 This meeting's not just about giving you kind of the good things going on public safety. We want to talk to you about some of the challenges as well and we're going to hit some of those challenges today. But before I begin with talking about one of the challenges we want to talk about is I want to give you an update on the chief of police search and where we are with that at this point. I have this week literally met with over according to individuals have been with me and also talking to the PPA. We believe I've met with at least a third of all sworn workforce at this time. I have another roll call to go to today and I'll be meeting with sworn and civilian employees later this afternoon. It is extremely important for me as a director of safety and leading the search effort for the mayor to make sure that we hear from our employees. Those employees are on the roads every day. They're in the communities every day. They know what issues that we're facing. We need to know what they want their police department to do in the future and also need to know some of the challenges that they think that they have during their jobs and how we can help them with their jobs and what they're looking for in their next police chief and how that chief how he or she could help them be successful. Also equally important actually more important because we take an oath in all of our departments specifically this time the police department to serve the public is will be having four community meetings. These meetings will be announced. I'm hoping to begin those meetings the week of the 14th. But some of this is still in the work. So please if that changes we will let you know but hopefully we can have the first meeting the week of May the 14th. We're working on locations now and we want to think it was important to have a facilitator someone that is trained in facilitation that can get to the certain points and to get community input and understanding of what once again communities are facing what issues they'd like to see their police department address any challenges that we need to address and moving forward. So those meetings will be forthcoming. How this process is going to work is that the information received from the community meetings and the information received from our employees will be reviewed. It'll be reviewed by me. It'll be reviewed by some others. It'll be reviewed by a third party that I'll talk about in a moment. And we will develop questions during the interview process. Some of the questions will be directly from the community and from the workforce. The priority is going to be as if we see the community is saying something at every one of the meetings and it's a continual theme. And we're also hearing it from our internal personnel. Certainly that's going to be a question. If we see a continued theme throughout the community that is certainly going to be a question that we pose to applicants for the position of chief of police. It's important to me to do that and to include the community and their voice and their questions because that police chief is responsible to the mayor and myself. But ultimately he or she is going to be responsible to the citizens of this great city. So with that said talking about the mayor is establishing a panel and it's going to be approximately 14 to 15 individuals that panel will be announced by the latest early next week. I am in the process of doing some follow up calls with them today and tomorrow. I'm about halfway through and I want to make sure that they understand the process thoroughly and that they're still on board to participate in reviewing the applicants. The posting for the position will go out sometime next week. Are we still in line for that daily. So sometime next week it will simply consist of a resume and a position paper. The position paper will be based on a question that we will ask each applicant to answer. Those resumes and position papers will then be forwarded. Hopefully we're working on this process today. We had some phone calls this morning on a potential third vendor an outside party that will receive all applications and all resumes. We're looking at a couple of vendors right now. Both of them have extraordinary records of finding doing searches across the nation. And let me be clear they are not handling the search for us. We are only taking applications from within the Denver Police Department or individuals that have retired. But what I want them to do is bring their national expertise and looking at the resumes looking at the background doing anybody looking at the position papers doing anything they think they need to do the properly vet. But my request to them is simply going to be this out of the applicant poll that we receive. Give me individuals that would be competitive for any national position of chief of police. So any major city across America I want the people that we review. I want to know that they would be competitive in any process across this nation. I say that with confidence that we have a tremendous amount of people with that background and the ability to run this police department and having a third party that does this constantly that is reviewing candidates on a daily basis fulfilling some of the largest cities police chiefs needs. I think it's important for us to have that third party in that perspective as well in ensuring that our next chief is committed to best practices and understands best practices across the nation. Once we have that list that'll be given to the panel the panel will review that list will have a probably a pretty lengthy meeting and from that initial meeting we will start setting up interviews of those candidates that we think show the most potential. Once that is concluded the mayor will make a decision from that panel recommendations on who he would like to interview. He could interview as few as one person. He could interview as many as all the