 Thank you for those of you just joined in the meeting. My translation is being provided in Spanish today. To listen to the Spanish channel, please click onto your Zoom toolbar icon that looks like the globe. Once you join the Spanish channel, we recommend you shut off the main audio so you only hear the Spanish translation. Additionally, if you choose to make a public comment during today's meeting, please speak steadily so the interpreters can translate accordingly. Thank you. Pablo, would you please translate? Muy bienvenidos. Para los que recién se han unido a la reunión interpretación en vivo, es... En español está disponible. Y los miembros que decen escuchar en español pueden unirse al canal, haciendo click en el icono de interpretación en la barra de herramientas de Zoom, que ahora puede ser un globo de ratio. Una vez que sea un al canal de español, se recomienda que apague el audio primario para que solo escuche la interpretación al español. Tradicionalmente, les queremos pedir al público si desean hacer comentarios durante la porción de comentarios de la reunión de hoy día. Les pedimos que hablen de una manera suave y de una manera más cabal y lenta para que todo sea interpretado. Thank you, Pablo. All right, Madam City Clerk, I recognize a quorum of the council. Can we go ahead and do a roll call vote? Or roll call attendance? Thank you. Councilmember Tibbets. Here. Councilmember Schwedhelm. Here. Councilmember Sawyer. Here. Councilmember Fleming. Here. Councilmember Alvarez. Present. Vice Mayor Rogers. Present. Mayor Rogers. Here. That the record show that all councilmembers are present. Great, thank you so much. And we do have interpreter services that are being provided in Spanish for today's meeting. Madam Zoom host, can you please explain to the public how they can access the Spanish channel? Just done that right before you hopped off and then hogged back on. So it's going to fill up some time. So we just had that explanation. We did ask one moment. One comment was we asked that everyone participating in today's meeting and making public comment speak steadily and thoughtfully so the interpreters can captures the important discussion being had today. Great, perfect. Thank you so much, Dina. Just as some quick housekeeping before we jump in on our meeting, councilmembers I'm just reminding you to please keep your zooms on mute when you're not speaking. That'll allow the presenters to be heard clearly. As members of the public join our meeting, they'll be participating as attendees with their microphones and cameras muted. Only the panelists for today's presentations will be viewed during the meeting. If you are calling in via telephone, please understand that your comments will be, your name will be redone as resident with the last four digits of your phone number. That's the way that we'll also call on you during public comment. And that's just to make sure that we keep your privacy. Madam city clerk, do you want to walk through for the public how they'll be able to participate via zoom in today's meeting? Yes, after all three presentations are made under item two and concluded, the mayor will call for public comment. The host and zoom will be lowering all hands until public comment is open for the agenda item. Once the mayor has called for public comment, the mayor will announce for the public to raise their hand if they wish to speak on the specific agenda item. If you are calling in to listen to the meeting audibly, you can dial star nine to raise your hand. The mayor will then call on the public who have raised their hands. Public comment will be limited to three minutes and a timer will appear on the screen for the council and the public to see. Once all live public comments have been made, the meeting host will play voicemail public comments. If you provide a live public comment on an agenda item, but also submitted an email, e-common or recorded voice message public comment, your email, e-common or voice message public comment will not be duplicated, read or play during the meeting. Throughout today's agenda, when the mayor calls for public comment, an interpreter will be prepared to assist anyone needing interpretation. Those using interpreter support will be afforded additional time for your public comment as required by the Brown app. We ask those listening on the Spanish channel, but wishing to make a public comment to turn off or leave the interpretation channel entirely at the time you hear your name called. So you can join the main channel to make your public comment heard and translated into English. This icon may now look like a circle with an E-S in the middle and the word Spanish underneath. You can then rejoin the Spanish channel at the conclusion of your comment to continue listening to the meeting in Spanish. Thank you. All right, thank you so much, Madam City Clerk. I do see quite a few new names and faces on our Zoom, so I'm just gonna take a little bit of an extra moment and make sure that as we kick this off, I explain up front what the process is so that folks understand when and how to better engage with this meeting. This is a special city council meeting. That means that comments will be limited to the items that are on the agenda. Typically we do have a section for public comment for non-agenda items that does not happen in a special meeting. Today is really focused on the items before us. You'll also notice that today's meeting is a two-day meeting, which is very rare from the city council, but we decided that we wanted to really schedule this in a way that facilitated not just discussion, but also reflection from the council and from the public. So we'll jump into item two in a minute here, which consists of both with the Human Rights Commission report, as well as the independent review report and the after-action report. Council members will be asking questions of the presenters as we work through those three items. And then when we complete those three items, we'll go to public comment. Folks in the public will be able to speak for three minutes to give their thoughts, to ask their questions, but we don't typically get into a back and forth at that time. Council will take those comments back, we'll ask some additional questions and we'll conclude today's portion of the meeting. I do want to give the public heads up that because we are designing this meeting in a way that allows council members in the community to really reflect on what we hear and what we discuss, typically what's gonna happen is not all council members are gonna be expected to be giving their thoughts in today's meeting. Tomorrow we'll come back at 10 a.m. We'll hear the community empowerment plan. We'll also hear from SRPD on changes that have already started to be made. And then we'll open it back up again for public comment for folks to comment, to talk to us about where we go from here and what additional policy considerations you'd like to see us consider largely through our public safety subcommittee and then bringing it to the full council. But I did wanna make sure that I set the stage for folks on when and how to participate and what to expect over the next two days watching the council. With that, I'm gonna turn it over to Mr. City Manager for item number two. Item two, study session review of city response to community protests in May and June, 2020. Mayor and council members, I'm gonna give a very brief introduction to today and then I will be turning it over to the first set of presenters. At the end of May and early June last year in response to the tragic murder of George Floyd, the city heard from thousands of Santa Rosas. They expressed their pain, their grief and their anger through marches, protests, public forums and correspondence. The city heard demands for change and a challenge to its leadership to review institutional structures that impact our local communities of color. The city also heard the community's concerns regarding the police department's use of force during the early days of protests and civil unrest in Santa Rosa. In response to these powerful voices, the city council committed to review the events of the protests and to implement actions for change. The city committed to an independent review of the police department's investigation into all reported use of force cases that occurred during the May and June, 2020 local protests and committed to an independent review of the city's overall response to the protests and civil unrest that occurred during that time. The city also committed to implementing Santa Rosa's community empowerment plan, starting with robust listening sessions to engage in a deeper dialogue with our communities of color around law enforcement, equity in local government and broader community issues. There is recognizably a long way to heal and make meaningful change. Ensuring Santa Rosa is a city of inclusion, diversity and equity where all our residents and visitors feel safe and welcome. So the first item is an item 2.2A, the Human Rights Commission report. The Sonoma County Commission on Human Rights provided this report to the city and the city invited the commission to have an opportunity to present their report here today to the council and to the public. Presenting are Jerry Three, chair of the commission and Demetra Smith, former chair of the commission, welcome and I will turn it over to them. Good morning. Before we get into our presenting the report, I have a short statement and former chair Smith also has one. So my name's Jerry Three, I'm the chair of the Sonoma County Commission on Human Rights and I'm also the founding director of ILR, which is civilian oversight office for the Sonoma County Sheriff. And I continue to work in the field of police oversight, but today I'm appearing here in my role as the chair of the commission and not as an oversight professional. In other words, I'm not here to present you an objective review of what happened during the protest last summer, I'll instead be expressing opinions informed by the facts in my role as the human rights commissioner. So the ordinance creating the commission on human rights includes the following statement. The role of the County of Sonoma Commission on Human Rights is to provide leadership guidance and assistance in assuring all members of our community, especially those among us who are marginalized or disadvantaged. Enjoy the full range of human rights to which every person is entitled. The commission will undertake and fulfilling its mission to include these things, creating awareness of human rights issues faced by members of our community, advocating for policy changes necessary to better protect human rights at the local, state and federal levels by investigating issues raised by our community, commenting on policies for by lawmakers and regularly reporting to the Board of Supervisors and also responding to and advancing concerns raised by members of our community by making referrals to appropriate resources, investigating the extent to which individual complaints reflect a broader human rights issue in the County and bringing attention to human rights issues of concern to County residents. So Ms. Smith and I will be acting in those roles today. This week is two poll. First, provide a safe and welcoming space for protesters to share with the council their experiences with police last summer that actually had the effect of suppressing their First Amendment rights to freely associate and publicly share their views on police violence in our society. And the second ask is to carefully consult with the public to change SRPD policies on use of force and policing of protests so that the policies are consistent with international human rights guidelines on the use of less lethal devices. Santa Rosa has an opportunity to be a model for the rest of the state and the country by getting this right. The CHR report on protest policing last summer was designed to give voice to the experiences of protesters and put forward their demands for change and prevent others from experiencing these things in the future. Ms. Smith and I will present a short summary of that report shortly. If you've not read the report, I strongly suggest that you do so. The report also shared international human rights standards for such situations, which I just want to briefly mention. In this particular context in 2020, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a report. It was called guidance on the use of less lethal weapons and law enforcement. And this guidance should be a key document for your counsel regarding any deliberations you make about changing policies. The guidance puts together several key principles that should be considered when setting limits on less lethal weapons. Those principles include legality, precaution, necessity, proportionality, non-discrimination and accountability. This guidance explicitly underscores that international human rights laws apply to the use of force, particularly laws pertaining to the rights of life, to freedom from torture, other forms of cruel and human or degrading treatment, and to security of a person into the right of peaceful assembly. It also states that breaches of these principles, which result in unnecessary excessive use of force may amount to torture or ill treatment. And these are categories of prohibited human rights abuses in international law. These statements and the guidance echo decisions of the European Court of Human Rights in relation to use of force in these settings. And the guidance further elaborates on how the inappropriate use of less lethal weapons can lead to breaches of absolute prohibitions of torture and other violations. And it provides a non-exhaustible list of weapons and equipment or quote, inherently degrading or unnecessarily painful, and therefore should never be used in contravention of international human rights standards. Ms. Smith will now share an opening statement before we turn to the brief PowerPoint presentation. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Demetra Smith. I am the former chair of the commission on human rights. Having served from 2012 to 2020, I'm also the former program manager of the junior commission on human rights. I'm a co-founder of Savior Six, which works on title six civil rights advocacy in schools and a co-founder of Food for All Comida Para Todos, which is a mutual food aid project in Sonoma Valley. I'm also the co-author of AB 655, the California Law Enforcement Accountability Reform Act, which is making its way through the legislature. I am 3,000 miles away from Sonoma and getting situated. So forgive my any movement or sounds you may hear. The human rights violations in Santa Rosa policing the Black Lives Matter protest report was the first report to emerge that cited human rights violations by Santa Rosa police department during protests. It's important to note that there were individuals who contacted the commission with deeply troubling accounts who did not feel comfortable coming forward out of fear of retaliation by police. There were also individuals who the commission was not able to include, perhaps on the advice of legal counsel or because they were not aware that community reports were being gathered. This report was a grassroots community driven effort. I wanna extend my sincere gratitude to those individuals who participated and my apology to anyone who we were unable to include. At the time of the report's unanimous approval, the commission also voted on the option to include additional reports as an addendum. If there is anyone in the community who would still like to come forward, the commission can be contacted for this purpose. We felt it was important to include context with regard to the historical relationship between law enforcement and the public, especially communities of color. BIPOC communities reported long standing issues county wide with racial profiling, use of racial slurs, quickly escalating force, a lack of oversight and accountability. Additionally, Santa Rosa has been without an independent police auditor since his removal several years ago. That position must be restored and allowed to function without hindrance or retaliation. It remains my view that this strained relationship, the unhealed wounds around the killings of Jeremiah Chas, Andy Lopez, Branch Roth and others, severe police violence in the great dog Taser assault of Jason Anglera-Wyrick were contributing factors to the energy and the intensity of the Santa Rosa protests in addition to nationwide grief and outrage over the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, and many, many other black and brown people leading up to the protests, but especially unarmed black folks. This report was called a quote categorical judgment of the men and women of SRPD and flawed at best. However, when we look at this report in tandem with the OIR group and Hillel-Heinz reports, not only is the commission report underscored, but a wider picture of negligence, lack of transparency and apparent obfuscation of records has emerged with regard to the use of tear gas, unauthorized projectiles and communication between agencies under an expired mutual aid agreement with Sonoma County Sheriff's Office. Also troubling is the fact that the OIR group was not made aware of the commission report, which may constitute a voluntary suppression of its contents. I'd like to briefly reflect on statements from the California Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights commission report on policing in Sonoma County from the year 2000, almost 20 years to the date of this report's release. And I quote, the advisory committee believes that effective policing is a partnership between a community and law enforcement. Denying the legitimate concerns of either half of this alliance imperils effectiveness of the already fragile partnership. Police departments should not marginalize the individuals or organizations within their communities who voiced their concerns about the type of policing being provided. This input can be a basis for constructive change for those departments with the wisdom to see its value. Since we entrust police officers with certain privileges, including the use of deadly force, in order for them to perform their role, it is the right and responsibility of citizens to protest police practices they view as unwarranted, unnecessary or gross abuse of discretionary authority. We provide police officers with the responsibility to enforce the laws and protect individuals and property. We do not grant them the authority to be arrogant or to abuse this trust. For a law enforcement department to view citizen concerns about police practices as a threat, makes a mockery of this trust. And the consequences are community fear, ineffective policing and deteriorating police community relations, end quote. So we know that the increased militarization of our communities and especially black and brown communities and communities of color is an effect of the so-called war on drugs and gangs beginning in the 90s. Under the federal LESO 1033 program, we have also seen law enforcement increase their stock of military grade weaponry. And we have seen this used increasingly on BIPOC communities, residents expressing their First Amendment constitutional rights and particularly around anti-racism work and environmental justice nationwide. The appearance of former SRPD officer and SRJC police training instructor Barry Broad in the Derek Chauvin trial was also a chilling reminder of the law enforcement culture and the deadly training that have informed police in our county. On Juneteenth, 2020, we met in good faith with Chief Navarro, then Mayor Schwedhelm, Supervisor Hopkins and injured protesters. It was a highly emotional experience that was also re-traumatizing for the protesters. I will always remember one individual present at that meeting asking the officials to think about their legacy in this moment, to choose human rights and accountability rather than oppression and violent authoritarianism. Instead, we were given a press release with a false narrative that the human rights report was a categorical judgment of all SRPD officers. The allegations have never been appropriately acknowledged by Chief Navarro or SRPD, even though he was personally witnessed to powerful testimony at our meeting. That is unacceptable. As Santa Rosa Police Department officers and the chief are city employees, it is my strong opinion that the city of Santa Rosa has jurisdiction to have oversight over the use of military-grade weaponry on the public. I am asking for your support and calling for a ban on the use of these weapons and aggressive tactics like kettling in alignment with United Nations and people who have been harmed by these practices. Policy is our love language, but we have yet to see any real accountability from SRPD with regard to their procedures. It's also deeply troubling that specific officers' names were submitted to SRPD, yet we have not seen significant disciplinary action. Rhetoric and discussion will not restore public trust. We must see accountability and policy changes. I would like to make the council aware that activists in the community continue to report being followed by SRPD, tailed or seeing police cars in or near their driveways, which is threatening and stalking behavior meant to intimidate and chill social justice activities. In closing, almost 10 months to the day our report was released, I still have the same question. How much is too much? What are our limits for police violence? Is it acceptable for police to make sexually assaultive comments about young female protesters when they are zip-tied and in a vulnerable position? Is it acceptable for police to roughly handle female protesters in an assaultive way and put their hands all over their bodies? Is it acceptable for police to shoot powerful projectors not meant for use on human beings at people who have no weapons and have their hands in the air? It is acceptable for police to rip out someone's hair and play soccer with it or joke about, quote, taking out, unquote, street medics. Is it acceptable for police to harm someone physically because they are black or Pomo or Latinx? Is it acceptable for police to ignore people who drive over human beings? The recommendations found in the 2000 US Civil Rights Commission Report still ring true 21 years later. The way forward must involve policy changes. I urged the city of Santa Rosa to adopt the demands outlined in the report. I would also address police training with the testimony of former SRPD officer and police training instructor Barry Broad during the Derek Chauvin trial. The entire world got a close-up view at the deeply troubling culture of SRPD and policing in general. When we are told that training techniques that can amount to torture and result in serious injury, disfigurement, and death are justified that officers are following their training, that training must change. Policing must change, and police conduct should be held to the highest standard for any public servant. Thank you so much for the opportunity to present. I'm gonna turn it back to Chair Threat to start us on the presentation slides. Are you muted? Yeah, thank you. Can we go to the first slide? Thank you. We just start with a little timeline of how events unfolded that resulted in this report. Early on, we had the protests unfolding on an almost daily basis. And multiple protesters were written to and individually of the commission to let us know that they were experiencing things that they thought were not okay. Gathered with some protestors and talked about what they would like and put together a meeting and county officials so that government officials could hear the stories of these protesters in the process that their ability and them to talk about it without a pushback so that the government officials could hear from their perspective what happened. That was the meeting Ms. Smith talked about with Chief Navarro and others. And the follow-up intended was to be an additional meeting after that where the protesters would talk about what changes they would like to see happen in policies and practices. Unfortunately, before that meeting could take place about a week later after this initial meeting, there was a lawsuit that was filed by some protesters and the Santa Rosa City Attorney's Office released a statement that basically said that all police officers in Santa Rosa are trained to act with their strain and did in fact act with their strain during these protests. And those protesters who experienced incidents of violence experienced it because they themselves were violent or were engaging in destructive behavior. We'll go to the next slide, please. You know, as a result of that press statement coming out, the folks that we had worked with on the commission to put together this meeting and have a meeting with government officials decided they no longer wanted to move forward with that process. Instead, they wanted the commission to put together a report that would gather their accounts and other can gather and be published so that the public could have access to their perspective on what happened. Soon after that meeting with protesters where that was the course of action was decided, former chair Smith appeared at the Santa Rosa City Council meeting on June 30th to let your council know that that was the course of action that the commission would be taking. She followed up with an email to Chief Navarro and in your mayor. And on July 11th in the summer of last year, CHR report was published. Email. And then soon thereafter, there was a request from former chair Smith that the council have a hearing on the report. Go to the next slide, please. Soon after the report had been released publicly, your chief made a statement in the press that was referenced earlier by former chair Smith that characterized the report as a flawed one-sided account of the events that were happening during the protest and suggested that it was a prejudice account with those events. So subsequent to that, the commission had received several notices that the report would be heard at various times. At first we were told that in August it would be heard by the community advisory board of Santa Rosa. In September of last summer, your city signed an agreement with OIR to review the incident complaints of various incidents during the protest. We were told when we were getting close to a date, that we were told that the report would be heard. We were told it would be delayed till October at the public saying, as I grew approach, we were told it would be delayed till December. And then at the time it was delayed until this hearing. Could have the next slide. Just the counts that are included in the report to have not an opportunity. The accounts fall into different types of categories. There were accounts of excessive and discriminant use of force against members of the crowd on the days and evenings of the protest. Tier gas was used to disperse crowds, including crowds that included children. They've accounts that when dispersal orders were given, they were not provided an opportunity actually to leave the protest, but were instead crowded together by SRPD officers and arrested in groups. Multiple protesters reported that they observed or experienced disparate treatment of black and brown protesters, as opposed to the young white protesters who were present at the demonstrations. There was an account by a young black woman who had several things that she reported that could be characterized as abusive and sexually harassing treatment by her by SRPD officers. And then generally the protesters reported that in contrast to what they saw as over-policing of protesters, when reports were filed with SRPD of individuals who were harassing, threatening, and trying to run out that those reports were not adequately followed up on by the department. So do we have the next slide please? I think that went backwards. Thank you. So just to call out some individual accounts that were included in the protests, some of which are better known through other coverage by the press. We had accounts from Marcus Redbeard Martinez who eventually filed a lawsuit against the county, which I believe was settled last week, that he was targeted with, said he was standing near and video evidence shows, him doing that before he was hit in the mouth. It resulted in breaking his jaw, knocking out his teeth, some of which were embedded in the roof of his mouth and took several surgeries to reconstruct his jaw and in his mouth in ways that made it okay for him to actually use his jaw again. And I just wanted to note that Mr. Martinez was previously a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the county, which was rather well-known than involved yard counseling. Excuse me, there's a jet going over. Demetri, did you want to pick up from here while this is going on? Yes, thank you. I did want to mention the importance of community members reporting that tear gas was used on crowds containing young folks, families and children really without warning. And so when we look at the OIR report, it does confirm this. I also want to underscore the fact that medical researchers have found links between police tear gas and its harm to women's reproductive health. I am also deeply concerned about the use of 40 millimeter projectiles that are actually barricade rounds that are not to be used on human beings that were utilized and the resulting documentation on how those actually made it into the munitions to be used during the protest is still a mystery. I feel that the council and the public deserves transparency on that. I believe the reasoning listed in the OIR report was that there was a mix up that those were used in error. However, I don't find that to be plausible. So I have a deep concern about that. I'm also seeing some similarities between, for example, the case of Mr. Argelio Giron who was hit in the groin, rupturing a testicle with around last June. There's also three men in Los Angeles who have filed lawsuits against the city and were also struck in the groin with similar injuries. So I just have a deep concern at the similarity of some of these injuries and some of the ways that protesters are being targeted with less lethal munitions. Jerry, do you kick it back to you? Sure, thank you. Two additional points there. The other thing about the tear gas is that it can severely aggravate the lungs and therefore for anyone who is susceptible to or had contracted COVID it would greatly aggravate the progress of that disease. So really contraindicated this summer. And in terms of the projectile rounds that Ms. Smith referred to, since the OIR report came out, we have looked at information from the manufacturer that shows that every one of the boxes of those rounds is marked that there are not for use against humans. And so it would be hard to miss that when they're being used. Can we go to the next slide, please? So another series of accounts that was provided by Mr. Paws was that he observed aggressive searches of Latino young males by an SRPD officer. He observed a young woman who had her hair pulled off of her head by an SRPD officers and then they proceeded to play soccer with it in a way, a demeaning way that made fun of her. And then there was a particular officer who was seen roughing up the black female protester after she protested his physical groping of her body. And generally they observed a lack of mass by officers during the potentially exposing protesters to transmission of COVID. Next slide, please. And Ms. Jordan's account, she provided an account that she received unnecessarily violence in her arrest for different officers. And I did observe the video myself of the arrest and it did appear that what she is saying has some validity. Her face was shoved away to prevent her from seeing the badge of the officer. And she reports that she currently still has ongoing injury and difficulty in using the wrist that was injured. The next slide, please. And as Ms. Smith reported, there were multiple protesters who did not feel comfortable providing their identity for purposes of the report but didn't want their accounts to be included. And these included folks that had seen the following things happen. There was a protester high in the air and smashed multiple protesters, saw that white protesters were treated better by officers and that black and brown protestors tended to be to receive greater enforcement efforts. Many officers reported to refuse to provide their badge numbers and names some had covered them up. Protesters heard officers bragging about targeting medics for enforcement efforts. And there are multiple protesters that reported that they were what is often called Kettle-ing where they are herded together after a dispersal order so that they cannot actually walk away from the protest and leave or rather are arrested in a large group and taken to the jail. And that's what happened on at least one night that was reported by. And then there were some officers who deliberately unmasked and coughed on protesters. Demetra, did you want to add anything to this? Yes, thank you. I would urge the council to request verification on who at San Rosa police department had clearance to purchase the 40 millimeter training rounds who authorized their use and why there is no documentation about that. Again, if law enforcement cannot tell the difference between a less lethal munition that is a barricade round not to be used on human beings and other less lethal rounds, that is unacceptable. If they were used voluntarily with the knowledge that they were not authorized for that purpose that is also not acceptable. That is why I feel that a ban on these weapons in on the public is necessary. I also have a concern about the mutual aid agreement that hopefully the council will get into that with the OIR report and the HH report. But I'm concerned that the mutual aid agreement between San Rosa police department and Sonoma County Sheriff's office expired June 30th, 2017. This means that the sheriff's office was called in under a mutual aid agreement that it expired. And so that provided in my opinion that may have provided an environment that was ripe for unauthorized actions. And then I also want to underscore the need for documentation around the mutual aid agreements. So as I understand it, the requests for mutual aid are made using clets, which is the California law enforcement telecommunication system. However, the requests for mutual aid were made using informal phone calls. And this means that official documentation on who made requests, who received them and who responded has also been obscured from the investigative process and from public transparency. I am calling again for further transparency on the mutual