able to will be available to respond to complaints by the from the community. We keep the auditor position apprised of any critical incidents that occur. So if there's an officer involved shooting or another critical incident that may occur, the auditor is immediately called and notified. And they have the option of or that auditor has the option of coming out and overseen what is happening. The the RFP has asked the vendor or the auditor to make regular reports, regularly meet with the stakeholders in the community and then make those reports to the city manager and and this body here as we move forward in the future. The auditor is a significant role for not only the police department, but for the city. In the meantime, we still have a professional standards team that responds to all all complaints that come in from the community. And I do want to remind our our community that they can still file complaints and commendations through our website, which can be found at SRCity.org slash file a complaint or they can reach us at SRPD info at SRCity.org. We expect the timeline. Timeline's coming to an end again. It's in the middle of the process and we should have we should have some updates at the October Public Safety Subcommittee on who's been selected. That is all for the police auditor. Happy to answer any questions that you might have. Thank you, chief. Subcommittee, any questions? I have a question. Oh, all right. Chief, where would we be able to see a copy of that RFP? Is that a public document? I believe it is. I would. I don't know if I have the anybody from the city attorney's office or city manager's office, but I believe they could it's not in the police department's venue. So we're we're not running it, but I could get that information back to you and let you know. That would be great. Thank you. Any questions, Vice Mayor Rodgers? OK, great. We'll move on to public comment. Seeing no lie. Oh, there we go. Give it one second for the clerk here. Allegra Wilson. Hi, good morning. I just wanted to provide some input and say that I hope that the police auditor also has the authority to make or advise on change in policies and some authority to advise on disciplinary actions. Sorry, you can probably hear my kids watching TV in the background. I just I feel like it's really important that there be some actual action that this auditor can take around any sort of incident. I think we've seen in the past where things have kind of been let go. Or, for example, with the protests last summer, there was a lot of complaint and not really a lot of disciplinary action, or at least not I understand there was a small amount, but not maybe to the level that would be appropriate. So I'd like to see this police auditor actually be able to take some action and have some teeth. Thank you. Thank you. Next up, we have Melissa followed by Claudia. I definitely want to agree with everything that was said in the previous comment, I absolutely agree. I kind of am curious about I appreciate the transparency about how many people applied for the auditor position and when that happened. And I'm kind of curious to why no one was hired. Like, were they not appropriate? You know, what was the hold up for that? So I'm just kind of curious to the transparency around that particular issue, because it has been so long since we've had a police auditor. And I feel like it needs to be such a huge priority. So, yeah, those are all my comments for today. Thank you. The rest of my time. Thank you, Claudia. Hi, I needed to unmute there. Can you hear me? We can. OK, thanks. I just had two questions. One was. It doesn't seem like there's been a lot of applicants. And I wondered if chief Navarro had a reason, you know, had an idea as to why that was. I do appreciate it, the transparency. And secondly, I wondered if it does, if he, in his opinion, as far as he knows, it looks as though one of these people will be hired as an auditor so that we will have an auditor before before too long. Those are my questions. Thanks a lot. OK, thank you. Madam Zoom host, do we have any pre-recorded comments? No pre-recorded comments for this item. OK, so I think that it's appropriate to ask the chief if you can help us to understand why there were so few applicants. Do you have any insight into that? Well, I believe so the auditor is a very it's a unique position and so we, you know, it's an important position and there are a lot of there are agencies throughout the nation that are seeking some sort of oversight and so it's you know, I don't know why we're getting so few other than it's a very unique position and it takes a lot of time. If you do it right, the police auditor is very involved in the policies and the administrative investigations and it's not something that can be done in just a snap of the finger. So it's you're not taking on each auditor does not take on a lot of clients. I can tell you that, you know, is this is a significant role that is that helps us, it supports the city, the police department in its accountability and transparency. There were a few other questions I had heard about the, you know, how it works. And so the auditor does help with direction as far as making recommendations on policy changes and it does provide recommendation on disciplinary action based on best practices of what is seen in other departments. So but it's I believe it's just because it's a very unique position and it takes a lot of time and effort in their attorneys that are that specifically deal with these sort of these sort of functions. OK, thank you. That's helpful. Any further comments or questions from subcommittee? All right. Seeing that, yes. I did. I did. There was another question about why it's taken so long. I can tell you that during the last several years, and I think you realize this, we've had several emergencies that have popped up with the city. And so because it does not lie within the police department, it lies within the city as a whole. It becomes a it's become a capacity issue to really kind of drill down and get through the selection process. So it's been a difficult time for the city in itself. And that's why it's taken so long. Yeah, thank you for that explanation. And I know speaking on, you know, from the count for myself and for the council level, we are committed to to getting this done. Thank you. All right. So with that, we will move on to item 5.2, our mental health response. And I believe Captain Cregan is up. Yes. Thank you so much for chairperson Fleming and the rest of our council for allowing us to present on this exciting topic. And today's an exciting time because we present on this four or five times over the last year, but we're really seeing some progress and we're starting to see this team starting to emerge. So if we go to the next slide, we'll talk about some of the overall updates. So we're continuing to work toward our citywide goal of getting a new response model for responding to those in a mental health crisis, as well as with some of our substance abuse and certainly working with those in our unchelter population here in our city. So what we're going to talk about today, and we've mentioned this at some of the other meetings, but this is we really have finalized this and we're in our final stages, finalizing agreement with the County of Sonoma's behavioral health team with their mobile support team. But one thing that we've been really trying to focus on some of our community presentations and really hearing a lot of our community feedback over the last eight months is how we design our team. And we've closely been modeling it after the CAHOOTS team in Eugene, Oregon. But we're proud for the city of Santa Rosa that we have, what we consider a CAHOOTS plus model. So we've taken what they've done in Eugene, really learned how they're doing it and saying, how can we make it even better for our community here in Santa Rosa? And here are some of the four primary pillars of our program. One of the things that we're going to do is we're going to have licensed mental health clinicians. And actually in Eugene, they don't have licensed mental health clinicians and it comes down to a cost. But for us, it's something with our collaboration with the county that we were able actually to put licensed mental health clinicians. They have more training, more expertise and more ability to actually put someone on a hold if necessary without a police officer coming to the scene. Because our goal is to be able to keep the police department out of this response model as much as possible. So that's a key enhancement for our team. The second one is a paramedic versus an ENT. And this is where Fire Chief Scott Westrop has been such a valuable ally in this program and working to embed fire paramedics with our program. And with a paramedic, it's going to give them enhanced abilities to medically treat those that we're seeing in the field. And they're going to be able to have a higher chance that they can handle the issue in the field without a entire fire engine coming to the scene. Are very importantly of unnecessarily bringing patients to the ER and putting people in our ER beds that are taken away from some of the vital emergency services that our local ER rooms supply. So that's going to be a key part of the team. And also it's just going to enhance our overall collaboration with the fire department by having one of their members embedded in this team. And our community has a lot of trust in our local fire department. So I think it's going to be a valuable asset. The third thing that we're doing, which is an enhancement to the CAHOOTS program, is actually adding a homeless outreach specialist to our team. And when we're looking around at some of the teams from around the nation, we're seeing that many of them, about 60% of their calls are homeless related, that these teams are going to. And we expect that it's going to be very similar to that in Santa Rosa and could even be higher here with our community and some of the special needs that we have. So having this dedicated homeless outreach specialist on our team to immediately be able to provide some of the critical services and help get some of our vulnerable members of our community into permanent support of a housing immediately. It's going to be something and I think it really goes toward our upstream approach. And that's going to be instead of the current model of repeatedly responding out to those in crisis and sometimes is putting a band-aid on the problem and providing temporary solutions, having this homeless outreach specialist on our response team is going to help us with some long term approaches to helping those in our community. And a fourth key element that we just are finalized in the last month is still continuing to have Bucaloo programs to be a key part of our mental health response model. And they're going to provide a critical wrap around support services. So what we're going to have is the county's mobile support team is going to be out with our first response team of going out in our response van and meeting with those in crisis. But an important element that we were seeing that wasn't captured in some of these programs across the nation is doing the follow up appointments and not being able to send the whole car out. They do the follow up appointments but having a team. So we're going to have Bucaloo staff who are trained mental