individuals that'll be up to the mayor and his decision at that time. An aggressive timeline but a thorough timeline I might add would be that the mayor could do some interviews sometimes by the end of June or early July would be my preference. But first of all we need to make sure we have a thorough process. Some questions that I have received is why are we looking just inside Denver and not doing a national search. I've been here for a short time but I've worked on a national level for quite some time and I can tell you without a doubt we have a tremendous amount of talent within the Denver Police Department that has grown dramatically over the last six ten years and I think that they need an opportunity to participate this and I certainly believe that the best candidate for this position even if we did a national search is going to be an internal candidate so that's why we're committed to doing that. I do want to add this about the meetings that I've had with the employees of the Denver Police Department. I've had media, I've had people on the street corners, I've had individuals internally say those are going to be tough meetings. I don't know why the perception is that those will be tough meetings or could potentially be meetings that people were aggressive. I have found the opposite to be true. The employees have been very thoughtful in their approach. The employees have been very professional in their approach. The PPA opened up their doors for us the other day in addition to the road calls to ensure that people had an opportunity to come there as well, receive great feedback, receive some very positive things that were said about the department and also quite frankly receive some things they believe that we can improve upon. But one of the things that was a common theme from our employees is their commitment to the community and their commitment to ensuring that we continue to develop partnerships, partnerships that will help us in the future because realizing that the job of policing is difficult and everyone has to have a responsibility in that position. With that said, I'm going to move on to some other issues in a minute. Can I answer any questions about that now? Would that be okay? Is that or do you want to go to the end? Any questions regarding the search? You know, I haven't, no, well I should have thought you would ask me that and I haven't really thought about it quite frankly. Let me, okay, right, I, well I'm sure. Let us talk about that. We have not, we have not had that discussion but we will and we'll, we'll go from there. Okay, thank you. All right, so second thing today is and when I said earlier that these are not about just positive things that's going on within public safety, this is something that's a big concern to me. If you know my history, one of the things that that I was concerned about and brought on a national level a few years ago was some of the violence we were seeing in inner cities across America and then when I arrived here in November and started looking at some of the scene sheets and different things that I was seeing in violence within the city, I became a little concerned obviously but I want to make sure that there was trending in that direction, understanding that a little bit more. Well, we're, we're through the first quarter of this year and our murders are up. They're up from 17 last year to 26 this year. That is a concern for me. I have had good conversations with the police department and I can tell you setting through their data meetings, listen to their approach. They are very thorough. They are doing the best job that they can do. Obviously, there's always room for improvement but I've set through a lot of data meetings. They're, they're making all the right contacts. They're hitting, hitting and talking to the people that they need to be talking to and addressing these issues, not just on a global area but on the street level. However, we still have 26 homicides or murders, I should say. 26 murders as compared to 17 last year. Nine is an increase. I'm going to turn this over in a moment to the commander but I want to say this to the public and you'll hear this from the commander in a moment. We are not seeing a spike because of a certain topic. Sometimes in the past it's been, if you go years ago, there's a spike in violence because of crack cocaine. Then there may have been a spike in violence because of methamphetamine. There may be a spike in violence and it's usually associated with, with a drug of choice. What the police department tells me they're seeing now is not uncommon that we're seeing in some cities across America is that people are using guns to settle arguments, settle beasts with one another. And what I would say today as you get the updates and you hear some of the numbers that are not very positive, obviously, know that your police department's working hard but also that citizens can take an active role in helping reduce this number and this growth that we've seen in the first quarter. If citizens see people in a simple argument, remember they need to have civic, be civically responsible and call their police department and have us look into that as an agency DPD. Helping officers identify individuals that are angry, having trouble, that have a beef with a neighbor, something along those lines, you could be preventing a murder, you could be preventing an aggravated assault. That is extremely important. Also, I will say that detectives have done a very good case or a very good job of developing cases on many of these murders so far but there's about 30% of those where they have very little or no information and the second ask I would have of the community on behalf of the police department is if you know something about any of these cases, no matter how small that information is, please notify the police department immediately. So with that said, I'm on turn over to Commander Archer for