 Item 5.1, Community Empowerment Plan listening session reports, Magali Teyes leading us off. Good morning, Mayor Rogers, members of the council, appreciate your time being able to give this presentation to you all in the community, and sorry, I think our slides are not quite up yet. There we go. I'd just like to start with saying, I'd like to start off this presentation by thanking the community who gave us their time during a pandemic, and in between fires and poor air quality, who met with us in person and online. I would especially like to thank them for their vulnerability, honesty, and commitment to working collaboratively towards change. Thank you for speaking to us while you were juggling child care challenges, learning how to use Zoom while experiencing what Dr. Blanca Gordo coined as digital destitution without proper broadband access and working through the pain of racial and economic injustice. Thank you for your incredibly valuable contribution to this report. Also, I want to quickly note that the full Community Empowerment Plan report that we're going to be presenting today is available in English and in Spanish. You can find those on our website along with all of the other reports that were presented yesterday and today. There will be an abbreviated version coming very soon, which we will post as well. And with that, I'd like to turn it over to Danielle Garvuno, Danielle Garvuno, who will be co-presenting with me today. Danielle. Thank you. Good morning, Mayor and members of the council. My name is Danielle Garvuno. I am the Community Engagement Coordinator for the City of Santa Rosa and with staff liaison to our Community Advisory Board. I played an extensive role in these listening sessions, including attending all listening sessions, collecting data from those listening sessions, analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data, and developing of this report. So next slide, please. As all of you know, on May 26, 2020 George Floyd was murdered by an on-duty police officer, which sparked protests across the nation, including here in Santa Rosa. The protest called for an overhaul of use of force policies as well as increased law enforcement oversight and accountability. The city responded by developing the Community Empowerment Plan and holding a list, a series of listening sessions with our Santa Rosa communities of color. Now, before I get into more about the Community Empowerment Plan and the listening sessions, I want to take a few moments to acknowledge the history of systemic and institutional racism in our country, both a deep part of the history of the United States. This history provides important context for why we continue to see mass protests and demonstrations both nationally and locally. American racism and oppression of BIPOC can be traced back to the 1600s when the kidnapping, enslavement, and transport of Africans and Indigenous Central and South Americans began taking place at the hands of white Europeans. The United States of America was built on the backs of Africans and Indigenous slaves, and the land was taken from Indigenous tribes and Mexican landowners during the expansion of the United States throughout the 17 and 1800s. Some of the earliest known policing groups in the United States were established in the early 1700s, with primary responsibility for controlling the movement of the slave population. Slaves are not allowed to leave their owner's property, nor make decisions for themselves, including who to marry, who they lived with, or who they communicated with outside of the property. Even when slavery was abolished in 1863, this did not eliminate systems of oppression, systemic racism, and racial violence towards our BIPOC communities throughout the country. Slavery was replaced by Jim Crow laws, and after the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, the Johnson administration enacted a war on crime, targeting communities of color, particularly those living in poverty. White supremacist views of people of color, particularly black Americans as criminals, led to mass arrests and incarceration of many black people during this time, often with little or no evidence of wrongdoing. The attitudes held by white supremacy culture is that people of color are dangerous and violent, often which lead to the perception of guilt, even in a country where all of its citizens are innocent until proven guilty. This belief continues to drive excessive sentencing policies today. In the 1980s, the war on drugs furthered the mass incarceration of black and brown Americans, many arrested and incarcerated for minor offenses, but sentenced to long prison terms. The city of Santa Rosa is not exempt from historical and institutional racism. Like most cities in America, we are not immune to redlining and other historical city policies, plans, programming and programming which have further segregation and disproportionate allocation of resources, which significantly impact our BIPOC communities today. We encourage city council, city staff and members of the public to view Dr. Sharon Washington's presentation called Tipping the Scale, Deconstructing Race and Racism Seminar for more information on the historical context of institutional and systemic racism. This presentation can be found on our website, SRCity.org, and then clicking the yellow button titled Community Empowerment. Next slide, please. So onto the Community Empowerment Plan, Vision and Goals. The vision of the plan was to build a trusting and open relationship of respect between SRPD and the community, and a space for ongoing, inclusive and constructive dialogue is available. The plan has three goals. The first is to increase constructive and inclusive dialogue between leaders from our BIPOC communities in Santa Rosa and Sonoma County and the city of Santa Rosa. The second is geared towards SRPD policies and use of use of force policies and practices, which state the community is provided with opportunities to review and provide input on Santa Rosa Police Department use of force and community policing policies. The third one is establishing a feedback loop to engage effectiveness of efforts in and with the community and among city staff. While we are here today to present information on the listing sessions, which are a part of Goal 1, it is important to note that for Goal 3, we are currently working with the city's equity officer and other staff to develop a feedback loop for this plan, which can serve as a model for other city projects. Next slide, please. So again, as I mentioned, this report and presentation only covers Goal 1 of the Community Empowerment Plan. Goal 2 will be addressed by SRPD in the next presentation. Goal 1 outcomes include we engage 280 people in this work, of which 265 people of color from people of color groups or communities. We held 18 listening sessions with 13 community groups. Five of these listening sessions were follow-up sessions. We held 18 one-on-one conversations and 15 informal group conversations. Next slide, please. Now going into the listening session outcomes. First of all, the listening sessions were held between June and December of 2020. This included participation from our former Mayor Tom Schwedhelm, Police Chief Ray Navarro, staff from our Office of Community Engagement, and also our Economic Development Director. We engaged 215 participants throughout these listening sessions. Again, 13 community groups were engaged, which included five Latinx community groups, four Black community groups, one Indigenous community group, and three mixed-race community groups. We chose groups from our BIPOC communities, including community members who have historically not been intentionally invited to engage with local government, including monolingual Spanish speakers, our Eritrean community, members of our Indigenous community groups, members of various Black community groups, and members of our immigrant populations in Santa Rosa and Sonoma County. And from these listening sessions, five major themes reoccurred. Next slide, please. So diving into those themes. The first theme was build relationships between Santa Rosa Police Department and the community, including youth. And when we say build relationships, we're talking about positive relationships. Examples from this theme. Most participants mentioned that they had some kind of negative interaction with law enforcement at some point in their lives. However, they still believe positive interactions with SRPD officers are possible and need to happen, even with children. Part of the reasoning includes ensuring that their children feel comfortable calling on public safety for help when the need arise, as well as creating an interest in public safety careers among young people. In addition, all participating groups agreed that SRPD needs to work on improving and strengthening their relationships with our BIPOC communities. How to do this varied from group to group. To Sonoma County Lowrider Council proposed building a lowrider patrol car for SRPD. Participants from the Indigenous community listening session expressed interest in having a cadet program for youth, as well as utilizing community space at Yakaama for activities with officers and the community. One resident from this particular group also proposed doing spiritual check-ins between members of the Indigenous community and officers before officers start their shifts for the day. In addition to early interactions with police officers and more opportunities to engage with SRPD, several groups stated that they would like to see more police presence in their neighborhood. Some participants said that this presence of police would help improve their sense of safety within their own communities. The second theme was around investing in community programming and services, particularly for our BIPOC communities. This includes programming and resources that include increased services and housing for individuals experiencing homelessness, recreation centers for black community members, financial opportunities for small BIPOC businesses, financial assistance for culturally appropriate mental, behavioral and educational needs, community housing and development for older youth ages 18 to 24, and violence prevention and healing strategies such as mentoring programs and opportunity for youth. Participants also stated that they want more economic opportunities for BIPOC. Theme number three centered around police accountability and oversight mechanisms, and this particular theme came up and was probably the most prevalent throughout these listening sessions. Throughout these listening sessions, staff heard stories from participants about their experiences with SRPD. While some mentioned positive experiences, including positive experiences with school resource officers, many shared negative encounters. These experiences, including stories from mothers and children about their children who were targeted by police officers and labeled as gang members. Youth also shared their experiences with being racially profiled by police officers and witnessing family members' violent experiences with law enforcement. While a few others stated that they heard their peers describe situations with officers that include racist experiences, mistaken identities and being labeled as looking suspicious. All participants want more accountability from SRPD. Participants also mentioned that officers must report their colleagues in cases of inappropriate behavior and actions that go against professional standards and policies, not fear retaliation or discipline for speaking up. Participants agreed that until officers are held accountable for their actions, BIPOC will continue to be mistreated. Participants also mentioned that they would like to see follow up on complaints against and investigations of SRPD officers and the need for that whole process to be improved. In addition, hiring processes were also mentioned. Participants suggested officers have to undergo certification and recertification every two years. In addition, having community review panels when officers are up for recertification and promotional opportunities. Another suggestion was to make tracking information related to officers who resigned prior to disciplinary action or termination available to the public. As well as those who have been found to have multiple sustained complaints and or violations whose personnel records are closed or unavailable. This will allow other agencies access to their records for review when applying for other positions locally. The suggestion was increased training for officers, including cultural competency, awareness and sensitivity trainings, implicit bias trainings, power dynamics and power and privilege trainings, systemic racism and white supremacy culture awareness trainings, and emotional resiliency trainings. Number four really focused around addressing institutional racism, systemic racism and the culture of white supremacy in Santa Rosa, and uplifting and celebrating Santa Rosa's BIPOC communities. And this is for our entire organization and not just specific to SRPD. Nearly all participants mentioned that they often do not feel safe in their communities due to system of these listening sessions brought up the issue of respect towards BIPOC, but in particular the dehumanizing treatment of black individuals in Santa Rosa. One participant stated growing up as a black man in Santa Rosa is traumatic. I do not want to raise children here. Another issue that was brought up by participants around this theme is that they feel the city focuses all time, effort and funding on the Latino community, and does not spend sufficient time or funding that addresses the needs of other communities of color in Santa Rosa. This equitable distribution of resources has a real impact on communities of color in Santa Rosa, and the city is encouraged to look at how to better distribute resources to all members of the community who need them. Finally, it was suggested that the city of Santa Rosa make a statement on diversity, inclusion, racial equity, and have trainings recommended that were recommended for SRPD officers extend to all city staff, council members, and board commission and committee members. Finally, the number five centered around addressing homelessness in our neighborhoods. The issue of homelessness came up multiple times throughout the listening sessions, particularly in the Roseland and South Park neighborhoods. Residents mentioned that there is a large population of individuals experience homelessness in their neighborhoods, and both neighborhoods have issues with loitering and trash. Many residents in both neighborhoods express feeling unsafe around those loitering and those who have mental health issues that have not been addressed. Some of these participants suggested the Kahootz model from Eugene, Oregon, which was brought up several times as a recommendation. With that, I'm going to turn it back over to Director Deyes who will get into more specifics of the community recommendations. Thank you Danielle. Next slide please. Okay. The following slides contain recommendations made by the community members we spoke to. I want to highlight that the top folded wording for the next slides will be the community recommendation and the bottom bullet points are programs and initiatives that have begun since starting the listening sessions or will soon be launched by the city of Santa Rosa. So starting with the community recommendation to engage through an anti racist lens creating an organizational culture that values public engagement with all community members and increasing access to public engagement opportunities. The development of the community empowerment plan was a first step towards engaging through an anti racist lens. The city will continue to make purposeful efforts to involve and engage our people of color communities, as well as other community members who have been as Abigail Echo Hawk from the Pawnee tribe has stated, we are working with the community advisory board to develop a citizen's guidebook and a citizen's academy, both aimed at educating community members on how local government functions, how decisions are made and how to get involved. We will also have a series of videos in English and Spanish. The city is taking steps to ensure that our monolingual Spanish speaking members which comprise of 30% of our population are able to participate in local government. This includes translation of city council agendas and city materials, as well as interpretation services available at city council meetings and many city hosted community meetings, translation and other languages can also be made available upon request. I want to talk about. Let's engage Santa Rosa. This engagement tool will assist us in gathering additional community input on a number of topics. The software will allow us to post surveys, polls, as well as other open ended input. We hope to have a soft launch later this month with a full launch by next month. Some examples of projects will be the social justice mapping project. Our collaboration with Sonoma County lawyer council, the Mary Lou and you'll be able to find polls and surveys on what the focus of the violence prevention program should be and many others. Next slide, please. The community recommends that the city of Santa Rosa make a public statement on the importance of diversity, inclusion and racial equity. The ask is that the city council include diversity, inclusion, racial equity and transparency as part of their mission statement. The city took initial steps towards this recommendation on June 28, 2020, when former mayor Tom Schwoldham and city manager Sean McGlynn released a letter to the community titled actions for change, a commitment from the Santa Rosa city council and city manager. More recently, Mayor Rogers and this council and the city council issued a resolution and a letter of support to our Asian American Pacific Islander communities standing in solidarity and condemning racial violence. In addition to these letters, the city has taken further steps to increase inclusion, diversity, equity, transparency and access over the last 10 months, adopting the open government ordinance that increases transparency of and access to city government processes and decision making. Working with seed collaborative to create plans to increase inclusion, diversity and equity and hiring, staff retention, staff trainings and engagement with the community, hiring and equity and public health planner who is responsible for ensuring city plans are inclusive, address community health disparities and incorporate public health best practice and the hiring of our diversity, inclusion and equal opportunity officer whose employment began on March 30, 2021. The office of community engagement has also created the multicultural roots project stories of Santa Rosa's black indigenous people of color. The goal of the project is to create visibility of Santa Rosa's people of color community by highlighting the contributions of past and present local leaders that have helped to shape Santa Rosa and Sonoma County into who they are today. This program will also include LGBTQ plus community as well as the voices of our younger residents who are actively working on making us a better community. This is a short list and we're happy to provide more examples at the end, specifically that the office of community engagement is directly working on next slide please. Okay, the community recommends the Council declare racism as a public health crisis for the city of Santa Rosa. Recently, the county of Sonoma joined 145 other cities and counties and 27 states, along with multiple organizations across California and the US and declaring racism as a public health crisis. In addition, the California State Legislature introduced Senate bill 17 also called the office of racial equity in December 2020. The proposed bill allows California to acknowledge the long standing impacts of systemic racism and to declare racism as a public health crisis. It creates a state office of equity and a racial equity and accountability council. The bill also states that California will approach laws and regulations with an anti racist health and equity in all policies focus that seeks whether policies play a role in creating, maintaining or dismantling racist systems and secure adequate resources to address the crisis. This new policy framework and leadership will also help California local governments and community based agencies develop strategies for reducing mental health disparities in BIPOC communities that will become an estimated 62% of the state's population by 2030. While the state legislature has yet to vote on SB 17, the city council could take a position of support on the bill and call for similar actions of the local level. Next slide please. Mandatory trainings and educational sessions for all city staff appointed and elected officials and members of city boards and commissions. Specifically, the community is asking that one public acknowledgement of how institutional racism impacts communities of color, including those here in Santa Rosa to development of self trainings. This would consist of staff members examining their own humanity and the humanity of those they serve and their role as public servants in the community. Three ethnic study sessions with an emphasis on history of policing in the US. The ask is for staff to receive ethnic studies education through sessions with a qualified facilitator. Integrate education on the history of policing in the United States and impacts of the system of communities of color. Furthermore, requesting annual required trainings for officers, which would include cultural competency, awareness and sensitive sensitivity trainings, power dynamics, power and privilege trainings, systemic racism and white supremacy culture awareness trainings and emotional resiliency trainings and mental health resources. Additionally, community members suggested mental health screenings for officers. These educational sessions are an important step that would lead us closer towards a healing relationship with the community, particularly with people of color. The following trainings are currently being administered or are upcoming and chief Navarro will address them further in his presentation. So it'd be skills for success training harassment in the workplace crisis intervention and implicit bias trainings community policing cultural awareness and implicit bias trainings through community matters. Next slide please. The community recommends the city develop a model of civilian oversight of law enforcement. The police department has recently issued a request for proposal for an independent police auditor position that will be overseen by the city manager. The art piece scope of work includes feedback received from listening session participants as outlined in the community empowerment plan goal 2.3 and chief Navarro will speak more on this in his presentation as well. Next slide please. Recommendation number six is restorative community justice circles with the community. In addition to working with the violence prevention partnership and its partner organizations who have subject matter experts in this field. We are looking at continuing to schedule speakers like Dr Sharon Washington, who walked us through the history of systemic racism, and how that has influenced where we are today. To Dr Daniela Dominguez who will speaking who will be speaking to the community advisory board on May 19th on self and community care as an act of resilience resistance. We will be reaching out to community to seek further input on what community healing looks like for them. This can and will look different for the many diverse communities that we have in the city, and we are aware that there is no one size fits all this work will have to be ongoing and constant. Next slide please. The final recommendation extends not just to SRPD, but to all city council city staff and San Rosa community members that and that and that is to continue to explore best practice responses to protest and demonstrations. To borrow the following bullet point suggestions from the League of California cities trauma informed responses to protest webinar and here are the sub recommendations. One get to know the community you are serving and what issues are important to them to recognize the humanity of why protests happen. Three recognize generational trauma and its impact on community for refrain from labeling protesters demonstrators as dangerous individuals. Five engage with the community and find out what they need to feel safe. The city has taken great strides towards these efforts via the community empowerment plan and we recognize that we still have quite a bit of work to do. Next slide please. The following are items that were born from the community empowerment plan goals and through listening to community needs chief Navarro will be expanding on these items in his presentation. So I will give a very light description of each. The public safety subcommittee was created as a forum to address SRPD use of force policies and also initially addressed other law enforcement related issues and concerns. The subcommittee is a forum where community members may attend and participate in these meetings providing feedback as the city continues to address police reform and public safety. The Santa Rosa police department with consultation from Whitebird Clinic, which implements the cahoots programming Eugene Oregon and in collaboration with other city departments is working on developing a program similar to cahoots that can be implemented in Santa Rosa. The chief's community advisory team is designed to be a bridge between the community and the Santa Rosa police department. It will facilitate and enhance communication and the relationship between the police department and the community. The office of community engagement and SRPD are teaming up with the Sonoma County lowrider council to build the Mary Lou. The car has been named after Mary Lou armor with permission from her family who was a fallen officer from SRPD and died of complications due to COVID last year. The Mary Lou lowrider patrol car will be used to engage community members of all ages and serve as a public safety recruitment tool. With this collaboration, we hope to develop opportunities for learning and growth, or we can share lowriding culture, not just as art, but as a form of healing and resistance to be able to bring in multiple speakers on the importance of cultural resiliency, the opportunity to partner with museums and connect segments of our communities that may have not intersected before an appreciation for each other. We'll have more to come on this. In closing, I'd like to say two items that came up for my team in this process. One, that BIPOC community is not a monolith. Even within our Latino community, we can have different opinions and needs and we heard that diversity thought throughout the listening sessions. Thoughts and opinions that were formed based on each other's on each individual's experience, immigration status, level of education and access to resources. As an institution and as a community, we need to honor that. Two, we need to continue to actively identify ways to invest in our communities of color. We have a number of programs that the Office of Community Engagement would like to launch next fiscal year, which are specific and intentional in nature. In addition, we are actively looking at programming that will assist our communities in the healing process. Some of our communities of color have compounded traumas, which have been exacerbated by fires. Next slide, please. And that is the end of our presentation. Thank you so much, Director Council who wants to start with questions. Adam Vice Mayor. Thank you guys so much for that presentation. It was great. I did want to say or ask that the lets engage Santa Rosa that if you had maybe a group of council members, people that are active on Facebook, have members that initially to get that started, if you could give us some posts that we can repost in order to engage our community members that follow us on social media. That would be great. If you get everyone involved. All right, Council Member Spathel. Mr. Mayor, I'm not sure who this would be for, but on slide three, we talked about the community empowerment plan vision and goals, which I'm very appreciative of. And number three talked about establishing the feedback loop to gauge effectiveness of efforts with and in the community among city staff. I know in previous council goal setting we have what we call the smart goals where we have some timelines. And I think Macaulay you had mentioned that we're starting and engaged with the EO officer position. I'm interested in hear a little bit more in some more specific details when we could you know what role would Council play with that what resources can we do to initiate that effort. Can you tell us a little bit more about what the plans would be for that other than continuing the dialogue which I know you're doing. Thank you so much for that question. And also thank you for being for being part of those listening sessions this last summer. So what we want to do is we want to come up with a more collaborative approach with other, you know, city staff, you know, because some of what we heard is also infrastructure base. You know, there were some issues with policing, but a lot of it had to do with city infrastructure and resources. So we do want to bring in, you know, planning our equity health officer, you know, our equity officer as well, and sort of come up with a model a program. And then we want to vet that through a couple of different groups and see, you know, how that feels, you know, for our process and definitely for community. So we'll definitely have more to come. I'm hoping to be able to update you all during our our staff report. In addition to that we are also building a toolkit and training for staff on community engagement. And really what what that looks like is community engagement beyond programs right so what are the best strategies the best practices out there. And also community engagement doesn't just have to be a community meeting. It can be multiple strategies put together as a full initiative. And so we are in the process of developing that. And through some of our other staff will be holding trainings hopefully towards the end of the year and into the next year as well. And then what do you see collectively is the next steps with the listening session because I know, you know, I was very appreciative being invited to be able to participate in those. But I'll just use the one example that Mr Alvar as part of being on council is that I remember asking him, what would it take to make you feel safe in the community. And again, it was just listening so that's pretty much where the conversation ended but I think that's where the real value of community, this entire community working together to solve some of those issues. So what are the, what are the next steps there and how can council be involved in some of those discussions, because I don't want to just leave it to the police department and I am a chief Navarro will be talking to the next presentation but how do you see council involvement in those type of dialogues. Thank you for the question and honestly I really wanted to refrain from saying this but we really need resources. This is really what it's going to take. There are an incredible group of young people that you know service providers has used from authorities who have been asking to get into a mentorship program with the city of Santa Rosa, it's something that we'd love to do. And to be really honest and I'm, I apologize ahead of time if this isn't appropriate but community engagement as a team is Danielle myself and half of the establishment don't have time. So it's there were an opportunity for us to borrow capacity from other, especially nonprofit partners and or you know other staff. We're in a crunch, you know, this year and we've gone through a lot. But the reality is that, you know, we love the opportunity to expand our reach and to dive deeper into some of these programs. I mean, just simply with the low rate of patrol car it's not about the car it's about the people that we want to bring to the table it's about their stories it's about their experience it's about their resistance it's, you know, it's about putting together those programs and events that are going to have different people coming to the table and having a conversation it's about us. Educated and acknowledging that there has been systemic racism and this is how we will move forward but we can't always dictate how we move forward the community has to help us with that right. So, everything's going to be centered around deep community input. We would appreciate, you know, you know, some of those recommendations like declaring racism as, as a, as a health issue. I feel like there's a lot of low hanging fruit of things that we could do Danielle, did I miss anything. No, I think that, you know, we would love to expand these listening sessions into all of the different districts and expand them to more than just our BIPOC community groups right. We want to be inclusive of all of our community members and their experiences, but as director to as mentioned, it's just the two of us and one of the half of one other person and so how do we do that. We are very creative. And we are going to have to work with each member on council to get to your different districts and get those folks at the table so we, we appreciate the collaboration and the opportunity and are open to suggestions. And I really appreciate that and I guess for Mr. City Manager, I would just ask that council is presented with options with funding. This is new territory for the city of Santa Rosa. We've never had the EO officer. I'm interested in here was she asked what her thoughts are and regarding, you know, we all know we're sitting on some one time money and I'm guessing that might be an appropriate use so I would just ask that some of those options be presented there because having attended Dr. Washington's training, it takes time energy and we all have to focus in my opinion on ourselves first and how can we be an ally to prevent the systemic racism that is in this community. And it's going to take us all and that is like what you said in my colleague that will take resource and so I would just ask Mr. when when we come up to these budget hearings right around the corner that we are given options. But you will see options in the budget. Some of them have been placed directly in the city council's budget. There will be obviously additional opportunities. I think the council's is doing her analysis and so see collaborative, but there is one thing that council really needs to be conscious of is that it's not just a investment in terms of money it's an investment in time. And so, and, and that requires staff time across the organization and you are going to be considering the work plan that seed is working on that they need staff commitment and time, which means other things will have to be deferred. If you're going to approach that. So I think those are really important conversations, but it's not just dollars. It's actually finding, as you heard Miss Taya state. It's it's about getting access to staff right and staff has to understand that that's an important step, and that you're going to carve out that space. There's a lot on the on the docket. And so when when the next city manager sits down that's going to be one of the things you're going to have to have a conversation with them about creating that space to allow staff to get access to staff. Thank you. Thank you, my god to be in your wonderful presentation. I really appreciate your connection with the community. And all those different listening sessions I participated on. There's very valuable information shared so thank you for all your efforts. member and I do before I go on to other council members I do just want to also point out for council that this is a study session so there are a number of questions that are embedded in this about our next steps that the council members after we do public comment can help direct you specifically the resource question with some of our one-time funding we'll obviously talk about that in the budget I have heard the resolution declaring racism as a public health crisis I've heard support for SB 17 and then obviously we'll also have our discussions with the chief on some of the other suggestions or recommendations that were made as well so I did want to just make sure that I pointed out that this meeting is structured so that these next two components are study sessions so that council can give that direction back to staff once we have these discussions council member Sawyer thank you mayor and thank you for mentioning the future conversations today about funding and resources et cetera because I agree with council member Schwedhelm everything here is important but it will take me those resources that are all important and thank you Magali and Danielle for a great presentation one of the two of the items that resonated to be one of which is shown clearly in your recommendation number one which is the guidebook you know kudos to to emphasizing the need for that guidebook we especially now with districts having more and more people involved in the community and knowing what it takes to run for council and to be involved in boards and commissions is so all important because the the pool given our circumstances right now and families being challenged and the entire community being challenged the pool is getting has has been lessened somewhat and so it's a shallower pool in which to find people that have the time and energy and willingness to spend the kind of time it takes to serve their community but between the guidebook and the and an academy a city academy that we used to have again lots of resources necessary but so important the the more people know about how our city functions the more they can decide or not to just to decide to become involved but it's it's all important and thank you very much you've brought some really really vital issues to the to the to the four and I very much appreciate it thank you councilmember tibbetz thank you mayor I had a question about community engagement and I know that it sounds like the listening sessions sounds like they went well sounds like we're going to do more of those but you know I guess we have the lowrider council are there were there other suggestions concrete suggestions from the community about how we can better engage and also you