 Pablo, can you please unmute your video and give me a thumbs up if you're on this banner side? Okay, he's ready. Thank you. Pablo, if you can start interpreting as soon as the meeting starts, thank you. My apologies for the delay, Chair Fleming. I think we're ready. Okay. Vice Mayor Rogers, she says she sees, though there she is, okay, all right. Thank you, everybody, for joining in. So I would like to call this January 27 meeting of the San Jose Public Safety Subcommittee meeting to order. Would Madam Clerk please call the roll? Good afternoon. Council Member Schwedhelm? Here. Vice Mayor Rogers? Present. And Council Member Fleming? Present. A couple pieces of housekeeping. One is can we please promote a City Attorney Gallagher to participant? And then while that's in progress, anybody else who's having trouble getting promoted, please let me know. And if we can just screen the participant view for our members who we know should be in here. All right. So housekeeping. I'd like to remind committee members, of course, to keep your audio on mute, unless you're speaking. Staff will remain muted until meeting to speak. As members of the public, during the meeting, you will be participating as attendees. Your microphone and camera will be muted. Only today's panelists will be viewed during the meeting. If you're calling in from the telephone issues to speak during public comments portion of today's agenda, for privacy concerns, the host will be renaming your viewable phone number to resident with the last four digits of your phone number. The City of Santa Rosa is committed to creating a safe and inclusive environment free from disruption. We will not tolerate any hateful speech or actions and are well staffed to monitor that everyone is participating respectfully or they will be removed. If necessary, we will also immediately end the meeting or call for a recess and try again. City Clerk, would you please explain how public comments will be heard at today's meeting? After each agenda item is presented, the chair will ask for the committee comments and then open it up for public comment. The host and zoom will be lowering all hands until public comment is open for the agenda item. Once the chair has called for public comment, the chair 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 may dial star nine to raise your hand. The chair 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 committee and the public to see. Once all live public comments have been heard, the meeting hosts will play voicemail public comments. If you provide live public comment on an agenda item but also submitted an email or recorded that voice message public comment, your email or voice message public comment will not be duplicated, read or played during the meeting. Thank you very much. This this moment I'd like to ask the city attorney where the appropriate place to propose a reordering of the agenda might be. You may make that proposal now. OK, thank you city attorney. I would like to propose. I move that we reorder item 6.4 to be item 6.1. I don't see a 6.1 or I do actually 6.1 and move all items following it as this is an item for the edification of the community and the public safety sub committee to understand how we got to where we are now. And what I'll be asking for at the end of this item is feedback on what you see as your priorities and the community's priorities for moving forward with the public safety subcommittee. So I'd like that item to be taken so that we can proceed with our other items in a manner that is informed by that conversation. Can I get a second on that, please? Second. City attorney, do we need to have a vote? Yes. OK, Madam City Clerk, would you please take a roll call vote? Yes, Councilmember Schwedhelm. If I can just get clarification, so what I'm hearing you saying 6.4 will become the new 6.1 and then everything else will be in the same order. Correct. It'll be like cutting in line. Great. I thank you, Vice Mayor Rogers. I and Councilmember Schwedhelm of Fleming. Pardon me. I thank you very much. So next we'll move on to public comments on non-agenda items that are within the scope of this subcommittee. So this is the time when any person may address matters not listed on the agenda, but which which are within the subject. Public may comment on agenda items when the item is called. Each speaker is allowed three minutes. So I will start with raised hands from attendees. Excuse me, Chair Fleming, if we could have our Spanish interpreter announced that there's a Spanish interpretation and and that they can when they raise their hand, they can ask for interpretation and then switch over to the Spanish channel and they can have interpretation. Thank you. There is interpretation in Spanish available and in favor of raising your hand. So if you want to comment on the public, you can switch over to the Spanish channel to do it. Thank you. OK, so not saying any live public comment. Madam Clerk, do we have any recorded public comment? There's no public comment for item three public comment on non-agenda matters. OK, thank you very much. We have no minutes to approve. And, you know, I think I might have made a mistake and thank you for sticking with me here. I see item five is subcommittee objectives and priority setting. And I may need to reorder the agenda again. What I was hoping was that we could have the presentation on from Director Teyes and then move on to item five. Does any Madam City Attorney, do you have a suggestion on how we proceed with that? Trying to find, so you'd like to move, would you like to move the fifth item up? Well, what I would like to do is I would like to have item, what is now item 6.1 that presentation if Director Teyes is available to do that and then follow it by subcommittee objectives and priority setting. Is Director Teyes on the line right now? Let's see if it's even possible before we go trying to make things happen. I can't hear you, Sean, but I'm getting a yes from your body language. OK, so let me propose to the subcommittee what I'm trying to do and see if we can get the agenda to follow. I'm trying to get, and I talked to Director Teyes about this before, which is why this item is on here. Heard to give us an update on how we got to where we are. And then I'd like us to have this discussion. I'm not sure about how to order this in a way that's consistent with the rules of order, though. So perhaps the city attorney could help us out with that. I'm not sure. I'm understanding that you'd like to take 6.4 first, which you have already gotten agreement to do that. Right. And then what is the other change that you wanted to make. So I'd like to hear a presentation of 6.4 first, and then I'd like to have item five, which is subcommittee objectives and priority setting. Essentially, follow in fall into that item or fall follow that item directly. You can have it follow that item. So you would rearrange it to add that in. Yeah. The agenda that I have in front of me. What is on currently online. Does not identify that. Okay, so what I'm saying here is that item five is subcommittee objectives and priority settings. So what I propose is that item 6.4 the previous item 6.4 becomes 6.1 and item five becomes 6.1 a essentially, or 6.2 if we have to do it that way. Again, I'm I'm online pulling up the agenda that was posted. And I am not seeing. I am not seeing the 6.5 that you have so I don't know if there was an amended agenda. It's not a 6.5 and perhaps that's the confusion it's item five. Subcommittee. I see. Oh, okay. Subcommittee. I see. I'm sorry. I got confused there. Yes. So you can take it in. You can ask that it be in order of 6.4. And then item five, and then the rest of item six, the 6.1.2.3 and point five. So we may ask that and get concurrence from your fellow subcommittee members. I'm sorry for the confusion there. And I am sorry for the confusion as well. And I hope that everybody is able to follow along here. The proposal is to take items as suggested. So we'll have item 6.4 become 6.1 and item five become 6.2 and the rest of the items will follow in the order that they're set forth on the published agenda. Can I add a second please. I have a question. Does it already matter that we already made a motion to change 6.4 to 6.1 and that's already on the table or we already approved that or no. So that that is fine. That's 6.6.4 6.1. This is another motion that would make item five 6.2 and that it would bump down all of the other items in the order in which they are listed, but one one down. You made a motion second. Thank you. Can I have a roll call vote please. Yes. Council member Schwedhelm. As far as we know offer of suggestions, my preference would be not picking and choosing which new business we're taking it. Let's just take the subcommittee objectives and priorities setting after hearing all new business because those other four items on the new business wouldn't for my me and for my decision on the subcommittee objectives and priorities setting so I can't support hearing that. Okay. Thank you. After just one new business items I'd be a no. And the reason why I'm suggesting that is because for the benefit, especially of council member Rogers to be able to hear how we got to where we are before having to make decisions on other items. Can we continue with the vote please. Pardon me. Vice Mayor Rogers. I And council member Fleming. Thank you. Okay. So off to a fun start. Here we go. So let's move on to item. New item 6.1. The community empowerment plan. And I will turn it over to staff. All right. Good afternoon. Council members members of the subcommittee and members of the public. I am a guy that is the director of community engagement. And we're going to jump right into this so we go to the next slide please. Thank you. So with the community empowerment plan. So the way this came about was looking at a number of principles that were going to guide this process. And the plan was developed using the city's principles of community engagement and the spectrum of public participation which I'll definitely go into with the means of developing a culture that is a public engagement. We wanted to really make sure to establish the city of Santa Rosa as a leader in civic engagement with the goal of increasing openness transparency and accountability, as well as increasing opportunities for diverse community engagement and effective participation with the specific eye on our BIPOC community. And again that's black indigenous people of color. And to build a strong civic infrastructure and help educate people about how to best engage with the city. And to learn from community members as well along in that process. And next slide please. So some of the principles that were administered in this process we're definitely looking at inclusiveness and equity participation and easy participation so meeting community members where they were as you all recall when we started this process. We had two fires and some of these community members we wanted to make sure that we reached out to in person giving of course COVID safety guidelines and you know bringing in transparency meaningful engagement and mutual accountability was important. So next slide please. So this was the spectrum of community engagement that we use it's often used by many cities that you know allows us to inform consult involve and collaborate with the means to empower community. I just wanted to add that as of recently I've been doing a lot of research and in terms of how we've been doing community engagement how to better our practices, how to better our processes. And I did find something I'd like to actually add here, which was the work of Rosa Gonzalez from facilitating power. So it's actually when we have in power we also want ownership. And what that means is is asking these three questions of community. So that community could feel ownership in this process and that is what role will community play in closing equity gaps. What is the collective vision for local community ownership and what can we be doing now to lay the groundwork with the groundwork for community ownership. So I just want to add this is a recent we definitely want to add Rosa Gonzalez this work that she's added to this spectrum of community engagement. Next slide please. So we have three set clear goals that were established with when the plan was set into motion this last summer, goal one was to increase constructive and inclusive dialogue between city and our BIPOC community. Our objectives were as follows 1.1 were to develop a process for regularly sharing progress and updates on this plan and related efforts, which we try to do via our website our community engagement website. And 1.2 is to buy July 31 2020 at least 50 leaders have been engaged in plan for broader community engagement is developed 1.3 by August 31 2020 at least five community listening sessions are to be completed and 1.4 by September 30 2020 a report on community listening session outcomes would be developed and presented back to community leadership. And by December 31 2020 and plans to be developed for ongoing community engagement opportunities with the focus on 2021 I just want to update folks. Again, due to the smoke and fires, we did we were impacted significantly with some of our community listening sessions that actually took place out in the community when we met folks where they were. We also had community members who did not at that point in time really have a good gauge of how to use zoom, or we're also experiencing some digital destitution issues, which is not having proper broadband access to be able to do some of the meet some of the objectives. And I'll go into where we are in terms of the, the, the report towards the end of my presentation next slide please. 2, which was a joint goal with SRPD and to have community provide us with opportunities to review and provide input on SRPD's use of force and community police policing policies with the objective of one establishing a forum to provide ongoing input on community policing practices, community issues and ideas for improvement, which we've done through our listening sessions item to utilize feedback from listening sessions one on one dialogues meetings and councils public safety subcommittee to update SRPD's use of force policies, and to utilize feedback from listening sessions one on one dialogues meetings and councils public safety subcommittee to shape the independent police auditor scope of work. We go to the next slide please. And with goal three, we had to establish a feedback loop to gauge effectiveness of efforts with and in the community and among city staff. The objectives were to train the city staff on opportunities for and levels of community engagement, including reviewing and adjusting adjusting based on community dialogue and listening sessions. And we hope to do this also in collaboration as you will probably hear later in my presentation would see collaborative to make sure that we have a unified process item to develop resource strategies to support and optimize community opportunities related to specific programs projects and services and object three, evaluate community engagement efforts loop and educational institutions and local organizations. We've done that by enlisting some folks at Stoneman State University on under their administration staff, some professors and we've also done that. We've also done a process of that with centers of junior college and annually report to city council on community engagement activities and progress towards each goal. This piece, we would like to actually include the community in informing us on what's what is the best way what is the best practice of doing this portion so next slide please. So here are some outcomes. We engaged with since the summer since we started the community empowerment plan. We've engaged with 280 community members, 265 of which were BIPOC community members are listening sessions we had a total of 18 sessions and people engaged in these sessions, 13 BIPOC groups and five sessions were actually follow up groups so we've had a number of follow ups with Sonoma County low writer council with the NAACP 100 black men. Four of these community groups were from our African American community five were from our Latin community. One was an indigenous group. One thing that came out of our meeting with our indigenous group that was really wonderful was, you know, they gifted us that, you know, what it's not typical for specifically these members that joined us to participate with government in this way. And so they've also asked if we could use their names publicly, because they're very interested in this bridge building with the city to create better engagement with us. And lastly, we had three mixed race groups that some of these groups comprised of, you know, restorative justice specialist and educators in these groups as well so next slide please. So, in total we had 18 meetings with one on one community members, 15 small informal group meetings and five city council meetings from June and July and I just want to note here for Vice Mayor Rogers that I came in sort of towards the tail end of this portion on July 21. So just to kind of give you some background on that. And again, some of the meetings were held in person. Next slide please. So in terms of goal to the outcomes that have come from this work with the community empowerment plan is a development of this public safety subcommittee so far in the year 2024 meetings were held and the next meeting of courses today. Also the development of the chiefs community ambassador team, which you know they're working on they received three applications and will be finalizing their process by next month I believe. And also the conversations and development of model response to mental illness and homelessness which is the work that we've been doing with cahoots and other similar models. Next slide please. So, goal three was the adoption of the open government ordinance on December 1 so we will be addressing transparency issues with city developing the citizen guidebook and language access so last night was a really fantastic moment for myself to actually see our modeling will Spanish speaking community come out to make public comment. So that was very exciting. And the development of the civic engagement 101 videos, these videos, which are being the themes are being shared with our CAB will basically help people walk through the process of how does one make public comment what is what is and isn't public comment. Sometimes community members are not sure if there's if there could be a conversation or how this that works. And also just sharing with community members, you know who are their district representatives, you know how the city is is broken up into districts and who are our leadership here at the city is. We also came up with a multi cultural roots projects as project, which is stories from Santa Rosa's BIPOC community. This has been incredibly well received by community members we've received countless emails from folks, you know, acknowledging this work and this work being important, and important for the community we've been able to feature folks like the Kashi upon Raman as you perish Reverend Dr James E coffee Maria garden as who has been an incredible member in our community and a big part of Yakima, which is a wonderful beautiful space that we have here in Sonoma County. And additionally, this this project that came about from the Sonoma County Low Rider Council project that they proposed as a bridge building tool, and as a way to, you know, work work with the city work with SRP D work with our community and that was the SRP D low rider control car, which, again, I just want to mention that we've had countless community members come forward, who are very interested in participating in this and either donating labor and donating parts as and the low rider council is also offered to do fundraising and as well as doing the actual physical labor of putting this this vehicle together. So next slide please. So the next steps for the community empowerment plan is to compile and finish up finish up the community listening sessions final report, which we are currently working on one item that I think is incredibly important is accessibility of report many reports have been done by governments. However, we want to make sure that this is something that young people could look at and completely understand and read and you know our entire community is able to access the information on here and we will be scheduling I will continue to schedule additional community listening sessions those have been ongoing with a lot of the groups that we started with. And we're also working on what is the best way to incorporate other groups or focus has been to work with our BIPOC community. So we want to figure out, you know, what are other ways other BIPOC members that we we want to make sure we're reaching out to as well. And then lastly, we have our city contract with C collaborative that is hopefully going to be working with us in this plan. As some folks who have tuned into our meeting last year with Dr. John Powell to see collaborative. He's offered us a lot of wonderful information about the work that you know he hopes to be doing with the city as well seed on targeted universalism equity 2.0, which I think is important to to note that it's it's equity where everyone is able to participate in in our sort of solution right. I just want to share a little bit more about what he mentioned as targeted strategies to move everyone to the universal goal while acknowledging that people are situated differently. Secondly, to consider how structures impact achieving universal goals, and also to facilitate bridging and belonging. So we're very excited to be working with them and also they will be presenting their own plan for SRPD as well as the fire department and the city in general as a whole so I think that's the end of my presentation. Do you have any questions. Council members any questions. Okay. Then I think we'll open it up to public comments. Let's see. Who do I have here. Evan Phillips. Can we get the timer up please. Evan. Yes, can you every. Yes, I can please go ahead. All right, good afternoon, and thank you all. First, I just want to very much commend the work. Pardon me if I butcher the pronunciation and names. I'm a golly tears. Good afternoon. I would also like to point out that if we're talking about systemic change and actual equity and representation that, you know, I hope our elected officials are willing and the police department, the fire department, etc. take into account the level of expertise and professional, you know, breadth of understanding that our unelected people who are putting this apartment plan together have. And it's not just reflecting the community's recommendations and concerns and needs, but these are also people who know what they are talking about. And I don't know if it's true or not, but the impression is given at least on my side of things as a citizen here that these might be just sort of feel like performative gesture sometimes, and we're not sure that the city and its associated departments are really taking all these things seriously. So I really want to encourage everybody to really listen to the unelected staff more. And then I really have a question about the timetable on the final report. And I would also like to offer help for dissemination of that final report, because while it's really crucial and vital that we've engaged with so many people collectively, you run the risk of discrediting the city and sort of throwing, you know, this outreach process under the bus if there isn't enough follow through and follow up and those dots don't connect well. So it's two parts, you know, it's actually being heard and being listened. It's the act in the implementation that goes associated with that. But then also the connection that is maintained, which was, you know, identified and discussed here in this presentation. And I also have some questions regarding the budget. If I recall correctly, there's a specific line item for just the empowerment plan. And I think the public I know myself are we're very curious. We like to have transparent access to how those funds have been used. Last night there was mentioned on City Council meeting of usage, you know, for a low rider car patrol. Sounds like outsourcing some services for additional equity programs. But if we can if we can get some visibility of what the budget was, what's remaining and you know, how that's been used, I think people would be greatly appreciative of that. And overall, I just want to go back to how I started that I really hope our elected people and our people at the top of our org charts truly take into account our unelected staff and