health clinicians and they're going to be following up with individuals that our team has had contact without the week. They're going to be looking at who are some of the high users of the system and that they can target some of the resources they need to give them the support that they need. So I think that's going to be a really important part of that. They're also going to help with some of our community outreach and some of the community meetings because that's going to be a key part of this team of understanding we're starting out with a 12 month pilot program and we're really going to be continuing to get community feedback, get feedback from our city council and city leaders on how we can make this team even better and the community outreach and those meetings throughout this first year and really ongoing or to be such a critical element. Can we go to the next slide, please? So some of the next steps that we have, I've been meeting with the staff from Whitebird Clinic almost on a weekly basis. We contact each other regularly as we're doing the final touches of our program and we're going to be launching right now. We're targeting for September. It may end up being early October because we're working with where we want to be able to have some of the final steps of this program, but Whitebird Clinic themselves is going to host a community meeting for us here in Santa Rosa and with all the COVID restrictions that may be via Zoom, so it might not be in person, we're still working out some of those issues, but I'll have some more news coming out on that soon and that's part of our continued effort to get the valuable community feedback because we don't want to build a team that doesn't meet the needs of our community, but that's an important part of that. Part of that is also continuing to meet with our local stakeholders. I've literally made dozens of presentations over the last couple of months to different community groups, to city leaders, community or county groups. Chief Navarro has been a key part of that as well with me as we continue to hear from what are some of the specific needs from our community. We continue to work in our own unique team name and logo and actually on our last slide we're going to add this today, just yesterday I finalized with our local branding company the name, so it's not included in this PowerPoint, but the city clerk's going to help me and we're going to add it to the last slide and then we'll update it to the council page today so everyone can have it in. The police department is going to be putting out on some of our social media platforms later this afternoon. So I'll give you that in just a minute. Another key part is we're still continuing to explore some private funding options and some grant opportunities. So we just actually applied for a third grant just last week and we're working collaboratively with the county and some of the other cities across our county who are looking at these new mental health response models and part of the focus of this grant is going to be on capturing the data and it's so important for us to be able to capture the demographics of those who are responding to the successes of our teams, the number of calls we're able to divert from the police and fire department and from our local ER room. So we're working together as a county to capture that data and Deputy Director Bill Carter for Behavioral Health has been a key partner in that and we're going to continue to work that toward our overall goal, which is making this a county wide response model. Our vehicles have been ordered. Now, if some of you guys have seen in the news, there's a national shortage in some of these vehicles with microchips to our vehicles were actually ordered months ago, but are still waiting on the microchips for them to be finalized and before they can be shipped. So right now we have a delay in that and it's been rather frustrating, but I've been working with our city fleet department and we're looking at some alternatives for the short term because we want to get this program out as quickly as we can. So I'll have some more updates on that as I meet with our fleet team and we work to be able to build a vehicle that safely meets the needs for our team and also for those who will be transported to some of the resources to our crisis stabilization unit and to a Renda Center with this vehicle. And we go to the next slide please. So another thing is just we've really the last three months has been a lot of times working closely with some of the other key partners. So obviously the fire department is Sonoma County Behavioral Health, Catholic Charities and Bucaloo programs have been the four key pillars of this team, but we've seen the Petaluma Police Department is launching a simpler version of this team is started and working very closely with them. Ronner Park and Katadi are looking at some as teams as well. So we really been kind of guiding those agencies and providing support to them and then working with Redcom, which is the countywide medical dispatch as we implement some of the new protocols that we've never seen a team like this of paramedics being first responders into some of the mental health crisis. So we're working together, we're really working the lay up a foundation to make this a countywide response model in the years to come. And that's what I think is really going to be kind of one of the most important parts of this program. And then I touched on this briefly, but really focusing on the internal protocols and how we measure the success of this program. And it's so important for us, for us to be able to have the data. And I think that's important for our community and certainly for our city council leaders that we're able to give specific and articulable data that we're able to come back. So we're looking at what are some of the empirical data resources that we can gather and be able to report back to our community on a regular basis. And that's going to start as which the best data system for us to use. So we're evaluating different data systems right now for collection. I'm talking with teams across the country on what works for them and what doesn't work. And hopefully we'll be able to finalize that soon. The timeline is the most important question we get. We're still marching toward our goal of October of this year, being able to have a launch with the team. It's a possibility in October that this team is going to be internally working on their training, setting up. And we're working on the timeline when they'll actually be responding to calls. We're actually going to have the team Eugene Oregon from CAHOODS is actually going to create a three day training with our staff, so they're going to come down here with COVID guidelines, hopefully working in our favor. They're going to come down and do a three day training with our team because we want to see exactly what they're doing Eugene and closely follow that model. So we're going to launch with seven days a week for 10 hours a day. We're looking at our peak hours of our team. So right now it's going to be from 12 noon to 10 o'clock at night. But seven days a week. And then phase two would be going to 17 hours a day where we'll be starting in the morning and going to that evening at 10 o'clock at night. And then phase three would be a full 24 seven response model. Now there is some optimism that with some additional funding from the grants and with our private funding that we could be able to go to phase two much quicker than waiting a whole year. And that's what my goal is. And I know chief Navarra and our city leaders. Our goal is to as quickly as possible of a full 24 seven response model. So we're working toward that goal. And I'll continue to update council on our community on our efforts with that. Can we go to the next slide, please? So here's the one and we just added this. So this is the new addition to it. So this is a logo. We really put a lot of thought, consideration and and really worked with our community, worked with Nami Sonoma County, was a key part of it. So our team, we didn't want to use the cahoots name that they're having Eugene. We wanted to come up with our own. We got a lot of feedback of staying away from an acronym and also staying away from some of the government sounding names of the mobile response team and things like that. So with after a lot of feedback, we developed a name in response. And that came from that we're in response to the cries from our community for a better response model or in response to those that need help and support in our community. And then with the under tagline of the mental health support team. And a lot of thought went into that as well. But this team is a team that's going to be providing support for those who most critically need the services in our community. We went with the green color, which is the mental health awareness color. We wanted to stay away from red or associated with the fire department or blue with the police department. So it was a very neutral color and it was very welcomed by some of those in our mental health community with being this the green color that has that connection. So we're really proud of this name. We're going to start working with our community. And part of it for us is making sure of building that community awareness for our team. So those in our community know that this is an alternative to police officer responding to those in crisis. So now our next stage is really building that community awareness and trust with this team. And that's where we're really excited to get some of this feedback and to be able to get this team hit in the ground, but also with the name where I want to continue to get feedback from our community on what you think of the name, the color, the response. And that's something too that will continue to evaluate for this first year as we work out. But so far we've gotten overwhelmingly positive feedback on our name. And most certainly the community is excited for this team to get started. So there that's where we really want to do. And we know there'll be some growing pains over the first year, but we know it's going to be such an enhanced model to serve theirs in our community. So that was a very quick, fast update. Y I'm happy to take any questions from our city council or from the community on this topic. Captain Cregan, thank you for such a detailed presentation and also for all of the work that I can't even begin to imagine how much time you spent putting into developing this. So thank you for that council questions. Vice Mayor Rogers. Not a question, more a comment. I just wanted to thank you guys for especially Captain Cregan for all your hard work on this project. It is very near and dear to my heart. And it just really shows your passion behind the project. And I can't wait till October to get it up and running and to get everyone trained and to really see it implemented and see the team on the streets and helping our residents. Yes, thank you so much. And it's really been such a team effort with Catholic Charities and Buckloo programs, the county's Noma, the fire department. And then in so many here at the police department that are coming together. But quite honestly, we wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for the strong support from our city council and from our city manager to get this off the ground. And that's