know kind of do lasting engagement and kind of one of the things that that comes up on my mind is listening sessions are good and I think that when we're trying to build trust where trust doesn't exist conversations are certainly a prerequisite to that but how are we going beyond that I guess is what I'm saying you know I speaking for myself one of the accusations I hear is that City Hall comes in and listens holds community sessions does the democracy dots yet potholes aren't getting filled on the west side of town so I guess what I'm trying to drive at is are there other methods that that you've heard that we can be involved in that that really kind of create that ongoing contact that ongoing relationships sports for example I think team-based experiences are really great at building lasting relationships lasting friendships similarly shared learning experiences I think the lowrider council and the Mary Lou lowrider is cool because I see that as kind of like a shared learning experience but how do we go bigger is my question thank you for asking that and I'm going to take it three steps back we have we met with community members who have no idea who the mayor is they don't know about districts they don't know how to get a hold of somebody at City Hall they don't even know how to get a hold of me so we are faced with that challenge as well of we need to go into community like you know especially with the challenge we mentioned with zoom there were pockets where folks didn't have adequate adequate broadband we have to go out there and meet them we have to speak Spanish right and we have to take it a step further there is a very rich indigenous community who Spanish is their second language right and so how do we access and connect with those resources so we can properly engage with folks who are have not been invited we need to do intentional invitations right so that takes a lot of effort that takes a lot of planning so we have to set up those really basic steps and then get to the point where we can get folks to okay think about how do I serve on a board and commission or young people tell us all the time like I want to be mentored because I want to understand how to be on a board and commission and I'm scared because I might be the only person that looks like me and I might be the youngest person are they going to listen to me right so we're listening to all of those community concerns and trying to find ways how can we either borrow capacity or find capacity somewhere find funding somewhere to connect community members to feel more empowered to step into those roles right I think a lot of it has been you know difficult because we can't be in community right like we want to be mindful of where we've been at with this pandemic but we are thinking about those things it's super multi-pronged and it's catered to each community and to Danielle's points in the report you know we do have a community of african-americans that feel totally left out of the conversation and I and I feel very mindful and very responsible for for doing something different right for providing for setting the stage and being the example for Sonoma County in in that we you know we have to have adequate attention to all of our groups like don't get me wrong I love Latin people right I'm probably one of the most proud Latin people you'll meet but we really need to be equitable across the board right and and thinking about our region community right like they're very active in our community and and they participate in ways that we may have not historically given value to and we need to honor that and and meet them Danielle another important reminder for council is the community advisory board has their community improvement grant program and that is an opportunity to use funds that council has given the cab to put community engagement things that we have heard in these sessions into action so community groups neighborhood groups non-profit schools etc can apply for these mini grants to do community building type projects throughout the city so community garden creation public art you know like murals or street painting type type projects you know there's so many different things that the community can do with these grants so please please please let your your district constituents know that the grants are open right now the first round closes June 30th but there are other opportunities to apply there are other deadlines including September 30th and December 31st of this year so the cab has opened it up to have an ongoing application process so please let the community know help us get that word out that community members can apply for up to $2,500 mini grants for these community community improvement and community building type projects and to Danielle's point that the grant program is amazing she's done a really fantastic job of putting presentations together in English and Spanish one tiny grow block if you are a community group and you are not a non-profit you get reimbursed right you're awarded the the scran you get reimbursed but if you are disengaged from the process and you don't know a non-profit that will be your fiscal sponsor then it's really difficult to participate so we want to look at you know are there foundations in our community that would like to partner with us in figuring out a way to create you know some sort of fiscal sponsorship model or how can we make this easier for community members to have access to right um sorry had to do that shameless plug can follow up question so um you know what I'd like to see from your department is to kind of maybe come back to us at some point with recommendations on I mean I don't know if it's a legal reason why we have to do reimbursement and fiscal sponsorship but can we help remove that barrier that financial barrier for folks and just give them the money and good faith and you know maybe do some follow-up later similarly you know how I'm wondering too thinking about the budget and what's coming up measure O funds I know that we've made a lot of investments already using our measure O funds but can we do more or can we realign some of the funding with a real focus over the next few years over making these investments in our you know communities of color so those are just some thoughts that I have and I'd like I'd love to see follow-up speaking for myself sure thank you yeah and a quick shout out to the chairwoman of the community advisory board who I see is also on the meeting today I do remember from my time on cab that one of the concerns and why they moved to the reimbursement policy it's not to say that we can't change it but there were instances of individuals utilizing the funds for an ineligible component so I'm sure there's a better way for us to get around that barrier councilmember Fleming thank you and I want to thank the community engagement team for a great presentation and I do hear you know all of these wonderful things and my questions and concerns come out of a fear here that we're focusing very much on you know beautifying the system that exists not getting into the deep change that we need to to make and so you know I I'm curious to know how you see your office effectuating policy change how you imagine your role and as it relates to the public safety subcommittee which is a vehicle potentially to make some changes you know the community advisory board is a wonderful outlet for the kinds of things that you're doing but it it's not specifically a policy it's it's it's not a policy board and so and then additionally how you plan to work with other agencies throughout the community how you plan used equity officer the police department how how you plan to engage these groups to effectuate policy change to realize the goals that were identified in the listening sessions thank you for that question and I just want to start out with I hope the report is able to convey that government doesn't work for everybody the way the way we do government right and and so my hope is that for us as a division to be incredibly community input driven to take those steps to get the information first and then show community how do you how do policies change and happen I mean on the most basic level like what does that look like because I think a lot of community members are not aware and yes they should expect change and they should expect things to happen but how do we make that how do we move the needle with community right so it doesn't feel like this is another performative thing that we're doing or that it's not authentic or that it's not sustainable so we are in that sort of process it has taken us some time to get here but we are in that process of you know what could this look like with partnering with the public safety subcommittee partnering with non-profits and that is another conversation that I think we we do need to have and I want to have more clear answers for you but unfortunately I don't think I I have enough of those things defined to be able to to present them um Danielle I don't know if there's anything that you can add but it is something that we are definitely looking at now that we are here we presented the information um we want to take those next steps thank you so much councilmember alvarez thank you mayor councilmember swoleham made a great point for for myself it was the most impressionable moment with a couple chairs sitting under the shade of city hall and having the question posed no amount of funding no amount of money could have ever equaled it and my god he is absolutely right about council members going into the community with a handshake once we're able to do that for myself with the experience that I had with Gustavo was exactly that chairs or actually at the time of zoom zoom meetings and we had great conversation with our neighbors over by the center of the creek about the center of the creek and what I would hope to see out of the community engagement is the tools that you possess the experience that you possess and how we can use that especially as a councilmember that really has no tools when it comes to community engagement I like to go and shoot the with the community but that's where my skill level comes in it's not really taking the notes down and and and Jen Jen Santos I mean that's that that's an angel to me as she really let me her experience into being effective when we have these talks with the community in regards to to moving forward and once the the COVID is over I would love to see us really going into those those communities and even our retreating brothers and sisters if you think of a retreat they have Plaza de Mexico and I bring that up because it is simple the mile you know the the pride that that our retreating brothers have of always being independent and never having been conquered is is speak to the pride that they have and yet we haven't been able to acknowledge that of them and it'd be beautiful to bring them into and I believe it was a course that we spoke of of preparing people that want to know about how to get engaged into local government maybe it's good that we didn't have that when I was thinking about running because I might not have done it but nonetheless though I'm glad that that that I did run and and I want to think to each and every one of you as council members and and city managers and and Magali Daniel and everyone included because of the support that I've received here I feel confident in being going to tell other members from my community it's okay to step forward it's okay and and you're going to find a great set of people who are going to take you under their wing and going to educate you on how to be effective hopefully one day I will I will be effective but it comes down to the support and I want to thank each and every one of you for allowing me and giving me the support that I need to be affected to represent my community I'm sorry about the voice I'm drinking my tea it's not working thank you council member director uh first I want to thank you for inviting me uh to speak with the youth from the torus uh just last week it it's one of my favorite things that that we do is talking with youth and um I know georgia pedgriffe when she was with the city was a huge huge huge advocate for youth involvement in governance uh and in the the city council uh and I'm just wondering if you have any recommendations on next steps that we can take to start getting the ball rolling so that as we come out of the pandemic and as we're able to do more things in person uh how can we better include our youth so that they feel like their time is well spent uh and that it furthers their interest in participating in their own local community thank you and we have a list of things um Daniel I'll let you go first yeah I'm glad that you asked that question so actually um through our AmeriCorps VISTA program our next VISTA will actually be taking that citizen guidebook for participation and making it a youth friendly version number one um they will also be helping to take uh the cab citizen engagement academy and making that also youth friendly um and helping us to roll that out with various uh youth groups throughout the the community um so that's definitely a first step we have looked into the team council um but again team council takes staffing and resources um and additional funding um because working with youth is quite different than working with um with adults uh that serve on our board and commission right um and so we have to have the necessary tools um and resources available for them so at this time unfortunately we won't be able to do that um the cab has been talking about doing a mentorship program with youth so having each cab member uh bring on a youth that they can mentor and that can sit with them um virtually first and then once we're back in person can sit with them during cab meetings um and see how these types of meetings work uh how do brown brown-acted meetings go right um and and learn more about what is going on in their community and Macaulay I'll turn it over to to you yeah I would say internships I mean I work at Sonoma State I always say this for 17 years and young people are so interested in learning more about what we haven't had that open door right um you know when when I was working with students at Sonoma State you know asking like do you know what a city planner is like like who are your council members and constantly right we we didn't know because we were so disengaged from that process and you know one idea that I've been floating around with my team is doing when we're allowed to um tours of you know the city facilities right like departments and this is who does that open houses right we can do specific teen open houses right for young people questions that they need to ask where they don't feel intimidated because there's you know older community members there who may know more and so just creating those spaces that are particular to specific groups of people that we want to intentionally reach uh but internships whether they're paid or we can um you know make a connection with Sonoma State or SRJC where they could students could receive units uh you know we have the work available um so we just we just need to connect with with the young people um as the next step now I really appreciate that and it's something that I hope will continue to talk about and implement um and one of the things that I was particularly struck by in that conversation as well was this idea that they didn't want to with their limited time with everything else going on they didn't want to um feel like their time was wasted they wanted to feel like they actually had to say that their input was uh actually mattered uh to us and I've been a big proponent for a long time of community budgeting participatory budgeting and I know we have sort of a hybrid model and how we do that with our community improvement grants through cab are there any recommendations or are there any types of ways with potentially with some of our one time funding that we could stand up community empowerment participatory budgeting programs throughout our community yeah before I get into that I actually want to go back to the internship thing really quick um one of the suggestions that we've heard from other staff um as well as uh some of our younger people is around the internship policy that we have here at the city currently we are only allowed to um hire interns who are currently actively enrolled in um courses at uh in college right so jc ssu other uh other universities policy change could be allowing those internship opportunities to be available to recent graduates of those institutions right they need some real world experience um they may not have gotten that they may not have had an internship opportunity while they were enrolled uh that would be a fantastic opportunity for them once they have graduated to get them some more of that real world experience if if I can jump in really fast there as well um I would think that an internship is also particularly valuable for individuals who are not going uh to hire institutions that that are trying to to find their path to see whether this is someplace that they would want to come and work eventually um and so I'm not sure quite why that that requirement is in place but I'd be interested in uh evaluating interns based on their merit and interests not based on what path they find themselves on so so just for technical reasons that's a federal law okay it's a pay versus educational experience so departments do have the opportunity to hire interns that are outside of that space but it's a hiring practice the other practice is federally a federal regulation that you you can only not pay an intern if they're having the appropriate college credit that's the differentiation okay all right I appreciate that clarification um and then before I go to public comment here and I jumped in and mentioned it for council members I am looking for uh council consensus in this discussion on a couple of these items uh and in particular I'd like to hear direction from the council and from the community on the preparation of that resolution declaring racism as a public health uh crisis uh to be able to to have the authority to bring that forward to council as well as if there's an interest in uh either through the Santa Rosa City Council or I also chair the mayors and council members legislative committee taking up the question about SB 17 which is working its way through state legislation all right so with that I'll go to public comment and we'll start with Elaine. Mayor Rogers I did want to make the announcement that due to a recent zoom update the audio dinger for the your time's up notice is not functioning today as it was not functioning last night so we just ask the public commenters to please be mindful of the visual reminder thank you I appreciate that thank you so much Dina I'll be uh polite but firm and reminding folks when their three minutes are up so go ahead Elaine if you can unmute can you hear me there you go okay I really appreciate this I was very involved with the Andy Lopez situation we went to meeting after meeting after meeting same kind of recommendations I heard same kind of conversations same kind of promises I was very shocked when uh council uh councilman John Sawyer said that he was very appreciated learning all this new information and new recommendations I heard these recommendations over and over and over again and I would like to be reassured how this is going to happen I mean how are we really going to bring about change and I am still stunned that nobody knows who signed off on allowing those weapons of mass destruction to be thrown into the crowd at that protest I can't believe that there was no accountability you know and all they keep saying is accountability accountability accountability everything I hear is in the report of 2000 made by the United States Civil Rights Commission when they came in and yet we're still in the same crack fire we're still having the same conversation so as an older woman as a person who's been in this community for 40 years and trying to understand I hear the same things over and over again and hey what happens more and more problems so I really think uh the the public needs a little bit more reassurance rather than all these reports so thank you so much for listening thank you Elaine we'll go to Evan followed by Michael Evan you there are you able to hear me there you go okay um good afternoon or morning I guess still my name is Evan Phillips I know many of you personally and professionally I'm born and raised in Santa Rosa for those who don't know and I have a lot of stake and investment in the long-standing wellness of this community and uh first off I very much appreciate the amount of effort energy the the sincerity that the earnest um participation from the community engagement staff you know which was identified as basically just here Magali and Danielle and it seems that we have this ongoing trend in some of these issues we face not just with law enforcement but for the city in general where we really lack perspective on the order of operations and we spend a lot of time and energy around responsive measures when we are not doing what we are capable of doing to have healthier communities in the first place and the fact that we wouldn't start with a larger investment with a department that is more equipped not just to gather this information but to actually implement models and to partner with additional uh third-party service providers whether it be non-profit or otherwise is just going to keep leading to the exact same result um I mean how do we get to a discussion when we're talking about our own police department tear gassing and firing live munition rounds on its own people and then we're broadly categorizing these events as a necessary response to rioting and looting which is an incredibly reckless distortion of the bigger picture the issue here which has been reflected now you know you just heard a lot of it in in in the community engagement report back there is a glaring lack of cultural competence from the city and particularly the police department to understand the dynamic at hand that it's fact and it's now factually dangerous I mean such a poor breed of the landscape with such little grasp of the nuances of our own community led to both the civilian public and the police department being at unnecessary risk with it was very reckless escalation to use right geared military equipped officers and it should have been abundantly obvious to santa rosa police department leadership that's such a strong show of that force would have only led to a heightened possibility of hostility and more need for policing so their own presence was justifying the future need of presence it's it's incredible lack of competence it from my perspective and for them to not even understand the nuance of what a sideshow is and to understand that use of fireworks is not a use of weaponry shows like where do these people live what are they even aware of what is their world view and now I hear arguments made that the way that we need to protect this or prevent this is you need more funding and more resources for police officers and and and you know more chain of authority when you're not actually addressing the core issues of how we arrive to these things and we cannot forget heaven I need you to please wrap up your comments that's okay I'll leave it there all right I appreciate it next we have michael followed by kelsey are we all able to unmute michael here hey I just saw the zoom the unmute button there we go I'm not for a little while um so I want to say I guess that you know the first thing I want to say here is um this is not a publicity issue this is an accountability issue what we saw happen in with the protests last summer um a lot of violence was committed against the protesters and I think it was disproportionate there the the level of violence that you saw against police officers we're talking about you know water bottles being thrown at officers and full body armor um there were you know a couple instances of fireworks being shot at officers um but we're talking about people who got their their teeth smashed into the roof of their mouth protesters who had a testicle shot off uh we're talking about sexual assault talking about all kinds of things that absolutely need to be helped people need to be held accountable for these things the problem is not that the community it's not how do we get the community to trust srpd more it's not that the community doesn't trust srpd because of what srpd has done and we need to have hold them accountable for that programs which are trying to make them look less racist than they are is not what we need right now um i've met with with the group that met with magali um and uh we had a good discussion about the ethnic studies with the cop pilot program which was launched as part of the community empowerment program um programs like that which put officers in the classroom with with students and the idea that um we're learning ethnic studies with students and not really having a real ethnic studies curriculum again you know this is more trying to make good publicity and doing it in a way that's not i don't think um culturally responsive but you know i what i my main point is i think that it's the work that we do in terms of community outreach is one thing and i it's not my main issue here my main issue is how this has been kind of held up as the city's response to these protests the ways in which we're trying to make better um but it's not it's disjointed it's unrelated to the atrocities that the community experienced and it doesn't touch on you know the the real issue of how much is our department like the department that killed George Floyd um what are the links we didn't know about very broad um until recently but we do know now so what are we going to do about that what are we going to do to make sure that SRPD is held accountable for its internal culture um it's not just about trying to get the community to trust SRPD more we need to have them to have good reasons to trust SRPD all right thank you Michael tell us followed by Kimberly hi can you hear me yep there you go okay um so yeah i want to echo what has already been said about how this a lot of this sounds like coming at it from a PR standpoint um and how the actual day-to-day actions of our police force and our sheriff's department is um what's at issue here the community is trying to draw attention to the abuses that they have suffered and we just keep talking about how to build trust without talking about how to stop the harm stopping the harm that's that's the point um we need people to be safe walking home walking down the street protesting um all of the above uh i i definitely want to hear more discussion of civilian oversight of the police department it's sort of a gap in what we have going on and it should be central to any discussion moving forward um and i just also want to bring attention to representation in decision making so listening circles are great but who's making the decisions and who sits there and have they had the lived experience um to to make decisions about their own communities rather than people discussing you know what needs to happen for them we want to see change in a substantive systemic way and i want to hear a discussion of over policing uh in the day to day when you if you can think of it in terms of our budget representing our values um what you can see is that when we're spending money in the form of police budgets and police salaries and all of the above um then we are spending that money to to do harm we're spending it to to incarcerate people spending it on taking people away spending it on abuses and beatings and arrests and all of the above and then saying that there is no money to help those communities just give the money to the people and many of the problems that they faced will go away on their own they just need the investment they need the opportunities and they need to be safe from the state and so that i'll yield the rest of my time all right thank you kelsey kimberley followed by alexis hello can you hear me yep we can hear you it feels like this meeting is completely unrelated to their presentations today before regarding the police use of force nothing mentioned here encourages deep systemic change and if the goal is to create better public trust then you need to address the roots of the issue which is that people in this community are being harmed by law enforcement and no one seems to take it seriously this is something we've said over and over again for years come on help publish consider that right now we see regular police base during the pandemic which most normal shawls for its neighbors it's the council and navarro not that and i when there are accusations of support of people last summer and if they weren't any of us last month is how many need to take these types of allegations seriously maybe loser looks like man okay uh go ahead and re-raise your hand and we'll jump back if possible here but for now we'll go on to alexis followed by madonna hi can you hear me yep wonderful um i just i want to echo a lot of what's being said um about this really feels like a like a band aid that we've seen time and time again by by government where it's like you want to you want to seem like you're being uh proactive about something and then it just turns into really nothing it's so it just kind of seems like more of the same and it's really frustrating and hard to hear and i was really grateful that somebody's that um i'm sorry i i missed the name spoke up and said you know this is all this isn't doing anything this is just words um i also want to talk us for a second um tidbits i hear time and again very tone deaf things coming out of your mouth um there's a lot of privilege that i don't think that you're even aware that you have and i i know in the past you suggested something like kids playing soccer kids who are afraid of the cops who just shot their friend playing soccer with the kids of the community and and today i hear you talking about sports teams and things like that and not talking about real investment in your community what like how what how is that going to build real change and i understand that that community activities are wonderful and i i don't i'm not i'm not saying anything negative about that but i think that you really need to get more in touch with your community because i don't think you have any idea what the people of the community really want or need i think that you need to step outside your privilege and step outside who you are and look at what your actual community is asking of you um i yield the rest of my time thank you alexis we'll go to madonna followed by katrine hi can you hear me yep thank you i've one of first acknowledge i'm currently on plomo land i am lakota and plomo i am as long term center as a resident um i'd like to challenge the city council um i recommend uh that you go to suskland or tribal council um and i want to thank a council member alvarez for taking that challenge and enrolling and registering in the historical trauma workshop series that was first originally created for the napa mental health department um i want to see you guys in that series it is on zoom it's an hour um once a month i'm sure you could make time i don't approve of arrays or any money given to srpd um yesterday's report that that was just really embarrassing for me um and you need to get get in other communities i mean the white privilege is just it's ridiculous and i mean i've i've had uh srpd you know put a gun to my face i i'm not a big scary person um the only time you know i'm not pulled over is when i dye my hair blonde um and that really sucks um the streets are not safe for my child to walk in um last year the the youth that was shot i mean that that that you guys the the police traumatized our youth and their their house is so dirty i mean i i don't know even what to suggest to suggest to um navarro i mean i i i just i'm i'm so angry um the youth that were hurt um in my relative who was shot in the face that that's not even enough money that's not enough i i'm not i'm not okay with that i yield my time thank you madonna katrine followed by leslie hi can you hear me yeah hi thank you just um from a personal perspective real quick i'm a privileged white woman living in san arosa and i am grateful to our youth including my own daughter for shaking me awake from my liberal complacent slumber during the week of so-called civil unrest last summer i'm forever changed because of the courageous and bold voices and actions of the youth who took to the streets of san arosa and i'm proud to walk and stand with them anytime i personally know youth who were tear gas kettled dragged out of their cars zip tied and arrested while trying to get home after distributing water to protesters the cost of a few broken windows pales in comparison to the grave injuries inflicted on protesters like marcus redbear martinez and mikaela stax by local law enforcement so listening to the special session yesterday i was deeply disappointed with how quickly the city council breathed through their human rights commission report with no questions and instead focused on the pandering presentations by oir and hillard heinzer this flies in the face of the gravity of the human rights violations committed by s srp d and srp d and chief navarro that um chief navarro continues to refuse to acknowledge so and while the efforts of the community engagement initiative are well in tension and i want to say i really appreciate the work of magali and danielle their sincerity and i acknowledge the importance of community outreach i completely agree with the previous callers and i have to say forgive me it feels a little bit like putting lipstick on a pig we don't need pretty band aids to placate the community um in the context of the atrocities that have been committed we need radical change we need true civilian oversight for all law enforcement in sonoma county including srp d we need to ban the use of tear gas and rubber bullets we need to follow the recommendations of the sonoma county human rights commission we need accountability from chief navarro and srp d for the violations that occurred and finally we need to defund the police and invest our tax dollars in actual public safety measures like mental health support housing education and racial justice enough is enough thank you i yield my time thank you we'll go to leslie followed by lori good morning um my name is leslie graves i'm the chair of the community advisory board uh i'm appearing here this morning as a private citizen of san rosa i want to thank you again for having this study session i don't want to reiterate the the calls for action but i believe that those calls for action that you've been hearing this morning um and the urgency around them are important what i do want to bring attention to and i want to thank council member vitoria phleming for asking about policy and systemic change i want to um respond to that by saying that we need to remove the barriers of community members that are that uh are now being faced for participation in policy matters um i know that there are good many community members that want to be more involved but their time is valuable i want to point out that 280 people were engaged in these listening sessions i think that more could have been engaged and would have come to listening sessions if things like a stipend and k would have been part of uh part of the system i think that starting with the civilian oversight committee that needs to be uh brought together as soon as possible and with the hiring of an auditor for the police department that that community oversight committee members need to know that a stipend is available so that it breaks down the barriers to participating we want to see people of all backgrounds and for that committee to be completely inclusive i realize that there is going to be a report by the police chief coming up and we might get into a little bit of talk about the new police chief ambassador team i would call for a stop action on the police chief ambassador team a police the civilian oversight committee takes precedence and we need that action faster and more urgent for that committee to be formed i i will go ahead and give my time to others but please do hear from the community that action is really important i i really want to see some action coming out of these study sessions as far as bringing it back to staff to bring them to a council meeting very soon as to see things like the ban on gas and munitions an auditor being hired and a civilian oversight committee thank you so much thank you madam chair lori followed by allegra can hear me yep we can hear you great um my name is lori anderson and i really appreciate the attention and consideration of the council members and especially other folks who have offered their super important beliefs and anecdotes and public comment um most of my comments are going to center around uh yesterday's reports while i find the community engagement work i really appreciate the sincere efforts um there but find it less important than the reports that i was able to tune into yesterday um i can't help but be a bit disturbed by the contract between what we heard in the human rights commission presentation and the other two um even so much of what i heard in the second presentation was also super scary albeit dulled by fancier vocabulary part of what i heard for example is that during the summer protests the srpd sent officers out to police the protest with an unknown number of dangerous projectiles that it did not keep track of um before during or after with proper reporting uh furthermore the sergeants in charge of overseeing this action were also deploying these unaccounted work projectiles so this alone is terrifying and shows an ineptitude that should really give us pause and even it pales in comparison to the real harm caused by the srpd to folks in our community um injury to and traumatization of individuals were and are real and i'd appreciate the council acknowledging that by giving equal if not more airtime and precedence in these presentations and in these resolution processes to the points of view of those people who were injured and traumatized i appreciate the incorporation of contracted experts and i want to see immediate change from mr. Navarro and the srpd i i hope i can trust that taking tear gas and these projectiles out of the rotation are necessary and immediate steps but i think from council on a higher level what i'm looking for is the response that acknowledges the humanity of the