the report that they're giving and I can't wait to see the final report. Thank you. Thank you, Evan. Brian Hart followed by Cox. Hi there. Can you hear me? We can. Thank you. Well, thank you, folks. Thank you for thank you first for moving this to one in the afternoon. It's a little easier to get to. I appreciate it. And I appreciate all your work. I just I wasn't planning on weighing in on this particular item. But I wanted to mention the low rider car. That's what I mentioned in terms of the low rider car that that we make sure that the message you want to convey with the low rider car is conveyed properly. The reason I bring this up is because the unfortunate incident last week where where some people took the the police flag, you know, some people were very offended by it and some people were very offended by the idea that people were offended by it. Certainly, certainly we know that most of our police people are very good people and they do a very hard job and they work very hard for us to bring us a better community. But I wouldn't want the low rider car to be interpreted as sort of, Well, are you infiltrating our neighborhoods or are you trying to make cop jobs more glamorous? Because as we all know that children are attracted to like bright lights and bright colors and things like that. So I would just caution the committee to make sure that the message that is conveyed by creating this wonderful car, which I think is a wonderful idea is just that it's the intended message of the of our Public Safety Services. That's all I have. Thank you. Thank you, Keith. All by Cox. I'm Ms. Cox and I'm kind of coming in this conversation. You said it started with these employment plan and like getting feedback from the community since the summer, but I'm pretty tapped into the community and I haven't heard about this. So I'm just kind of curious of like what type of outreach are you using to advertise this or you said that you're working specifically, I've heard you name like organizations, but have those meetings been open to like the general public like I'm just kind of surprised that we're in January and this is the first time that I've heard about this through I know Tom knows me. Remember me from when your officer caused me a concussion from a peaceful protest when we shut down City Council? Yeah, that took a year off of my life where I had to recover from that. So I see your officers are still with their on their same line of discrimination still in their intimidation and I see you sitting there with your same face. Excuse me. No, Victoria, I'm going to you can address this body. You cannot address or call out Council members individually. We are very interested in hearing this is my public comment and I can use it how I wish and you're infringing on my right right now going over the Brown Act and your privileges will be removed. I'd invite you to share your comments are infringing on my right to free speech right now. So you said you wanted to hear from the community here I am. Yeah, I was planning on it. So, um, yeah, like I was saying to Tom, um, you wanted to hear from the community here it is. So I would appreciate you not muting a black woman while she's giving her experience of being left out of this situation where you've been targeting certain organizations. What is this conversation with this low rider car? I think that's incredibly inappropriate. And then also, I'm curious about hearing about the children who are going into these like ethnic study classes that are being co facilitated by police officers. I think that is highly inappropriate. Is that part of this empowerment plan? And so all of the efforts that have been made so far have been, uh, shoddy. And then when I see, like brought into this conversation saying like the flag being raised in these 13 stripe flags and things like that, it's really makes me feel like your police other departments not receiving any of the information from the community and they're doubling down on feeling that they're not being appreciated, but they're not being appreciated because they're doubling down on their intimidation and all of their same rhetoric that we've been experiencing from the BIPOC community. So if we could get more transparency around how your budgets being spent and more transparency and advertising around how you're reaching out to certain communities, that would be helpful. Thank you, Cox. Lee followed by Melissa. Lee, are you there? Okay, Lee, we can't hear you. Can you remove? Can you unmute yourself, please? We'll come back to you. Melissa. Yes, we can. Please go ahead, Melissa. Awesome. Thank you much for having this meeting. I really just want to echo what some of the previous speaker said about transparency of like how you're reaching out to these communities. I, I'm pretty tapped in as well, and I haven't participated in any of the listening sessions. I don't know how they're being held. So I would love some transparency on how to get more involved in that. You know, maybe people can volunteer and reach out to you. So maybe just like a better bridging of that with the communities. I'm also interested in why the Ethnic Studies with the COP program was not mentioned in the report. So I'm kind of curious about how that came to be and what happened to it after and if it plans to be continued, I'm really interested in that. And yeah, I just, I really would like to see a concerted effort to really bridging these gaps. I feel like right now you have a community, especially people from, you know, the BIPOC community that really want to be involved in these projects and really want to be involved in bridging the gap between, you know, the city and these underserved communities. So I would really love to see better outreach, more transparency and yeah, more information about what happened with that particular program and how that came to be. So that's my comment. Thank you so much. Thank you, Melissa. BIP's followed by Michael. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Okay. First, I want to say that it's very shameful to cut someone off who's talking when they're not even actually swearing at somebody and when they're actually just voicing their concerns with a current elected official who used to be a law enforcement officer. Trying to interrupt somebody like that is very shameful and you shouldn't be you shouldn't be doing that. The other thing is that with community outreach, I'm also tapped into to other to the community and I don't really know about these listening programs. There absolutely has to be more transparency with that. Very concerning that we're still trying to have a positive like they were starting to we're trying to make a positive relationship with police officers when truly I really don't see a point when their function is to keep people down. Keep them down in some kind of like houseless in situations who take away their things to keep perpetuating the cycles of the prison and the prison industrial complex and white supremacy. They are a symptom of a larger white supremacist system that that isn't talked about. And I this this this applies less to Natalie Rogers. I know that you're new here and I appreciate your time. I appreciate you being here. I would like to hear from everyone else though. Why don't you talk about combating white supremacist values and combating white supremacy within this institutions themselves? Why do we still try to work with a system work within a system that's clearly based to do better for cis white people? It doesn't make any sense to me. I'm a trans non binary black person and day in and day out. I just see so many people being frustrated to the point of not really even being able to speak because we're so tired of seeing the same things over and over again. I'm glad this conversation is happening but there's got to be so much more done in a short amount of time. Like we really have to think about true systemic changes and you have the opportunity to do this. You have the opportunity to do this. Really consider that. Why are we still working within these systems that have only benefited cis white people? I yield my time. Thank you. Michael followed by Lee. Can you hear me? Yes we can. Okay. So this is an item about community engagement in a public meeting about that's supposed to bring the community and the police together. So I would, it's completely unacceptable to cut off a black woman while she's speaking and while she's speaking about experiences that she's, I'm sorry, I'm gendering here and that's experience that they've had while, you know, that have that have happened to them that really need to be talked about and they're willing to talk about it in a public format. That is not the first time I've seen you cut someone off during these meetings and it's completely unacceptable. That needs to stop. That's, you know, this is part of the reason why I don't think that there is that level of trust in this community with the community engagement process because it's, if it's selective about what voices are being heard. So there are a lot of very painful experiences that people have had and those need to be talked about. So please, please don't do that. Thank you, Michael. Lee followed by Bailey. Can you hear me this time? I can now. Thank you, Lee. Thank you. I'm just calling. I'm a community member. I'm calling again. I think what we first of all, this time of the day is not accessible to the people who need it the most. I wanted to point that out. I think I think that we know that I I heard someone say I'm a white woman, but I'd heard someone who is not white say how many more listening sessions do you need to expose us to. So I'm really sensitive to that at this moment. I really I really think the only true community engagement is when the people who are the most vulnerable who say that, hey, we're the most hurt are heard because it indicates that everybody would be heard if they were hurting. And so when we don't see that there's a there's a a disc a cognitive dissonance that happens with us as a collective. And I think the only way for community to engagement to have any healing is to actually really, you know, engage with the community about the human rights violations report, have accountability, start to shift and change and embrace new ideas, resiliency plans that are actually being embraced by communities all over the country. Change is hard and scary, but but the whole thing has been those last seven months again has echoed what happened in the 60s. And it was all because of police brutality. So this time we need to move to different possibilities. We need to be accountable as community members for one another. Our leadership needs to be accountable to things like human rights violations reports. Our community needs to build trust through accountability and through putting money into programs like the cahoots, like things that are already starting. It's already happening. It's just that it's it it just it just needs to keep going forward in healing and true healing means really looking at the hard, hard truth of that human rights violations report. I don't think anything else will do to do healing for everyone in the community. So thank you. And I yield my time. Thank you, Lee Bailey, followed by Chris. Hello, can you hear me? Yes, we can go. Awesome. Hi, my name is Bailey. I'm a community member here and I I would like to echo the statements of most previously before me. Yeah, there as far as a community empowerment plan and engaging the community, I think that there needs to be there needs to be some some serious listening to the people that have been hurt and that are continued to be hurt by the systems that are in place. I think a good step would definitely be finally looking at that human rights violation and to have some accountability there, especially from the SRPD that is gone on. That happened a while ago and it still has not been addressed. And it seems as if the council is continuing to just push it off and push all these things off. And the time is now. I would like to yield the rest of my time. Thank you. Thank you, Bailey. Chris called by Tavi. Chris, are you there? I'm here and also the person up next, my name is Tavi, not Tavi. You're welcome. I am also someone that is pre active in the local community and I have never heard of any of these outreach conversations. So I really feel like you guys are not doing a good job making those public enough because I think that there should be more races heard than what like 300. I don't remember what was on that slide. I also wish you guys were a little bit more transparent about the money that is going into that low rider program because honestly, I think there are bigger issues in the police forces here that that money could be spent on. You know, like, I don't know, maybe some like cultural sensitivity training. Maybe, I don't know their mental health since they're out here like in the streets, beating this up and shit. But yeah, that's all I have to say about that. And also, I know you don't like to be directly spoken to Victoria, but don't ever cut a black woman off like that again. You were the only one on the screen right now that is not muted outside of everyone else here. You could at least have some respect and mute yourself while everyone else is speaking. And also, I do have a question about like, Tom, like, why are you always here? Like, you don't do anything. You're just sitting here staring at the screen. You never participate in conversations. You're just, I don't understand. Goodbye. Chris, Chris followed by Colin. Can you hear me? Yes, you can, Colin. My name is Colin McAfee. I'm a lifetime San Rose resident. And some of my county. I agree with a lot of the things that the folks prior to me have said, I'm not going to rehash what they have to say. They already said it better than I could. I kind of wanted to drill into a very specific point. And this is partially because I've been trying to attend these public safety subcommittee meetings as often as possible. And there was something in the community empowerment plan that I hadn't noticed before. Maybe that's, I just wasn't paying close enough attention. So that could entirely be my fault. It was the positions that are going to be selected for the chief's community, something team community. I don't know. Maybe you can talk about it. But are these new positions that are going to be added to what I'm assuming is the police force? And I would assume that when you use the word chief, you mean police chief Navarro. If part of the community empowerment plan is to select a team of cops to go out and talk to the community about why the community shouldn't be afraid of cops. That's adding money to the police department. Like I like some clarification on that. And maybe I need to just go into the documents that you often have linked in the website. I'm sure there's a detailed right up there. So I'm going to be looking at that. Post this meeting, but maybe some clarifications for the folks who don't want to have to dig through all that paperwork because it can be densely written at times. So just some clarification on that would be great. Thanks. Thank you very much, Colin. And apologies if I get the name incorrectly, TV. Okay, there you are, TV. Can you unmute yourself? Hi, can you hear me? We can. I apologize. Sorry, I kept lowering my hand. It's Sean to be to be for short. I appreciate you all doing this presentation. I do have to say as a woman of color, a mother and activist and a mentor. I lit I grew up in Roseland neighborhood. And the fact of the matter that the cops in schools program, the pilot program was presented to the West side, I find very disturbing. Especially after Andy Lopez, you've, you've already diminished the truck on the West side. And as we continue to fight for transparency, accountability, and just fair communication, we continue to be told that that's not available to us. Along with that MLK day just passed and there was a letter written to to speak against white supremacy in our community to keep BIPOC safe. And there was no law enforcement, no law enforcement that signed that letter. So you tell me why? If we're trying to create communication between the people and law enforcement, why did law enforcement not show accountability? This represents even the false narrative of the measure P campaign, the no on measure P campaign that was presented to us by the state government and the state government. And the state government did not show accountability to the people that were sent to the West side. You continue to speak about transparency, but yet we are continuing to do the work as the people. We continue to ask the questions. The fact that I'm a mother, a single mother, a brown woman in the United States, and I say that because you're slipping our children a propaganda pill. This in turn is without our consent and you cannot cherry pick the voices when we have a voice and we keep us safe. Again, with cruising, I do know that with the low riders that there was a listening session done. I will not speak on that other than, you know, making a law against cruising in the first place was to oppress the Latinx community, the Chicano community. And so I find it very performative the actions being taken. We do need more transparency. We need to bridge the gap. But how can we do that if you have not even gained our trust? You haven't even spoken out against white supremacy. And I'm going to close public comment unless we have do we have any e-mail or pre-reported public comment? Oh, you know before we get to that we've got two new hands up. So we'll keep public comment open. Daniela followed by Alice. Hi, can you hear me? We hear him. Okay. Hi. So my name is Daniela. I also go by Daniela. And I just first wanted to say thank you for doing this and thank you for being here. I do want to echo what some of the previous commenters have said. Let's see, specifically regarding what to be just mentioned with this letter that I myself signed as well. Why don't we have law enforcement signatures on that letter? This is a letter saying we unequivocally condemn the violence that I have heard on January 6th. And we commit to keeping BIPOC people black, indigenous and people of color in our community safe. So I think if you want to help build a bridge or repair the relationship between law enforcement and the community, especially the community of color, then you need to sign that letter. And there is a second chance you can go ahead and actually do that. And I think that's the first step. Also, I have a question Colin Medcaff mentioned, I think he might be talking about the chief community ambassador team. I was just looking at some links that you had attached. So I'm just wondering if you could speak to that a little bit, like what that is going to do? Is that going to be hiring people through the police department to then be ambassadors for the community? I'm just wondering what the thought process is there? And ethnic studies with a cop? I don't know why that's a good idea. I don't think that's a good idea. I'm thinking that if you want to do ethnic studies, you need to have people of color who have studied ethnic studies to come in and do a class on that, not an officer. That just doesn't make any sense to me. I'm really wondering what the thought process is. I think Martin Luther King also said we live in two Americas. There's one America for white people. And then there's another America for people of color. And that is, I mean, I know we might not like to hear or speak about white supremacy, but that's what we're talking about here. And we want to dismantle it and end it. We want our people of color, black people, indigenous people, people of color who are white people. And that's where we have addressed you. And thank you so much. That's all I have. Thank you, Daniella. Alice. Thank you very much. I'm just filming. Excuse me. Thank you for this meeting. And I really appreciate the comments of everyone who's spoken before me. I'm learning so much from your and wisdom from lived experience and I'm brand new to this process in Santa Rosa and I just wanna ask it seems like this meeting has perhaps not been planned with representatives of community of color organizations and I don't know if that's the case but if that is the case it seems like future each future meeting should be planned with representatives from from many organizations from communities of color and to ensure that outreach that the format everything about the meeting has been planned in a collaborative manner with members of the city staff until also learning from the community and also on the topic of police officer in an ethnic studies class that horrifies me I know that if I were in a women's studies class and police officer walked in I would be enraged and it make would make more sense for representatives experts on ethnic studies issues and racial justice be speaking at the police department instead thank you very much thank you Alice Kelsey hi there my name is Kelsey Vero on the issue of the community empowerment plan I believe I'm correct that this is the survey I saw on the plan was put out at some point with like the five pillars of the future planning including things like racial justice one if I'm correct about where the community empowerment plan has has come from people mentioned the outreach about it and I remember when it was going by thinking that it was a good opportunity for input but it was not well advertised and most people I talked to who are engaged didn't know about it on the deadlines and whatnot so definitely that's that's one of the issues in terms of advertising it that has been mentioned and then otherwise I I've been trying to think when I'm listening to the comments what the underlying issue around the empowerment plan is and I think that part of it is that in the context of bureaucracies um frequently what happens is this incremental change and discussion of obviously either takes a lot of time and things are set for a meeting in months or it's going to take years and all of that can be the way that the slow grinding of bureaucracy happens um but I think what I think is completely missing from it is the acknowledgement of what harm is actively being done what policies are and practices in the community are actively harmful and sort of the accountability around that so there's a question of what we want to see improved and these these small reforms or or committees made or task forces and things like that all of that is is important to be doing but I don't see this this listening that is about the hurt and the pain that the that community members speak out about if it's police brutality if it's poverty the treatment of the unsheltered in our community like where is the accountability around the harm that's being done and speaking directly to basically mistakes that have been made in our policies in the past in order to move forward and I think that's part of where the trust is broken so I just wanted to speak to that um and you know say that that's part of where the pain and outrage that you're hearing is coming from um and maybe with that we can move forward that's all thanks thank you Kelsey um uh resident 4196 followed by Zoe resident 4196 are you able to hear us yes I'm here thank you my name is Eddie Alvarez Rosen what what I just heard on on on the cause regards to the low rider vehicle we were informed that at the cost of the vehicle is actually being the ticket of it the improvements of it is actually picked up by the community who requested that this be done so it's not money that we're taking from something or that's being I'm sorry that's being taken from something and put to something else that must be stated in regards to the comments that I just heard towards this the council members it's very important that my community understands that we are demanding respect for for ourselves and our fellow members and in doing so we must also acknowledge that we must be we must give respect and after being here for so long I think it's only a right that we show exactly how we want to be treated and we demand that and with that being said please reach out to your elected officials understand that that I know for a fact they want to work with you especially the ones that you're seeing before you so it behooves us in absolutely no way for us to ridicule each other for us to condemn each other and accuse each other this is the opportunity that you have the most progressive council in Santa Rosa's history I recommend that each one of us work together for the bigger picture or towards reaching that bigger picture I think it's feasible I think we have great community leaders that can do just that so I would like to see respect given respect earned respect reciprocated that is all thank all right