aid agreement, how many units from SCSO responded, what their functions were, et cetera. That's very important. And I know that will be discussed later, but I'm just urging the council to really take that one seriously. Back to you, Mr. Threat. Thank you. One additional point on the mutual aid agreement. My understanding is that the one with the sheriff is being renegotiated currently, but for all of them, it's important for the council to consider and look at what are the parameters and the agreements and the agreements around which policies shall govern the officers who are there to assist with the protest. And some situations across the country, and I say this may even be typical, the responding agencies follow their own policies. So to the extent that Santa Rosa wants to ensure that it's a community members are governed by policies that it adopts, it would need to ensure that the mutual aid agreements require responding agencies to also follow its policies. Can we go to the next slide, please? You know, and this is really a final area that was identified by protesters as one that they found trouble with attention. And that was the disparate enforcement response when it came to the protesters themselves as opposed to those trying to disrupt the protest. Announced by protesters that they received excessive necessary force when they were protesting. And then multiple accounts that when protesters called SRPD to report that individuals were disrupting the protest, including people driving their cars to protesters, they felt that they were not receiving an adequate response, that sometimes their reports were not treated seriously and that there was not sufficient follow-up to investigate what they were saying is happening. And in particular, since the protest and the complaints were provided to SRPD, there have been multiple sources of information suggesting that at least one of those people who drove a car has some connection to folks at the Sonoma County Jail. And so the perception that is created by this, these two different responses or perceptions or responses that protesters and community members have begun to believe that there's disparate treatment based on political sympathy towards police officers, that the police may treat people differently based on whether they are more sympathetic to police officers or less. And that's a perception that is really not conducive to trust. Demetri, did you wanna add anything? Thank you. I just wanted to mention that it's important for the council and the public to really understand the gravity of the United Nations, Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner in July, 2020 feeling the need to issue guidance on less lethal weapons and law enforcement with the extreme response from police. In fact, we have not seen the same response from police in the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol that we saw during Black Lives Matter protest nationwide. And so those are, I'm not gonna go through all of them, but those are significant with regard to points like, law enforcement officials should delay direct contact or engagement with members of the public if that would make the need to use force or the potential for violent outcomes less likely. Law enforcement policies, instructions and operations must give special consideration to those who are particularly vulnerable to the harmful consequences of the use and force in general and to the effects of specific less lethal weapons. This includes children, pregnant women, the elderly, persons with disabilities, persons with mental health problems and persons under the influence of drugs or alcohol. Deescalation is key. And then again, in performing duties, law enforcement shall not discriminate against any person on the basis of race, ethnicity, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender, et cetera. And so we brought these forward so that folks could have a tangible view of that these are actually real human rights violations. This could be submitted to the United Nations as a shadow report. These can be used in class action lawsuits and so forth. And so beyond the moral issue of ensuring that Santa Rosa residents are safe and free from disproportionate police violence, that also the city really looks at the liability that is incurred by contracting, excuse me, by having law enforcement services with an agency that is using less lethal weapons but weapons that are causing extreme harm. And so I just wanna underscore that liability issue. For me, it's a human rights issue but it's also a liability issue as well. We've seen through a Public Records Act request that the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office has cost the County of Sonoma over $20 million since 1996, just in settlement fees and legal proceedings. That does not include all the staff time. It's likely much higher than that. So I'm noting the $1.9 million settlement and I feel it would behoove the council to do a similar look at the fiscal cost of the settlements from police violence use of force within Santa Rosa. I wanna thank the members of the council who have been helpful in moving this forward and to the members of the public who did not stop mentioning the report, requesting that it be heard. We wanted to bring this straight to you from the people and I feel that we've done that. Though as I mentioned at the beginning, we may not have gotten every account. I am grateful and thankful to everyone. And I hope that the city of Santa Rosa will take this opportunity to move forward with strong policy changes, including cahoots, which is a great model and actually put a stop to the use of tear gas and projectiles. And to really uphold and follow through with the protestor demands that are in the report. We've had the independent investigation already. So there's four more to do. Thank you so much. Is there another slide? Yeah, just to highlight the demands that the protesters put forward. First, they requested that there be independent investigations of the officers involved in their allegations. I will say it's unclear to me whether that has happened. The OIR report does go through multiple investigations and reports on the findings and whether they think that the investigations were done appropriately. And I think that's a good function and I'm happy that it happened. But what's unclear from the OIR report is whether any of the allegations in the commission on human rights report were actually investigated and whether they were reviewed by OIR. So that's an open question for us. Certainly if they were not investigated, I would say that the protestors are required to be investigated every instance of potentially inappropriate behavior by an officer should be investigated whether a complaint is filed or not. So that's an open question and which we would appreciate gets some light in this hearing. And the protesters also asked for a few things in terms of changes in policy. One would be a ban on the use of militia grade weaponry on the public. That includes tear gas and protest settings, particularly cause tear gas is an indiscriminate device that affects everyone in the protest equally, regardless of whether they were involved in anything like violence or spandalism. It also affects the vulnerable quite significantly and you cannot protect them if they're in the crowd. They've also asked for a ban on the use of 40 millimeter projectiles on protestors. Obviously there may be situations where there may be individuals who are at a protest who are committing violence that presents this imminent risk of death or bodily significant bodily injury to another where something like less lethal projectiles could be justified. But as a general tool for crowd control, the protesters are asking that they not be used any longer. And certainly a ban on explosive devices such as stingrays and other sting grenades and other things that could seriously injure or even kill protesters exercising their first amendment rights. And finally the protesters have asked that any officers that are found to have the violations to be sustained that they committed these acts be fired. And so that they're no longer in the force and cannot do something like that again. So do we go? I think that's it, let's check and make sure. That was the conclusion of your presentation, sir. Okay, thank you. Just to wrap up, we wanna first thank the commission for the opportunity to present the report, summary of the report and the concerns that it raises on behalf of the members of the public who are out to protest. I did wanna just point out one thing that we saw both in the CHR report and the OI report, which is that there were instances where it was apparent that SRPD could have taken another tactic rather than pushing forward into the crowd and confronting them. At certain times they could have retreated and allowed tensions to cool. And when responding to thrown rocks and bottles and other things from individuals rather than responding to the crowd as a group, they could have responded to individuals and taken them out and arrested them. When a crowd has responded to as a group, this can escalate tensions and cause the crowd to become cohesive and all act together in a similar fashion. And it's really counterproductive to treat a crowd in that manner and can make things worse rather than better. And one final thing, I think it's noteworthy that we should be very careful about how we define actions by protestors that might justify violence by the police in response. In the OI report, there were several examples of protestor actions that actually caused SRPD to use force and those were found within policy and compliant with policy. But I think it's important to look at the details. Two of those examples were protesters putting cones over canisters of tear gas to prevent them from being effective and dispersing the crowd and also protesters picking up canisters and throwing them back towards the police. You know, if you're at a protest with your family and your kids are there with you and tear gas is thrown at you, how are you gonna respond? I think that's a question that we all need to ask. And are those two examples really things we want to be able to justify extreme force against members of a crowd that could injure or even kill people? And I think that the council should look at that very carefully. So again, thank you for the opportunity. Dimitri, did you wanna say anything in closing? No further commentary. Thank you so much to the council and to the members of the public present. Thank you. Thank you so much, Ms. Smith and Mr. Threat for the presentation and for being here with us today. Council, do we have any questions on the Human Rights Commission report before we go on to our next report? So I did have two quick ones. And Mr. Threat, you touched on it very briefly. Can you talk a little bit about contagion during these protests, both from a perspective that you've seen from the protest side as well as from the law enforcement side? You touched on it very briefly, but when you and I have previously discussed this, I thought that it was important contextually for us to understand as we develop and talk about policies. Sure, contagion is a concept that explains what can happen in crowds in terms of the kind of emotional reactions of individuals who are part of a crowd. And it can happen on both the side of people who are in a crowd of protesters and also individuals who are police officers who are working together to try to help provide a peaceful protest. And what happens is that there tends to be a transmission of the emotional reaction of individuals from one to the other in the crowd. And to the extent police officers treat the crowd as a indistinguishable mass and respond with force to particular individuals who may be throwing things at them, that causes the crowd generally to start acting in the same way. So individuals who may have arrived at the protest entirely intent on being peaceful throughout and are now receiving projectiles being fired in their direction or hitting people that they know, they will tend to start acting like the more violent protesters and going with that direction instead of what they intended. By the same token, officers who are on the enforcement side of the equation, if they see other officers firing projectiles and discriminately at a crowd of protesters and if they're looking at the crowd and they see project bottles and rocks coming at them and don't carefully distinguish who is doing that but rather think it's the crowd doing that, then they'll go with the other members of law enforcement firing projectiles and that will escalate also. So the important thing to remember is that from a strategic and tactical standpoint on the law enforcement side, it's much more beneficial to target the individuals who are causing the problem, surround and arrest them and take them out of the equation so that they will no longer have that effect on other protesters. I really appreciate that and I'm glad you touched on that because I know that is one of the things that we'll discuss in the OIR report as well is that recommendation around as SRPD adapted what tactics were more effective than others and understanding contagion seems to be really important for as we develop this policy. My last question that I'll jump to another council member here for either of you has the human rights commission, has Iolero or any other organization put together a model ordinance for what a use of force policy might look like or for procedures around particularly first amendment protests. I know Oakland, for example, has one. Are there other cities that as our public safety subcommittee starts to work through some of these issues, are there specific cities or policies that they should start with for discussion purposes? Well, I don't think Iolero has put one together. They have looked briefly at the issue of protest policing and had a panel on it with their CEC that I don't think they've put together a model policy or suggested policy provisions. You mentioned Oakland. Oakland has been through multiple mass protests in the last years, including the Occupy protests. There were protests around the Ferguson events. And they've been pretty big and have late at night gone in directions that were pretty challenging for officers. And so they've been resulting a significant use of force in all of those protests. So Oakland has what I would consider a pretty good policy now. And to be honest, even with a good policy, when that police force and its mutual aid partners are overwhelmed by protests, they still sometimes go outside of policy and are scrambling to handle things and do things that violate their policies. So, it's a good starting point across the country. All agencies are struggling with these issues and are going through changes to their policies and looking at them. So it's a period of a lot of change and a lot of consideration. And I think there's, you can look across the country and get information from a lot of sources right now. Okay, thank you so much. Please remember Fleming. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Threat and Ms. Smith. I was wondering if you, one of you would reiterate, I think it was Mr. Threat. You mentioned the principles like proportionality and accountability in your introduction. Would you be willing to expound on how you see those as they relate to your report and recommendations moving forward? And would you reiterate them for the benefit of the council and our listeners? Oh, sure. Let me just second. I'm gonna get my list. So the principles come from the United Nation guidance on the use of less lethal weapons and they are expanded on and defined in that guidance. The principles are legality, precaution, necessity, proportionality, non-discrimination and accountability. And Ms. Smith also touched on some of these in her statement. So, I mean, legality is pretty self-explanatory. I think the techniques used have to be consistent with the legal authority that the police have and what the law provides. Precaution really is to do everything you can to avoid the use of the force. Necessity means you should only, I'm boiling these down to the most simple, necessity means you should only use the force where it's necessary to stop something that needs to be prevented. Proportionality means that the force should be in proportion to what it's responding to. So for example, if a protester said something degrading to a police officer and they responded with a projectile, that would not be a proportionate response. Non-discrimination means you don't use one kind of force on one group of people and another kind of force on another group of people. And accountability means that once it's happened that there's a review of it and where there are individual officers who go outside of what is authorized that they are held accountable for those mistakes. Thank you, that's really helpful. I'm just curious to know if you have any recommendations on resources that have been used to implement this principle effectively in this type of situation or policing? Yeah, I can put together a list of resources and send it to you. There's a lot that's come out this year that's actually very helpful in this area. Okay, thank you. All right, council members, do we have any other questions? All right, I just wanna thank both of you for presenting, Mr. Threat and Ms. Smith. Really appreciate it. We'll take a five minute break here to allow us to switch presenters to the OIR group up next. Council members go grab a glass of water and we'll be back for part B in five minutes. Thank you. Thank you. All right, Madam City Clerk, I see a quorum. Let's go ahead and recall the role and resume our meeting. Thank you, Mayor. Council member Tibbetts. Yeah. Council member Schwedhelm. Here. Council member Sawyer. Here. Council member Fleming. Here. Council member Alvarez. Present. Vice Mayor Rogers. Present. Mayor Rogers. Here. Let the record show that all council members are present. Great, thank you so much. Just as an additional reminder for folks, if you are interested in listening to the meeting in Spanish, go ahead and hit the interpretation button on your Zoom and we'll continue working our way through the reports, get the public comment in just a little bit here. Mr. City Manager. Yes, agenda item two, the independent review of police departments, internal affairs investigations of specific incidents of use of force by officers that occurred during the community protests in May and June 2020. Following the May June 2020 protests, the city of the Santa Rosa Police Department launched an internal investigation into the use of force instances that occurred during the civil unrest. It is department protocol to launch an internal investigation anytime an officer uses force. Given the nature of these incidents being investigated and the express community concerns, the city sought an outside auditor to conduct an independent review of the police department's internal investigation. Through a competitive process, OIR group was contracted for this role. The city provided OIR group unrestricted access to police records and information to complete their review process. OIR group is here to present their findings and the leads on that presentation are Michael Janakko and Stephen Conley and I will turn the presentation over to them. Thank you, Mr. City Manager. City Council, it's great to be before you this afternoon to present our report and our findings and we appreciate the opportunity to do so. And I have my colleague, Steve Conley with me who will be sharing the presentation this afternoon and we look forward to doing this and to presenting it also to the community of Santa Rosa regarding our findings. So as the city manager indicated, we were asked to conduct an independent, provide an independent report on the internal review process regarding the complaints and uses of force that were identified in the police department's response to protest activity after the George Floyd murder in late May and early June of 2020. Steve, if you can go to the next slide. Oh, I think Santa Rosa's in charge here. All right, Santa Rosa, if you can go to the next slide, thank you. So just a little bit, a very little bit about us. The older I get, the longer it takes to talk about my history, so I'm not gonna go into detail, but so I used to say that since 2001, we have been working in the world of oversight and conducting independent reviews and audits for approximately 20 years. And over that time, we've probably done work in probably 30 or 40 different police agencies throughout the state of California and outside California. And as part of that work, we have likely reviewed well over 2000 or 3000 force incidents as part of our responsibilities over the years. With particular regard to the events that happened last summer, we have been engaged in reviewing police responses to public protests in five different jurisdictions and have issued reports in two of them, your city being one, but we've also issued a report for Iowa City and we are currently working on reports for the cities of Santa Monica. That report is going to be out next week. Kalamazoo, Michigan and the city of San Jose, which we are currently, which is currently underway. The public reports, the reports on all of those after actions and our review of the way in which force was used last summer in response to First Amendment protected activity will all be public and so we are here to give you a high level pass on the findings with regard to our work and our engagement with regard to the work in your city. Next slide, please. So the scope of work was, as you know, city council, but for your community, I'll just advise that it was part of a larger Santa Rosa response. Obviously, we were able to hear the report put together by the Human Relations Commission. We also are aware and have had a chance to review the systemic report that was put together by the other consultants, the Hillard-Hines Group, which I understand you'll be hearing from later today. Our work was focused on the use as a force and complaints surrounding the use as a force as a result of the Santa Rosa Police Department's response to First Amendment activity. So we focused on the use as a force that happened while Santa Rosa was deployed, any misconduct investigations that came out of those use of force and any complaints that were received by the police department. And I'm going to have my colleague talk about the process we used to ensure that there was an independent review of each of those actions. Steve, and next slide, please. So the relationship that we had with the police department courtesy of the city was an unusual one. And so far as we do this thing in a lot of different capacities, and sometimes we conduct our own investigations, the department basically gives us the authority of the chief to do the investigation and to handle it completely independently. In other instances, we will go back when investigations are completed and evaluate them and make recommendations about the process. Here it was kind of an interesting hybrid in so far as that it was the department's professional standards group that was in charge of the investigation and review process and conducting it and doing the overwhelming majority of the actual work and reviewing through these hundreds of hours of body camera, video, et cetera. But we had the opportunity to participate as kind of second chair, if you will, and sit in in real time and be actively involved in the assessment process and the decision-making process about what route these particular allegations or issues ought to be driven towards. And then in terms of participating in the interviews, there were some cases that went to a formal administrative investigation, and we had the opportunity to participate in those interviews, sit in on them, ask questions, and kind of contribute our own perspective and again, make sure that all the issues that we had identified were being appropriately covered. Then at the back end of the process, we worked with the department on the assessment of results and the decision-making. The final authority for decision-making continued to rest with the chief of police, but it was very much of an interactive process and we really did achieve consensus on the outcome. So in terms of this slide, some key factors to bring to the council's attention and the public's attention is we had unfettered access to the materials that form the basis of these investigations. And the most obvious example of that is literally hundreds of hours of body camera. We didn't look at all, however many 1500 hours or whatever it was, but there was an expensive amount of body camera evidence and we had the access to all of it and obviously looked through a great deal of it in terms of carrying out our responsibilities. There was a very active interactive process with the department's investigators and decision-makers at every step of the way. And as I said before, we had an opportunity to participate in both the interviews and the decision-making regarding outcomes. Next slide, please. So I will say that one of the things that we're always looking at and very attentive to in terms of all of the reviews that we do of the internal review processes in law enforcement agencies is this idea of thoroughness, rigor and the legitimacy of the outcomes. So obviously the concern, public concern when the police are left to address their own issues, that raises some inherent questions about how unbiased and committed to the process that the police are gonna be, how legitimate the thoroughness and kind of rigor of the investigations are gonna be. And then when it comes to the outcomes, are they gonna be appropriately responsive to the evidence and will the accountability level be where it needs to be? And so that is, again, a focal point for us in terms of monitoring the work of different agencies. What I can tell you in Santa Rosa and in this process is that there was full cooperation from Santa Rosa PD. I mentioned the access before, but I mean we had multiple telephone conversations and meetings and exchanging documents and review. It was a very, very extensive process over the course of several months. And again, the access that we received allowed us to corroborate some of the work that the department was doing. And then last but not least, the investigation was framed originally when we got started in September based on some groundwork that Santa Rosa police already done in terms of identified concerns and some of the individual uses of force that it had started to put a fence around in terms of saying, okay, here's what happened on each given night. As the process continued, we participated actively in the whole issue spotting piece and raising questions and saying, what about this? And did you folks notice that? And why is that happening that way? And there was some further scoping of new inquiries, investigations. The department went back and looked at some other things or re-looked at some things at our request as the process unfolded. And again, my sense is that it was, it was they approached it with certainly professionalism but with a genuine commitment to wanting to do an appropriate job. Next slide, please. And that is sort of the thrust of this slide. This is a quote from the report itself. And my sense is that the, an OR group sense is that Santa Rosa, the Santa Rosa police department was indeed committed to looking at these things, holding its officers accountable and working to move forward as an agency based not just on the shortcomings that they identified on the part of individual officers but also some of the larger systemic issues that emerged during the course of a response to a very challenging set of circumstances that the police I think would tell you themselves were kind of overwhelming at times and certainly not something that they were used to or well-prepared for in some respects. So the process of learning from it and tailoring or re-tailoring things going forward is certainly a key component of the work that has happened in the time since those days in the late May and early June. Next slide, please. So Mike and I have been doing this kind of work together for 20 years and we have said, from really from the very beginning but it's been reinforced for us in many ways over the course of a lot of the different agencies and the different individual incidents that we've assessed. There really are two components in our view of an effective internal review process. So if a police agency is taking care of business the right way in terms of its after-action scrutiny of these events, there are gonna be two components. One is accountability. So the individual officer performance is going to be assessed and if it's found wanting in any ways either because of a malicious act or just a failure to comply with policy or failure to live up to the department's expectations and how things are trained and carried out we expect that those individual officers are going to be dealt with appropriately. And sometimes that can mean discipline up to and including discharge. Other times it can be other kinds of interventions whether it's the conduct issue doesn't rise to the level of policy violation but we're gonna do some sort of a documented counseling. So the department, everybody is on the same page of what the department expects and there's a record of it. Other times it's gonna be, hey, we're gonna send you to training because we don't think this was malicious in what you did but you didn't handle this as well as you could have and there are other options that we wish you would explore and we're based on this event we're gonna send you to a specific training program that hopefully will fill in some of those gaps and give you some new ideas. Those are just some examples. So all of those individual accountability pieces are certainly a key component and we'll talk about some specifics a little later on in the presentation. As for systemic reform, in some ways particularly in a situation like this with the protests and the kind of big ticket larger issues of how the police are going to engage with these events more holistically globally what's the approach gonna be? What does the community want and how what should the parameters be for using force or deciding that people are gonna be arrested and what are some of the responses? What uses of force are gonna be considered acceptable under the various and dynamic circumstances that the protest movement presented? All of those are really, really important questions and all of them were very much applicable to the situation here in Santa Rosa and one of the things that we showcased in our report and that we'll talk about later on our seven individual recommendations that relate more to again the systemic issues and not so much looking back at past officer conduct but saying going forward how should we approach a similar kind of situation differently or better based on what we've learned? Next slide please. So in terms of the kind of framework and just to kind of bring everybody up to speed I'm sure you are certainly familiar on some level with these particulars but in terms of kind of resetting the stage the murder of George Floyd happened on May 25th which was a Monday, I think it was Memorial Day and as that week progressed the video in the Floyd case and the larger concerns across the country about discrimination and police violence and injustice that were manifesting themselves in a lot of different situations and that the Floyd case really exemplified for people it really produced a national movement obviously Minneapolis was the epicenter of it but as the week progressed that it really did spread across the country in almost unprecedented ways and it reached the city of Santa Rosa in earnest on Saturday May 30th and this is one of the questions that I hope and expect that the council and the department are going to engage with more completely tomorrow and in the future and that is the very very challenging issue of how do we facilitate a first amendment demonstrations in ways that promote the safety and give people an opportunity to protest and express dissenting opinions and how do we balance that against some of the concerns at the edges of the protest groups which were issues of vandalism and other kinds of unlawful behavior that really create public safety issues and also make things very challenging for the police and that whole idea of you've got 10 people that are acting in an assaultive way or they're vandalizing property in a group of 120 people and what is the best way to address that these are all very very much open questions and I think there's room for improvement as the police department would be the first to concede. I will also tell you that Santa Rosa was not unique. As Mike said, we've been doing this kind of work in other agencies or with other jurisdictions as well and the repeated refrain is people just were not ready in terms of their resources, their experience level, their training, they did not have the preparation for the scope and intensity of the protests that swept across the country at the end of May and again, it's kind of an obvious point but it bears a certain amount of repeating or attention and that is one of the real distinctive challenges of this was that the idea that the police were not only entrusted with public safety responsibilities but were the, and so they're out there and it's all hands on deck to make sure that these protests are being conducted safely and that traffic issues and other kinds of concerns are being appropriately considered, they're out there working the very large demonstration and at the same time, they are literally the focal point of the demonstration and the focal point of people's anger and obviously that's a tough position to be in in terms of getting the cooperation of people and engaging with them in constructive ways when there's this undercurrent of hostility so all of that stuff, not unique to Santa Rosa extremely, extremely challenging and I think agencies dealt with it too with more or less success but I think in many ways it would be the exception instead of the rule for the jurisdiction not to experience any of these challenges or growing pains or controversies that emerged and as that last bullet highlights, there was an unprecedented volume of use of force in response to this protest activity and that cuts in a couple of directions. It really raises alarm bells on the one hand, it's like, wow, why is this happening and why is force being the response to these protests and are there significant First Amendment implications to this, is this retaliatory? What are the takeaways from it and the concerns that people have flagged