folks you're representing um i wanted to also address the line of questioning that i believe council member flaming brought up yesterday which is why a curfew was declared in santa rosa in the first place if we are and i hope we are at a place where we can acknowledge that the murder of george floyd was and is unjust and unacceptable therefore warranting outrage especially on the part of folks who are victims of systemic oppression and law enforcement and other aspects of society if we have that common understanding why weren't these protesters supported and kept safe for as long as they saw fit to demonstrate peacefully so to make a big show a force of that opportunity by declaring the curfew um sorry hold on one second uh by declaring the curfew um and by enforcing it um with tear gas projectiles and then arrest with inadequate safety during the pandemic it's upsetting to say the least so frankly it's hard to come up with any other reason for it aside from purposefully intimidating people who were and are rightfully upset about the injustices perpetrated and glossed over by institutions by the police um so i appreciate you the council for taking time and care with these issues and i trust you to take definitive action in both the short and long term and uh with that i will be done thanks thank you lori colin followed by noah hi can you hear me yep hi my name is colin uh i'm a santa rosa resident um so i mean i echo the things that everyone else has said as well um but i specifically kind of wanted to to ask about a particular section um i've been going to these encampment clearings in santa rosa and abroad pretty much every week now for the last few months and um it's exhausting um it's it's terrifying it's incredibly upsetting and i notice in your community discussion on uh houselessness um which unfortunately i i missed the section where you discussed that this morning so um feel free to let me know if there's just something i missed there but um i mean i would i would first like to know if that discussion included members of our houseless community um and asking them what they think would help for their community um but i also notice like there's discussion in there about cahoots which is great i'm really looking forward to seeing the implementation of that program in santa rosa um but i think a discussion also needs to be had about just stopping sweeps in general i understand that there are a number of places that camps crop up that are then become public safety hazards because folks are in the street and there's some concern about vehicles you know drivers not being careful enough into hitting people who are just trying to sleep who are just trying to live their lives um but i think that is something that seems to be missing from the the published report at least that i read that indicates that uh suggested action is to work more with heap and with cahoots on these issues and it seems like a discussion about stopping the sweeps at all is severely lacking um there are a number of places that people live that are public safety hazards there were people living in historical fire areas across santa rosa um which would be a public safety issue for them as well moving forward and you don't see the city coming in to evict them in the same way that the city comes into evict camps every week um it just needs to stop okay thank you colin we'll go to noah followed by sarah can you hear me yep all right i want to uplift the speakers before who spoke to many of the same points that i will be reiterating and i want to especially uplift the fact that one of the speaker's name that we are on southern polo land and i think that should be brought before the council before public comment fundamentally stop being performative this runs deeper than just asks for participation and further labor from black indians people of color in our community in a system that already alienates them this runs as deep as the bloodshed of our own police department this runs as deep as the pockets of white and wealthy county decision makers who ignore marginalized people a few low riders and inadequate ethnic studies with armed officers prowling over students is an insult to the collective intelligence of this town we've been saying the same thing for a year a whole year where the police have proven themselves to be only increasingly violent images mean nothing if our community is suffering under police oppression PR means nothing and instead of taking that suffering seriously we heard protesters get vilified and systemic issues distorted into a narrative of a few bad actors yesterday if anyone on this council doesn't know this phrase by now a single sentence which has been carried predominantly by women and trans and queer people of color throughout santa rosa learn it no good cops in a racist system think about how many millions this council hands to police how many meals could that buy for struggling families in a pandemic how many shelves in the rosalind library with that fill with books tidbits do this community a favor and actually engage with anti-racism before you open your mouth we will not accept a single dollar more towards police departments we will not accept the vilification of youth of color we will not accept mass evictions of unsheltered people who it is this council's duty to shelter they will not accept propaganda from cops given more credibility than the lived experiences of trauma of young people and black indigenous people of color organizers disarm defund and dismantle srpd reinvest in communities of color listen to us i yield my time thank you noah sarah followed by a rose oh yes okay so uh it seems like y'all are really set on not listening to people and i'm really tired of repeating the same thing so i'm just gonna let stevie address this issue for y'all all right thank you so much sarah we've got to wrap up we'll go to a rose followed by pamela hi can you hear me yep hi my name's alissa after seven hours of listening in the last 24 hours i echo what i've heard from the majority of our community members who have been listening we are tired of platitudes and band-aids we don't need soccer games we need to ban tear gas rubber bullets we need to defund the srpd and at the very least at the very least we need to change in leadership and the removal of navarro and esic who have proven that they cannot effectively protect our community we need to defund our police not add additional funds for higher up officers i'm shocked but not surprised at how you breezed over the human rights commission report yesterday and while i appreciate seeing more engagement this morning with janielle and me golly thank you so much for both of your time i want to hear from each of you on the council about that human rights report now that you've had time to sit overnight with your missteps and how you dealt with it yesterday we want to hear from you and jack tidbits every comment that i've heard from you in the last two days has been so far out of touch with what is actually going on that you are clearly blatantly ignoring and glossing over our community trauma and pandering to your privileged white constituents i yield the rest of my time thank you alissa pamela followed by alan hi thank you for this opportunity to speak um i am a 50 year old white woman from santa rosa who has a house that i own so i have a lot of privilege here i'm educated um but i want to be an ally for those folks who are out on the street and i join them and i walk side by side with them and i was even almost hit by a white suv with my daughters at one of those protests um last summer um and i feel very strongly that if this is a true community empowerment session i want to talk about power and i want to talk about community because if you are you trying to really empower or make people feel empowered that's different to have authentic empowerment means that you are being vulnerable you are being humble and you are saying you know the police have too much power and our communities don't and so let's not have a performative situation where we want people to feel heard let's actually have them be heard and make policies that actually bring more power economic power opportunity power voices being heard and acted on in our government that would be really democratic wouldn't it that would really be empowering and in fact it would be safer let's face it if you want to hold people down have bullies with power alerting over them so people don't feel safe that's not a safe situation let's have public safety not instead of enforcement let's have a place where every life is valued let's truly value the people who live in santa rosa no matter who you are no matter if you have a roof over your head or not and that's what i'd like to see i love the idea of magali of having these vistas helping um in the community within with training and community empowerment in fact i think each uh city council member should have a team of six or ten of these helping them understand who is living in your district and how you can really be listening and really acting on the needs and desires and interests of your people that you represent lastly i'd like to advocate for a public parking area for RVs and vans and tents fully accessible with some toilets and showers and trash receptacles for those who do not have permanent homes it's not illegal to be homeless but it is hard to be homeless and we need to help those people more and provide a place for them to put these vehicles i heal the rest of my time thank you pamela alan followed by veronica uh can you hear me yep we can hear you alan okay thank you for allowing me to speak and uh i leave this on behalf of the community appreciated alan veronica followed by concerned citizen saying or good afternoon and i just wanted to thank you guys for having this forum i'm a 60 year old this year latina spent 40 years in santa rosa i'm a homeowner i'm a 32 year 32 year civil servant and i spent 3.5 years on cab and i was very proud of the work we did and i have to give a big shout out to danielle and to magali for the doing such a big job with no resources you guys lead on volunteers to do community engagement and we're volunteers we've given hours on top of hours to send out messages and to go do things and do this do that and it's like if you really value community engagement you're going to put your money where your mouth is and give the magali in this division some resources and some money in a bigger budget because if you want to hear the community and you really value community engagement you got to run this department it is you can't expect two people to do this huge job if you really value community engagement you're going to fund this department in a bigger way that was my biggest frustration with being on cap it's like we were expected to do so much and you guys rely on the work and you appreciate it you talk about how you really want this you really want that and we hear from all these departments and we're giving you we're a sounding board and which i enjoyed that time but it was a it was a lot of work so anyway that's one point and as far as community engagement is like who is the equity officer i'll look search the whole santo's the city website this morning i could not find a name for that person the person was prior to march who is that person who's on ccat we talk about ccat i applied for that i was told i was not going to be on it but i don't know who was on it who was on it is it anywhere listed somewhere on the website i i'm like if community engagement and educating the the public on how city government works you guys got to put it out there i hear about it on this forum but it's like i can't find it on the website and i'm pretty resourceful i can find quite a bit of stuff um i i just want to add thank to just thank daniel amigale for the enormous amount of work that they do with one hand tied behind the back so support them give them a bigger budget give them some money to actually have real staff work in to do some of these things that you guys say that you value as a city council thank you thank you for onica we'll go to concerned citizen followed by alias time but i just wanted to say that i felt like these last three days you guys um completely defeated the purpose of this meeting i didn't hear much talked about the brutality to the protesters it was more about the personal property and i feel like we accomplished anything here except for once again we're back to beg you guys i'm tired of begging i'm a person i'm a citizen and i'm a county member i don't understand how cheap it is still here when he constantly comes to the meeting to make some mockery of him he leaves and comes as he wants and then yesterday to the barrow said that he had enough money to test the rape kids he published that and he's not just saying anything the cover is at i'm personally sick of it thank you for your comments alias followed by elizabeth yeah can you hear me yep yeah so following up on my sister jelly yeah uh you know i appreciate the work that went into this presentation but in all honestly you know we're here for we're here for accountability and you know possible solution maybe some of the police department can uh funnel some of their money to this office of community engagement or to the office of equity or more importantly what i would favor is funds being diverted to the affinity groups and the neighborhoods associated with the victims of these past attacks from these protests to repair the relationship that is currently broken and the and you know we understand the chief has a hard road of making examples out of these officers that have belonged people's body parts i mean damn near off and and that's the type of healing we're looking for for example some of the solutions that look uh we're spoken about with the restorative justice thing healing requires action and accountability and you know what someone needs to someone needs to get fired you know someone needs to lose a pension because that's what accountability looks like and that's what people are looking for we the people must be assured that if something wants to happen to them or a loved one someone's going to be held accountable and the type of accountability must be serious because that's how you create a culture of accountability and respect and to the chief we understand you are up against powerful unions state and federal bodies that may honestly lead to them not supporting you in the future but you have an obligation to the people that so that supported you and are looking and looking up to you to make an example of these officers that shocked people's body parts off you know and i use that word to really understand that's what we're dealing with and these things are the things that were discussed yesterday about i had never seen the word unintentional typed in a presentation so many times these things were not and these things were not unintentional these were targets shot in certain people's body parts people's growing people's heads i mean that's a small area people got a target so we're not dumb and we expect accountability i knew the rest of my time thank you alias elizabeth followed by zyra good afternoon city council um can you hear me yep go ahead thank you well um after listening to the public comment that has come before me um the report that was given out today that was very thoughtfully prepared by magali and danielle thank you very much for doing all of that hard work on getting in touch with your community um and seeking those solutions to um to restore um to hopefully restore the trust that your community is is having a hard time to restore with the srpd i might recommend too that we need to take a couple steps back because trust cannot be even talked about yet unless there is accountability and unless these you know the atrocities that happened last summer are addressed and more listening sessions more additional time for um you know we're sorry we made a mistake um and lending out a hand because let just trust us to do our job but the job was not done correctly the first time or even worse so let's think about that and also referring back to page 26 of the human rights commission report the recommendations put before our commission accountability okay i'll bullet point that one highlight accountability of the srpd for the inhumane treatment of peaceful protesters and also if we're asking for more money for the pd then maybe let's consider banning the use of the military grade weaponry that is not required for our city and like the last speaker said mr alias it's really funny to use the word unintentional when you hold such weapon and perhaps even that appetite for power to shoot projectiles towards a direction of a group of protesters where you know there were young people people of color children even how is it unintentional to fire projectile and these tear gas and and whatnot into a crowd of people i asked for humanity too when thinking about what moral compass you might have please consider this and please again read the report from the human rights commission in its entirety i'm pointing to page 26 section 4 and take those recommendations to heart thank you elizabeth syrah followed by ava hey everyone thank you so much so i echo what everyone had already said and those recommendations on the human rights commission should definitely be looked at and sincerely considered and it sounds like your community is wanting you as leaders to put in the work and not just checkboxes this is why representation matters because the reality is as white people you don't experience racism or systemic oppression and learning about racism and systemic oppression is actually a privilege that you all have this isn't meant to be an attack it's just you have to acknowledge that you represent a system that for centuries have oppressed marginalized communities so when community comes at you it's not about you it's the system that you represent it's a system that is flawed so for trust to happen your community is asking for transparency to data and accountability again i want to thank councilmember fleming for asking about policy within the e o department we also have to recognize about tokenization and gatekeeping because most of those folks are going to be safe why are they safe they're safe because you don't want confrontation and you don't like when people rock the boat that needs to stop um so also you need to stop reinventing the wheel there are resources like nonprofits such as nb op lsp kura project the junior commission human rights sonoma county black coalition lgbtq connections positive images sonoma county acts of kindness for unhoused communities sonoma county tenant union as well as the api communities and that's just to name a few because organizers save lives so this is going to take a lot of time it's going to take years and this is going to be something that you need to acknowledge that you are working on undoing centuries of oppression this isn't within a you know a flick this is going to take years so therefore you need to have to spend time in undoing these things so if you want policy interaction don't include policing your community engagement reimagine your tax dollars create a civilian oversight committee which can't be done because petaluma has done it i sit on that ad hoc committee and thankfully our city was smart enough to hire a de and i consultant tracy web who is a black woman to ensure that we are creating a culture for racial equity justice is keeping our black and brown communities alive so we also uh that's all i wanted to give tonight and appreciate the fact thanks so much thank you xyra and that's the last live hand i see us we'll go to voicemail pre-recorded public comments for this item there there were no voicemail public comments for item 5.1 great i'll go ahead bring it back to council then uh there was in particular there was one question that uh was asked about who our new eeo uh officer is uh that's sequoro sheels and i know that uh she is working her way into the job and is looking forward to getting out and engaging folks i am working with the community engagement department even more so i did want to mention that there's also a question about the the ccat who serves on that i'm actually gonna hold that that question the next presentation is from the chief of police i know we'll go over that and so we can talk about that as well uh and then i'll bring it back for comments from council members again this is a study session so it's an opportunity to provide direction to staff uh on next steps uh council member fleming thank you mayor i uh appreciate the opportunity to give feedback on a couple of things one is that um i'm you know and i understand that staffing is limited and i encourage um our our council and uh city management to look at ways to to increase funding um to make the playing field more equitable in terms of community engagement and in the same bread i encourage our community engagement team to look for existing opportunities within the organizational structure because as has been made abundantly clear government does not work um super quickly even though individuals like yourselves work really um really efficiently we're gonna need to to look at collaborations um hopefully with our new equity officer and um with our police department and you know i want to say to the community i hear really clearly what you're saying about the structure being difficult for people to engage with when you know people are working a lot and taking care of small children and um these positions are are not paid and it's something that is systemic throughout the policy side of the shop of the city it's it doesn't end with you know it includes the city council as well and and how and who is able to participate and so you know the the overwhelming thing i heard from the community today is that policy is the next step for us and so to that end i'm really hopeful and excited to work with our community and our community engagement team on determining next steps and i implore you to use the public safety subcommittee to help us um revision what public safety means and and how to best accommodate um and engage our community in a way that public safety can take on a meaning that goes beyond policing and goes to assuring that that safe participation in in daily living is assured for all who reside visit and work in in the city of Santa Rosa so again i really appreciate not just the work of the community engagement team but the everybody in the community shows up to do this work i hear loud and clear that this is difficult and traumatic for many of you and so i i just want to acknowledge that it takes a lot to show up here and to put yourselves out and i'm deeply appreciative thank you councilmember councilmember tidbits thank you mayor i just wanted to go through and give my comments um you know i'm one of the things that i definitely want to support uh for the office of engagement is the crisis declaration the public safety excuse me public health declaration of crisis around racism in senate bill 17 um i do want to support increasing the budget for the engagement department to you know do some of that that initial outreach work that uh janielle magali brought up putting in the foundation to have more input um as far as something else that was brought up that i actually thought was interesting and it something i'll probably bring up in the next presentation assuming we get into more policy conversations but about kind of a restorative justice model or restorative justice circle and what role does that have um and if i answer all the questions mayor i think that it was really those two was it not uh yeah i think there was the lingering question also about sp17 yeah i so supporting that as well janielle magali did you need anything else okay councilmembers what helm thank you mr mayor um you know it's interesting having been with the city for a while the um we never moved fast enough for all the events that are coming but i know magali's current position you're the third occupant of that chair it wasn't created until after the open government task force that was just uh recommendations remain 2014 so is it fast enough to anyone's liking absolutely not but we are making progress and even just the investment that the city and this city council has made in the seed collaborative which i think is foundational and that's again why i was asking what are some of those specific um objectives that will be participating how do we embed this in the organization that doesn't happen overnight and again i think we've heard and i'm very supportive we need to give our employees and our community time to hear learn and make those changes to make this better inclusive community for all um additionally with our eo officer new shields i'm really anxious to hear her perspective on many of these things and that's she's been an employee here since march of 21 so i'm anxious to get that information to see how we can start prioritizing that essential work for the city of santa rosa mr mayor for the two questions that you asked i think was on slide nine the clear racism is a public health crisis in santa rosa absolutely supportive of that but i'm also interested in hearing more information about it because i think uh it's easy to say yes it's a public health crisis but what are we going to do what are the investments are we going to be doing um about that so i don't want this just to be a check the box we've declared it as a public health crisis but what proactive steps are we going to take to make a difference same thing with sb 17 i'd like to hear more information about what are the impacts what we can do what can we do other than just saying yes check the box we were supportive of it but how do we embed it in our culture and the steps of the operation city of santa rosa thanks thank you council member council member alvarez thank you mayor in regards to increasing the funding uh to empower our community absolutely i would like to see that happen in regards to our mission statement i believe one of the words was diversity amongst others uh my god if you would like to touch on that and what with the other uh changes that you want to see to the mission statement i believe as well as the health crisis declaration but also equating what what council member swallown just stated that it just can't be words it has to be what we do afterwards and i am interested in and what is what is what is happening with the police auditor and how to move that forward one of the things that i hear from the community is is that we that we that we speak a lot about empowering the community but yet we we haven't put those tools into place all right madame city clerk are we ready to resume yes we are all right let's go ahead and call the roll council member tibbetz here council member here council member soyer here council member fleming here council member alvarez vice mayor rogers president mayor rogers here let the record show that all council members are present great thank you so much we'll go on to item 5.2 item 5.2 police reform updates chief navarro leading us off good morning mayor rogers and members of the city council sorry about the delay it goes off when it when i rejoin here um brainer navarro chief of police captain cregan captain lichville and i will be presenting this item uh before we start uh it's important to again go through uh some comments i know some of this may be a little repetitive from yesterday but i'm not sure uh who who wasn't watching yesterday and um i feel it's really important to make sure that we're setting the stage uh but today we will be addressing the recommendations found in the independent reports related to last summer's protest and provide an update on the actionable steps the police department is taken in regard to each of the recommendations i'll also outline the actions of the police department which we have taken or will be working toward related to reform measures in building community trust the um the violent protests last summer were an extraordinary and prolonged event for our community and at times very overwhelming for our officers many many communities throughout our nation including ours have never experienced this level of unlawful acts as the peaceful protests turned violent uh during the during the evening hours we did promise to conduct a comprehensive review and provide a detailed report into the protest and although it's been almost a year we did take immediate action to begin evaluating our process and response and we didn't wait for the official reports to come out again i want to reiterate that both consultants had our full cooperation both hillard hinds and the oir group were provided unfettered access to the police department staff our reports policies hundreds of hours of body work camera footage our officers as noted in both the after action and the use of forest reports experience unlawful activity and assaults as the nights wore on not only to themselves but also to the businesses which were looted and vandalized and our community members both demonstrators and bystanders who were assaulted our use of force was in response to the assault of behavior within the crowds after the initial demonstrators left we had inadequate staffing which led to expanded control issues and officers being on the line for expiry extended period of time without a break although most of our officers uh and use of although most of our use of force and the actions were within policy and professional there were several incidents in which we made serious errors we are here to discuss those concerns and how we move forward and get better there was not enough staff we failed to control unauthorized munitions from getting in the field which was ultimately deployed and there was significant injury which could have been prevented i was part of several of the listening sessions that occurred over this last year and i heard the distrust and the concern over law enforcement and the need for reforms i also heard the desire to work with us to overcome these concerns and and the request for more officers in some neighborhoods and more opportunities to engage with officers in a positive setting i am fully committed to making sure there are mistakes noted in these reports will not be repeated and at the best practices we employ to limit issues and continue will continue and are going to be expanded into the future this afternoon we will walk through each of the recommendations by the consultant and the work we are doing in response to the community empowerment plan and the listening sessions as we do i'm sure there's going to be a lot of questions we've separated this to in different segments captain cregan will provide a response to the oir report which will be followed by captain litchfield and our response to the after action report and there may be specific questions related to those but then after that i'll come back and i'll talk about our community of some of the things going on with from our community empowerment strategy and summarize what you've heard and then we will have an opportunity to ask questions after that so with that i will turn it over to captain cregan thank you thank you good afternoon mayor and council and especially members of our community have joined us today um so if we can go to the next slide i'm going to go over the oir group report and i'm the captain who manages our special services division so the special services division incorporates our investigations bureau our hiring and recruitment and then an important part of this presentation which is our professional standards team which investigates all citizen complaints and officer misconduct cases and this team worked very closely with steve connelly and mike genocco from oir group we provided hundreds of hours of body-worn camera footage to oir group all police reports they set in on our administrative investigations involving these officers they directly asked the officer's questions they met week after week with myself and other members of our command staff team as we received feedback from them they were part of our decisions on the discipline on these cases and we came to agreement on all the discipline and on our findings on these administrative investigations but out of the report as we heard yesterday they delivered seven key recommendations and we've been going over those recommendations and i'm going to share with you some of our first steps toward making some reforms based on those recommendations and then talk about the pathways we continue to see community and city leadership correspondence and work with this as we develop on this to develop this even further so we can go to the first slide for the first recommendation so the first recommendation that we had in the oir group report is right here in the top and it's talking about the department's planning and messaging the personnel and our supervisor follow-up and the key part of this is improving our methods for appropriately and timely documenting and reviewing all uses of force and to be very clear for counsel we have an extensive policy already in place for investigating and reporting uses of force our policy now is as soon as an officer can safely contact the supervisor after forces use they have to immediately contact the supervisor and advise them that force has been used then the protocol is that the supervisor actually responds to the scene and they assess the use of force as soon as practical and be able to view it in the field and that incorporates talking to the officer who deployed the force and used the force talking to the individual the force was employed against and determined they can get a voluntary statement from that individual about what led up to the force and and any witnesses that may be on the scene the sergeant then reviews the report that's later written by that officer and reviews the body worn camera footage to be able to see if that force was applied legally and within our policy that sergeant then completes a use of force review form that we have that goes through a series of steps that the sergeant needs to determine again if this was within policy and within the law and if there are any training methods that need to be incorporated to assist that officer or other members of our organization then we have a second stage review where a lieutenant who oversees the patrol teams reviews again the body worn camera footage and goes through that use of force investigation so those first two levels of review would happen on every use of force that's documented by the santa rosa police department what the oir group pointed out is some of these mechanisms weren't able to be followed in the setting of these large crowd control situations where multiple officers were out on the scene as we talked about clearly multiple applications of force were applied throughout the week and it made it difficult to follow that of having a supervisor stop what was going on and obviously be able to talk to people where the force was used against so what we're looking at is incorporating some mechanisms where we still can have that use of force review some of those things that are outlined here as us starting with our in our incident action plan and the incident action plan is at the beginning of every pre-planned event that happens where we have a team who outlines who the supervisors are in charge some of the basic rules of engagement for our staff some of the safety plans and and talks about the use of force application and goes over some of our policies but this is where we want to be able to go over some of this stuff and discuss some of the big changes that we're going to talk about today about that we've already made in our use of force policy with restricting when less lethal devices can be used with having more oversight on the deployment of gas and less lethal munitions another key part when we'll be looking at other agencies across california and what they're doing is implementing the safety or compliance supervisors that we're going to have out in the field now again this is going to be one of the key triggers for this is having the staffing to allow this to occur and last time that was something that we saw throughout the week was quickly running out of supervisors and staff to be able to fill some of these roles but we want to be able to work toward is having a plan so these compliance supervisors and their key role is going to be in the field through the monitoring the deployment and the use of all force and the actions that are our officers to make sure that they're staying within the bounds of our policies within the law and with the direction by the supervisors who are managing that event and that's going to be one of the key things that I think is going to be in addition and it's really going to be able to help address some of the key community concerns that were brought up and concerns that were brought up through our after action report and the oir group report so this is something that we're going to be working and we'll continue to educate our community and our city leaders on how we implement this program and identify the supervisors for that role can we go to the next slide please so this one talks again and the first three recommendations all have a common theme and this one is talking about supervisors staying in traditional functions and to not actually be stepping out of their supervisor roles and starting applying force so I are brought up a group brought up some examples where supervisors were supervising the officers who were on the scene but due to the lack of available resources stepped into the additional role and actually deployed force themselves and supervisors are of course all trained to deploy force and are authorized to use force but what our hope is that they're able to stay in their role of supervising the event and monitoring what the force is being used and making sure that we're having discretion and applying some of our core de-escalation techniques that are core part of our training and part of our protocols here at the police department this again comes down to having the staff to be able to properly fill each one of the roles that we have for these overwhelming events such as large-scale protests that were spread out among different geographical areas in the city some of the other things as us incorporating into our interaction plan into our briefings about ensuring that the lieutenants and sergeants who are out in the field when they see supervisors stepping out of that role to take action and we've talked about in our policies about a duty to intervene when we see uses of force and we actually have that incorporated currently