 I'd like to ask the interpreter currently on the Spanish channel to commence translation of the meeting. For those just joining the meeting, live translation in Spanish is available and members of the public or staff wishing to listen in Spanish can join the Spanish channel by clicking on the interpretation icon in the 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. Mario, will you please restate this in Spanish? Good morning ...let's start this conversation. I'd also like to ask Cßenna to elaborate on talk about content, are there lots of content leatherabur fishing about content to explore how forever a lot of content is lost when I find hand written content, mood, culture, listening in Spanish and so on. Speaking of which I'd like to ask You, for those who wish to join the meeting, live translation in Spanish is available and members or staff who wish to listen in Spanish January 23rd Public Safety Subcommittee meeting. Rhonda, could you please take roll? Mayor Rogers. Present. Council Member Alvarez. Present. Chair Okrepke. Here. Let the record reflect all subcommittee members are present. Thank you very much. I don't believe we have any announcements and there's no minutes for approval. So we're gonna move on to public comment on non-agenda items. This is the public's opportunity to comment on anything within the purview of the Public Safety Subcommittee. That is not agendized for today. If you have anything you'd like to say, go ahead and move to one of the lecterns on either the east or west side and we will give you your opportunity to speak. Seeing nobody moving at all, we will move on. To new business, Chief Westrop. First response events, life support, partnership agreement. Take it away. Thanks, sir. Good morning Chair Okrepke and members of the subcommittee. Scott Westrop, Fire Chief of the City of Santa Rosa. With me today is Division Chief Jack Thomas who oversees all of our EMS divisions and programs. Before we get started, I really want to publicly thank Chief Thomas and his team which was EMS Captain Chris Matthews and City Attorney Jessica Mullins for all their work in putting this agreement together. There was countless hours that went into this. It's been going on for years and years and actually I'd like to thank retired Division Chief Steve Souter because he actually started the process before Jack took over this position about a little over a year ago. So thank you for all the work that went into this. We covered some of this in the January 9th City Council meeting but today we're kind of getting a little more finite into some of the details to present to the Public Safety Subcommittee on what we got out of the Frals Agreement with Sonoma County Fire District. So just some real quick high level review and background. Councils seeing this and the subcommittee seeing a lot of this information before but on June 6th of 2003, the DHS Director through DHS through the County of Sonoma put forward the Emergency Medical Services Exclusive Operating Area Agreement, RFP results and recommendation. And as we go through and I use the term EOA I'm referring to the Exclusive Operating Area 1 in Sonoma County which is largely Santa Rosa about 75% is Santa Rosa and includes owner parks of AstaPool and the unincorporated areas that surround us. The recommendations over the report that the Board of Supervisors authorize the DHS Director to execute a five year contract for emergency ground ambulance service to the Sonoma in the Sonoma County Exclusive Operating Area 1 to the Sonoma County Fire District with the option to extend another five years. The Board of Supervisors voted 50 in support of this recommendation. Some background, the Santa Rosa Fire Department has held a first response to advanced life support contract or what we'll refer to as FRAL's contract with the previous ground ambulance contractor since 2004. And we are an integral part of the robust EMS system in EOA 1 and as part of the new ground ambulance contract it was important enough that the County actually inserted the Santa Rosa FRAL's program would continue under the new contractor. So again, a lot of this we discussed at the January 9th meeting, but the FRAL's partnership between Sonoma County Fire District and Santa Rosa was negotiated in good faith between us with the city attorney's office in the district. The agreement actually took effect on January 16th which is tied to the start of the new ground ambulance contract. The expiration of the agreement aligned with the ground ambulance contract, the initial term ends on January 15th, 2029 with the ability to extend with a five year extension of the ground ambulance contract to 2034. And again, you've heard this in two study sessions and in the January 9th meeting, but our whole focus on this was these four points and I really think that we fortified this through this new agreement. Our focus was on service to the community, number one, first and foremost, with the ability to enhance our operations and improve our operational control to fortify open communications and data sharing and build a financially sustainable model and agreement. So two slides here on some of the key components of the partnership agreement and certainly Chief Thomas and I will be available for questions and Chief Thomas as really the author of this can answer any more granular details that you may need, but the service area definition was a big one for us. We have a clearly defined service area for the city's primary delivery of service, allowing city resources to be utilized and concentrated within the city limits. The response time framework, we were using our city response time set forth by council under the ground ambulance contract. There was some discussion about changing those, but we held strong that we wanted to use the council goals for our response times. In this agreement, there's reciprocal obligations for the city and the fire district. Obligations of both parties are more consistent and cooperative. Substantial change reopeners, we inserted the opportunity to reopen this agreement and have discussions as required based on substantial changes to the system, whether that's operationally, financially, whatever the case may be. And then with this really building the partnership of a joint development and supportive EMS enhancements gives us the opportunity to partner on system wide enhancements and provide increased service to the community. And then really with data sharing, we just codified data sharing between parties as both being public entities. That's pretty much cleared up as it is, but really we wanted to build this regardless of who the contractor was to make sure that we had access to data at all times. And really sort of the heart of the matter here and probably the most interesting to the subcommittee is, are these five or six components here? Number one is the compensation to the city of Santa Rosa. Our previous contract last year was about $605,000 for first response ALS service under our new contract. We'll receive $1.5 million per year for FRAWL service. This equates to complete cost recovery at the current time for our FRAWL service for EMS division in its entirety. There will be an annual adjustment based on the ground ambulance contract rate adjustment. So as the rates goes up, our rates will go up as well. With this, we also have our own medical director for the first time in the 20 years we've been providing advanced life support service. And really the benefit to that is we have a medical director who is now dedicated to Santa Rosa and Chief Thomas and Captain Matthews have done a great job of selecting a doctor who will be our medical director to provide oversight, training and consultation on a PSA or an agreement basis with the city. So it's the first time we've had that and really just dedicated to our personnel and us. Previously we've shared that. Concurrently we'll have our own CQI or Continuous Quality Improvement Program. This will be the first time where we're not partnering in this and we actually have our own CQI coordinator that will assist in employee development, quality assurance and all the things we need to make our system as strong as it can be. But again, it's not gonna be a shared resource. It'll be just dedicated to our employees. One of the components we're still working on it's in the agreement but we still have to develop it as a mutual aid agreement for surge ambulance protection. Essentially what this means is if the system for whatever reason due to a large scale incident or due to a massive emergency or just if the system gets busy, we as the city and the fire department wanna have the ability to surge into the system with our own ambulances. So it's something that we're working on. It'll be a side mutual aid agreement but there is a provision within this contract that allows us to build that and do that and we're gonna be working on that really hard here in the next couple of months. And lastly, one of the elements that we really wanted to look at was the ability to have long-term or planned revenue coming out of this in addition to the compensation for the ground ambulance car or for the Friars Agreement itself. And this will be through payment of a development of an EMS subscription fee or a first responder fee program. We've looked at this in the past and it could be lucrative and it could add additional revenue stream to pay for our EMS services. But we still have to do some research and do diligence on which one we're gonna go with, what the best benefit to the community is and to the city is. And then we'll be building that with Cinema County Fire District and we'll bring that back to council when it's finalized. So again, we're just trying to build a financially sustainable program. So as we expand and as we grow, we have the funds available to do that without coming back to the general fund or measure out. So with that, that's sort of the high level overview of the new Friars contract and we're here for any questions you may have. Thank you. Thank you very much, Chief. Are there any questions on the presentation from, all right? My only question before we go to public comment is within this contract, is there other staffing requirements? There are staffing requirements. There's a couple. Number one is we have to maintain 12 advanced life support units. So the current 12 units that we have on the street, the 10 engines and two trucks were contractually obligated to keep those in service and advanced life support qualified and capable. The other staffing piece is, and it's not required, but there is the compensation for the medical director for the CQI coordinator and for an additional emergency medical services company officer. So they're not required, but the funding's in there for those pieces. So really the only staffing requirement is that we keep our current system solid as it is. Okay. And I know as with any startup staffing can be a concern. Does Sonoma County Fire District have a minimum staff that they have that need to support us as a city and as the exclusive operating area? And is there any concern about them up staffing to get to those levels? So they certainly do have a minimum staffing, just like we all do in the public sector, is they have a minimum staffing pattern. We have their, not only their staffing model and their daily roster, but also their posting plan. So that's the one big benefit that we've seen already is the transparency. And so we're seeing on a daily basis what their staffing looks like. It's a concern, but they're contractually obligated to meet that staffing concern and make sure that we're covered and make sure that we have enough ambulances on the street to cover our community. One of the things that Chief Thomas is monitoring very closely is, the system's been in service for a week and there's gonna be speed bumps along the way and we're monitoring it very closely. Our crews are filling out what we call an unusual occurrence form and sending them to Chief Thomas. We're compiling that data. And so we'll go back and work with the district and with Coastal Valley's EMSA to make those modifications necessary to make sure that we're being covered by ambulances in the way that we expect. All right, thank you. Councilor Galvarez. Thank you, sir. Good morning. In regards to being as a startup, I understand the hiccups and the learning process. Absolutely. In the future, how will we actually measure if the service is actually being provided at a higher standard, other than people actually walking out of the hospital opposed to the side of that coin, right? That's a great question. So those metrics are gonna be measured in several different ways. First of all, we'll be using, through the ground ambulance contract, there's a program called First Watch. So that's access to everybody that's in the system to watch exactly what's going on in real time. So there's real-time data through a dashboard that we're able to monitor. The second piece is that Santa Rosa Fire Departments just switched to a new reporting system called Image Trend. And with that, we can build our own dashboards, both public-facing and internal-facing, to monitor what response times look like, all the time factors involved. And then with the medical director, CQI coordinator, and the new EMS captain, we'll be measuring patient outcomes as well. And so we'll tie all of that together to make sure that not only are we quantitatively meeting our response time standards, but qualitatively as well. So there's a lot of things involved in the, not only the ground contract, but in the frow's contract to make sure that we can measure those. And the nice thing is, is that we've really worked the last four or five years to have a seat at all the tables to make sure that our voice is heard as the biggest user of the system, to make sure that Santa Rosa's needs are being met while keeping in mind this is for EOA-1 and really for the whole county, but making sure that our needs are met and protecting our interests and protecting our community. All right, thank you very much. We're gonna move to public comment on this item. If anybody would like to make a comment on the ground ambulance service, please move to one of the lecterns. Seeing none, we'll come back to the committee for any final comments or questions. I just want to say that I'm very happy that we have a week under our belts that this has been a long time coming and to congratulate you guys again on a job well done. Yeah, and for me, this is, I know we've discussed this a