what got us selected by other cities with the Cahoots program is because they saw the passion, they saw the energy and they saw that our city council was willing to dedicate to necessary funds. So that was another big accomplishment that I didn't put in the slide about us actually dedicating the one point one million dollars in our new upcoming general fund budget that city council did. So that's a big step forward and those funds are allowed us to get moving with creating some of the contracts with our different organizations and getting these vehicles. So you finally see kind of the light at the end of the tunnel. And so it's going to be a legacy for our city for many decades to come for others in the Bay Area, which are following our model. That's something that's really proud for us, for the city of Santa Rosa, to kind of be the model for others around California and even the nation to follow. And especially I always kind of laughingly tell that to the COOTS, that we consider a Cahoots Plus model. They take it in stride over there in the gene. But I think we really have made our model even that much better. And so I think it's going to be something that's exciting for our community. Great councilmember Schwedhelm. Thank you. Thanks for that presentation. Kevin Pagan, from Chief Navarro. I really appreciate the progress that's been made here. And I really like the marketing of it, too. And I know I had heard some comments and I think you did, too, John, from Bill Carter about the name of the team mental health support team versus behavioral health support team. Can you talk a little bit about how we landed on mental health versus behavioral health? Certainly. We literally had probably a hundred names that we went through and we're going through and getting the community feedback, but the mental health was important to us, especially when we're talking to some of the NAMI families and those to make sure that people understand the priority and the overall focus of this team is responding to those in a mental health crisis. And that's what we heard early on from our community, that they didn't want an armed police officer with certainly not as much training as some of the mental health clinicians have responding to those in crisis. But it is important to understand that our team is still going to have a strong emphasis on working with those with substance abuse issues. Those in our homeless community is still going to have a strong focus on those, but just for the internal branding and for people understanding what this team is and what we want is for people to understand when they have a family member going into a mental health crisis or maybe a son or daughter who's having a tough time at school or with some of the other increasingly complex issues for adolescents that they know what this team does and they understand that it's not just for substance abuse and it's not just for those in our homeless community, but it's for everyone in our community. And I think our whole city is going to be able to explore the benefits of this team, and that's what's important for us, though, for that community education, so people know that so that that mental health support team was very strategically chosen to be able to make sure to help with that branding and for our community understanding about what the primary focus of this team is. Great, thanks for that clarification, because until I heard Bill Carter, who's a sub-matter expert, mentioned that, again, for those who are in the profession, that's a big difference, but from that branding aspect. So our normal community members understand, I really appreciate the efforts and how much time and effort went into the actual selection of in response and the actual name of the team. So thank you. Yes, thank you. Excellent, thank you. Subcommittee members, we'll move on to public comment. All right. We will have Matt Bogue, followed by Catrine Siapa. Matt, are you ready? Unfortunately, Chair Matt is using an old version of Zoom and needs to do an update so he will not be able to write public comment if he can do the update and log back in. We're happy to call on him again. Excellent, I'll keep my eye out for him. All right, we'll move on to Catrine. Did you mean Claudia? My chance. I actually saw Catrine's hand first, but we can start with Claudia. No, no, that's fine. It just told me to speak. So I don't mean to step in front of Catrine at all. I actually I attended this meeting because I'm concerned about the local police and I appreciated Chief Navarro's comments in response to my questions. But I'm really I too want to just echo my thanks to Captain Creedon for his work and the work of the team on this. I'm so glad I have I stayed on and listen to this. And I think the public is going to be as a member of the public. Really hard to have, you know, very glad to hear it's gone into this and the diligence and then the plan itself. And I have a vote as a person that, you know, as a member of the public encounters people that could clearly use help, you know, mental help, help. I'm really glad to know this is going to go on. And I have a son that we've only had to have one intervention with him. But so as a parent as well. Thank you. And I appreciate the city council's support of it. It just makes me proud to live in Santa Rosa and and really feel safer as a member of the public. So thank you. Thank you. Catrine, followed by Roger. Good morning. Can you hear me? Great. I just want to echo what Claudia was saying. I'm really, really heartened by hearing this update and, you know, by all the efforts that went into creating this mental health response team. It's a really, really important step in the right direction and a great benefit to our community. So thanks to Captain Kreegan and everybody really excited that Nami was involved, that Bacaloo programs is involved. I just want to add a couple of comments, you know, for your consideration. My hope is that you will also consider including a peer specialist with lived mental health experience on the team and that the team will, you know, reflect racial and ethnic diversity and have Spanish speakers involved as well so that we can respond culturally competent. And, you know, the only other concern that I have is that, you know, there will be situations if there is a perceived threat of violence or anything resembling a weapon involved that most likely law enforcement will still be involved. And I think in those situations, it's going to be extremely critical to practice deescalation under the guidance of a mental health professional so that we can avoid any any tragic outcomes as have happened in the past in our community, where people with mental health challenges have been killed by law enforcement because of those situations. So hopefully we can continue to address that and really move into the direction of having it be focused on a mental health intervention and not a law enforcement intervention. But congratulations on all the work that's gone into that really appreciated and again, I'm very, very encouraged by this and please keep us posted and I yield my time. Thank you. Roger, followed by Melissa. Sorry, I have a lot of experience in mental illness, homelessness and alcohol abuse. I've gained restoration from NGI and now I'm a high functioning individual after 13 years homeless. I have been housed for 10 years and 17 years being sober. I can relate to these individuals that have these illnesses. And if you need more insight, you can call on me. And I think that's a very nice logo you have there, Mr. Captain Cregan, and it looks like the hands are reaching out to each other. That's very nice. OK, thank you. Have a deathly fear of public speaking. That's why I'm so nervous. OK, that's all I have to say. Thank you. Well, you wouldn't know it. You sound great. All right, Melissa, followed by Kimmy. Again, I just want to say that I'm really excited for how this is all shaping up. I'm so glad that everybody's taking their time to make sure this is going to be the best possible program. I was worried when we first started talking about this, like it's going to get rushed through, but it's very thoughtful. I love that there's collaboration between the cities, right? Because you don't want to have different responses, depending on where you have your mental health crisis. It's no McCounty. I love the logo. I think it's really warm and inviting. I love the model. I definitely want to echo some of the things that Katrina said about if there's a weapon involved to make sure that we don't have any horrible tragedies que we've had in the past, where people were having mental health crisis and were killed by the police. So, yes, I'm excited. Thank you for this update. I'm looking forward to seeing how it rolls out in October. And hopefully we can get it off the ground 24 hours as soon as possible. And I also want to say that yeah, I just want to uplift the previous commenter that we really need those voices, we need to hear from the people who have been in this experience so they can help us, you know, frame this program to be the best possible. So thank you again. I yield the rest. Thank you. Kimmy followed by Allegra. Hi, can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you. Hi, good morning. My name is Kimmy Barabosa. And first of all, I would like to thank you all for this presentation and your work, Captain Cregan. This is the first time that I actually feel hopeful about some change in this community that will bring about compassionate care for the most vulnerable in our community. I know I've called to these meetings a lot and I want to share that police response to mental health drastically shaped my life. My father, who's no longer alive, was an immigrant, struggled with schizophrenia and I subsequently experienced my own mental health challenges as a child and both me and my father had very traumatic experiences with law enforcement and I'm currently pregnant and to know that if my child has a potential crisis that there is potential for a safe response if he experiences that crisis. So I would like to thank you and also highlight the need for culturally mindful practices as well. Different folks in different cultures need different responses. And I think one of the previous callers also mentioned having a diversity in staff and response staff and also having someone on staff who has a lived mental health experience and a lived addiction experience. And I also want to highlight the need for extra support for youth who often fall through the cracks. Juvenal detention facilities are less rehabilitative for a lot of youth that I see who have interactions with law enforcement. They need a lot of help and a lot of support, especially being so young and still developing a lot of these coping mechanisms and ways to help themselves. But anyways, I look forward to seeing how this program evolves and please continue to keep the community involved. We are the experts of our own experiences and I yield my time. Thank you. Thank you. We have Allegra followed by Matt. Hello. Thank you for bringing this topic here to this meeting today. I want to say I also agree completely with the comments around diversity and cultural competence, as well as highlighting the importance of deescalation always. I also just want to bring up a concern about the potential for lifelong diagnoses of people with mental health issues when clinicians get involved. So I just I want to say I hope there's a plan to route that in a thoughtful way that doesn't end up with somebody having basically a diagnosis that that takes away opportunities from them. I'd love to hear more about how this is actually going to work in terms of a community member calling in. Where does that call get routed? How does that all happen? I think that's really exciting. And I would also just want to point out, I hope you are working with Sonoma County Human Services Department in addition to the Health Department, because there is a lot of crossover there. So I think that would be really important. I do also want to say thank you so much to Captain Kagan. This is a really great collaborative effort, the amount of time and community input that you've coordinated is such a good example for this endeavor and for future endeavors. And it's really exciting to hear that there is going to be a new resource for people who need it in our community. And it's super appreciated. So thank you. Excellent. Thank you. Matt, followed by Alexis. OK, can you hear me? Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. OK, just checking. I had to update all my stuff from the previous time I tried to raise my hand. So I just want to make sure. Yeah, basically I want to just echo what a lot of these other people have been saying that this is a really, really great program. Thank you so much, Captain Kagan and Chief Navarro for getting this going. And yeah, it's it does. It's like you said, it makes me proud to feel like we have forward thinking police department here that is willing to make outside the box and look at programs like this. This sounds like an excellent program and I'm really happy you guys are doing this. I guess I don't have a whole lot else to say, but yeah. You know, I hear a lot of negativity about police departments and different things. And maybe that's true in some places, you know, I don't know. But I think Santa Rosa Policia as a this is a good example of how they're really thinking outside the box and really listening to the community and trying to make things better. So thank you very much, SRPD. Thank you and Alexis. Hi, can you hear me? We can go ahead. Awesome. OK. I just think that this is really is really important. I don't know that I can echo the previous sentiments, but I definitely am really excited to hear that this is what's happening. I want to echo a lot of what Allegra had previously said in that. And that, you know, things like institutional and institutionalization is detrimental and things like that. But it's really exciting to see a program like this pop up within our community, especially because we we do have such a need for it. So I'm very excited as as somebody who works a lot, one on one with unhoused folks who very regularly talk about how there is no real services. There's no mental health services for unhoused folks. So something like this, having a compassionate response is really, really important. And I think it will lead to a lot more safely. No conflicts with with folks handling or dealing with mental health crisis. And that's that's about it. I yield the rest of my time. Thank you. And we have Noah. Can you hear me? We can go ahead. I also wanted to comment to voice my support for this program, as well as main points that I felt were important to hold as this is developing and as this is implemented in the community. To uplift what many other commenters have said, we must make this team and this core group reflective of the diversity of our communities, including things like language justice and cultural competency. We need community input from black voices, indigenous voices from all of our communities of color, and as well as disabled communities, mentally ill communities and neurodivergent communities. All of these groups have trauma from our carceral system, whether that carceral system be jail or psychiatric incarceration. We also need to take seriously many of the mental health situations that are often widely stigmatized or branded as inherently dangerous. We also need to recognize things like medical institutional bias and work with folks who have lived experience and take their needs seriously. Those are the kinds of things we need to ask ourselves. We need to ask ourselves critically at every step of developing this program. I yield the rest of my time. Thank you, Lee. Hi, can you hear me? We can go ahead. Hi, I just want to kind of pretty much echo what many people have already said, including having people who have lived experiences of mental health situations be a part of the team. It's so important to have. I'm a person who suffers from mental illness. I'm a person who has had trauma around that. I think it's really important to have people who have had these lived experiences from all parts of the. The intersections is basically what I'm trying to say. It need to include people who have lived experiences so that the sensitivities that those who did not have the lived experience and maybe have only studied and maybe only know it from an outsider perspective could really understand how things, how traumatic things can be, something that may not seem traumatic to somebody who is neurotypical, may seem extraordinary to someone who is neurodivergent, someone who is neurotypical may not recognize something that's pretty common around a neurodivergent mind. And those things are being talked about more and more in the world of therapy and in the world of inclusion. So I just want to make sure that there are people who have lived experiences and expertise. So the combination of an expertise, a scholarly expertise and lived experience expertise is really important to me. And of course, echoing what others have said, and I want to say it again, especially people from marginalized groups now, people of color, who also have issues that they have a voice that needs to be heard and it can help. It can help so much. So this is a really important program. It's really important. And yeah, thank you. I yield the rest of my time. Thank you, Lee. I don't see any more live public comment. Do we have any pre-recorded voicemail public comment? We have no pre-recorded voicemail public comments for this item. Well, I'll bring it back to the subcommittee then for comments. Sorry, I'm working off one screen here, so your hands are popped up. I'm not seeing it. Anything from you all? OK, well, I did want to say one thing, which is just a request of Captain Kreegan, which is once you get up and running, one of the callers had asked to kind of hear the actual mechanics of how a call gets initiated and then what happens. And I think that'd be real interesting and informative for this subcommittee to hear how how things go once the team is deployed. So very exciting and interested in that. Also agree with the comments around having a team of this team be reflective of the community that we're serving. So with that, we will move in one second to the next item. I think it's item 5.3, but I need a moment here to pull it up. Let's see. Item three, Chiefs Community Ambassador Team, Chief Navarro and Lieutenant Cooker. Please take it away. Thank you very much, Chair Fleming. I don't believe Lieutenant Cooker is on here, pero ella está ayudando a leadar este programa. So I have her information at the end of this presentation in case anybody has any questions. So if we can go to the next slide, please. So the Chiefs Community Ambassador Team is a team that we've been in development with this for a few years now. When I took the Chiefs position, one of the first things I wanted to do was create some sort of group to be able to provide feedback directly to me from the community. We did a couple of things early on back in 2019. We did a few community listening sessions and we quickly realized it can be difficult to get people to come to come to these meetings. We had a very small numbers in the community, although we did five throughout the entire city. And so we disemprecise the need to be able to really be strategic in speaking with a particular group to be able to use them to go out and help us and do more and and better engagement. So we with that. And then last year we heard a lot about additional community engagement. This became a priority for for council to continue to work on. And so this year we were able to move forward and put out a request for people to join the community ambassador team earlier this year. The our mission really is it's very simple. We want to be I need a team to help be a bridge between the police department and in our community to enhance that communication. And this team is going to assist with informing me and my in my team in some of the broader community concerns, issues that that are being seen out there that may not get to us in other venues. So I'm really excited to have this this team coming on board. Can go to the next slide, please. So the purpose really, again, is to strengthen our relationship with the community. The CCAP does not replace community meetings or community groups that we already do. It really supplements our ongoing community engagement that we have done historically done in the past. We, you know, the CCAP team at alliance with council feedback and priorities for our department that we've been hearing over the year. Our community members, when we went through our our empowerment sessions last year with the help of Magali's team, we we heard many times that the community wanted more dialogue and more partnership with with the police department. And so this is consistent with our ongoing police community policing efforts. And it will it will offer an opportunity for our community members to participate and lend lend insight on the policing within their community. So we really evaluate our value, the input that we are we are getting and the ongoing conversation. Next slide, please. So I've been asked about who's on the team. How did we do it? Oh, how did we how did we form this team? And so I wanted to give we were initially planning on coming to June to the June subcommittee meeting to present this with scheduling conflicts and other issues. We weren't able to do that, but this is our this is a community ambassador team. And they come from all walks of life when we we put out the information for the for the CCAP team. We did it in several ways. First of all, we put it out on our own social media groups. We contacted several nonprofit organizations that we are that we have had partnerships in the past. We put it out in the violence prevention partnership. We asked the Office of Community Engagement to reach out to groups that we don't normally have a work, an ongoing relationship with. Y then that also included some of the some of the groups that came to the empowerment meetings over this last year. And so we really relied on on on help from the the OCE and our other city partners to to really help push this information out. So we we put it out. We received over 40 applications from community members from throughout the city. Y after that, we tried to narrow that down to a kind of a workable group. We did that through an interview process that I had myself and in Lieutenant Cooker. We we met with several members and several of the members that were not selected. We responded to them and let them know that we're we're keeping their name on file to reach out