in two of our policies both in our code of conduct and in our use of force policy about ensuring that not only supervisors but every officer in our organization has that duty to intercede when they see other officers who aren't following policies or are stepping out of our guidelines that we train our officers for can we go to the next slide please this one is talking about and this came back to an OIR provided us some some critical feedback on having our training supervisors and our professional standard staff who were out in the field and in some cases deployed force within the professional standards team and the training sergeants they're part of our internal review process and that brought up a cure conflict for the OIR group of saying you can't have people who are using force in the field who are then part of the process overall of reviewing the use of force and we agree with that so we're taking steps to be able to make sure that doesn't occur and we had we built in follow-up protocols within the use of force here where we have the professional standards lieutenant was going over those those and the professional standards lieutenant was not using force in the field and was able to review all of the uses of force including those employed by the supervisors but this is where we feel like a key role for that professional standard sergeant and the training sergeant is to be able to step in as those compliance officers they have the training and the expertise and it's in their purview of their current work to be able to step into that role and to be able to ensure that we're able to report at the end of these events that we're complying with the needs of our community complying with the needs of our policies and the law and be able to report back some of the at the end of the day which i'll believe will to be a market difference in our response to protest going forward can we go to our recommendation number four the next slide so this is a key one and we started laying some of this groundwork today with the office of community engagement and the things that would be done and they are a group gave the recommendation of us working with our community and having honest and open conversations about when and whether we should deploy less lethal munitions and crowd control situations and this is something that we've begun some of this work but it's clear that there's still work to be done and we heard feedback over the last year and especially yesterday and today and these community listening sessions here and with our city council and the frustrations and the anger from our community were probable we heard those and we're sitting here listening as command staff understanding that changes need to be made and we can give you a firm commitment that the santa rosa police department is committed to making some of those changes now the pathway to getting there is working with continuing to work with our office of community engagement and uh migale tell us and the rest of her team to be able to work with some of our community grassroots organizations members of our bicoch community uh some of the faith-based organizations and other in our community so we're able to get what is the expectations of our community but also we're going to work with some of our business owners and talk to our small business owners in downtown santa rosa who were affected by this and get their feedback on this process and we're going to talk to city staff members who were out on this process and how they were involved in this and i think it's important for us to holistically bring all these groups together and have genuine and honest conversations so we can talk about where do we want to see going forward with our use of less lethal munitions and how can we do it to be able to protect all in our community another key factor would be on that and we talked about this a little bit in the earlier presentation but it was our work with seed collaborative and we've begun our meetings with seed collaborative where we're looking at creating an equitable policing plan for the police department and for our city and that's going to incorporate of us getting the additional feedback from our community i'm our police department liaison for that team and we set up a core group of stakeholders within the department that are representing our hiring and our recruitment and our training and our community engagement we've met twice already with socorro shills our new equity officer to be able to evolve her with the process and look how we can get input on our hiring and our training and our recruitment and our policies going forward so i'm excited to see what we can get out of the seed collaborative effort and be able to bring a substantive plan back to our city council and to our community and be able to incorporate some of that feedback chief navar will talk later in the presentation about the chief's community ambassador program the ccat team and how we're going to use that as key stakeholders from our community to be able to provide feedback on some of these changes that we can be made and i think this is going to be in the months going forward something that we're putting a lot of effort to in working with not just these three organizations we mentioned here but with many more organizations and we want to be able to receive that so for community members today we'd love for you to reach out you can reach out to me or other members of our organization to be part of those conversations we'll be working with the human rights commission and other people who have given rather critical feedback and that's the feedback that we need we don't we want to be able to hear how can we make some of these changes and um and what i can assure you right now is that we're hearing this and we are going to see changes going forward including the ones that have already been made as of today we'll of course be working with the city council public safety subcommittee and frequently providing public feedback and presentations on the progress that we've made and continuing to seek feedback both from the community and from our city leaders on how we can look at policy changes organizational changes as we go forward next slide please now this is another one that came up and we've heard this over the last couple days and through i through the oir reports but it's talking about when we're actually declaring an unlawful assembly and it's important for everyone understand that many of these interactions were starting around 12 12 30 in the afternoon and for 10 to 12 hours peaceful protests occurred and people were able to exercise their first amendment rights and be able to express their frustrations with some of the societal issues and policing issues in america and that was done safely and done without breaking any laws or without any violence to others but then there's a clear distinction that later in the night and this was most nights around 11 30 to past midnight at night where then that's when you started to see some of the violent behavior and some of the actions that took place and that's when an unlawful assembly was declared which serves the law allows us to do and then in that case is when we started doing the announcements and using this enhanced loud speaking device but what we heard from some of the feedback from oir group and from some of our community that the devices we had weren't loud enough to be able to provide clear direction and so what we did was an invested in this device that is used by agencies across the nation which greatly enhances our ability to be able to communicate with the crowd and what we want to do is make sure they understand that there's a lawful order at that time to disperse that they clearly understand why the lawful order is based on and that they have a clear direction that they can safely exit and be able to leave the area before there's any type of arrest made or before there's any type of force used and all those things so it allows us to pre-record messages in english and spanish that we can provide to our community and it also allows the tactical commander on that scene that day to be able to continue to provide updates and provide specific instructions depending upon the intersection or location that there are that device we're going to talk about and we've already developed a policy on there were some community members who expressed some concern about using that device and some of the alert and warning tones that could be used on that we have a policy that we've already addressed that restricts the use of that device in those matters is going to be focused on giving just be able to clear and loud direction to our community so they understand where to go and what the instructions are so that's a key step that we've made going forward in this and i think it's going to be able to help us that everyone on the street and in that crowd understands and this is only going to be used on those rare cases that it is declared an unlawful assembly and that's something that we're really going to take a lot of restraint and being able to declare those but at times and places it may result in that we have to do that we can go to the next slide please this is another one that talks about just the the critical importance importance of getting our community feedback so the last one talked about with the engagement of our less lethal munitions which was our 40 millimeter uh less lethal launchers that we use during the crowd control situations the second one is talking about here with the tear gas deployment and that again is going to be a key part of us working with our office of community engagement seed collaborative our ccat team the human rights commission and other local nonprofits and community-based organizations to get their feedback upon when that should be used and when it shouldn't be used and to make it clear uh that there's going to be restrictions on that and the clear community feedback we heard about the restraint that should be used and the use of those devices in our community again we'll be reporting back to our city council safety public safety subcommittee and be able to give them clear and public direction on the policy changes that have been made and continuing to get that feedback from our community as we develop these policies if we go to our next recommendation on the next slide so this was a critical one and this is some of the most stinging criticism that we received throughout this process and this was in the in truly the in its in excusable actions of barricade rounds being introduced in a crowd control situation to give a little bit of clarity in that the the barricade round is used for when someone may be quote-unquote barricaded in a room and may have a hostage in a house or be held in there and it is designed to go through windows or holocore doors and it introduces a cs gas into that environment they are not designed and absolutely should not be used in a crowd control situation and are not designed as a direct impact weapon on an individual the unfortunate circumstance is that some of these munitions were mixed in with the less lethal rounds they look strikingly similar especially at night but we've taken substantial steps to make sure this never occurs in our community again uh first of all is identifying there was only a very limited amount of these barricade rounds that we had in possession they've all been located and identified and removed from the less lethal munitions storage area so there's no possibility they could ever be mixed in with those again we've done extensive department training to understand that our staff at all levels understands and recognizes what these barricade rounds are and understanding that they aren't used in a crowd control setting we've worked with our mobile field force and our SWAT team members on the importance of each one of these members understanding munition identification and each one of these individuals has a responsibility to be aware and know what is in the launcher that they're using and to not deploy that if there's any doubt on the round and we've taken any steps to be able to make sure that happens and then we've taken administrative steps to create a new munitions inventory document and this dives into some of the earlier recommendations of having a better accountability with the rounds that are deployed and the rounds that are used in the field and at the end of the event to be able to count those rounds and to be able to have an accurate reflection of the rounds that were deployed and that's something that is management that we recognize more needed to be done there wasn't enough training and communication about these barricade rounds and it was clear that the officers who use those rounds had no idea that what they were firing and that's something that we take upon management that was a failure and steps that we've taken to ensure that it never happens again and this munitions inventory process I believe is really going to bring some clarity to that and make sure that there's tracking and clear accountability of the rounds that are deployed in the field so this is a brief overview of the seven recommendations that we receive from the OIR group we're going to continue to work as our complete our police command staff team to continue to hear this community feedback and to see more changes that come from this but already in the next presentation is going to dive a little deeper with captain litchfield talking more detail about the policy changes that were made with our less lethal munitions deployment and with our use of force policy and some of the other changes so that'll get a little bit deeper into the details this was more just a broad overview about some of the feedback received and what our pathway is to making some of these substantive changes so if you have any questions directly related to the OIR group report I'll be able to answer that if not I believe some more of the clarity is going to be provided in captain litchfield's presentation which is coming up next all right thank you captain and I'll I'll bring it back to council for questions and I know if other council members are like me they have questions that they're not quite sure if they fit better in the OIR portion or in in captain litchfield's portion um so just bear with us a little bit if there's some overlap here just I'll start with council member tidbits thanks mayor and thank you captain cregan um I had questions particularly about the barricade rounds obviously uh that was our biggest failure uh that night or one of them um but uh you know my question specifically is you know the the it sounds like the two of the same canisters can launch from the same gun if you will um is there you know I I I don't want to necessarily dive into right now you know the efficacy of the barricade around and the role it has uh within our arsenal so to speak that's probably something I'd like to lean on the chief and the public safety committee to talk about first but you know to me it seems like kind of a big just failure in the system to allow to have a weapon that fires two very distinct rounds out of the same barrel is you know is there not something operationally that can be changed to to inch I mean I see that you're making operational changes already that's appreciated but is there something that that can be done about you know having two different distinct colored rifles perhaps I don't know well that's one of the the versatility of this less lethal munition is that it allows you to be able to use tools that are appropriate for the conditions so where we're focusing on is the training and the application and the storage to make sure that doesn't happen and that clearly came back as something that there wasn't enough training on this and there wasn't proper protocols for the storage of those 40 millimeter rounds and I think we've taken substantial changes to make sure that never happens again and we can have some more holistic citywide talks about the appropriateness of of having a barricade round in our arsenal there are times in place that I think that could be a crucial tool to be used for the safety of a community member who may be being held hostage are in some situations but clearly steps need to be taken to make sure and I think the training that's happened in the storage and then the more accountability of the deployment of those rounds some of the things that we're going to do in captain litchfield to be able to to dive a little deeper into this is just really be taking substantive changes toward restricting when 40 millimeters are employed in the field but also of going to this team where instead of um line level officers having a 40 millimeter of only trained individuals and only in restricting that to two per team of the officers and those two are going to be directly supervised by a sergeant who's trained in this and having two of what we call like a grenadier or someone who's been trained and gone to special enhanced training and that greatly restricts the amount of these weapons that are even deployed in the field and then having a supervisor right there and being which one of the theme that we talked about yesterday about being more strategic with the deployment of some of these tools and I think that you'll see through the restriction and who is even uh has these uh launchers in the field having direct supervision over them have an enhanced training and having a more strategic uh approach to the deployment of these tools you're going to see uh substantial changes uh going forward if we have additional uh protests that reach this level here in our community thank you councilmember soyer thank you mayor um and thank you for this for these responses my question has to do with the um communication system the loud speaker and even though this is not necessarily a question around um uh protests um but public safety in general would this device also be able to be used during um other public emergencies like wildfires earthquake just communicating with our community in various uh neighborhoods where um just loud speakers in the patrol cars might not do the trick yeah that's an excellent question councilmember soyer and absolutely will be so it'll be deployed in our fire evacuation uh protocols we can use it on search warrants and we and part of our de-escalation tactics has been not necessarily all going in and busting down doors on search warrants but to do sometimes a surrounding call out where we can use this and have people voluntarily come out of the house so we can um uh reduce the chances of force being used we'll be able to use them in search and rescue operations so other natural disasters so there's there's quite a lot of capabilities we'll be able to use this and it's easy to deploy in the field it's mobile and so i see it more often actually being used in fire evacuations and some of these other events that it actually is used in a crowd control setting that's Danny thank you councilmember squadel thank you mr mayor thank you captain crane for your portion of this presentation i'm just going to go over some of the recommendations i had some questions so the first one was recommendation too that i had a question um and it was about taking steps the second bullet point was taking steps to ensure that lieutenants in the field take action when they observe supervisors and officers stepping out of their expected roles i'm surprised to see that because i thought you know maybe chief this is more of a question for you is that not your expectation of all managers and officers that if they see something inappropriate action or out of the roles that they take action versus just observe it i'm going back to some conversations that i know you and i had during this time frame about the eight can't wait because i was one of those recommended policy procedures so can you clarify for us what your expectations are of all of your organization when they see officers or any employee stepping out of their expected role uh yes that's a very good question so uh we we have we've had a lot of discussions about uh roles and expectations and it is my expectation that if we see if we have supervisors um out in the field that they are they are taking charge and they were making sure that everybody is in a designated role and not stepping into something else so that's an expectation talked about it here and those are things that we're going to be um we're reinforcing uh through our operational plans and make sure that our staff have clear guidelines before they even step into the field when there's a potential demonstration uh or even uh you know even even when we have special events anything that goes on it's important that everybody has clear roles and so um when when when chaos does come does come and and and and things start things start going uh you know not as planned we do have those clear roles and responsibilities uh to people for so people can be um they know what they need to do and they can be supported and just to clarify is that do you have that same expectation of officers because as we all know when we talk about the span of control you're not always going to have a captain lieutenant or sergeant seen do you have that same expectation of officers we're seeing colleagues or peers stepping out of their roles yes it's been it's very clear for officers everybody knows if they see something they need to say something great thank you and then captain craig and on uh recommendation four and five which was the deployment of chemical agents and munitions are are are the sandals of police departments current policies consistent with california police officer standards and training standards yes absolutely and one of the things we've done since these protests so we didn't wait for the oir group or the after action so actually in october of this year and um captain litchfield will go into a little bit more detail with that made some pretty significant changes so the deployment of our less lethal and that policy went into effect in october and he'll be able to dive a little deeper into some of those details next okay that may be okay we'll get some more there this may be for you too chief then on that same question regarding um all of sonoma county agencies when we have mutual aid are the all the agency's policies when it comes to uh chemical agents and less lethal munitions consistent from your understanding at this point yeah it's another really good question so uh most of the agencies are um they work with a private company called lexical and uh the reason for that is to standardize uh under best practices uh for all of these for all of our policies and specifically for the ones that are what we used to call red geos right red general orders right the ones that are are going to be the the high liability ones and so um although there may be some differences from one agency to another we try to be consistent we do have a chief's monthly chief's meeting we do have we do have mo use in place uh there was some talk yesterday about mo use and and it expired one with the sheriff's department uh that that is that is uh that has to do with calls for service it does not have to do with emergency responses and those are those are dealt with through our our chiefs our chief's protocols but uh we we try to be as consistent as possible not every single one is the same but most of these high level high liability um uh policies are are consistent within the county right and would that also be consistent with the state agency the california highway patrol are their policies fairly consistent with those policies at the Sonoma county law enforcement agencies yeah everything yeah i uh we're all fairly consistent again we do have conversations um there may there might be some uh some some specific areas that might be different um and again we can't dictate what chp officers do when they come onto the streets or vice versa you know we can uh we can tell them what our role is and what our policies are but ultimately they have to rely on their own policies which there may be some differences but uh we we do try to stay online as much as possible uh specifically in this region and is the local chp captain still part of the chief's association so at least he or she is hearing the same policy conversations yes great thank you and then uh captain krig and on number five we talked about um given the dispersal orders and i know some uh previous years tactical operations there were employees at the back of the incident tape recording what the what direction was getting given whether it was a knock a notice have we employed any of those tactics or is that still a standard practice so someone actually who's at the very back a city employee police department employee is actually tape recording what is being heard at the back of the crowd or place that's about to be entered well one thing that's really helped with that now is just the overall deployment of the body worn camera so it pretty clearly is able to capture and officers are able to articulate on the body worn camera about being able to hear it but that's certainly something our tactical commander who's out in the field and is the one who's making uh the unlawful assembly announcements ensures that appropriately the crowd and all officers in the area are able to clearly hear that but it is something honestly that we said we have to get better at and so that's the purchase of this new equipment i believe is going to allow us to do that in a more effective manner and it's something that i think that will benefit the community and allow those who want to peacefully leave the area to be able to do so and have clear direction on how to do that and where to do that safely great thank you for the information absolutely madam vice mayor hey thank you uh for the presentation thus far i did have a question though it's pretty simple what is force for those in the community that are listening and those of us that just really don't know like when you say force um we may have different interpretations so what is force so force is going to be and our policy outlines that are talking about using any of our some so it goes from uh using hands i've been able to do some of the things that we saw like doing like putting people in control holds or doing like a leg sweep takedown that we saw deployed in one of the things that the human rights commission talked about and so those we for us required that you document that you notify a supervisor and we do a use of force investigation and then certainly when you use some of the less lethal tools that officers are equipped with whether that be pepper spray uh whether it be a taser whether it be a baton whether it be any of these less lethal munitions those would all be deployments of force and then certainly obviously using a deadly force tools such as a firearm or a rifle so any of those things so so as far as going from a control hold to using deadly force any of those uh even at the smallest level must be documented must be reported to a supervisor and then supervisors do an independent review and we're trying to really look at it the lens of was this appropriate were there other decisions or pathways that could have been taking and then our training department reviews that and saying hey maybe this was appropriate but this is something we do to do more training on to make sure that we that we utilize some of the other tools and that's where the chief will talk about this exciting grant that we're having this year which talks about some of the things that we can be using for deescalation and some of the things that we have that we're working with a local uh group on on some of the implicit bias and the uh culture diversity and things we're working with in our training department utilizes that and utilizes some of the grants that are out there to enhance the level of service by our officers to our community thank you so much absolutely all right captain thank you so much for taking the time to walk us through some of these uh i have a number of questions and some of them are not in particular about the recommendations but i notice in the oir report that there are quite a few areas that are critical that stop short of actually making a recommendation and i'm hoping to to suss some of those out and see where we're at in discussions and see if you have a response or something for us to to further consider with them but i want to start just right at the beginning of of the the protests uh in the oir report does i don't know if i would say it's critical but it certainly implies that uh officers being in riot gear in a protest about policing helped exacerbate and we talked a little bit yesterday about the the psyche of both the protesters as well as the officers that it did further escalate the tensions that are there was was at least perceived to further escalate the tensions the oir report doesn't make any recommendations about that uh but it is glaring in how it starts the report and i'm wondering if that's something that we have started to have initial conversations about within the department uh because i know that there are certainly conversations happening in the community about that absolutely that's a that's an important point and it's one of the things that and and i think when you when we critically look at this you saw some of that being that these protests were starting at 12 in the afternoon and there was not a police officer in sight and that we chose to be able to keep whole police officers back to not be able to uh to escalate some of the tensions that were out there and and that's a fair point that when officers coming out there that it could lead and we heard some of the talk about contagions yesterday and how that can lead by the crowd getting amped up and officers getting up and that doesn't benefit anyone so that's something that we incorporate with our troops and with our mobile field force to be able to say let's not be visible and let's not be out there until some of this unlawful behavior starts and that's kind of something that we're going to continue to work on internally about what kind of restraint can be done and that's some of the things that we have to have honest conversations with our city council with our community about what is the level of property crimes that we say are acceptable in our community and that's a tough decision and if you're the business owner you may have a different opinion than someone else and so we have to come together and say what is acceptable for our community and then we'll work with our city leaders in our community to say what are the triggers and what are the threshold when we will have officers deployed in the field and that's something that we really want to continue to seek feedback on and I know Chief Navarro is is going to be looking at as we make refined policy changes going forward. I really appreciate you bringing that up that was actually my next question and I asked a little bit yesterday in the OIR report about what officers understood that point to be at which they engage it is something that I'm very interested in and I mentioned officers stood down and just watched graffiti happen to the police department headquarters but then engaged in other opportunities or other other times things were happening I'm just going to speak for myself I don't think that it is worth putting an officer or anybody in the community at risk to prevent some graffiti it's something we can clean up later what was the department's understanding of when they would engage was it broken windows was it uh potential harm to bystanders well when did officers choose to engage or what was their understanding of what the policy and the expectation from city leadership was and the community was when they engage and that's a good question and so the officers are following the direction of the incident commanders and the captains are the incident commanders and we have a lieutenant who's a tactical commander in the field and they're following the direction provided by us so that was a calculated decision about not engaging those you're feeding the front of the police department and that was a calculated decision it came from our command staff team which directed the officers not to now becomes a little bit of a grayer area when you're out in the community because it's kind of a mixed response that there weren't people uh engaging people who were just doing graffiti it became when it was a mix when you're having intermittent rocks and bottles thrown at the officers and then it was changing dynamics of some violence toward our city employees and our staff members here and then you're also seeing at the same time some of like what we talked about with the contagion so once that starts happening in the crowd that you see hey some people are throwing rocks and bottles it becomes it others in the crowd start throwing rocks and bottles and then that spreads to maybe breaking a window or doing some other things like that so that's when it's like a tipping point that the incident commander has to say all right is this a threshold where we're going to engage and that's something that we've really spent a lot of time reflecting on and having some of the tough conversations about is it going to be just violence toward others in our community and those on the line versus the property crime but it is important to understand that that the officers were out in the line and who were later in the evening into the early morning hours who were receiving the rocks and bottles and a host of other items being thrown on it that made the incident commander say okay this is the time that we're going to change our tactics proceeding forward in this event and it wasn't based just on graffiti you did see at one point where they were able to breach forever 21 in the Macy's at Santa Rosa Plaza and we're taking clothes and other items in there and then forces did move forward at that point okay yeah um mayor I just if I could just add real quick there was a lot of discussion at the very beginning about you know what happens uh what type of vandalism that would happen downtown uh and uh you know we early on we made it clear that you know just graffiti we were not going to be responding to and that's why we held back we didn't have any officers out in front of the police station and that's why you saw um graffiti all over the downtown area uh but uh one of the conversations that we had because we did have fire within our doc was um what what is the potential of uh uh fire risk if uh businesses are alluded and fires fires start um or are ignited within the business and so you know if that goes if that happens there's a lot of old old buildings down there and it could go up very quickly so it wasn't just the fact that you know um you know is it going to be a broken window or not there was a lot of other conversations going on about you know what is the ultimate safety of the of the entire community and if if the the violence continued as um I believe it was uh Heller Heinz who'd mentioned that there were other communities similar to ours that saw burned down banks um those are some very very uh valid concerns for us especially in the downtown area so we took it very seriously um and that's why um we that's why we felt there was you know at at one at some point when there was looting and people were starting to enter businesses um and and assaults were happening that's when we made the decision to um to take some actionable steps and I can appreciate that chief and I understand it's always a balance uh has the department leadership uh I know we're starting to engage the community on this conversation has the department leadership also engaged the officers who are on the line to ask them what they see is the appropriate time to engage yeah so uh John may have more information so they we're having continuous conversations with all of our line staff and and really throughout the department uh we have um you know just from an informational we've had several zoom meetings with our department uh we have uh we have monthly meetings with our each of our labor groups which includes our police officers association many of them who were on the line and so uh many of our staff uh they're involved in uh in setting up our trainings and um and in working with our use of force policies and defensive tactics and so they're a part of the conversations um as we move forward so we're constantly having those conversations here um because number one if we do change uh if we do change tactics or or policies uh you know they have to be aware of it it's like what what are we doing if those tactics or policies change how is that impacting what they're doing on on the on the line so we are having those conversations I appreciate that chief and especially since when we talk about accountability uh if they were found to be following policy accountability needs to fall on us I'm going to continue to stress that so I want to make sure that those who are going to be faced with executing those policies also have a say in in discussing them um I want to keep going through the night a little bit captain if I can and I apologize to to take so much time but I think it's important um we've heard from the community concerns over use of kettling can you there I don't think I even saw in the OIR report any references to kettling and can or perhaps it's just called something different in the the report and I'm not noticing that it's the same thing can you talk through how that tactic was utilized um and if that is something that uh is also being discussed a discussion on how it's being used absolutely so I mean some of that comes to a basic misunderstanding of some of the facts and sometimes it's easy to see a term like that may be used on social media but not have really a firm understanding of what it means so the kettling that's been criticized across the nation was used in larger agencies like in New York PD were in large public settings and they were using it to like move and control crowd movement of being able to say make like an L formation and uh and use of building and then force the crowd in one direction but some of the criticism is that people who weren't even involved in the protest and who were walking in downtown businesses were getting caught up in that movement and were getting forced to funnel out in a certain direction that tactic wasn't deployed by the Santa Rosa Police Department now some of the confusion is coming in on Tuesday night when the mass arrest situation happened on Minasino Avenue that there was uh the crowd and that was hours after curfew and hours after an unlawful assembly had been declared uh based on some