little bit accountable for, but I wanted to provide an opportunity to get into the nitty gritty if necessary, because this is a large change for how we operate. And great job by everybody. Thank you so much, Jack, sorry, Chief Thomas. I know you have a small little countdown on your cell phone right now, but this is a great legacy to have. This is a huge lift and a great job by you and the rest of the department. And so thank you all so much for working on this. With that, we'll move on to the next item, which is a presentation on the gang crimes team by Chief Kreegan and Sergeant Mankey. Good morning, I'm John Kreegan, the Chief of Police here in San Rosa, and thanks so much for allowing us to present this important topic to the Public Safety Subcommittee. I'm joined today with Travis Mink, who's the Sergeant of our newly formed gang crimes team, and Travis will go a little bit into his story, but he spent seven years as a detective on our gang crimes team and was assigned to the FBI Safe Streets Task Force, and truly is the subject matter expert for our entire police department, and so I'm really proud to be able to have him leading this team, and so I'm gonna start off and talk a little bit about the outline of this team, and then Sergeant Mink is gonna discuss some of the gang crime that we have here in the community and how his team is gonna work with the violence prevention partnership and some of our other key partners. So I'll start off at the very beginning, and I myself served as a gang crime detective, and later as a Sergeant of the gang crimes team, and at one point from 2005 to 2019, we had seven gang detectives that were in the team with one Sergeant. In 2019, we saw that slowly start whittling down because we had some catastrophic staffing shortages at the Santa Rosa Police Department, and at the time Chief Ray Navarro made the really tough decision to temporarily suspend the gang team until we were able to regroup with some of our staffing needs. So in 2019, the gang crimes team was reassigned to patrol to be able to go to 911 calls and other issues Unfortunately, since 2019, we've seen a significant resurgence in some of the gang crime and the gang activity throughout the city of Santa Rosa and we'll go into some of those details in just a little bit. Another thing that's really important to understand is we also saw a significant breakdown in the bridge between resources in our community and the reality is the Santa Rosa police officers are the first in the city of Santa Rosa that are contacting people who are involved in gang activity, who have been victim of gang crimes, who are involved in gang activity, and they're an important link to be able to provide resources to the families, to the youth who are involved in some of these gang activities and be able to use some of the existing resources that we have with the Santa Rosa Finance Commission partnership and many of our other nonprofit resources, some resources that are available through our district attorney's office. So one thing that was really important to me as chief and I became chief just about a year and a half ago and one of my priorities from day one from a firm understanding of some of the gang issues that we have in the city was to be able to bring back our gang crimes team but to make some adjustments and be able to hear some of the concerns from our community and how we can be able to build back this team that meets the needs of our community today. Some of the groups that I met with was our chief's community advisory team and these are 21 members that are cross section of our entire community. They were handpicked by our city manager, Mark Hisha Smith, going through the applications and we really tried to pick a diverse group of individuals who can give me like solid feedback about what's the community saying on these issues and they had a lot of questions about the gang crimes team and we worked through some of those concerns and they really helped build some of the main structure of this team about hearing their feedback. The other thing is going to the mayor's town hall meetings and we had a really robust conversation at our Roseland thing and also a council member Eddie Alvarez was helped participate with that as well and we had a lot of community feedback on that. We also presented it to the Public Safety and Prevention Tax Oversight Committee and that's when we asked to be able to use the at the time measure of funds to be able to fund the sergeant in that position because that position had been eliminated in 2019. We've also had a lot of other discussion and we did that with the Binance Pension Partnership with their strategic planning sessions that we met with Daniel Gardunio from there. We had a lot of feedback from our community so those are some of the key teams and meetings that we had but also just for myself, a lot of community meetings of going the Rotary Clubs and other things like that and presenting about some of the future problems here in the city of Santa Rosa and how we're going to address them. Though one thing that I really want to lay out for right now, we're not going to go to seven detectives. We're going to go to the four detectives with it. That meets my staffing capacity that I have right now. So we're going to have four dedicated detectives and one sergeant and we'll talk a little bit about as important to understand there's some confusion about this team about being uniformed out in the street and making kind of indiscriminate stops and we'll talk about that. These are plain clothes detectives that are responding to acts of violence in our city. So we've had just last week and Sergeant Meek can talk about it, a large gang stabbing out at Bellevue Ranch Park where we had seven juveniles were involved in a pretty violent assault with a man who was stabbed 10 to 12 times for doing nothing but wearing a red hat when he drove through Bellevue Ranch Park. And this is where having this dedicated team of detectives who can respond reactively to that but use their training and experience to be able to make pretty swift arrests in those cases. But there's four key priorities and this is something that's new from our original gang crimes team and this came from feedback from our community about really setting out what are the priorities and I want to be as transparent as possible with our community on that. So the first one is prevention and we're going to be out playing a key part and be able to prevent our youth from ever joining gangs and some of that is going to be being the bridge to resources that I'll use that phrase a lot about connecting to the incredible violence prevention partnerships team that we have. But again, of the firm understanding that it's our officers who are out there in the street. So it's our officers who are making the first contacts with the youth here in our community, especially when they're exhibiting some of this gang activity and getting involved in gang fights and gang salts. So our hope is to be able to have conversations with these youth, work with their parents, be able to work with our youth and our local schools to be able to have real conversations with them about never getting involved in the gang, in the first place in preventing that activity. The other one that I think is so important is the intervention. And this is where we're helping young people leave the gang lifestyle behind. And I still have conversations with gang members for years later after me working in the gang crimes team. And this is you can build relationships with the youth and even with the adults that are involved in gang crimes and help be able to give them that path out of the gang lifestyle, how they can get their tattoos removed and be able to introduce them to many of the resources that we have here in Sonoma County. Another really important one is the education. And this is so important about not only for our city leaders but our school leaders, our teachers, parents, community groups, working with youth and even our own police officers here at the Santa Rosa Police Department about educating them on gang trends and gang signs. And so we have that awareness. And when moms and dads are able to see some of these things and they can start some of that early intervention of helping some of the youth. And I can't tell you how many times when I was on the gang crimes team that we would be serving a cert torn at someone's house and mom and dad were just flabbergasted about that. And when we're showing them the gang clothing and the gang Facebook and all the other things, their minds were just blown by this and they had no idea. And so it's really important for me to be able to provide that education and be able to use that to help the parent. And it's really gonna be a team effort to help in some of these youths be able to leave this gang lifestyle behind. And the last one that's equally important is the enforcement, that we are gonna have to have that thing. We've made it very clear as chief that we're not gonna arrest our way out of the gang problem, that that can't be the only solution that we have here. But the reality of it is, it is a piece of the problem that we're gonna have to be able to solve. And it's part of the equation that we're gonna have to be able to use. So this team will be working out just like the case last week with the stabbing. They're gonna be working with that enforcement. They're gonna work to quickly solve some of these violent gang crimes. And what I feel is what's gonna happen now is we're gonna be able to address some of these problems instead of having repeat victims where we have the same person who's involved in five, six shootings within several weeks, that this dedicated team is gonna be able to move in, put some of those resources and take some of the violent offenders and have some consequences for their behavior. And then hopefully be able to lead them getting out of that gang lifestyle so they can come out a reformed youth or a reformed adult. The, like I spoke about, I hear the term I bristle a little bit when I hear this about gang task force. So it's not a gang task force. And a lot of that comes from misunderstanding about a previous team that was through the County of Sonoma. The Santa Rosa Police Department didn't participate in the magnet team, which is the multi-agency gang enforcement team that we didn't participate that. So there's a lot of confusion sometimes. And that team was uniform, street level of going out and making a lot of stops throughout the city and throughout the county. And that team had a lot of extremely powerful uses, but that's not what this team is. These teams are the plain clothes detectives that are working and be able to have the expertise to be able to respond and work on those four priorities. I was able to talk about, and we're not a task force. It's this four Santa Rosa police officers with no other agencies involved with our team. The, like I talked about, our way to detect us. And I think what's really important, and when you hear from the Sergeant Mink, is about having the dedicated supervisor. And that supervisor is monitoring their investigations, is monitoring their actions, is monitoring their context with the community to make sure it meets not only my expectations, but the expectations of our city manager, our city leaders, and very importantly, our community. And that's gonna be one thing that I wanna be able to talk about, that I wanna continue to hear. How was our game crimes team doing? Are there adjustments that we need to be able to do? And I wanna make sure, and I have full confidence in Sergeant Mink and our four detectives that we have assigned to our team. The funding, that's a question that's come up before about, hey, was this additional funding? So I wanna make really clear for that. The only additional funding we had was just for the Sergeant position, which had been eliminated from our budget. And we're using the public safety and prevention tax formerly called Measure O and Measure H. That is the only, the additional four detectives were from my already assigned positions that I had for full-time positions at the police department. And I was able to do it just because we've made significant progress in our hiring and recruitment over the last two years. So no additional funds we're doing outside of just the public safety and prevention tax. Another one that's come up a lot is addressing some of the implicit bias and concerns about cow gang. So for those who are familiar, cow gang was a system where you could enter and say, hey, this person had some contacts, gang related, there were 10 different criteria, talking about wearing gang clothing, gang, all these other criteria. But there's a lot of concerns on that. So the Santa Rosa Police Department for years has not participated in cow gang. So I want people to understand that, that we're not putting people into the cow gang system. That's not a concern that's gonna come up with this. And we've really done a lot of training with our team about recognizing some of the signs of gang activity and also understanding some of the times, the mistakes that have been made in the past by agencies across California. We really work to be able to understand that. We've also dedicated that every Santa Rosa police officer is going through significant implicit bias training, procedural justice training. And we're really focused on building what we call relational police department or relational policing, which is getting out in our community. And this isn't always like this us versus them, but yet like we're building connections in our neighborhood. And we're building whether it be where other gang activity may be, that we're going out that relational policing at the end of the day, constitutional policing, that we're meeting like the guidelines that are set both by the state and by our federal government to make sure that we're treating each person with respect, with dignity and within the kind finds of the law. And that's again, where I really wanna be able to focus this team is gonna be working on the root causes of the violence. And we understand just arresting kids that are involved in low level gang crime is not gonna be the necessary solution. We're gonna work with our partners. We're gonna work with this team and really be able to be the bridge to resources. Another thing that we didn't have when we had our original gang crimes team that we have now is our new restorative justice program. So we launched that in 2023. I'm really proud