are 100% understandable? At the same time, within that larger context of protest and genuine dismay over the way policing and the justice system and racial equity issues in the United States were and are going there was a lot of instances of behavior in these crowds and intermingled with the other kinds of protests in which there was unlawful activity, destructive activity, assaultive behavior, all of which had implications of their own and challenges for the department in terms of balancing the First Amendment versus the order and control pieces of it. Next slide, please. So just to put things into a little bit of perspective in terms of, again, that intensity and unusual nature of these days, there were more than 120 individual 40 millimeter rounds of various kinds. And we'll talk a little bit about the differences between the rounds, but a 40 millimeter, that 40 millimeter distinction just refers to the size of the shell. And there are a lot of different things that can go inside it. And we'll talk about the differences between that and all of them are deployed through the same basic launcher mechanism. And that's that weapon that's shown at the top of the page there. So there were more than 120 of those rounds. And if you skip down to the last bullet there, versus one 40 millimeter round that was deployed in all of 2019. And I think you would see that in prior years that the statistical tally is much more for the center as a police department is much more in tune with the 2019 numbers than the 2020 three day window and this incredibly intense amount of force and engagements and conflicts with protesters that were going on over during this period. Similarly, there were 30 individual documented deployments of gas of various kinds. And again, some canisters and there were different mechanisms for the delivery of those. And the issue of tear gas is absolutely a sensitive one and one that merits some very, very careful consideration. There were 30 deployments over the course of the three days that we were focused on versus zero for all of 2019. And it just goes to show your couple of things. One, how extraordinary the events of late spring were in Santa Rosa as well as in other places. Two, it also goes to some of the ways in which departments like Santa Rosa found themselves less than, you know, perfectly ready to deal with these in the most efficient and effective ways. And unfortunately there were some negative implications to that lack of training, that lack of experience, that lack of preparation and we'll get into those. Next slide, please. So in terms of the, I want to kind of break this up into a couple of different categories and I hope this makes sense. One of the things that we do in our report is critique aspects of the force review process. In so far as we noticed some issues in how and how well the department tracked its use of force sort of before we ever got there and before this review was contemplated. The review of use of force is absolutely a fundamental accountability and systems issue in law enforcement use of force review and effective use of force review is I think a cornerstone of an effective agency in a lot of different directions. And for the, my sense is that the Santa Rosa police department has protocols for the standard review of force that are entirely appropriate, entirely consistent with best practices and certainly they gesture towards the sort of scrutiny and accountability that we would expect a forward thinking agency to have. Some of that didn't really make it, it didn't survive the intensity and the volume of incidents that occurred within this relatively tight window. The department did do its best to go back and fill in where it could and do some documentation and do some individual acts of homework, but there were some breakdowns in the normal way of doing things that I think had some implications and that potentially can and should be avoided in the future. A couple of examples of this include individual officer documentation. So when any officer uses force and it is not a common event by any stretch of the imagination, the department's annual statistical reviews and reports would break it down by the types of force that are used. It's a good thing for the public to have some awareness of when an officer uses force of any kind that is expected to be documented and it's gonna be reviewed by a supervisor to make sure that it was appropriate and in policy and we couldn't or shouldn't have done something differently. That did not happen in the same predictable, regimented automatic way that normally would. Things were just moving too quickly and officers would be out for literally 14 or 16 hours at a time. They would have multiple individual uses of force and then they would turn around and be back at work the next day and the reporting suffered a little bit. That said, there were some efforts after the fact to go back and fill in some of the gaps and the department, as I say, did do its due diligence in terms of reviewing body camera footage and responding to all the information that it had in an effort to put as much of a fence as it could around the individual force uses. And I think that their process, their after the fact process really did address some of the most glaring shortcomings but obviously it goes into the lessons learned category in terms of what should we do differently in terms of mechanisms for making sure that if there were ever to be a situation like this where officers were using a high volume of force in a relatively short period of time, how could we be sure that those were each documented and treated with the kind of scrutiny and concern that any normal individual force should receive? The second bullet point there is, again, a systemic flaw and that is that one of the individuals that was given sort of frontline responsibility for conducting an assessment of all the uses of force and kind of organizing them and describing them, defining them and doing the first line of evaluation of them, one of those individuals was a sergeant who actually had a lot of relevant responsibility and training and in terms of his assignment in the department, it made sense for him to be the one who was entrusted with the first level of this project in, again, and this was host the immediate days of the protest. However, that individual for some different reasons was actually deployed almost as a frontline officer for some of the critical days of the protests and was involved in several uses of force himself and there is something inherently flawed in that whole idea of somebody being entrusted to review his own act, his own force acts and also those of people that are obviously right around him because his perspective is inevitably limited. So we didn't have the sense that that led to any sort of malicious attempts to skew information one way or another, but it's just inherently problematic and the department recognizes that. They basically put some safeguards into place in order to say, hey, we will make sure that any use of force that this individual was involved in has additional layers of sort of independent scrutiny from scratch and so they did stem the damage of it, if you will, but obviously a suboptimal approach and I think they would again learn from that and try to avoid it in the future. That said, our overall impression was that the department made good faith efforts to assess the individual uses. It was challenging to do for a lot of different reasons and including the fact that the body camera recordings while they are tremendously helpful, they are far from being a complete, clear, obvious, comprehensive document, if you will, of exactly what occurred and there were multiple instances for example, when people were too far away in the dark to for the actions of the officers to be completely assessed, completely and objectively, assessed just based on the video. That said, the department really did do the best it can. The officers were oftentimes providing narration and our sense of it overall was that the department was making a good faith effort to evaluate all of these instances and make sure that the officers were acting in compliance with policy and there were some individual, like we looked at a bunch of stuff, we looked at different body camera angles just kind of surveying around and on those occasions when we did raise a question and say, hey, what about this? I don't see anything about this. Have you guys looked at this? The department would always go back and say, what's your question? And they would review it and when additional assessment was warranted, they would go ahead and conduct that. So it, as I say, it was an interactive process and we caught some other things along the way. Next slide, please. So I wanna move now to the substantive piece as opposed to the process piece. We talked a lot about the process and some deficiencies in the process. In terms of the substance, the department found and we concurred that almost every single of the individual uses of forces that were recorded were consistent with policy, at least as it existed at the time. And that's an important caveat that I want to flag for you because the department has already made some changes and we are certainly supportive of that, particularly with regard to refining the parameters for the authorized deployment of the 40 millimeter launcher and the different shells that can be used with it. So we'll talk a little bit about that as we go along. But again, our sense was that we agreed with the department and it's finding that almost all of its individual uses were consistent with policy. There were two very significant instances in which the force was found to be out of policy. And unfortunately, both of those led to significant injury for the people who were on the receiving end of that force. That is obviously problematic. It is troubling and it is very much understandably those, the injuries that resulted and received some publicity were understandably a source of a considerable amount of the public concern and consternation and or even anger over the police response to the protests. And so we'll talk about those a little bit more, but I will tell you that the department's opened formal misconduct investigations into both of those cases and did review them quite carefully. And then last but not least, there were complaint cases that were investigated and evaluated based on some of the different sources of information that the department received, including some of the litigation, the lawsuits that were filed and some of the emails that they received from people and letters from individuals who wanted to raise certain concerns. And so the department marshaled all of those and included those in their process. Let's keep going, please. Next slide. You've got it, Steve. Oh, wow, great. Thank you. You're more efficient than I am. So in terms of these, the injury cases that I wanted to draw attention to, one of them involved a fairly serious injury to the face of a protester. Considerable damage was done and it was a notorious event in several different respects. I will tell you in the report talks about this in more detail and I encourage people to read through it. The finding that the department reached and we concurred is that this was not an intentional targeting either of this individual based on his identity or any familiarity that anybody had with him from the past. There was not evidence to support that. And we also, after a lot of painstaking theories and review of a lot of different kinds of evidence and including the opinions of an outside expert as to what could have happened and what did happen, our best sense at the end of the investigation is that the targeting of this individual in a specific way was not intentional and certainly the striking of him in the face which is prohibited by policy was, again, not intentional but there's absolutely culpability involved because the practice that the officer used in deploying the round that we now believe injured this individual, he was targeting an area in an effort to create a deterrent which is not necessarily something that the department teaches and the potential things that can go wrong when these things are fired down range without a very, very specific focus in mind, it is believed that this was sort of the unintended result of a sort of improvised deployment strategy in the context of a standoff with a group of protesters at about one o'clock in the morning on one of the nights and again, the injury that resulted was the very unfortunate result. So the department did a lot of investigation and again, found that officer to be culpable. The other most serious injury that resulted in a finding of misconduct and policy violation was the inappropriate use of a particular kind of 40 millimeter munition known as a barricade round and that was a very, very serious mistake. It should never have happened and there were some significant safety issues related to that as the report talks about, I believe there were a total of four of those rounds that were deployed. They never should have made their way into the field for the purpose of the crowd control that was happening and the mix up from the officers is again, a little bit of a complicated convoluted thing that it really did have to do with the volume with which people were moving and trying to adapt to the circumstances and get the materials that they needed after having been out in the field already for a few hours. Perhaps most significantly, the barricade rounds that did find their way into the field and were used negligently were very, very close. It was a new kind of barricade round for the department and they were very, very close in appearance to a much more safe and appropriate foam baton round that the officers were also using in the course of those different days. So again, very serious issue in terms of the unintended consequences and in some ways it could have been worse and the injury that resulted was obviously extremely unfortunate and the practices or lack of practices that allowed that to happen including some of the failures by the line level officers to do their due diligence as they are expected by policy to do resulted in this mistaken deployment occurring in this injury resulting in and there were some different officers that were found to be in violation of policy and that includes the two officers who used these rounds including the one that injured the individual and two other officers also received discipline because of their actions in failing to kind of carry out their responsibilities with regard to control of those munitions and the proper identification and safety measures that should have been in place and were not because things were sort of evolving very dynamically in the course of those evenings. So there were other injury cases that the department investigated including some ones that got some public and media attention because of injuries to people's heads that they believe they have been struck by these rounds. The department did do investigations into these individual cases as well and attempted to reconstruct what had happened based on the information that it had and the videos and piecing together social media videos from their own body warm camera videos and other perspectives. They did what they could to determine who was responsible and how it happened but in both of those other injury cases they were not able to trace it back to a specific officer and we concurred with that result being inclusive and obviously if more information were to become available then it's potentially actionable. Next slide please. So Mike, I wanna kick it back to you for this slide so I can have a little water but this is in terms of some of the reform and recommendations ideas we have there are several of them related to the force category. Mike? Yeah, well, we will have our recommendations at the end of the presentation in a minute here but these are some of the areas that have been where the focus of the department's review and improvement and to the department's credit it didn't sit around for a year waiting for all of the reviews to be done before they conducted its own sort of systemic review and have made some reforms with regard to guidance to officers and other areas. That doesn't mean that there isn't more to be done we think there is and we'll talk about our recommendations that as our last piece. But to speak about this, the department did recognize soon into this soon after the few days of responding to protest activity that they did need to up their game with regard to reporting and review protocols particularly with regard to uses of force. So what we mean by that is that, you know, as Steve indicated when an officer uses force in the field, understand their protocols a sergeant gets out there starts an immediate investigation the body camera footage is pulled and reviewed and we're on to the races with regard to a mature review and a timely review. But that didn't happen in every case here in regard to the few days at the end of May and early June because of the volume of force that was being used and the way in which the force was being used not necessarily in every case targeting individuals and also less attention being placed on the need for a timely notification of a supervisor. Hey, we've just used force here or before going home at the end of shift writing out a use of force memo which is what the standard policy would be. And so I think the department has recognized the need to up their game with regard to this in future cases in which there is a large deployment and the potential for sustained uses of force. The department has also come up with new guidance and in fact, new restrictions on when and in what conditions 40 millimeters which is the less lethal rounds should be used. And we have some additional recommendations about that process and feel that there should be more conversation on that, but certainly council and community should be aware that the department has already worked to create new restrictions and guidance rosters on the use of these less lethal rounds in the crowd control context. Finally, and very significantly in my view, the department soon recognized that there needed to be more control and distribution of munitions. Obviously as Steve has indicated, the barricade rounds going out into the field and with under the belief that they were simply additional less lethal rounds for use against individuals was a huge mistake, a huge error and one that shouldn't happen and can't happen in the future. And really what methods that are in place, the best method to prevent this from happening again is to have very good inventory and control regarding the distribution of munitions. If you recall the earlier slide that Steve put up said, there were over 120 uses of 40 millimeter over the four or five day period that in which the protest activity occurred. The number shouldn't be over 120. The number should be a precise number. It should be 134 or 167, but just over 120, that's not good enough. So there's gotta be very, very careful control assessment and counting of how many munitions are being deployed at any one particular incident and how many, you know, and even down to which officers deployed, which munitions and how many did they deploy? And there needs to be some ways of checking on that. And there are effective ways to do that if you put a priority on that issue. The issue that we haven't talked about yet is the issue of dispersal orders. So under California law, before you order a crowd to disperse and under current Santa Rosa Police Department policy, you're supposed to give warnings to the crowd, to the protesters that they are to disperse. And as part of that order, you're supposed to indicate where the police department wants them to disperse to. You're supposed to indicate that if there is no dispersal that force may be used on the crowd, including the application of less lethal or tear gas. And the problems that we have seen and there's some indication this may have happened in your city is that the departments do not necessarily, at least last year, did not have very effective communication devices to ensure that to the degree possible that every protester was aware of the dispersal order. Even those in the back of the crowd, even those that may have been some distance away from the megaphone or wherever, whatever it was that the equipment was you being used to communicate those orders. And I think I know, based on our discussions with the department, that the department is focusing on finding ways to more effectively communicate these dispersal orders to protesters. And finally, the department, I think in fact, on the fly last summer was beginning to realize as many other departments have, that's the traditional skirmish lines, the traditional gearing up in riot gear and riot batons and all of that may not be effective in dealing with today's, the way in which protests are done today, the way in which protests are effectuated today and the segments of the crowd that may get into illegal activity. And so a new approach is instead of treating everybody who's protesting the same, which isn't fair because not all the protesters are behaving the same to target those who are behaving aggressively who are engaged in assault of conduct and to focus on that activity rather than the whole activity of the protests. And by having that more of a scalpel approach and effectuating effective arrests and having arrest teams that are going to be focusing on, even if you're useless lethal to then come and arrest those individuals, take them out of the process. That is a more effective way to manage the crowd and results in reduces, highly reduces the potential for individuals who are purely innocent, getting struck with munitions and other force. So Steve, I'll turn it back to you for the misconduct investigations and then we'll wrap up with our recommendation. Next slide, please. So the misconduct investigations were generated in a few different ways, including from within the department, they identified a couple of issues on in terms of the initial work that they had done and opened investigations accordingly. As I said before, the legal claims were treated as complaints as if they were complaints from members of the public about police conduct and that there are agencies that we have worked with where that does not happen. And the legal claim, the litigation process is really walled off from the complaint process and the administrative investigation process. And unless somebody fills out the form and submits it separately from making a legal claim. But here with the center as a police department said, if there's a legal claim that we're aware of, then we are going to address the issues that it brings forth in the allegations and those complaints, those legal complaints, legal claims were certainly a source of some of the individual investigations that were done. Other complaints again, emerged over the course of the days immediately following and then subsequently and those two were considered by the department and kind of routed in some different directions depending on the nature of them and whether there was corroborating evidence and we had the opportunity to participate in that process and evaluate that process. Last but not least, there were a few instances as I think I mentioned earlier where we asked the department for further investigation based on concerns that we identified in our independent review of some of these individual incidents and the department agreed to follow up in one way or another including with one additional formal internal affairs investigation as well as some other counselings and other kinds of interventions that we'll talk about. Next please. So the result of some of these additional misconducting investigations besides the injuring force cases that we talked about, there was formal discipline for an officer in one other case that related to a use of force. The use of force was found to be in policy but there were some collateral concerns about the officer's conduct that led to sustained policy violation and there were other interventions in terms of documented counseling for a few different instances in which either officers had neglected to activate their body-worn cameras in keeping with the department requirements and then other instances where we just kind of flagged or the department flagged issues of professionalism inappropriate comments that were made. Most of these, and obviously that's always disappointing when you hear them, most of these were not directed at members of the public. They were more officer to officer and kind of captured by the body cameras but we have taken the position that it just reflects very poorly, it's not consistent with the ideals of the agency and the attitudes that the agency should be promoting and reinforcing and the department did address those things. So the total of issues or the total of individual instances in which that led to some sort of response by the department, it was 10 issues that resulted in eight officers receiving some kind of an intervention from the department whether it was formal discipline or some other form of documented counseling or other training or other effort by the department to address the concern that had been raised. Lastly, some of the complaints that were looked at were exonerated and some of these were systemic in their nature. They had to do with people complaining about the tear gas issues and complaining about some of the conditions related to arrest. Those were absolutely, many of those were very legitimate concerns and things that the department couldn't should be looking at but not necessarily connected back to an act of misconduct by individual officers. It was more a breakdown in the department's preparation and handling things the way they were supposed to. So other cases were exonerated. And by the way, so some of them were systemic issues that weren't really issues of individual officer's conduct but led to recommendations. And some of them, the department reviewed the issue. There were a couple of forced cases that prompted complaints. The department reviewed them and found the force to be in policy with the help of the body camera and officer reports and everything else. And OIR looked at those also and concurred with the outcomes. Next slide, please. And back to the recommendations and Michael turn it over to you. Yeah, down the home stretch here, council but just to go over the seven recommendations, we largely were focusing on use of force and the complaint process and the investigative process as well as the misconduct investigations that came out of the review of force. And we recognize and you will, I'm sure here from Hillard Heinz who did more of a systemic 50,000 foot view of the way in which Santa Rosa PD responded those critical days. But because Hillard Heinz did not look at the force in the way that we did, we found seven areas that were force related that we thought were important to identify and present on a going forward basis to improve the department's response. In future similar activities. One, and I've talked all about these in different contexts but just to go over them one more time. One is the enhanced documentation for large scale events and the focus here is primarily in ensuring that officers at the briefings before deploying that they are reminded how important it is to document the force that any force that's going to be used that they buy any particular officer and that sergeants should also be reminded that there is a need to get this information on paper sooner rather than later. The second question has to do with, the second recommendation has to do with supervisors and what we found as Steve has indicated at least in a couple instances where sergeants were actually performing and using force as a line officer would do and what we like to see is that supervisors are supervising line officers with regard to decisions about using force but not actual force users. Obviously there are extenuating circumstances and under extraordinary circumstances sergeants can use force but ordinarily you want the sergeants out there ensuring that things are being done according to Hoyle and according to the expectations of the department rather than using force themselves. And related to that is our third recommendation is that if an officer has used force on an operation that officer should not be part of the formal review process for other force users. The two shouldn't be commingled and there needs to be a separation on that with regard to just the idea of objectivity if no other reason. The fourth is a larger and conversation that we believe should be had which is while the department has placed restrictions on less lethal munitions in crowd enforcement context there has been broader discussions by numerous communities up and down the state of California about whether less lethal munitions are the right tool in large crowd enforcement context. And the recommendation really is for the city to engage with the community about that issue in a constructive way to see whether or not the use of 40 millimeters makes sense connected up with trying to control or manage First Amendment activity. And in some jurisdictions the decision has been made that it doesn't make sense. So I think that conversation would be important to have in the city of Santa Rosa. The fifth recommendation is to enhance mechanisms for enforcement related communications. And I've already talked about this in regards to the dispersal orders to make sure that everyone hears the order so everyone understands what the intent of the police department is and what the directions, if any, are provided to the protesters by police. The sixth is related to four but this is really about tear gas. And in the same way that there has been reevaluation, reconsideration and discussion about whether less lethal munitions should be used in the context of the First Amendment activity. There are similar conversations going on throughout the state of California at the local level, at the state level regarding whether or not tear gas also is an effective or the best tool to use in controlling or trying to manage protest activity. And some would say for reasons I think you've heard in the earlier presentation the proponents of why maybe that is not the best tool to use. And I think again, this is a conversation piece that should be had on an ongoing and forward going basis. And finally, and in some ways, most importantly, I've talked about this before, but I can't emphasize enough in my view, the need to get 40 millimeters are gonna be used in the way in which they were used in the end of May and early June in your city. There have to be very, very careful safeguards inventory to ensure that the right munitions are used at the right time and to avoid what occurred in your city last year in which the wrong munition was used at the wrong time. Just to conclude last slide, please. We appreciated your patience in staying with us as we went over this relatively dense presentation. We think overall that Santa Rosa did good work, maybe a tad late to the game with regard to the force issues. But once they got started, we think they did a robust job that we and they, meaning the department have identified reforms for future performance. And we appreciate council your interest. And I understand you're gonna go on and to hear public comment. And then even into tomorrow, perhaps with regard to the dialogue that you have already started with your community and continue to embrace your community with. And I think that's a testament to effective leadership and appreciate you listening to your community with regard to these very critical issues. So with that, I'm gonna stop talking and certainly are available for any questions that you have, Mr. Mayor, or any of your colleagues on council. All right, thank you so much. Council members, who wants to start with questions? Council member Tibbets. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you for this presentation. I have a couple of questions for you, especially as we go into the next presentation with our own police department and the policy work tomorrow. Twice now, I've heard both from the group that preceded you and yourselves that we should be using the scalpel approach, more of the targeted control of bad behavior as opposed to crowd control. Can you share with us what a policy like that would look like and also what it would entail in terms of personnel requirements? I'm not the expert in the room, obviously, but I would assume that maybe require more officers. I don't know, but that's obviously something I would be interested in, but I've reviewed a lot of the footage from these nights when this transpired. And I think that trying to make those to identify perpetrators who were acting in bad faith and frankly destroying an otherwise noble and good protest, it seems like it would be difficult to me. Can you share any wisdom with us on that? Sure, council member Tibbets, nothing's easy with regard to this. And I think hopefully the takeaway you receive from at least our presentation is that nothing is easy in this arena. That being said, the old fashioned, I'll call it old fashioned even though it was the way in which many departments responded in late May to protest activity is as they always respond, which is create a line, put the officers cheek to cheek, put them in riot gear, give them a riot baton, give them less lethal munitions and you have this faceless presence that in some ways often serves as a escalating feature rather than a de-escalating feature. It does show a show of force, but that's often not effective in controlling crowds or telling them what you wanna do. And the other part of it, of course, it's not easy, but if in fact you have mobile force units that are more nimble, that are off the line, that are not in that skirmish line sort of configuration, they can get obs on the protest at large and eventually you're going to see who it is in the crowd that is engaged in assault of behavior, which I think is the behavior that needs to be stopped primarily. Obviously the vandalism is also a concern and if there is time and resources to stop that, that's important, but it's the assault of behavior back towards the police or other protesters that I think is the element that needs to be removed from the situation. And so by having these mobile field force units sort of as a complement to the deployment, you can then assign those individuals to identifying the miscreants, if you will, the law breakers and removing them from the situation. The advantage of that also, Council Member Tibbets, if it's effectively done, is that the peaceful protesters do not have to be dispersed. They can continue to be engaged in peaceful protesting and they don't get overspray from the tear gas that is the other option or they don't get hit accidentally by a less lethal bullet that is sort of indiscriminately fired in an effort to disperse the crowd as opposed to targeting an individual who is an actual assaulter. Okay, thank you. And also when your presentation, one thing that struck me was you spoke about the dispersal notice or dispersal notification. And I can't recall if it was part of the slide where we needed to beef up communications. I think it was. But could you expand upon or opine on whether you felt that we gave appropriate dispersal notice? Because again, I wanna share my perspective with the public after reviewing the footage that I reviewed. And again, I recognize that the footage I reviewed was from the police officer's vantage point. So I could hear very loudly and clearly that there was very sufficient dispersal notification. And I also will go so far as to say that, whether we like it or not, the law was, if in the event of an unlawful assembly, we have to protect life and property. And I think we have plenty of footage that definitely shows that there was a lot of looting and vandalism going on. And so therefore, I think it empirically and objectively became an unlawful assembly. Now I wanna say to the public who are listening to me right now going forward, I wanna find a way that we do better policing to allow protests to continue. That's why I have a real interest in this mobile force unit concept. But I also wanna know from your perspective, gentlemen, and please feel free to be honest and frank, was there insufficient or inadequate dispersal notification? Do you wanna take the point on that? Sure, I would be glad to and thank you for the question. I would say that it got better as the week went on. And what I always said to the department folks that I spoke to about this issue is the department wants to be on the side of the angels here in terms of giving everybody the fair opportunity to understand what's happening and making sure that whatever issues there are, they aren't issues of miscommunication or misunderstanding. And particularly, and this kind of makes sense because Saturday night was when things really moved to a different level. I saw instances where protestors were engaging with the, and genuinely, they seemed genuinely confused about why they were being told to leave and asked to leave or what have you. And I found some legitimate, first of all, they seemed very sincere. But second of all, in terms of my listening to some of the audio, and I certainly respect your impression and there were other instances when it was much more clear and projected and repeated. But certainly on that first night or two, I think that the issue of confusion or misunderstanding or unawareness was a legitimate one. And again, as things progressed through the week and as people became more aware of what was happening and it's the second night of tear gassing and now the third night of these standoffs after curfew with protestors, that has a little bit of a different feel than the first night when everybody really was, I think there was a high level of genuine confusion based on the lack of equipment and just the preparation deficiencies. Thank you, Steve. And then my last question is for Sean. You know, I've noticed it so far in these presentations when looking at the presentation that's supposed to come, we aren't getting any pictures or body cam footage, correct? We're only gonna be seeing these presentations. That is correct. I guess my question then to you and or Sue, our city attorney is what's the reason for that? Cause I've got to, and please make no mistake, Michael and Steven, this is no judgment on you. Your presentation was great, but I'm a little bit confused and somewhat frustrated as to why when we're seeing these reports of some pretty serious allegations, like we saw from Mr. Threat and Ms. Smith about pulling somebody's hair out and kicking it on the ground, is there a reason? Is that still an ongoing investigation? Is that why we're not seeing body cam footage on it? So my frustration is this guys, we're here giving bullet points to the public, but I think that we need to be also showing the public what it is that, what information or evidence we have. I, the way I see it is the city is effectively on trial here with the public about how we responded to the situation. And we're asking the public to kind of see it from our perspective. And I just, you know, I'm not, I'm worried that a bullet point isn't gonna do that. I understand about your bullet points. There's nothing more helpful than a graphic representation of what has occurred. And we've seen that, I mean, George Floyd murder happened and what happened may not have happened, but for the video. So we get that two parts to your question. And I would defer to your city attorney and city manager, some degree, but my understanding is under the new transparency law, some of this information may end up being disclosed at some point, but not now. The second thing is with regard to many, much of it though, there are privacy concerns, not only with regard to the officers involved, but with regard to the protesters. And so releasing that information, sort of willy-nilly, without any careful thought, there are some competing considerations there council member. But then the final thing I wanna say is that to the degree you mentioned, the one allegation of someone's hair being pulled out, that didn't come across to us. We are not aware of that allegation. As far as we know, the police department did not receive any allegations such as that. Well, I appreciate you talking about that, Michael, because this is what has me concerned. We have a public these days that is increasingly becoming an us versus them public. And I think there are probably some good reasons for that. I think there's a lot of historical context for that, but it's difficult for me sometimes to work within the city, because I feel like I work with a lot of really good people, both here on the council and in our police department, and we're always trying to be better and improve. And so when we bring that kind of information to a public forum, I really hope that we can bring information that is conclusive and definitive that either supports or refutes that what's being talked about, because I think our public deserves that level of transparency. Absolutely, and it's hard to prove a negative, but all I can say is that did not get into the complaint process by SRPD. Thank you, Michael. And Madam City Attorney or Mr. City Manager, did either of you want to respond as well? Well, I'll certainly just echo what Michael said exactly. Some of this body-worn can will be released if certain findings are sustained and as the disciplinary process runs its course. But in general, we don't just release body-worn cam. If we wanted to include it, we would have to go through a process of blurring faces, of making sure privacy, and as Michael indicated, not just for the officers, but equally for members of the public that were out involved in the protests. So it's not a simple matter of simply plugging in some body-worn cam into the presentation. I recognize that, Sue, but I do hope that at some point in the future, we can kind of bring forward that information. And the reason why is whether we did things right or wrong, again, I'm coming from a place where I watched our video in closed session two weeks ago. And honestly, I felt for the most part good about the job that a lot of our officers were doing. Now, did we do some things wrong? Absolutely. Do we need to correct going forward? Absolutely. Did we do, did bad things happen to protestors or people involved in the protest that we should not be proud of? Absolutely. We can do a better job. But again, I just, I come from this place where I'm watching the public go grow increasingly apart at a time when we should be doing everything we can to come together. And I feel just really strongly that if we're putting information out there, we need to put out evidence too. And we can certainly explore what options we might have for putting something together. But it, but the council should be aware that that is a significant undertaking to do that. But we can sure look at that and discuss it. So, but thank you. And I certainly understand your concerns and the openness. Council Member Sveta. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you for this report. You know, it was interesting that you indicated some information about the munitions and chemical agents from like 2019. Well, some of us have been around a little bit longer. And this is one of those low frequency high liability events, you know, in the city of Santa Rosa, you know, we've been doing crowd control events coming back to the 70s with the Nazi riots at Franklin Park in downtown all the way to occupy. And each time I think the city has done an effort to say what work would didn't work, what do we do next time? But, you know, I'm very complimentary of the city manager going to this level of in depth because again, the outcomes of these several days was not desirable for anyone. Didn't need, I don't think anyone's expectation. So thank you for the thorough review. So I do have some questions about you and your collective experiences with, are there some departments that you would say are a model for the best practices and or model programs for response to these type of incidents? Okay, no, you know, unfortunately, you know, we are continuing to look for the perfect police agency and that doesn't exist. But what I can say is that virtually every agency that is forward thinking is looking at these issues. And I have to say in our experience that you all are ahead of the game with regard to that. You know, some have complained that maybe it's taken so long to get these reviews out. Well, that may or may not be true, but I appreciate thoroughness and I also appreciate staying with it. And it sounds like you all are staying with it. So council member, what I would suggest to you is that as a result of your process and your continued process, I hope that I'll be able to say, hey, you all may want to take a look and see how Santa Rosa has improved their response to the crowd control a year from now or two years from now. And I would appreciate it. Hopefully you'll be in that position because I would just use the example of our Kahootz program that we're examining now. So we went to Eugene, Oregon to find this model and we're trying to create a model for all of the state or if not the nation when we actually do implement. So I hope we can do that. I also have some questions as we progress through here. One thing that I did not see in the report or commented on about what role the curfew does play or does not play some of, from a best practice perspective, what are your thoughts or comments on the declaration of a curfew? Is the Senate or not every city declare a curfew? Absolutely. And this is an issue again, there's nothing to suggest that the declaration of curfew was inappropriate untoward or outside of the law. And I understand and probably assume, presume, but the legal niceties of the curfew were complied with. But then there's the second question, which is even though you can declare a curfew, what conditions should exist before you do declare a curfew? And I think that also is a subject worthy of further discussion, because simply because you can declare a curfew, there are certainly competing considerations from business owners and attendees and protesters about that issue. So I think again, council member, that that also should be part of a future forward going discussion. Well, with that, because it kind of ties into the comment and you said I think it was a recommendation number six, engaged with the community regarding tear gas and protest activity. It seems like gosh, it would have been nice for us to do that because again, it's a low frequency. When do you recommend having those conversations? Before there's ever a need for a curfew, the best decisions are made when things are not in crisis mode, in our experience. And so I think this is a good time tomorrow and the next day and then in the oncoming weeks before you have another crisis where you have to decide, do we put a curfew in place? And I'm not suggesting that the decision to declare a curfew in your city was right or wrong. I'm just saying as with any decision, always looking back at it and tabletopping it and trying to evaluate and getting input from others all impacted individuals on the issue is the key to best government in my view. And so it's for some foundational things from my perspective again, using your expertise to set matter of experts and review other departments. So we talked about dispersal order. What is the best practice? Who makes a declaration? Is that from the command post senior officer on the field or someone else? Who do you recommend when we, and again, I think tomorrow we'll get into this more. Who makes that declaration that it's a unlawful assembly from the best practice perspective, not specifically this case. Some of that will turn on the events that are being experienced. And there always probably needs to be an exception for exigency where a first or second level supervisor makes that call. But I think in a perfect situation, which nothing is ever perfect, but ordinarily I would want that decision to be made by the highest level of command on scene. Okay. And again, this is gonna be helpful, I think for our tomorrow's discussion. And then the same question would be from the best case practices with the deployment of chemical agents, who makes that call? Because I know it's a total different scenario than lethal force where you may have two officers side by side, one feels threatened, one doesn't, but it's a different animal when it comes to crack and full best practices. Where does that chemical agent deployment decision get made? Again, the principle that we adhere to is the higher up in the chain of command that that decision can be pushed. And the higher command presence that's there that makes that decision, I think the better office it is. Because that requires in the same way that things need to be approved at certain levels of review. That's an important decision. And if the chief is available, make that decision or his designated, that should be the person making that call. And if I could just jump in council member, I know one thing that you should talk to the police about tomorrow is the whole idea of the department operations center. And I know that they had executive level folks back at the headquarters who had camera observations and were in regular contact with the people in the field. And the two things that you are describing the dispersal orders and the tear gas, those are really, really significant exercises of police power. And one of the things that we have seen in the different jurisdictions that we've worked with is you want to make sure that you are getting it right in terms of having a clear cut justification with regard to the legal standards and everything else. And so that whole decision, it shouldn't be a snap decision to do that. It shouldn't have to be, and there should be regular communication and there should be some standards that people are looking for in order to authorize things that are that serious. Right, thank you. That was very helpful. Council member Fleming. Yes, thank you. I have sort of a follow-up to Mr. Schwedhelm's question, but it's a slightly different angle on it, which is in my work when I'm a social worker at a psychiatric facility, and sometimes we do have to engage with people in a very different situation than this. But when we evaluate these types of things, one of the principles is keeping in mind that behavior influences behavior. And so to that end, I'm curious to know if the targeted arrests, if the dispersal orders, the chemical agents, the curfew order, not if they're illegal proportional or so forth, but did they, and they're very different uses of force, but did they have or not have the intended effect on how did they influence the behavior of our residents and those protesting? And if they did have the intended effects, which of them were more effectual and which were less effectual and in causing the intended effects of peaceful protests? Steve, do you want to start on that? I don't know. I would be happy to. It's an excellent question. And what I would tell you is that we saw this dynamic in Santa Rosa and we saw it in other places as well, which is it's one thing for protesters to be unaware that the rules on the ground have changed and that all of a sudden they're not allowed to be there anymore and that there's been a legally authorized dispersal or it's another matter entirely. And I think your point is an extremely valid one. And we saw instances of this, particularly in the latter stages of each night. So you're 11 o'clock p.m. to one or two a.m. These were people whose commitment to protest was actually reinforced or reinvigorated by the actions of the police and the attempts to disperse them. It became a loop of sorts where they just became even more defined and determined in response to what was happening. So it's a great observation to make and it's not an easy thing to untangle in terms of how should a recognition of this inform the police decision-making. And I think that again, I think I've talked about this issue with the department and their progression as they moved from Saturday to Tuesday or Wednesday was a very interesting one in terms of what some of their strategies were and ways of approaching and addressing the very ideas that you're talking about it. I would encourage you to pick that up with them when they give their presentation to you. Yeah. And just to emphasize Steve's point, I'm sorry, council member, but just to emphasize his point, the example that continues to come to mind as we continue to look at these protest activities and police response is when you, for example, insert a canister of tear gas into the crowd, you may get dispersal, but you're also gonna probably get somebody in the crowd taking that canister and throwing it back at the police, which just further escalates the situation. And then the police feel like they need to respond to that because an alter officer is getting tear gas canisters thrown at them. And so you get that unintended consequence as well at times. Did following on that, did you find that there, because it sounds like there was a progression and Mr. Caudley was talking about the intent behind the use of force and you mentioned that it was to disperse crowds. Did the intent change as time went on in terms of wanting to dissuade unlawful or violent behavior versus wanting to just shut things down, understanding curfew is very clear on that, but does that impact what uses of force were employed and was there a clear articulated change in the intention behind the use of force? Is that common to adjust that and articulate it as we go forward in these types of situations? So the lines were blurred at times for sure in terms of, and there were a couple of different examples on Saturday night and Sunday night. It's sticking in my mind where the protesters and the police had a long standing series of interactions as the police attempted to move the crowd out of the downtown old courthouse square area and then north on Mendocino Avenue. And so the police would move forward and tell people that they needed to leave and there would be some specific confrontations with individuals who they were targeting for particular activities. But the whole idea was everybody needs to leave and we are not gonna just sit here because that dynamic has not been working and we need to kind of move them along block by block and that strategy obviously that strategy changed by Tuesday night when they were saying, hey, we do not want to be in a five hour long battle with folks who are aware that we've declared and I'm off assembly who are aware that they need to disperse but they are sort of intentionally defining us as part of the protest. And then again, that's where you saw some of the unlawful activity as well in terms of some of the vandalism and assault of behavior towards the police. So again, I think that evolution is a really, really important one and that distinction is important one and I definitely saw a shift in strategy as the days progressed because the police were realizing this is just a dynamic that is frustrating for everybody and we're using a lot of force here in the service of this trying to get the crowd to leave. Switching over to an arrest strategy was a different kind of dynamic and I think it was effective in reducing some of the force by Monday and Tuesday night. Okay, thank you, Brad. And last question, hopefully, which is, did you have an opportunity to evaluate the communications that command staff had with mutual aid and were you, if you had a chance to assess them, can you say anything about that? So I would just tell you briefly that that was not an issue that we looked at systemically in terms of, as an isolated thing, there were a few instances. For example, the protest activity on Highway 101 on Saturday night was absolutely a mutual aid situation where it was the CHP that declared the unlawful assembly and it was the CHP that wanted the crowd to get off the freeway and then SRPD was in the enforcement mode in terms of helping them do that. But your question is a very valid one and it's a dynamic that we've seen in a lot of jurisdictions which is mutual aid is a wonderful thing and it can be a necessary thing, particularly in these large scale events, but there are control and communications issues and maybe different standards and policies that are hard to resolve on the fly and there were some instances where I think communication absolutely could have been better and some of the post event reconnoitering between the agencies and kind of mutual debriefing, there was absolutely some room for that too, I think. Okay, thank you very much. All right, I've got a couple of questions as well. Council member Alvarez, did you wanna ask a few first? Go ahead. Just a general question. I know that we have a couple more presentations tomorrow and I'm wondering if the two groups that are presented today will they be available tomorrow for questions or for questions? I hope so, that's my answer, but I'll check with the city manager and the city attorney to make sure. Thank you. We'll have to confer with the teams. I do not know about the contractors availability but we will discuss that during a break and try to get that information to you. The times were set today for each presenter set but we'll look at it, we'll see what availability is. I just can't answer it at this time, council member. In that case, I'll try to ask a couple of questions if I can. And I will, I know you're having a hard time with your second vaccine shots. So I do, the public will give you a little bit of leeway. Yeah, if you see me take a couple of drinks, you'll know why. In regards to the OIRR, you said that you've done approximately three or 4,000 reviews. Over what time period was that, Michael? Since 2001, 20 years. 20 years. In regards to the information that you requested, did you interview protesters by any chance or was it only law enforcement? Steve, did you have a? Yeah, so no, we did not interview protesters. My understanding was that some of the complainants, I don't give you a very specific example, in terms of the individual investigations that were open as a result of legal claims, there was outreach to the involved individuals to see if they wanted to participate in an internal affairs interview and they went through council to do that and I think the answer was generally not. So I think your question is a really, really valid one and some of the points in terms of protester perception in a broader way, I think are really, really important to drill down on. Our focus in terms of individual incidents was based on the investigations that the department open based on specific allegations with identified folks and I think efforts were made to communicate with them and get information from them about their experience and their concerns. And but in terms of just interviewing protesters in a wider way that did not happen. In regards to individual incidents, were you aware of the Kettling, the soccer weave officers hiding badges? And if so, did you request any surveillance video of those incidents if there were any? So that's actually a real, those issues that you're, that you are identifying are really good examples of things where some more specific information absolutely would have been helpful in terms of, again, finding particular body camera, recordings and kind of matching them up to individual protest, the issue about the grades and again as Mike said earlier, that one is obviously very, very concerning on its face. So it's the kind of thing that had we been aware of it and there was a specific time and place associated with it, it absolutely would have been incorporated in our work. And again, I would say if more information emerges then the department is obviously still able to go back and do some further digging. Is there any incidents in the video that you were able to review that cost pause as major issues that we should be addressing? Well, I think again, in terms of the report itself it does get into some specific details about individual incidents. More broadly, I think there certainly, we did not have the sense that there was an undercurrent of hostility or a lack of professionalism or aggression or officers out of control in terms of how they were acting and why they were acting. That was just kind of the general sense that we had, but I certainly understand that the multiplicity of perspectives on some of these things is really, really important. And I'll give you one specific example, a woman who actually did file a kind of a formal complaint, the department investigated it and she had some genuine concerns about her being detained briefly by officers while she was trying to observe a traffic stop of other individuals that she was concerned about because she was afraid that the police were sort of abusing their authority. So she wanted to monitor it. And she said she was approached by, you know, SWAT officers with a rifle strapped over their chest and her perception that that was intimidating and that they were telling her that she had to leave that absolutely rang true with me. And this is the fine line that has to be navigated and why the communication piece is so important. We looked at that, we looked at the body camera, some of the specific things that she was alleging didn't exactly match up to what the police were actually saying to her, but her underlying perception, and we talk about this in the report, seemed really valid. And I think that a lot of the things that you hear about from the community and their feelings about how they were treated and some of the things that they didn't understand about police response, all of that is worth drilling down into. And now in regards to the outdated or expired cooperation contract between the SRPD and some of the County Sheriff's Department as an example, as well as as the California Highway Patrol, is this normal for those contracts to be expired and still in use? Unfortunately, yes. Because people don't recognize that the agreement has expired until there's a need for mutual aid. Yeah, so that doesn't mean that it's okay to allow them to expire. And one of the things that could be done is to give somebody the responsibility to ensure that mutual aid agreements are current and consistent with best practices. And I must ask once again, was there any video or evidence where officers were covering their badges to hide their identity? I did not see that. And unfortunately, it's one of those things that's uniquely difficult to capture from the body-worn camera unless you've got a few different officers in the same situation. But it was not my impression and I didn't see instances of it as being any sort of habitual thing or a concern that had been raised by the department in terms of its extensive review of all this stuff. This was not an issue that they said they had found instances of. And we did not confer with the protesters as many of them did not make themselves available. So therefore, there wasn't any way for us to look at any video footage that they might have had in this incident. So my correct statement? I think that's right. The specifics are, it's always difficult. The more specific information that you have, the better alike, the more you are able to make an assessment. And that's not to say you're gonna have a perfect universe of evidence and really be 100% sure every time. But in the absence of specifics and in the absence of coming across some of these things, you know, again in the course of coming across them collaterally in the course of other reviews, then it's entirely possible that those things occurred. But I did not see evidence of it, no. No, let me hear that you've been in operation for over 20 years. And my question is over those 20 years, have you noticed the militarization of our law enforcement agencies? At what point did you notice such? And did you notice an increase in these type of incidents where we see an increased amount of violence or just disruption within our communities? I would answer that a couple of ways, Council Member Alvarez. One is, I think that the public is paying more attention to policing these days and for good reason and well overdue. And so that engagement I think has caused there to be an examination of issues like that. And you're probably aware there's a bill in Congress to try and restrict the acquisition of military equipment by law enforcement and we'll see how that goes. But I think that's going on. And I'd also think that as new technology gets online as well, the public is appropriately interested in ensuring that the balance between enforcement and privacy interests are struck appropriately and whether that's license plate readers or surveillance technology or whatever or militarized equipment, I think that's all worthy of continued engagement with the community. And knowing your community, which is a very engaged community, I suspect that those conversations will continue and in fact, they should continue. Thank you, sir. And my last question, are there any examples that you could give us of law enforcement agency that's really gotten good at extracting individuals opposed to going for the full crowd? The problematic individuals, is it saying? Yeah, go ahead, Steve. I would take the first pass at that and say, it's a great question. And a lot of the, and another council member raised a similar issue about best practices. What I would say is it's very much a work in progress and there are agencies all over the country that are learning from what happened in late May and early June of last year, assessing what went wrong and assessing some of the tactics that they shifted to. And we're working with agencies, including Santa Rosa, that adjusted as they went and kind of were learning based on the experiences that they were having. So in answer to your question, I don't know of an agency that has nailed it yet, but I know that that kind of assessment of effective tactics is very much on the radar screen and a lot of the after-action reports and a lot of the reforms that are happening do get into that level of tactical detail. Very well, thank you both gentlemen. And hopefully, hopefully it's possible to see you tomorrow and I do appreciate the amount of information that you've been able to provide. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I wanna jump in with a quick follow-up question and then I'll come to you Vice Mayor, but I don't wanna lose the thread on a number of Council Member Alvarez's questions there. He asked about playing soccer with the weave. He asked about some of the other aspects that you said that you couldn't find or couldn't find people to talk to, but it was in the Human Rights Commission report. Did you follow up with the Human Rights Commission to get more information? So some of the individual aspects of the report and I had looked at that back in September. So in terms of that not being made available to us, that, I mean, it was a public document and it was, the department brought our attention to it in September when we got started. I think that answers to some of these individual issues that were raised, it depends sort of a thing depending on the particulars of each case. But yeah, to be honest with you, I would have to go back and I encourage you to ask the department specifically about how they incorporated that HRC allegations, looking through some of the individual ones in the report and as I was refreshing my recollection of it and getting ready for today, a lot of them were broader systemic issues, but some of the more specific things, again, we did not have particularized information that allowed those things to go forward and in terms of communication and outreach to the HRC, yeah, I'm not sure whether that's a place where more could have been done and I would defer to the police on that. I would just add, Mayor, that there are some things in the PowerPoint production presentation that we saw just got this morning that we can't even identify in the HR report. So this may have been new information that they've received along the way, but I wasn't even able to tie up the one with the braids to tie it up to an earlier narrative in their initial report. So maybe it's there and I missed it because I didn't have a lot of time to go through it, but I didn't see it. Okay, I'll have more questions in a minute, but we'll go to the Vice Mayor. Well, Mayor, that was one of my questions and then another one of my questions were, did you at all tries to reach out? Well, thank you guys for the presentation first. Thank you for your work. Did you try to reach out to the authors of the human rights report and or any of the commissioners, because I'm sure that they would have been more than willing to speak with you and make some connections. So did that occur? So we did not, ma'am, and it's an excellent point in terms of, again, the scope that we were working. Along the way, you weren't working with anyone in particular other than the team that you were working with that are a part of SRPD. Correct, our outreach and investigative, we didn't, again, the only investigative work we did was in collaboration with the department in terms of its internal review process and we did not do any outreach to other individuals or stakeholders. And again, that is an important aspect of this work and I know that the Hilliard-Hines report did some of that kind of outreach and we have done it in other jurisdictions in the past and certainly in the context of the demonstration activity as well, but it wasn't part of our scope for this project. And if I can, Vice Mayor, I see the city attorney's hand popped up. So I'm gonna give her a chance to jump in really fast and then we'll continue. Yeah, and I will just reiterate as Steve just mentioned that the Hilliard-Hines, which is the after-action report and the broader view, they did reach out to community representatives. Most significant policy violations, including that injury cases in both of those instances, it was our, we concurred with the department's conclusion that neither of those instances was malicious and intended to have the very unfortunate effect that it did have. The evidence simply did not support that. And that said that there was absolutely misconduct that is designed to keep accidents from happening and designed to keep unfortunate things from occurring to the extent possible. But to the extent that understandably the intent of the officers and any sense of malice, that was not the case. And although there were a few fringe issues of comments here and there that I think didn't reflect well on the department as a whole, it certainly was not the case that our overall sense of their professionalism or their attitude towards this was antagonistic, hostile, aggressive, inappropriate in that kind of way. All right, I appreciate that. And then I'm gonna tread lightly here because I know that the city attorney is gonna look at me sideways if I track too far. But one of the high-profile incidents that was found to be within policy but still had an outcome or did not rise to the level of professionalism that was found involved the incident of an individual who had a substantial injury to their face. And the narrative in the rumor that has been out there is that this individual was shot with a sting grenade point blank when they were kneeling and that it was a malicious outcome from an officer who recognized them previously. Is that narrative true based on your review based on the body cam videos or can you please flush out to Council Member Tibbets as point that incident a little bit more about the intent and what the data or the evidence actually shows to the extent that you can? So again, in terms of the, if we're talking about the same thing, I am aware of some of the coverage that it got and some of the ways that it was represented. It is not our sense and I don't think the evidence supported the idea that either that this was a point blank and intentional or malicious sort of thing and or that this individual was specifically targeted on the basis of his identity or any past associations that the department had with him. The evidence is, I will acknowledge that the evidence is far from conclusive in terms of exactly what happened in terms of, again, that the distance that was involved and the darkness and the blurriness of the movements. I can tell you the department put a tremendous amount of effort into assessing it and raising a variety of theories and really trying to drill down on what happened and the conclusion that they reached was that it was an accident but an accident for which the officer needs to be accountable because it was a tactic that was out of policy. Okay, I appreciate that. And I will concur with council member Tibbets that I think that in particular those videos and I think under the new state law will be disclosed but I do think given that that has had significant media attention and does cut at the issue of what the intent of SRPD was, I think it's important for us to have as much information out there for the public to see as possible. One of the things that you discussed in your report, I think it was on page four or five of the report was when protesters came to SRPD headquarters and officers allowed graffiti without intervening and then in different instances were stepping in with either tear gas or rubber bullets to control. And one of the policy conversations that I think that we need to have is at what point do officers engage? What activities do they stand back for versus when do they insert themselves in your discussion with officers and in the after action of talking to them, what was their understanding of at what point do they engage versus how much do they tolerate in terms of graffiti, looting, anything of that nature before they would actually get involved or in particular use force? So I'm not sure if maybe you're conflating our report with the Hilliard-Heinz report, I'm not, because I know you've done a lot of homework. I don't remember focusing on that specific issue of the graffiti and the- Well, you mentioned it tangentially in it when you're setting the stage, but I'm asking from your broader discussion when you're talking to officers, did they have a sense that they could articulate them at what point they would engage versus when they would pull back? So absolutely the whole idea of incident command and those deployment decisions being something that is coming from the command level of the organization is a critical feature and it is the officers that were engaged in the response over the course of those few days, they were acting with supervision in large groups and in response to directives that also hit on sort of the dichotomy of the different nights. I will tell you just like council member Tibbets and the rest of council members, I wanted to watch the body cams to get a feel and there is a difficulty when you do see folks who are in the front with their hands up saying peaceful protests and then you see a firework that comes flying in from the back row at police officers and a lot of the psychology around this is how individuals were primed. Did you look into where much of the information that helped prime officers and what they expected to have happen when they went out into the field where that came from and did that play a role and I'll use specifically, I know in subsequent protests, the chief has made an attempt to contact protest organizers to talk through what the expectations are or what they see, what they're trying to accomplish to the extent that they can. Is that a common policy or a common practice? How could that have changed the outcome here in terms of the psychological impact of what the protesters respond? And again, ideally engaged in the kind of outreach you were mentioning as sort of preparatory steps that would make the actual playing out of these things go more smoothly. Yeah, I appreciate that and perhaps that's a question that I'll ask the chief tomorrow in the discussions as well is where were they developing their expectations? Where did that information come from to help prime officers? Did they expect going out there that there would be looting and fire set or did they expect that it would be a peaceful protest and how do they come to that determination? I think it's gonna be really important for us to discuss as well. The final question that I have actually, one more question for you and then one question for the city manager, we've talked a little bit about mutual aid and I know that your job was not to go into deep looks at the mutual aid system and how it worked in other jurisdictions that you have worked with though in the event of mutual aid and perhaps this comes with the expired contract. Is it you're finding that the best practice is for the responding agency who joins to help takes the lead of the command officers for the existing agency? And I guess I'll ask the question another way in the event that call it CHP call it the sheriffs an agency that responded in mutual aid for Santa Rosa in the event that they needed to utilize force would that determination have been made by their own command staff or would that have been made by Santa Rosa's command staff in an ideal world? So it varies, I don't know how helpful that is a lot of it depends on the circumstances but I think the model that is most effective in one of these situations where there are multiple agencies involved is that the concept of some sort of unified command where some particular agency is sort of deferred to as the lead in the individual operation deployment enforcement activity, however you want to put it and there's communication between the supervisorial representatives of the other agencies and there's that whole idea of people being on the same page. I am not sure to what extent that occurred and whether it was done more on the fly in Santa Rosa on those particularly in those early nights as a function of the kind of rapidly evolving circumstances and I can't really speak to what the past practice was or how effective their protocols were but it's certainly a very valid point worth exploring. Okay, Mr. State Manager, really quick question. It's been mentioned a couple of times SRPD's new first amendment public policy. Is there a place where the community could read that policy? I'm gonna have the, when the chief reports out I'll have the chief report out where that location is. Excellent, thank you so much. Council Member Schwedhelm, did you have another question? It's just related to the same thing and for Stephen or Michael, can you talk a little bit about when we talk about the MOUs? Cause I see a difference with a pre-planned event where you can schedule it, roles and responsibility versus I think in one of the reports code 30 was called meaning we're in an emergency we need as much help as possible. Can you talk about the differences between those two? And then when you talk about policies and procedures I'm not sure what was the case with the CHP asking for help. Was that a code 30 or pre-scheduled event where you could lay out some of these roles and responsibilities we've been discussing? Do you know the answer to that? I don't. So yeah, I guess in answer to your question in terms of there's pre-planned and this is gonna be happening three days from now and there's pre-planned in the sense that we are going to, you know, we're aware of protest activity on the 101 and we're gonna give this an hour and then we're gonna take some enforcement action to try to get the protesters to leave the freeway area. And again, ideally there is going to be a great deal of coordination and communication and a sense of who is making the calls and devising the strategy for how a particular issue is going to be addressed. But the more rapidly evolving the situation is, understandably the more individual discretion that the groups of, you know, who are there to provide mutual aid, the more discretion that they're gonna have and the more variety that you could have but hopefully there's at least internal supervision and coordination and that it is sort of congruence with the larger mission. I believe council member that Hillard Hines did touch on the mutual aid and I think they have a whole chapter on that in their reports. So maybe better to defer to them for tomorrow but it can get very complicated. So for example, in one of the jurisdictions that we reviewed from last year, their city council decided after the first night of protest that they didn't want their agency to be using tear gas anymore in protest activities which then created all kinds of complications for mutual aid because now you have an agency that has been told instructed not to use tear gas in their collaborating or working together with agencies that are fine with using tear gas. So it can get very complicated which is why these mutual aid agreements need to be continually updated so that the expectations are known ahead of time rather than in crisis time. And I lied, I did have one more question. There was comments that were made, at least that the perception was from some of the protesters that there was different treatment in similarly tight events that happened. And the one that I hear the most specifically about is the difference between the individual and the red truck and the woman in the white car. Did you look into those incidents and did you find that the SRPV had acted appropriately in response to those two incidents? We did not look at either of those incidents in that whole issue of disparate treatment and that the response to the counter protesters is not something that we explored. Yeah, okay, I appreciate that. Councilor, are there any other questions? All right, then we'll go ahead and take a 10 minute break here while we get the third presentation up and running. And we'll come back at 4.30. Thank you, Bo. Appreciate it. Dean, can you hear me? All right, Madam City Clerk, let's go ahead and call the roll and resume our meeting. Thank you. Council Member Tibbets. Here. Council Member Schwedhelm. Here. Council Member Sawyer. Here. Council Member Fleming. Here. Council Member Alvarez. Present. Vice Mayor Rogers. Present. Mayor Rogers. Here. Let the record show that all council members are present. Great, thank you. Mr. City Manager, Part C. After action review of the response to people, peaceful protests and civil unrest in May and June 2020, turn it over to Chief Navarro for the to introduce this item. Good afternoon, Mayor Rogers and members of the City Council, Rainer Navarro, Chief of Police. Before I turn it over to the presenters, I have just a few comments and I know that there were some questions that came up during the last presentation. First of all, there was a question about where to find the First Amendment policy. I wanted to provide that location. It is on our website. It's on srcity.org slash change for the better. It's our transparency website, which we'll talk more about. We talked about it in City Council in the past. We'll talk a little bit more about it tomorrow, but that's where the community and you can find our new First Amendment policy. Secondly, there were some questions during the last presentation about best practices and I believe some of those questions will be clarified during this particular presentation with Hillard Hines. And then we will, as the city manager stated earlier, tomorrow you're going to hear about how we are taking actual steps to move forward with all of the recommendations from these two presentations. Lastly, I wanna thank the community for their patience. It's been a long time coming, but there was a lot of information to go through. And I wanna thank the city council for the opportunity to provide an in-depth review of the events from last year. Last summer, we promised to provide a detailed report into the department's response to the protests. And I want you to know that the consultants had our full cooperation and we are already using these reports to improve our operations. As a chief of police, I wanna assure you that me and my staff are fully committed to making sure any deficiencies noted in these reports will not be repeated. We're also committed to ensuring best practices, the best practices that we employed to limit issues and protect our community during this event will continue and are expanded in the future. And we will get into those, again, what changes we've made when we have our presentation tomorrow. With that, I'll introduce the next item. Item 2C, after actual review and response to the protests and civil unrest in May and June, 2020. Following the May, June 2020 protests and civil unrest, the city requested an after-action review of the police departments and city's response to the protest activity that occurred between May 30th and June 5th. The action or the intent of the review was to examine the planning, the strategy and the response to all of the actions taken. Through a comparative process, Hillard Hines LLC was contracted for this role. The city and the police department provided Hillard Hines with unrestricted access to the police department records and information to complete the review process. Here from Hillard Hines LLC to present are Robert Boomer, Robert Davis and Chad McGinty. And I will turn it over to them right now. Thank you. Thank you very much, Chief. We really appreciate it. We appreciate the time and attention from everybody from the council. My name is Rob Davis. I'm the Senior Vice President who oversees the law enforcement consulting practices for Hillard Hines, which is based in Chicago, but the main offices for our overall firm is actually based, are actually based in Baltimore. Bob Boomer is also on a project on the East Coast, but he will be joining us most likely in the next 45 minutes to an hour. So he'll be on eventually on this call. But I'm also joined by my colleague, Chad McGinty, who also has been heavily involved in this project. Next slide, please. Very, very briefly, as you can see from the screen, we're a company that specializes in a very unique way to try and help local, state and federal law enforcement agencies assess their operations, take a look at what they're doing, figure out where they can improve, and we compare and contrast what specific agencies are doing in their operations with other best practices we've observed over the last several years. Our firm really started getting engaged with the law enforcement consulting back about almost 10 years ago and have since done a number of projects across the country, which I'll highlight. Thank you. Next. I just tried to accept. Council Member Sawyer, go ahead and mute so we can continue the presentation. I apologize. That's all right, we've all been there. So, but if you'll go, yeah, thank you very much on this slide. Let me just briefly explain why we do what we do and some of our experience in doing this. We're not comprised or composed of just people who have backgrounds in law enforcement. We have a whole series of people who use the subject matter experts on our team to look at things from a global perspective in terms of police operation. So it's not just digging into police operations to looking at things like community interaction, how they're engaging in community policing, how the community is responding to them, how collaborative are they in leveraging resources within a community to assist in police operations. So we have a variety of people both from the social justice world as well as the academic world who assist us in these processes. But some of the individuals or entities with whom we've been interacting for the last several years included, of course, the Department of Justice in the COPS office who stands for the Community Oriented Policing Services Office. And during the Obama administration, they had actually several programs running across the country where there were agencies who were requesting assistance from the federal government to improve their police operations. And we competed for a contract with many firms across the country. We were selected as the sole provider for that and we're doing work in places like Milwaukee. We were in a little town called Commerce City, Colorado in Colorado, but we're also in places in Florida. We were in Memphis. We did a variety of projects for them. And we also did a project for them in the city of San Francisco. That project since was terminated or was stopped during the most recent administration. But we continued on with San Francisco and are still involved in that San Francisco process as a result of the DOJ project through the state of California. So heavily involved in trying to provide technical assistance to agencies that are trying to improve and implement best practices as they've been identified either by the federal government, state governments and or by departments themselves that are doing a lot of good work. We most recently just completed an assessment of the Louisville Police Department as a result of the very tragic incident that recently occurred there. Literally, we just finished that just about six, eight weeks ago. We also just completed a project down in La Mesa, California, which was very similar to the one in Santa Rosa. Only in that situation, some of the peaceful protesters, there were some peaceful protests going on, but eventually during the evening there were other things that occurred and the community ended up experiencing two downtown banks being burned to the ground as well as an office building. So that was our experience there. We're gonna have the Denver Sheriff's Department, I already mentioned San Francisco, California, King County, Washington, up in Seattle, we've done quite a few projects up there for them. We've been in Boulder, Colorado, Maplewood, New Jersey, Lancaster, California at the moment, we're actually helping them design a new police department where they'll have a hybrid model. They'll use the Sheriff's Office to handle the high-level 911 calls, but they'll actually have its own police department. It's kind of a hybrid model where they'll have some of their community service officer type responses to the community policing needs in that area. So I don't want to drone on longer about this just to try and give you some brief background, but these are getting engaged in literally over 100 agencies over the last 10 years. So that's basically where our background is coming from. I would like to at this time dig right into the issues therein. For strategies and ultimately the response to those protest activities, areas of improvement and moreover to find lessons learned in what the police department has been doing with the information that they learned as a result of the protest activity. And lastly, we were asked to engage with the community to understand better their perspectives on the police department's response. Next slide, please. So what is an after-action assessment? It's important at this point to tell you that it is not an investigation. It's a review of what occurred to identify again opportunities to improve actions, to learn lessons from things that have occurred, to strengthen policies, to address areas again where maybe some areas weren't as optimal as what they had hoped. We focused on pre-incident planning, the incident response and post-incident. We hope that this information and we learned in Santa Rosa, the information that we gleaned from this work is used by the department and the city to better prepare for similar incidents in the future. In large part, the work that we do is based on an after-action like this is based and measured against the principles of the national incident management system and the incident command system. In short, that's a framework. It's an organizational framework that provides for the effective and efficient command and control of any incident, be that wildfires or protest activity. Address the First Amendment, protection of the First Amendment of the prototype. So we had significant documentation to look at our team, this police, fire, government officials and community members. We conducted a lot of interviews. As I said, we reached out to the community to try to gain them from city officials. In all of this, we used to compare what we learned about what the city did and what's specifically what the department did against the best practices employed by similar agencies. And at this point, it's important to note that in many instances, and in fact, probably most instances, these were situations that the current personnel at departments across the country, the current personnel had never faced before. So important to note that level of civil unrest like this. Next slide, please. So as a result of our work, we identify observations. We and I stated on the previous slide that we measure the work done by the department based on the national incident management system and adherence to incident command. What jumped out immediately to us was that the Santa Rosa Police Department embraces the concepts and the principles of incident command, not just for emergencies, but this runs from the top of the department from the chief all the way down to the patrol officers. They employ incident command principles in much of the work that they do, be that a community engagement, be it a call out for special weapons and tactics, or be that a protest. So that concept in principle of structured and organizational framework to provide for the efficient and effective command and control is utilized throughout the organization. And I would say that that is not just for, again, not just for an emergency like a protest. This is something that the city takes advantage of or enjoys as a result of the police department and the city's response to wildfire management. The police department's actions in evacuating an entire section of town. The police department's ability and the city's ability to effectively manage through an emergency. So that incident command piece is extremely important. The next thing that we found was that they have a dedicated incident management team. And that is the best practice. As stated, it facilitates effective and efficient management oversight. So what that means in this instance is that there are people that have clearly defined roles. They have clearly defined roles that they step into. It's not a matter in the heat of the moment or in the crisis or as something unfolds, trying to figure out which individual is best suited or which individual is going to move into that role. It's already pre-designated. Those people understand what their responsibilities are. They understand the role that they play and they quickly move into the department operation center and begin fulfilling those roles. Furthermore, the incident management team doesn't rest when there's not an emergency. They're in action all the time. When the department learns of an event, something that is going to occur within the city, the incident management team is already working and looking at the different criteria and establishing as a police department, what is the appropriate response to that event? So the incident management team is always in place. There are people, although it is a collateral assignment for these individuals, they are always in place and ready to respond when needed. The next observation that that we found in this speaks to the OIR group's report is that we found that there was a lack of available experience commanders. That the span of control, at least in the early days, was not as effective as it could be. And this speaks to mutual aid. It speaks to bringing in other agencies. It speaks to the number of officers that are out at any point in the speed at which these events were evolving at times, specifically in the early days, to maintain an adequate span of control. And we'll talk about that more in the recommendations. The next thing that we identified was at the processes that the police department has in place allowed them to adapt. It allowed them to a set of draw upon to utilize to help manage this situation. What that meant is that they had to change when they did change potentially the incident commander. We recognized in the early days of this, they didn't have a formal passing of the baton, if you will. They didn't have a formalized process where a commander could share it or with the next commander coming in or the next team coming in, what they learned, what they experienced to give them basically a download of what they had experienced in the previous operational period, the previous day, and what they should be looking for in the next operational period. Next slide, please. We interviewed a number of people from the community. And first and foremost, what we learned is that there were some ongoing relationship issues that were highlighted. That generally there were people that stressed to us that the relationship, not specifically with Santa Rosa Police Department, many of them spoke about the sheriff's office, but in general in law enforcement, there was a strain that existed prior to the protests. I will say at this point that when you look back and certainly the council members, Mayor, Vice Mayor, you have more knowledge of this than what we would, but there have been protests annually after the death of Andy Lopez. And I think it's important to look at what was different in this instance. The city and the police department engaged year after year with protest in Old Courthouse Square that involved a very, very emotional situation where people were standing in unity against the death of Andy Lopez. Year after year that occurred. We learned from some of the people that we talked to that that was essentially unsettled business, that there was a lot of emotion that hadn't yet been thoroughly discussed with the city and with the police departments. The next item is particularly important, and this is an item that is being discussed across the country, and that's the perception we heard from people that the police showing up in riot gear as the OIR group talked about with helmets and batons, that that had in some cases, they felt that that increased the level of aggression that incited more violence and it created more of a separation in more of a difficult situation. And we'll talk more about that later in our presentation. The community members we talked to were equally concerned about the use of force and certainly OIR group covered that. That was not something that we looked at. We were very specific in scope that we were not looking at force incidents, but they addressed that. We heard from the community members about many of the things that the Human Rights Commission talked about and that OIR reported on. We also heard, as you've heard already, that there was a perception that the police department provided preferential treatment and perhaps some protest groups or some individuals were treated differently than the larger Black Lives Matter supporters. And I think most important is that in nearly every interview that we had with the community, they were generally optimistic that there is a path forward, that there is a way to repair this relationship and to move Santa Rosa in a positive direction. And we found that to be very optimistic and we found that to be a great opportunity for the city to engage with the community and attempt to repair those relationships. Next slide, please. So some things that we looked at was first and foremost and certainly you heard about this with the OIR group is to amend policy provisions related to lethal munitions, less lethal munitions. We found that the same circumstances that OIR group found, again, our scope was different, but clearly there was a void in the way that those less lethal munitions were handled. And we found everything that OIR found that things were quickly evolving, that there was an urgency to get munitions out to the field, but we identified just like they did, that there was a breakdown there in the overall accountability of those less lethal munitions. Next is to revise a policy and clearly state the importance of First Amendment rights. While the department has a mobile field force policy that addresses crowd control issues, the policy that was in effect at the time and that we reviewed didn't specifically focus on First Amendment rights. We would encourage the department to continue to adhere to the current standard of the value of ICS, of incident command, they continue to use that. The last bullet here is to ensure that they have enough command level officers and that they have the appropriate level of experience, that they can rotate command level officers through an emergencies in different command level positions so that they have succession. When you have two or three command level offers, in this case, even one command level officer retire that you have other individuals that can step up and effectively operate in that environment. Again, not just talking about an emergency, not talking about just a protest, but what about the next wildfire? Do you have the appropriate depth of bench? Do you have the succession plan to ensure you have competent and experienced command level officers that can step in? Next slide, please. This is something that was touched on and I think it's important to underscore this here is there were some issues with radio interoperability and I believe the question came up in Mutual Aid, were there issues with communication? Yes, there were. There was not a standard radio platform. When the code 30 went out, there were agencies that came in from within the county and from out of the county and they didn't have an established single radio platform, a communication that they could use to communicate with all of the officers. So what that meant is that a command level officer at Santa Rosa using their radio frequency could not provide the mission objectives, the rules of engagement to every officer that arrived. So the department quickly moved to ensure that any agency that came in was assigned to at least one Santa Rosa officer, preferably a supervisor that could assist them and could relay word of mouth. This is what I'm being told on my radio frequency and they were sharing that information with the other agency. Certainly that is a time element. The information is not firsthand over the radio, you're getting it from an additional source. So it's not optimal, but this happens frequently with other agencies. Anytime you bring this many officers together from a lot of different agencies, that many different agencies, you're going to have issues with communications. And frequently when you do after action reviews, nearly every after action review, one of the first things that pops up is that we had an issue with our communications. Certainly we would encourage the city and county and the department to work towards ensuring that they have the most effective and current radio platform available to support interagency communications. Provide situational awareness to incoming incident commanders. I touched on that in the last slide to make sure in situations of multiple operational periods, day after day after day, that you provide situational awareness, that there is a passing of the baton and that information is clearly given to the next team or the next incident commander. The next item is something that also came up. I believe the Human Rights Commission commented on this and that is that when the Code 30 request went out, the department in the incident command center quickly went through the list of agencies split those up and delegated different individuals of the incident management team, you're going to call these five agencies, you're going to call these five agencies and so on. What we found is that they didn't use C-Lens, that they didn't have a documentation chain. They made the phone call, they asked for the assistance with the utmost urgency but we would recommend that they at least follow that up with a computerized message that provides that timestamp in the specifics of the request. So you have that documentation. With given the level of proficiency and competency