criminal behavior that was occurring with the protest so the incident commander uh made the decision to clear an unlawful assembly the loudspeakers were used out there saying this is no longer a peaceful assembly and that those who were still out on the street were subject to arrest not only for the unlawful assembly but for the curfew violation and we gave about two and a half hours for people to disperse and then at one point the decision was made to make an arrest of those who were violating both of those lawful sections and the crowd was encircled and arrested so that's different than kettling because the decision was to encircle and arrest everyone in there who had at that point refused the multiple uh request to peacefully leave the area so I think there's some confusion of calling that a kettling event that that was actually a decision to surround and all arrest all those who were breaking the law and refusing to disperse at that point so we're not involving of actually kettling tactics used like during the day and during the early hours of the protest just to move people who are peacefully assembled and who aren't breaking any laws that didn't occur and that's something that will continue to avoid in our tactics here at the Santa Rosa Police Department so absent absent the protest the kettling is not something that officers utilize no the confusion is is coming out directly with the one specific incident on Tuesday night when the mass arrest was made there on minnesino avenue okay and I'm making an assumption and so correct me if I'm wrong but you mentioned that the dispersal order was made and then two and a half hours later this occurred uh I assume that officers made periodic announcements uh and I know that the the OIR report was critical at some points or at least mentioned at some points that it was possible that some people came after the dispersal order was given and then didn't hear an additional one but I think again correct me if I'm wrong over that two and a half hour period where there are multiple announcements of the dispersal order absolutely and that's something that we built into our training mechanisms of repeatedly given that announcement and then also even using our social media platforms that make community members aware of that a curfew had been enacted and that an unlawful assembly had been declared at that point so we used as many platforms as possible but that's certainly something that I want getting some of the feedback from the community and from our independent auditor is something that we could do better with and so that's the steps that we took to buy enhanced equipment to do that and also to build that into our training mechanism so it's clear that every one of that group has abundant knowledge of that it's been declared an awful assembly and in how they can peacefully exit because our hope our hope is to not make arrests that people say like all right this is getting out of control now criminal behaviors being demonstrated and so I'm it now's my time to be able to peacefully exit and be able to do that and so they still have their absolute first amendment right to display their frustration with whatever the event is but at that point to be able to peacefully and safely exit the area okay I appreciate that and then you you've talked about the the new speaker system with the pre-recorded message how will that work with a pre-recorded message if it's also explaining to people how to how to leave right so that's direction on where and how how does that work that's a good question so that so the pre-recorded message is just an option to use so we're going to have it in Spanish and English with a with a more generic dispersal order of just talking about the legal requirements about this is the Santa Rosa police department this is an unlawful assembly based on this we're ordering you to leave are you subject to arrest and force may be used so the generic admonishment about that that sets the legal parameters for declaring an unlawful assembly and that's it's part of 407 and 408 of the penal code but then the operator there our tactical commander or whoever his or her designee is would then be able to use that mic to be able to give more of an prompt to talk about all right we're directing you to go southbound on mendicino and turn westbound on college or whatever the direction may be wherever you are so you have both options available but it also gives us option to make sure that we're helping with with being able to provide those instructions in Spanish as well and we'll have bilingual officers who are part of that are able to give those same and prompt two directions to our Spanish speaking community as well okay thank you um chief you mentioned with the mo use that we can't require or we it'd be difficult to require other agencies to follow srpd's policies uh i know from a practical standpoint i can understand how that'd be difficult to if they're not within our command for them to be up on both their policies as well as ours but is there a way for us to put them in a position to where uh one of our command staff is making the determinations about their use of force um and i ask this question particularly because i do hear criticism both from srpd folks as well as folks in the community about other agencies that are quicker to use force or don't uh have the same community mentality and it would seem to me to be a conflict between we're going through this process of working with the community and then other agencies that come in might still do some of these same things that that we're having the tough community conversations about so what could we do within the mo use to try to fix that i i think i know what we try to do now is we you know whenever there's an emergency we uh we try and it's still or operate under a unified command system where we you know we do have um you know one one particular agency or entity that is going to be an overall um in overall control of of the situation um if you know we again we we work very closely with the other chiefs and the sheriff um on a on a regular basis and our second in commands all the captains throughout the um and and lieutenants throughout the the region um they meet on a regular basis also to try to make sure that we're in as as close to lockstep as possible on on our on our responses again ultimately you know we we uh we can't uh tell them what their policies and what they need to do uh but if if uh you know if there's no if there's no consistency then they wouldn't they wouldn't be coming and so uh we try to remain consistent uh if there is use of force we can't you know we're not going to investigate doing an internal review of uh one of the other jurisdictions here but if we are aware made aware of some type of use of force um then that that looks to be concerning then we will definitely we can you know we definitely reach out to that department and let them know what's going on so uh but ultimately you know the the the mutual aid agreements those are those are in place to to try to address uh you know initial staffing issues and so uh you know ultimately what we want to do we don't want to get into a position where we have to use mutual aid those are under extreme emergencies and we use those as uh as a last resort okay thank you chief um one of the questions that was asked yesterday and and I asked sue about it I'm hoping you can dive a little bit more into it in the OIR report they were able to sit in uh when a policy was was not followed or when disciplinary action had to had to take place they concurred with the discipline that was given from a community accountability standpoint can you explain a little bit better about how that process works um for folks who have questions about what the outcome was and I understand that the the information is limited that we can share given state law I think we talked talked about that a little bit yesterday so I'm not asking us to to um you know go against state law but uh that that question keeps coming up from the public absolutely it's a fair question to ask so what what we did is had the auditor who played a key role in and and played an intimate role in those conversations of having a bit directly talking to the officers looking at the body worn camera looking at the reports and and being able to evaluate that but so state law does prohibit uh some of those from being released but also we have sent it bill 1421 that it's going to allow for two of those reports and then the entire reports will get delivered so it's going to be the officers interviews it's going to be our uh supervisor review it's going to be the exact discipline that uh was imposed for those officers it's going to be the body worn camera footage uh from both of those events from not only those officers but the officers surrounding them are going to be released and that's going to be on our police transparency page that will be released in the coming weeks and so that's going to be an opportunity for our community to see exactly what transpired and to be able to view that body worn camera footage from themselves and that's for the two incidents that resulted in great bodily injury to protesters and uh the police department is um committed to following these transparency laws getting that out there for the community for them to see for themselves about our internal investigation and that included uh hiring an independent uh outside use of force expert to review um and determine exactly what the force was uh employed and they're going to get that full report from that outside use of force and that's going to be on uh on the two significant uh injuries that occurred during that protest and so those uh you can look forward to seeing that in the coming weeks and we have some statutory obligations that have to be completed before we can uh post those but uh we're near the final stages of that and well those will be posted into something that we'll be updating our city council and our community on and continue to go to the Santa Rosa police department's police transparency webpage which you can find on our main website uh to be able to get that information and uh view those reports in full and the body worn camera in full and I did go back and I looked today and I know on the srcd.org uh police link it does have the policies as well as the srpd's new first amendment public policy so I did want to do a quick plug since you mentioned those I know that there's some interest in uh folks reading what currently exists we also heard in some of the public comment yesterday concerns that uh what has happened in other departments is an individual will be facing discipline will resign and then go on and take another police position elsewhere and it's not communicated across departments that there was potential disciplinary action that was coming or what happened chief can you just sort of tell us what type of screening does go in with the recruitment of officers when they transfer from one department to another absolutely uh so uh the first thing I want you to know is that what we do uh when when there is a uh concern um or when somebody is terminated um because of uh some type of misconduct we we complete the uh we complete the process and um and we are uh when when another agency comes in we we do uh we allow them to do a full background um and what happens is the the applicant has to sign a waiver to to look at um to allow their background officers to go in and go talk to their past employers um one of the things that um that we we do we do a full background and we also go back to the visiting or to prior law enforcement agencies we're an employee we're a an officer may have worked and we we look into uh any type of uh misconduct uh any type of uh you know what their history is there over at the police department and then um and then one other thing that we do if if somebody uh if somebody resigns in lieu of termination or they leave and um because they think that uh they fear the of some significant uh discipline uh we will complete our investigation we won't put it on the shelf and we won't suspend it we are going to carry through uh complete that that way if another police agency comes in um they will be able to see a an actual completed investigation and so uh for for our part we do we do a thorough investigation that includes uh reaching out to past employers including police departments we do a background uh or psychological and um and uh and and and it usually takes about a good six months to get get through the hiring process here uh one of the other things you're you're kind of stealing my thunder i was going to bring some of this up later on but um the uh the california police chiefs association you know we are really trying to uh work together and lead the way for uh the rest of the nation uh there's one of the chiefs that's actually on uh on a national board and uh they're continuing to push for um national national consistency with desertification uh in under you know under specific circumstances so those are some of the things that are very important uh you know we don't want bad officers to be out there on the street and uh we're we're trying to work together on on how to best do that yeah apologies for stealing your fender chief i'll pull it back to the uh to the oir report and and to what it says and one of the other areas that it was critical of but stopped short of a recommendation of uh was as the nights progressed uh it says that srpb did not could not or felt like they could not hold back uh from the from the line when they were encountering uh resistant protesters uh has that been a conversation topic within the department or is that something uh that has been brought up with the public safety subcommittee as well about perhaps a different tactic there it's something that will continue to evaluate in reality uh a lot of the troops did pull back and were given the direction to do that and showed a lot of restraint throughout the night and we're ultimately as you mentioned earlier just following the direction of the command staff and and what we told them to do but it's certainly something that we're evaluating when we deploy our resources what some of those key trigger points are going to be and then what our sustained involvement throughout the night is and that's something that we're going to continue to have conversations on as our uh as on our command staff but certainly engaging our community leaders and community stakeholders to be able to see what is the response going forward that we want for our own unique community here in santa rosa all right thank you captain and to be clear i i do put that question on the command staff because i understand that that's where the direction is coming we've got two more chief um we've heard uh about some of the injuries to protesters were police officers injured uh yeah police officers were injured they suffered um bruises i mean part of it was uh you know we have the safety equipment so that that helped out but we did we did have injuries um and both physically and uh i mean we have some officers that are on that are out on stress leave and so uh we it's it's impacted our um it's impacted our our force um and uh but we did have we did have uh rocks bottles bottles with urine uh and in uh industrial-grade fireworks uh being shot in uh at our officers uh we actually i think we had a trashcan lid thrown at an officer who struck in the head okay thanks chief uh and then my last question and we heard quite a bit of public comment about this yesterday was folks who uh had incidents that they had in the human rights commission report or that they had followed up uh with the department about that then felt like the ball was dropped either uh it was not an incident that actually was opened and so OIR didn't look at it or they felt like there was not enough follow through from the department like i'm just giving you a little bit of a space to kind of talk about how we move forward from here and what avenues are available to folks uh who feel that way sure we were good go ahead chief so um again i was gonna dress us a little later too but again on the um on our department website uh we do have a um a link to be able to uh to be able to get our complaint of complaint forms uh you can uh anybody who has a concern uh with any type of whether it's a use of forest or any type of uh misconduct um that they can contact us uh they can contact us by phone they can contact us by email um they can uh they can file a complaint form in and return it in and uh we respond to every single one so we have a professional standards team uh they look at every single one uh when when a uh when an inquiry is brought in i actually sign a letter that goes out to that person and uh when we complete the inquiry we i i i sent another letter out stating that it's complete um sometimes uh we we find that there was no uh you know no misconduct or no violation of policy uh sometimes we do that we do find that there's a violation of policy um so we let uh we let the the person who reported it the impact person know uh but we don't go into further detail about what we're doing about it just that it has been addressed uh but i do want to assure everyone that um if there is any information out there uh we want to hear about it we can only get better by by listening and um and hearing about what what these allegations are um and my my team is completely willing to uh look into any of these issues uh there were several that did come up yesterday during the uh during the public comment uh we did roundtable to ensure that uh we're doing what we can we are uh we did look into some of the ones uh again uh OIR did look at uh one specifically that came up and uh we you know we uh we we do know that was uh that was looked into and it was there was no finding of any type of violation uh but um you know if you know if if people are concerned uh about what how we may be uh acting we want we want to know that and where I encourage everybody to to call in or email and uh we will we will look thoroughly into it all right thanks chief and I know we'll talk a little bit more about the uh auditor position as well and so I'll stop there uh believe it or not I still have questions for later but uh I don't want to seal all of uh all of your thunder uh council members are there any other additional questions before we move on to uh captain litchfield okay so thank you everybody who's here today to to hear our presentations thanks john so I want to talk about responses to the uh after the after action report so you heard from hillard hinds yesterday their investigation consisted of of quite a few steps and again I was assigned as their liaison here at the police department so I worked through this investigation with them making sure they had access to anything that they requested or needed and that included all of the police reports related to this incident all of the computer aided dispatch reports uh any relevant radio traffic all of the incident action plans from these protest responses as well as incident action plans from several other responses that they wanted to compare them to it included all relevant policies um which of course they could could get online but they had specific questions about policies I facilitated any of those things that they needed uh over a thousand hours of body worn camera footage that they had access to much like OIR they had access to all of that and in fact viewed um several hundred hours of that they conducted a three-day site visit that included physically looking at all of the sites in question and then they conducted three days of interviews with staff that included multiple uh staff from the police department from the dispatch center the police officers command staff and anyone else who had a response or was present at the incidents that included allied agencies mutual aid responders those who agreed to speak with them it included community members business owners and staff from other departments that also assisted and to answer a question you had uh prior mayor they did talk to line staff about their understanding of rules of engagement when to use force command decisions and so on so they conducted several interviews specific to those topics which were shared with us so we could create better responses to those issues so that did take place both internally and from hillard hines so it was a significant amount of material that they received I spent at least three days just sending them documents not to mention all the other other items that they looked at so that's what went into their report and as we've heard it it looked bullet pointed yesterday but it was actually quite extensive and if you read the full report it has a lot more information in it so out of that they came up with 12 recommendations for the santa rosa police department many of these recommendations we started working on prior to getting the report because we had already identified them in our own after action reviews of the incidents nonetheless they were all valid recommendations whether we identified them or they identified them there they were all valid and required response so I will go through the 12 of those so if I could go to the next slide I'll start with the first one so the first one we've talked about it quite a bit is the inventory and issuance of less lethal munitions and it relates to their second recommendation with procedures on the use of less lethal munitions we have a policy for that it's policy 308 control devices and techniques I just wanted to make a quick comment about use of force policies when you hear about the use of force policy that's policy 300 for those if anyone in the community or anyone who hasn't had experience with how the police department policies work there are multiple policies that relate to use of force and you can think of policy 300 as the umbrella policy that provides you the legal guidance justification and rules for using and documenting force and then you will have policies much like 308 that come under that umbrella that are very specific to a type of use of force or a type of device so I sometimes can get confusing the police department has multiple policies most of the use of force policies fall under the 300s so 308 control devices and techniques we looked at that policy and we made several additions to it those additions went to strengthening the training standards for less lethal munitions so both mobile field force and line staff officers and SWAT officers are trained on less lethal munitions there's a big difference in responding with a 40 millimeter less lethal munition in the field as compared to a crowd control scenario so the majority of officers who are not part of mobile field force or the special weapons and tactics team are trained to a more field level response that has to do with addressing an armed and dangerous suspect at a distance and being able to use that less lethal munition to hopefully disarm just wait or convince that person to not use that weapon or to not commit an assault in crowd control it's a different level of training those are referred to as grenadiers and they specialize in delivering those munitions in much more tactical scenarios or in much more difficult scenarios such as a crowd control and the special weapon and tactics team are actually the team that would use the barricade rounds you've heard about barricade rounds are not used should not be used in a mobile field force team ever they're used by tactical teams to deliver gas through a barrier so those are the differences so tightening down the training standards and more fully explaining the differences in deployments the next thing that we changed was the department armor or designee controlling the issuance of less lethal munitions before it was the training sergeant was the only person designated to control the issuance of less lethal munitions it ended up that the training sergeant was actually out in the field during these incidents he was not available to monitor all of the less lethal munitions nor would he have been able to over a five day period over each operational period control the issuance of every munition and track it because of that it fell more to the logistics team and the logistics team generally takes care of all logistical needs for the police department as far as getting supplies getting food getting things to officers to the field from the field and so on however they are not experts in munitions uh and less lethal munitions so a lot of that fell down to the logistics team we changed the policy to indicate that the department armors which we have several of and who are experts on all types of munitions in the future would log issue and track all of the less lethal munitions during an incident so that will create a much stronger chain people who are experts in those munitions handling them to eliminate the possibility of an of an incorrect munition being issued out or somehow getting onto the street we also expanded the deployment and use guidelines for the less lethal munitions so as I mentioned there's different levels of training for these munitions so depending on what team or what your role is you might receive a different type of training or a different type of school that you attend for these so in order to make it much more clear we expanded in the policy the section that talks about when munitions can be deployed by who and we specifically added a section that talks about in crowd control situations only the grenadiers who are trained in those situations will be deploying a 40 millimeter and they will only be using those against people that are engaged in assaultive behavior specifically assaulting someone with rocks bottles projectiles or committing other acts of violence and lastly it expands the guidelines for tear gas deployment as we were mentioned in the OIR reports a significant amount of tear gas was deployed during these incidents I have been part of several crowd control incidents in the past 15 plus years in my dealings with different crowd control teams and this is the first time I can remember deploying any significant amount of gas during a crowd control incident in fact I was at multiple protests during the Andy Lopez incidents and I don't recall us deploying gas at those protests so this was a much different level and because of that we had to expand our policy to meet this level of response which we had not had before so we did expand instructions and guidelines for using gas in crowd control scenarios and next slide so we were asked to revise policy 409 mobile field force to include language regarding first amended amendment assemblies so policy 409 mobile field force really has to do with the training and responsibility of field force personnel it's a very nuts and bolts policy and it wasn't really an appropriate place to put something that far reaching because it's generally something that's used by the mobile field force members and not taught to the entire organization because it's it's as I said more of a nuts and bolts policy for them so as the chief mentioned we use a third party vendor lexical that creates all of our policies there are subject matter experts in law and policy and case law so we use them to make sure we always have the most up-to-date policies available in policy language we created policy 467 first amendment assemblies that addresses the right to peacefully assemble while preserving peace protecting life and property I want to make clear that that language that idea and that goal existed prior to the policy itself it is in the incident action it is trained during crowd control training it's trained to the mobile field force it it is a post requirement training for the police academy it is trained and taught however having it in one policy is not a bad thing because these policies are taught and updated to the entire police department on a regular basis so it is now exists in a standalone policy it has guidelines for response to unplanned events that also existed the incident management team that you've heard about they create the IAPs for planned and unplanned events so during an unplanned event the guideline for response it falls to the supervisor who first arrives on scene and then IMT would pick up the incident action plan and planning of that event as soon as they arrived on on the scene or at the department however it memorializes those guidelines which are taught to the supervisors in a policy which is a positive in that any officer can now see what those guidelines look like even if a supervisor weren't to be available to be first on scene related to that's the procedure for the planned events again IMT held all of those procedures themselves and as they create and do all of our planning but now everything they do can be found within this policy the procedure for unlawful assembly dispersal orders we do follow that procedure we use that procedure several times it is something that is taught and known by the supervisors who are the ones who give the unlawful assembly dispersal orders and now can be found the conditions for that within the policy use of force guidelines those are very general guidelines because as i mentioned we have multiple use of force policies but it it mostly refers back to existing policies but it is a roadmap of where you can find use of force guidelines and policies for response to these events arrest guidelines that has to do with mass arrest which is a separate slide all of its own and planning and preparing for master mass arrest scenarios which are must much different than arresting one or two people during an incident post event documentation and after action evaluation the Santa Rosa police department after every significant incident or event does an after action report this just memorializes that within the policy but again the incident management team does that and has done that for some time and then also memorializes training requirements for for IMT and other people for responding to first amendment assemblies so what this policy basically does it makes everything very clear and takes documents or procedures or things that existed in multiple spaces and brought them all into one space where anyone from the community or police department can go to this one document and not have to hunt down three four five different documents or training materials to find these things so they're all contained in one policy now next slide please so the continue the department's focus on adhering to the incident command system or ICS ICS has been part of the Santa Rosa police department since 2014 when we really committed to it and in fact Captain John Cregan was the first person to start ringing that bell loudly coming from Novato where they really adhered to the ICS system and incident management so we started that back in 2014 and we have continued to grow our expertise in that add people to the incident management team do extensive training for our command level people our supervisors and even our line staff people so we have no plan to abandon ICS it has worked for us multiple times although this incident was very challenging without ICS we would have been completely lost although the fires have been very challenging and other significant events without ICS it would have been much worse much harder for us to control and manage these large incidents so there's no plan not to continue with ICS and in fact now that training is coming back as COVID restrictions ease we're we're sending people to ICS training at this moment the succession planning for incident management team and command positions again they talked about lack of depth on the bench we only have so many supervisors and we don't have as many supervisors as many agencies our size have and that's been true since I started at the police department many years ago we've always been light on supervisory positions so our succession planning does go on and we do plan and prepare people through these IMT and ICS positions and as I mentioned that starts at the line staff and then you move possibly on to an IMT position or a tactical team position which is heavily involved with IMT in that type of planning and then from there you promote and then you have a different role in these teams and then you promote again and you have a different role the issue isn't part of not planning for succession it's just the number of people that we can train and that's restricted by the number of people we have which leads into the impact on the staffing levels for teams and operations there's only two lieutenants excuse me two captains so during this incident you'll see on a later slide for a couple days there was only one captain available which created some issues but there's only two captains and we have seven lieutenants and one of those lieutenants we lost was off and on a long-term issue during this incident so it is difficult to have enough command level people through a sustained event to staff all of the critical positions in the operations center and on the field and that's just a reality we've been dealing with for for several years and at least in the next couple budget cycles will continue to be our reality most likely next slide please so countywide radio interoperability so this one's a very difficult one because what it should say is national radio interoperability this is not a problem just for Sonoma County the state of California it's a national problem and it has been for many many years with radio frequencies and I am not going to sit here and try to talk about the technical side of radio interoperability and megahertz I know we went from you know from a 400 system to a 900 you know I I'm not that radio guy in that sense but what I can tell you is I do know who I can and can't talk to and for Sonoma County we have interoperability with every agency except for ronert park and the reason for that is ronert parks a public safety agency and they air police and fire have to be on the same frequency to talk to each other so they're just simply on a different frequency and system than everybody yells we do not have interoperability with chp there is statewide agency they have much different needs than we do much different system than we do so we do not have the interoperability directly with them so the way that we handle that is during a significant incident we run under a unified command so chp will be in our department operations center the sheriff's department might be there Petaluma was there for these incidents whichever agency is bringing a significant number of personnel with them they will come to the department operations center so that they can relay the commander's intent the rules of engagement and all these things they make sure that those are relayed to their people and that they understand what's going on so the incident commanders for this incident was santa rosa they were working under our command but they have their own commanders in the doc who ultimately are responsible for their people and making decisions in their interests and following their policies so when the officers come in they're embedded generally with our squads and our people so as mutual aid officers come onto the street they are given a radio that has our frequencies we after the radio upgrade we were fortunate we have 200 radios that were switched out for the new radios for the new system those radios have a patch on them that allows them to talk to the new radios so the old radios can talk to the new radios on our main channels that allows us to have those radios to give to responding personnel and that's how we solve a significant amount of that problem is by providing them with a radio that they can directly communicate and hear what's going on with us so before when this incident was going on we did not have 200 of those radios we had maybe 30 now we have a significantly more of them so those can be given out so between being assigned with our personnel and having our radio that will handle a lot of these issues um and I'm sorry I said 900 megahertz it's a 700 megahertz system see I told you I'm I'm not a technical radio guy so at any rate we are the first agency to go to 700 megahertz it's a very expensive and extensive upgrade to make and the other agencies are working on it for now we can talk to most of them through these software bridges and eventually they'll be hopefully on the same 700 megahertz system but again it's it's more it's a statewide national national issue it's a huge issue these radios it's a very expensive and complicated problem to solve but I think we are in a good position um we've had this issue all through the fires where we had many many mutual aid personnel coming up and we were able to get through these communication issues but it is true they are difficult and it's something we continually have to work on next slide situational awareness briefings so communication issues were identified between the first and second operational period so the operational periods generally that just means the time frame in which we're running an event or we're we're responding to an event this event was very unique because it popped up spontaneously it wasn't planned far in advance so we responded that day to an event that was we could see was being planned and was growing I was the incident commander on that first day and as I mentioned for a couple until the third operational period there was only one captain and we were also missing some other key personnel and logistics in some other areas who weren't were not in town so after that operational period ended after about 13 hours we didn't know when the next operational period was going to start one of our lieutenants with a significant amount of tactical experience and who had been a tactical commander for me on several large incidents he stepped in to be the incident commander that day so I could come back the following day we did have some discussion he and I we did not know when the next operational period was going to start from day one to day two so that was one of the issues where we could not debrief the teams and whole because they weren't together so in fires and other incidents this has not been an issue because we've had set operational periods we've had official briefings and debriefings this one presented some challenges by the third day we knew what our operational period was going to be we knew what personnel we had and we were back to formal briefings I will say I do not want to understate having done it both ways you want a formal briefing no doubt you want the team there for a formal briefing and debriefing it was very difficult for him and I because unfortunately after that second day he was no longer