to see if they would still be interested at a later date. The the members that you see here, they represent community members who are involved in school, including graduate students, educators, people with social work experience, people from the faith based community, people who have resilient or they maybe even face traumatic crises in in their past and in our resilient in their own backgrounds. And so we also included people who were long time residents of the Santa Rosa and then also a few people who have just moved here in the last few years and are wanting to get involved in the community that they've moved to and are involved in. Y so we think we have a pretty good cross section if we can move to the next slide, please. So this map is it's a map of our police feets and how we tried to really try to diversify the where our community members were coming from. And so the stars represent areas that that the CCAT members reside in or work in. Y so we are we think we've done a pretty good job at finding people and based on the the people who have applied, have we've gotten a good representation from throughout the city. I can tell you that there is a representative of each council member district within that. I didn't have time to overlay a council map or a district map on here, but we do have representatives from each of the council member districts. As far as a demographics, we do have a pretty good cross section. There's 15 community members. We have six men, nine women. There are four Latinx community members for our five. Five from the black community. We have one biracial member for members of the white community. And then we have one Asian community member on the on the team. So we tried to make sure that we were diverse in demographics, geographically, and also in backgrounds as we made selections. Next slide, please. So our CCAT meetings, they are held on we're holding them on a regular basis. The first meeting was held on May 5th. It was an introductory introductory meeting for the team to get to know each other. We we introduced my command staff to the team to get them to let them know who was on who are my leaders on the team. We had another meeting on June 4th, where we had the opportunity to present a policy, which you're going to hear about in 5.4. So they reviewed one of our policies already and they are currently going through a community police experience, and that's a it's a used to be known as our Citizens Police Academy. We've changed the name, changed the name about two years ago. And they're going through that virtually to get a better idea of how we do things here at the police department. They get to know a little bit more about some of our staff members. They're hearing from our defensive tactics instructors, some of our investigators, some of our supervisors and some of our civilian employees on how we do work here. And that's going to give them kind of a baseline of our business, our organization, and then help create that baseline to be able to have those discussions on where do we need to go next? We are going to be meeting at quarterly, at minimum. The next their next meeting is actually tomorrow, where they'll be completing the community police experience. And then we are going to be meeting as a group at the end of August. And we usually meet on they've been meeting on Thursdays for the CPE and we're going to be we're going to be standardizing the meetings as we go forward. We are going to be providing feedback to the community. So one of the things I want, I would like to see our CCAP members do would be to self report out. And, you know, so we're looking at, you know, after the meetings that we have, I'm going to our our team is going to ask see if there's if see if any of the team members are interested in providing a quick overview of what we talked about and report out and we'll be putting that information out on our on our department website. So the feedback that we are going to be getting will be found on our website at SRCity.org slash change for the better. Next slide, please. Again, this is a, again, a kind of a wrap up of what we are what we are doing as a team, some of the expectations. We did have a conversation with each team member as we went through our initial application process. Really, what we're looking for our team to serve as ambassadors to the community and advisors to my position, both for local issues and national issues that are related to public safety and law enforcement. We've used our members in several areas already. We've invited our CCAP members to be part of our promotional interview panels for a wide number of, a wide variety of positions such as lieutenant, sergeant, recent administrative secretary position and in some we're going to be using them in future promotional panels as we move forward. They're going to be lending insight to myself on some of the issues that are occurring because we often think that we, you know, I think we've we've come to to learn that, you know, we think we know what is important, but sometimes, you know, a community member may have a different point of view. Y so it's important to hear that. And so this is an opportunity for them to give me that information and we can develop some of our talking points, the things that we put out on social media, how we create and provide information at community meetings. I the expectation I talked to the members is to take the information that they're hearing and they're learning and they're asking about back to their community groups and their networks and ask questions so we can continue that conversation. And I'm going to be asking our community members in the future or secret members in the future, once we can get back to regular community engagement to assist with formalizing or forming an ongoing conversation. So it could look like a community listening session, a town hall meeting, maybe a meeting with a network that they're a part of to and help assist with some of the facilitation in those groups as we move forward. The some of the other things that they've done is they again, we talked about the policies. They're going to be regularly looking at our policies as they come up for review and some of the changes that that we're going to be looking at. We already have three or four policies that we're probably going to bring to them to let them know this is the trend that's going on in law enforcement and we're going to be seeking their feedback as we come up with some of these ideas. The members initially will participate on the team for a period of one to two years, we're going to be setting up a rotation. That way, we don't have the entire team rolling off at the same time. And so we'll we'll be asking for community members in the future and we'll be working again with the Office of Community Engagement and the SEACAT team to seek out new members as as people's as their terms come up. Next slide, please. And that is that is our presentation. Again, this is something that we've been working on for quite some time. Lieutenant Jeanine Cooke has been assisting me. So both of our emails are here. If anybody has any questions on the process, how how the meetings are going or how to how to get involved in the future. And I'm open for any questions that you might have. Thank you, Chief, for your presentation. And Council Member Schwedhelm or Vice Mayor Rodgers. Any questions from either you? Vice Mayor Rodgers. I was just thinking of it sounds great. I was thinking of your initial initial term one to two years. If I were a member meeting quarterly and doing all of that work meeting four times, I don't think would I don't think that I would really. Yeah, I would just be getting into it like we would just be starting to. I would just be getting to know the team and just getting to know what we were actually really doing. So one year wouldn't be so maybe two to three years. And I don't know if you guys have really thought about that, but it just really is getting off by the time you get to six months, you're just really getting to. But that's just me, I don't know, I'm just thinking of initially and you're just getting rolling. You're just starting to see what the team is doing and getting a vibe. So that's just would be my only input, but it sounds like that it's getting rolling and you guys have a good outlook of what the team is going to do. So thank you, Vice Mayor. That's good feedback. We are definitely we can definitely look at the terms. You know, the we were we're sensitive to the fact that community members have a lot of lot going on in their personal time. If yeah, and we really is their team. I told them early on that if they want to meet, you know, if they want to meet monthly, they want to meet every other month, I am completely open to that and we're willing to do that. But at the very least, we wanted to make sure that we were, you know, we weren't just like meeting. And then six months later, we, you know, we were like, what happened? So we're we're open to the meeting more frequently and then we'll we'll work with the team and we'll look at what the time on the team will look like, and we can definitely make those adjustments. So thank you for that. And we're open to, you know, again, with we're going to be virtually for a little longer, so we're going to have to adapt on how we do community engagement. And so we're going to be talking to them about that. Y si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si si Ok, so I will bring it back to the subcommittee and I'm not seeing anybody who's desperate to to make any further comments. Just want to thank you chief again for all of the work that you're putting into thoughtfully organizing this advisory team. It sounds like it's going to be an excellent resource and I'm also grateful to all the individuals who applied and who were selected to participate. With that, we will move on to item 5.4 policy discussions on policy 706. Victoria. Yes. Sorry, really quick. I missed something. Yeah. Chief, can people communicate directly with your team if they have a concern the people that you put up. Is there an email? Will they have emails? Very good question, Vice Mayor. So we have set up an email system. You can find it on our transparency website. Before we end this meeting today, I will get you the exact address, but what we've done is we've set up an email. They can, a community member can email this particular link and the email will be shot out to the CCAC team. Okay. With that, we will move on to item 5.4, Captain Cregan on policy 706. Thank you so much. If we go to the next slide, I'll start this presentation. So the first thing to do is kind of give a little background on this because this is a rather sensitive topic and we've gotten a lot of feedback from the community on it. As we continue to seek that feedback and see how we can make some of the changes to our policies and our protocols in regards to our public address system. So in reality, this conversation started in 2017 and 2018 after we saw the disastrous Tubbs Fire come through our community and we started looking at some of the clear concerns that we heard about our alert and warning systems that we had here in our county and then our ability as a police agency to do mass evacuations during these acute crisis that are facing our community such as a rapidly spreading wildfire. So we started doing some research