that the Santa Rosa Police Department operates their incident command system and specifically their department operations center, we would recommend that they would look to invest in installing a duplicate computer aided dispatch center to create the identical workstation for the dispatchers that are working in that environment that they have in their dispatch center. Next slide please. Ensure that only authorized personnel are permitted entry to their DOC. Obviously when they have an incident, they quickly activate the department operation center, the incident management team goes in, they assume their respective roles, they get the right people in the right seats and they start moving through the effective and efficient command of the incident. We would recommend that they restrict access and keep only those individuals that should be in the room, in the room so as not to distract from the overall command. And develop a process to audit the points of contact. What we did learn throughout our assessment is that at certain points within the protest that there were officers that were attempting to contact business owners to either help them with an evacuation of their business or to provide updates about what was going on. And in some instances we found that they didn't have the appropriate contact, they didn't have the most current contact. So where it would have been nice for the business owner to have learned directly from a member of the police department, this is what's going on, this is what we're doing, this is what we would ask of you, they couldn't successfully make that contact in all of those circumstances. So we would certainly support that. And lastly on this slide is to ensure that they have mass arrest procedures that are current. What we learned is that as we got later into the week and the department did make a mass arrest and certainly you've heard some information related to that, they didn't have a current mass arrest plan. If you're going to arrest 25, 50, 75 people it's paramount that you have a plan in place that you can effectively and efficiently process those arrestees. And at the time that that arrest took place, the department's mass arrest plan wasn't as well known and the resources weren't readily available. So they put that together as they moved through that instance. And certainly that slowed that process. Next slide please. And lastly is to create formal and written operational guides for the dissemination of information to make sure that the information that the police department is getting is being shared with the city. And that the city is communicating with the respective first responders, be that fire, be that police department, office of emergency management, et cetera to make sure that they are communicating and that they have a message going forward so that the message that the public gets has been vetted through all of the appropriate channels. Next slide. And I believe we're two questions. All right, thank you so much, Mr. McGinty. Questions from council members? All right, start with the vice mayor. So I had a question. Oh, there he is. Hi, chief. I had a question for the chief. So thank you guys for the presentation, by the way. So about the people that drove into the protesters, my question is, why wasn't there the same enthusiasm to address that as there was for the protesters? Or can you tell me why that was different? Because the way it was explained to me, it was a little bit, it was different. The interaction with our officers. Yes, that's a very good question, vice mayor. So we did look into the investigations with the vehicles. In fact, we did make an arrest on a, I believe he was a juvenile who had driven through one of the protests. There was another incident where there was a vehicle on Sonoma Avenue that drove through the protest. There were conflicting information from both sides. But we did do a thorough investigation on that and we sent it to the district attorney's office. So we did do thorough investigations on each of those. All right, and then my second question is, after the report came out from the commission on making the rights, did SRPD contact them? Or I know that there was the one meeting, but was there any more contact after that to see how we could cohesively move forward and what we could do to work together? Or how did it proceed after the initial meeting that you guys had? Yes, so we had that initial meeting in June and there were several comments that were made. And at the end of the meeting, I offered up our resources and I asked them to give us a call and I offered the opportunity to provide information regarding any type of complaints, use of force, complaints about unprofessionalism to come forward and let us know what was going on. The information was vague at the time, but I did provide a call to the commission but I did offer that opportunity to provide more information to us in that if we don't know about these situations, then we can't do anything to address them. And so I made that very clear. To my knowledge, we did not have any complaints come forward based on that, but the offer was made. And we did not have any further conversations with the Human Rights Commission. And what about any of the individual protesters, Jake? We had, so I had, there were several listening sessions that we were a part of that involved people who were involved in the protests throughout the, over this last year, we've had several of those contacts and conversations. You're gonna hear more about that tomorrow with the Community Empowerment Plan Report. We also had we had, I think it was on June 1st, I went out to the protest to contact the protesters at the very beginning of the demonstration to speak with them and to talk about what we, we were looking for as far as safety. We wanted to make sure that they had the ability to demonstrate and exercise their first amendment rights, but that we couldn't have violence or unlawful activity occur. And during that time or during these events, there were, we tried to refrain from being actively on scene until there was a violent activity or some type of unlawful activity that started to happen. So, but we did, we did try to reach out to organizers and we did have opportunities using the Community Empowerment or the Office of Community Engagement to reach out and have ongoing discussions with people who were involved in the demonstrations. Thank you. Mr. McGinty, I just have a couple of quick questions. And first I wanna thank you for your detailed report for us. One of the things that really struck me looking at both your report and the OIR report was two different things. One was both of you referring to SRPV as adaptable during the situation and it was specifically pointing to the command structure that allowed for that adaptability to learn and do things different as the different nights wore on. And both of you also mentioned that particularly around communication, some of the failings were in regard to not having the correct amount of command staff or the way that those lines fell. Is there a typical ratio of command to line staff that the city should be looking at as we try to correct some of those communication issues that occur in these mass events? In the instance of response to a protest, ideally you don't want to have a supervisor that is responsible for direct oversight of more than maybe a half dozen officers. You want to have a sergeant that can put eyes on and be able to effectively communicate with a very small group of individuals. So at a base level addressing the protest, they couldn't achieve that. They just didn't have enough supervision. And in the first day of the protest, they had one field commander that was attempting to facilitate all of the officers coming in from mutual aid, facilitate their mission objectives as well as the multitude of Santa Rosa officers that were out there. That proved to be ineffective. Everybody that we talked to from the incident commander, from the field commander himself, which there's a pride factor there, right? Where that individual says, look, it was just too much. It was too much for one individual. The command staff, the incident commander, the sergeants, the officers, everybody identified that they just did not have enough officers out there. That was unreasonable to expect one field commander to command that large of a scale. Again, going back to the broader just daily operations, certainly with the agencies that we look at, there are more command level officers per capita than what we are seeing in Santa Rosa. And we point to specific agencies, not right off the top of my head, but I can tell you in our work with the agencies that we have worked with, Rob mentioned some of the agencies, they have a much smaller department, a much smaller population, but yet they have the same number of captains that Santa Rosa does. And those captains become pivotal positions in any emergency. Again, be that a protest or be that a wildfire, you have to have those command level officers that can drive that mission forward. Just, I would underscore something you just said, Chad, because I think it is important based upon the mayor's question. And that is it. First of all, understand, and I understand that there are a lot of viewpoints that the public is watching, I said, are there legitimate critical issues that need to be studied. I think listening to council member Tibbets earlier during one of the other presentations where he was underscoring that, that everybody's looking for ways that they can prove his right on point. So I don't want anybody listening to think that we're just trying to overstate something. But remember, we've been in an awful lot of cities, especially in the last 18 months, especially over the last 12 months. And in comparing and contrasting Santa Rosa with these other entities to be quite candid, you're doing much better than the average agency with whom we interact in terms of not only using that national incident management system, but in having the ability to, as you stated, flex the adaptable. I think the only thing that really is missing here that it lets us assume for a moment that you had what we might consider more robust staffing at the command level. One thing that was missing is that you had some of those command level officers that didn't have the experience because you had so few of them. But if as a matter of routine, you had a higher level of command staff members in your department, they would just, by the way that your other Santa Rosa command officers have had this experience and had background experience in this, they would have been more prepared than what have been other people to turn to as a natural course of the way you're operating in your department. So I'm not trying to just overstate something and upsetting anyone in the community, but let's be very clear in terms of our assessment. If it wasn't so, we wouldn't say it was so. But the Santa Rosa Police Department was much, much more adaptable than what we saw or what we see in most agencies. And that's what you hope for when you're seeing an incident like this. I also want to underscore the fact and the point that was made earlier and that is that there's not a police department in this country that hasn't gone through growing pains over this. I mean, Santa Rosa is not the only agency that has had to deal with something to a degree or a level that they have never had to deal with before. But Santa Rosa was much more adaptable of being able to respond to that than average. And that's why you saw some of those changes that Chad was describing from the very first couple of days of the incident to the back end of that week. So you do have to give that department credit and leadership there for doing what they did do as they were learning as they went. Great, thank you so much, Mr. Davis. And I appreciate you giving us some candid, some candid comments there. Council Member Sawyer. Thank you, Mayor. Expanding on the concept of our command officers, is are we currently looking at the need, the potential needs for more positions or training of the existing officers or a combination of both? And where are we chief in as far as responding to this, what sounds like a common problem in many agencies that it also sounds like we're doing better than many. So where do we stand in our reaction to this and preparing for the future? Well, Council Member, it's a very good question. Much of this really relies on our staffing and our staffing relies on our budget. And so, in order to have more people in our command structure, we have to be able to promote those people and those people are coming directly out of our line staff. So we were doing what we can to train. We just went through several classes both from a line personnel with our mobile field force. They just went through a three-day mobile field force training with updated information that was put on by FEMA and myself and several other management of our management and command staff went through a day-long training last week on how to manage critical incidents. And so we're looking for the training from an operational side and putting our officers through and every chance we get when FEMA provides free training, we're trying to capitalize on those. We learned very early on with the fires that it's very important to have this training. We take it very seriously. But in terms of being able to staff, I don't have the budget to add a third captain or additional lieutenants or actually officers at this point. And so that's kind of where we're stuck. Thank you, Chief. And just to go a little bit further in that, is it likely that we will be looking at some potential recommendations coming from you and your staff or you and your organization to where necessary to beef up potentially some numbers in our police organization to satisfy some of those what have been clearly identified as some needs? Will we be potentially looking at that during the budget cycle? Council Member Sawyer, we've lost seven officers in the last couple of years. We are currently looking at completing a staffing study by the end of the year to help us. But we are not gonna be, the city's not in a position or we're going through the budget session. And at this point, there's nothing there to add staffing. Thank you, sir. All right, do we have any other questions from Council Members? Council Member Alvarez. Thank you, Mayor. Chief Lombardo, first of all, thank you for your willingness to produce the different reports and your willingness to participate in them and really have an uncomfortable conversation as I personally believe that sometimes through these uncomfortable conversations, we can gain progress in moving the head. And I just have a couple of questions for you. What came first, tear gas or the fireworks? If you can answer that question. So short answer is the fireworks. So we had, the protest started early afternoon, usually around 12, the one o'clock and the first unlawful activity or the first order of dispersal didn't happen until later in the evening. So we saw definitely a progression and a change in the crowds. And so we'll talk more about that tomorrow, but there was definitely a change from the protest demonstrators that were out there at the beginning to when it got dark and there was a definite change. And that's when we began deploying our officers onto Highway 101 and to address the unlawful activity, including the fireworks and looting and also assaults. We were getting 911 calls from patrons downtown. There was one incident where a person was pulled out of their vehicle. And so, and then we also have the other issues with some of the side shows that were occurring. So, you know, there were fireworks going off. They weren't going off at us until we actually got out there because we weren't out there for several hours, but there was definitely a lot of, there were fireworks going off. There was unlawful activity that was occurring. And I will test the fact of having been out there including the spray painting of the Center of the Police Department windows. I did witness the restraint from our Center of the Police Department. I did notice the side shows that were happening on Sotomay Avenue. And you're right, there was restraint. After it got dark, I did leave. So therefore, I did not know what happened first if it had been the two guests or the fireworks. In regards to two guests as in general and seeing, or actually, here's a question for you, sir. What the strategy changes that you are commencing or you were initiating is removal of tear gas or anything that addresses the crowd opposed to individual? Is that some of the changes that you plan to make? Or could you explain some of the changes that you plan to make in the future? Yeah, and again, the tear gas that was deployed wasn't deployed until after a lawful assembly was announced and gave people time to leave. As far as the updates, you're gonna be hearing tomorrow about our changes in our use of force policies and our less lethal policies. And that includes our 40 millimeters, less lethal rounds, immunizations, deployment of those, the 40 millimeters and also our tear gas. And so we did restrict, make restrictions to how those are being used so we can tighten our operations and deployments of those tools. And my last question, we keep hearing about the soccer weave and officers tying their badges. Are you aware of anything of that sorts? No, I've asked my staff about that particular incident that came up. I am not aware of anything. My command staff is not aware of that happening. If we saw it on camera or if that came across during an arrest, we would definitely look into it and we would address it. And so we're continuing to evaluate everything. And again, as stated earlier, if things come up, come to light and people come forward, we're more than happy. In fact, I'm willing and my team is willing to look into each one of these to make sure that we are doing everything we can within policy and to ensure that we've got the best department here. So we're more than willing to look at any complaints that come in. And I do believe that full heartedly from the actions that you're taking, including dealing with the protesters, including approaching them and having them wanting to have the conversation. So if there's anything that I could do to further along the process in the future, I would be more than willing to do so. And last but not least, I know that remembering 2000s when we had protests, have we taken those events into account on how to produce strategies, what worked them and what didn't work them into what we're doing currently now? Council Member Alvarez, we always look at, we debrief any major events and significant events. And so we've done that over the years. And I think what you've heard both by OIR and Hillard Hines is that this was an unprecedented event and that this was not something that I'm gonna be perfectly honest, and we'll bring it up next tomorrow also. But when we have demonstrations and protests, it usually is, people are out there for a few hours. We've, in the past we've shown up, they're there for a little bit longer and then they leave. Didn't happen in this case. And this was something that we saw nationwide and nothing that we just, nothing that we could have expected. It was, yeah. So we do look at each event and we do after action, internal after action reviews and we talk about each of these incidents to make sure that we're better in the future. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Council Member Weiss. Mayor. So I think this probably is directed, Rob. Rob, thank you so much for acknowledging that we have a very good force. But while I sit on council, my goal is not for us to have a good force, it's for us to have a great force and for us to strive to perfection. So anytime there is room for improvement, that is what we need to do. So I appreciate your comment, but in the same breath, I feel like it kinda negates some of the things that our community wants us to look at in some ways that we can make improvement. So I just really wanted to point that out is that, yes, we have a wonderful force and we have wonderful people working on our force, but we are striving for perfection. So we are the best. So we are that model when someone asks you who is the model and who you want to look at, you can raise your hand and say Santa Rosa. So that is what we're going for, not being mediocre and definitely not being compared to some of the cities within our nation that have a lot more work. So when you say, oh, we're doing good, when I look at some of the things that are going on in some of the other cities, I want to be the best in striving for perfection, not doing well compared to other cities. So I just wanted to... Yeah, I know Vice Mayor, please don't misinterpret anything we're saying, which is why I alluded to the comments that Councilman Betimus had made earlier. Look, there are mistakes were made, we heard it during the OIR presentation. And even the people that we spoke with during our assessment from the police department, were very candid about the fact that there were things they would change and need to do better. So please don't misinterpret what we're suggesting by saying that they're better than the other departments we've interacted with, that that doesn't mean there's not room for improvement. In fact, if there's anything we also learned in this presentation is that the people with whom we interacted as Santa Rosa were much more willing and open-minded if you will to consider what it is that's being recommended not only by us, but by the OIR group and what they heard from the Human Rights Commission to be able to figure out where they need to go from here. So I agree with you. Another thing too is anybody who tells you they know everything there is to know about policing doesn't know a whole lot about policing because there's always something to learn. Remember, these are individual police departments of service communities and no single community is like any other community. They're all very, very distinct in their own way. So I think what we hope you hear from us is that we recognize that there are community issues out there, there are concerns and they're all valid and they're all legitimate. But I think what we're suggesting is that you're much further ahead than most agencies and you've got people in place that get that and are willing to roll up their sleeves and move forward, which is, which from our perspective when we compare and contrast other agencies, we, that gives us confidence that in two or three years you'll be able to say, come take a look at how we're doing. That's our comment. Thank you. I just wanted to call you on it because I know if I heard it that there was someone else in our community that possibly heard it that way. And I want them to know and everyone else to know that we're striving for perfection. We want our department to be one of the best. It's not the best. Thank you. All right, thank you, Vice Mayor. Council, any other questions? Okay. So we will go on to public comment for item number two. So for folks who have been watching and I appreciate you bearing with us through all of the different presentations that we've had here today. We thought it was important to get through all of them. We will have public comment. And as I mentioned at the outset everyone will have three minutes to say their piece today on these items. We can't get into a back and forth during public comment but if you have something specific that you'd like us to follow up on we can definitely take a note down and follow back up with that as well. If you are on phone hit star nine to raise your hand for our Zoom meeting. And then just as a reminder there will also be a second opportunity for public comment to discuss both the community empowerment plan as well as SRPD's presentation on reforms that they've made tomorrow on that meeting as well. With that, we'll start with Raigel followed by Bailey. Raigel, you should be unbuted. I am, can you hear me okay? Yep, go ahead. All right, so as you said, my name is Raigel. I mentioned my name in the HRC report as the one who recorded and released body cam footage of the unaddressed SUV attack on protesters. I'm also witness to a number of vehicle attacks within plain view of SRPD officers as well as being the victim and being struck by two of those attacks. During several of them, I witnessed SRPD officers tell us that they did nothing because quote, you don't want us, you don't get us. Monitored scanner traffic during that time revealed that SRPD were using the live streams of protesters during the primary first protest to gain tactical advantage. And during the cycle for life protest on June 27th, telling each other that since we had $10 stop signs to deal with traffic, that they didn't need to do anything. I personally gave two statements on the SUV attack that happened, both of them before SRPD released their statement to the press. They completely refuted and ignored mine and everybody else's statements from that night and the following morning. And this kind of behavior not only creates the mistrust, but forces changes in our behavior as we become more desperate to keep each other safe while we speak out. Most importantly and reinforces our completely correct perception so far that law enforcement does not exist to protect everyone or serve all communities. And in fact, it actually exists to police those who oppose the view of the established status quo. This is also evident in who is employed to investigate these events, simply reviewing the company roster of the OIR group. They very clearly do not culturally or racially represent the communities that are asked to provide accountability in. And so far, all I've heard is recommendations for more police spending and more cops and more staff on targeted tactical teams to terrorize individuals. And I just don't understand why anybody who's sitting on this council would think that targeting individuals would not escalate with a further response from the crowd. You're talking about protester demands of policy reform and proportional response happening, but really what it comes down to is that there is no such thing as proportional response when one side carries guns, grenades and total power over the outcome of the situation. It just doesn't exist. And there should really be no other outcome in here than total abolition of this biased and bankrupt institution. I yield my time. All right, thank you so much, Rachel. Bailey, followed by Alexis. Bailey, you should be unmuted. Hello. Go ahead, we can hear you. Yeah, so first I would like to start off. Can you hear me cool? Greetings, Ms. Smith, for the report. I also would like to say that the rest of these reports were soon and now just diminutive of the actual harm that was caused to our community last summer. I just want to ask like, do y'all like really care about human rights violations? Like, do you care about the people who are violently harmed, sexually assaulted and injured? Like, I just don't understand. When we look to this meeting, y'all only seem to really care about the abuse that caused vicious violence and harm to our community and continue to do so. You help fund and give power to these abusers who would rather protect property over people and ultimately uphold white supremacist values. How is it that the people facilitating the OIR report like did actually not even talk to like the community members who were harmed? Like it just does not make sense. And I would like just, we really just need to stop quit protecting the perpetrator and listen to the victim. It's as simple as that. Basically, I strongly encourage you to ban all use of shared gas, ban use of less lethal rounds, especially for crowd control and just police defund the police. Like it's not that hard. Like I'm sitting here in Navarro is asking for more money, but when really if you just take real reallocate those funds and put them into the community for social services and the health and maybe better fund our schools, like there wouldn't necessarily be a need for people to be protesting the police at health, your community and that stance. I yield the rest of my time. Thank you. All right, thank you, Bailey. Alexis followed by Michael. Hi, can you hear me? Yep, go ahead, Alexis. I just wanted to first off comment on how alarming it was to hear a lot of mistruths in this. I'm also alarmed here that the Santa Rosa police would be asking for a larger budget after the amount that citizens have had to pay out and the city has had to pay out for their numerous human rights violations over the years. I'm also really surprised to hear Navarro speak about reaching out to citizens and that's absolutely not the case. In fact, we have all, I think everyone who has been involved in these protests have reached out to Santa Rosa PD to provide information about different men who have pulled guns. I believe that there was a post by the SRPD calling out protesters for breaking off the back of a guy's window of his car window, when in reality he had driven through six people and almost killed a child. And we reached out to SRPD, tried to give them information about that. We were never contacted back. The lie that's being told is that they have contacted our community or been in touch with our community to ask us any questions. It's absolutely not true in any capacity. And I think that every single person you will hear from today will tell you that. They also are not taking the sexual assault claims seriously. There's been no mention of the sexual assault claims by these officers. I'm actually really shocked about that. I think it shows a lot about what Navarro's actual agenda is where he's trying to get more money from the city instead of addressing the actual issues at hand. I'm really surprised also to hear nobody, no other member of city council speaking out about the obvious mistruths that are being spoken right now. I can't believe that we are even considered I was shocked to hear that they thought that this was a tactical, this was a great thing or whatever it is that they had said because I live near Red Bear. I saw his face the day after he was shot in the face at point blank rage by a concussion grenade. His jaw was being held together. The fact that you think that was there a 16-year-old girl who had her head split open by another concussion grenade? I mean, the fact that you have the audacity, Navarro, to sit there and lie about the actions of your officers while admitting that there was a lack of control during the first week. It's beyond me. And you want to talk about how there hasn't been protests. I'm sorry, but we had a 20,000 person march when for the pink hat march. I mean, literally it's crazy that you would even imply that there haven't been protests to that degree. Also, it shows a lot of lack of foreshadowing on your end. There were literally across the nation, across the world protests in regards to George Floyd, of gravity of which no one had seen before. But ours didn't actually come until actually, I think a week after those major protests started. So Navarro, it really shows a lack of planning and a lack of intelligence on your end that you weren't able to foresee that. So Alexis, if I could get you to wrap up your comments, please? Yep, I can, yes, I'm all done. All right, but thank you so much. Michael, followed by Zaira. Hi, can you hear me? Yep, go ahead. So first, I really wanna thank Dimitra Smith and Jerry Three for publishing the report that they published a year ago. This report is amazing. I believe that this meeting wouldn't be happening if it weren't for them. And to thank all the community members who protested and who went through these traumatic experiences with the police and are still fighting to this day. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. What we're seeing today is not accountability. It's been a year since the report was released and dismissed. And now we've been given two reports, neither of which is really in scope of the majority of what was brought up in the Human Rights Report. Some of the incidents were investigated, but a lot of them, including the sexual assault, including the comments by officers, they were not. We were not given any specific names of officers who were disciplined or how they were disciplined. We were not, we were told that there were comments that didn't represent the department well, but we weren't told what those comments are. We weren't told who said those comments. And I'd be interested to know if there was an investigation of those individuals based on what they said, where did they say white supremacists' ideas. This was a protest against George Floyd. These are all critically important. And in terms of the investigation that did happen, the incident of the man who was shot in the face at point-blank range, my understanding is that this report is just not true at all. There's basically he was targeted. And so we need to, this is not a sufficient investigation and that there needs to be more public accountability behind that. We do not need to give SRPD more funding, absolutely not. We need to be defunding SRPD. I wanna mention very broad again, because this was a protest against what happened to George Floyd. I was told by officers at the protest, you don't think that someone from our department would do what they did to George Floyd, do you? Well, guess what? Now on the national stage, testifying in favor of Derek Chauvin, we have a 20-year veteran of the Sonoma County, the Santa Rosa Police Department. And I wanna address Jack Tibbets' comments that we have an attitude of us versus them. I firmly believe that there's no accountability here. That's what I firmly believe. And you're afraid that we're gonna point that out and that we're gonna blame you. And I want better representation from you. We know where you stand, Jack Tibbets. You've been representing the business community, your entire time in office, and we absolutely, none of this, this is all fake accountability. We're not afraid and we're gonna keep protesting, we're gonna keep fighting. All right, thank you, Michael. And I do have some of your questions or comments down to ask questions of staff after public comment as well. Next, we'll go to Zaira, followed by Kelsey. Hey, thanks everyone. Again, my name is Zaira, pronouncing her Aya. I sit on the AdHoc Community Advisory Committee for Petaluma. I'm also former chair to the Commission on Human Rights, and I can attest that I was not at all involved, nor was I ever contacted, as well as the president of North Bay Organizing Projects. I wanted to thank council members who specifically asked more specific questions because the more specific questions you all asked, it became clear that this consultant that was hired was to keep its clients happy, and that wasn't part of the community. It was not a thorough independent investigation. As for Councilman Jack Tibbetts, I too, the place you come from, sir, is white privilege. The us versus them and public is being divisive. That is gaslighting. So if you're tired of hearing about racism, imagine how tired people are of experiencing it. Councilmember Tibbetts, you lack cultural awareness, cultural competency, and cultural responsiveness. The right to live, the right to breathe, and the survival of community is not a divisive issue. It is about human rights. I believe black women, I believe the community, the people in these reports are coming from white men who have failed to understand systemic oppression. Not just systemic oppression, but people's actual lives. Accountability means a badge is never a shield for accountability. We need to make it easier to successfully prosecute police misconduct cases and curb racial and religious profiling. Transparency, the public deserves to know if officers are corrupt, dangerous, and or abusive. Inform the public about an officer's history or disciplinary actions by recording it in an accessible database. The community's relationship with police departments across the country are largely fractured because of lack of trust and lack of accountability that is enforced. That is how if we want to change the system, we need to change the whole thing. Thank you very much. I yield my time. Thank you. Next we have Kelsey followed by Kathleen. Hi, thank you for hearing me. I just wanna zoom out a little bit and say that I really hope from the human rights report that the people sitting on the council and the mayor and the leaders of our community are seeing the big picture here. If you don't see the problem with people being brutalized and injured at protest against police brutality by the police, then you shouldn't be in those chairs. We fundamentally reject the status quo where public employees go to war with civilians and call it acceptable and unpreventable. Let's not lose track of the big picture that citizens are rising up to demand change from police brutality, mass incarceration, shelterless raids, and systemic underinvestment in communities. And they do so at risk to themselves and you call it civil unrest. Ban less lethal rounds and tear gas. Protect people over property. Do not increase the budget of the SRPD. Reinvest in the people. Show us the change that the people are demanding in the streets now and yield the rest of my time. All right, thank you, Kelsey. Kathleen followed by Katrina. Good evening, everyone. I'm so glad to be here with you this evening discussing these vital issues. I think we're making headway even though other advocates may not think so. There's a lot of work to be done and that's very, very clear. One thing I want to mention that Mr. Connolly doesn't seem to be here anymore, but he did say something that I must very respectfully disagree with when he said that regarding Marcus Martinez injuries, they were just an accident. And I'm sorry when you aim a sting grenade at close range at the face of a man who is unarmed with his holding his hands up and you shoot, then that was very much intentional. I don't think you can get out of that one. And the same with man who was injured in the groin. And somebody has a weapon, they're pointing it at a person's groin and they discharge it intentional folks. So let's get real about that kind of stuff. And Ms. Gallagher, we want to see the evidence. We want to see those body counts and we know that we have a right to do that. So if you have to blur their faces, blur the faces but give us the evidence. So I wanted to just go back for a minute when I was present in your chambers and the council had a temperature lantern when police auditor Bob Aronson reported that officers in the streets were suffering from poor morale because they know that homeless policies aren't working and we're in some sort of standards actually making things worse. Mr. Aronson was summarily terminated as you all know. Since that time, activists have been completely calling for the appointment of a new auditor, a cry that has been ignored to this day. So where do we go from here? I suggest the timely appointment of a new auditor along with the citizen oversight committee. We need a deep review of implicit bias and outright racism in the force. We need new use of force policies, dedicated de-escalation training, appropriate discipline for misconduct, and that's just for starters. So the outcome of last summer's protests was a train wreck just waiting to happen. I think that you know it, I know it and it's up to you to make certain that it doesn't happen again. Thank you. Thank you, Kathleen. We'll go to Katrina followed by Eris. Hello, can you hear me? Yep, go ahead Katrina. Thank you. My name is Katrina Phillips. I am the vice chair of the commission of human rights. I as well was never contacted by any council, sheriff or SRPD concerning our commission report. The lack of accountability on behalf of the SRPD or any response on our report is unacceptable. The CHR report was made public in July of 2020. And during this whole meeting, it seems that little to no people have actually read it. As a survivor of actually being beaten by SWAT while peacefully protesting, I can swear to you that trust is completely broken between resident and police. PTSD is never ending. Here in Santa Rosa, we could barely tell the difference between military and police during the protests. If trust is to be rebuilt in the city of Santa Rosa, changes must be made. More budget and staff are not what is needed for change and qualified immunity. It's time. Thank you. I yield my time. Thank you to Katrina. Eris followed by Elizabeth. Hello, my name is Ted. I am a national registered EMT with 15 years of experience in the medical field. Two days of training to work in a psych hospital prepared me better to de-escalate situations than what I saw from the police. I've been present at George Floyd protests, other BLM events, Occupy, Standing Rock, and I've not seen such brutality. Me and my partner also an EMT did not leave our house until the order to release tear gas on the crowds had been used. In total, we didn't went out for three days. Ever once in those three days that I ever hear in order to disperse, I saw many unforced trauma injuries to backs of legs from people who had been retreating. I saw head wounds with facial injuries. I saw gas fired ahead of withdrawing groups, forcing them to move through the gas to flee the advancing police line. I saw police vehicles charging protesters in the street, forcing their way through crowds and generally traveling at unsafe speeds. I had some limited observation of property damage, broken windows and tagging, no burning or successful looting. And the police's response to that was completely disproportional. I saw zero observations of use of force against police or fireworks aimed at them. What I did see was a dragnet, grab and book and charge of groups who were either standing their ground as peaceful protesters or leaving as individuals. I feel that the curfew was a violation of the right to protest, but the folks that went out went out with the expectation they would be arrested, understanding of the consequences but were committed to feeling the need for change. As an EMT, I feel I was arrested in a honeypot. The group of medics I was with were misled, the social media reports that led us to a concentration of police who once we were arrested, I overheard saying that they were with a group that was looking for the medics. Being an EMT, I have some good old boy privilege. Being white, I was able to talk my way out of any hostile or violent interactions with the police, but shortly before my arrest, I did witness police pull up, jump out of the car, parked up on the curb and run down protesters who were people of color. Once in jail, my N95 respirator mask was removed, replaced with a flimsy paper mask, and masking was not enforced in the crowded jail situation. Injured protesters in the jail, in holding, were not treated for many hours and various inmates were treating each other for abrasions and injuries sustained from their arrest. The continued trend of militarization of police in Santa Rosa, Sonoma County in the US at large must end. You need to know the world is watching. History will judge your response, especially since you have the distinction of being a small part of a small group of municipalities that deployed chemical weapons against their own citizens. I recognize my time is done. Thank you. Thank you for sharing your story, Ted. Elizabeth followed by Lee. Good afternoon, City Council. This is Elizabeth Escalante, Second District Human Rights Commissioner and President of the Wine Country Young Democrats. So it seems to me that some of us have not fully read the Commission on Human Rights Report, and I just wanted to emphasize and make it a little bit easier by referring to page six, excuse me, page 26 of the commission, the Commission Recommendation Supporting Injured Protester Demands. Bullet point it, you know, conduct the review, you know, must be conducted in compliance with the standards for accountability laid out in the United Nations standards, including in this report, report being CHR, okay? And investigations and the likelihood of warranting criminal investigations of the SRPD. And let's also not ask for more money. What the people are asking for is removing and banning these military-grade weapons such as tear gas, rubber bullets, grenades, projectiles. What the hell do you need all that for? These protesters were peaceful. And to put it lightly, I'm really, really, really concerned about how some of us are talking about this as if this is just a divisive political issue. It's not. This is a human rights issue. And I'll say that again, I'm also really, really, really, really concerned that we may not be seeing this as so. People read through the report. I should not have to repeat some of these instances that have happened to these people unspeakable. And all by the hands of the SRPD, it was not the protesters who incited the violence. This is violence perpetrated by the police department. That's the truth right there. And Council Member Tibbetts, what's this talk about the divisiveness between your public? No, this is, I think I'm hearing the white privilege just coming out of that. They what? If you're going against what the people are asking for, I don't see that as divisiveness. Rather, I think we need to listen a lot more closely. I yield the rest of my time. Thank you, Elizabeth. Next, we'll go to Lee followed by concerned citizen. Hi, thank you. First of all, thank you to Ms. Smith and Mr. Three for your long overdue presentation. I appreciate your work and the work of the Human Rights Commission. Regarding these internal apologetic reports, I think many members of the public will be very confused by these reports since what actually happened was the city settled something like 2 million due to law enforcement brutality. These investigators admitted their own negligence in not interviewing protesters or looking at videos taken by observers. No wonder you just had to settle. The minimizing of things like sexual assault and blowing a person's face off is blatant, systematic racism and toxic white behavior. It's quite the display. I look forward to the contents of this lawsuit being public so the public can compare these reports that the city funded and to focus on things like broken car windows instead of the driver who tried to kill a child is just sick and to keep bringing up fire as a fear tactic is also deeply disturbing. I wonder what Martin Luther King would say, hearing white men say not a debarper in the country is not dealing with growing pains over this and the Lopez is watching and so is history. Like so many, I called to protest and to report what I witnessed drivers who tried to kill protesters and I was dismissed multiple times both by police and by the DA. So yes, we are divided. We are divided by white supremacists and those trying to unwind racism and to be held hold and to hold each other accountable to systematic oppression. We are divided between people who value human rights and who value property. That said, this council continued financial support of brutality during the past year has been troubling to say the least. Law enforcement already knows about crowd control and contagion. You just grew Google criminal justice curriculum while city council members may be new to these terms. Law enforcement is not and that's deeply disturbing. When to witness calls for training when we know the trainers has been historically people like Barry Broad is very troubling. To witness community members who are black, brown, indigenous, melanated people continue to be in far greater danger than the white community members most specifically at the intersections of healthlessness and mental illness is deeply troubling. For this discussion to come almost a year after human rights were violated is deeply disturbing. I'm coming near the end of my time. This council's choice to not only fund violence but to attempt to bring those whom they have funded to the table is deeply disturbing. The city council funded those whom human rights is violated this human rights violations a court is about. You funded sexual abuse. You funded blowing a person's face off. This is the public's continuing to speak the same things for a year. And now the case of the same thing. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Lee. Concerns that is in followed by Leslie. I'm saying that the cringe level I experienced here today is heavy and it deeply hurt. We came here to talk about the brutality of protesters by police that has been one time acknowledging the property that was damaged but not the property that was damaged by the police. Why say that it's the public versus the police when the police hold the power? They are often arrested and we are constantly begging the police to rectify and protect this community. As a black woman and a protester who was present first all of the event I can say that the police barely acknowledged us and often tried to treat us like we're not humans. Navarro's asking for more money for officers when it was when it has constantly been put on record that they lack funding to run great kids. I heard that they can only find videos from the police's point of view. How about you guys use Google or ask the community instead of sitting around and waiting until it's time to say that you have not had any communication with the community. We've called the police. I myself have showed up to the police station myself because I got tired of being ignored only to be pushed to the left. You concerned citizen, I appreciate you sharing your story. Leslie followed by Jerry. Thank you. Thank you for having these study sessions. My name is Leslie Graves. I am the chair of the community advisory board. Although I do not represent the community advisory board at this time, I am a citizen of Santa Rosa. I want to echo the sentiment that a policy should be in place immediately banning the indiscriminate use of tear gas and less lethal rounds of ammunition. At all protests, events, gatherings, rallies and any and all crowd control. We need to recognize that any event can become a protest. That any event can go out of control. That we are all human beings and that the variable of human beings makes it to where we need to have this policy in place. I realized by listening to this study session that there may be further discussions in order to create this policy. I want to remind you that at this point in time, if there is a protest tonight, if there is a protest of 100 people, 1,000 people, 5,000 people of any amount and it gets out of hand that these munitions could be used tonight. That they could have been used a few weeks ago if the verdict in the case against the murderer of George Floyd would have been different. Santa Rosa is not immune to having these kinds of events. I think that was a fatal flaw. I think that we're extremely lucky that we had people injured and not killed by the incidents that happened last summer. It is unfortunate, it is sad, it is frustrating that people were injured. There's so much more to say. But I want to point out a couple incidents that happened previously. In 2017, the Santa Rosa Women's March had over 8,000 people. Santa Rosa police officers brought out barricades and helped those people to stay safe from vehicles running into them. It was not planned. There was an expectation of only 600 people. Santa Rosa Police Department can make good decisions and have integrity no matter what the situation, no matter whether they're prepared, no matter what the intensity of the situation, no matter what the duration of the situation, no matter whether it's at night or at day. I want those things to be heard and I want everybody in this community to have the assumption of safety no matter where they are going, where they're gathering, where they're protesting, where they're enjoying themselves. We are all need that kind of safety from the police department. Thank you so much. Thank you, Madam Chair. Jerry, followed by Collin. Hi, this is Jerry. I want to clarify a few factual points that came up during the hearing. At the CHR meeting between protesters and city and county officials that happened last summer, Chief Navarro took contact information from some of the protesters there, yet never followed up by calling or otherwise contacting them. I know this because we checked in with the protesters to ask them what follow-up happened. During the meeting, protesters shared facts, strongly suggesting officer misconduct happened during the protest. So follow-up is the fundamental obligation of the chief of a police agency who's concerned about whether his employees are violating their oaths. In addition, the chief obviously read the CHR report because he then characterized it as an unfair blanket condemnation of his employees. Yet the department did not follow up with the CHR or the identified protesters to gather more information that would allow an actual investigation of the very serious and concerning allegations in the report. Because of these fundamental failures, the IE division of SRPD apparently did not investigate these issues and therefore OIR was unable to determine whether there was an adequate investigation of these complaints. And to be clear, the CHR PowerPoint did not raise anything new that was not already in the report published last summer. Every agency must investigate when information comes to their attention that raises the issue of possible misconduct by officers. The onus is not on the public to file a formal complaint to ensure that happens. It's on the department once they have that information as they did here. The failure to do so sends a troubling signal about the department's attitude toward possible misconduct. Accountability is very important. I hopefully it extends to everyone in the department from the top to the bottom. I heard the chief say that he's willing and ready to investigate these reports that are in the CHR report. I hope that's true and I hope he follows up with the folks who are identified in the report and with the commission to actually conduct these investigations. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Colin followed by Ian. Hi, can you hear me? Yep, go ahead, Colin. Hi, I just wanna respond to a number of very concerning things that I heard throughout this meeting. That the Human Rights Commission was addressed so briefly and had so little interaction was concerning to say the least and to follow that up with two other reports that read to me as community gaslighting of just saying, oh, it really wasn't that bad or it was pretty bad. It was very unfortunate but we're doing better than other places. It's insane to me and I don't know how so many of our city council members can sit back and continue to say, oh, yeah, you're right, it was better. Well, maybe we can do better to have Nimbaro come on and ask for more high level officials so that they can have more supervisors on staff in case some of these situations happen. It's also insane. It's completely counter to what we've been telling you this entire time, which is we want fewer police officers. We want less funding for the police department. I don't know how you think putting more cops on the street isn't gonna do that for anyone. I mean, there were dozens of police officers out there already and yeah, maybe you think it's an operational thing but ultimately when it comes down to it, regardless of how many supervisors you have out there, you still have cops out there saying inappropriate comments like others have said that you won't elaborate what those comments were making use of force situations that were inappropriate that you also will not elaborate on. All these situations are terrifying and to hear Tibbets and other council members cotton on to the idea of maybe we should just target the violent protesters, the bad protesters. What does that mean? What does a bad protester look like to you? What constitutes a necessitation of the violation of someone's first amendment rights to you that you can take a mobile team of people in a car to go out and essentially do hits on who you think are bad protesters? As someone who has been labeled as a bad violent protester who has been arrested for alleged violent activity at protests, fuck you. Honestly, like to hear that is just frightening. To hear that you want a more effective and efficient use of police force against individuals is terrifying. It's an expansion of state repression and it's not something that people are gonna stand for. We need less police. We need no police. We don't need you. You don't need to be out here beating people, injuring people, putting people in the hospital. No police. We don't need you and we never have. All right, thank you, Colin. Ian followed by Jenny. Oh, sorry, hello. Yep, we can hear Ian. All right, I would just like to speak on the fact of just on the tear gas. It's very interesting to me that tear gas was banned in 1925 with the Geneva Convention. So not only is it banned in actual warfare that the whole world respects, it's for some reason our police are allowed to use it against our citizen, which is not even against our citizens, which is not even close to any form of war or war like conduct. So that's just one thing that I find very interesting. The second thing is, as far as giving the police department more funds, when they're costing money left and right on lawsuits, on trying to fix this lawsuit, trying to fix that lawsuit, we're already funding them more. So why do they need more money internally? It just makes no sense to me. Another thing is with the cooperation of the sheriff and the police department during the protests, you found like later, did we find out that when measure P was put on the ballots, the sheriff office tried to call on judges to try to get that evoked from the ballot. So that's a weird little trust thing. And now he is also suing a member of Sonoma County over abusive comments and not letting those out to the public. So the cooperation between the Senators of Police Department and the Sonoma County Sheriff's doesn't seem to be, it doesn't help any sort of trust at all. Now that's the Senators of Police Department, it is very strange that they want more money yet they have to have new car, brand new cars every five years. No regular citizen gets a new car. If you're in the lower middle class, you don't get a new car every five years. You repair those cars, you keep up repairs. Those cars last for hundreds, they last for at least 100,000 miles. So maybe they should sell off some of the cars, not buying new cars for a little bit. I don't know, just the top. Although there's all these weapons with the tear gas, you can just not have those anymore, just sell those back to the government. Easy little, oh, they need some more money. Great, there you go. And they also did speak, someone did speak on this before, but they have a lack of funding for their sexual assault victim unit. That's very strange what they need, but they all, like someone said before, they need that money. They need extra money to get more officers on the street. Like people said, there are plenty of officers on the street. It's not a matter of more policing that is scientifically proven to not help crime rates across America. Lucky Canada as an example of like a well-established first world country who has a police system that does somewhat a better job. Sure, it doesn't do the best job. I don't know, police officers, they don't really do that good a job, but they do, you can look at them as someone to take examples from. Thank you. Thank you, Ian. Next we'll have Jenny followed by Noah. Hi, can you hear me okay? Yep, we can hear you just fine, Jenny. Thank you so much. Yeah, I really appreciate everyone, especially from the Human Rights Commission calling in and reiterating that you did not or were not contacted on the human rights report or whatever this report was. It just seems like really weird to me. I just want to point out a few things. I'm trying to find the article, but and Santa Rosa Police Department just settled a $2 million lawsuit for the human rights. And so I'm just a little bit confused as far as like why we're painting protesters as these villains because as far as I'm aware, like we're funding you, we're funding you. That's our money as taxpayers that you're paying out. That's not like getting cut from salaries. That's not, you're asking for more. You just messed up. You just shot someone in the face. You sexually assaulted people. You did countless literal human rights violations and now you're asking for more money, for more things. This really seems to me like an abusive partner gaslighting you and being like, hey, I'm really sorry I had to do that, but if you give me more love, if you would only be a better wife, then I wouldn't have to hit you. So I also want to point out this is not isolated to Santa Rosa. I feel like the council today is acting like this is just Santa Rosa's problem with protesters and the police. This is literally happening not only across the country, but globally, there is a shift towards Black Lives Matter and defunding the police. There's movement and like we are not crazy. There's a lot of movement towards mutual aid, funding education, funding mental health, funding families. That's, it's not just us. It's not just us asking for this. And like it was said, it's not just here that we're asking for this. It works in Canada. It works other places, maybe not perfectly, but there are places where not every city in the US gassed and shot their protesters last year. I also want to point out what are the long-term consequences? So far, tear gas has also been found to affect women's reproductive systems extensively even after a year after being gassed. And this is just, there's so much wrong with this that we are not addressing. Oh, thank you. I wasn't sure how much time. But anyway, just yeah, this is not okay. And this is, I don't feel represented here. So thanks. All right, thank you for your comments, Jenny. Noah, followed by Elias. Can you hear me? Yep, I can hear you. First and foremost, I uplift the black indigenous people of color who have spent countless hours of their time doing tireless organizing in our community, unpaid, as well as hours spent here in this meeting today. I uplift the protesters who contributed to the Human Rights Commission report, a report that did not get its due in this meeting compared to the apologies of internal sympathizers and the trauma those protesters had to live and relive then and now. Our community is not here for lies and platitudes. Our community is not here to reward police violence and torture with more funding and specialized training, which targets already marginalized individuals. How dare white men with no community connection talk flippantly about the supposed procedures that give state-sponsored terrorists a license to kill? How dare you demonize youth of color from mourning the loss and birthday of their friend, Andy Lopez, who your weapons suppliers, the sheriffs murdered in cold blood. Firing noxious chemical weapons like tear gas during a pandemic of deadly respiratory illness is inexcusable and I can guarantee you any medical professional would say the same. Letting curb jumping cars driving to unarmed crowds with little more than a slap on the wrist is just another example of police temporarily deputizing their white supremacist sympathizers. It happened all over the nation and it happens here too. And that was before protesters were imprisoned without any COVID safety precautions, mocked relentlessly and in many cases subject to sexual assaulting comments. We saw and heard everything. And when SRPD's own trainer Barry Broad testified in defense of another killer cop, the world witnessed the homegrown brutality germinating within SRPD. The message hasn't changed and we've been saying for a whole year. The police department exists to serve privilege and property like every other medieval system where support was supremacy, the only option is abolition. Disarm, defund and dismantle SRPD. Put the money in disinvested communities where it always belonged, communities that these cops continue to harass. The same people who treat police budgets with endless generosity turn around in Christ scarcity when it comes to invest in services, in health, in housing, in schools and in every aspect of actual community care. So this is your chance to show us you care. Take the human rights report seriously. And I uphold and uplift what Jerry 3 and Demetra Smith spoke of before. To everyone who is speaking in favor of abolition, I'm with you. Show us where you stand. I yield my time. All right, thank you Noah. Elias followed by Melissa. Great, can you hear me? Yep, go ahead. For sure, yes. Hi everybody, my name is Elias Hinnett. I'm a member of the Sonoma County Black Coalition speaking on their behalf today. And yeah, also, as everybody else said, I'm also appalled but not surprised. As another public commenter said, it was a train wreck, but really the train's already been off its track and it's been running over people of color since the beginning. And as for preliminary solutions coming with these things, I'm also a member of the Measure O oversight committee and I'm speaking on behalf as an individual today, where just to make y'all leave a little more matter we're in the process of approving a four plus million dollar budget for the police department with no added guarantee that the funding is gonna go towards these weapons that were shot against people. We don't have no guarantee that these officers are being further screened and trained because of these out permission attacks on people. And this ask for more money, I mean, any money that comes further should be used for an auditor or it can also be used for direct aid for the community. Solutions are available. And for the people that are outraged, I hope to see you all at the next Measure O meeting because these auditors have clearly chosen what side they're on. They're not saying what needs to be said and they're not holding the people accountable that they take part in these actions against people being shot in the face and in the groin. I hope those officers are gonna be investigated and eventually fired and they're held accountable. And just for the public, it's gonna be up to us to demand what we want our city to be like. And yeah, I definitely appreciate the council members that have spoken up. And I hope that this comes as an example for all of us to really begin to understand that money is being used in ways that we are not consenting to. And we hope that this is not a conversation starter. We hope that people are held accountable and money does go towards where we need it to be such as another public commenter said, mutual aid and resources for the community. I yield the rest of my time. All right, thank you so much, Elias. Melissa, followed by Alan. Hi, can you hear me? Yep, go ahead, Melissa. Hi, my name is Melissa. I'm an educator and activist and I'm just calling in to tell you that I'm really concerned about the stark difference of tones between the human rights report and the oversight report. We hear human rights violations from the UN being outlined in the human rights commissions report. And then on the other side, we have the oversight report that seemed to uphold one sided narrative that the police did the best they could and made a couple of mistakes. These couple of mistakes were people who were permanently harmed, people who were terrorized and traumatized, people who were sexually harassed and assaulted. These are not just a couple of mistakes. These are incredibly harmful things that have been done to our community. And I hope that the city council understands that as much. I really hope that more money is not sent to the SRPD because that is not the answer. The city just settled for $2 million money that is coming from the community. The community is paying for the abuses of the SRPD. And I just don't see how giving them more money for training and staffing is going to repair what they have done. They have made a huge mistake and they need to be held accountable. They should not be given a bigger budget. That money has already been taken from the community and so it needs to be reinvested back into the community to be taken from the SRPD and that should be part of them being held accountable for what they did. And we need deep systemic change. So I hope that when we talk about policy tomorrow, we really talk about ways that we can change the system of policing in Santa Rosa because we are a model for Sonoma County. What we do here changes how the rest of the cities in Sonoma County see policy and policing and ways forward. We can see that with the CAHOOTS program. So I really, really hope that the city council thinks about the human rights violations and moves forward using that lens, rather than the one that said the police did the best they could with a couple of mistakes. Thank you. I yield the rest of my time. Thank you, Melissa. Alan, followed by North Bay Jobs with Justice. Alan, are you able to end you? Hi, I'm sorry about that. So, Alan, we're having a little bit of difficulty hearing you. I can hear you. You sound like you're a thousand miles away. He needs more money to hire more officers, almost in the same sentence as saying that they've lost seven officers in the past few years. And so I wanna know what happened to that money and if we got it back or what. And I just wanted to