about this program. We have a dedicated MOU with a company called dot rg for restorative justice. And we're able to do that for low level nonviolent offenses. So obviously if you're doing a stabbing and a shooting, you don't meet the criteria for the restorative justice program, but things like stealing the shoes from Santa Rosa Plaza, getting a maybe low level disturbances at the transit mall, things like that. That could be something that we could use this new program. And you go through a 10 week program where you're going and meeting with the dot rg staff. You're doing things like meeting with the victim, you're understanding the consequences of your behavior. And it's hoping them, especially our young youth, to be able to have a better mindset about what their actions are doing on the streets of Santa Rosa and some of the consequences for that. If they successfully complete the 10 week program, they have no criminal charges and they're completely diverted from ever going to the criminal justice system and we don't even send a report. So there's not even a record of that that goes to the criminal justice system. So we're really excited about that and anxious to see how we can use our game crimes team to refer some of those. Also working with juvenile probation and they have a host of different programs like it's the reach program and other things that are working with youth that have been introduced to the criminal justice system, but our team is gonna work within to better provide some of the resources and really help with that intervention part. We're also talking and Danielle's here today and she's such a close partner with our team. And so we'll have Sergeant Meek and some of our staff members are gonna be working really closely of going to the monthly operational team meetings. And also we're gonna have teams of Lieutenant Philp and Captain Marensa attending the policy team meetings. I myself attend the policy team meetings whenever I can as well. So we'll really be working toward bringing some of those resources connecting there and really being with, and we've seen the violence prevention partnership take big strides forward of having more of a presence on our streets of Santa Rosa and we're gonna continue to work with them really closely. We also work with our district attorney victim advocates and these are people who have been now victims of gang crimes and we can help them with some of the resources they need sometimes financial resources and other things so they're able to attend court and get back on their feet. Now I'm gonna turn it over to Sergeant Meek and he's gonna highlight a little bit of like some of the crime that we're seeing here in the city is Santa Rosa and one of the things that he's really gonna talk about is we've lost a lot of our tracking mechanisms for gang crimes when we lost the gang crimes team. So that's gonna be another thing that I can come more and provide more accurate information to our community, to our city leaders, but he'll be able to go through some of the gang crime we were able to track this last year. Thank you guys. I'll try to be brief. Thank you. I'll try to be brief so I can give you guys as much time to ask questions of me. I wanna make sure you guys get the information that you guys need and as I kind of navigate this new process I'll get a better understanding of the information that you're looking for. So please ask questions. What we're seeing so far. So as a chief alluded to, we've lost a lot of our tracking mechanisms and our ability to evaluate what a lot of these crimes, whether they're gang motivated, there's a gang nexus and those sorts of things. So we do have an understanding that about half of our homicides that have occurred have a gang nexus. That does not necessarily mean that they have a gang enhancement, but there is maybe a gang motivation for the crime. There are individuals who have prior histories of being involved in gangs that are involved in these incidents. The really concerning thing we've seen is that over the last year we've had a dramatic increase in juveniles being obsession of loaded firearms. So we had five in 2022 that jumped up to 21 in 2023. Over a recent case we actually, this last week arrested a juvenile who was manufacturing firearms. He had a 3D printer and was actually bringing manufactured firearms and high capacity magazines to school in his backpack. So this is something we're very concerned about. We're aware of and as we navigate the next few months, next few years with the gang crime team, it would be a focus. We did have two juveniles that were shot and killed this past summer. We are seeing an increase that as I alluded to earlier, an increased rate of firearms in the hands of young people that will obviously translate to increased violence. We have had shootings that had not resulted in deaths as well. So school safety, obviously what we're seeing is that a lot of this gang involvement where the violence manifests itself is at school. So when you begin to see identifiers that you have a gang problem in a community, where those problems will arise is when you have these juveniles interacting and that is usually at schools. So going back, we have the homicide at Montgomery High School. We have a stabbing at Santa Rosa High School. We have transit mall, where recently a juvenile, I believe 15 years old who was confronting perceived rivals in the transit mall. He was then apprehended with a loaded firearm by an officer working mall security on overtime. So you can see that even though incidents are happening at schools, a lot of times the disagreements at school or the conflict at school will manifest itself in other areas of the community. Shooting on Dutton Meadow, a young man was shot about a year ago. We've seen recently where we had a stabbing after school ended at the park just north of L.C. Allen High School. Those students then fled from that scene through L.C. Allen to get into cars that were parked in the parking lot, L.C. Allen students. So we see a lot of these gang things, all their gang motivations that are occurring and bringing violence to the campuses throughout Santa Rosa. And one of the directions obviously is that if we can prevent crime and prevent gang violence, that is the ultimate goal. And the questions are, how do we do that? A lot of times it involves identifying and getting involved with these kids young when they're at risk. And that unfortunately is gonna be anywhere from 12, 13, 14 years old. A lot of times when they get upwards to 18 in the early 20s and we see them, they've already been ingrained in gang culture, they're already out committing felonies, they're out committing more serious crimes. So with this gang team, hopefully, when we have a dedicated group of detectives working gang involvement, gang crimes, 40 hours a week, we will be able to identify and help these younger people get services sooner. Instead of once they get to the police level, they get to where they are breaking the law, a lot of times they're already ingrained in that culture. And that's our high level overview of the gang crimes team. And I just wanna acknowledge, I've heard concerns from our community about bringing back this gang crimes team and I just really wanna talk to our community right now. Like I've heard some of the concerns and I wanna promise you that I'm listening to those, really incorporating that as we build back this team. But at the end of the day, we have a significant gang problem here in the city of Santa Rosa and throughout Sonoma County. And it's important that we have those trained resources to be able to provide that. But I'm gonna continue to closely monitor our team, be able to hear the feedback from our community. I really just wanna pledge, like let me know directly about concerns that come up and I'll be able to hear that and we can make adjustments as we go. But I have a lot of faith in the detectives and the sergeants that we've selected for the team. We went through a careful selection process to select the right people that really have the right temperament to be able to do this, that have that focus on the prevention and intervention and be able to bring some of the resources to those in our community. So I really feel that we have the right team but I wanna also say, continue to hear that feedback and very happy to make adjustments if necessary. So I'll turn it over if there's any questions. Thank you very much Chief and Sergeant. Any questions from the committee? Go ahead. Thank you, sir. Good morning to you both. And I will definitely be redundant in my questioning just to make sure that we are addressing a lot of the concerns of the community. And my first question is, how many police officers or patrol officers will be assigned to the gang crime team? So it'll be the four dedicated detectives and then the one sergeant of Travis Mink that will be the sergeant. So that'll be the total that we have and that's a reduction from our seven that we had back in the early 2000s and into the 2010. And I did not hear patrol officers in your statement, right? No, so they're not gonna be uniform. They're not gonna be, these are gonna be plain clothes detectives that are responding out to these incidents. And there will be times that they'll do proactive enforcement throughout the community and they'll be serving search warrants and doing other enforcement options. Very well. Now in regards to generational gang life where we pick up the culture, so to speak. What are we doing or how is our team working with our partners to break that lifestyle, to break that chain? And I think it all at Travis Mink dive in too but I think that's really that connection with the violence prevention partnership. And we have people with lived experience working on the violence prevention partnership that we've been able to work over the years and they have that expertise. And that's something that we're working with them to be able to make those connections and be able to help the youth that maybe grow up in generational gang households and to be able to show them a lifestyle outside of gangs and be able to do that. So I'm in constant contact with Daniel Gardunio and her team and Rogelio and the rest of the team to be able to use them and kind of leverage their expertise with our team. And Sergeant Mink is gonna be the same of really communicating with them on a daily level and be able to talk into and that we work together as one Santa Rosa strong team. And I don't know if you wanna add anything to that Sergeant. So one thing we gotta make very clear is that it is not a crime to be a gang member. Okay, so we're not gonna go out and arrest people who we believe are being involved in gangs. One of the things that is important to understand is that there has to be an accompanying felony or public offense. So if you do the crime and you are a gang participant, then you could be subject to an enhanced penalty. But we do not identify gang members. The law articulates that we need to identify them as a gang participant. And that is a substantial amount of work. So it would completely exhaust patrol in this capacity, these gang enhancements for designating someone as a gang participant is done extremely discernibly. So back prior, we've lost this over the past four years since the gang team has been gone. But we were only identifying gang participants in about eight to 10% of the time from roughly 2010 to I would say 2017 give or take. When I was testifying as an expert in these types of cases, it was only in generally more serious felonies, your assaults with deadly weapons, robberies, home invasion robberies, murder investigations, attempted murder investigations. These were where the gang enhancements and identifying gang participants was truly used. The overwhelming majority of our work does not qualify for a gang enhancement or enhanced penalty. So again, we don't identify gang members. We identify gang participants per the law, 18622 with a penal code. So it's not something we throw on willy-nilly. We don't slap a gang enhancement on a young kid at his first fight. These are generally people that are well entrenched in gang violence. If there is a young man who is arrested for say, challenging to fight somebody at school that is motivated by a gang, it would go through our juvenile justice process. There's restorative justice and these other mechanisms, hopefully that can intervene and working with our violence prevention partnership that can kind of mitigate that. And that would be the plan going forward is to try and intervene, get these kids out of the lifestyle and get them resources before they get to those higher level felonies. And that's a very important statement that you just made. I know that most would feel that we should identify all gang members. We should go after all gang members. But being a person of color, the way that we perceive it is our skin becomes a sin. And I don't see that your strategy is going in that direction or at least has been a change in this strategy. And I do appreciate that statement very much so. I just kind of piggyback on your point, that has truly never been the aim of the Santa Rosa Police Department is that, again, it is not a crime to be a gang member. If you are out of the lifestyle now, I've seen dozens of people move on after momentary juvenile indiscretions, if you will, and they lead or highly productive members of society. We have used individuals with previous gang members who have become members and close supporters of our violence prevention partnership. So redemption is completely possible. In those cases, you can go on and do many more things through this kind of program that we've set up. And although a bit jokingly, I'll say that as youth, we see a lot of people go through the gang life and they have their first child and they grow up. And the ones that are left behind are known as tweakers and burnouts, and it goes way beyond gang life or anything else, it's just pretty much sustaining and trying to fill a void that the skills set that they do not pick up in youth. And sadly, it's something that happens in our society, but I'm glad we're doing something to address that shortfall. In regards to a registry, I imagine part of the strategy is to build a list of those participants, not members, participants that are participating in doing well for their gang's crimes. Who are we gonna be sharing that list with if there is one? So I think I can speak to this as well. So there is no list per se. One of the things, if there is