available at all so I never followed up with him even on the third day it was like we were starting over two days in a row so those briefings are very important and in the future we understand we have to do everything we can to make sure that briefing happens regardless of the circumstances but this was something that really was isolated is not a common practice not to have those briefings next slide please follow the phone calls for assistance with documented requests so it is true we were in a scramble we were in a scramble to get help we called a code 30 the first night that is an emergency request for anyone available to send assistance so that was not followed up with clets because a code 30 generally isn't followed up with a clutch response and it's an emergency call out for help in subsequent nights most mutual aid requests were made through phone calls by calling agencies and asking who they could send so we could do planning for the incident those needed to be followed up with a formal request just to document and track who responded who came and what they brought much like we do with the fires and other major incidents many nights we were scrambling because we were competing with multiple other jurisdictions so one agency that might be available one night was going to be in Oakland the next night it was going to be in Southern California wherever they were going it just depended on on who could get to them first and try to try to lock down assistance so it made it very challenging but in the end the planning team in the future will be tasked with following up any phone call they make with a clutch response to create that trail next slide please so install a CAD station in the DOC to streamline communications so during this time we were working in a temporary DOC a DOC is a department operation center it's basically where incident command operates from the planning and intel team the incident commander the ops commander the logistics people and the communications and any allied agencies inside or outside the city all come together in the department operation center and that's where the incidents run from at that time every time we had an incident we had to take our training room and quickly convert it to a operation center that is a less than ideal situation and it didn't allow for a permanent CAD station to be installed you you weren't able to do that because it spends most of its life as a training room and in a little bit of its life as a department operation center so due to the number of incidents we have due to the growth of our IMT in our incident command it made sense to create a permanent department operation center which we accomplished about maybe two months after this incident so we now have a permanent DOC that's in a completely different location and it's dedicated and the CAD station this month the permanent station is being installed in that DOC next slide please restricting access to the DOC this relates to what I just said the the kind of throw-up DOC the toss-up DOC in the training room made it very difficult to restrict access it was it was in a heavily traveled location hallway and it just allowed people to be able to be in the hallway or in the DOC it had a more than one entrance to it it just wasn't ideal the new DOC is in a different location it has one entrance and that entrance can be closed off to restrict access so that was we'll solve that problem next slide develop a process to audit and update business contacts so we relied there was a couple of things that happened here and I found this out myself and trying to contact businesses during and after the event two things that that went wrong for us the first thing we didn't control and that was COVID we were in COVID restrictions at the time so not all the businesses were running normal business hours and not all of them were running normal capacity which means not all of the personnel were the same that we had listed as contacts and since then in the month since that trying to follow up with businesses or contact them I have found that many people who were at businesses aren't at businesses anymore so it's very difficult to keep up on that we were also using our Nixle platform primarily our main social media accounts to put information out to people and that's great in some instances but it wasn't so good for the fixed locations like the businesses so really we needed to be utilizing the code red and and we have platforms to communicate so that we could reach a larger audience and it's more accurate so in the future rather than just lose using Nixle when we have to make notifications to businesses and so on we can utilize code red and then those notifications will get made and it'll cover a much larger population so that was a mistake on our part to just use Nixle believing at the time we were reaching who we needed to reach next slide please so the mass arrest policy and resources are maintained we did engage in one mass arrest event those events take a lot more planning logistics personnel and time than just arresting one or two people here and there they're very intensive for many years the mobile field force had a mass arrest team it technically still did at the time however the supervisor who had been in charge of that team for many years had retired and had not been replaced at that point so we did not have the dedicated supervisor and because of that the supervisors in charge of a lot of the supplies and the personnel and keeping everything up to speed so that was some scrambling had to be done on our part another sergeant did step in and did a great job with it but it definitely wasn't as smooth as we would have liked nor was the person as up to speed and comfortable with the process it would have gone a lot quicker otherwise so we have reassigned a new sergeant to that team he has already gone through and and taking care of the supplies documents and inventories we've assigned new civilian personnel to assist with that team and made sure they're integrated back into the mobile field force training next slide so create protocols between srpd and city pio for sharing information with the public we did have two pios in the department operation center for each event one was a santa rosa police officer and the other was someone from the city's team and we were sending out real-time information in in fact sending out quite a bit of it and we do not have a written policy for sending communications out in emergency situations because those are very fluid and each emergency is different and each need is different we have since created a full-time pio sergeant within the police department so that would be the person assigned for these events and the reason for that is it's a supervisor level position with more authority and ability and knowledge to send out real-time information correctly and properly and is able to be in higher level conversations in the doc or elsewhere to be able to formulate messages quicker so that is a major step up for us the city pio team as a whole is drafting a new citywide policy i just want to make clear that that citywide policy will provide us some additional guidance and and you know it's always good to have that kind of policy i just want to make clear that that they are not developing a policy to address specifically emergency situations protests things of that nature it's just more of a an overarching citywide policy on social media and such that will fall under that umbrella and it'll help us facilitate messaging easier with the city team so for guidance and information and i believe that's the last one next slide well i don't have a question slide but i'm sure i have questions thank you so much captain council members do we have any questions for the count for the captain councilmember tibbetz yes thank you captain litchfield um and i apologize i had to step away for about five minutes my my son was crying in the other room but on slide 12 you were talking about the mobile i'm sorry it was the mobile yield units or mobile force field units and yesterday we had a comment from jerry three about one tactic that can be used to prevent the i don't know disbursement if you will of a peaceful protest by having officers be located or co-located within the uh the protest itself so if there is an incident where somebody acts unlawfully instead of deeming the whole protest to be unlawful we can kind of surgically i think the term used was with a scalpel go in and try to you know address that individual and then you know prevent contagion was the term that was also used from kind of spreading throughout the group was that something that you've looked at that the department has an opinion on because because for me um i you know it sounds good i don't know how that works in practice um but one of the things that frustrated me most about this protest was here was generations of systemic poverty and and racism and um just you know a genuine distrust of of the system and how it's oppressed them for years but then it also kind of got silenced because we declared it an unlawful assembly and and i'm not disputing how we declared it an unlawful assembly that's a policy discussion for the council down the road you know what how much um i guess law breaking do we want to accept but uh yeah just just generally speaking i was sorry to see that those voices got silenced so it's it's a it's a good question and it's a very difficult one because of the nature of crowd events so as i mentioned i've been involved in in crowd control events for a long time i actually created the mobile field force so the gold standard of training for mobile field force across the nation is done by FEMA in aniston alabama and you can either go to aniston or or we generally bring them here and trade train large numbers of people there's no real part of that training that addresses putting a small team in the middle of a crowd for multiple reasons mainly the safety of the people you have to account for the safety of the officers so if you have a crowd of hundreds of people and you drop four five six even eight an arrest team is generally six so those are arrest teams and so you drop six or eight people in a crowd of hundreds of people and expect them to carry out enforcement activity while they're surrounded by hundreds of people as you can imagine that's a very difficult situation depending on the nature of the crowd you know it you have a largely friendly crowd you have a largely hostile crowd how quickly can you get someone in custody and moved out of the crowd before enough before a hostile crowd forms around you and there's no one to to provide protection to that team so the general standard is that's why you have a skirmish line and this is the way it's trained across the nation is the skirmish lines are formed that is the protection area that's kind of your fallback point your line and the arrest teams come forward from the skirmish line not very far into the crowd literally a couple feet into the crowd grab an agitator or a violent individual and pull them back behind the skirmish line that's how it's done and it's done for for safety and reasons i'm not aware of any other training that's been put forth yet and as i said fema is at the forefront of this so maybe they'll they'll be developing something and i'm not saying it it can't be done but i i it's going to be very situation-specific when you could just have teams mingling in a protest crowd and it's going to be very dependent on on communication with the crowd and the protest organizers and making sure they want and will allow that to happen that's going to be a significant issue and if you have enough good communication and enough good understanding between the protest organizers and the police that we are only there for this reason because a complaint we heard from peaceful protesters was we don't want the agitators in the crowd because look what happens you know then it becomes this this massive problem and so i think it can be accomplished it's not being trained that way presently that doesn't mean that can't change but i think your best bet for that kind of response would have to do with a lot of communication between the police department and the protesters and an agreement and understanding that they're going to allow that to take place no i i agree and i think you bring up another valid point which is does the protesters want the police officers you know involved or sharing space with the protest itself but just speaking for myself if there is training that can be identified where we're not putting officers in harm's way and we are communicating with protesters in advance i hope that that can be achieved because what i think about is you know i think a community should strive to always have a peaceful protest and so that those first amendment rights can continue to be expressed you know we all know that police and law enforcement agencies part of your job too is also maintaining first amendment rights in the constitution and so any policies we can we can implement that achieves that outcome is going to serve the public better i agree and we're well aware that when once you put police officers online on a skirmish line you are going to change the reaction and dynamic of a crowd situation by the nature of being there and which is why for eight to twelve hours every day we never appeared online and at one point we came online for a request for call for help and then we retreated when that situation was resolved in fact we got criticized for doing that in one of the reports for for retreating at that point but again once you put officers online it is extremely difficult to remove them to back them out of that situation you're now have changed the dynamic and you've changed the incident and we are very well aware of that and and ever since 2014 we've done everything we can to delay or not put officers online thank you all right thank you councilmember councilmember soyer thank you mayor thanks for being here erick and for your responses i'm going to read from a press democrat article that was recently published this is attributed to to mr three community members do not want to see tear gas used against protesters and now i'll quote him according to the press democrat tear gas should should be reserved as a last resort type of strategy where you have widespread violence and destruction of property that's gotten to the point where it's just mayhem and you have to stop it what i'm curious about is what is the trigger when you immediately and we're able to determine mayhem some of the photographs that i've seen and some of the the body worn cameras and you mentioned earlier that this can also be attributable just for the presence of the police department that it changes the dynamic but that being said because humans being what they are and and and act inappropriately at times how does you how do you determine at what point you're dealing with mayhem which would suggest the use of tear gas well that is a decision and it's not an easy one that has to be made solely by the incident commander during these incidents and in order to make that decision you have to have multiple inputs coming in from the field from the line and additionally generally we have visual as well through various video feeds and such to help us with that for me during these incidents when we started to we wouldn't come online until we started seeing a significant amount of behavior that was no longer peaceful protest free speech activity but had devolved into side shows in the middle of crowds that were extremely dangerous where people were in danger of are almost struck by vehicles you started to get fireworks we have a particular sensitivity to fire especially in the downtown area around the buildings and such where you have large explosions and fireworks going off we had some fires lit windows broken reports of looting at the mall and then you put officers online and we haven't even deployed anything yet other than bodies we put officers online at that point to start to try to gain control and prepare to disperse crowds if we need to so already before the first canister is thrown there's already a significant issue or we would not even come online so once we're online at that point and we're trying to regain control or stop these type of behaviors or prevent them from continuing when we start to have rebar thrown at us rocks thrown at us people throwing frozen water bottles we're not concerned as has been stated an empty water bottle or a water bottle yeah it will bounce off of a helmet or it will bounce off of turtle armor we call it but a frozen water bottle is nothing more than a big rock and that's what we were taking bottles filled with urine fireworks now being shot directly at officers the sideshow activity continuing windows breaking minor acts of vandalism never brought us out onto line spray painting small acts of vandalism we're not in the rules of engagement as being engageable so it had to be much more significant than that at that point when we have multiple issues and the crowd is clearly moved from peaceful protest activity into illegal assembly and destructive or violent behavior especially assaulting behavior that's when we declare the unlawful assembly again we give time for dispersal and if that assault continues and we are unable to disperse the crowd voluntarily and we're being assaulted as we attempt to move forward we use tear gas is what's known as a force multiplier there's not as many of us as there is of the crowd and we have to maintain a significant amount of discipline on the line what the tear gas is designed to do is be a force multiplier and motivate people to move away from the line and move out of the area and disperse that's what it's designed for so that's when you'll see an incident commander authorize the use of tear gas to move and disperse the crowd thanks sir i appreciate it i know it's a tough question to answer and i appreciate the answer thank you council member council member split helm thank you miss mayor thank you got in litchfield for that presentation i really appreciate the thoroughness and the just going through each of the bullet points with the department response and so some of those i have a question so um on the responses to 1.2 1.3 um we've all acknowledged the chiefs acknowledged it um the use of barricading kind of barricading less lethal rounds inappropriate use and on uh slide 11 it says department armor or designee controls and issues less lethal munitions my concern is the word designee um so i'm a little concerned how they were deploying the first place as my understanding is that a direction was given to go to the department bring these rounds out and i'm assuming the person who made that direction could have been a department armor or someone who has the authority to make that decision but the person who got the rounds could have been a designee so how how is this step going to prevent what occurred with the use of those rounds in the future well the department armors we have several of them and our our expectation would be as the day would be available you do have individuals like the training sergeant who's not an armorer but he's an expert in in those munitions so if he's available he could be designated to that role the designee would need to be someone who was an expert in those munitions you have certain grenadiers who have been to grenadier training school where they're the train the trainers they can train grenadiers they are experts in all of these munitions and we have those on swat and mobile field force not not everyone who's an expert in munitions is or wants to be an armorer as well so those designees would have to have that same level of expertise and we do have those people um but again we extensively went through attempting to find out how those munitions moved from the station and although we learned a lot about where those munitions came from and we learned a lot about where the breakdowns in the system occurred we never learned who moved them from a to b so we do have designated storage for all munitions in special what's called magazines large special boxes that are made to store munitions the mobile field force does not use those munitions and they were not in in their magazine and then other than that we're not sure but the uh the designee to answer your question would have to have that same or higher level of expertise and they do exist that aren't designated armors but are experts in munitions and is that identified and documented in the policy versus just what you have here department armor or designee which you just shared with us i'm very comfortable with but is that specifically identified in the policy so these are the only folks that could be those designees no that is not i guess i would make her request i would ask that it be because again i i appreciate your answer but just leaving it as a designee doesn't um it leads me to some concern councilmember schoenhelm that's fair it's a fair uh statement and uh we will we will review it and i will provide a i will provide follow-up to the public safety subcommittee on on the changes okay and then on the same nature of this munitions are the barricade penetrating rounds now stored in a separate location from the other crowd control 40 millimeter munitions yes they are swat has its own magazine and that and swat does have legitimate use and trains for barricade rounds i know you were a former swat operator and you probably remember those rounds additionally we do no longer have that type of barricade round that barricade round look very similar to a foam tip 40 millimeter round and those rounds were all destroyed after this incident the barricade rounds that most officers are used to look completely different than a 40 millimeter non-lethal munition completely different and those are stored in the swat magazine they're totally separate great thank you and then also on 1.3 both during the events and during the listening sessions i and the chief participated on we heard some discussions and concerns about during this time of covid why would the chemical agents be introduced to crowds you know we're back i guess they identified in the red tier what discussions if any did the department have on the use of chemical agents during a covid pandemic we did have that discussion and we did that is one of the reasons why the rules of engagement you know we we definitely gave a lot of leeway before we would engage because we realized we did not have enough people to control the crowd we were going to have to use a force multiplier we were going to have to use gas if it got bad enough and that was a concern and discussion but it had to be weighed against the safety of the officers the safety of the community and the goal to simply cause the crowd to disperse without creating any more damage or harm to to anyone so it simply we had to make the decision to use that force multiplier multiplier but we did have extensive discussion about that and we certainly would have preferred not to have had to use it great thank you for that because i know there there are no easy solution to these ongoing dynamic events and then the last question i had was about the mass arrest team again shortly after it occurred some of the mass arrests and i'm not sure what the location was um and i had this conversation with the chief at the time it appeared as though some officers were not following covid protocols that had been established um what was the department's response to that uh it was very swift and they they got a visit from the chief himself which as you know as being a former chief it's either a really good thing or a really not good thing when the chief comes to see you personally so um it was very swift the message went back out and the chief himself delivered that message personally and enforced it and were there any policy changes as a result of those actions or any discipline that we have not heard of yet there was not uh official discipline created as a result of that and the policy was already in place to wear the mask so it didn't require a change that required enforcement okay thank you all right thank you council member are there any other questions from council council member fleming thank you um mr litchfield for your um analysis of the recommendations i'm curious to know some of this is um i think that you know in an abundance of cotton the tendency is to address specific concerns with specific solutions and while that is admirable i wonder sometimes if our assumptions that underlie uh the the actions themselves or for the whole reason for for being needs to also be looked at and so did that and um please forgive me for asking somewhat philosophical questions um but i'm just curious to know um how how your department or if and um how first amendment rights were if at all conceptualized in this discussion um and how they were weighed against um public safety um if that happened in real time or in your analysis of the events well at the incident command level it's a constant analysis of the event that's taking place as far as preserving the rights of people to have their first amendment right and protest peacefully and even to allow that to go into as we stated and allowed some acts that aren't technically maybe legal but then again aren't something that we want to escalate or confront with authority such as spray painting something which can be cleaned up later on the police department was spray painted and it can all be washed off or repainted or repaired later on so it's a constant discussion since the incident command has to make the decision of when you're going to confront um riotous or illegal or problem behavior so that discussion about balancing those two things is a constant in the command center and it's had with the tactical commander with his inputs as the eyes right on the ground it's had with various other streams of information that we have access to to try to go as long as we can and allow first amendment expression and first amendment protest for as long as possible until it gets the point where as it did a couple times where we have to respond and and address behavior that's no longer protected first amendment behavior you know the the reason that I asked that questions because you know I think of other examples like it was brought up yesterday in the women's march where I think that that the police force and and rank and file officers largely saw themselves as facilitating a community event rather than um you know in the us versus them you know when I hear this analysis I hear a lot of you know today and yesterday a lot of military type of of discussion and I understand there are some parallels but I do think that when we talk about you know troops and rules of engagement and you know broken arrows that we we start to um you know make it more difficult to facilitate the exercising of civil rights and and removing someone's civil rights is really a difficult call and you know I think about if somebody goes into a school and commits a massacre where they done that individual is arrested but nobody else is deprived of their right to a firearm and I know that's not a it's apples and oranges but you know the the right to freedom of speech certainly looms large and but not not as large as some other constitutional rights the other question I have is about proportionality and if those are conversations that are had during an incident and also in the aftermath of an incident they are the the rules of engagement are significant to addressing uh proportional use of force meaning what activity on one side is going to create which what response from us and that's also proportionality is also ruled as I mentioned the the use of force policies there's four or five different policies and one overarching one and those address proportionality and that doesn't change incident to incident that policy is in effect no matter what force you're using where against who and and for what reason all force has to be a proportional level of force that's why you know the less less lethal munitions which the 40 millimeter foam tip the appropriate one is a less lethal munition it's much like an extended baton strike and the gas use itself is what we would consider a low-level less lethal response as well so proportionality is discussed constantly it is put into the IAP in the general rules of engagement and it's tightly controlled through incident command about what level of response are we going to have depending on the activities that we're facing or the incident that we're facing um and then the last question is just a specific thing that was mentioned um in the sorry for asking though if I'm out of probably should have asked it earlier but um on page 15 of the OIR report um and again I apologize for asking this now it said that um steam rolling was used is that um consistent with department um techniques um our use of force and can you elaborate on what that actually means well that's not a term that's in our use or training what they're talking about is an incident where there was a small group of people and I believe they were sitting on the ground and just refusing to move and as the line advances forward to move the crowd it has to stop if you can't have a break in the line or a distortion in the line it has to be a line so it has to stop if if someone it will not move and then generally what happens is an arrest team comes forward and it takes those people as I explained and it takes them behind the line for an arrest that would have been uh the proper procedure for the crowd control incident it sounded like what happened here was they were moving trying to move faster than that or didn't have an arrest team so what they did is tried to push the people along and what ended up happening was if you're sitting and I push you you're gonna probably fall over or or go prone so it's not an effective tactic it's not solving the problem you either have to stand people up or or they have to move and what they mean by steamrolling is basically those individuals they tried to push them along and they just ended up basically walking over or around them because that that just wasn't an effective tactic so I would agree with OIR that that was not an effective tactic what should have happened is the line should have stopped and formulated an arrest and I know it takes time and and maybe they were trying to move quicker than they should have in that instance but that's that is not a would not be a normal crowd control tactic thank you for clarifying that's all the questions I have at this time great thank you councilmember uh thank you so much captain I really appreciate the clarity of the answers that you've given I think it's been been helpful for the discussion council we're well past two hours on this this component so far so I'm gonna give let's call it a 10 minute break come back at 310 and I know that Chief Navarro will be continuing the presentation at that point right Madam City Clerk let's go ahead and resume and recall the role okay councilmember Tibbets councilmember Schwedhelm there councilmember Sawyer here councilmember Fleming here councilmember Alvarez president vice mayor Rogers mayor Rogers here councilmember Tibbets have you joined us here councilmember Tibbets was that you oh yep here sorry thank you let the record show that all councilmembers are present all right all right go ahead chief if you want to jump back into it yes thank you mayor uh so if we can pull the slide deck up I think you go to the next slide please so we're good uh mayor we're going to go into uh really the community engagement uh our training and our programs in in the next few slides but I wanted to touch on some of the policies that you have heard about and then just a couple of other things that we're doing uh within the police department uh you've heard from both uh both Captain Corrigan and Captain Litchfield about some of the updates uh and so I won't go into too much detail about that but I just want to remind everybody that we have done um or completed updates on our use of force our less lethal policies and we actually we actually created the first amendment policy and um I appreciate the feedback that we've already received uh we will uh we will take those comments and uh note those and we will be making we will be making some changes related to the uh any type of designee that would be responsible for any less lethal munitions so we'll be making those changes and I will report back on what those changes are at the next public safety subcommittee uh some of the other things that we've done again we've we've restricted the the deployment of us lethal and tear gas and then uh one of the other things that we have done that we did early on was um I made a decision quickly to remove the carotid from our use of force policy so I just wanted to remind council in the community that that was something that we didn't wait on we made some immediate immediate moves and changes in in that regard um and I don't remember which council member asked about I might have been a council member solier about you know getting feedback from our staff um that was one of the that was one of the few times where I made a decision without uh without conferring with staff I knew it was going to be um you know there were going to be some uh potential issues with that but with uh the the concerns that we saw I thought it was a necessary adjustment and I took uh you know I I I took the initiative to to make those changes immediately um the other thing that we're doing is there's a a new law that's going into effect for us in 2022 I've talked about it briefly in some of the past council member meetings it's called the RIPA Act the Racial Identity Profiling Act of 2015 and it's had a staged approach or implementation throughout the state and so they started with some of the larger agencies such as Los Angeles Police Department San Diego and the California Highway Patrol and they've been implementing it and so we have to be in full compliance by January of 2022. At that time we are supposed to begin compiling data on stops enforcement stops that our staff our officers are going to be doing and then we report back and then the first report will be in 2023. With all the events that took place last year I went to the the other Sonoma County Chiefs and also our consortium to let them know that we were going to be moving forward and attempting to implement this early. With that we were able to engage with the current changes in some of our RMS systems and we are working towards a countywide initiative to implement this early and so we anticipate that we're going to be able to start collecting data in July of this year so that's something that we wanted to make sure that we were we started early on to make sure that we are full compliance by the time we have to be in January 2022. So those are going to be done six months prior to our mandate and again we talked briefly about it earlier Mayor you know we are as a Chiefs Association throughout the state we are looking at continuing to be active in legislation and reviewing you know different mandates and reforms both statewide and also nationally and some of those include desertification. There was again a movement with the carotid and and we are actively involved as an association throughout the state when it comes to national reform. Next slide please. So oh go back one thank you. So with community engagement we've done a lot in we want to do a lot in this particular area. One of the things that came up in the community empowerment plan in their first recommendation was around again providing opportunities to enhance a culture that values public engagement and giving a voice to our community members and one of the things that we have done is we created this our our Chiefs Community Ambassador team. This is we've identified 15 members from throughout the community which will meet on they'll meet with me on a regular basis. The first the first meeting will be a virtual introduction later this month. We're going to be able to provide more information to our our CCAP members on what we're looking for and and really get started getting some feedback. This will be an opportunity to have these 15 community members go through our community police experience to learn more about our police department. It'll give them a platform to ask questions and provide input on the type of police department that they want and we will be able to use them as ambassadors to their personal and professional networks to create additional community listening sessions in the future. The as we are beginning this I again we will be introducing my command staff to the CCAP team this month and then at the next public safety subcommittee meeting I can provide an update on who these members are. It is a cross pretty good cross section of people from throughout the city and from and and several of them were part of meetings that we had through the Office of Community Engagement with the community listening sessions with the empowerment plan this last year. So we're very excited about that and I look forward to bringing on bringing more information to you and the subcommittee in in in June. I also think that this will be a a prime area and a perfect venue to be able to start having some of the discussions that we've talked about related to demonstrations and including police response and our community response and how we work together to make demonstrations as safe as we can for for everybody. So I'm really looking forward to having those conversations. We also have a community engagement team so there was some discussion with the with Megali and her team about their community engagement team. Internally we identified numerous numerous staff members both sworn and civilian throughout the department who are who want to be part of our engagement team. It's a collateral assignment that they they want to take on and I think you know to Councilmember Fleming's state question earlier I can't remember the exact exact question but it struck me that you know wanting to make cultural change and not just you know not not just doing something that we're already doing and and it really does take time and it takes people and it takes that that true engagement and this team I think will help build and maintain those positive relationships and build that trust between the police department in our community and and utilize the best practices that we we have seen and then also create new best practices in the area of community engagement and in outreach and and those are some those are some things that we can't just rely on ourselves and to do what we think is best. We're really going