her to give you kind of a deeper overview and I'll pass this down to you Commander. So good morning. I'm Barb Archer. I'm the commander of major crimes. So as the director has said, we do have an increase compared to last year of nine homicides compared to last year at this time. We were at 17 this year or 26. Out of that, we have 26 victims with 23 incidents and it's important to note these incidents are not related. They're independent. There's no connection. We have not had any retaliatory acts connected with any of these. Guns were the weapon of choice in 21 of these murders. Knives were used in four and bodily force was used in one of them. One of the things that's unusual for us this year is we have three incidents where we have two victims. We have the 38th and Chestnut that happened in January, a double murder again on Leedsdale and then another one 13,000 block of East Elgin Place. Obviously that drives our numbers up a little bit more. Five of these cases are gang motivated. We've determined through our investigation. Two of them were domestic violence related incidents. Of those 26 cases, 17 of them we have suspects identified. We've made arrests or we have warrants issued and I want to praise the work of the detectives who have pursued every opportunity of any piece of information, any lead to develop these cases into the point where we could make arrests. That also goes along to say we've had great cooperation from witnesses in some of these cases which can be difficult and some of that information has come from crime stoppers tipsters which is super important for us. The 10 unsolved cases that we have include our five gang motivated homicides this year. Gang homicides are difficult for us with witness cooperation. We encourage crime stoppers as a resource for people to provide us information especially on those types of cases where people aren't comfortable coming forward based because they're in the neighborhood or they know the people involved. Three of the cases I want to bring up that we would really look for crime stoppers tips on is 38th and Chestnut. This was back in January. We two males were found shot in the parking lot at the new Welcome Inn Bar. We're looking for information on the murder of Guillermo Ornelis and Jose Herrera Cabral. The next one we're looking for information on was on January 30th. Donnie Howard was found shot and laying in the street in the 2100 block of Arapaho. Love information on that one as well and then the other one I'm going to make a plea for happened in February at 8282 East Colfax. The victim Richard Young who goes by the nickname of Panic was found shot behind the Regis Motel at 8282 East Colfax. So again these are crime stoppers bulletins that we have put out but the public can contact us contact crime stoppers through their phone number 720913 stop. They can text it to 274-637. They can email it as well. We really welcome any piece of information anything that you think might be useful. It could be a person something you've overheard. It could be a vehicle that you saw leaving the area or somebody some other conversation that you're hearing in your social settings that would help us. Prevention of these things is tough. The community members there's a valuable contributors to our investigations witnesses eyewitnesses ear witnesses anything that you think is useful we really want you to reach out and contact us you know to go back to the kind of famous phrase now if you see something say something reach out to us give us a call. The Denver Police Department does a lot to direct efforts at addressing violence. We have weekly meetings where we discuss trends being seen across the city at our core meetings. We adjust patrol resources based on what the deputy chief sees and the needs that he can provide. We have some technology that we have at our fingertips now called ShotSpotter that helps us identify evidence and maybe witnesses. Unfortunately gunfire has become too frequent and a lot of people don't call it in anymore so the ShotSpotter technology has helped us get to scenes quicker and I'd like to think that that is helping interrupt some potential violence if we're in the area quick quickly. So as we address these issues we work with some of our partners we work with federal and local law enforcement agencies we work with other city agencies parks and rec Denver Public Library. We created a whole set of community opportunities for people using the faith-based community Denver Public Schools. We also work with GRID, the Gang Reduction Initiative of Denver and Director Kellan-Ann is here to speak about that. So any questions that I can answer on the homicide? They are not. So we have 26 murders. We had 17 murders last year. We have 17 cases that we've identified suspects and there sometimes are single suspects sometimes are multiple suspects. Ten or I'm sorry you're right nine. Yeah 26 and 17. Yeah last year we had 38 of them involved firearms. 38 total. Yes last year we ended with 57. Last year also included blunt objects, bodily force, asphyxiation, knives, and a motor vehicle. Anything else? Okay I'll turn it over to Paul Kellan-Ann. Good morning my name is Paul Kellan-Ann. I'm the Director of the Gang Reduction Initiative of Denver. I just want to take a couple moments and talk about what the city is doing in response to the gang elements of the current violence that we're seeing as well as what we've been preparing for over the last couple years of developing in a sustainable model to address gang violence. Since 2012 the city has been partnering with the U.S. Department of Justice and the network of state and local agencies in developing a sustainable gang violence reduction model. The model focuses on enhancing our collective efforts in the areas of enforcement, intervention, prevention, and community mobilization efforts. In addition to exploring how we can leverage our existing resources, federal