an investigation where we have a group, a criminal organization, if you will, of a gang in the community as defined through the penal code, which means that they are committing a pattern of criminal offenses, and that's consistent, and they are doing it in association with for the benefit of or at the direction of a criminal street gang, then we would identify those perpetrators of said crime or incident or people that are involved in criminal activity. So now there's no list that's built, it would be pursuant to an ongoing investigation or if there was an ability to provide an investigative direction. So to kind of answer your point, I don't communicate with individuals for like a background check or for a job interview. I'm not fielding calls from the community for somebody who's trying to get a job at a bank. I don't deter people from employment or anything like that. This information would be held at the police department, pursuant to an ongoing investigation or through some sort of intelligence mechanism through a network of potentially confidential informants that where we are receiving better direction from the community on where crime may occur. So it could be something as simple as a data analysis or if individuals are coming out of prison or coming out of federal custody, coming back into the area, we may better serve the community if we know where these high-risk individuals are at. So if we go into an incident and we identify a license plate and a license plate is relative to a gang participant, it is helpful to know who his associates are because they would likely be perpetrators of the crime, just logically, right? So there's no list per se. There's nothing that we establish or maintain. The Cal Gang database, for example, was essentially built in its infancy as a way to monitor individuals involved in gang crime because we know that these gangs can be nomadic. They move from area to area. We had individual equipping members who were coming from Virginia here to commit home-invasion robberies and then flee out of state because it would thwart law enforcement's locating them, right? So they would come out here, they did a homicide in the county area. They were doing marijuana rips throughout the Santa Rosa area. The Cal Gang database was basically built to track that so that I could log in, password protected, maybe put in a name or something like that into the database. It would direct me to law enforcement contacts. I would then seek out those investigators at that resident agency and get more information about that individual. So it did not retain information per se. It also had a purge date that would three to five years with no entries. That entry would be purged. So those lists have now gone away for various reasons, as we know, but we do not use those lists that kind of a long-winded answer to your question is we don't have a list that is not relative to an ongoing criminal investigation or have some sort of intelligence relevance. I appreciate the elaboration. That is the major concern of the community of being misidentified as a gang member when in reality it's by association. You went to the school or whatever might have been. And Gintzoo, just to kind of summarize is that we would not be using that information unless there is some sort of felony that's been committed to show that that person is a gang participant relative to the offense that they committed. And the key word is participant. I believe that's what I'm hearing. Correct, yeah, we did not identify gang members. A gang member is a social term. The law articulates clearly through the penal code that it's a gang participant. Let me see here. You spoke a little bit, chief, you spoke a little bit about the strategies being used for identifying whether it's school, education, enforcement. And I'm wondering if you could detail some of the strategies in regards to, for the parents. You're spot on when you said that you walk into a home and the parents had no idea what their child was up to. And I'm wondering if there's specific programs. And for Daniel as well, the question for you as well is that if there's specific programs or strategies that you would like to share, that would be used to really educate parents? Yeah, I think that's a key thing. And some of us is gonna be community meetings that we're doing. And actually Danielle can come down and talk. She has one coming up just the next Wednesday, I believe it is, like that, about being able to parent education to be able to talk about our community about, first, what is some of the signs of active gang participant? And secondly, what are some of the available resources that are out there? We're also, I've been having some talks with our district attorney, Carla Rodriguez, about a program that we did years ago about talking about firearm violence in a school where we partner with a district attorney and they talk about the criminal consequences. And we talk about some of the real world consequences of it and getting back in our schools and doing that. We also participated, both Sergeant Mink and I, both participated in the GREAT program, which is gang resistance education and training where we went to fifth grade classes for over seven weeks and talked to them just about how to avoid peer pressure, trusted resources. So we're gonna be looking at a lot of these different programs and working really closely with Danielle and her expertise, but I'll let her talk about the upcoming meeting that she's been planning that's gonna, I think an important one. And Sergeant Mink and I are both gonna be there at that meeting to help participate. Thank you. Hello, good morning. So next Wednesday, 6.30 p.m. at Santa Rosa High School, we will be hosting a community-wide educational event mainly targeted for parents on signs to look for, if you're a child, might be interested in gang or showing signs that they might be involved in gang activity. So my staff will be providing an overview of what to look for, why kids join gangs, what is the motivation behind that, and how we can interrupt in that. In addition, we'll have community partners from Probation and Verity on hand to talk about parent rights and responsibilities, available community resources, and from Verity specifically, we have someone who will be able to talk about female gang participation. We've seen an incredible rise in the number of females being referred directly to us for services, some as young as 12 and 13 years old, and really talking about what it's like for a female to participate in a gang, and some of the issues that come along that are unique to female gang participation, including trafficking issues that we are also seeing tied with that right now. They will be on hand to answer questions, and then we'll have about two dozen community partners providing resources for a tabling opportunity after the presentation is over. And hello to you too, good morning. In regards to the event happening next Wednesday at Center of the High School, what time is that event now? It's at 6.30. I'll also add that we're in talks with the Roseland School District to host a similar event in the Roseland School District for parents there. And I'll also add that through our wrap around program and wrap around coordinator, Rohelio talks to parents on a daily basis, and so he's doing a lot of that education one-on-one with parents, talking to them about the science because as Chief mentioned, a lot of times parents are completely blindsided and had no idea that kid was involved in this type of activity. So working with them to get them connected to services so that they can better support their child at home as well. Now, in regards to the feature of not only this program for violence prevention, do you see any shortfalls in your program? Well, where are we as counsel filling you? What can we do better to assist you? So I will be here next Tuesday to talk about that with full counsel. Perfect. So thank you for the question, Councilman Alvarez and through the chair, I would say it's staffing. So we have a minimal amount of staffing trying to work with our partnering agencies for 42 square miles of crime. And that is a lot. We are spending a lot of time, as you know, in our school systems, but we only have so much capacity. And we have an obligation to protect everyone here in the city. So I think we do at some point have to talk about what the staffing model looks like for violence prevention. And I appreciate your focus on really the shortfalls and being proactive in that sense. I know it was one of the issues that we have with our centers of police department. And I'm happy to hear when you say that the staffing and we're being, we have the officers that you need. So hopefully we can do that for violence prevention as well moving forward. My last question, actually, I believe my last question is metrics, you know, how can you possibly gauge if you're doing good, bad, other than not seeing any gangs or gang violence in the city of Santa Rosa, right? But you know, with COVID and what we did with the social issues that rose from the pandemic, how are you able to gauge how we're doing in the gang department? And that's an important part for me to be able to talk to our city manager, be able to provide her and our other city leaders about, okay, we made a significant investment and like, are we getting the return on that investment? So I think one of the simpler ways is we're gonna start tracking some of the gang related crime in our city and look at next year, I hope to see a reduction in our homicides. And this year we did see a 17% reduction in our homicides this year, but we need to do better than that. What I was really concerned with 50% of those homicides though had a gang connection. So I'm hoping that we'll see that. We had 361 shootings reported in the city of Santa Rosa in 2023. That was a 14% reduction from 2022, but we need to do better than that. So I'm hoping that we're seeing some of these shootings, the gang violence go down. But on the other side, what I'm really hoping that we see is working with Danielle and her team is that we're seeing an increase in the referrals to the violence pension partnership. We're seeing an increase of people engaging in some of these services and leaving that gangstye life's all beside. And I'm hoping that we're seeing more robust community participation in this where we're having some of these meetings and we have people coming from all over our community who wanna be a part of the solution about how do we start providing some of these resources. We're seeing a lot of opportunities at our schools and then we've had a lot of conversations with our school leaders and they're very engaged with working with us about how we can provide some of the resources from the violence pension partnership and the police department to address some of our youth violence and some of the gang activity. So I'm hoping that we see that that we see for schools in Santa Rosa for this next year. And I think with this combined city-wide effort that we're gonna be able to see that. And I'm hoping that a year from now we can come back and be able to report that we've seen a reduction in the gang violence, the gang activity and a substantial increase in those for getting some of those services across our city. It really sounds, and correct me if I'm wrong, it sounds the level of participation that we see and on the other side taking the amount of shootings or deaths and seeing what percentage of those were gang affiliated and as basic metrics or ways to gauge how we're going. Yeah, and I think another thing that's really important to understand is being able to bring justice to victims of violent crimes. And so an exciting one we put out just a press release about last week, we had a very tragic incident in 2022 where a young 19-year-old male was on the Comstock Elementary, our middle school campus after hours on the weekend was just standing there, was assaulted and robbed by two young individuals. He was doing nothing wrong, this young man had no gang activity whatsoever, but yet was shot and executed right there at the Comstock Middle School. And that I had multiple conversations with the family on that one who really wanted to have justice for a Connor, Bunak was his name and our detectives worked tirelessly over this last year and a half working with DNA evidence and a host of other things to finally identify the young men who were gang participants here in the city of Santa Rosa, but those cases aren't gonna get solved without having dedicated detective with the expertise. And what a cool moment that was for our team to be able to call the family and saying, hey, after almost a year and a half, we have closure for you and it's still a gaping hole for them with the loss of their son, but it's bringing them some justice for that. And I think that's really important for me to be able to have that obligation to be able to be able to solve some of these violent crimes and bring justice and peace to some of the victims of violent crimes here in the city of Santa Rosa. Absolutely, and your efforts are definitely appreciated. That's all the questions that happened. Thank you, thank you, all three of you, as well as our entire police department and our violence prevention and our staff and city manager who are working to really address the issues that play our community. Thank you. Thank you, sir. And just real quick to repeat, next week we will have, at the city council meeting, there will be a study session on the implementation of the violence prevention partnership strategic plan where we can dovetail off of this conversation. I just want to make sure the public is aware of that, that that is very nearly adjacent if not directly connected to this conversation as well. Mayor Rogers. Thank you, chair. So I just had a couple of questions. Excuse me. They're kind of related. The first would be what resources are available to support individuals trying to get out of the gang lifestyle. I know, I don't know very much about it, but myself and chief sat down with the individual that explained to us that he wanted to get out for his family, but that there was a lot of physical violence and other repercussions for that decision. So when we're asking someone or giving them friendly advice, I don't know what you want to call it, that there is a better lifestyle. How do we support them in doing that? That's something we're currently building in-house. We used to have a local provider, California Youth Outreach, that provided