to be looking at trying to get help from the office community engagement. I will definitely be reaching out to to Council when we're we're having meetings or any type of events in your particular districts to let you know what's going on and to get any any feedback from from from Council. Again we will be I think one of the other things that we'll be able to utilize as restrictions begin to get lifted over the next several months and throughout this year is that we are going to be able to get back to the things that we've done in the past we'll be able to start doing coffee with a cop again we'll be able to do community police experience in person again and and and doing doing those actual face to face meetings with with with our community members because I think you lose a lot you know virtual experience has been has been great to stay in touch but I think there's there's always a lot that can be gained when we're actually talking to people in person and they really get to know who we are. Again we'll be working in community listening sessions both you know sessions that we will be trying to put together but also using CCAT to create some of these listening sessions and some of their groups. We'll be working with the office community engagement and continue to to help or rely on them to help us with really reaching out to to groups that don't usually we either aren't in contact with or don't usually come in contact with us. So we are you know I think this past year we really we really were I think it was valuable to have that that partnership because we were able to get introduced to a hundred black men the indigenous community and then also the lowrider council and I think that we'll continue to use these collaborations to and then also seek out further connections and some of the areas I think you know council member Alvarez mentioned the Eritrean community I've already had some conversations with with somebody who we had talked about how do we reach out to the Eritrean community and so those are that in the Asian community or our communities that I think that we can do a better job in and we're looking forward to seeing how we can move forward in those areas with with the violence prevention partnership we have a strong collaboration and we work well within the partnership and we will definitely be using that the violence prevention partnership to identify groups and neighborhoods where we can meet and work together and building that stronger bond between us and the community that may be you know and it may be you know going to their locations right and it may be a community center or an apartment complex but you know working with them to address some of the safety issues in our specific communities and then earlier you heard about the lowrider Mary Lou Lowrider from Magali and you know what was exciting about this was that this wasn't my idea and it wasn't the police department's idea this idea came from the lowrider council so it came from the community and when it came up it was it was like wow you know can we really do that and we have been able to identify the vehicle we donated the car to this to this program there are no other police department funds that are going to this program I know there's been questions concerns about that but you know this is being done with the assistance of the office of community engagement and is really being driven by the community so we're really excited about that in the area of social media some of the things that we've tried to do is and again you've heard this when it comes to demonstrations and emergencies is really utilize so social media as an awareness and education tool and to provide real-time information with our incidents and then also to be able to provide safety instruction and instructions to our community some of the other things that we've got is we've updated our website and we touched on this earlier but our if you go to our main webpage which is Santa Rosa Police Santa Rosa PD dot org right there you can find the page and links to be able to provide complaints or accommodations for our staff you can also go to Santa Rosa PD slash change for the better and on that on that link you can find policies training data community programs and links to the public safety subcommittee so we've made some significant changes there and we're continuing to push information out as we as we make changes to our policies and then also whenever there's a significant incident that comes up that's where you'll be able to find the information and again Kevin literally talked about our pio and that was created to provide better information to the public Sergeant Mahurn is our current pio he he helps in timely response to the media and the community and we're able to work closely with our city comms team and officer community engagement when significant issues arise and then also when we want to reach out to to help build trusting in in our legitimacy and the pio pio position has been vital in this past year already we've been able to connect with Sonoma State University to be a part of some of their programs in our archive projects that they've got going i've been a part of virtual sessions with uh students and other nonprofits and a lot of that work has come through having that that dedicated pio who is helping us with some of these contacts next slide please as for training so we talked a lot about training over the last couple days and we're going to be able to provide more more information on this as we you know as we're bringing things forward to the public safety subcommittee some of the things that we do currently is that we do we do train in implicit bias and tactical issues that may may be related to people with emotional issues or some type of crisis crisis issues we train in the area of community policing and and engagement so we we require implicit bias training for every single employee who starts with the police department and we require regular updates in in that implicit bias training every two years the other thing that we did several years ago was that we sent we sent staff we sent four officers to Chicago to train in procedural justice which is you know it it talks about creating an opportunity to have a voice to build trust to be fair and to provide respect when when encountering or when we're talking with people speaking with people in the public and so we we train all of our staff in in procedural justice in addition recently you heard Magali talk about the the seminar called tipping the scales several of us in our so our command staff several managers and several field training officers attended the seminar which was was put on by the violence prevention partnership and those are you know we're always looking for new training that that can pop up both virtually and also where we can we'll be able to attend in person you know whether they're one-day seminars or we we can you know adjust officers time if we can to to go to some of these trainings to to get the most up-to-date information as possible in addition we're excited to you know to be able to work with our the new city equity officer Socorro and we we have a past relationship because she was with the city schools so we we're excited to have her coming on and as she you know gets her feet underneath her we'll be able to start working with her and then also human resources on additional training that they identify and again we'll talk a little bit more about the seed collaborative in the in the next slide but you know those are some things that we're looking at we are we created a post-distance learning training and that is a that is a training that we put a grant in for through the police officers standards and training it was awarded we were awarded this grant in October of 2020 and this is a one-time project funding to equip law enforcement in in an innovative way and so the way we're using it is that we are creating a curriculum and working in partnership with the with a non-profit local non-profit community matters to create a training and this will be allow us to help create this curriculum which reflects a deep rooted understanding an empathy for a variety of individuals by December and so we are we're actively working on that right now and we should be able to have this implemented by December and it's not only a training that we're going to be able to take on here at the department but it will be a training that can be used regionally and throughout the state so we're really excited about that you know with communication equipment you know you heard from Captain Kreegan we did purchase the this new equipment to be able to communicate better with crowds and and also during emergencies to be able to provide better direction and instruction in in you know when it's when it's really noisy and it and you know some of the other equipment that we had was you know we was not as good so we're excited we're glad that we have we have the opportunity to use this new equipment for that we've had they we've got the upgraded radio system with captain Lynchfield talked about and then we as far as training goes some of the things that we have done is over the last two weeks we have had command staff and supervisors supervisors attend a a day long management course in in demonstrations and then we also had our mobile field force attend a three-day course to get up to date on current tactics and current the current use of mobile field force and then the last thing in the area training that I want to highlight is I've asked our training team to look in to look at a new program and bring a national best practice model to Santa Rosa it's called ICAT and it's uh it stands for the integrating communications assessment and tactics training it's designed specifically for situations involving persons who are unarmed who or who may be armed with weapons other than firearms or persons or persons addressing persons who might be experiencing a mental health or other type of crisis and so it's a nationally recognized model and so we are working on bringing that here to be able to uh fully implement that training for our staff next slide please so in the area of programs again we've we've talked a little bit about the SEED Collaborative uh the city entered into a contract with SEED Collaborative and our portion at the police department uh SEED Collaborative will be helping us develop a department equitable policing plan uh we've I've had two meetings with them uh last week we had our first meeting with our internal team and SEED Collaborative uh we are they're going to be they've talked about creating uh more information to help get our officers and our staff better educated on on what what is going to be happening over the next several months but we're going to be working very closely with them to create focus groups within the police department and also focus groups within the community to talk about what an equitable policing program looks like for for our community um the uh I'm going to jump around a little bit here but uh we've we've talked a lot about uh CAHOOTS and the mental health uh response program uh in in past uh sub subcommittee meetings and city council meetings uh so we are actively working with community-based organizations and local hospitals to implement a mobile crisis response team that's going to serve the city's most vulnerable populations uh so this is again modeled off of CAHOOTS which is in Eugene Orgen uh it this includes uh a uh working with a growing homeless population who who exhibit serious emotional disturbances and serious mental illness so uh we are in the in the throes of creating that team uh the crisis response team is going to be comprised of mental health clinician a paramedic and a homeless service advocate uh they'll be working collaboratively with us at the police department uh to fill the gaps uh in in in uh law enforcement to respond to mental health uh crises uh we uh we plan to have this program launched in the fall hopefully october of 2021 and this team would be responding to all mental health crisis calls for service that don't involve weapons or violence and uh if for some reason we get a call that uh that that we go to or if it's uh during off times uh you know they will be a uh a resource for us and if it's during their times uh we can definitely give them a call and they can come on and we're one of the other things that we're doing right now is we are having uh ongoing conversations right now with the county uh to see how we can implement and and utilize continue to utilize the mobile support team uh that they have um uh through the county the other thing that we've done is that we've reached out to the to the u.s. department of justice uh the the bureau of justice assistance and um we are um looking to be a part of a uh a collaborative and a cohort uh regarding mental health learning sites and so if we're admitted this program would allow uh uh the the this program that we're setting up and the center was a police department to access free technical assistance resources uh from uh from their uh from their center law enforcement center um and uh that would provide invaluable training opportunities for us and uh program guidance uh for uh for these for us and also other jurisdictions uh that are going to be setting up these models uh in the region uh this network of learning uh uh sites it thrives on the collaboration and information uh information sharing uh to be able to have a consistent program improvement and then have the maximum impact uh for our program that we're implementing uh the other thing that I don't have on here is uh there was some talk about an internship internship program citywide uh we actually have a limited internship program here uh it's limited right now to uh vehicle technicians uh they basically help maintain our vehicles uh make sure that they're serviced in a timely manner uh they're um make sure that we have the proper equipment uh inside our vehicles and so uh there is some limited law enforcement uh a piece to that but it really it's not specific to some of the other things that we that we do here uh what I would really like to do is uh and this is part of our strategic plans to look at uh incorporating a thriving internship program within the police department and uh part of that is going to be looking at um you know how do we you know what what kind of dedicated work are we going to have for that um how do we identify funding if it's a paid internship um and uh you know be able to make sure that uh you know people uh you know uh people can come here and and have a valuable uh interaction and learn uh more about public safety uh number one this would uh it could help us in uh our daily uh our daily duties but also it would provide um I think a good recruitment tool to help people keep them in in the public safety um and uh help people understand us a little bit more um as they as they go through as they go through school um and then uh we've we've also talked um you know I think what everybody's waiting for is what's going on with the police auditor uh so we've heard a lot uh from the community I went to several community listening sessions we talked about oversight and we talked about the police auditor and there's been a lot of questions about that so uh one of the things that is going on right now is that we currently have the police auditor RFP in process uh it did go out um one of the um one of the pieces of this contract is that it's going to be a uh we're looking at a five-year contract for uh the next auditor so give us some uh some some I guess a long-term standing uh with with this uh with with whoever is awarded this uh this opportunity um the police auditor will answer directly to the next city manager and uh community members will be able to um go or contact the auditor directly uh to issue complaints but the the auditor uh will work closely with us uh the auditor will have unfettered access to the police department our reports again data body word camera footage and our policies so uh we we we will not be restricting uh the auditor uh very similar to um you know what what we saw in in the um the investigations uh they'll be part they can be part of the investigations uh that that come up and um I you know there's been questions about you know what if we would have had one now um I think the process would be the same it would have been quicker um that uh you know we could go directly immediately into uh this mode of using a an auditor to help with to go into some of these investigations um and then again uh one of the last things uh that has uh that has been implemented and this is not a police department thing but the um but the uh council has initiated the public safety subcommittee and this is going to be uh really that uh that venue where we can bring policies uh to uh the subcommittee to provide to get feedback on where we need to go our programs uh what we need to do and uh and for the community to have a uh a voice also in those venues there and then um and then we will provide uh regular updates on the programs that we have moving forward so with that um next slide please that is the end of our presentation in closing uh again I want to thank the city council and the community for your time over the last two days uh I I want I want to be very frank uh none of us ever want to go through something uh like like we did uh last year again uh I I'm going to say it again we've made mistakes um and uh these but but these deficiencies have been corrected and we are using these reports to improve our organization we've held and we are holding uh individuals accountable and we've made systemic changes to our policies but ultimately I take full responsibility changes have been made to ensure that these policies and procedures are up to date and our and our officers understand the intent of each operation and again we've already undertaken several reform measures to make sure uh that uh we aren't making these same mistakes the men and women of the Santa Rosa police department remain steadfast in the desire to make sure that we are making necessary changes and serve our community well we heard yesterday from the consultants that there appears to be a path forward and I truly believe that but I know that we can't do this alone and that's why it will be important for us to work with the community and have those conversations to be able to put the safeguards into place so everyone is available to help us enhance our police services and we have that engagement with the community for the future again I want you to know as the chief of police I am fully committed to this um we will do our part in being better in being better prepared in how we respond to protests and build trust within our community this will take time but it's important that we continue to work on this and I'm committed to make sure that this momentum does not stop uh the captains and I are here to answer any questions that you might have thank you very much thank you chief just two quick uh questions as follow-ups uh the first I'm not sure I heard and maybe I just missed it from you you mentioned that the RFP has gone out when can the public expect that those proposals are due and what does the timeline look like for actually getting somebody into that position of police auditor so the um the RFP went out uh the uh I think the solicitation is open until mid-May uh it'll come back for review and uh I would anticipate uh we will be able to give some feedback to the public safety subcommittee in June and then hopefully have somebody um again they don't work for me but uh we want them as quickly as possible but I would anticipate by the beginning of fiscal year great thank you and then I also received uh questions from the public uh leading up to this presentation specifically about the the uh new equipment for communications during the during protests uh I think it was identified in one of the uh initial documents and then it was amended that it was an LRAD system um and there was some significant concern from some folks that in other jurisdictions that's been weaponized uh to do to use loud noises to control crowds uh is that the intent with this device uh or is that um I will I'll say if that's possible I think that that's also an another area of discussion about uh less lethal means of crowd control that council members will be interested in discussing policies around yeah so uh we can bring the uh we can bring the LRAD policy to the next public safety subcommittee uh we the the intent is for clear communication it is not to use it as a weapon uh that was uh that was one of the first things I asked about when we were uh looking at purchasing a new uh communication device and so we we had those conversations early on I am aware of the concern and uh we are we we put measures into place where that is not going to be done and uh communication with the LRAD system uh is has to be done with supervisor approval and the watch commander uh has to be notified okay thank you chief I really appreciate that in that intent council member tibbetz thank you mayor uh chief I want to thank you and the captains for this presentation I want to thank you for your words there at the end chief as well um and and also I want to call captain cregan in particular he said something earlier that caught my attention and I think was really important as you developed this ambassador team and that was uh the departments intent to reach out to you know some of our biggest critics um we reaching out to the appropriate people on human rights council people that have been have been hurt at our hands um and uh people that have you know have experience with us uh for better or for worse and and I just want to really tip my hat to you captain cregan and chief I know you probably pow out on this before this presentation but I think that's so important as we have these conversations um because I think it is truly going to lead to us being being better and being more responsive and and in that spirit I wanted to ask too about the RFP process with the auditor um you know I assume you're going to be selecting the auditor uh internally but I would encourage the department to to reach out to either the ambassador team itself um or the public safety subcommittee uh with public input to select the ambassador as well excuse me not the ambassador the auditor uh only because I think that should be you know a publicly driven process and and the reason why is if something does happen in the future and let's face it it will this is a police department they're never perfect but they can be good and and work towards great and I know that that's what we're doing um but I think it's just again important that that auditor is truly seen as independent through an independently selected process um so again thank you guys and those are my comments yeah so um I I can tell you that the process for review uh we do have uh we we do have a member on that I believe it is going to be captain cregan um who's going to be part of that review team but uh in addition to that uh there is somebody actually from our community uh chiefs advisory team who's going to be part of that also we wanted to make sure that there was a community member who was part of that process and um I believe somebody from the public safety subcommittee meeting uh will be a part of that um and uh there were a few more so it's not just the police the police department is not selecting the auditor uh we are we are a part of the process uh but ultimately uh this position uh answers to the city manager and so uh we've been a part of the process of of of putting it together because uh we need to work closely with them but it's important that we have unfettered they have unfettered access and that uh it's as transparent and uh as accountable as possible and so that means that uh we should not be the ones uh solely picking this position and I do believe council member uh I know that there is a council member that serves on that selection committee I believe it will be the chair of the subcommittee so I think it will be council member Fleming who will be on it all right thanks chief and thanks Chris yep council member Fleming yeah that's a good dovetail um thank you chief have some questions um for you and for the city manager one is um did you just say that there is going to be um a member of the community besides myself like um uh a member from the broader community involved or is it yes yes okay and um curious to know uh where you find their role uh our new equity officer in this because I think the whole gist of this is about equity and so I'm really looking forward to her being included in this process so just to put that out there um and the other thing um so I'm wondering has that been considered we can look at it um but it was published it might further delay the process because we had to publish who the review committee is but we're happy to look at it yeah respectfully like I find that the delay excuse um a little given that the position has been open for two years again it may just alter the time we may have to repost I will consult with with the legal team if that's a so direction we're not standing in the way of that we're just we may have to repost the the solicitation okay um and then sticking with the same topic um I'm curious to know um you know this is a question for the city manager if you believe it would be appropriate to assign the DEI person to be the staff liaison to the public safety subcommittee so that we can have a bridge between um our police department and our community engagement team uh I would have to check the work plan for the DEI person and and understand that better and what that requirement would be but we can you know those are conversations that can be can be further analyzed and then the last piece is um I'm glad to hear that the seed collaborative has been involved I am wondering you know where where staff and um the council will ultimately have access to hear about what's going on in the process and if we can get more regular updates from them uh they're just initiating the process and I believe the plan is in June to have them come back and give an update to council on where they're where their work is okay thank you all right thank you councilmember so council I will point out again this is our second study session of the day it does provide us an opportunity to give direction to staff and to talk about where we go from here now that we've heard these reports as well uh I chuckled a little bit I appreciate that Lexa Paul writes policies and procedures that we utilize here in Santa Rosa but I do want to remind the council that policy discussions do fall at our doorstep and so I'm interested in hearing both from the public as well as council members when we come back what additional direction we would like to give in particular to our public safety subcommittee on policy discussions that they'd like to see uh facilitated or that would be of the public's interest for us to expedite to bring back for the full council's discussion uh so with that I'll go to public comment first and I just make sure I set the expectation for council members about what will be helpful to hear when we come back right I'll start sorry go ahead just a reminder I just wanted to put that reminder out there one more time that the audio indicator of times up is not working today so please use the visual cue um in lieu of the audio timer and if you are running long Mayor Rogers will do what he can to ask you to kindly wrap it up thank you I appreciate that Nina we'll start with the evidence we'll go to Rigel after are you able to hear me yep all right you've now heard five reports regardless of perspective on each report the fact of the matter is SRPD used to your gas and unapproved live munitions rounds on its own people they also use crowded control tactics not only were seen as ineffective but as human rights violations by international standards they also resulted in 1.9 million dollars in settlement paid outs in favor of protesters and it further deepen the divide between the civilian public and law enforcement so there is no version of public trust or credible accountability where the police are left to police themselves no matter how sincere that attempt may be in theory or in practice it is an inherent conflict of interest that requires additional independent oversight with significant authority so there's another unpopular truth that has to be acknowledged about people and culture and that's the nature of the psychological profile of somebody who's drawn to be in law enforcement to begin with and the greater culture of this nation well some people are drawn to provide acts of service there are indeed others drawn to income authority power and approved use of weaponry so we need to not only have the best screening hiring training and accountability practices we also have to have ways to legislatively combat officer associations that empower abuses of authority and excessive use of force that undermine policy reforms because appropriate policy can exist on paper but it's the culture that creates the conditions for behavior in reality so and then as for the protests as the crowds became smaller younger and more melanated in skin tone to be very direct the police presence grew in a manner that was in itself a show of force and intimidation that i personally witnessed and it was grossly disproportionate to as a response to the actual threat level on the ground so we have to ask ourselves what what does this cost our community both in dollars and ethical credibility and you cannot discount the historical context both nationally and locally Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering George Floyd murder this community still holds polls profound agony over Andy Lopez and others so our cause and motives for these protests were and are just so as Santa Rosa now the city responsible for producing the only witness in the whole country who testified that the murder of an unarmed restrained man was a justified use of force and also the city that tear gassed and shot its own people indiscriminately for expressing their first amendment rights is that who we are so council i think you have to take these following actions to make sure that they promptly hire the already approved police auditor you have to implement a civilian review board in addition to the independent auditor that is legally empowered with direct authority over the auditor and the review process need the ban the use of tear gas rubber bullets unwarranted drone surveillance facial recognition technology kettling and the use of lrad and other similar sound and frequency devices and you have to enhance the requirements for reporting all forms of misconduct not just use of force and ultimately what this comes down to is you need to divest from the local police and invest in community-based services and program thank you evan i need you to start to wrap up yes you need to invent last statement divest from local police and invest in community-based service programs that are known to definitively reduce crime and the subsequent need for future potential policing thank you great thank you so much evan rajal followed by alegra hello we can hear you okay okay perfect um i'm i'm just going to make this really short and sweet because this is a department that has shown that they cannot be trusted and even today they change their presentation and misrepresent the purchase of an lrad as an enhanced loud speaking device if in if his intent and i'm speaking about ray tomorrow um is clear communication then by a pa an lrad is not needed this is a weapon that is designed to disperse crowds by putting out decibel levels that cause incredible pain and destroy hearing especially when used improperly and i don't think that there's anything we've heard today or yesterday um in these reports that shows that this police department is capable of using these devices discriminately improperly um if that weapon comes out and i you can this is easily google i promise you that lawsuits lawsuits in the city will increase exponentially across the board like even as recent as last night to show that this department cannot be trusted protesters were followed to their cars by drones myself included and had our plates run and names called out over monitored standard channels just for leaving an entirely peaceful protest with no even police interaction so i i just would implore the city council to not only review these purchases but deny them and revoke them i yield my time all right thank you rajal allegra followed by michael allegra are you with us sorry how about now there we go okay um just a couple quick statements so first of all i don't understand why the police department is involved in the contracting process for their own auditor that seems like a conflict of interest um i certainly don't trust them to select an auditor who will do a fair and impartial job um we know that we can't trust them because they have not been telling the truth um in regards to this entire meeting um they say that they didn't kettle there's a video of them kettling they say like there's been so many incidents that they claimed didn't happen when there's video evidence it's like they don't know we live in 2021 um additionally the promises of chief navarro to do better bring very false he and his team have continuously justified their use of force against residents they have not even commented on the human rights campaign or the human rights commission's report which just speaks volumes to the fact that they really don't mean what they say um they're not going to do better unless they we make them do better they cause conflict when they show up to protest and riot gear and then they victim blame and they act as though they had no choice but to gas a crowd of children um as other people have said more mostly young mostly brown people that they chose to do this violence towards we have to ban tear gas we have to ban rubber bullets and projectiles we have to ban the all rad and we have to take their money away it's not okay to continue funding this violence against the community thank you thank you allegra michael followed by kelsey hi can you hear me yep we can hear you okay so my comment from yesterday still stands um i'm not surprised that there are so few policy changes that are meaningful that have come out of this because the reports that those policy changes are based on did not really address the majority of the acts of violence that occurred against regular people or protesters um the human rights commission report was basically sidelined even in this meeting it was mentioned and then that's it you know jerry and demitra were given a little bit of time to talk um but basically we're not really acknowledged except in public comment and comments from the city council members so that's really disappointing that they were basically just ignored by the police department when there are many protesters who have a video footage of what happened who could you know provide more context for those investigations very very very very disappointing um i want to say that you know when it comes to kettling you know we can talk about the semantics of what the word kettling means but what it was being described as as not kettling is a mass arrest surrounding protesters cutting off all the exits what kettling was described as was you know forcing protesters to move that is something that i experienced during the protests um i was forced we were forced down b street um we were basically you know we continued down b street and got cut off by another group of officers who pushed us back toward san aro or back toward a mendicino and then pushed us out of mendicino and it was it was very forceful movement if it sounds like the only thing that makes the kettling is that you know non protesters were involved that's just not true it's a very escalatory tactic it doesn't matter how you define it however you define it it was definitely done at some point by srpd um during the protests there's a lot more i want to say one thing is when the with the use of tear gas i think that there are a lot of concerns about the effects on women's reproductive health with tear gas i don't i'm really concerned about who's going to be involved in the community discussions about whether or not to ban it it should be the people who are most impacted by it there's a certain level of force that you know when it affects people it's not a matter of discussion whether or not you use it it's a matter of yeah we don't use it i'm super concerned about the alorad because those devices have done extreme harm to protesters in the past um i i really want to ask okay we have we're going to try to stop shooting people in the testicle with a barricade round but if we shoot them in the testicle with a rubber bullet is that going to be better um we need you know we read it widely reconsider the use of the 40 millimeter munitions you know basically ban rubber bullets thank you michael i need you to wrap up please okay kelsey followed by lee hi there um yeah so we've been listening to a lot of conversation around the police basically um representing for themselves what was done and whether it was okay or not and yet you know we're sitting here listening to them justify that everything they did or almost everything they did was justified and necessary and then telling us that they're committed to changes and they're listening to what we're saying these things cannot both be true um essentially we cannot have the fox guarding the hen house um the auditor position has been left empty we do not think that was an accident and now we're talking about when they're going to hire someone for themselves we need that position to be removed from their control completely they have proven that that is not going to work and that they're not going to cooperate with it and in fact the auditor position is woefully um under you know it less than what we need as compared to the iolero for instance and is a huge gap in the kind of oversight that we clearly need um i just want to say that use of curfew and any kind of um ammunition and gas that is extremely indiscriminate like there's no way to talk about whether or not everyone in a crowd was uh justifiably gassed it's just into the crowd and we're sitting here listening to a conversation about when it's okay to fire into a crowd of people with almost anything i mean we should be considering the term less lethal rounds um very carefully um i don't think we should be firing less lethal rounds into crowds of people basically ever um so we want to see real oversight out of this and to have the control be uh with the