funding has allowed us over the last couple years to implement and design and test some innovative programs as well as replicate some proven and promising programs that have been effective in other cities. To give you some examples of some of those efforts, since 2012 8,000 elementary middle school students have completed the gang resistance and education and training program. This is a law enforcement taught life skills program that helps kids avoid gangs and violence. Approximately 500 high-risk individuals involved in the gang culture have received coordinated case management services from MDT teams that are comprised of Denver's best treatment service agencies. The purpose of these teams is to guarantee direct services and immediate access to services to these individuals as well as 24-hour support system. To compliment that, about 5,000 case managers across the city that work with youth and adults involved in the gang culture have been trained in understanding Denver's gang structures and dynamics and how to better effectively work with gang members. We recently implemented a specialized juvenile court gun project to take a look at are we providing the most advanced or most effective intervention and supervision programming to youth that have been arrested with firearms. We've worked with community coalitions and developing community designed short-term and long-term projects where the community can get involved in reducing efforts. Some of you might be familiar with the 2014 summer safe holly effort which involved a coalition of agencies, community-based organizations and neighbors in northeast Denver holly area where for 90 days they declared a safe zone of a hot spot within the city and for that 90 days there wasn't a single incident of of the shooting. So we've proven that on the short term that community residents and groups coming together can have an impact. In the long-term projects with the community we're working with the coalition out in Montbello right now called RISE, I believe it's a respect to intervene, support and and I forget educate. But what that coalition of community groups are doing is looking at how to develop a long-term sustainable program specific to the Montbello area that involves heavily community involvement. To intercede in some of the violence between gangs that we've seen over the last couple years, we've embarked on some innovative programs where we worked with individuals that used to be involved with gangs that serve as violence interrupters across the city that have a unique ability to reach out to those groups and individuals that are involved in the violence and try to mitigate some of the conflict that is going on. We all know that violence in our community inflicts wounds and scars. People are frustrated, they're angry, they're hurt, they're scared. The level of secondary trauma leads a long-lasting impact. In response to that, June of last year we kicked off a program in partnership with our faith-based partners around the city who are combining their efforts with our mental health partners and providing a critical incident response to gang shootings. And in not so what they do is after a gang shooting in the city the church closest to that shooting will open a store for a period of three days. Mental health specialists will help staff that facility for the three days and it's an effort where people in the community who are just angry or frustrated have a safe place to go to get some spiritual or emotional assistance. If they need some more services then those are extended to them. To date we've implemented 18 safe havens across the city and over 1500 residents have taken advantage of those services. We believe that's the coordinated efforts of all that are involved that are going to reduce violence and keep gang violence in check across our city and we're beginning to see the results of that. Between 2015 and 2017 we saw 65 reduction in gang related homicides. Between that same time frame we saw 22 percent reduction in overall gang violence. However gang violence is very dynamic in its nature and we continue to be vigilant in what we do. This year ends our in 2017 ended our financial relationship with the feds. A large number of our federal grants ended where it came incumbent upon the city to sustain many of the proven models that we've put in place. At the beginning of the year we were short a little bit of funds for our secondary prevention area but the Department of Safety was able to reallocate some funds to ensure that the full model is funded throughout the rest of the year. Gang violence is difficult to address. There's a lot of factors that have impacted gang violence. It's a wide spectrum of influencers across the board. But we remain vigilant in what we do and when we look at numbers and we look at reductions we take a step back, we breathe and then we move forward with optimism and what we're doing is correct. If we see numbers that are going up we take a step back, we breathe and then we refocus our efforts on what we need to do better. It's too early this year to tell where gang crime is going to go. Every year we're faced with comments about we're going to go back to 1992-93 with the summer of violence. We hear that every single year of the last three or four years we have not seen that. I don't anticipate that we're going to see that this year because I think we have a sound model in place. The difference between today and maybe 10 years ago, 15 years ago, is our approach to addressing gang violence is consistent and it remains coordinated on a daily basis rather than a fragmented approach or a knee-jerk reaction. Thank you. I'm wrapping that part out just like you know we have 26 murders. The challenges of the police department are not just the murders as significant as they are but remember the city is growing us our recent study 1% per year. We are having more events, we are having more