that service doing intensive case management with those individuals. And so we are working on building out that particular team. I have two staff members right now. Part of our wraparound coordinators time is spent doing that. And then we have a new member coming on board starting next week that will take in referrals from our partners like the police department and other agencies to work directly with those individuals to start helping them build that safety plan and that plan to exit that lifestyle. We also have a variety of community partners that we can refer them for individual type services, such as mental health counseling and other support. And we have our partners inside juvenile hall through the Boys and Girls Clubs Reach Program, providing mentoring and case management services for those who are incarcerated and re-entering back into the community. Danielle, Chief, can I have one of you talk about the importance of crafting a safety plan for these individuals who are actually trying to get out of the lifestyle? Absolutely. So the importance of that is really find out what's going on with that particular individual. So there's intake, right? What their goals are, what their challenges are that they are facing and kind of what's the priority of services that are needed at that particular time. So it's building out that plan with a dedicated intervention specialist that will then serve as their case manager for however long that they need. Usually it's about a year to a year and a half. And then also through that safety plan, identifying those resources that are needed that we can then refer out to. And then having those regular check-ins to make sure that that individual is meeting their goals and that if anything comes up that they need to address, they're able to do that as well. And I think an important part of that, and as you mentioned that we have young gang members who are trying to leave this lifestyle, but then you see violence in Santa Rosa when you're leaving a gang lifestyle and considered no good and going through these things. So we're really working with Danielle and her team, but also with our district attorney's office. And sometimes it's when you're seeing someone who's willing to actually testify in one of these gang related violent crimes and they're seeing retribution and assaults or we're working with our district attorney's office with our gang team and this is gonna be a new resource to be able to provide them some of the resources and the protection they need. And sometimes it's even relocating out of the area and using some county resources that we have to be able to do that and make sure that they feel if they're willing to have the courage to stand up and testifying one of these cases and assist us with a violent crime with is that they get the resources and the assistance whether it be relocation, some financial resources, also refunding it for people who lost jobs and things like that out of being the victim of the violent crime. So those are resources that now this gang crime team is gonna help connect between the district attorney's office between the violence prevention partnership. And just to add one quick thing to that too is that with a dedicated group of detectives now who are on call 24 seven is that there is an avenue for them to get a hold of somebody to contact one of these detectives. These detectives each manage their caseloads. They talk to the victims. They talk to the victim's family and they can be that lifeline if for say that, hey, I don't necessarily feel comfortable talking to a uniform police officer but I'm okay talking to that, get that detective. So they can meet in UC, they can meet in kind of in discreet locations. They can meet at, you know, less risky positions. They can contact them 24 seven if something does happen. And so there is an avenue now a conduit if you will that will enable that interaction enabled them to get to Danielle and to get to the resources that they need. Integrated in with that too is support for the parents and a plan for the parents as well so that they're getting the help that they need then to support their young person at home. However, we are also working with individuals all the way up to age 24, 25 and even beyond that we've had a couple of folks over the last few weeks since the press release went out about this new team reaching out to us directly saying, hey, I'm a former gang member and I really wanna help. So, you know, I've been through this, I have this experience, I'm happy to share my story. So we're in talks with those individuals to come up with a volunteer plan to kind of incorporate their experience into this as well. Wow. So one, I would like to, I can speak for myself, I would like to be invited to the meetings that the one you're gonna have at Santa Rosa High School and then also as they come up for like Roseland and stuff I think is really important that they know that all leadership is behind them in doing this. I apologize, you guys. And then Chief, you mentioned an increase, wanting an increase in referrals for VPP, right? Because that's a proactive approach. Do we have the staffing to accommodate that or do we have the resources to accommodate that? So here we're building it and I hear C.M. saying, you know, we need staffing. And I know it's a hard question, right? But like how are we gonna accommodate this because we see the rise. So we know that there are people out there and we wanna capture them, we wanna help them. How are we gonna accommodate this? Yeah, and from the police department, we have the staffing to do the referrals but to your point is, do we have the base? And I think that's something the city manager is really working with Danielle and her team to look like, what does the future look like, one incredible thing about the Violence Prevention Partnership is the network that it forms of literally dozens of local nonprofits and community-based organizations that are helping to provide these resources. What we saw is when we lost the gang crime team, we saw a big decrease in the amount of referrals from the Santa Rosa Police Department. So what I wanna see now is this team doing more education with all eight of our patrol teams, giving them more of understanding the Violence Prevention Partnership. And we've hired a lot of people, we're really proud about that, of 50 new officers in the last two and a half years but that's 50 new officers that don't have as much of the relationship with the Violence Prevention Partnership and haven't been introduced. So we're gonna work toward this team and we're gonna work with Danielle and her team about even coming in and doing briefing trainings for officers, making sure they know how to do these referrals and being that bridge the resources, as I was saying about it and I think that we're gonna see it significant and then we'll work with Danielle and her team to make sure that she has the resources to be able to accommodate those referrals. Thank you. Danielle, I just wanna tell you that your team is awesome. I already have an invite for Santa Rosa High School so they are definitely listening and following up. Another question I had was being a gang member is not a crime but one of the things in Council Member Alvarez touched on this, you will not be stopping our youth or people that you perceive to be gang members just for the sake of stopping and harassing them. If they have not participated and I just wanna make it really clear because I've heard it a lot of times just for the sake of stopping them only if they have participated in a crime, correct? Correct, yeah, most of our investigations and I say this kind of understanding the gravity of it but most of our investigations will begin in an emergency room. So the incident has taken place, the detectives have now been called out and we're doing a lot of follow up. So our proactive cases are not our priority. Now if we are working a proactive case in the capacity of a search warrant or through a confidential informant type or through kind of a directed enforcement at a criminal organization that would be from a special services division not from the patrol division. So we did not have like an on view traffic infraction which then leads to a traffic stop which then leads to a subsequent investigation for a search of the vehicle or for some sort of contraband contained there within. So that is not the role of the detective. They will be on an on-call basis. So when your home invasion, your stabbing, your attempted murder comes out. In the past month, we have investigated cases. There was a fight at Slater Middle School where a student was attacked in a classroom. He then pulled a 10 inch butcher knife out. The gang crimes team responded to that follow up investigation. Downtown got blasted with a couple thousand dollars worth of graffiti vandalism. Responded out, checked surveillance to arrest of Serenio gang participants. We had a seven defendant stabbing attempted murder that occurred at a park, Bellevue Ranch Park last week. Detective spawned it out, investigated that. The graffiti investigation with the resources we threw out initially took two days, made arrests. The attempted murder now took five days to a seven defendant arrest process. So you're getting an increased rate of solving the crime of apprehension and these aren't kind of lingering in a caseload any longer. They're getting immediate review. I wanted to ask also, not registry, not list, but because you're able to be out there and we have dedicated detectives in yourself, we're able to build relationships with people and know them. So really as far as locally, we won't need a list or a registry. Is that correct? I mean, I know we don't have a list or a registry. It came up when council member Alvarez was asking his questioning, but I was thinking about that. And I was just thinking if you're able to be in the community and get to know people that you don't really need a list or a registry or anything else of that kind, because you're building relationships with people, you're getting to know them like chief said, you're treating them with dignity and respect and you're available. So that would essentially take place of an informal or formal registry? Well, just to be clarified too is that if a subject is convicted of a gang crime, can you hear that okay? Is convicted of a gang crime and the court orders them to register as a gang member or a gang participant that can be court ordered, court authorized and that could go for, they'll be required to register for a period of time at which point they would be purged and not required to register. Same type of a registry database as a arson suspect or a sex registering. So that would be court ordered. That is not something that we would necessarily compile compile outside the court system. But as far as like just building a list and now for whatever reason, targeting or harassing that individual for simply being on a list of some sort, that is not something that's irrelevant. It doesn't serve a purpose. So it would be a waste of my time to try and build a list and then harass these individuals without an accompanying purpose, if that makes sense. Makes sense. Yeah. And I also heard that being a gang member is not a crime. So there's question and we're putting the cart before the horse. When officers are present at any of our schools, are they questioning children while they're in school regarding any possible gang activity that has happened within the community? I think that's really important. And we're still working with our school board and city leaders on what is the future of a school resource officer program look like. But we're gonna have a really carefully designed MOU to be talking about like what are the interactions with school campuses and the youth that are involving. But right now our procedure is we're just going to the schools when we're called for an investigation of some type of assault or weapons on school campuses. But we're really careful about that. And you never saw with our original SRO program of SROs contacting individuals, but I have heard some community feedback on that. So that's one thing that we're gonna carefully build in with our future program is what are the interactions with our youth and our school campus and making sure that we don't have any of that implicit bias or any type of discrimination going on in the school campuses. And I have absolute faith in the staff of the Santa Rosa Police Department that you're not gonna see that occur. But we also have procedures in place if you do see something that you're unhappy with through our complaint process with our professional standards division. We now have an independent police order that anyone in our community can contact directly, including students in our school campuses and parents and teachers who are able to see something that they feel isn't appropriate. And our pledges that we'll thoroughly investigate that and be able to make sure that we get to the bottom of it. And lastly, two things. The safety plan I think is great being in the mental health field. I think that that is a very successful way of supporting people. Also, I heard that about mentoring while people were in juvenile hall. That is also great, but I would love to see some of that mentoring prior to people going to juvenile hall because we don't want them to have to go to juvenile hall in order to get those robust services of mentorship, which are so important for our youth. And that concludes my questions. Thank you very much for being here. All right, I just have a couple more questions. First, how does this differ from the special enforcement team? So that's an important distinction. These are detectives who are plain clothes detectives that are going out and investigating all gang related crimes and violent crimes. They work really closely with our violent crimes team that we have. The special enforcement team is uniquely different and they work of hearing like problem-oriented policing areas that we have within the city of Santa Rosa. They are going out, they are street level team, but they're not focused on gang crimes. And they'll do things like working with our narcotics team over subjects selling drugs out of our house. They hear a lot of community planes about, hey, this specific home selling drugs or seeing some activity in there. And they'll work with that. So they'll work as sister teams and coordinate with each other, but are uniquely different. That the special enforcement team has been