then and seeing the need for a better system. At the end of this presentation, I worked with our staff to prepare and Lieutenant Dan Brensig has been a key part of the development of this program of creating a video that really shows the current capabilities of our equipment and the capabilities of our new public address system. So this video I think will hopefully bring some of this presentation to life and help people to be able to visually and auto hear the effects of it. So we started that. In our current system, we have just these portable like megaphones, but they're kind of like the typical small ones that you'd almost see like at a Walmart or something like that. There were nothing special. And then we have like a public address system as part of each one of the patrol vehicles and the video is going to demonstrate that. Well, we saw that it wasn't sufficient for what we need for doing mass evacuations are doing large crowd control situations because they don't work when you put in traffic noise and crowd noise and whether wind or other natural events that are occurring there weren't sufficient to be able to adequately relay our message to the community. So if we go to next slide. So we started researching our staff here at the police department really researching like what are some of the different available mechanisms that are out there across the US and what agencies are using them. Some of the key things that we were looking at is the ability to pre recorded messages. So what we're going to do for evacuations or even in crowd control situations are if you had a large event like our fairgrounds or the country country summer music festival and things like that that these pre recorded events and maybe you can pre record in case of a disaster. This is your exit route that you're going to take our during evacuations and it's obviously easy to talk about a pre recorded message about what the crisis that we're facing is and what the safest exit route is and communicating very clearly. And then making sure that we're having a consistent message that goes out to the community. Another key element that we wanted was the portability. So being able to carry one by hand and if possible secure to a vehicle but we wanted one of the smaller ones and that's what I really want people to understand today is that there's a lot of confusion over the LRAD system. So Genesis is the actual manufacturer and then LRAD is the model for this and that stands for long range acoustic device, but they make quite a wide array of devices, including some that are even utilized by military. But those are large devices that are bolted to vehicles that are so much different than the portable device that we're going to be exploring today and I'll try to video hopefully bring that a little bit more clarity. So we examined some of the effectiveness of these things because we didn't want to make a purchase and just buy another version of what we have currently now, which is not meeting the needs for our staff to be able to safely convey the messages are the expectations of our community. We also really started studying what are some of the agencies across the US doing because we're not the only one facing these issues. And we started seeing a common trend of what police agencies and a lot of fire agencies are utilizing as well for their response to buildings on fire are also during wildfire responses. We can go to the next slide please. So that's where we started looking at this, the Genesis systems, the long range acoustic devices and they're used in over 500 cities here in the US. And some of the cities are that we're looking at that are rather progressive cities but are facing some of the same issues as us is the city of Berkeley, Portland and Seattle and as some of those Los Angeles Orlando. We also have some of the ones we did, but we wanted to look right here in our own Bay Area so we look at Berkeley and what Berkeley's policy is doing. And they actually have the same devices as us and so it's important for us to understand. We have the one that we're examining here for the city of Santa Rosa is the Genesis L Rad 100x is the model and I think it's coming up a one of the other slides so the 100x is a small portable handheld that an officer, a firefighter, any one of our staff members who are utilizing this device just carries by hand, you can have the prerecorded messages or you can talk into a microphone and speak loudly or on it and And this is what we were getting from some of the feedback from our after action report we had during the protest, and also after action reports that we saw across the country, involving some of the protest that a common theme is that police agencies weren't adequately be able to communicate with those who are protesting. And there son that if you gave them a clear message about at this point, based on the fact of criminal behavior or whatever the unique circumstances of the night are, that has been declared an unlawful assembly, and that those that are need to be clear that the unlawful assembly has been declared, but also provide a safe and organize exit route for those who want to leave the area. And what we saw was our equipment did not allow for that it wasn't allowing for people to clear clearly hear some of these announcements and vote and those who wanted to voluntarily comply. It wasn't giving them clear direction on how to safely exit from that area and that's something that was really important for us to come up with a strategy that allows that to occur. So let's go to the next slide please. So this is some of the things we talked about here, really focusing on the clarity that you're able to hear in this video is going to be able to show you that the significant difference that you're able to see in the clarity and being able to understand the message. We also want to make sure that it certainly will be a tool in the tool belt for for us during crowd control situations, but I actually see it being utilized and more often for natural disasters and for the wildfires we're preparing as a city for what could be a potentially rough fire season coming for our community here in Sonoma County. We're working to be able to pre record some fire evacuation messages on that and to supplement some of the things with our Hilo sirens, which we launched last year, but a perfect example where this could be utilizes in our Oakmont community, which is an area that's on the edge, the eastern edge of our town, certainly is one of the high risk areas for our wild land interfaces and our fires coming into our community. Sometimes those in the community aren't as adapt with some of the alert and warning options that we have available through smartphones and other devices. So it's important for us to be able to go in that community, supplement our Hilo sirens and being able to have a very clear and audible message that could be heard inside of residents directing some vulnerable members of our community about what the emergency is at hand and how they can safely respond to that emergency. Another application could be search and rescue missions. We see this out at Anadel quite often, even in Spring Lake and Howard Park and some of the other areas of our city. We see sometimes at risk missing people, whether it be young people, whether it be those with disabilities or whether it be sometimes in our elderly community that for a wide array of issues could become disoriented or lost. So it could be another tool for that. Also, for search warrant, so right now, we're trying to have a really use some of the de-escalation techniques with our tactical teams and look at times where when a SWAT team has to go out in a high risk search warrant, instead of doing some of these dynamic entries and busting in the front door and stuff like that that maybe you saw in years past through our movies, we're trying to have a slower, more methodical approach and doing what we can, what we call a surround and call out where we have the tactical resources on the scene, but we're using this device to be able to clearly communicate with those in the residence of the police officer's presence, not to be able to surprise them, not to lead to some type of unnecessary use of force situations, but give them clear directions to be able to safely exit the house as required by the search warrant. And I think it's something that we're going to be able to see less potential uses of force and clear communication to those in the residence. The crowd communication will certainly be something that we utilize with our cloud control and utilizing with some of the our teams and over the last year and a half. We saw some of the things that 100% we could do better as a police department command staff of managing these protests. And there's one of the things that we think will enhance our team's ability to be able to communicate with those during the protest and enhance the ability of our staff who are on the ground during those protests. Traffic management events. I think there are some possibilities for significant traffic incidents and that may be like for the 4th of July when you have thousands of vehicles on non COVID years, leaving the fairgrounds area. And if anyone's tried to get home on 4th of July in downtown Santa Rosa, it can be quite a bit. So that's something that we can be able to utilize this device for as well. We go to the next slide. So I mentioned this already. So I think it's really important that we understand that there's a wide array of these devices made by this manufacturer and that our device that we have is the 100x, which is the small portable device and doesn't have near the capability. So sometimes you see information shared on social media about these devices and it's important though to be able to put in context with what the devices that we have right here in our community. So this is the smallest device in their team of tools that they have there, which has the least decibel output, and we'll talk about that. So for us to be really clear on that, it has the maximum decibel level of 133 decibels. And that sounds kind of loud when you first think about it, but actually it's important to understand that 133 decibel levels is that they measure in the measurement of meters is at one meter. So this device is never going to be used one meter from any from any individual. That's actually for the safety of our staff to understand that for those who are utilizing the tool where it goes to when you look at and these are available online at and I can provide information of Council needs more, but it has the rate and it goes out to 16 meters, it goes to 109 decibels, and then at 32 meters going to 103 decibels and then at 64 meters, which that would be the crowd, the time that I think you could start seeing in crowd control settings that goes to 97 decibels. So 97 decibels to put it in perspective, the research we done shows that that's that could be as loud as like a passing motorcycle. The police sirens that we have in our vehicles are 115 decibels. So it's under what you see of a police car drove by you on a street, which is at roughly 115 decibels. So it's important to understand the capabilities of that. Now, it allows for the pre recorded messages we talked about being portable, it allows for the operator to control so that actually we can put it even in lower settings, depending upon the unique