people come to the city, we have more visitors, more individuals looking for employment. The difficulty of the police department are when you look at all this combined has increased and so they're making some different changes adapting to it, looking at staffing, hiring civilians, more civilians. That work needs to continue and it really pulls these two stories regarding homicides and murders and the chief search together because these are some of the challenges that the chief is going to have when he or she arrives. How to deal with this type of violence is this a going to continue to be a trend that has to be addressed. Is it something we can get ahead of as a department and as a community and then how do we address the rapid growth? That is a challenge for this police department that is not a challenge for most departments across the nation. So far they've handled it very well and we need to make sure that momentum continues in the future. At this point I want to turn it over to our fire chief that has some updates on some important things that have matters that have occurred within the fire department recently. Chief. All right thank you. So luckily I get to talk about some positive news here today and I think the first thing we're going to talk about is fairly exciting is that we were able to appoint a new division chief of administration recently. Wendy Motor here will be our new division chief of administration. She is the first female to ever hold that position within the Denver fire department and only the second female to hold the rank of division chief. So with that news I'm going to let her introduce herself to you and give you a little bit of her background. Thanks chief. Good morning my name is Wendy Motor. I've been on the Denver fire department for 22 years. I've been in several different divisions in the department. I've worked in our dispatch. I've worked as a captain in the EMS division. I've worked in arson, a captain in arson and IA. I've also worked in the fire prevention division. I've been in operations in district three mostly as recently as a roving assistant chief and as in two weeks ago I was appointed to the division chief of administration. Anybody have any questions for Wendy before I move on? All right seeing none. So the next is probably what I consider to be exciting news. Hopefully you guys will share that excitement. We recently went under an audit from the insurance services office who gives every community a public protection class rating which then ultimately helps to set the insurance rates for homeowners, residential and commercial insurance. They grade fire departments, their water supply system and their ability to respond to and to mitigate fire hazards in a city on a scale of one to ten with one being the best. Denver fire has traditionally received a grade of two which is extremely good. However after this last audit Denver will now be a class one rate at city and so I can see you guys are all looking with tremendous excitement wondering what that means. So let me just tell you right now insurance services offices, they help insurance companies underwrite their policies by providing them data and ratings for 14 of the 15 largest insurance companies. For each point of improvement you see up to about a 5% reduction in insurance rates both commercial and residential. So for our homeowners in Denver and our business owners they have the potential of receiving either a discount next year or depending what insurance rates maybe their rates don't go up as high. This is something we worked really hard for over the last almost 10 years now is when we got our last audit we looked at every area that we had lost points or not received maximum points and put a lot of effort in there with the goal of receiving the ISO rating of one. I can tell you we actually did it one year early. They typically do those evaluations every 10 years. We had reached a point where we thought we had met most of those goals and so we voluntarily submitted for an audit and we were able to receive that positive rating. They do about 46,000 ratings across the world and of that only 241 cities last year were at that ISO one so that kind of shows you where we fall in that spectrum so I'm very proud of that rating and all the credit goes to the men and women of the Denver Fire Department that are truly dedicated and bring their A game every day so along with that rating we also looked at an area for improvement and one was in our arson division and through a partnership with the ATF we now have a new accelerant detection dog. It is a black Labrador and I invite you guys to come to a badge pinning at one o'clock at Denver Fire Station number one at 745 West Colfax where we'll be pinning a badge on our dog which happens to have the name of Cora and no we did not pick the dog and I see see I finally got some excitement out of you guys there we didn't pick the name the dogs come with their name so unless anybody has any questions I'll give it back to Troy. All right well thanks for attending I also want to say you look around the room and there's a lot of individuals here and here's what impresses me about Denver I've not asked any of these individuals to be here I've asked these individuals to be here I've asked Eileen to be here as the chief of staff but it just goes to show the commitment that our employees have and I've said this numerous times I've worked across this nation I've consulted I've never seen a group of such talented individuals and compassion individuals and I'm really excited about the future but with that any have any other questions or anything about anything else we can answer while we're here or I can answer. So the murders this year are pretty evenly spread across the city in our police districts I have four in district one five in district two five in district three seven in district four five in district five and four in district six