primarily focused on firearms. And last year, as Sergeant Mink mentioned, we seized 255 illegal firearms off the streets of Santa Rosa and 55 of those were ghost guns or these un-serilized firearms. So they've been really focused on some of the firearm reduction in our city. I don't know if you wanna add anything to that, Sergeant Mink? Yeah, so the special enforcement team is really kind of a gopher. They can help out in special services division if we have a wanted subject that we need to get a stop on or something like that. They're kind of a Swiss Army knife, if you will, that helps us to maximize our efficiency. They're kind of a force multiplier, if you will. I can now have a dedicated group of individuals with training that can go out and help me fix a problem in the community. They can solve something. They're always available and they can be a uniform presence when needed. And the special enforcement team is a meeting with community members going to community meetings and addressing some of the issues that are occurring in our neighborhoods across city of Santa Rosa. All right, thank you. One of the things that we heard a lot about was tracking metrics. And then we also saw in your presentation within the question to the use of the term school, schools and district and districts. Will we be tracking metrics of number of cases within the gang crimes team that are involving school-aged children as either the victims or alleged perpetrators? We currently track and we provide publicly of all juvenile arrests made with it. And we also have different tracking mechanisms for incidents on school campuses. So we haven't been tracking necessarily victims of juvenile crime, but that's something that certainly we have the ability to track. And we'd love to get feedback from our community and our city leaders about what are the specific metrics that you'd like to see as we examine the effectiveness of this team as we go into our first year. Right now, we track over aggregate data of the amount of crimes, the amount of shootings, the amount of arrests, the amount of stops and all those things like that, but we can dive deeper into that data. Okay. A lot of this discussion has been focused on individual crimes or individuals. Is there any historical, are there any historical cases or examples of actual, taking on an actual gang at a larger scale than just like they did this one crime where we arrested this one individual who was perpetrating, but like actually taking on a known gang? Absolutely, we've had, and Sergeant Mink was part of the FBI State Streets Task Force and he could talk about some of the things he've done to dismantle the Hell's Angels criminal street gang here in the city of Santa Rosa. As a gang detective, I tracked the Barbarian Brotherhood, which is a radical white supremacist gang that we have here in the city of Santa Rosa. We brought the first step-back enhancements or the gang enhancements against the Barbarian Brotherhood and have almost dismantled that organization here in Sonoma County. So those are some of the things that I think it's also important. There's a lot of community concerns about, hey, this is only focusing on these active gang members and sometimes people of color, but actually we have white supremacist gangs here in the Sonoma County. It's important that we're able to track that. And we're also, we've seen a significant rise in our Jewish community about fear of violence and things like that. And I just met with one of our synagogues just this weekend over some of their concerns over that. So that's gonna be another thing that this gang crimes team can talk about, but I'll let Travis Ming talk about because he led the investigation of bringing some of the first federal RICO act against our local Hells Angels. Yeah, so I guess one of the benefits to the gang crime team is you actually get to conduct investigations and you can target the leadership of a lot of these larger organizations. So going back to 2002, there was Operation Black Widow, which targeted the New Western Familia Prison Gang. That was involving Santa Rosa investigators. You had in 2014, Vario South Park, which was a RICO indictment centered in the South Park area of Santa Rosa during a, or targeting a Nortanio criminal street gang. It targeted eight members there, removed the leadership of the group. We actually saw a significant vacuum effect where that area for decades had been a exclusively Nortanio gang area. Well, with the removal of that through the RICO indictment, you actually saw Serenio gang members move in there. We had a shooting and we had several more contacts with Serenio gang members that moved into the void created when that investigation removed them from the area. In the following events, after that indictment was rendered, you saw a extreme decrease in violent crime over the next several years. Now, subsequently, a lot of those individuals are getting out of prison at this point because it's been almost a decade now. So you do see those individuals getting released coming back to the area. We also had another indictment that gets to the Hells Angels that was in 2019 and proceeded through two federal jury trials that completed last year. So with the gang crimes team, with partnership with our federal authorities, you do see significant investigations taking place throughout the greater center's area. Great, thank you. And then my last question, in the city we have a graffiti abatement program, but it's also my understanding and I think most people understanding that graffiti is a key component of gang activity. I'll let you speak to it rather than pontificate from up here. But if someone suspects there's gang graffiti on private or public property, or they know it is based on their own education, what processes do you think that, is that something that your team will take care of and what process should they go in reporting that? Yes, my team will handle that. Like as I alluded to earlier, we've already been handling those types of investigations. So the gang's crime team will investigate essentially everything from graffiti vandalism up to attempted murder. If there is a gang related homicide, they will work with our VCI team to work that murder investigation. But in regards to graffiti vandalism, we get several different ways. It could be an online reporting where the individual could take pictures with their iPhone, submit a report through our police database and that will come to my desk. I can then pass that to an investigator for follow-up. If there is a large amount of graffiti, say what recently happened at the Center of Plaza, detectives could be dispatched out on an on-call. Generally, they can check the area for video surveillance, take high quality photographs and those sorts of things. And then immediately begin the investigation there. It could come from a patrol dispatch where a patrol officer responded out, took the initial report, forwards it to the gang crime team. So it's any matter of ways, but it will come across our desk. It will receive a follow-up from an investigator. All right, thank you very much. That's it for my questions. We're gonna move to public comment on this. This is the public's opportunity to give feedback, voice concerns and ask questions about the gang crimes team. Each individual would give in three minutes to make their comments. If you have questions, please ask them. We can't get into it back and forth, but we'll note them and make sure that your questions are answered after the fact. So if there's anybody that would like to make public comment, please go ahead and move to one of the podiums. Hi, my name is Ana Benuñez and I'm born and raised here in Santa Rosa. I just have a few questions because you did reference gangs on schools. And I know that some of my questions might refer to the past, but I'm interested in knowing how many of our children have been arrested on school campus. What is the school's disciplinary process? How many of our children bypassed those steps and instead were incarcerated of those children? How many of them were of color? How many of those youths had their rights violated? How many of them were interrogated without legal or parental representation? How many of those children were on an IEP? How many of them were arrested for violation of probation or parole? For actually not even committing a crime, but may have just been violated their conditions of being with another person who may have been a gang member. And if they weren't committing a crime, why were they stopped? Is it just because they're on probation? Like, I mean, the only reason I can see you even searching and questioning a child is because you want them to cope back and get incarcerated. You want to find something on them. Okay, I was a little upset when writing this last night. I said, so my question is, do you just automatically stop an individual because you know they're on probation in hopes that they fuck up and have something in their possession? Otherwise, why would you make contact? Thank you very much. Is there anybody else that would like to make comment at this time? Go ahead, when you're ready. Hello, my name is Annette Arnold, and I am with the South Park Coalition for a group of neighbors working together to try to make South Park a cleaner, safer, and better resource neighborhood. I'm also on the chief's community ambassador team, which it gives me the opportunity to meet with the chief once a month and find out the issues that are happening with the city and bring it back to my neighborhood. I want to say that I am very much in support of the gang crimes team and the violence prevention partnership and hope that the city will fund them for the needed resources that we need to tackle crimes and gangs in our neighborhood. Thank you. Thank you very much. Anybody else seeing none? We'll close public comment, and we'll come back to the committee for any last comments or questions. Thank you so much for doing this. I know it may seem like we were kind of raking you over the coals, but with anything like this, I think it's important for our council to represent our constituents and ask some hard questions and repeatedly assert what our expectations are of units like this and what the community expects. Going forward, in terms of metrics, I would like to see metrics on school activity if three out of the four points that this team is supposed to be taking on are involved in education and prevention. I think it's important to have that so that we understand just what that looks like in our community. And then the reason for my graffiti question is I would like to see some sort of, and I don't know which department this would fall under, but the gang's crime team work with the team that handles the My Santa Rosa app so that we can coordinate and individuals can just say, hey, I think this may be gang-related. It goes directly to you, and you can make that determination of yes, this absolutely is or no, this isn't. And then comment on them instead of having it just turned over to code enforcement or something like that. So I would like to see that going forward. Anything else from the committee? Seeing none, we will move on to the next item. Thank you so much. We appreciate it. Oh, real quick, sorry, Chief, did you want to answer those questions that were brought up in public comment? That's my fault. We moved over that real quick. Absolutely, so we are tracking, and so right now it's really important to understand that police officers are not doing random patrol of our school campuses. That the only time that we're going to school campuses is when called to investigate. We have unfortunately seen a significant increase in those calls for services over this last semester. So something, there's actually the law in California. It doesn't allow that a juvenile's been arrested. Now in California, it was probably two years ago that we can't interview them without a lawyer present for a juvenile that's arrested for defense. So there's no juveniles being arrested without knowing their rights and without even having a public defender. There's some very small exceptions to that for public safety exemptions and things like that. Definitely not stops of being indiscriminately of just as someone that an officer knows that it's on probation on the school campuses. But that's what's really important. We've heard feedback about that from programs before and SRO programs and other communities. So that's why we're really, it's important for us to hear this feedback and make sure when we build back some form of a school resource officer program that our EMOU specifically addresses some of these issues. Officers are not involved in any way, whatsoever with school discipline, with suspensions, expulsions. That's none of our purview and we're not going to get involved in those. But those are some of the things that I want to more carefully outline in this future MOU about what the proactive interactions are, when arrests need to be made on school campus and how we can minimize that and some of the impacts that come from that. And also really clearly defining about when an SRO is not going to be used and it's not going to be used for administrative offenses such as talking on your cell phone in class or running in the hallways and things like that that we're really going to carefully define those. But we are going to be carefully track the metrics on our school campuses, including the arrest made and one of the recommendations or modifications that I'm recommending is that we do a public facing dashboard and that dashboard would talk about what are the arrests made in our school campus? What's the ethnic breakdown, the gender breakdown, the type of crimes? Were they arrested on the school campus? Was it initiated by an officer versus a school administrator? And those are all questions that our community deserves to know and to be able to have transparent and those are some of the things that we're working toward bringing for, especially with our school campuses. So we're going to have a host more of community conversations with that between us and our Santa Rosa School District. And so we really want to hear these voices so we can build a program that works for all. Thank you very much. And I apologize, I didn't mean to gloss over that. So we'll move on to item 5.3 which is the Rosen substation update. Chief, take it away when you're ready. All right, we'll begin. I'll arrange to introduce myself. I'm John Cregan, our chief of police here in the city of Santa