circumstances where it's getting deployed. And as we'll see in this video, it's the messages are much clearer and more audible. If we go to the next slide, then we'll address one of the primary concerns with this device. So one of the very loud cries that we heard from our community is concerns over this morning tone that these have. That's something that we presented to our city council with the help from two outside auditors from the hillard hines group in the oh I group in may about some of the protest response. And in that presentation, we talked about utilizing this device after the recommendations from those groups. And we heard a lot of feedback from our community about strong concerns with this warning tone. So this is something to give credit to our chief of police, immediately hit pause in the program is saying we need to look at this and we got strong feedback from our city council members, including the three of you here today about, we really need to have a little bit more measured response and really think about our approach of deploying this tool in our community so we met as a police department command staff and looked with our subject matter experts. We presented this to the community ambassador team that the chief just presented on the sea cat team got feedback collectively from that group about how we can make changes to our policy. And we're trying to balance the needs for our staff to be able to utilize the tools they need to do their job, but also to make sure that it meets the expectations of our community and make sure that it's a safe tool for our community and that's really important for us. So we ended up making we adjusted after the feedback that we received in May and June. We made it immediate adjustment to our policy and I put the policy on here and anyone can access our policies on our change for the better and our transparency web page on the police department website has the full policy. But I took a direct quote from that policy. And we put right here in the policy, it says the L Rad warning tone shall not be used under any circumstances and shall for us is the highest degree it's not should not is not could not is not probably couldn't. It shall not so under no circumstances can our staff do that. Even with that, we had some pointed criticism saying hey there were tools that you guys utilized on the protest that you shouldn't have utilized. How can we trust the police department that you're still going to follow just what a policy says. And we took that very seriously so we took another step which I think really demonstrates the desire to remove this tool, and we worked with the manufacturers from Genesis were actually able to disable this device so it's permanently disabled and we can not use so you won't see it inadvertently used by a staff member who maybe doesn't have the training and expertise. You won't see it use maybe maliciously by someone with that under some crazy circumstances. They don't have the ability so not only does our policy absolutely say that you shall not use under any circumstances, but we were able to remove the ability to have this alert and warning tone come from the device. So the capabilities of the device right now is truly what we intended to use it for, which is as a public address system that is able to give clear and messages to our community that they're able to understand. So, I to me I truly believe as an example where our department was able to hear some of the concerns from our community, we hit pause on this program based on that feedback. We made adjustments to our policy. We disabled the warning tone as really as a direct result of the feedback from our community and from our city council leaders. But we want to continue to hear this feedback and learn how we can continue to make adjustments to our policies to the being able to apply the use of this device out in our community. And we want to continue to be able to make sure that we're able to provide the tools that our staff needs to be able to do safely do their job, but under the parameters of it meeting the expectations of our community and that we're utilizing a safe tool for our community. If we go to the next slide please. So this is the video demonstration so before we started, I want to kind of put it in context so we have. First they're going to use the existing like handheld, like public address system that we have, and then they're going to use the vehicle public address system so that's where we have one built into every patrol vehicle in our city. And third they're going to use the device and you're going to see the remarkable difference in clarity from the three devices, but then the important thing for us to understand this is in a really like static situation like we did this out at our corp yard for the city where they do the repairs in our vehicles. So it's quiet, there's no traffic noise, there's no crowd noise, there's no wildfire in the background, or whatever the emergency we may be facing. So this is under ideal circumstances and you're going to see how remarkably insufficient really the the regular public address system and the current system that we have in our vehicle, and then some of the enhanced capabilities of our system. So let's play this video and this video will be made available online too for anyone else who wants to spend more time looking at it. This is a demonstration of several pieces of communications equipment that the Santa Rosa Police Department possesses. It includes the LRAD, a vehicle public address system, and a megaphone. You will see their capabilities at various distances. 20 yards away, one Rosa Police Department, this area is under a warning for evacuations. So, for me, that video was pretty powerful, even for someone who works with these tools, more often I'm showing that, especially at the 100 yards, which is where more likely you're going to be seeing this, whether it be in a residential neighborhood, whether it be at some type of special event or during a crowd control situation, the tools that we have aren't sufficient, like you can't clearly understand what's being said. And I think that's really a disservice for our community. What's the point of giving messages if they can't clearly hear the message. So now the concern for us is like, well, how can you have a tool that gives a clear message, but still be able to do it safely and make sure that there's parameters in place to make sure it's not abused by staff or are used maliciously against our community. So I think those two key elements to our protocol are permanently disabling this warning tone device, which was a strong concern for our community, and then putting in our protocols that you shall not use. And then the third really important element is our continued training with our staff, and we're working with our staff of understanding the capabilities of this tool, and then most importantly, how it's used safely for our community. So I hope that was able to put a little bit more clarity behind the specific device we have here, how it's being utilized across the nation by other agencies, and then some of the enhanced protocols that we put here. Because even when you look at some agencies with Berkeley, which is a pretty progressive city, they have the LRAD, the 100X, but actually they have a larger version too of the 450XL, which is bigger and goes on vehicles. And they actually still have the warning tone in the Berkeley community. So ours is more restrictive than the Berkeley community, but I think it meets the needs of our community. And it's something that we as an agency, with our city leaders in our community, that I think that we'll be able to be able to safely to utilize in our community. But this is still part of the process today to hear more feedback from our city leaders and refer community and see how else we can make changes to server community. That's what we have. Excellent. Thank you, Captain Cregan. Questions from the Vice Mayor or Council Member Schwedhelm. Okay, not seeing any. I'm going to go to public comment. Do we have any public comments? All right. Looks like we're starting to get some flowing in here. We will start with Matt followed by Kimmy. Chair Fleming, we are also receiving the same message for Matt that we received previously. I don't know if he switched devices and that switch device is now needing an update. So Matt, if you can do your update and log back in, we'll be happy to take your public comment at that time. Excellent. So we'll move to Kimmy followed by Lee. Hi. Hello. My name is Kimmy. Again, I have the same ability to your community concerns. I just feel like this community has been so different. Kimmy, we're having a hard time hearing you. I think that there's something going on with your connection. Can you retry again and we'll circle back around to you. Thank you. Sorry about that. So we'll do Lee followed by Allegra. Hi, can you hear me? Thank you, Captain Cregan. That was very helpful. And I certainly can't speak for others, but I do feel like some of the complaints and some of the concerns that community members had have been addressed and listened to. I'm glad that the the the warning noise, the sound part is disabled. And I can certainly see why and how these would be very helpful for the fire season. Again, I just want to just, even though you already said it, I just want to say it's really important for me to that these never, ever, ever be used as weapons against the community, even if the community is a protesting police brutality, because that's a tricky thing for you to uphold the law means that we're allowed to do that, but it's, it's very, it's, it's tricky. And I see that and it sounds like we are in a different conversation that we have been in the past. And I appreciate your time and I appreciate the presentation. Thank you very much. And I yield my time. Excellent Allegra, followed by anon. Hi, good morning again. And I, I want to echo what we just said, this seems like such a vast improvement over when we first were informed about the alra being purchased. And it's really important. I think we're feeling like we're being heard around some of these issues. And I think that there was a time earlier in the summer when it definitely didn't feel like that. So I really want to appreciate again Captain Grigen for your thoughtfulness on this topic and your understanding that there is a trust issue and that it is hard for people to hear that the police have purchased a new potential weapon. And then, and then to make to mitigate that to make changes so that we can feel a little bit more trust and feel like this isn't necessarily going to be used against human beings in a destructive manner. And like we said to I just, I agree, I hear you saying that we that it can't be used against people. And, and that's the most important thing. And so thank you for not weaponizing this. Thank you for making changes to your policy, and thanks for hearing what we had to say. Thank you. We'll go to anon valid by Matt. Hello, can you hear me. Yes. Okay, so I'm after hearing that the speech and Captain Grigen I just want to start out by saying like what a colossal waste of money that we spent, you know, tens of thousands of dollars on a device that we've been disabled to make it do the same thing as a $500 band pa. So I feel like going forward, like, what kind of trust has this police department built