thank you and Zoe hi can you hear me we can go ahead Zoe all right thank you so much for this meeting thank you all for being here I'd like to echo all of the comments and concerns of the constituents in this meeting and also the of all the public comments and I would just like to say that um there is such a problem with the Santa Rosa police department especially acknowledging that white supremacy exists even in this community I I'm I'm pretty active in this community I'm an advocate for unsheltered folks and I engage with the officers pretty frequently and I do have on camera one of the officers specifically saying that he does not believe that white supremacy even exists within this community and he compared the violations on human rights that the officers committed over the summer during the George Floyd and Brunner Taylor protests he compared those violations and those actions to telling somebody to move from a falling branch and if they get hurt it's their problem that is gas lighting and I need I need you all and I know I just heard Eddie Alvarez speak and I wanted to thank him for bringing all of that up I need you all to really think about and discuss about how you can root this out of your institution how you can really acknowledge and admit that white supremacy is very prevalent in the ways that you are governing I just um wanted to drive home that point and I yield the rest of my time thank you very much thank you very much Zoe and before we continue on with public comment we have a request to give a moment to turn over our Spanish language translation so we will be taking a brief break and our clerk will let us know when we can come back thank you interpreter Charles can you please turn on your camera and give a thumbs up to show that you're on the Spanish side okay chair Fleming we're ready to begin again thank you for your patience are we ready to resume we are ready when you are thank you great um do we need to do a roll call or is that considered as just a pause we can do a roll call okay please council members Shwedhelm here vice mayor Rogers as it council member Fleming present thank you so let's continue with public meant um madam clerk do we have any prerecorded public comment there's excuse me there's no voicemail public comment on item 6.1 thank you very much I want to um bring it back to the close public comment and bring it back to the subcommittee I want to make a quick notation here and thank all participants and let you know that this was um I appreciate your grace this is my first time conducting public comment for a city meeting and I'm learning as I'm going and I appreciate all opinions those of which I agree and don't agree and please forgive me for being sensitive when attacks on the physical characteristics of one of the members are made however um I understand that all voices must be heard and going forward um I I hope that you can feel that this is a welcoming and inclusive place for both community members and subcommittee members uh to participate so with that um uh I want to extend my apologies Ms Cox and move forward bringing it back to the committee for your comment questions first and then comments do we have any questions from the subcommittee I have some oh that's me right I have some clarification questions that were brought up during public comment um and if there are not answers to them if we can get some answers that would be great uh none would be um sorry uh Ms Vice Mayor Rogers um I just want to make sure I've got a hand up from the clerk and I just want to make sure that we're not missing a housekeeping piece if you mind if we defer to that making no problem sorry about that uh Sandy thank you my apologies I should have um done this before I wanted to announce and um ask our interpreter to announce that the Spanish um the Spanish language channel is now backed up for use and um and that that people can people can call when they when they raise their hand they will need to switch over to the um to the Spanish channel or from the Spanish channel when they um when they wish to make their public comment and if our interpreter could announce that the Spanish channel is available well as we have mentioned we are going to have interpretation in Spanish for this meeting if you would like to participate you can raise your hand you can also raise your hand to make a comment using star 9 you can press the link below para ser un globo para escuchar esta reunión en español thank you very much apologies for the interruption um Vice Mayor please continue thank you uh so one of the questions was what is the time frame for the um the listening sessions what is the time frame to compile a report uh and when will that be available yes so um so I just want to make sure I understood your question correctly so the the listening sessions were held from um June to December and the time frame to get the report out um we are hoping um to do that at some point um next month the the situation we're at right now is is the accessibility piece uh we want to make sure that it's something that all community members can can it's readable um for everybody okay um and then there was um another question about how are people invited to the meetings and I was just taking notes I'm sorry so when they had questions I'm like oh good question how are people invited to the listening listening sure um and thank you for asking that question um actually what what was done was we reached out to community members whom specifically in the BIPOC community and then drilling down even more to folks who do not have we don't know how to navigate forums such as public comment who have never participated in city council in this way so that's why we did reach out to groups um like CBI Roseland and also we met folks at um Bayer Farm Park we also met people um at at um in South Park so we selected community members who are experiencing digital destitution um and or do not know how to navigate these spaces um or you know we did have that functionality set up quite yet for community members um to make public comment in Spanish so we really try to uh recruit community members there and then also with our indigenous community who doesn't normally participate in government in these ways um we've reached out to them as well uh there so there were also organizations that were invited um so again those were um CBI um uh Roseland um also 100 Black men and double ACP so there was a combination of organizations and also community members um that came together okay um and how did the ethnic studies with the COP that program how was it developed have we tried something similar before in the past or sure that's a great question um unfortunately I don't know I haven't I haven't been with the city enough to know if we've tried something similar to that in that way um and so the concept and you know I recognize on the number of forums that um it was my mistake to call it ethnic studies uh because of what it means um to the community members who were to decolonize education the program should have been called the multicultural roots junior project which is more reflective uh I'm so sorry which is more reflective of what we were um engaging with the youth and also to clear up some of those questions that came up um the officers did not administer the curriculum um the curriculum was administered by staff member Gustavo Mendoza um who has a significant experience uh working with youth and a background in restorative justice so what was the purpose of the officers being there if they weren't I'm sorry but just point of clarification what was the purpose of them being in the room sure so throughout the community listening sessions and also I offer for community members um please their honor website under community uh empowerment plan of their community engagement there are listening summaries from the listening sessions and you will find that community members frequently mentioned that they were looking for opportunities um in order to build bridges with our law enforcement um to engage in positive interactions starting at an earlier age so this these were recommendations that were coming from community members okay um and I think this is my last one uh clarification on the chief's community and ambassador team uh how did we recruit for that since you said I believe it was 43 applications what's the process uh is it a paid position and what exactly will they uh do sure um that's a great question and I don't want to take that from uh chief Navarro because uh his team has been we've been working together on it but in in terms of the outreach uh we've been sharing it on the various um channels that we have our social media I believe also our city connections page um and we've been talking about it at some of many of our listening sessions um but I know chief has more information about that yes thank you um so very good question vice mayor Rainer Navarro chief of police we um had initially planned upon my appointment to begin a some type of panel or team compiled of residents who could provide feedback and and speak with me personally on issues in the community and um just get a better better um better pulse on what's going on and as we went through this year we were able to develop an application process we sent out information over social media and received information back through our the community empowerment plan and we received 43 applications we're in the middle of going through those right now I'm going to be having some interviews with with some people it is not a paid position it is voluntary and we are looking at basically it's it's designed to be a bridge between the police department and the community to to provide better information build relationships and to get out to the community members that they are in contact with and and build those build those contacts and and relationships so that's the that's the background and we hope to have that uh starting up here in the spring thank you uh mr schwedholm thank you chair um thank you um golly for that presentation a couple questions I also had uh questions about the timeline about when might we see this report and some of my questions will tie into that so having listened or participated in many of the listening sessions some of the conversations we had just scratched the surface on you know I I know I asked some individuals you know what would it take to make so that you would feel safe in this community and we're never never able to actually take the next steps there um you know some of the times I would have even asked them okay if you were the mayor santa rosa what would you be doing now getting to those action steps can you share with me where you see those actual next steps fit in will that be part of the community empowerment plan with action steps or we just going to continue the listening sessions and actually having more dialogue sessions sure that's that's a great question um so we will be continuing the the listening sessions those will be ongoing um in terms of the report we do want to include those pieces where people were speaking about you know some of the things that made them feel safe or you know if the light on x street worked um or you know some of these other sort of infrastructure um items that came up so we are going to be including that in our report so that we could get the best overall picture of what the community members that participated you know what fell under safety um for them all the different safety categories as well as recommendations and suggestions uh from community members that participated and I also just want to briefly add that we have been listening uh very closely to public comment um so we are um taking into account uh what community members um are stating during public comment at city council meetings uh as well as the subcommittee meetings as well okay great thank you and if I could just say one more thing I'm sorry I think I I want to answer just to some community member questions but I just wanted everyone to know that um the work that is outlined on the community empowerment plan that that's not everything that community engagement is doing um this morning um via our violence prevention partnership program which is part of community engagement we had the honor to have Dr. Sharon Washington and her presentation on tipping the scales um deconstructing race and racism um and within that she also did address um gender bias so we had an incredible participation of over 300 community members participating in that conversation that is explicit uh where we do talk about um white supremacy and rape and racism and institutions and how that affects us as a community so I just I'd like for the community to understand that we are also doing that um that work is happening we're just it's not necessarily included and I would love to speak to anyone who has more questions um my email is mdaes at srcity.org um if anyone has any follow questions regarding that and it will be available on our website thank you mgaula that's what that's what I wanted to emphasize having attended it was a wonderful presentation from Dr. Washington and the key point is um it is going to be on the website where you can watch the entire presentation and it is a lot of self-reflection and for me it was great that you know as we start you mentioned a couple of time with the seed collaborative and mr. mclean is shared with us too it's going to take time and energy and effort from all of us um because I really think it starts with us as an individual and then how do we change the culture of not only the organization of the city of Santa Rosa but our entire community so thank you for mentioning that and I really encourage everyone once it's up on the webpage to follow along with the presentation a lot of valuable information thank you mr. Schwadhelm um and thank you ms. Tejas um could you um spell your email out for the community please sure um and thank you for asking that because um other people spell my last name differently it's m-t-e-l-l-e-s at s-r-c-d-dot-o-r-g thank you so much um and this question is um kind of a general one which is what do you see as some of the most helpful things moving forward that we can do to ensure that uh as many residents as possible of the city of Santa Rosa feel safe um yes I I appreciate the question um I think that I understand the community's frustration with feeling like we've been doing a lot of listening sessions but I promise you that every single time we continue to do these listening sessions we learn something new about how to communicate with community what's the what are the best mechanisms to get a hold of folks to get the information out there uh one huge lesson was in speaking to our monolingual Spanish community of what are the different modalities that we need to use as a city to reach out to them and some of them are not you know our Facebook page some of them are not you know social media related and so taking those things into account and and understanding that safety means something different for each community um and also understanding that um BIPOC community members are not a monolith especially specifically on the Latino community we we are we all kind of fall in different spaces of the spectrum and we have a very diverse thought and what we bring to the table based on our experiences and what we bring to it so I think in terms of the city we we are taking all of the steps and one item that I did not necessarily mention but I think is important to note that the city is in the process we just closed on the 26th for the application for the equity officer position um so with the equity officer position that's going to be working with the city with seed collaborative uh with the work that community engagement is doing in listening but listening intently and listening to not just in power but for ownership so that community can feel that ownership um that's that's the direction we want to go in and I I completely understand community members being frustrated but I know that we are in the right direction um and I appreciate everyone's comment and say everyone's energy um today thank you one of the questions I get from the community and I have a challenge answering myself is um and hopefully you can explain this for us is what piece does the seed collaborative do what piece of the community empowerment um plan do what piece does the equity officer do and how do all of those pieces work together so that we know who's got what part of the wheel or if we're building and reinventing multiple wheels at the same time thank you and I think I'm going to forward that to city manager I see you so I I think that we are in the process of developing that I think it's going over the next few weeks we're going to talk very specifically during goal setting about some of those roles and responsibilities we're waiting to finalize the contract with seed collaborative right now um hopefully that will be finalized very very shortly and they'll be on board and we will be bringing back a work plan that outlines this um these exact uh areas uh for the council and regular check-in points for the council during the during their engagement thank you in addition to keeping the council informed you know like I said these are questions that I'm getting from the public so if it could be um because it's not intuitive um you know what who does what um and I don't think that there is any intentional obfuscation of the information I think that we're learning as we go but if it can be placed prominently on the city's website I think that would go a long way to letting our our public know where we're at with this absolutely thank you so much that's all the questions that I have so unless there's anything else from the members of the subcommittee or staff um I believe that we're ready to move on from this item we've got one item done so thank you very much so now we will move on to subcommittee objectives and priority settings and this is an opportunity for a discussion amongst uh the uh the subcommittee members about what types of things we would like to see on um what we envision the scope to be and what the the purpose of this committee is and where we'd like to see it go so um I'm not seeing Ms. Rogers um I am going to oh there she is okay oh little snack time all right uh we all get hungry don't we um so uh given that um Mr. Schwedhelm's mouth is not oval we'll ask him uh put him on the spot uh what do you think about where we should be going from here right so for me the intent of this public safety subcommittee meeting was to assist staff and council with further exploration that are of interest to the entire council and as we've been populating these agenda since inception that's the kind of model that we do what would be helpful if we want to start prioritizing you know and again with the new business with cahoots that's a I know a lot of progress has been there and um my hope is that we would prioritize some things over the other um but there's also that balance I think this would be a healthy conversation for the entire council uh to see what would you like us to be able to do and I think a big thing is the prioritization um what is going to be the most important for this community that we address in this subcommittee as quickly as possible thank you miss rogers um well ultimately uh not specifically ultimately I like to see us go with the the goals of the council um continuing to get input from the community about the way that we're going and I would like to see um some wholeness within our community again so however we can make that happen I think we have a lot of wonderful people um on our in our police department and um we have a lot of wonderful passionate people in our community and I think that we need to figure out a way to to make us whole because this is tearing us apart um so however we can do that that would be that would be my goal and definitely the cahoots model but having the space and opportunity for our community members to give us their input to to make us make us whole again thank you um and and to that end you know somebody said something last night about there being one Santa Rosa and that is my goal is that we have a Santa Rosa that meets the needs of the various community members and understanding that not everybody is in the same place and has the same needs but that we can all be Santa Rosans and all feel safe um in the policing that is done and that we have robust community participation I think that uh Mr. Schwadhelm was perhaps wise and suggesting that we might have taken up this item later after we passed through some things and um that will be better informed to do so um later on in the meeting but I did want to um make a space for the community to weigh in on what direction we go and um even if we don't come out with a robust plan which it doesn't look like we will at this point what we can do is at the end of future meetings we can have uh upcoming meeting uh items as an agenda um placeholder and uh allow for uh the community and for council members or subcommittee members to add on their ideas of what would be appropriate next steps so um as this is an item I will open it up for one more question just for my colleagues on the subcommittee how do you see our conversations council conversations on February well 17th we're hearing from the community and 18th and 19th about setting goals and priorities almost like what Victoria you were saying about how these different pieces intersect together how do you see the goal setting intersect with what the task of this subcommittee would be that's a great question um and a real softball if I'm going to be honest Tom it's well again I I say because not every member of the community understands that there's a great opportunity I've been sharing it with many folks on the 17th 18th and 19th to listen in that is a priority setting and that does intersect here so yeah and I think that will be largely informed by that last year even though it was only a few months ago and diversity equity and inclusion was a priority for the the council and so I think that that informs the work that we do here I think also you know going forward depending on how things come out with a potential charter review or general plan update those might inform how we look toward having a the police auditor which we'll take up later today and also whether that's a chartered position or also you know whether we have citizen oversight and things like that so definitely want to take the temperature of the entire council because we have you know once in a decade opportunity with the the charter coming up to sort of codify and bring to the not just the council but to the whole public a chance to say how do you as as an entire city you can vote on how you want us to to manage our and and have oversight and there's no better opportunity than at the ballot box to to tell us how you want to do it it's not just us sitting in our living room saying what we think it's it's you mailing in and telling us how how to govern you because ultimately we work for you so I'm I'm looking forward to those those conversations Ms. Rogers same all right anything else before I open up public comment all right with that I'll open public comment and I see one hand raised from Bonnie Bonnie followed by Cox okay Chair Fleming if you don't mind I wanted to read the instructions for members of the public we're now taking public comment on subcommittee objectives and priority setting if you wish to make a comment via zoom please raise your hand if you are dialing in via telephone please dial star nine to raise your hand you'll have three minutes for your comment and a countdown timer alert at the include conclusion of that period if you are participating in the meeting from the Spanish Channel in zoom we have an interpreter on standby on the English Channel to assist during your public comment if you wish to make a public comment please be sure to pause throughout your comment to allow for interpretation those using interpreter support will be afforded additional time for your public comment as required by the Brown Act for Spanish speakers at the time you hear your name called turn off the Spanish Channel to make your public comment this icon looks like the circle with an es in the middle and the word Spanish underneath and now I'll turn the time over to our first speaker can you hear me we can thank you Bonnie yes my name is Bonnie Hogue I'm a resident of Santa Rosa and members of the public safety subcommittee thank you for the opportunity to make a statement I was going to actually read this a little later in the agenda but I feel like it's pretty urgent right now especially given the presentation I just saw I applaud the city's inquiry into the cahoots program and hardly endorse