Rosa. And today we're going to talk about something that's really exciting. It's just our ongoing efforts toward building a substation for our Roseland community. And we annex the Rosen community in 2017. And I've heard strong feedback from our community about wanting to see an increased presence in the Roseland community and how we can do that and how we can increase our response times to the Roseland community and our connectivity to the community there and especially being more accessible. So we're going to go through some of those things. And I said, as soon as stepping into the role as chief that was one of my first priorities which is to locate a building that we could purchase. And my key parameters were that I wanted to be on Sebastopol Road that was visible to the community right there in the heart of Roseland. Council member Eddie Alvarez has been such a key strong partner in this from day one. And actually we spent a day, one time we walked a mile or two back and forth going on business and business and he has had strong connections in the neighborhood about looking for available spaces. Our city realtor Jill Scott and Celeste and her team have been incredible partners in this and talking to Jill Scott as we've gone through the last year and a half of looking for an available space. She said, it's the most exhaustive city search as she's ever been involved in about Chinafeld, a building that meet our needs. It's within our price range. And we're really excited that after a year of looking for a building that we were able to find a building and that building that we purchased and we used formerly the Mejaro money to be able to do that. We purchased the building that's existing right now at the Rosen Library. That's at 470 Sebastopol Road, right adjacent to the exchange bank, Sebastopol Road across the street from Motote. And that's where we're able to purchase that but we entered into an agreement with the library that obviously we didn't wanna kick the library out of that space until they moved to their new building. And so they're moving hopefully in 2026 as we see the Herne Community Hub come together, the library is gonna move their space to a new and proved building space there at the Herne Community Hub. And then we're gonna move into that space at 470 Sebastopol Road. It's 4,500 square feet. It's gonna be such an exciting place that what, and my goal and vision is to have, actually have police technicians there in the lobby where you could come in and you could file reports, you could have community questions, you could get fixed ticket signed off, whatever your needs may be and be able to have that Monday through Friday, like eight to five open to the public and to have officers assigned out of that area to increase their connectivity with the community, their response times. And because we have 4,500 square feet, we're gonna build in even a community meeting space. So when we have community meetings, we can hold them right there in Roseland and whether it be in way to be an available space for the violence prevention partnership and our other community stakeholders. So the only downside is we're excited but we have to wait kinda until 2026 to be able to get into that space. So then we started looking, okay, what are some of the other opportunities until 2026 as we're able to get in there? And this is our, the Roseland Library space. So it's an incredible building that the owner that had space had done quite a bit of refurbishing over the last couple of years. So it's a perfect space for us to be able to move into and meet the needs of our community. So we started looking all over the place for a place that we could lease. The options were pretty limited to be frank, that were on Sebastopol Road, that were available, that met our needs with it. But after an exhaustive search, our city team was able to locate this space at 1215 Sebastopol Road. And if you're familiar with the area, it's a Skype both trucking company area and they own multiple buildings there on that property. It is smaller. So it's approximately 800 square feet compared to 4,500 square feet. So much smaller. So that's gonna have some limitations. So it's not gonna be able to be a public facing location that we could have a lobby there and staff there, but we're gonna have four desks for officers. And we have four parking spaces for police cars there. So what I love is now, when you're driving down Sebastopol Road, you can see police cars parked there. They're gonna be able, instead of driving all the way back to Sonoma Avenue to our main police department, they can eat lunches there. There's a small kitchenette there for a bathroom. They can take bathroom breaks. They can write reports there. They can process evidence there, that room. So the end of the day, you're gonna see more of a presence in Roseland. And then when there is an emergency call, they're gonna have a faster response time and community members can always come knock on the door when they see a police officer and the officer will be able to come talk to them. So it's still gonna have some exciting accessibility for the Roseland community, but not quite what we get when we're able to move to our more formal location. And we're in the process of finalizing that lease. It's actually gonna come to council next week as a consent item as the final thing for that lease. And so that's coming up. And then we hope to be in this location by March of this year. We have just a little bit of work to do with the desk getting moved in, but we've already ordered the desk. Our IT team needs to come connect the computers and those telephones and things like that. But our goal is to have officers using that space within March of this year. And then we're closely following the timeline for the Hernd Community Hub for us to be able to move in to the new building. And that's where we're gonna have, like I said, the public facing, but also we're gonna have a call, our phone there on the outside. So even at night, if anyone come, you could pick up that phone. It would ring directly to our dispatch center to be able to alert and to be able to get resources. But I hope that you're gonna see all night long that officers are in and out of those locations and it's more accessible to our community. We have a picture here of the, so this is the Sky Coast Company. We're right there on the bottom left, that first little building there is we're gonna be our substation right there. And we have the four parking spaces right there. So when you're passing on Sebastopol Road, hopefully you'll see. And then anytime you can come knock on that door and be able to access if an officer is there. But it's gonna be a, we're gonna do community education on, there's not always someone there. So call 911 in the case of an emergency. But this is at least one more resource that you'd be able to reach out to. So our short-term goals that we have with this is to provide the more visible police presence, improve the police response times, and then the community access. Our long-term goals, like I already highlighted, is the walk-in counter service, be able to come in directly to Roseland and be able to have Spanish-speaking staff there who can be able to address needs in the community. And again, have that public meeting space, which I think is gonna be a game changer for us connecting, and we've heard loudly from the Roseland community about some of the barriers that are coming all the way to the Sonoma Avenue, the police department, or the Finlay Center, and kind of community leaders in Roseland saying, you come to us, and that's where you're gonna get more engagement. So that's one of my key roles, and that way I can hear more, and we're in the planning stages right now of doing a Roseland community meeting, where we wanna hear, and so we're planning to do that sometime in March, and we'll be able to talk about this substation to educate the community. But I wanna learn more about how we can provide a better level of service throughout the whole city of Santa Rosa, but specifically for our Roseland community here. So I'll make sure that Council's aware once we set the date and location for that meeting. So that was the quick, high-level overview, but we're excited to be able to see where we're at with that. All right, I think the only question from me is to, can you please confirm what I heard was that your desire to have this presence was as a response to community request to have a larger police presence in Roseland. Is that correct? Absolutely, so, and I just had a meeting with some Roseland community members. There's a merchant there who owns a business there, and was really saying like, hey, we're not seeing the presence that we wanna see. We wanna see a stronger presence, addressing some of the crime, addressing some of the safety concerns, but there's a real interest in building more of a partnership, and that's something that I really wanna do. So I really wanted to be careful, like this isn't of trying to police more of the Roseland community. This is more to build like a partnership with the Roseland community, and to be more accessible to our community that our community can reach out to us, and with our building, especially our meeting space, so that's a really important distinction that I wanna make that this is to be with our Roseland community, not to be against our Roseland community by any means. Thank you, I appreciate that. Seeing no more questions up here, we'll move to public comment. If you would like to make a comment on this item, please go ahead and move to one of the podiums up top, and you'll have three minutes to do so. Seeing none, we will close public comment. Come back, any Council Member Alvarez? Thank you, sir. Well Chief, you're right, it was a long day of walking, meeting a lot of individuals, and I really do thank you for the focus being providing a service, not instilling fear, not instilling more tickets for the community that sometimes are already financially strapped, and I hope the community sees it for what it is, and that's really providing more services to an underserved community, one that's gone a long time without attention, and without a helping hand, so hopefully my community sees it as such, thank you. Thank you, we wouldn't have been there without all these reports, so thank you. All right, I think Council Member Alvarez said it perfectly, so I have no comments, so we will move on to item six, there's no matters held in committee, item seven, Police Department update, 7.1. All right, and I'll keep this brief, but we wanted to go over some of the most important exciting updates that we've had at the Santa Rosa Police Department, let's see if we could share that one, there we go, is our recruitment, and so it's really been one of our biggest focuses when I stepped into the role of Chief, we had 21 sworn police officer vacancies and a host of civilian vacancies, and it was really crippling our organization to be able to provide the level of service that we wanted to do, and I really have to tip my hats to Captain Dan Marensik and Lieutenant Brenda Harrington and Lieutenant Matt North at the time, and now Christy Fisher who are on that team who really poured their heart and soul in Amanda Donahue who does all of our backgrounds toward really working together as a team, and we wouldn't be here today without the hard work of each one of those individuals, so just in 2023, we hired 37 new employees at the Santa Rosa Police Department and three interns that we were able to launch a new intern program, so 26 of those were new police officers, so one thing that we really love is we recruited 13 lateral police officers who were existing police officers who had training and experience that moved over from other police agencies, because quite honestly, we're building a department that other people want to be a part of, the word on our city managers, incredible with other officers of the support with our city council, and so they feel supported here in the city of Santa Rosa and want to come over and be part of our incredible team. We also sent 13 new police officers to the police academy, that's a 20 week program that they go through, so 26 police officers hired last year, we hired 11 civilian employees who between our dispatchers, our police technicians, field evidence technicians, community service officers, and a host of other positions, and the three intern positions, we now have five funded 20 hours a week of student intern positions, we're currently recruiting for those positions right now, so that's something that we're able to do and be able to connect some of our youth here in Santa Rosa with the police department, so we'll go through some of the things but we've been maintaining near full staffing, we did have some retirements at the end of 2023, so currently we have four police officer vacancies, but we're recruiting right now for the April and July police academies, so we're accepting applications right now for those positions and hope to be back to full staffing for our police officer positions in the coming weeks, we also have some existing positions for our field evidence technicians, our community service officers, and one dispatch vacancy right now. The growth that we had last year, we added the one position to the gang crime team that we talked about using the public safety and prevention funds, we also have our council authorized to two more downtown enforcement officers and two felled evidence technicians with our last fiscal budget, so that brings our total department strength to 184 sworn positions and 80 civilian positions with a total department strength of 264 full-time employee positions that we have. One of the things that we really saw as an area to growth is with some of what we refer to commonly is just like building a department that matches and represents the community that we serve. One of the things that was remarkable for a county here, our city here in Sonoma, and you'd think that we're very progressive in the things, but we really saw that in 2019 that we only had 6% of our sworn staff were females, and so it's something that we really wanted to be able to take greater strides to her, representing our community, so we joined the program. We were one of the first 100 police agencies in the United States that joined the 30 by 30 initiative, and it's a host of pledges that you work toward examining your current department and some of the accessibility and some of the fairness that you have within your department, and to be