point out that a number of people on the city council know that he's lying about what went down at the protests. And I'm just waiting for anyone to call him out on that because how do you know if Chief Navarro's lying? He has unmuted himself on Zoom. Thank you. Thank you, Alan. Lily, followed by Sarah. Lily, are you able to unmute? Hello, yeah. Can you hear me? Yep, there you go. Okay. I wonder why this special meeting is being held near the anniversary of these protests instead of closer in time to the events being talked about today. It's never too late, but it's telling the lack of urgency this council seems to be taking this issue with. Mr. Jerry Three, I wanna point out when you advise on how to better quote unquote quality's protests by targeting individuals who may be throwing empty water bottles at officers who are dressed head to toe with armor suitable for war. You seem to be contradicting your earlier statement and acknowledging that police treated white protesters differently than protesters of color. You expect police officers to treat these arrests fairly. You expect these officers to treat those arrests humanely to even arrest the right person. It's concerning how you seem to explore this idea that peaceful protesters might be deserving more rights or better treatment than violent ones. I was speaking as a protestor who attended every single one of the major protests. I was also arrested on the birthday of Evie Lopez. I saw firsthand the accounts we are talking about today and in some ways I'm happy that these events I saw and know to be true or being treated with the seriousness I would hope they would be treated with but I'm concerned about these lines being drawn categorizing protesters in this way talking about this scalpel approach you're reframing the idea of stopping the human rights abuses and instead targeting people for these human rights abuses. You either care about the public and how the police abuse us or you don't it could be that black and white. I urge the council to remember what we were protesting for in the first place. We want the police to funded. We want the police gone. I yield my time. Thank you, Lily. Sarah followed by River. Hey, can you all hear me? Yep, go ahead Sarah. Great. Here we are again. So as folks have brought up, I really wanna know how many of the people in those listening sessions were actually among the ones who were under attack by SRPD last summer? And I like under attack and I mean people who were gassed, people who were traumatized, people who were injured, including those folks who SRPD hospitalized that you all just had to pay out to. Those folks that were kettled and arrested during a pandemic, including medics who are like local health professionals like during a pandemic, people who were told that they couldn't wear masks in a jail during a pandemic. How many of those folks were in those listening sessions? I don't know a single person from any of the organizations you all have listening sessions with. And if you're seriously counting the community conversations on race panels, that is a joke. Like I hope it didn't get named conversation. So you all could prop it up as a listening session. And I know that you didn't talk to those folks because the first thing on your list of things to do is to build trust. And the folks who were attacked by SRPD last summer are not asking for trust between SRPD and the community. There's no amount of listening circles and community events that you can do to convince folks who experienced that level of violence to trust the source of that violence. You're all repeatedly and blatantly ignoring a substantial part of your community, of your constituents. You're on your phones during these meetings, you're rolling your eyes, you're incorporating zero feedback from these comments, from the community. If you actually listened to us, we probably wouldn't be here. I have better things to do on a Tuesday afternoon than drag public comments on late into the evening or night. But really, it's worth it because I hope we keep at it. Because if y'all is conscious, won't keep you up at night, public comments should. People who were under attack last summer want accountability. They want this prevented from happening again to more of our friends and people that we care about. They want this cruel, failed anti-community department to lose funding and for people to lose or leave their jobs. We don't want better policing. We want less policing. We want the budget that allowed these people to buy tear gas to attack local residents with slashed. Like honestly, the only reason you don't have people out on the streets every night right now is because people are so exhausted by y'all's nonsense. And I hope people are re-energized by this blatant theater. I hope people hit the streets again. And I hope it grows the level of like an uprising, like a non-violent uprising or whatever is just y'all's performance today. Y'all have absolutely earned that and I need a drink. Thank you, Sarah. River followed by Allegra. Hello, can you hear me? Yep, go ahead River. Hi, I've been an educator for about 15 years. I've worked with adults, I've worked with kids. And when I'm on the job, the safety of my students is really, really important to me. And I work very, very hard to make sure that my students are safe. And never, not once have I used tear gas on my students when they break the rules. If I did that, that would make my students less safe. It would be beyond the pale. It would be ineffective, it would be inhumane, it would be cruel, no teacher should never do that. Our local law enforcement's reaction to the protest last summer was ineffective. It was inhumane, it was cruel and I am utterly appalled. And I want you to make sure that it never happens again. Not the rest of my time. All right, thank you, River. Allegra followed by Amber. Hi, good evening. I just wanted to also say, yeah, the way that this meeting has run has been super disappointing. The way that the reports were received, the huge disparity between the discussion or lack thereof on the human rights commission report and the long drawn out multi-pronged approach to wondering how we could possibly police protesters better and not hold the police accountable was ridiculous. And I'm disappointed in every single one of you for the fact that you didn't stand up to that. Ask some questions, try and determine which of these statements came from the police versus the community and actually think about how you can support the people who live here and not just the police department, that nobody on the council countered the lies that were in those reports and the lies that were coming from Navarro's mouth. It's ludicrous and disappointing. And I just really don't see how we move on from here when the city council does not respect the rights of First Amendment protest and instead bows its heads to propaganda of the police. And the fact that we're sitting here talking about giving the cops more money after they have permanently injured people, after people are disfigured and damaged for life, after the police tear-gassed children, which as I think somebody else said is against the Geneva conventions in our streets in Santa Rosa, that's not Sonoma County or at least that's not supposed to be Sonoma County. So I think you all need to take a step back, think about what you're doing and think about whose side you're on because this is unbelievable. I yield my time. Thank you, Allegra. Amber followed by Shintavi. Hi, can you hear me? Yep, go ahead, Amber. Okay, my name is Amber and I am a concerned citizen of Santa Rosa. Santa Rosa, you are on trial right now in a really big way and your citizens have a right to be heard. Your citizens have a right to assembly and your citizens have a right to protest. What an absolute joke that oversight report was. The stark contrast between that and the human rights violation report could not have been more black and white. Chief Navarro, you have shown a willingness to show up only when you are able to look good. You continue to gaslight this community in such a grand and performative way that I'm left to wonder if you're simply making a mockery of us. What a joke. What an insult. Tibbets, you are a part of the problem. You are a direct part of the problem of why we are here for you to stand before us during a human rights violation report and suggest that we place a hit and or a target on quote unquote violent protesters within a crowd is a joke. Do you hear yourself? Do you hear yourself when you say things like that? That does nothing to strengthen the complete lack of trust that citizens have with their local law enforcement. It's a complete mockery of why we're here today. Protesters have been and are being stalked. Our privacy is being violated. Last summer, law enforcement declared war on us on citizens of Santa Rosa, you tear gas children, you tear gas business owners, you tear gas local citizens, simply exercising their right to make their voices heard. Ask yourself why we had to take to the streets in the first place because you won't hear us in council meetings. You won't hear us in board of supervisor meetings. You won't hear us and you're still trying to silence us. SRPD spent how much money in 2019 and 2020 to get all their vehicles wrapped? SRPD spent how much money sending out bogus, overly violated and overly biased reports on press releases? You wanna talk about the white Porsche? Who does that driver know? Who is that driver connected to? And now you want more money? You want to tell us that you're gonna try and do a better job? You have your time. It's time to leave. You pay protesters as villains but you pay out literal millions for your brutality and then you have the gall to ask for more money through funding and better training. Fuck you. We are seeds and we're not going anywhere. Thank you Amber, Shantavi followed by John. Hey y'all, can you hear me? Yep, go ahead. Good evening everybody. I know this has been a long meeting but it's worth the wait. We have been putting off this issue for way too long. I'm Shantavi Tornado, founder of Love and Light and I have led one of the first protests here in Sonoma County last year. You know, reliving this on the daily, I can't say that it was just last year that we were fighting. Growing up here in Sonoma County, we've been fighting our whole lives, especially if you grew up in the West end of Sonoma County in Santa Rosa in the Roseland area. We have seen violence on violence and last year was just a tipping point. You know, we did have Andy Lopez, our little brother who we lost to police brutality. And when you ask us what we are fighting for, we are fighting innately to keep each other safe. If you read law enforcement mission statement, your own mission statement says the community will believe the Santa Rosa Police Department is a proactive, progressive and professional organization committed to making Santa Rosa a safe place to work and play. You all don't even live up to your own words of keeping us safe and creating safe spaces for our children to live. And as a mother, I am angry and far beyond angry. Growing up in this broken system in Santa Rosa, this has been our lives. And we are so sick of hearing the white noise drown out people of color. The erasure of women of color doing the good work here in Sonoma County and uplifting civil rights actions has been enough. We have people like Demetra Smith who are literally batting for us to survive. We have, we finally have you all speaking out for Jackie Elwood, but you haven't spoke out enough. This human rights report literally states what we have gone through. And I am so disappointed in the white noise. Jack, you hide your cloak well, we see you, we see you. And you know what we need? We need for the council to say, we take a stand against white supremacy because innately that is what is keeping us from growing. Is the white supremacy, the structure here in Sonoma County that was founded on. You all planted the seed, but we are here to, we are here to break that soil. We are the, we are the brain drop of change here in this community. And I am not gonna stand down as much as, as long as I live in this County. Thank you, Shantidee. John, followed by Veronica. Hi, can you hear me? Yep, go ahead, John. Hi, my name is John Courage, I'm a lifelong resident of Santa Rosa, and a musician and entertainer here in town. And I was active in the protest downtown last summer and was down there. And first hand witness these actions by police. And mostly I have a question for council member Tibbets right now. And the other people that have referenced the looting in Santa Rosa that sort of seems like a very confusing blanket term. When as far as I know, the only isolated incident was someone had gone into the mall after a window was broken and other people actually forced that person to return what they took from the mall. So I'm just curious where the rhetoric of looting has come into play here as part of our conversation today. I'm also appalled at the notion that after SRPD commits felonious acts that cost the city and its taxpayers $2 million that the nerve is there to reinforce the rhetoric that we need to continue the budget expansion each year for the police department when in fact we need to be dismantling that budget and redirecting it into more sustainable ways for our community to come together and to feel safe. I yield my time. Thank you, John, Veronica. Good evening. I just wanna start with the good reports. And to me, it's like you have to really follow the money here and you figure who paid to have these reports prepared and investigated. So of course the preparer, the investigator is gonna make findings in favor of who hired them to do that report. So people out there, it's no surprise that two of them were pretty favorable or they were softball, I guess, softball-ish because really the city of Santa Rosa is investigating itself. And I would really wanna know how much money they paid to have these reports prepared. I mean, that's just like very broad, ex-Santa Luis office being paid $10,000 to say what he was paid to say to benefit a murderer. People were paid to say what people wanted them to say, but they were self-serving. And then when we talk about money, I was like, really, how can you put a value on someone's face or their testicle? It's not like you can go down to the hardware store and get a new window, you can get a new face. I mean, that's just priceless. There's no price you can put on that. And if we talk about money, again, like we are paying out millions of dollars for the police department and I expect professionalism, professional football players catch the ball, professional police officers do your job in a professional way and protect and serve your citizens that you're paid to protect and serve. And wait too much to say. If you wanna join the military, you wanna use military weapons, go join the military, go knock yourself out, go to war, get shot at yourself because the police department shouldn't be militarized. And tear gas, why are we using tear gas? Really? And then projectiles that are shooting people that are not meant to shoot people. This is, I cannot believe that this happened in our city. And I called on that day and I said, why are there helicopters? Why is Sebastopol Police Department in Qatarie and all these local other law enforcement agencies in our town, what's going on? Oh, we're protecting the citizen. Oh, it's almost citizen, but it looks like we're in a war zone. I was offended by it. If people want a peaceful protest, then we need to figure out how to make that happen. I'm not for troublemaker. I don't like people terrorizing or criminalizing, committing crimes. I'm not for that at all. But I am for people allowing people to have a voice. And I wanna know where the charges filed on the person that went to the DA's office, the crime that was referred to the DA was a case filed. And how many other agencies were all there total? Because were those all coordinated and all working in the same direction? I'm very disappointed and I hope we do better. I hope for the police department to do good. And I want the city council members, don't be shy. Speak out, speak out, because that's why we worked hard to put you there. All right, thank you so much, Veronica. Madam city clerk, that's the last live hand I see. Can we go to the prerecorded voicemail public comments? I'm sorry, Mary, I wanted to refresh my screen. We're having a problem with the audio coming through. I'm not sure if the indicator was coming through. So I'm not sure that audio is going to play, but we'll give it a shot. Okay. Hi, my name is Ari and I'm commenting on agenda item number two. Thank you for finally looking into the human rights commission report, which was released almost a year ago. When police have access to weaponry like tear gas and sting ball grenades and they show up to protests ready and willing to deploy them, that communicates that they see the people they are supposedly sworn to protect as enemies to be subdued. There can be no community between police and the people of Santa Rosa if they are so willing and equipped to brutalize anyone they get a bad feeling about. How much taxpayer money went to funding that tear gas? How many other people could that settlement money have helped if those protesters had never been hurt? I also want to talk about the city, police and press response to the cars that repeatedly drove through the crowds of protesters. That was a terrifying thing to have happen even once and the lack of action taken against any of the drivers. Some of whom even got their side of the story publicized who chose to needlessly and recklessly endanger so many people in bold and others and it became an expected occurrence. It shouldn't take a tragedy like the 2017 murder of Heather Haier who was killed by someone hateful driving through a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville to realize this is a very serious and dangerous thing to ignore. The lack of response as these incidents increased made it clear how little the city cared about people they didn't agree with. So that's us. Thanks. Bye. Hello, my name is Sophia and I've been a community member of Cinnamon County my entire life. I'm calling to comment on number two agenda item number two which is the review of city response to community protests in May and June of 2020. The first thing that I would like to say is there has been a lack of accountability on SRPD, the Sheriff's Department and all other law enforcement within the county has taken a year to publicly review these reports although the human rights commission report came out weeks after the incident. Chief Navarro has not included a response to the human rights commission report about police abuse which highlights disturbing police behavior within our county. There has been no public accountability for the police violence that seriously injured members of the community. No charges have also been filed against the driver of the white Porsche who drove into a crowd of people and no statement from SRPD on their misleading Nixle regarding that incident. I would like as a community member that SRPD needs to answer to multiple things including the use of barricade rounds against the crowd that included children, the use of tear gas and less legal projectiles against that same crowd, cuddling peaceful protesters for simply breaking curfew and arresting over 150 of them even as they were trying to leave the protest. The utter lack of concern for human wellbeing and lack of de-escalation practices which led to a 2.1 million human rights litigation for substantial human rights violations and abuse. And that is just the most recent payout. Special harassment of protesters by officers and purposeful targeting of bodies and heads with less lethal projectiles or also disturbing things that they need to answer for. There are other systemic issues at hand including the mistreatment of protesters in jail, masks were taken away, no proper PPE was given despite a global pandemic, requests for water were being refused, selective use and enforcement of curfew, curfew should never be set to prevent free speech. Protesters were arrested for curfew violation which did not happen for people violating COVID curfew and police violence has cost the city much more in lawsuits. Take the 2.1 million then protesters cost and property damage which is about 20,000. People are always more valuable than property. There are many changes that must be happened including officers who injured protesters must be identified publicly and held accountable. SRPD must have ongoing community oversight in the independent auditor position which has been vacant for over two years must be filled immediately. Santa Rosa PV must implement policies barring the use of tear gas and less lethal weapons against the community that includes children. We want to demilitarize as our. Hi, my name is Allegra Wilson and I'm a Santa Rosa resident. I'm calling to express my outrage. Mayor, I'm going to pause that comment because Ms. Wilson spoke during my public comment. Okay, we'll keep moving. Hi, my name is Cecilia. I'm a resident of Santa Rosa. I'm calling in response to the police's response to protesters in the summer of 2020. There has been such a significant lack of accountability. There was the human rights commission report that came out weeks after some of these incidents were happening and there was never a response given to us by Chief Navarro. There was a horrific incident that happened while I was there with a white Porsche running into a group of protesters. These were my friends and people who had known for much of my life and to hear what was happening and know that there was no justice and no repercussions and no accountability whatsoever for a person who literally could have turned the car around and chose instead to accelerate straight into a group of human beings. If our police force is not going to respond to that, which is a definite threat against the community and the people here during a very peaceful walk down the street, then what are you doing? We need SRP to answer for the violence that they used against the crowds, including children, tear gas and other projectiles, the general lack of concern for human well-being and no de-escalation practices. I know that y'all have paid out a lot for the lack of care that you've given to the people. Sexual harassment of the protesters and the treatment of protesters in jail during a COVID outbreak in the Santa Rosa Jails, we need change, we need change and we need it now. The officers who injured and harm protesters must be identified publicly and held accountable. There needs to be ongoing community oversight in every police department, but certainly not least the Santa Rosa Police Department. And we need to demilitarize the SRPD. So none of this happens ever again. Please consider protecting the people instead of using and abusing your power to continue to harm them. Thank you for your time. Hi, my name is Kim and I'm a resident of Santa Rosa. This comment is for the Council Special Meeting Police After Action Report. I know that the police have been under scrutiny lately, but I wanted to call and show my full support of the Santa Rosa Police Department. We have very loyal and brave men and women who faithfully serve our city and our community. Yes, they are human and they make mistakes sometimes, but our department as a whole seeks to do what is right and what is best. We need them to feel supported so that they will continue to keep the peace and help us. They actually need increased staffing to meet the high demands that we have in our city, demands from the big protests, yearly fire evacuations and other emergencies that rise up. They need our support so that more young men and women want to serve in this area. Thank you, bye. Hello, my name is Alan Worstel and I am a resident to the city of Santa Rosa. Mr. Worstel's live mayor, I'm going to move on to the next presentation or next question of the public. Okay. Hello, my name is Josh and I'm a resident of Santa Rosa and I would like to leave a comment about the Council Special Meeting Police After Action Report. And as a citizen in the community, I just wanted to say that I love and care for our community very much, respect our city council very much. I care for our community, I care for our police officers very much. And I know that in this unique time and difficult season, while it has been hard, I think this is again a great opportunity for us to come together as a community and care for one another and encourage each other. And I think our police need to be a big part of that as they continue to grow and help serve and help protect our community, especially considering all the things that they protect from whether it's helping out with the fire evacuations and all sorts of things that they do. I just want to encourage the council and I think really helping our police and giving them the resources they need to care for our community well would be a great benefit to our community. I appreciate your time. Thank you so much. Hi, my name is Angela and I'm calling in regard to agenda item D for the city council special meeting on the police protest response. During the protests in Santa Rosa last summer, I watched online as police officers mustered up great composure as they were subjected to abuse such as withstanding fireworks, rocks and bottles being pelted at them. I went to dinner downtown with my kids and we read graffiti together on a street light that said kill the cops. It is unacceptable that local law enforcement for whom most Santa Rosa residents have a great deal of respect was expected to withstand this persecution from the same public they protect and serve during fires and on a daily basis. When members of the public need protection, we want to have police officers who want to work in our city and respond to our calls for help. Since the city council has taken funding and therefore some of the ability to protect and serve away from our Santa Rosa police officers, there has been a recent uptick in crime and traffic violations. I want myself and my family to feel safe living in the community of Santa Rosa. I do not feel safe walking in my own neighborhood due to the lack of police officers to do traffic enforcement in Santa Rosa. I am asking the city council to refund the police and budget for more police officers in the city of Santa Rosa. I am also asking for these police officers to receive a much deserved raise to help keep them in our city and therefore show them that we respect and value them. These police officers have a tough job to do. They are not perfect and neither are any of us. We need them to keep law in order in our city and to be there for us. Let's support our Santa Rosa police officers and trust them to do the excellent job we know they are capable of doing. Thank you for your time. Hello, my name is Olivia and I'm speaking on behalf of the Santa Rosa police department and lack of accountability during last year's protests. There has been no public accountability for the police violence that has seriously injured community members, not only injuring community members but putting money at risk by not supplying PPE during unnecessary jail time. And I feel like I don't really, I'm not really going to trust a police department that treats its community like this. We won't stand for it and we won't continue to allow it. So this is a point where the Santa Rosa must implement policies taking away the use of tear gas and lastly pull up against the community. I'm going to say it again against children and teens. If you're not protecting everyone then you are not welcome in Santa Rosa as a police department. This is my opinion and I feel like everybody in elected position in Santa Rosa should agree with me. Demilitarize the Santa Rosa police department immediately so this never happens to any residents ever again. And also all officers who have injured protesters should be identified and I'd like to see Chief Navarro in particularly come out from hiding and address in his human rights commission report. Just anything if he was mean at all to the community or are we just selecting who we are protecting? Again, I'm demanding accountability and that's it. Thank you. That concludes based message a couple of comments received before the 5 p.m. cutoff yesterday. All right, thank you so much. I'll go ahead and bring it back. And I had a couple of notes here if the Chief is there, I've got a couple for you. Sue, I think I have a couple for you as well just based on some of the public comments that we heard. Chief, I'll start with you because this is one that we hear pretty frequently and I know the answer to it but I think the public has an interest in hearing the answer. Do we have a lack of funding to process rape kits at SRPD? No, we do not have a lack of funding. It does get more expensive every year but we do not have a backlog. Okay, and if you follow up question if you ever did need additional funding for something as important as that you would come to the council to ask for it? Yes. Okay, thank you. We also heard considerable public comment about the white Porsche incident. What I heard from you in the presentation earlier and I just wanted to confirm is that SRPD investigated put together information and sent it over to the district attorney's office and that the district attorney's office did not file charges in that case. That is correct. Okay, and then there was also an additional question about the use of sting ball grenades during the protest. Did SRPD use any sting ball grenades or to your knowledge did any of our mutual aid partners utilize that munition? Not to my knowledge. We definitely did not and I said to my knowledge, I'm not aware of mutual aid officers deploying that either. Okay, and perhaps that's something we can follow up on tomorrow as well. Sue, and there were quite a few comments particularly about discipline. So I know in the reports it was vague. We did talk about some officers were disciplined. What information can we give the public on those deliberations? I know that obviously it's a complex web between state laws and personnel laws. Is there a point where some of that information becomes public for discussion? Yes, in general, the personnel, the disciplinary investigation, disciplinary process is all confidential under state law. We are constrained by state law on that. There is a provision in state law adopted a couple of years ago for release of information if an officer in four situations, a discharge of firearms at a person, a use of force that causes death or great bodily injury, a sustained finding of sexual assault or a sustained finding of dishonesty on the part of an officer. In those cases, there will be information that can be released. The disciplinary processes are not yet to that point of having any final decision for any instances that may, may or may not, but may fall into one of those four categories, those processes have not run their course to get to that point. So if any of those four are sustained, that information then will be released, but not until that time. Again, under state law. I appreciate that answer. Thank you, Sue. It's good for us to know what the expectations are. And it's something that I know that the public will be interested in following up on as it does run its course. Come back to the rest of the council and see if there are any additional questions based on the public comment that you heard. Okay, I'm not seeing any. I also mentioned at the outset of our meeting that we would be recessing and resuming our meeting tomorrow at 10 a.m. for the next presentations, more public comment, and then council members discussion. I will open it up really fast. I know not all council members are prepared to comment yet, want to process what we've heard today, but is there any comments that council members would like to make before we recess today's meeting and come back tomorrow? Council member Tibbets. Thank you, Chris. Yeah, I wanted to, well, first of all, let me start by saying that, yes, I will be taking this information that we got today. And as we go on to tomorrow, definitely processing that. And I do think that this council is going to arrive at some meaningful policy changes that are going to prevent a lot of the things from happening that happened a year ago, from happening again. I do want to make some comments, though, in regards to my previous comments about divisiveness in response to some of the public commenters tonight. I want to just be clear, I in no way shape or form meant to lay the divisiveness that I feel in this country and sometimes in this community at your feet. I was actually more trying to lay in a defeat of our institution at City Hall, if you will, based on my frustration with the fact that we bring forward information tonight in the form of bullet points and reports from different entities. And it wasn't lost on me either that all of the people who did an independent audit of us were white males as well. And these bullet points state things like that you are naturally going to question, given your experience that night in the protests. And what I wanted to see from us was more concrete evidence to show the perspectives of our police officers as well as the perspectives of the protesters to help influence this council more in policy decisions tomorrow. So I just wanted to be very abundantly clear about that. I appreciate this dialogue. It is going to influence me going into tomorrow. And the other thing I wanted to say is just really round out my comments with what I touched on earlier. And that was just my general sense of how much of a travesty it was that this protest was cut short. Some people will point the finger at City Hall and the police department for cutting it short and silencing the voices of people who have been subjected to generations of systemic racism in this country. And then others may point the finger at the people who were among the protesters but not necessarily protesting themselves who were clearly, from my perspective, based on the video footage, I had the privilege of seeing in closed session were doing clear acts that were endangering people's lives and also property. And so when I talk about wanting to look into things like these mobile field units, that's coming from a place where I don't wanna see protests in this community get silenced again. And so I just want you all to know that. And that's it for my comments, Mayor, thank you. All right, thank you, Council Member. Are there any other comments from Council Members? Okay, seeing none, we'll stand at recess and we'll be back tomorrow at 10 a.m. to continue our meeting. Thank you, everybody.