implementing such a program in Santa Rosa Chief Navarro admitted during the listening session that the number one call SRPD gets is related to homeless individuals if trained social workers rather than SRPD officers can handle even some of these calls it cannot but help put us on track to change our approach to this issue which will help achieve a better outcome with respect to the police auditor position the city must immediately create a citizen police oversight board reporting directly to the city council not the city manager citizen oversight is essential for police transparency accountability and reform police departments don't reform themselves regardless of what their PR campaigns promise citizens must take the lead responsibility in working with government and law enforcement to enact meaningful police reform the police response to last summer's racial justice protests in Santa Rosa resulted in a number of lawsuits and considerable community outrage the voters of Sonoma County past proposition p which strengthens oversight of the sheriff department chief Navarro has commented on poor morale in SRPD understandable relations with the community are fractured reform is needed the most effective way to heal this fracture is transparency and accountability and these are best achieved with a community based citizen police oversight board I urge you to make this a priority and to work with the city council to urgently create this very needed citizen police oversight board you ask what would make me feel safe having such a police oversight board with teeth something that I feel would knit the community and law enforcement together thank you thank you Bonnie Cox I see that it says here if you've already made a public comment please do not raise your hand again but they're different separate items so that doesn't really make sense I think the suggestion of changing that wording should happen um I feel like with asking the community per to provide a person a bike park or a community representative who is going to be in a volunteer position not only do I think that is inappropriate because you're expecting free labor from the community but also you're relying on that free labor of that potentially by community member having to go out into their community and you know basically be a middleman for what the community should be empowered to do in what y'all should be making more accessible is how to file police complaints directly how to file complaints with staff members of city council elected and non-elected and also just I find it very tokenizing that you would just continue to try to make us do free labor for y'all and it's like not all not all skinfolk or kinfolk you know I think it's very tokenizing to be like okay well this one person is going to speak on behalf of an entire community uh it's not the case as we see on fox news and when you expect that free labor from us understand that that impacts us historically where we're already have provided a lot of free labor to this country so um I feel like we're just speaking in circles around what's really important and what really needs to be prioritized is a need to be looking into our police officers and seeing if there's an ability to audit all police officers and search into their gang affiliations their white nationalist affiliations their domestic terrorist affiliations the groups that they're aligned with the type of social media that they engage with because I think that's really what would make me feel safer in this community is a complete audit of the police officers each individual officer and any individual officer that wants to go into law enforcement in Sonoma County in Santa Rosa at the JC at college campuses to be audited completely for their social media and their affiliations to domestic terrorist in fact you know what may I think what's on my mind really what I want to say is where was Tom on January 6th I think it's on everybody's mind where were you Tom on January 6 I think we need a complete audit of every staff member and anyone who's an elected official and anyone who's serving as a police officer to be audited for their affiliations to white supremacy to white nationalism and to domestic terrorism thank you all right um seeing uh no additional okay Zoe hello can you hear me indeed please okay hold on a second here I have some things to say as a on the ground volunteer at acts of kindness Sonoma County acts of kindness I would like to officially request an urgent immediate aid to the unsheltered an emergency stop to illegal sweeps and human rights violations destruction of belongings and eviction we urgently request COVID safe warming tents and winter shelter immediately sanitation and trash receptacles at encampments and also sufficient housing my position is to abandon um residents under these conditions and to apply aggressive police presence to encampments is state violence deprivation of well-being and aid and basic rights equates to state violence the inadequacies of city and county shelters and the lack of placement services is a willful activity abandonment so I'm asking you all to prioritize this need immediately thank you thank you um Omar Omar are you with us good afternoon uh this is Omar Figueroa can you hear me we can thank you yeah I'm a lawyer here in Sonoma County and I'm calling to speak out in favor of having civilian oversight of law enforcement and that should be an objective and a priority for you this year also addressing the issue of criminalization of the unhoused should also be an issue because in terms of public safety uh trying to deal with this issue by putting people in jail and turning the jails into a rotating criminal justice system is not a wise use of taxpayer dollars there are better solutions to that and it's important for public safety to weigh in on how criminalizing the homeless is not the way to go forward thank you for your time thank you Omar um through the clerk do we have any uh oh Tavey I mean sorry Tavey I'm apologize Tavey I'm just getting your name wrong every time Tavey followed by Evan hi there um so just so you remember how to say my name it's Tavey or not Tavey that will help you thank you Tavey you're welcome um I just want to reiterate what Cox has said uh what basically they have said needs to be really heard and I know that it may sound repetitive to you all but the repetition of violence and oppression that that BIPOC will within Sonoma County is has gone too far um what we need to look at and I'm going to repeat it again is that we need to audit law enforcement and we need to to find affiliations to white supremacy that is bottom line what we could do to keep us safe and Victoria you did say we work for you if you work for the people then you need to keep the people safe and this includes your most marginalized this includes your unsheltered this includes your black indigenous people of color this includes your LGBTQIA plus that's bottom line what we need to do as a community um you know this is really important that we need a public statement from law enforcement and I'm going to reiterate that we need a public statement from law enforcement dismantling white supremacy we need a public statement from law enforcement ever since the protest has ever since the peaceful protest that the force that ran through peaceful protesters was wrong we are tired of the white community getting slaps on the wrist they need to be accountable and then we need to keep our law enforcement accountable along with that um you know back to our unsheltered and back to what Zoe was saying I want to reiterate that we are in a climate crisis we are in a social pandemic crisis uh with with people worrying about evictions the unsheltered population will grow if we do not do something it is a bare minimum to be housed and fed we need to keep our people safe by all means necessary and with that said I don't know how much time I have but yesterday was Angela Davis's birthday and this is a woman an educator and she said prisons do not disappear social problems they disappear human beings homelessness unemployment drug addition mental illness and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from a public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages I want you all to sit with that out of sight out of mind doesn't work anymore we see it we hear we're here to change it and we need to do this together as a community thank you Tavi Evan followed by Colin I've switched devices are you able to hear me yes okay great um you know if this item is about objectives and priority setting for public safety there's just kind of a gross oversight to jump out of me or two of them really all solutions point back to the same answers which is budgeting and resources if you're talking about safety it's in the best interest of any community to invest the best models practices and the most resources in preventative measures rather than responsive measures it's it's wonderful I'm so glad that cahoots is something that's being adopted and part of our responsive nature and improving those practices but wouldn't we all like to live in a world that has less need for emergency call and actually has safer people which has to account for holistic wellness and holistic justice of what that looks like so it's interesting to me that comes down to two things so for talking about priorities how Santa Rosa police department is funded the amount they're funded with what they do with the funding are very curious things for example you know an easy line item I've picked on a lot this year is vehicles and how much money you spend annually on vehicles versus violence prevention and it's extremely hard to maintain credibility with the community when we can do dollar for dollar comparisons like that I don't have the figures in front of me but I'm just speaking more conceptually we're talking about priorities the other part of this is the unions I have come to a shift in my own personal view being very involved in this community that I don't think it's necessarily chief Navarro or Santa Rosa police department institutionally that is resistant to these cultural shifts it is the function of the unions and the amount of influence they have to empower these quote-unquote bad apples and associated labor law that makes it very difficult for the department or the city to hold people accountable in a way that frustrates the community greatly but that is the dot that is not being connected there has to be something and it may have to come from a state or federal reform but the amount of influence and power that the union has over functional policy is it has to come to an end and until you address the cultural issues of a union of a union that would support you know I know you know measure p was a county a county measure but these are people you know who support blatant lies you know calling their campaign uh transparent snowmen they're literally opposing transparency and the thing is people are paying attention now and if elected and unelected people want to maintain their positions be servants of the people as they're supposed to be and intended to be and want to have credibility you're going to have to confront some of these things head on and um councilmember schwedhelm I think you'd be a wonderful person to do it I think this is a historic moment for you to show some incredible leadership and guidance because you know how all these things connect better than any of us and it would be great to see your voice in there thank you thank you Evan uh Colin followed by Maria hey can you hear me we can thank you hi my name is Colin I talked earlier already um I want to echo what uh Zoe and to the said earlier particularly about ending uh sweeps from Santa Rosa police department um I don't know if there's any way that the Sonoma county sheriff could also be forced to comply with some kind of sweep stop uh just within the sanity limits wherever they might have like overlapping jurisdiction I don't know if that occurs but um I've been present at a number of these sweeps and it's always horrifying um um these are folks homes this is where they're trying to live this is where they're trying to survive uh in the middle of a situation that has killed dozens of people locally and hundreds of thousands of people across the country the last thing we need to be doing is targeting folks where they're trying to just exist um if we need to find spaces for them there are plenty of abandoned structures uh abandoned lots throughout Santa Rosa I'm sure there are places that we could help folks just set up and provide them resources uh I know at least for a segment of time there was a camp kind of a long highway 12 where either the county or the city had been providing uh sanitation services and was doing trash pickups and had uh border body there briefly I I know that it was eventually taken away as well uh because why treat people like people so if if there's something that the subcommittee could do to pressure the police department and police chief Navarro to exercise a little bit of humanity and just allow people to continue living wherever they're at not moving them around not only is it a moral issue it's also just a public health issue every time these camps are swept and people are distributed throughout the city it presents another potential COVID spread um it's just it's not good practice the CDC has asked people to stop doing it uh there's really nothing more that I can say about it there's no good reason to continue sweeping these camps and there are only bad reasons to continue doing it uh and I'd like to see the subcommittee take some some position on it at the very least if not try to push in a direction thanks thank you Maria hi there can you hear me yes okay great hi my name is Maria better cat I am a member of the community I um engage with the human rights commission of Sonoma County and I do some volunteer work with Sonoma County acts of kindness um um my priority and objectives for the subcommittee suggestions are that we are in the middle of a COVID pandemic we are in the middle of winter and that um we need immediate emergency shelters and COVID safe warming tents set up there are people who are out on the street in freezing temperatures um we need uh accessible uh and sufficient numbers of beds in housing locations we need sanitation and trash set up where encampments currently are we need the police to stop sweeping because they disperse people and they have nowhere to go the only time police engage with the unsheltered community in this town is whenever they are sweeping them and in no way does it provide aid or care to the community we need police oversight in all of these matters and um we also request um a permanent setup at a property or land in town for people to camp if there is not sufficient housing available and we know that these long-term projects um like room key and house key are going to take a lot of time we need in the meantime an initiative that supports the large numbers of vulnerable unsheltered people in this community um and especially with freezing cold temperatures and with a pandemic we also request that you please prioritize getting vaccinations to this community who have um health vulnerability vulnerabilities and old age thank you okay our next caller is Laima after Laima we will be taking a brief break to reset our language translation services hi can you hear me we can hi my name is Laima and I would also like to echo the comments um that have been presented before me uh first I know that this is what was talked before but the fact that so many folks have raised the concern about how um they hadn't heard about or didn't know about the community engagement efforts that were mentioned during the previous presentation just shows to me how much work still still needs to be done in order to effectively engage uh the community and especially the community members that have been historically misrepresented and oppressed and their voices ignored and I would also like to mention the issue um regarding cops on campuses I highly doubt that um having more officers in in schools is what makes students feel safe especially specifically by proc students and I'm obviously not the only one who thinks this way because if I have for correctly the school board is um fully supports the removal of cops from campuses in San Rosa and and also it seems like the city is making an effort to move in the right direction but in the end it's still working within the frameworks of the system that was built to basically enrich protect and defend white folks while controlling intimidating and oppressing people of color in this country and it's just shameful in my in my opinion that it took so long for the city to start doing this that when these issues the issues of white supremacy and racism have been around for decades if not centuries thank you I yield my time thank you um and now um we will uh take a brief recess in order to uh change over our translation services keep back in a minute interpreter Pablo can you please unmute your screen and confirm that you're on the spanner side thank you chair Fleming we're ready to continue chair Fleming and we're available to start again when when you're ready our Spanish interpreters have been switched and we're ready to zoom um when the committee is ready okay I do see a quorum do you need to read anything um or set that up in any way if the Spanish translator can uh let the members of the public that they can switch back to the Spanish channel okay and if I can just read this really quickly if you're participating in the meeting from the Spanish channel in zoom we have an interpreter on standby on the English channel to assist during your public comment if you wish to make a public comment please be sure to pause throughout your comment to allow for interpretation those using interpreter support will be afforded additional time for your public comment as required by the brown act for Spanish speakers at the time you hear your name called turn off the Spanish channel to make your public comment this item looks like the circle with an es in the middle and the word Spanish underneath thank you thank you very much and I need to take roll call yep uh councilmember Schwedhelm here vice mayor rogers present councilmember Fleming present thank you very much so now we move on to the Santa Rosa police department model for response to mental illness or homelessness or more commonly known as cahoots and prior to taking this item I was advised by our city attorney out of an abundance of caution to disclose um that I do work for uh the county of Sonoma has a social worker and although I don't work for the mobile support team I am an employee there I don't believe that this presents any conflict of interest for me and that I am capable of evaluating the programs presented before us without bias and have no financial stake in the outcome of these discussions thank you would anybody else like to make a statement like that miss rogers uh given my employment with the county of Sonoma I just want to say for the record that that employment will not affect my ability um and intent to act solely in the best interests of the city as we weigh the options for alternative responses to calls for services related to mental health homelessness and similar concerns thank you she said a much better than I I did but that too all right so um staff will provide us an update um on the contract uh with um white bird clinic and I see here that um our police captain john fregan is joining us captain fregan I turn it over to you great thank you very much for giving me the opportunity uh today I'm going to talk to the subcommittee about our continued citywide efforts uh toward transforming our police department's mental health response model I presented twice to the subcommittee before and today I'm going to focus on some significant steps we've taken over the last couple of months toward accomplishing our goal so we'll start with this a few of a quick summary I know we have a lot on the agenda today to go through so I'm going to go through some quick summary of the things that we've accomplished we started by meeting with some of our key community stakeholders in the mental health arena Nami Sonoma County has been a key part of those discussions and has such an intimate knowledge about some of the needs here in our community and about some of the providers who may be able to assist us as in our local nonprofit efforts obviously Sonoma County behavioral health has been a key part of these discussions and we want them to be a part of our program especially as it expands in the years to come. Buckelu programs which has a strong presence here in Sonoma County in our local hospitals a memorial hospital and Kaiser and Sutter all play a key role in the mental health deliveries here in our county and are affected tremendously with ER visits and patients who get admitted into their facilities. One of the biggest updates that we're really excited about is to talk about our signing the agreement with Whitebird Clinic so actually we started these conversations with them back in July and it's been months of work toward reaching this but I'm super excited to say as of yesterday we've officially signed our agreement and we're in contract with Whitebird clinics and they're the nonprofit which administers or runs the Kahootz program and Eugene and Springfield Oregon so that's a big step forward for us and I think it's going to help really carry the momentum forward at a more rapid pace going forward. One of the things with them we talked to and it's we've been pushing them to sign this agreement and one a little bit of the backstory on that is they're obviously received national interest in growing this program and agencies from across the country are reaching out to them and we were one of the early agencies to reach out to them and in getting some of the backstory they just finished getting the program up and running in Rochester, New York and speaking with one of their directors yesterday he said that the city of Santa Rosa is their top priority now we're going to start with our first formal meetings next week as part of our contract and he said that Santa Rosa was selected as just a few in a nation they're going to take on and they've diverted out or most of the other agencies to other groups and part of what made us stand apart was just our strong support from our chief of police from our city council our city manager and our strong community desire to build a program here so that's what put us to the top of the group and I really feel that we're going to be able to build a program that's a example for the nation to follow. The next thing that we're going to talk about here we really been looking about how we can expand this and throughout our whole department and throughout the county and so we started examining some of the different grant and training opportunities that are out there that can work collaboratively with this team and one of them is a program it's called the law enforcement mental health learning sites and it's offered through the US Department of Justice and what it's designed for is agencies that have teams like this like a hoot style models and who are kind of leaders in their regions with the mental health response with law enforcement so we're just starting to explore this and we believe it's something that we're going to be able to work with our team and potentially give us some reimbursement funds for this team for some training and some other things so we just started this process I'll have a lot more to come over the couple coming months to let the subcommittee know about but I wanted this to put it on everyone's radar and then we can do some more research on that as for the community the next stage that we're working in right now actively is seeking some community feedback on what are the needs because we don't want to build a program that is just for the police department we want to build something that meets the needs of our community and so we're starting out by using some of the resources through Nami Sonoma County tonight I'll actually be presenting to the Santa Rosa Community Advisory Board and starting from from the beginning of kind of telling what the foods model is and what our vision is and seeking feedback from this group. Also one of the key deliverables from our contract with Whitebird Clinic is some community engagement and to be able so they can continue to help us build a program that's modeled off Eugene Oregon but also meets the needs of our unique community here in Santa Rosa and then we've also been working closely with the different nonprofits here in Sonoma County to see who has number one the capacity to take on such a big project and also the interest to be