able to also do better job of recruiting recruits, and so the initiative says by 2030 that 30% of your police academy classes that you'd have a goal of them being represented by female employees, and we made a tremendous stride, and actually just last week, all of our female officers came together and had an offsite meeting and talking about some of the progress, so currently today we have the most female officers in the history of the Santa Rosa Police Department, which I'm really excited about, and we have 25 female police officers making up 12% of our sworn police officer staff, so we're excited by that, but we also understand that we still have progress to do. We have three female sergeants, and we have one female lieutenant, representing our command staff team, and we're excited to have them in our leadership team, but also looking about how do we remove some of those barriers to application and promotion within our own department and do even better with that, but we have an incredible staff. Another thing that we've really heard a lot of feedback is how do we have a growing Hispanic population here in the city of Santa Rosa, and how do we better represent that community with our police staff, and we've made some strides, and one of the thing is we really made a focus on developing internal Spanish speaking classes, and we have some of our bilingual officers who lead this class and are doing that, and we've really seen a huge growth in the number of our Spanish speaking officers, so currently we have a process that go through that you can test for that, so we currently have 42 police officers who can speak what we call conversational Spanish, who are being able to be not completely fluent, but they can have a conversation with you in the street and understand what's going on, bring in the resources that you need, and be able to answer basic questions, but we have 24 police officers that are absolutely fluent in Spanish, and many of them come from Spanish speaking families and have grown up in that. We have seven civilian staff members who are working in dispatch and our police technician spots that are completely fluent in Spanish, but we're really working toward refining our Spanish speaking classes and even increasing some of that. We currently have out of 184 officers, we have 34 who identify as Hispanic, 30 male and four females, and we have 10 civilian staff members who identify as Hispanic of kind of the opposite of two males and eight females. So it's something that we're tracking closely and this is some of the things that we're starting to use metrics with our hiring, with our recruitment, working really closely with our HR department here, how we can increase some of these numbers. And the most important thing for us is reducing some of the barriers to application. We're identifying what are some of the issues where we're not seeing community members, and that's our biggest thing is that we're really trying to get the word out, but we're not always seeing the number of applicants applying for these positions. So we really been working with our recruitment team about getting out in the community, meeting with some of our community leaders, meeting with community groups, and making the awareness about the great opportunities that we have here at the Santa Rosa Police Department, some of the opportunities we have for our Spanish speakers too and how we really promote that within our organization. Also really working with SEED Collaborative and the city helped us create what we call an equitable policing task force where we had both internal members from the police department and a host of community members who came together and we looked at different recommendations that we could do to improve some of the diversity in our hiring and making sure that we're getting great qualified members who truly represent our community. And what we're also really trying to focus on in the city of Santa Rosa is how do we maintain the incredibly qualified staff that we have and how do we keep them here longer? And we're building that between the police department and our city team. We're building a city where people wanna come and be employed and there's still progress that we can make on that as a city, but that's what we really wanna do is keep all the officers that we have and continue to be able to grow even in our strength and how we can represent our community. So that was really quickly highlighting some of the successes that we've had and I'm really proud of our team and I'm happy to take any questions on that of our areas that we can still improve on. No questions, we'll move to public comment on this item. If there's anybody that'd like to make public comment, now is your time to do so. Seeing none, we'll close public comment. Go ahead. A couple of things I wanted to say is I've seen an increase in District 7 of police presence and I wanted to say thank you. The residents of District 7 would like to say thank you, less speeding down main roads and things like that. So we are very grateful and also I attended the US Conference of Mayors this past week and I wanted to say it was very nice to be able to brag about some of the wonderful things that we're doing in Santa Rosa and I know that we wouldn't be able to do that. Know it's a collaborative effort but without your leadership chief. So thank you very much. Yeah, thank you very much and we really, one of the biggest concerns we've heard from our community is traffic violations. So with this full staffing we just talked about, we're able to bring our traffic team at one time many years ago had nine motorcycle officers on it and it had gone all the way down to four in this 2019, 2020 kind of slump. So just next week actually we're adding another motor officer so we'll be at six on our motorcycle team and they're able to really address some of the community concerns. We're able to have our downtown enforcement team now with eight officers due to the incredible support of our council with that and so those are some of the teams that were able to start getting back to full staffing and we're adding another property crimes detective as well all those positions have been not filled for years because of the staffing thing. So just this last couple months we're able to start slowly feeling those and we're gonna take our patrol to the highest level of spend of our uniform patrol officers. So that's gonna provide a much more visible presence out on our community and I think it'll help us be more responsive to our community concerns and then one of our overriding strides is to decrease our priority one response times and so we're really gonna, I think you're gonna see in 2024 some incredible progress with that. Chief, I met an officer that was supposed to promote up to being on a motorcycle officer and I hope he was able to do that because I know he had been waiting for a while so. Yeah, the motor, I'm not sure who you met but Garrison Schwartz, he's a tall skinny guy is gonna be the guy taking over that position. Thank you chief. You're being very humble about this and I just wanna commend you and our city manager and all the staff on our successes in staffing for the public that doesn't know there are departments that are not far away that are severely understaffed to the point of asking for emergency mutual aid just to cover shifts and patrols and that's how bad down some of these departments are near us and we are nearly fully staffed to the point where we can staff multiple needed departments and our teams and I think that's great. So congratulations on your successes this last year to both you and the city manager. Thank you. All right, we will move on to item 7.2 which is the fire department update. Chief Westrop, thank you for sticking around. Thank you, chair. Didn't have much of a choice, but good to see you all again. Scott Westrop, fire chief of the city of Santa Rosa for the last public safety subcommittee meeting I had a PowerPoint on our update and chief creaking it did not and we switched roles this time so we will coordinate accordingly for the next public safety subcommittee meeting but I just have a brief update much in alignment with the police department. So as far as staffing goes the fire department currently has a staff of 157 FTEs that's before the safer positions are added into the position control list. We currently have nine vacant positions and operations. This is largely due to retirements at the end of the year and then we have the 12 employees we need to hire for safer. I'm happy to report we have an academy of four members starting next Monday. We currently have 11 in the background process and we have a new recruitment underway right now. So we're doing well as far as recruitment goes we have enough for the safer positions which I'll talk about here in a moment but we're doing well in our recruitment process and we should be able to fill those vacancies here relatively quickly. In fire prevention we're back to full staffing we had a brief vacancy due to a retirement and the community development technician role. We were fortunate enough to find an excellent candidate within the city who were bringing over to the fire department to take over that position to keep a plan review and plan checks underway as far as new construction and remodels go. And then in administration we have one vacancy currently in an admin secretary we're currently recruiting for that position that employee went back to her role in human resources. As far as fire station goes nothing really new to report since last time. Fire station five has been delayed a little bit due to the weather but we'll make up that time elsewhere in the process. Right now physical construction is due to begin in around June of 2024 if not a little bit sooner with an estimated completion date of mid 2025. Fire station eight and Roseland we're currently finishing up the design build process in order to put that out to RFP and get that out to bid. There's still no finite start date or completion date. One of the elements that has been awarded is the demolition of the current proper houses on the properties. So we're underway there so you start to see some physical work on that property as well. One of the things that I'll kind of keep you posted on is the real estate team is actively looking for properties that we could potentially purchase should the fire service sales tax measure pass in March. We'll need to buy three properties to build three new fire stations. So we have been out with them and they are currently looking around for the appropriate properties within the guidelines of where we need to build those fire stations. So we're trying to get ahead of the curve there hopefully should that sales tax pass in March. As far as fleet goes we still have seven type one fire engines on order. We're expecting two of them to arrive this spring. The other five to arrive in the fall. The two type six fire engines there's been a bit of a delay. We expected them this winter but the chassis are built and they're working on the box build up right now. We've already purchased all the equipment to go on the engines. So hopefully we'll see them in the next month or two and we'll already have the equipment to put on there and finish the build out here. So those certainly will be in service by this summer. The quick attack vehicles that were purchased by the Santa Rosa fire foundation via a grant from the community fund. We received one of those trucks. The other one should be here anytime. So we're really excited about that. Those will be the initial rollout of the advanced life support squads that we'll see out of safer. So we're really excited about that and we'll do some press on that as soon as we actually get both of them here. And then we're working with fleet and with finance on the purchase orders or the purchase plan for our future purchases of engines and a ladder truck. On safer, which if you recall is a federal grant we received to put two paramedic squads in service in the core area of Santa Rosa to handle a lot of the emergency medical services call and keep our engines and trucks off of those calls. They're scheduled on pace to go in service in March as designed on when the period of performance begins. As I stated earlier, the employees are in the background process and we should have all of them on board in time for this process to begin. As I stated, the vehicles are ready and the team is currently working on policy procedures and dispatch protocols. This is a new response model going into service, particularly in the downtown area. And lastly, just a very quick update on the fire service sales tax measure. Again, this is for information and education only but things are moving along well as far as the sales tax goes. The campaign team has received some strong key endorsements and as a reminder for the subcommittee and for the public, the funding for Santa Rosa would provide three new fire stations, three new companies that are staffed full-time companies, a second battalion chief on duty on a day-to-day basis and two vegetation management inspectors for a total of 35 new FTEs serving the Santa Rosa. So things are moving along well and we're really happy with the progress the campaign team's making on that front. And with that, I'll turn it over to you for any questions or comments you may have. All right, no questions here. We'll go to public comment on this item. If you have a public comment, please move to one of the podiums. Seeing nobody move, we will close public comment. Any comments? Great job on staffing as well. I know that our department tends to be a little bit more difficult to recruit for based on the fact that we require paramedics and we don't backfill with the MTs. So you should be very proud of yourself as well as well as your department. One question on the staffing. Does those staffing numbers include Maverick and Gabby? Maverick and Gabby are not on the position control list. So they don't, but Maverick's doing great, very well received, and Gabby should be here in the next six months or so. So those are our behavioral health canines for those. Aren't keenly aware of what's going on. Yes, I heard from the mayor here that there may be a request that should you have another department updated a future public safety subcommittee meeting that Maverick or Gabby should be present for that. We can certainly make that happen. Thank you, chief. Seeing as how there is nothing else on the agenda, we'll move to item eight, which is adjournment. Thank you.