in a fish like that they can, we can believe them that they did permanently disable that warning tone that it won't get turned back on that it won't get weaponized against us. It's the same guideline that they weren't supposed to use barricade rounds against us, and yet they did. nada ha sido encuelvo en esta explicación particular, y yo definitivamente quiero ver ese dispositivo removido. Hace mi tiempo. Gracias. Gracias, Kimi. Hola, ¿estás capaz de escuchar a mi? Mucho mejor. Gracias. Gracias mucho. De nuevo, lo que estaba diciendo es que estoy muy impresionada por esta habilidad de escuchar a las preocupaciones de la comunidad, y que esta reunión ha sido muy diferente, al menos en mi opinión, ha sido muy diferente de any previous meetings with law enforcement, where there really seems to be an avoidance of accountability, and even a gaslighting approach of victim blaming, for example, justifying the horrible use of force against residents with the kind of a you started it demeanor. So this has just been a breath of fresh air to just even feel like our feedback has been taken seriously and incorporated into new policy. The fact that Captain Corrigan even mentioned the incident with the barricade rounds and took specific measures to make sure that something like this wouldn't happen with the L red, not only by making policy against it, which like you mentioned, like, you know, there was policy against the barricade rounds and still that was used against us, then also taking the steps to completely eliminate that option by disabling the warning, the warning tone. I would love to see the policy to make sure that even with the other, the PA system, I guess aspect of this that it doesn't go over the 90 decibels or 100 decibels, has anything above 120 decibels, I think, is where it really causes hearing harm to residents. But I'm really just encouraged to see that you're hearing us, that you're reiterating our concerns, that you see that there is a distrust and that you're working towards that. And for that, I'm very appreciative and thank you, and thank you for disabling the warning tone. I give my time. Thank you. And we have mad up next. All right. Sorry. I haven't some technical difficulties here. Yeah, I'd just like to thank Captain Cregan for this talk that he gave, because yeah, I could see how the LRAD system, honestly, seems a little creepy if you look into it and you see different things. But I think you really did well to ease my mind personally on the whole system, how it's going to be used and answered a lot of my questions and, you know, the fact that there's different like frequencies and different strengths that are out there and available and that you guys aren't using the really high strength version and stuff like that. And the demonstration in the video was particularly good. That's pretty amazing how well that thing works. So anyway, again, like others have said, I think you guys are doing great to address all the community, the things that people are bringing up and things like that. And so I really appreciate you guys as a department and I just wanted to say thanks again and I thought that was a very good presentation. Thank you. Thank you. Madam Zoom host, do we have any pre-recorded voicemail comment? No, no, previously recorded voicemail public comment. All right. I'll bring it back to the subcommittee for comments. I know I have some, but we'll start out with Vice Mayor Rogers. So really quickly, I just wanted to say that I am super, super. Oh, everyone away. I don't know. Super, super excited and thank you for the presentation. It was very well executed. I felt like the community was heard. I feel like there is progress. I felt like the tone of this meeting, especially this item was very different from other items that we've had in the past. And I feel like we're going in the right direction and just, I don't just, Captain Cregan, thank you so much for this presentation, just the way you went about it and the accountability. And I just, I definitely loved it and I love the video. It showed so much like really why we needed it. And I'm wondering how we only have one LVAD and how we're going to only have one and how we're going to make it work with one and probably how we're going to need more because I don't know how our equipment, how we suffice this long with what we had. So thank you so much. Thank you, Vice Mayor, Councilmember. Thank you. Thanks again, Captain Cregan, for the presentation. And again, we've come a long way from when this was first introduced to the subcommittee. Question I might have for you is, are any other law enforcement agencies in Sonoma County following our lead in this arena? That's a good question. I believe the sheriff's department, I don't want to speak for them, but I believe they were examined in this and made the introducing one as well. But a lot of them are kind of following our lead and seeing where the community feedback we get and going to follow our policy. And Vice Mayor Rodgers point for us, it may be something that we buy more for the city and even examining for the fire department to utilize in the fire department, we wanted to really get the feedback from our community this meeting and from our city leaders before we move forward. So this was an important step to us to see the is this policy and is some of the steps we took going to be sufficient. And I'm really appreciative for the feedback we received today. So that could be something that we will continue to work with our fire department, especially as we prepare, unfortunately, a year after year for some of these devastating qualifiers. Yeah, thank you with that because I would concur for those of us that have experienced multiple evacuations, almost like when law enforcement went to the high low siren for all doing the same thing. We're all in the same community together. So it'd be wonderful if the chiefs and the sheriff would get together using the same strategies. Because again, I think the video is excellent to show the capabilities of that, especially in emergency situations. So thank you. Absolutely. I'll just just on that. I will share it with the chiefs of police. We have monthly meetings, share it with them and we'll be working with our emergency services manager for the city and Chief Westrope on what it looks like for the city in the future. Excellent. Great. So where I want to start with this is on a technical piece, which is I believe that our community will is already going to be safer as a result of having purchased this piece of equipment. And but on the more policy and philosophy level, what I want to say is that you and your team did an outstanding job of listening to the community and not just responding in terms of, you know, checkboxes, but really synthesizing the information and the sentiments that were expressed, acknowledging them and following through. And I've been, you know, a fierce critic when you guys have got things wrong and I want to be a fierce supporter when you get it right. And this is an example of really getting it right. This item was excellent and this meeting was excellent. And I'm really heartened and I believe that we're moving forward in the right direction together, a sincere thank you to both Captain Cregan and your team and Chief Navarro. Excellent work. Thank you. Yes. And thank you so much. And this was something that really come under the leadership of Chief Navarro of saying we need a really hit pause. And then Lieutenant Dan Marensic, who is really an expert in this area and helped create that video and has done a lot of help provide some of the expertise for this presentation today. So both of them were key of making it happen. Excellent. All right. Thank you so much. And then with that, we are on item 5.5 Future Agenda Items. This is an opportunity for our council members. And I see a hand up already. Is that hand still up, Vice Mayor? Oh, it was me. I just wanted to thank the Chief because I feel like the Chief takes on the really hard items and the items where he's going to get a lot of pushback from the community. And I feel like sometimes he gives Captain Cregan some of the items where Captain Cregan is going to get a lot of praise. And Chief, I see you and I see the hard work that you're doing. And I feel like sometimes when Captain Cregan is in front of me, I'm like, thank you very much. Thank you for the hard work you do. But Chief, I do see you and I see the hard work that you're doing. And it's just when Captain is in front of me, I get really excited. And so he's really he's right there in front of me. So I acknowledge him because he's in front of me. But I do see the department and I see you and I see you as the head in the lead and I see what you're doing. So thank you for your hard work and dedication. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I mean, it definitely is a team effort. I mean, I rely heavily on my team and they do a great job. And it really is. I think we're all rolling in the same same direction. So but I appreciate that. Wonderful. So with that, we'll move on to Item 5.5. And it's an opportunity. We'll start with the councilmember Schwedhelm. Thank you, chair. Yeah, one thing I would like to have this committee have some discussions about measure O in the extension of it because I know another subcommittee, the long term financial planning audit. I think I got that in the right order. Subcommittee is looking at the financial impacts in what the city mayor may not do. But I think it'd be appropriate to hear the pros and cons about the operational impacts, you know, from both police, fire and violence prevention that if it does extend, if it doesn't extend, what are some of the consequences? The more community conversations we have on this topic, I think it'd be beneficial for all. Great, we will add that on. Vice Mayor, any thoughts on things that you would like to add to future agendas? Not this time. OK, one thing that's been on my mind as we roll out the CAHOOTS model is and it's probably a little too soon to throw this on the agenda, but I would like to put it on your radars is when we when we get our footing with it and we understand operationally how it works, looking to see what works and then see where we can expand our services in order to relieve our officers of having to deal with things like some more homeless complaints and other sort of quality of life things, non-dangerous situations that could be dealt with in similar manners to reduce call volumes and give officers a little bit more quality. I don't know, quality of life is what I want to say, but to address some of these complaints that we're getting in the community that are really drawing on your resources. So I'd like us to get our footing with CAHOOTS first and then see how we can expand without losing without having mission creep with being intentional about what we're doing. Seeing no other comments from the subcommittee, we will go to public comment. I'm not seeing any live comment. Do we have any pre-recorded voicemail comment? None. OK. We have none. All right. Well, let me go to my other screen here. And thanks for bearing with me today on that count, guys. With that, we adjourn our meeting. I want to once again thank everybody for your participation. This was a community effort and it's reflected in the product of this meeting today. Have a great day and I'll see you in two months.