able to take on one of those projects and can we go to the next slide please. So a little bit on that and we're still in the early stages of this is we've identified one of the programs that has the biggest capacity and has the desire to be involved with our pilot program and the first one on that is Buckaloo programs and Buckaloo programs has a long history of both here in Sonoma County and Marin County as many existing programs and staff already hired and has had a big player in the mental health arena here. The second one is Catholic Charities that many you know we have already existing city contracts with Catholic Charities we have the host team and numerous other outreach programs here in the city and throughout Sonoma County and thirdly as we've been in early discussions with the Santa Rosa fire department as we examine some of our different medical responses and fire chief Scott Westrow has been very engaged with the process and is so supportive of the Cahoots model and seeing what we can do with his medical expertise that he provides whether it be using someone from the fire department to fulfill that role or using his expertise as we pick the best medical response. So there's still more work to be done on that one but our approach right now is looking at having a program that has obviously a strong mental health response but also incorporates due to the unique needs here in Santa Rosa the homeless outreach and so what we envision right now but we'll continue to work with our council and with our community before any final decisions are made what we envision right now is three different representatives being on our response model and it would be our representative from Buckaloo with being a trained mental health clinician we have a representative from Catholic Charities being our homeless outreach specialist and then having a medical representative and as we explore more whether that be a fire representative or whether it be a EMT that we contract out with we're so examining those things but that's the model that we see working here for Santa Rosa and especially part of our one-year pilot program that we're going to start out with and a big part of getting this off the ground is establishing the budget and working toward finding alternative funding sources and so we really been putting a focus on looking at some state and federal grants and also innovatively looking at some private funding opportunities so one of the grants that we've already applied for is through SAMHSA and SAMHSA is the substance abuse and mental health services administration that's through the Department of Health and Human Services through the it's a federal agency so we're applied for that and that would give us up to 125,000 dollars a year for up to five years and it was specifically need for the training needs of this team of our Kahoot staff and obviously our mental health clinicians have abundance of training but also our homeless outreach and our medical and then also it would give us some training to be able to start increasing the mental health and de-escalation training for our local first responders so that would be for our fire department and our police department and we're hoping to be able to obtain this grant and then see how we can use it the private funding is another interesting opportunity where we're looking towards some of our local hospitals who are heavily impacted by the mental health response here in Sonoma County and so we're looking at partnering with some of these organizations whose missions and strategies are in alignment with the Kahoot's model and who are willing to donate funds to make this a comprehensive program that will benefit all members of our community so there's still a lot more to come for this but we're excited about being able to offset a significant portion between the grant and private funding the significant portion of our general fund commitment to get this ground or this team off the ground and running. Some of the other key next steps that we have is we're going to be continuing to work with the Whitebird Clinic team there in Eugene about developing our training and identifying the equipment needs and we hope to mirror their same training program that's worked so exceptionally well for now 32 years in Eugene and they'll be also helping us develop and we hope to mirror their same protocols and policies for the type of calls that this team goes to and how they're used as an asset throughout our city and again our plan is to focus first on this one-year pilot program as we get this off with the the three different kind of team components that I've discussed and then for the first year what we envision is having seven days a week for 10 hours a day and then it'd be two teams that are working these four-day shifts throughout the week they'd have an overlap day on a Wednesday and on that overlap day would be an increased engagement and also have additional capacity for reaching out to some of the referrals they've got throughout the week and recontacting with some of the individuals they've reached out to or had calls for service throughout the week. We'll continue to work with the Whitebird Clinic and community education and engagement it's going to be a process that obviously we'll be working through and during our pilot phase but we envision that through the years to come that to make this program successful that community education and continue an engagement with all of our key stakeholders is going to be imperative and it's something that we're going to ensure is one of the core elements of our team. One of the last steps here is just working with our other partners across the county and we envision this team of expanding we've had numerous conversations with the runner park department of public safety and their city team, Petaluma police department, the Sonoma county behavioral health and we look toward us kind of being the model for Sonoma county of getting this ground off this program off the ground and then getting other cities who may eventually join in with our team and we certainly want to see strong county input and participation as we get through this. So now we I know we went through this stuff very fast but all done with this presentation I want to cite it to take any questions about this program. Thank you captain subcommittee members any questions I see a hand up from I don't know who put their hand up first so we'll go with Mr. Schwadhelm. Thank you Madam Chair thank you Captain Creiging for this presentation it really is exciting I know you talked about on the first slide the police mental health collaboration program you said that's affiliated with the U.S. Department of Justice. Correct and that would be for building these mental health learning sites right here in Santa Rosa and so what's that designed is for you build these learning sites and then it's it's for to help with peer engagement so for us to work with other law enforcement agencies and other key community partners and help developing in our fabric here in our county of some of the mental health programs and trying to stand upon the resources we have offered. Okay and so would they also I know we have Whitebird Clinic to help support us as some technical assistance would that police mental health collaboration program do they also have the technical assistance or is it more just bringing people together from their perspective? From my understanding so far of looking into it that it more helps support the work you're doing so reimburse some of the funds for training it's more of a reimbursement program almost kind of like California Post and reimbursing the efforts that you've done but it'll certainly we're going to look more into the resources that it offered and I believe it will be able to provide some assistance but it won't be able to take the place of what Whitebird Clinic is doing for us. Right and then you know you had mentioned collaboration with other county partners and I've talked other electeds from other jurisdictions and it does seem as you mentioned we may be a little bit further ahead of in this because some people are talking implementation in 2022. Do you have a ballpark idea as to I know there's a lot of moving parts but as to when this actually might this pilot program might actually be able to start here in Santa Rosa? So our optimistic timeline is by this summer so we're looking for a tentative July to August being able to launch our pilot program and that's something because it's been such a community goal to have this done and it's a strong priority by our chief of police and city manager to carry this through so we're now that we're actually in contract with Whitebird Clinic I think we're going to be able to expedite this and I think we'll be the first here in Sonoma County to be launching our program and other agencies Petaluma and Rohner Park and the county of Sonoma will be following but frankly they're kind of waiting to see how our programs work and kind of use us as a model and a learning step as they expand their programs. And I know here in Sonoma County we also have the mobile support team that is a county county funded. Can you explain the difference between what that team does versus what we're looking at Cahood's because it's my understanding the only way some of the mobile support team gets called and seen is after a law enforcement officer has been there and that's not the model that we're looking at here correct. Correct so our program is going to be transformational for that that our goal is as many calls as this Cahood style team can respond to without law enforcement so we're trying to divert these calls that they'll still come through our Santa Rosa police dispatch but they'll divert this team and there'll be no police response necessary and so we'll work through the protocols for those cases the mobile support team by the county is uniquely different under the current structure that they have that the mobile support team will only respond once law enforcement has responded secured the scene and then they'll respond and they supplement law enforcement so our Cahood's team will be distinctly different as that they actually are absolutely in addition to law enforcement and they divert those calls so that there'll be a big difference and I think it'll give us an certainly an enhanced service for our community and our hope is that we'll be able to have police officers to be able to go to more violent calls and that may necessitate a police response and not these mental health calls that don't always need that. And would this team have the ability to transport people in need? Correct so they would be able they would directly if they if someone gets put on a mental health hold they can transport themselves to our crisis stabilization unit they would be able to do minor trans medical calls to local hospitals obviously if there's anything significant we'd have more advanced response they uh the Cahood's team in Eugene does a lot of the upstream approach about transporting people just to doctors appointments to get medication because our goal is is to get those who are suffering in our community through mental health is to get them to their doctor's appointment and make sure they're taking the medication and really hope toward this upstream approach reduces the chances of them ever going into a crisis moment that results in law enforcement being called. And you briefly mentioned some of our local health care health care providers what has been their level of interest and how engaged have they been in these conversations about this opportunity? Well we're really excited for uh St. Joseph's and Kaiser and Sutter have all been shown significant interest in being able to be a part of this program to contribute to this program we still are in the early stages of those conversations and um now seeing that we actually have a pathway to getting this program up and running later this year through our contract I think that we're going to see us be able to finalize some of those talks and I'll continue to update our council on that. Great thank you. Thank you uh Vice Mayor do you have any questions? Yes so uh really happy to hear that the fire department is going to be a part of this um I think they have a great relationship with the community um and dealing with people in the community. Also um when you spoke about the shifts and multiple shifts I hope we can make some correlations between the calls that we receive now for for dispatch and making those at peak times so uh that community the community gets the best out of having this this model here uh in Santa Rosa in regular business hours being in the mental health field are not always the hours in which we see the most uh the most need for mental health mental health assistance. Um I was wondering about the Bukaloo trained mental health clinician is that clinician going to be a licensed clinician bachelor's level what level of education with that person actually have um and then lastly um hoping that we can also although I don't believe the county requires it at this time to do annual or biannual refresher or trainings on the 5150 and how how they change periodically and what does classify uh for uh 5150. Okay great so the first question uh about the hours of the team so that's certainly that's something that we're going to be working with our uh analysts here at the police department to understand when are those peak hours and that's again where the Kahootz program or Whitebird Clinic is going to be great with us because we're really trying to follow their proven model they have 32 years of providing an excellent service with this and so we're going to try not to reinvent the wheel and to really follow their pattern they're talking to us right now about some of the hours of like the afternoon to evening time being the peak times but we'll look at our calls for service right here in Santa Rosa and make sure that we're providing them and then also understand that our pilot program is just the beginning of this as our nonprofits build capacity we're going to try to expand this team have additional teams and our goal is to get to a 24 seven or 24 hours a day seven days a week that we're always able to provide this service and uh to vert as many of the police and fire calls as we can but that'll obviously be a work in progress the training uh that is our early indications of getting licensed mental health clinicians but that's what we're also working with Kahootz on so he already their director that i'm working with is sending me some of their training guidelines and what their requirements are so that'll be one of our first key deliverables that we get from them is their exact training plans and we're going to model that here and then see what changes they may be here with california and some of our requirements and our loss so i'll have more on that coming but it's certainly going to be highly trained staff that have a unique level of expertise that'll be something new to be able to provide here for our city so we'll continue with that and and and i think the key is is that this program's going to get off the ground and running we have this pilot and that it's going to continue to grow and i think the capacity of the team will certainly strengthen in the years to come and we really hope to be the absolute model not here in justinoma county but in the bay area and across the state and we're just so excited for this relationship we'll be able to have and i think it just speaks for our community from the strong community support and the council support that we have and among our city leaders that we'll be able to be that example perfect thank you so much thank you um and my question and sorry if it um was already answered is i know last year um when the mayor uh when former mayor schwedhelm and uh chief navarro and the city manager and i went to um the department of justice there was talk about federal funding and i don't know if you're familiar with um those federal funds that may be available for mental health units it seemed like that it was for mental health units within um the police department and i know we're talking about a slightly different model but um as uh you know a steward of public resources i hope that as we continue to go through this process i'm wondering if we will continue to look for available grant sources and and matching in partnerships to stretch these uh my my goal is to not just be uh responsible with public funds but also to stretch these services so that them the uh most people can get the kind of help that they need and also that our officers are not put in the position of doing things that are outside of the scope of their expertise or interests wherever possible and that we can preserve them for um our most violent um and uh threatening offenders which are oftentimes not our patients absolutely and so yeah we've spent extensive time examining both state and federal grant opportunities the grant opportunities that you're referring to haven't been released yet but we're closely watching them and we have uh an analyst here at the police department that is spending time scouring for these grants and applying for the ones and the one that we've already applied for that's available is that SAMHSA grant and uh that's the one we're pursuing but we'll we'll certainly want to supplement that with additional grants and part of establishing just our eligibility for these grants is to have a stronger of having this pilot program and the show that we have concrete steps toward reaching this goal so um in the months to come i think it'll make us a lot more um uh competitive for these grants that's really exciting and whoever is doing that work has my gratitude and um i think that that might be one of the most valuable positions within the force because it allows us to expand our reach without leaning on our taxpayers so um thank you for to you and uh that person who is doing that work any more questions before we open up public comment all right i would like to now open public comment on this item do we need to read the public comment um stuff from the clerk or is it okay if i just go straight in okay you can i'm sorry you can go in thank you all right we'll start with evan followed by merlin evan you're up all right um i'd just like to uh commend collectively from the city council police department community members like this sort of reform is exactly what community looks like in collaboration and using common sense of best practices or at least it clearly has the intent of of being so so and i'd like to commend the the city and police department for making a priority to get in line to be a priority uh with the Eugene program to be able to implement more effectively and also point out that i believe this idea came from community members in public comment that was viewed quite contentiously at the time but maybe some of the things we say that feel a little heated now when you get a little distance from them are actually exactly what we need to be doing i've got some questions i think for the community that will take time to clarify about infrastructural um uh you know chain of command and authority is this budget in an independent line item on the Santa Rosa budget or is this in addition or existing amendment to how Santa Rosa police department's budget is allocated um and what is the authority the chain of command is this the chief that oversees this because you're going to get a lot of pushback that is not going to go very well with the community if this is an expansion of the police department rather than a community oriented service that works in collaboration with the police department um and i know that we're following the cahoots model and i can't speak to which how does theirs work but you've already identified times where you're willing to do something different than them because it's a better practice so we really do just need to examine what the best practices are um also i previously have heard i think chief navarro and i may be mistaken but i believe not refer to that they think this may take five percent of calls and i think that comment gets made because of how it'll correspond to budgeting again um but that five percent number doesn't add up from what i have reconciled and i would like the city council to dig deeper into why are you coming with a five percent number of calls that would be diverted when you've already said that most of your calls are for these types of issues it seems like the cahoots program i know this won't happen overnight and it'll be a pilot process eventually should could be as or more substantial than the police department itself and again that brings back to the union comments i was making earlier also i really hope um sergeant craig and i appreciate what you're doing i hope you and chief navarro and everybody are really pushing a cultural embrace from srpd officers and i hope you understand that what you're doing is exactly the sentiments of people who said defund the police and defund the police is a terrible marketing phrase but in concept and in function that's what this is so i hope you can get a cultural shift to break that divide to realize what we want is a safer healthier community also i'm curious about the classification criteria of what gets diverted if you could elaborate and define that right um and then also it's a little bit concerning it seems like kind of an echo chamber of the usual suspects that you'd go to the catholic charities as your partnership when they are not very popular amongst actual activists and providers in the community for helping with the homelessness issue and then lastly i also hope we can add an element that's a fire response team that uses people instead of police officers collecting overtime pay for when we have fire for nonviolent issues happening that we can incorporate that into this program we shouldn't be paying outrageous sums of money for people to do have offered burden with extra overtime and and the taxpayers burden with the cost of that overtime we should be using these sort of people to to help with fire related issues that are not immediately you know violent or threat of loss of life thank you evan merlin followed by alice can you hear me yes please go ahead uh evan is absolutely right um it's great that you're working on decreasing people's exposure to the police but uh it should absolutely not be run under the province of the police department or their budget the number one thing that you can immediately do to help with people's health is to protect them from the police to keep the police away from them give them a spot to be open the fairgrounds up protect them from the people that the last year should have shown you abuse the community murder the community and help not at all run this separate from the police take the police out of the picture defund them that is the number one thing that you can do for people's safety for their mental health for their housing situation so that they can continue to build the resources that they need to get toward housing themselves to provide for their stability their safety their community and their basic needs instead of being reset every single time they find a place to be being chased off having their things stolen by the police being brutalized being sent to jail and then having to start all over again the number one thing you can do here is to get the police out of the picture and here you are having the cops center stage in this discussion center stage in this discussion after a year of seeing the damage that they do the harm that they do to the communities to people of color to unhoused people and to all of us I'm done thank you Merlin Alice followed by Allegra thank you chair Fleming I'm pleased to see this program starting I'm trying to divert as many calls as possible from the police and I completely agree that this program should not be under the police department it should be under some sort of human services or healthcare department instead for reasons that Merlin just stated and I would recommend I am also deeply concerned that Catholic Charities is being considered as a partner for this you should be aware that many people in the homeless community I'm surprised how many I keep hearing this from our regard Catholic Charities as an adversary to people who are homeless rather than service providers except in the most formal sense of having a contract to ostensibly provide services it's just one example from the the report out of the at the closure of the Finley encampment that the city provided which I was very glad the city did provide and would like to see more of I was deeply concerned that of the 210 people that we were told were served by that encampment for sanctioned encampment 95 were transitioned to enter interim housing and six to permanent housing meaning that the majority 109 were either kicked out by Catholic Charities or knew that they would be kicked out if they came back and that's terrible and then the services that are supposed to be for homeless people are kicking out more than half the people or that people can't stay there because the situation is intolerable so I recommend brookwood clinic instead of Catholic Charities as a partner and also consider partnering with acts of kindness and homeless action as representatives working with the homeless community thank you very much thank you Alice Allegro followed by this hi um I just wanted to call and say that I support this effort I really believe that we do need to move out of a punitive model of policing our residents to providing services to our residents regardless of what kind of um difficulties and challenges they've had in their lives I think that um continuing to build people up instead of trying to catch them doing something wrong and then um jail them to what end um is is not the way to be so I'm glad that we're taking this step and I hope we continue to step forward um like Evan said I think we can expand this model and make a much bigger um services model and a much smaller if not non-existent police force um I also would just like to echo others about um the question on Catholic Charities I wonder if there was a public process for these contracts and how that they were selected um just just wondering like more about yeah how did how did these decisions get made and um notification which I think has been a theme of this meeting as well um so community safety starts with limiting communities contact with the police please keep moving these kinds of efforts forward thank you thank you uh bibbs followed by maria can you hear me indeed yes okay thank you uh names Libby and I will I will first start saying I will start off by saying I'm glad this is an item on the agenda I'm glad that this conversation is being had and I'm glad there's actually an effort being put forward to have more mental health services than more interactions with the police what I will say is I want to echo everyone everyone else that says you probably shouldn't be partnering with Catholic Charities the fact that this happened without a lot of public awareness seems really suspect to me I suggest moving forward you be absolutely more transparent with the public as aggravating as that might sound it's the best thing for you to do 100 and um yeah ideally it would be it would be great to see this thing turned into a larger service program with less police effort in general because at the end of the day uh the law was made up and crime is manufactured and I'm going to keep bringing this up in every meeting but we have to talk about how the police are a symptom of a white supremacist system and that we still operate under it so please keep that in mind and think about that I mean think about that for a long time um thank you for your time how you live my time thank you Maria followed by Bailey hi there thank you for taking my comment again I'd like to thank um future Fleming and Sergeant Craig and I appreciate this conversation and um the progress of of this sort of initiative in reducing the police engagement and giving police tools when when engaging I wanted to just give a little bit of feedback from my personal experience with the work that we've done to say that also Catholic Charities and the host team does not have a sufficient capacity to handle the amount of need through street outreach in consistent ways um directing people to drop off centers repeatedly who need services people cannot get there people do not have the ability to repeatedly show up across town things like that on just a basic level um show some some real challenges um also they're just not trusted in the unsheltered community um secondly I would like to um inquire about funding that you said federal funding um was available I wondering if this is um funds that are are maybe being allocated away from housing first agenda um another question that I have is um can um another sanctioned encampment be uh opened up at the fairgrounds the closure of finley pre winter before cold weather um was was cruel and we need a new location for people thank you thank you um bailey followed by daniella hi hello can you hear me yes yes awesome uh hi uh my name is bailey um and I um would like to say that yes um I am in support of this uh cahoots like program um I definitely think that um um mental health professionals uh should be handling um mental health cases um coming from someone who is schizophrenic um I the times that I have been in um I guess you'd say uh a break or have had a bigger episode um the police were not the first on my list um they were they've never been on my list um I think that this program um should not um partake or should should not have um the police involved um I think that um the professionals of mental health can definitely do their jobs um because that's what they're trained to do and um the police are not trained to do that um and uh also um yeah I think that there needs to be um I think that the the police need to be defunded and those funds do need to be reallocated to more services um to give to the greater community um and uh yeah um that is all I have I yield the rest of my time thank you so much uh Daniella followed by Cox hey thank you so much for taking my comments and yeah I just wanted to say this is really exciting news um I was one of the many public um commenters this summer who kept bringing up the cahoots program I actually lived in Eugene for a while and thank you thank you for listening because I think this is a great first step and I think it's a great first step for the county um I'm not a resident of Santa Rosa I never know if I'm supposed to call in but here I am hi I live in Katari um I've lived in Sonoma County though for 30 years and I was a resident of Santa Rosa for a long time but I'm hoping we can do something like this in Katari so if I could get someone's contact information um I would just love to to you know I mean I know that we're all looking to you as the leaders in this program with this pilot program so you know I'm I'm hoping we can extend it and so that Katari could be involved as well and then I just had another couple comments um yeah so in 2017 the cahoots program actually about 17 percent they served 17 percent of the overall calls for the Eugene Police Department their overall call volume so they actually took 17 percent of that so I'm thinking that you know we are very Santa Rosa is very similar to Eugene in many ways the size demographics um so I'm thinking that you know cahoots will be taking more than five percent as well one of the previous commenters said that you know maybe that's what we're thinking here it's going to take maybe five percent of the police total call volume but I'm thinking it will be more like what the Eugene program has um and yeah I'm wondering as well as the um Vice Mayor Rogers I believe asked whether those 10 hours a day were going to be peak times where um you know the Santa Rosa Police Department gets um mental health phone calls so I'm hoping that we can line those up I mean ideally we would have something that's 24 seven and also to echo other callers um yeah the 911 dispatch dispatchers should really be trained so that the police don't have to be involved at all that those calls go directly to cahoots and then cahoots can take over without having the police presence that I know um you know is requested with um mobile services team so this is a totally different program and I think it's going to be much more successful and as we all know a preventative approach is the best approach um and I guess my only other question was whether we were going to be able to fund you know with that grant money or any other money those 911 dispatchers um I think that's my last question I actually have one other question how is it budgeted I believe Evan Phillips asked is this a line budget from the police department or is it budgeted separately so I think that's it but thank you so much and hopefully I could be in touch with someone about this program because I'm really excited thank you uh cox flap followed by Michael hello um I do support uh the last you know police engagement and especially mental health crises because police are not trained um as mental health providers they tend to escalate situations in all cases but also especially mental health situations and also um you know it'd be interesting to see you know what are the police are what's their level of training around therapeutic approaches do they get any training around anything like that or is there any interest in having counselors even go out with officers on other calls where this kind of cahoots like program wouldn't maybe take that call but still maybe a person who would go out just to make sure and can act as a de-escalator and and uh also you know policing the police kind of there to de-escalate the police if needed but um you know it's interesting to see if there's interest in training police and therapeutic approaches but also it'd be interesting to know how many of our police officers are receiving personal therapy um so that they're not bringing their work you know bringing their stuff into work bringing their bias into work bringing you know their white supremacy and domestic you know terrorist ideology into their workplace with them um also another thing with mental health is just physical health and well-being and and having a safe place to be um and that has a lot to do with sanitation providing of the hand washing stations especially during covid providing another winter shelter and long-term shelters and also writing the bathrooms which were previously provided and taken away um it seems like it's follows this very strategic format where there's these sweeps or like these really violent acts against our houseless communities where it goes from like the east Santa Rosa down south and um it just keeps going in a cycle where it goes east to south east to south in a cycle and also follows a kind of like a news cycle as well where it's kind of like oh we're allowing them to stay here we're extending the time or or we put in a toilet and then as soon as you get a little bit of public support and then you take it back and then you take away the toilets you take away the hand washing stations you send in the police you send in the bulldozer and the last point I want to make is also a lot of the people who are there to clean up after when the encampments are destroyed and looted are people who are also houseless they're there because they have repeated accounts of violations for quality of living ordinance violations so that's something to consider as well you're making them clean up after the violence thank you thank you Michael followed by Sarah hi so I want to echo the comments made earlier um particularly you know making sure that this program doesn't fall under the police budget I don't see any reason why it should fall under SRPD um and I'm worried that that police would have the ability to you know control that budget and allocate that money and I don't think that they should have that ability um I also question the fact that um the catholic charities is the only um entity that's in contract here and they're the real diversity of contracts my opinion honestly I I wish that more homeless people who are houseless in this community um were in these calls or were able to attend these calls um to give their own perspective but having worked at last chance village and other encampments something I constantly have seen was distressed toward catholic charities so to make this program as effective as possible I think um there that should be something you know under consideration and it's you know making sure that police aren't responding to mental health calls is important because the um the levels of violence that we've seen by police again that was completely you know unjustified towards people with um mental health disabilities is egregious and it's not you know it's not just the police it's also the people who call the police I've been in so many situations where I you know I've been with a group of people and I've seen someone they see someone acting what they think is erratically on the street and if they just call the police and they're just like this is 1-800 make this person disappear um and so I think it's really important that those calls are not you know routed to that and that there's that there isn't this this idea that Santa Rosa police should be making these people disappear um there should be real solutions embedded in this what I remember call from the you know the previous Santa Rosa auditor was this idea that morale um among the Santa Rosa police was low because of they were forced to respond to all these these homeless calls and you know what are they're gonna what are they supposed to do are they supposed to make these people disappear um are they supposed to enforce these quality of life violations um I think it all kind of goes hand in hand and so I I like I really appreciate this program is happening I hope that we can get some clarification on the budgeting and I hope that there's a diverse more of a diversity of contracts and I will yield the rest of my time thank you Sarah followed by Keith yes hello my name is sarah casmith they them pronouns um I agree with just so much of what's been said already and I don't know that I have too much to add um but I do want to note that there is um just like earlier uh Ms Ms. Tejas was saying that um the the program had reached out to community members that aren't as able to navigate spaces like this and I just want to like normally that's about you I deeply appreciate uh but I just want to kind of pause and reflect on how many of the voices that you've been hearing from the public uh today and recently were were voices that were present a year ago um so just to note that these are folks that uh didn't navigate spaces like this and have learned to do so and so I just want to make sure that that these are also voices that are incredibly important because they've made the effort to do that and that's just uh that's something that they can't be be left out because as we need to continue to reach out to community that that isn't able to reach the space when they do that's also uh folks that need to be listened to um and and you're hearing over and over again from people saying that um that they don't trust police that they don't um you know that this is uh they don't trust catheterities and I keep hearing that we need to repair the relationship and restore trust and so there's kind of that those two things don't um you know they don't come together in in some kind of middle ground and suddenly become a fix to the problem we have to actually look into why people don't trust the police um and start investigating that and this is one of those programs that that can lead us to that place of you know starting to uh address some of the underlying problems um but as folks have said uh you know Sonoma County Access Highness is a really great program to or organization to look to uh that that works with the homeless community that knows that has relationships there and has that level of trust has um that in place uh and I know y'all know them I know SRPD does um and yeah uh it's great that y'all are working with Kahootz they're absolutely the the gold standard for this kind of work um but also just remember that that's that's a program that started 32 years ago and so just because it is embedded within the police there that started under very different circumstances than what we have right now so what we do to distance that program from the police so that it can gain the trust of the community is really important I really don't think that it should be housed under the police I can see some like logistics uh dispatch reasons for that but but it's more critical to get the trust of the community when you're doing something like this thank you for your time so we're going to take um Keith, Colin, Tavi, and Alan and then we're going to take a brief break for um uh we've been going since one we're going to take a five minute bathroom break and uh change over break as well all right sounds good can you hear me can indeed well I thought it was Keith can you hear me are you Keith yeah great go for it I'm still Keith thank you I feel like I'm living on a different planet please let me know if I cut out um it's so discouraging when I read in the paper that some malfeasance has been uncovered in the center of police department because I truly believe it's the best police agency we have in the county now not saying it doesn't need improvement but that article that hit last summer about withholding evidence and the city having to settle for some two hundred thousand dollars because the department withheld evidence as recently as 2019 I just think you guys you know public safety has got to get serious about improving the reputation but the real reason for my comment is this this is at the far end of my son's suicide last spring 2019 when an officer refused to call in the MST and he was dead within 24 hours I complained to the police and the police did their investigation and it turned out of course with all police investigations to my experience the police department investigating themselves always comes up with a reason that they didn't do anything wrong all right so I'm used to that but my hope with this cahoots program is that no other parent has to go through what I have gone through trying to get help from my son uh and being refused and and him ending up taking his own life the next I'm truly supportive of this direction the police department is going and I hope no other parent has to suffer what I and many parents of uh addicted or mentally disturbed children have and uh and then up losing them to suicide which is of course a permanent solution to a temporary problem thank you thank you call on followed by to be hi can you hear me hi my name is Colin uh I want to start by surveying um mr Reinhardt I'm so sorry for your loss like you deserve better and it sounds like your son deserved better as well and I'm sorry that the police department did not come through for you um what I wanted to say about cahoots I think it's a great program uh I think it's it's an excellent first step towards where we want to be heading um I think once we see that other agencies can start taking over some of these calls from the police department we'll only find more and more creative solutions to say well how much do we really need the police department to do and we can work on pairing it down to their essential functions um maybe diverting in time and in the future more things away from them as well and just entrusting the community to keep the community safe um I do want to add and I believe that this is already part of the cahoots program uh is just making sure that calls uh for overdosing addicts um addicts in mental health crises uh would also hopefully be going through the cahoots dispatch uh system um on top of mental health crises and how something that uh that greatly impacts both our community and just everyone in general a lot of the times the three of them are intersecting you'll have people with mental health issues who are addicted to drugs or people who are houseless with mental health issues or people with all three and uh just understanding the intersection of those and that police are not the correct respondents to any of those three situations um would be excellent I also do have some similar concerns to other folks about it going under the traditional emergency response uh like dispatch system radcom um I would hope that maybe it can set up its own uh dispatch program but I understand that that's a lot of logistical issues and then what do you do with people who are calling 911 and then transferring them through so I understand that that's a much more complicated subject than we probably have time for today but and then that thanks thank you to be um followed by Alan again can you hear me um again um sorry for your loss sir and this is a consistent and a chronic issue we have here in Sonoma County um I do support the hoots I do think that we need to modify it to fit our community it is it was the right floor pan in in the beginning but it does not fit the floor fan of our community and how we change that is that we need a mediated listening session with our unsheltered and also those who have suffered from law enforcement dealing with mental illness um on march 12 2007 this is from an article in the bohemian in 2009 Jeremiah's parents knew that they're 127 pound son the product of a black father and white mother was having an episode of mental decompensation they had tried to find mental health health help for him the night before to no availability I'm not going to read all of this but they called the fire department which routed it to the police department which routed the call to the sheriff's department which officers shot their son 11 times and I'm not going to go in gross detail but that was in 2007 in 2019 Nino Nino Bosco's mother called the police to request a welfare check since he was in the car in front of his house having a manic episode and I'm not going to go into detail out of respect for the family but this is a chronic issue in our community the fact that we don't have sustainable help for mental disorder or drug addiction in our community is just creating the domino effect of disparities and we need we need to take that in mind we need to take communication and hold it close to us we can't just take a hoop then and pretend that that's going to make everything better we need to modify it we need to adjust it to our community's needs and this is with the input of the unsheltered and I say mediated because we want Sonoma act Sonoma acts of kindness to a group that has shown consistency and rapport with the houseless to mediate the conversation because at this point there is a lack of trust and we we really need to look at our patterns and we need to end them so although this is a great effort we are still far behind so we need to do better thank you um our last public comment prior to our break will be on hi everybody thank you um and uh so I'd like to echo the sentiments that I've heard from everyone about uh it's being the right way to go and um moving as many services away uh from being done by the police department is exactly what we want to be doing and also looking at other groups aside from Catholic charities because whoever is performing the service needs to be trusted in the community and Catholic charities is not um one thing that I would like to recommend is that um we pay the employees who will be doing this valuable work at least if not vastly more than we pay our police officers um now these are just rough estimate numbers but roughly it costs um about five thousand dollars and six to eight months of training to become police officer to go through the academy and to become a social worker it uh takes four years and uh around forty thousand dollars at the low end so it costs a lot more uh to do that and so we need to be paying these people uh you know what they're worth um and I'd also like to request that that come out of the police department's budget and I really wish my time thank you thank you very much uh we're going to take a very brief five minute break um and return thank you interpreter charles can you please um turn on your screen and confirm that you're on the spanish channel interpreter charles can you please um give a thumbs up and uh and check your mic please all right welcome back uh madam clerk would you please call the roll do we need another minute i'm ready to take roll call chair i apologize councilmember schwethelm here vice mayor rogers president councilmember fleming president thank you um do we need a interpreter update we've checked that the interpreter is on and I can make the announcement again if you like only if it's necessary thank you we're good okay great um so uh we had a couple of attendees wanting to make public comment thank you for your patience uh now would be the time to raise your hand um if you have anything that you would like to add to our conversation on the mental health model okay seeing none um do we have any prerecorded our voicemail public comment we had no voicemail public comment on um on this item okay thank you um I will now close public comment and bring this item back to the subcommittee for your questions councilmember schwethelm thank you madam chair um yeah most of these are for captain cregan questions that came up um so i'll just go in order not necessarily ordered by the ones that i wrote down um so what will the police department's role be in this it's my understanding um because the police department controls the 911 system they would be coming into 911 but could you explain what level of involvement the police department would have in this model yes so it's a great question and so our hope is to really to have very little police involvement in this so there won't be police officers assigned with the team they won't be patrolling with them and the only time that they'll be going to calls is when the cahoots team they can't it doesn't meet their criteria and some of the key criterias are calls with violence or weapons so there'll be many calls though following the Eugene model where an officer responds to the scene the scene is stabilized and similar to the mobile support team then cahoots will come in and provide their advanced level of service but as many of the calls as we can we'll send just the cahoots team to them there won't be uh uh the only contact will be a police dispatcher will receive the call will evaluate it if it meets the criteria will dispatch that team and that team will respond and there'll be no uh marked or uniform police presence on the scene okay thank you then i also heard some questions about uh chain of command in budget locations can you explain and i know this you know you're talking about a pilot program what have been the early discussions about those two items well the budget discussions will be a council decision that will go will go for the budget review and set the city priorities and then ultimately decide where this uh funding comes from and where it sits with is the easiest answer on that okay and then could you also talk about i i know you briefly mentioned it but we heard a lot of comments about catholic charities can you talk about um why they have been a player in this in these discussions certainly and we had a lot of discussions and some of this comes from the advice of looking with our cahoots model and some of their advice is working with an established nonprofit is going to be able to get us off the ground and some of the things is catholic charities has established relationships with the city they're currently a contracted service provider for us from the city of santa rosa they have staff in place with the local knowledge uh in our homeless community they have a lot of established partnerships with our homeless uh groups and services here in our city and throughout the county uh catholic charities in in our talks with them is also willing to provide quite a bit of in-kind services meaning using some of their establish of some of their administrative staff and at no cost us as is part of their existing program so it really helps reduce the cost for our taxpayers and to our city's general fund and one of the keys for us of working with cahoots is and the strong community feedback that we got that this is uh an immediate need for our community and by using these established nonprofits like catholic charities and buckaloo it helps us get this pilot program off the ground and running as quickly as possible we had a strong desire desire to do it with the new fiscal year coming up in july of 2021 and this is going to help us to be able to provide this critical service to our community as quickly as possible and again this is a one-year pilot that we're starting with and we'll continue to evaluate as a city with our city leaders and council uh to what meets the needs of our community okay and then the the last question that i heard um well there's a lot of questions but about what type of calls get diverting and i'm making the assumption that's part of the role that cahoots would be playing so if you get elaborating on that and then also the whole aspect of if it's going through the 911 center or redcomb what what type of training for those dispatchers would be taking place yeah so the the primary calls are going to are obviously those in mental health crisis with the exception of with weapons involved or violence involved but also we talked about with intoxicated subjects with though with drug overdoses so that's that's a core part of their calls but they're also assisting with this public services with and our team is going to have that strong homeless emphasis of providing services doing welfare checks going out to some of our larger encampments going out to just a homeless individual in crisis on a downtown street or anywhere in our city doing and then again a lot of those upstream approaches of taking people who are in crisis who they've been working with and this team will quickly start to build strong relationships with some of the vulnerable members of our population here in the city and they'll start being able to say let me take you to the doctor's appointment let me take you to get your meds and things like that so that's going to be some of the core calls now our dispatchers are certainly going to have a training aspect and for those they'll initially come into our 911 system if it's a medical call that's what goes to redcom so those are separate and distinct dispatch centers and ultimately the Santa Rosa police department dispatch center will dispatch directly to cahoots and we'll work with training it'll certainly add staff responsibilities upon our dispatch center but we're working with our technical services manager for them to be able to incorporate that training and build it into the capacity of the team that we have but also for us we'll evaluate over this first year what is the impacts on our dispatch center and are we do we have the capacity to handle that and that'll be part of the things that we're evaluating as a city great thank you nice mayor okay hi um so i have a a couple of questions going based on um the dispatchers first we heard last night that we're already short on dispatchers um so these would be separate dispatchers for the cahoots program or all the dispatchers will be trained in how to respond incorporating the cahoots program yeah so it will not be separate dispatchers it'll be part of the job responsibilities of our current dispatcher but it will add to their workload certainly but to be clear it's going to be them just diverting the calls so we may get some additional calls that we have families that grow trust with this team who wouldn't have normally called the police department so i actually hope we see an increased calls with those families reaching out to us and using this service that we have but most of the work will be just instead of sending it to a uniform police officer they'll be diverting it to this other team and it won't be significant more work on that team it'll be just using a different radio channel basically and dispatching it to the cahoots team okay and i i realize that the the easiest and the fastest way i'll say to get this program implemented um we has been said that catholic charities is the you know they're established here but i i think that we do need to listen uh to the community and the part of having this program is to have people uh that are coming out that the community trusts and wants to work with and if that is not the case then i think it kind of is working against us in what we actually want the the program to do so i just hope that we are hearing the community speak and i would have to say this would not be the first time that i heard this um and working in mental health so i just hope that uh we're listening um in addition to i hope that the staff uh for the cahoots program is a diverse staff uh and staff that uh has different languages um that they speak only to make it easier especially in the bi-pop community dealing with mental health is not an easy thing to ask for assistance um so just in that way making it easier it's easier to to deal with people that look like you that can relate to you um a little better and will the grant um funding be able to assist with uh the 911 dispatchers in other areas besides training the current grant that we applied for the samsa grant would is is training focused and would provide some equipment that we can do but that's where we're going to be actively looking that's a big part of our plan is actively looking for other state and federal grants working with some of the city resources that we have to be able to explore that and that's going to be a key part of that for us to establish the funding and to reduce the impact to our general fund and to our community okay and uh my last question is having worked uh in mental health for a while what direct contact will the team have if they if things change and I know that things can change fairly quickly um so will they have radios or like what would be the direct contact that they would have for backup to ensure everyone's safety that is on a scene that does not have law enforcement present absolutely that's a key concern so the first stage will be us evaluating the calls that they go to and then they won't be in uniform like in a police uniform they'll have probably like a polo shirt or something with with the cahoots name or the name that we choose for our local team here but they will have a police radio so they'll have they'll have immediate mobile way to communicate with our teams and uh and be able to call for resources and then an officer could be dispatched to provide those services and um in speaking with the cahoots team they've done a tremendous job for the thousands of calls of service that they go to they've had relatively minor incidents that I've heard with staff but it's certainly a concern and it's always going to be about evaluating the calls they go to and then building that trust between the police department and that team that they work uh collaboratively to provide that service to our community perfect thank you so much absolutely thank you um my uh questions I think largely will be answered as we start to roll this out but one is um if in working with a non-profit partner would this be sent out for a competitive bid and that's something we so to be clear we haven't entered into a contract with any non-profit so the feedback that we're receiving from working with cahoots and and as we explore this as that an rfp process will certainly slow this down and won't make it realistic for us to start a program this summer so the the current uh model but we're looking for feedback is that we roll out this prop the pilot with the nonprofits we've identified we do this pilot year we continue to evaluate what meets the needs of our city what the best nonprofits are and that'll be certainly something that we could explore in that year okay um and so to start with the cost center would come out of the police budget and that's something that we could evaluate after the pilot period that'll be a council decision as you guys set your priority and I think the set you guys are processing that is going to be of me being able to come and talk about the grant opportunities and the private funding and as we still establish that and then council will be able to see what is the total cost of what this program the pilot program is going to take and then we can make citywide council decisions about where that's going to come from it would also be helpful um during the pilot period to track the reduction in um you know there's going to be some ways that it's going to require more coordination with officers um as you know highlighted by the vice mayor's last question around police backup but there will be some ways that it's a reduction in in stresses and in calls for service um and then there will be more in terms of dispatch complexity so you know it's it's going to be a complicated picture and I hope that we're able to capture that completely so that we assign the funding um to reflect the needs therein um that's all of my questions um uh so um we'll go straight into comments and the comment that I wanted to make which was um around the um the rfp thing is that you know a year and a half ago we brought up um whether or not we should send catholic charities or ask for an additional rfp because catholic charities had been re-upped so many times um without having a competitive bid process and that this um there's not a slam on catholic charities they they do some uh really you know intense work for the city but that it's just not good governance to continue to re-up contracts it doesn't invite other players to the table and it doesn't um allow for the kind of accountability that that we would like or that I would like to see in government so um you know while I understand that there's a push and a pull here um I do hope that that we have a very transparent process and that we don't just continue to re-up contracts and expand them without um adding I think we have a responsibility regardless of you know they might be the best the best um nonprofit in the world but we have a responsibility in government to inspect our contracts and scrutinize them so you know I'm not for just expanding that without a careful and critical eye and then um the other thing is that you know I know it will be council decision but I'm I'm hopeful that that these um that as the hopefully the the pressures on the police department will come down and therefore funding levels um to make to do what your core services are will not be as high and that this can come out of the police budget if that's uh what's appropriate but I think that we'll need more time to know um how that's going to look so those are my comments for now and I see that the vice mayor has her hand up I forgot to put my hand down but just again uh thank you so much I'm really excited to see see where this goes thank you uh councilmember schwedhelm your comments please thank you um I I am very supportive of this program and I like the direction we're going I totally hear the rfp process but quite frankly what I've seen was some rfp process it um for something of this urgent nature um I like the direction we're going with the pilot program with catholic charities because I also know um a catholic charities is populating our host team so they're working with this population um and they're also bringing their own additional money and resources to the table so I'm more comfortable with as you've been mentioning captain cregan a six month or 12 month pilot program and then absolutely I think we go out to rfp because quite frankly even um our other partners with buckloo there may be other resources out there and by that time you know I'm hoping maybe even there's some county resources and other jurisdiction resources so I think the best for our citizens because that's the big thing here for santa rosa this is not about what's going to make it easier on the police department or even the hospitals but it's what's the best service delivery for those people of our community who are most vulnerable and that's what I don't think I don't want to delay this until january of 2022 and if this is the route that we're going I think it's very strategic and I I heard you say that your early consultation with gahoots um subject matter experts are saying that it's a good model that we're going for so I would like you to continue and I'm supportive you continue it on the path that we've already begun so thank you all right uh thank you very much everybody um I think that we have exhausted this topic for today uh so moving on to school resource officer update um and so I'll be turning this over to chief Navarro thank you chair Fleming uh vice mayor rogers and uh councilmember schwedhelm a few months ago the committee asked for ongoing updates regarding our school resource officer program um I believe there's a slide um that should be coming up slide five there you go so um just a quick update on the where where we've been uh the school resource officer program uh was uh in effect and we had a sergeant and five school resource officers uh we had a partnership with the center of the city school district and had an officer assigned to each of the high schools and their feeder middle school and then we also had a um uh we had we had a uh a relationship with the sanders or the rosin school district and some of the other smaller school districts working with them we did a lot of education with staff and students on a variety of topics and crisis issues they responded to uh they respond to emergency situations such as a shooting which occurred in 20 october 2019 uh in front of one of the one of our local schools uh they've um they've worked on uh teaching and mentoring and and talking about alcohol abuse drug awareness gangs um discussing peer pressure self-esteem and we uh they were they took the lead in our great program which was a life skills program uh working with fifth grade students in several of the school districts uh that was a that was a program that we were in partnership with several different schools where they asked us to come in and build better relationships with our with our youth they've also in the past led our youth community police experience um and uh that was that's a um it's a program where we bring juniors and seniors and uh uh bring them in to have them have them learn more about public safety and uh the different areas within our department uh they've also engaged in local nonprofits mentoring youth and um being involved in community listening sessions recently uh they've collaborated collaborated a lot with our other city departments and specifically with the violence prevention program over the years um they uh they're they're involved in uh some of the um the restorative circles uh that occur uh on campus in the past and uh some of the other awareness that they've done is drugs and vaping uh they they've addressed school safety uh both on and off campus and uh one of the things that uh some of the some of the other uh key things that they brought forward was specific training on uh active shooters for our staff and the and the teachers um and then also addressing um again uh significant incidents that occur on campus they were also very very instrumental in some of our recent emergencies so they were part of the direct response to the glass fire and uh in the in the days afterwards and also dealing with the COVID over the last year uh they were um they were instrumental in dealing with protocols and managing these incidents as part of the incident management team uh currently there's no uh no no campus or no no school on campus at this time uh due to COVID-19 and we do not have an active MOU the next slide please so uh this is our current status again we don't have SROs on campus at this time uh we have um we had a uh or the Santa Rosa City Schools District Board they set up an ad hoc committee which meant for about 15 weeks to talk about uh current issues related around the SRO program uh we had three employees the sergeant and two officers who were part of that ad hoc committee including um and it also included uh uh council member Fleming uh the uh it ran again for several weeks there was uh uh there was some very uh good discussion going back and forth included community comment um however there was no vote um based on the recommendation uh by that ad hoc committee uh and by which was to continue uh the program with some changes and so uh as we are have been awaiting uh you know the uh decision by the schools we've also have had some significant staffing issues uh as as you are aware of and um so we've had to make some adjustments for uh this particular um for 2021 uh so uh to address the uh the staffing issues um some of the things that we did uh we had to uh reassign our sergeant back to patrol uh however that sergeant continues to liaise on with our local school districts for any questions or any issues that come up and uh working with them to direct uh calls for service back to our uh beat officers uh we are uh we've assigned uh three of the officers of the SRO officers back to patrol to assist with our staffing shortages uh the uh again calls for service are are are directed back to our beats uh two officer positions were frozen uh based uh because they were measure O positions and uh they uh we we have seen a revenue shortfall within measure O so to meet that uh meet that need and to meet that budget revenue we had to freeze two positions there uh we are in ongoing conversations with the Santa Rosa City Schools District um and also uh the Rosen School District on how do we how we continue to partner in the future uh there are some things that we are going to continue to have to work out uh number one uh we continue to have staffing staffing issues and so uh where our priorities are in patrol right now uh we are going to need to uh look at an MOU that uh to sign with the school uh any school district that we work with um and uh you know those are going to continue to to be part of strengthening the learning environment for the students and uh how to support and transform safety on campus uh again we've I've had uh I've had conversations with the superintendent we're both in agreement on on the need to continue to move forward uh our our staff we are um we are willing and committed to continue those conversations and um uh be in dialogue with them to work on um how to better uh provide safety for students and uh staff uh so that is a quick uh overview of where we are um I don't know I'm happy to answer any questions that you might have again uh there there is a uh a component of this that is outside of our control uh with the centers of city schools district um having to make their own decisions thank you chief um I'll open it up to the um the subcommittee for questions vice mayor mr schwadholm any questions seeing none um I will now open public comment um and I want to let um the public and staff know that we have to adjourn this meeting um or um for uh staffing reasons at 5 25 p.m so if we don't get to you um that is because um of of things that are beyond our control and we will resume this meeting uh when when we get another time and we'll put make that sure that's public so we'll start with lee followed by evan hi this is lee i'm calling again um uh a couple things I just want to again state um as a member of the community I again am in strong favor of um the the leadership of this community funding programs like cahoots um as as far as the schools I think that they're um again we have another issue here of police are absolutely not capable of distinguishing uh between a person who's having a mental illness crisis at a school um versus somebody who's just not obeying orders and I think that puts the most vulnerable kids in the most amount of danger and those kids um need to be protected with um with mental health resources um and uh that's not an appropriate place for um trying to trying to have a good relationship with the community kind of circles back to the human rights violations report and making sure those things are taken care of in the community first and foremost um again I'm totally um in favor of funding programs that will increase salaries for social workers who will deal with very that already deal with issues that are huge and beyond the scope of what law enforcement is um usually um educated to be able to deal with it takes a lot longer it takes years of education to understand how to the nuances of mental health issues and especially in the school setting um I'm a former teacher I have a mental health issues um I am very concerned for lots of reasons in the in the community that that we it would it would serve us all to have funding be for people who are better educated to take care of the situations that are happening and even further in increasing funding for communities so that these issues aren't even in the streets in the first place so I yield the rest of my time thank you again for having these meetings thank you Evan followed by Merlin um thank you for taking my comment I'm sure by getting tired of my voice um this is a conversation that's really about best practices I work for an organization uh as an independent contractor that's locally based called Community Matters that is one of the foremost if not the foremost um campus safety and climate safety you know on on campus experts in the country if not the world I think both the city and senator's police department are familiar with them the history of SROs is being completely overlooked in this discussion SROs being standardized is not for the reasons that chief Tavaro um laid out which were lots of good things that they can add but those are not unique services that they offer outside of shootings um the standardization of SROs was out of response to mass school shootings and to date um zero mass school shootings we're having a hard time can you hear me hello yeah yeah yes okay the standardization of SROs was a response to mass school shootings that's why they were put there not for the things to do that chief Navarro laid out that that's a fact of history that's not a any type of interpretation they have yet to stop a single mass shooting even when there is an SRO not to say that they couldn't be a deterrent for them happening that's a different discussion however the data is empirical about what has happened with the increase of SROs which is a massive increase of arrests and suspensions over very small and petty things disproportionately affecting BIPOC and low-income students so for all the things that it's not a slight tool an officer for the good things that they do I personally know officer Crosby consider him to be one of the most outstanding and incredible members of this community that's not the point the defensiveness you get from people defending SROs it's about best practices and what the initial purpose was at all and for the cost of one officer you could fund the entire city to have a program that like community matters offers that is not it's in a lot of schools it's not in every single school so do you want to prevent these things from happening and do you want to actually increase school safety with actual data evidence and proof or do you want to do something that just seems like a logical line that doesn't have a lot of evidence to back it about SROs increasing school safety and when there are really dramatic things like shootings we already have a police department that's active on their normal beats to respond no SRO has ever stopped a mass shooting and that's why they were there in the first place and then ironically in the city of Santa Rosa you have access to an organization that is one of the leaders if not the leaders in school safety that can be funded for the cost of just one of these officers city-wide it is like mind-boggling we'd even be having this discussion about a use of funds in SRO so thank you very much you'll the rest of my time thank you Merlin followed by Keith yeah can you hear me yes schools have done the right thing and kicked cops off of campus they're keeping these violent criminals away from our children that is absolutely the right thing to do and look at these creeps trying to insert themselves back into the lives of our children that should concern everyone I am so pleased to hear that the police are having staffing difficulties and staffing shortages that is exactly what we need continue that trend absolutely a pause do more of that defund them take away their staff take away the money that they pay their staff with take those resource officers that were on campus and instead of inserting them back into the communities around the schools get rid of them the school said we don't need them we don't listen to the schools they know what's up keep these violent criminals away from children and away from the rest of us we don't need their violence we don't need their guns we don't need their abuse nobody needs that children don't need that people of color don't need that other marginalized groups don't need that none of us need that thank you mark followed by this hello can you hear me yep yep hi I was a member of the SRO ad hoc committee that met this past summer I wish to offer my support for continuing the SRO program with some modifications at santa rosa city schools this support was also offered by 24 of the 27 people by vote at the conclusion of our ad hoc meetings as noted in the december 16th letter from president fawn this committee was comprised of what appeared to be a majority of people of color yet race and ethnicity were not part of the selection process it was particularly disappointing to not see support and involvement by the city council on this important committee since Victoria Fleming was listed as a member yet chose not to attend any of the meetings also noted in president fawn's letter was that eight percent of the student surveys stated that they had some level of dissatisfaction with the SRO program students of color make up almost 70 percent of the middle and high school student demographic so it's only logical this 60 percent of this eight percent were students of color more importantly if looking through an equity lens to see which students would be harmed most by a decision the 40 percent of students who felt safer with SROs on campus would now feel unsafe and be harmed most i'll ask you the same question i asked the school board what is the educational and emotional process that you are going to undertake to support the large majority of our students as well as the admin and staff personnel who are going to be traumatized because they will no longer feel safe on their campuses if SROs are removed in the school board's special meeting on november 9th several directors mentioned the need for SRPD to acknowledge and apologize for the shootings of Andy Lopez and Jeremiah Chase before they could move forward with any kind of support for the SRO program SRPD was not involved in these tragic shootings it was the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department this would be like asking the Santa Rosa City School District to apologize for an incident that occurred in the Healdsburg district they are different organizations i truly hope that the SRPD will be able to continue providing the viable SRO program at no cost to the Santa Rosa City Schools the city and school board should work together to develop a new memorandum of understanding that is acceptable to both parties the SRO program is an excellent opportunity for young students to hope to build relationships and bridges with police officers in our community in order to alleviate any possible fears that may exist thank you thank you Keith followed by Bibbs hello can you hear me yes okay so this is the other end of my sad tale and i want to thank Evan and other folks for their time comments about man and late son Liam Liam was put into the system by a Santa Rosa Resource Officer in 2009 under no tolerance and that was because of the school district at the time had no tolerance and i actually went around town objecting to why were SROs even in school i didn't know there were cops on campus when i put my kid back into mainstream school so to correct the point of order now it may have been standardized what Evan was saying however we put cops in schools in 1994 five years before Columbine and the reason was an increase in gang activity stemming from what was going on in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict so the whole reason that we have SROs in Santa Rosa in my opinion was racist in nature going after people of color and trying to find out which family members were in gangs and that is what i believe is the inception of our SRO program and frankly it's shameful secondly when my son who was only 15 was detained by a detective for over four hours and admitted to all kinds of things because he didn't nobody called me nobody called an apparent fortunately that can't happen anymore to a student who's under 16 but you cannot trust the police department to do the right thing uh in cases like this they get they get a a kid in a room and they start promising the kid as you know it's legal for an officer to lie to a subject in order to gain information that's been established in court already um and that's exactly what happened to Liam and i'm not saying he didn't do bad things and i'm not saying that he was a perfect kid because he was far from that you know but he was certainly loved um i don't think a cop should be allowed to talk to anybody under 18 without parental permission and i certainly don't think that we need the SROs on campus and i believe that it's mainly driven by the teachers and the parents and regarding Mark's earlier comment i don't think kids are afraid to be in school and i'll think they're gonna be afraid to be in school you know we were never afraid to be in school before there were cops on campus and we put cops on campus a full five years before Columbine so that that argument is out the window anyway i appreciate this committee thank you for letting me speak and uh i'll go now thank you babes followed by julia all right can you hear me yes all right um i remember being a child uh in the early 90s and early 2000s and remembering how much there was police propaganda just being pushed at me all the time and everyone was telling me that cops were heroes and that they are here to protect us and then i grew up and learned that that was actually not the truth and that they're really only here to support the wealthy rich class and cis people so well cis white people so that's the thing is that i don't agree with having an SRO program at all because what i was told as a kid was a lie and i can imagine i can imagine the cops trying to make themselves look good to these children say hey this is a good this is a good vocation you should do that you can use it to protect your community when in reality it's just another facet of the white supremacist system that we operate under so yeah the fact you're trying to maintain this program even though the whole school board was against it that's really suspect and frankly very disrespectful so if you're really trying to connect their community maybe just leave them be and leave the handling of other people to other people it's great to hear that the cops are losing more positions and funding because frankly we need more of this money for others other services for other people we need like we need more money for the kahoots program we need more money for iolero to also mean to we need it to be used properly or regenerative practices we can't keep operating under the same paradigm if you put if you keep putting SROs in schools you're just going to tell the people that you're not listening to them and you're not taking them seriously so really think on that and again the school board was not down so i don't know what more you need to back off navarro but you should probably back off i yield my time thank you Julia followed by colin julia are you with us okay uh because we're tied on time well we're going to come back to you uh colin hey can you hear me hi uh let's go on again i'll i'll keep it quick since you're short on time um just a small kind of fact-checky kind of thing uh indicating that the school board has not voted yet on we're moving SROs or not while technically true at the last meeting that the school board had regarding the question of SROs they did this kind of straw poll vote at the end of course non-binding so we don't know what their official vote is going to be yet but out of the eight members present seven of them indicated that they would support moving forward with removing SROs from campuses uh citing that they are already off campuses currently because of the pandemic and it's a lot easier to just say that they shouldn't come back as opposed to having to bring them all the way back onto campus and then turn around and tell them that they have to leave so a little disingenuous to say that they haven't voted on it yet you're writing on a technicality there that's they have essentially said that they want to move ahead with doing that and it'll be great to see this subcommittee and the council in general support the school board in their decision thanks thank you cox followed by Natalie just to echo what everyone else has said just to listen to the school board the school board is being informed by the community and if I agree if Navarra of you were to keep pushing this program onto the community you know if you say that you want to support the community and build trust this is how you do it is by listening to them I believe that having resource officers in schools in general is socializing conditioning and normalizing our children to over policing especially to black indigenous and people of color communities they are being conditioned to obey and comply with officers even when uh those officers are not trained as behavioral health technicians in cases of mental health and autism and other behavioral and learning developmental stages that they're not aware of and they're not going to be trained on and assuming on how to interact with those type of youth and also it's again it goes back to just like why we're not sending out police on mental health calls it's just our students don't need police officers they already have principals and deans and teachers who do that kind of the redirections and what I've learned from working as a child care counselor is that what's most supportive to youth is having therapists and counselors and therapeutic approaches and restorative justice rather than a police and I agree with that like the school board's decision to move away from that and I agree with them because what we really need is more mental health services thank you thank you Natalie followed by Alan hi can you hear me all right awesome um good evening I don't have anything new or revolutionary to say but I do want to add my voice to the chorus of comments tonight as a former teacher myself and a current parent in Santa Rosa City Schools um I just want to say this issue is very important to me I don't see any place for police on our school campuses um I said that to the Santa Rosa City School Board and I'll continue to make my voice heard there but as Evan mentioned earlier there is no evidence to support that um police police officers make our schools any safer and as Cox just said what we really need is more therapists and counselors and those sorts of services available to our students um that it was brought up at the school board that this is a program that's free to the school board but it's not free to our community and as a taxpayer in Santa Rosa it is expensive and I would much rather see those that funding go towards other programs and definitely like the concludes program things like that I'd rather see instead of officers on school I'd much rather see that money going towards um these outreach people that are going to be helping the community at risk thank you so much for you all the rest of my time thank you Alan followed by Chelsea hi everyone Alan from Santa Rosa um I'm calling for a few reasons uh one because um um Chief Navarro was indicating that they're you know not able to have the staffing now and they need more staffing in order to have resource offices and schools um I mean that that seems like an easy solution don't have them but I think the reason that he wants to have them is because that's another area of recruitment to try and get more staffing for him through um what a lot of people call propaganda where uh it's ingrained in society that police are the solution for way more things than they can actually solve or actually should be trying to solve so I think that that's really why that's trying to happen and I don't believe that police officers have any place in schools whatsoever and then to another caller who um mentioned that since it was the sheriff's department that murdered Andy Lopez that the Santa Rosa police department uh shouldn't have to apologize for that um I mean this whole issue we're talking about having police officers around children and a law enforcement officer in our community killed a child I don't think that child's parents cares if it was the Santa Rosa police department or the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department um if the Santa Rosa police department isn't very strongly condemning bad actions of their their peers uh then they're complicit in those actions uh and that goes for their peers everywhere but especially for those here local in the community uh thank you I yield maytime thank you Elsie followed by toby hi there um I just uh want to echo what other people are saying I also speak directly to one of the previous callers who was talking about the ad hoc committee that um uh sort of voted and took surveys around whether they were okay with the SRO program it was discussed at length in the board meeting and already they've been heard from on multiple levels I just want to say that just because the majority of people are okay with something doesn't mean it's actually okay just sometimes the right thing to do the anti-racist thing to do does involve looking at a small percent of people a minority of people and people in minority communities and listening to what they are saying about what they need and whether they feel safe as opposed to telling them that it is okay even though they feel unsafe I don't believe it's a lack of understanding respect or contact with police at a young age that makes kids of color feel unsafe around cops I believe that it's because of their lived experiences personally and their parents and their peers and the talk that they get that contributes to um that feeling and the very real harm and consequences that come from having that contact known as the school to prison pipeline so uh we can start always by just listening to the communities that are really affected and uh following um what they're asking for thanks thank you to be hey y'all can you hear me again okay so I just want to touch on the school to prison pipeline um you know let's just define that a little bit and it's you know taking young adults from disadvantaged backgrounds to become incarcerated because of increasingly harsh school and municipal policies so let's just start with that and listen to that a little bit along with what Evan and everybody is saying I'm going to reiterate if you go on srcity.org you're going to get a list of duties and responsibilities of these SRO officers and a few of them is basically taking the role of teachers educating both staff and students on various topics including constitutional law drug awareness gangs juvenile law and court procedures resources for hard to control and out of control kids there we go right there it goes reiterate why we need cahoots uh self-esteem and peer pressure I don't know if um school resource officers are necessarily great for self-esteem or peer pressure um teen alcohol use I don't think they're great for that either if anything having an officer's presence in lower income neighborhoods would probably drive me at 16 to drink um my thing is that there is literally no communication with parents and where is it that the parents get involved these are minors we're talking about with influences from law officers on campus this is intimidation and if we look at the west side versus the east side you don't see this presence prevalent in any of the schools that are mainly white so that shows me that it is a form of oppression it is a form of intimidation which shows that there is white supremacy prevalent in our law enforcement we need it we need to talk about that we really really need to talk about that um you know we're not creating upstanding citizens we're you're you're not helping our people if you're not listening to our people and this is BIPOC people this is people on the west side we need resources you're called school resource officers but yet there's a lack of resources to provide substantial help for parents and as a single mother as a woman of color and a daughter of a refugee to the fact that it took them so long to even put a public library in roseland is egregious resources for parents to keep their kids out of trouble we need to think about where we put our resources in this community and with that said thank you um do we um have any voicemail public comment yes hi my name is elizabeth do that was that the conclusion of voicemail public comment um you're muted sandy yes hi my name is elizabeth merrick and i am calling to comment on agenda items 6.2 and 6.3 um i would like to voice my support for the school sro program officer and i would also like to voice my support for an auditor who is not based in politics um on the 6.3 agenda i feel that it's important that there is an auditor that is not politically based that is critical and i give my support to the santa rosa police department thank you bye it's monday commenting on item 6.2 the school resource officer it's a very important position and it should only be increased because of the uh there's more people so we need we need money to support that program yeah thank you that now concludes public comments i'll close public comment and bring it back to um the council or the subcommittee for comments who would like to go first 12 minutes to solve this one i don't mind going first if you'd like go for it you know for me there's been a whole process with the school board and it's their decision you know i'm supportive of whatever direction the school board's you know want to go we haven't had much discussion about the merits of it i know it was a lengthy process but we're not going to rehash that thing sounds like the school board's made their decision and let's move forward before moving on i just wanted to add a piece of information which is that yeah i went while i was the liaison to the the committee i was unable to attend the meetings as was noted by one of our callers and this was because the school board chose to put their meetings on Tuesday evenings which is when we have our council meeting so that was a challenge but i did read the reports so um thank you for um understanding natalie do you have anything you'd like to add same same as tom supporting with the school board supporting the school board decision um so um at this point the school board um has not made an official decision um so do we want to take a position on this outside of um what they decide to do as far as i know i didn't think that i don't it's their it's their schools what position it's their schools but it's our money well do we want to pay for five sros is that a question for natalie or who the question it's a um you know i'm trying to understand uh what the recommendation from this subcommittee is going to be because the schools can you know we the another option would be that we could defer um upon a formal decision from the schools but their decision does not bind us to to comply with it it only you know they're either going to say we don't want you there and and that's fine um or they're going to say we do want you there and then we have a decision to make are we going to show up i i the mayor i'd be meeting with the the president and the the superintendent i could bring forward whatever um you know if if the desires for the school board to make a decision i'm happy to communicate that back to the superintendent to the president uh that that's going to be the subcommittee recommendation or any other recommendation i just wanted to make you aware that we're going to be sitting down very shortly and having a a conversation so i'm happy to communicate um what whatever it is that the subcommittee wants me to communicate i for one would be most comfortable um weighing in after hearing the formal recommendation from the school board i think that um asking us to make a decision ahead of their decision puts us in a tough position so i'm happy to communicate that if that's the the subcommittees it sounds like that's the subcommittee's recommendation i'm happy to communicate can i get um some thumbs up or not well and for me i think a lot more discussion needs to take place because i i don't know all the information i try to follow as much as i could with the SRO discussion but quite frankly i i would think the time to discuss this is when the city manager presents the next year's fiscal budget to the city council and whether it's included or not that buys us a couple of months to you know for whatever the school board's going to be doing um but for me it's it's a conversation between the chief of police and the city manager because it is a san rosa police resource how we want to utilize that i'll be anxious to hear during the next budget process uh how they're going to include that okay um well i see it as a um that but it's also a philosophical um question about having people feel safe in our community and um we heard that 40 percent of people feel safer with police um in the schools which means that 60 percent of people did not agree that they felt safer so i think that um you know we we need to take this on um if it's the desire of the schools to have us uh fund this so um vice mayor do you have any comments before we conclude no okay thank you so um unfortunately for today um we are not able to get to the following items which um for the police auditor position and um a discussion around the social media post of last week um i will be working with the city manager and his staff to get us another meeting as soon as possible i want to thank the community for your participation vice mayor rogers and mr schwedhelm um city attorney mr navarro miss tayez um captain fregan and anybody else who i might have missed as well as our interpreters and our technical support from sandy and lis um thank you to everybody who makes all of this happen so with that i during this meeting