council with the people in some way and we definitely want to see the budget priorities shifted to alternatives policing um rather than just keeping business as usual and then uh justifying it after the fact also whatever's in those reports that were alluded to and described things like what was said and the sexual harassment and all of those things we do not have the details we do not know who it was we don't know whether they were disciplined we don't know what they said we need all of that to come out if you want to talk about trust and transparency thank you thank you kelsey lee followed by ellen hi thank you after listening to two days of very high paid professionals who were observed videoed even escalating crowds and the advice of their hand-picked audit teams that somehow didn't see those videos or interview the victims i i have no words the city council now holds the legacy ignoring not only human rights report here but international human rights and instead giving the platform the time the consideration to those who just cost you over two million dollars i don't know how anyone can trust anyone who is actually considering the advice of groups that admitted to not contacting protesters or watching the videos from observers you were listening to the brutalizers side of the story the subject of the protesters they are the reason protesters were out there in the first place think about that think about which side of this legacy you are on the settlement of over two million dollars was for a reason you lost the trust of the community last year when you essentially ignore the human rights report and now you have literally obliterated any hope of trust by giving more time to an admittedly poor audit hand-picked by the person who's accused of doing the bad things and those who have been accused of sexual assault horrific displays of hatred toward the community you have a lot of work to do to earn the trust of our as our elected officials i urge you to take the human rights report seriously and to give the community the equivalent amount of time to discuss the details of their report i implore you to adopt the demands delivered on behalf of the community by mr. threed and miss smith again the solid days of gas lighting and we need our elected officials to do better now demilitarize and stop funding things like l r ad weapons to be used on citizens who are standing up to police brutality who have been who who's who have been in crowds who have been escalated escalated clearly want to stop protests against police brutality stop police brutality stop listening to the brutalizers excuses hold murderers sexual sultans and people who cause bodily harm and mental anguish accountable put human lives over property listen to those who are harmed not to the guys who do the harm go down in history for being the good bad guys i yield my time thank you lee we've got ellen followed by alan can you hear me yep you can hear me okay um i can't possibly be as eloquent as lee that was amazing and i echo all the statements already made today i do want to say that the police department responded in such detail to reports by the office's office of independent review which did an investigation of policing at black lives matter protests yet didn't talk to any protesters to review protesters video tapes and the after action assessment report which was not an investigation yet no response at all to the commission on human rights report as demetri smith commented yesterday seems like years ago right um beyond a moral issue how the police department does his job is a legal liability matter the press democrat reported there's been a 1.9 million settlement of black life um that went to black live matter protesters yet anyone listening in on this marathon discussion within the only things the pd did wrong was not have enough supervisors and not communicate enough i repeat what others have urged you to do address the commission on human rights report and implement the true reforms request did on page 26 of that report took my time thanks ellen i've got an alan followed by collin hi um chief navarro said that he never wants to see something like this happen again since it was 100 the police that escalated all the bad things that happened during the protests according to your own report it's up to him directly to tell us how he's going to make sure that it doesn't happen again he also said he takes full responsibility for what happened if he takes responsibility for the tragedies which cost the city over two million dollars so far he needs to immediately resign that's accountability uh anything else is just lip service having the police be the ones to create the order of position themselves is a joke why would we expect them to create a strong enough position that would create actual change at the department they don't want to change themselves and on l rads l rads are a weapon of war they have no use by civilian police departments especially with the ridiculous argument that they're used as a communications device there's no area of santa rosa in which police would be far enough away from protesters in which an l-rab would be needed for audible communications and using them in close range is defined as a band weapon of war after the cheney convention as it can cause permanent hearing loss and furthermore councilmember tidbits the term pow wow is racist towards our indigenous community and hearing it casually thrown around in an official meeting was pretty disturbing please strike it from your vocabulary and get your whole council's language training on what casually used terms in our society are only casually used due to how much white supremacy is ingrained in the whole system i yield my time thank you allen we have colin followed by elaine hi can you hear me yeah hey so um my name is colin i'm a santa rosa resident and um i'm disappointed but not surprised uh by that entire presentation uh it was a marathon presentation question and answer uh system and it was just more of the same and i feel like some of us are just bashing our heads against this brick wall that is the police department because very rarely in that report was addressed the the problems that we were talking about you know i noticed in the written documents that there is a single reference to citizens demands to defund the police and other demands and not only the other demands are addressed naturally that was written by people at the police department so it doesn't really surprise me that they wouldn't want to address their jobs being cut but either way um i was also disappointed to hear that uh chief navarro and the police department did not really intend or even try to engage with the human rights commission report i understand navarro has said before that it was baseless and one sided but you know if we're going to hear your side and from the agencies that you picked to analyze your response then you should also hear from the people's side regardless of whether you like it or not also for the rest of the time i i want to address people's concerns about the lrad because i was also very concerned and i was also very concerned to see that in the slides for today it was adjusted to enhanced acoustic device rather than lrad i would understand this is probably because lrad is a very you know contentious divisive situation and i understand that your intent is to use it for public communication and not as a weapon but you also intended to use barricade rounds against windows and hollow core doors and not against people so there are situations wherein things that you don't intend to use as weapons and then be used as weapons there are a number of us who've been to uh other jurisdictions other places where lrads have been used as weapons against protesters and i would like to if you'll indulge me play for you what it sounds like so that you understand why we are afraid of it no concern about the lrad it's pretty loud and you can't really get away from it either you can move side to side but that's all you can do and this is the kind of thing that you want to bring into our community it's a weapon all right thank you callin we'll go to elaine followed by diana can you hear me now go ahead elaine first of all i want to say that i i feel ashamed unimpressed and i really have lost confidence in the city council i heard more from the public comment i learned more from the public comment and i heard from any of these presentations i was shocked the way the report from the human rights commission was handled it felt like it was ignored i really appreciate that young man giving an example of that horrible sound of that l rod that's what we want to bring into our community i know mr tibet just gave birth to a little boy congratulations jack your father is this the future you want for your child that they have policing like this that if he goes to a protest because he believes that people are not being treated fairly that he will be confronted this way you know i i really feel that what happened today you know everything that was presented during the andy lopez situation was presented today and i heard one of our city council members say oh i didn't know it i didn't know any of this before when people were coming time after time after time saying the same things that are happening and it happened and escalated more and i went on to the website for the press democrat and i saw the pictures that reviewed my mind of what happened during that protest and my heart sunk i said this is the community i live in and also one last thing i want to say the human rights commission i was on that commission i was appointed by senator mike maguire we were volunteers those people that gave that report were volunteers the other two reports were paid and there's a difference when someone gets paid to do something versus somebody that's a volunteer and i can't encourage you enough you know i'm a great grandmother now and they say when you become a great grandmother you're supposed to be have wisdom you're supposed to be able to give advice you're supposed to encourage people well i encourage each one of you on that council to give thought to the future of our children the future of our lives if we allow this stuff to go on a 13 year old boy was killed handcuffed we went to the supreme court four million dollars to prove that it was okay that that happened it is not okay our children are the future we're looking at the future is this what we want escalation like this like i said at the beginning i was ashamed that this is my city please do something to help me feel more proud of each and every one of you thank you for listening thank you elaine we'll go to diana followed by alexis hello we can hear you oh great uh i'm so sorry this is so confusing to me uh just to get all this so i just can try to quickly put it in there uh you talked about and i thought you were joking at first i thought you were talking about my family because we have been attacked by sonoma county sheriffs for since 1983 when i first moved here we are black and white they thought my children were mexican so they were ordered at nine years old to raise her shirts and that's when you know i come from berkeley i was just astounded it was like moving 50 years back in time but uh i just want to go through this uh somebody said explicit bias there's some kind of training there there's also on the sonoma county uh web or youtube police explicit bias dog attack where you almost murdered my son and i really would appreciate if everybody looked at that because i'm not taking this joke everything you guys said is a lie cover up a smother and you're not going to smother me i'm a mother so let's just go on of your possibilities and take trust i have trusted you since 1983 you marginalized subliminalized criminalized prison my son and almost killed him okay you have lost your trust with me and it sounds not like now with also the community and uh the young man whoever was uh had 15 years he keeps bragging on he had 15 years to deal with uh this lethal response suddenly it's black people and it's lethal we all know what that means okay you weren't ready for black people to stand up in sonoma county because they never have but i'm gonna tell you that's about to change because we're here we're all black we're all white we're all brown and we're all chinese get used to it okay and the man with the baby you really need to pay attention your child is growing up in this mud bath so the incidences and your scramble code i couldn't believe you had a scramble code code 30 really you already have had this in plan and you still don't have it together you are so incompetent and let's talk about that freaking speaker because that is pure abuse and if you get it you are more abusive than i ever thought a human being can be because loud sounds have been used by racist white people i'll i'll just put a few on the board while i had to move out of forestville the third black family in west county because our white racist neighbor along with the police they used bulldozers diana i need you to please wrap up your comments okay the thing is you're all lying get it straight okay thanks bye all right thank you diana alexis followed by scott hi can you hear me yep wonderful um so i just want to echo i think that we are hearing a lot from older generations who have been dealing with this type of abuse um by the police for a lot of years and i i think that's incredible i want to first off address something that i find incredibly upsetting chief navarro you started off this conversation by saying uh essentially saying i'm yeah we we we had to target the protesters because because they were being bad it's essentially the same logic that an abuser would use when they say i'm sorry i had to hit you you were doing x y and z which goes to show that you absolutely do not feel real remorse about what happened in our community i mean we had we had teenagers who had their heads blown open by concussion grenades i mean the fact that you started off this conversation what a conversation that's supposed to be about rebuilding trust through the community by blaming the community for the actions of your officers is appalling it is appalling and it's disturbing and it goes to absolutely speak to the rest of your message is essentially moot after that because you you've already proven that you don't want to take responsibility and then it wasn't even till much later in the conversation that you even tried to take any accountability but the but without actually saying you're sitting here you were just saying the words i want to take accountability without actually having any accountability sorry can you please sit back i'm on the phone right now i'll be with you um so i'm just i'm really shocked by the amount of like the lack of truth here too you talked about their big um not directing things that protesters but if that's the case then how come so many protesters have facial injuries you talked about uh people shooting fireworks at the police well they only started shooting fireworks after people were being hit in the face of concussion grenades as a way to get the police to back off after people were getting injured so what you're saying you're lying about the the way that things are happening you're lying about the situations and the city council who wasn't there for these protests doesn't know so they're they're having to trust you and you're blatantly lying about things that we have video of we have videos of your officers committing these crimes we have we literally have videos of all of this and you're lying directly about it we've reached out to you multiple times to share these videos with you we never hear back from you you're lying about the community outreach you're doing it's a disgrace and honestly really disappointing because if you really want to change things in this community then listening to the community and accepting responsibility for the actions of your officers is the way you start and to start off this meeting not doing that all of this is null and void you i'm just i'm blown away honestly and i keep i keep insisting that that we have a conversation with with like we have more conversations with you guys but at this point you're just proving that you're not going to hear anything we say you're going to continue blaming us for your officers actions i mean what is the point of this at this point and city council if you're not seriously questioning the validity of this then i i have serious questions about you as well that's it i yield my time thank you alexis go to scott followed by leslie hi can you hear me yep okay i just want to first off i want to just encourage the council to support our police department um you know listening to the meeting i i see that the the police department is being humble and transparent and they are taking actions to try and meet with the community i i remember seeing reyna varro taking a knee with the community and i i thought that was uh very different than what i'd seen elsewhere in the country i think it is sad though that we live in a society where our actions don't have accountability by stripping the police of the ability to manage riots riot like situations is not going to lead to positive a better environment for our community i've heard some things like i don't think we should fire less lethal rounds into crowds ever that statement uh while it sounds great what if that crowd is trying to burn down your house what if that crowd is trying to murder your child um i i think the police uh while it's sad and that shouldn't happen uh and i and i fully empathize with what reyna varro says and that he doesn't ever want to have this happen again uh he's not the only person that's in control of what is happening or not happening accountability goes all the way around uh and i think the community needs to step up and and understand that and i and i like the idea of having uh community members shadow with the police and see what they have to deal with day in and day out uh in their very difficult job i i'm not a police officer i don't uh i don't pretend to know the the depth of of conflict that they're constantly having to de-escalate but uh i i don't think that getting emotional and thinking this uh and and trying to deal with this emotionally is going to solve the problems that uh that the people that i'm hearing that are making comments uh are raising um i think cooler heads should prevail and uh i really appreciate our police department i wanted to make sure that that was noted to them i'll yield my time all right thank you so much scott we'll go to leslie followed by ian good afternoon thanks again for being here thanks for all of this uh very long and in-depth listening session this is leslie graves again here as a private resident actually as a mom of someone who um was out the protests and i have to say looking at you jack i agree that when your son goes out and wants to have their voice heard and the thing that you think about is their safety but it's not because of the crowd it's because of the police i actually call the former council member asking for their assistance when my son was out that night when he went out on subsequent nights i was more concerned and worried about the retaliation of police officers than i was of anybody in the crowd so i just want to make that statement clear i also want to bring up my concerns about the police chief's community ambassador team i mentioned it earlier it's a hand picked engagement team it was hand picked by the police department on the website it says the meetings will not be open to the public that there will simply be the meeting notes that will be available after the meetings there i don't believe that there's any other staff from the community engagement team involved that i'm aware of at this time that they meet quarterly i believe that it may be a use of diffusion of responsibility that it may be gatekeepers on what the police department is doing and how community engagement is used i am a proponent i want community engagement that is important but i think the police chief's community ambassador team may be heading in the wrong direction if nothing else in complete marketing terms that is not a good way to come across to a community that is already distrustful of the police department it was asked earlier if there was going to be a member of the broader community as part of the selection committee for the auditor the police chief i want to make sure that you remember said that it was going to be a member of the police chief's community ambassador team so it's going to be a hand picked person from the broader community i don't think that that is representative of the broader community i also want to echo and reinforce that yes our new equity officer needs to be a part of that selection committee and there needs to be other people from the broader community on that selection committee in order for the community to be trustful of the independent auditor thank you thank you madam chair we'll go to ian followed by fate hello um hi so i just wanted to um give you guys some little news that happened in the last month regarding the lrad systems uh the nypd is actually now banned from using the systems and they have to pay uh approximately eight hundred thousand dollars that they settled with five protesters from 2014 demonstrations and this little quote from an article the lrad one thousand one hundred x is a weapon said michael decker a lawyer from the protesters at a virtual news conference it is designed to hurt anyone within range of the device its range is up to seven football fields away so this new little toy that the police officers are asking for might end up costing a lot more money than down the line than it might then it just might cost to buy outright so that's just a little something to think about and i would also encourage you guys to look at uh pro the protests that happened in uh northern ireland and look at how the police dealt with those actually those protesters who were throwing molotov cocktails directly at the police officers they did not respond in such way as even tear gas or any sort of projectiles being shot at them just look across the globe at other police departments and how they were against protesters against people who honestly aren't even doing the extreme i like things that the irish people were doing this last year in their protest uh yield the rest of my time just something for you guys to think about thank you ian fate followed by madonna hello my name's um fate carol and i was injured in the protests um i'm very upset about it because i did not hear any coverage of the lawsuit that's happening and i did not get any update on it so i didn't get any justice for what happened to me um i was shot in the behind running away from the cops with a barricade bullet and i picked up the bullet well not i because i could walk but my friend picked up the bullet after it hit me i was then surrounded by police officers and i couldn't walk and this is something that was very tragic to me and it it made it to where i have no complete trust in the police department whatsoever um i'd really like to see some change and i'd really like some justice for my what they did to me um i was only 18 at the time and it's just it's really sad that i'm going to have a scar and i have a severe hematoma under my skin for the rest of my life and it's still here and you know it's it's okay but it's just saddening to see them laugh after they hurt you um i don't think that what you guys are doing is appropriate in ways to change things and revolutionize justice and whatnot but you know your guys's continuance and disappointing the community is well off thank you for my time and you guys have an amazing day thank you fate we'll go to Madonna followed by Noah can you hear me yeah thank you i want to acknowledge i'm currently on pomo land i am Lakota and pomo a long time sonoma county resident um and a couple things i emailed all of you guys so please check that email i want to thank councilmember alvarez for committing to take the historical trauma workshops put on by suskel intertribal council out of napa and the powell comment from jack uh i hope i see you in that workshop because as a native american woman i am very angry with you for using that you are not native american are you so i didn't see you at the powell that we put on saturday at the fairgrounds so you need to check yourself that is not okay i yield my time thank you madonna we'll go to noah can you hear me i asked the council this do you really believe the abusers will check themselves do you really believe that this armed and bloodthirsty department and their paid sympathizers will be honest about the depth of their harm collectively do you really think they won't use branded sonic weapons blatantly known as such when they already aimed noxious gases at youth of color during a respiratory pandemic come on cops lie through their teeth and take every measure to shield themselves from anything resembling consequence stop gaslighting and victim blaming the public we know your job is irrelevant and your cruelty is intentional to this council you have an opportunity to divest from violence and white supremacy so take it it is heartless to make black indigenous people of color relive their traumas over and over for your voyeuristic appetite when you don't listen to or change anything we don't trust the cops and what little trust we have in this council is fading fast for those of you who are new you have a chance to cement a reputation no amount of procedural minutiae or pure marketing is going to change the fact that police use weapons of war and mass surveillance technology against anyone they don't like all i've learned from these two days is that the easiest way to get away with violence to get away with supposed crime is to square fealty to white supremacy and get a badge and a gun for my troubles if the council wants violence to end this violence to end they must take the weapons and funding and impunity away from the brutalizers i'm sure you contact any grassroots organization in this town in this county they will tell you getting anything remotely close to the amount of money police hemorrhage on lawsuits for human rights violations would be pulling teeth would be endless hours of fundraising and yet who gets handed it the institution of policing was born of violence and that violence is endemic to this institution today disarm defund dismantle and abolish srpd invest in the communities that this government and this police department neglects and terrorizes respectively this isn't about professional looking slides or numbers on a spreadsheet lives are on the line no matter how trivial the cops might treat them so put tax dollars towards community care and not violence you've got a lot to prove i yield my time thank you noa that's the last hand i see for live public comment madame city clerk do we have any voicemail public comments on this item may or the only public comment we received via voice message was someone who spoke live during the public comment period okay we will not repeat the playback all right then i will go ahead bring it back to council council members as i mentioned this is a study session it is an opportunity for us to provide direction to staff and in particular to our public safety subcommittee so who wants to start i'll start with councilmember alvarez please bear with me 130 bullets i find no just cause for so many bullets being used i don't think the amount of damage that was produced in the city center rosa merits it so it makes me think that it was indiscriminate i have found fault in both reports from both sides with the human commission report as well as the the law enforcement report discrepancies and we just heard from a young lady 18 years old who forever has a mark on her butt and yet she still tells us to have an amazing day we look at the tear gas because it's banned by academic environment allow chemical to be used on our fellow cell roses i have a deep issue with that in regards to the lrad system i've heard of the about this system for many many days it's nothing new we're supposed to be demilitarizing our our law enforcement not militarizing even further than 40s if we cannot use them respectfully effectively and we should not be using them at all no borrow there are situations where life might be in danger in those cases i cannot speak on that i believe that's duty to protect life in regards to those people claiming that they have video the alvarez as src.org i would love to see them thank you thank you council member alright council member soyer thank you mayor a great deal of information has been imparted over the last couple of days lots of public comment council comment statistics policy changes recommended policy changes and i think that i have come to trust our subcommittees that are able to take recommendations both from staff and from the community and funnel them into a conversation that in an open and and i've learned a also a casual conversation with lacking formality that allows for a free wheeling discussion about the the wants and the needs not only the community but the community that served by the police department um that it's you know it's it's we've talked a lot about the the peaceful protests and and those and the peaceful protesters and also the protesters that were there were less peaceful but what we haven't talked about here are the other duties of our police department the high-risk vehicle stops the detective work into into murder investigations public intoxication calls domestic violence welfare checks and this is not in any order of of importance just things that came to me vehicle speeding and dui arrests public nuisance reports accident investigations and traffic control illegal drug sales and use calls hostage negotiations critical incidents sexual abuse rape child endangerment and homelessness issues all falls into their department and on their shoulders so this is a very very important piece of what they do it's also something that i hope as far as dealing with the bad players which have been um referred to by the um the peaceful protesters as people that they do not want to be associated with necessarily but there's there this this it's a relatively speaking crowd control during protests is a small part of what they do which is probably a good thing peaceful protests could happen every week and require very little police presence except maybe traffic control but that's not always the case so i i'm putting my trust in our subcommittee and those that are that inform our subcommittee in coming up with recent with recommendations that the count the any recommendations that they might come up with that have to do with policy that the that the council can um digest and discuss and come back with reasonable recommendations so i will um again i'll put my trust there and i will leave it at that thank you i thank you so much councilmember councilmember tidbits thank you mayor um i'll be concise you know i think that uh in the selection of the independent review officer i i again stress that involvement with members of the outside public as well as our chair of the public safety subcommittee is would be the best approach um the other thing that i wanted to to ask for from the police department or the public safety subcommittee or working in conjunction with one another is to indeed look at um i'm going to call you know this is the the mobile task force that jerry three was talking about but i'm going to call it advanced communication with with protesters and um you know co-mingling of police uh some some kind of a method to prevent us from declaring unlawful assembly so that first amendment speech rights can prevail i'm excited to hear about the cahoots and see that be implemented um and i am also uh excited about the public ambassadors program and again you know uh kind of just echoing what captain cregan said um please involve our critics please involve people who do not have as much trust for the police department because i think they are going to their input their perspectives are going to be what really help us uh shape a stronger department and that's it mayor thank you all right council member split help hey mayor rogers um been a challenging two days and just for me being the mayor when these incidents occurred and we specifically addressed the human rights commission report one of the reasons why i didn't think it would have been appropriated in july of 2020 when the report came out to have this conversation is that we did not have all the information and i just want those that are listening to this i've heard a lot saying that we're not listening um i participate in listening sessions and i hear what is being said sometimes we're going to have some differences as to what our conclusions are what the appropriate steps are in hearing from all this to two short-term type strategies and a long-term strategy have come together so i wanted to first address the long-term challenges that you know after the homicide of george floyd triggered this event and some of these underlying feelings i referred over the last two days about sonoma county and specifically santa rosa so first of all you know the systemic racism affects everyone whether you're a city employee or a member of this community we have to acknowledge that and i think we're in a place now where we are having these conversations and we need to change together i'm a big believer of that i really hope we're going in the direction and stop pointing fingers and have the conversations together as i mentioned earlier today with some of the listening sessions about what would make you feel safe in this community let's continue that dialogue because we have to that's our long-term strategy so for counts i think we're going to really need to reevaluate our priorities as mr mcglenn has told us it's really easy to ask and ask and ask but we only have so much capacity it's going through some things that this community is facing with because unfortunately the city of santa rosa is not a we just don't make widgets so let's just do that real well i'm sure we're about to declare water emergency we're still being with a pandemic homelessness our diversity equity and inclusion work our climate change we're losing a city manager we're in a process of hiring a new one and this whole cahoots program all that takes time energy and resources including from the seven of us on the city council so i think mr mayor at some point we need to have a conversation about what are we prioritizing and how are we going to be doing that so specifically about some of the things that were presented for the short term i'm very supportive of the community empowerment plan and i'm really interested in sharing those conversations in each of our districts because 265 folks i think participated in that but we're a community of over 175 000 people i want to have those conversations a just to educate the rest of the community and get feedback from them on about what our next steps can be in regards to the specific tactics that we heard with some of these last presentations i think the public safety subcommittee is an appropriate place to initiate those conversations but specifically what i'm looking for and for the conversations as we heard from captain litchfield if we remove chemical agents and less lethal projectiles from the deployment options what else do we have and that's the challenge and again we need more information now that we didn't go into whatever our options are are explored in the lrad gotta be honest with you with what i've heard about the lrad i'm not sure why why wouldn't we go in that direction but again if the public safety subcommittee is going to be that vehicle or we can have additional community conversations with then let's have it but it just doesn't seem like the direction that santa rosa and sonoma county should be going at this point i do appreciate everyone who's provided feedback and participated with this and yes change things will take time and we're trying to affect some cultural change and not only the city of santa rosa by our community it is not going to happen overnight we didn't get here overnight but please stay engaged and let's keep the common conversation going we need to change together thank you mr mayor thank you councilmember councilmember fleming thank you mayor so the first thing that i want to say is that what i hear from the community and what i hear from actually from everyone is that this is a really complex issue that did not begin or end last may or june that that these issues have been a long time um in the coming and are going to require a long term commitment and so you know i don't want to limit my comments to what happened i do have a couple of suggestions and i'll i'll discuss my um my approach in terms of being the public safety subcommittee chair going forward so the thing that i i think we need to really focus on it it's kind of touched on before is is creating a culture of community policing that goes beyond beyond just what we've been talking about i think we really need to challenge ourselves to do that to think bigger and do better and specifically what i'm talking about is that we need to look at the role of community policing and community safety and then we need to ask ourselves what what is required look at our charter and i identify what in there is necessary and then what are all the other responsibilities that our our department is tasked with doing and i think we need to analyze those responsibilities and determine if that they are most appropriately carried out the way they are and and if not what might be a more appropriate solution i think that the cahoots is is the beginning of that process and i think that it's going to produce a really fruitful um conversation that may lead to a revitalized approach to how how the police view their work and how the community views the police and further more i think that our our police in our community need to through that process come to see that the community comprises the police and police officers are part of the community and i don't believe we're at that place now for for really good reason um i also want to share my disappointment with um the the contractors that were chosen felt that they had strong um pro military and pro police bias that they produced some some fair recommendations but that um it was really troubling that they didn't represent the community that has commissioned that and to that end i believe that auditor needs to be we need to take up the question in public safety subcommittee and perhaps put it toward the voters whether or not the auditor should be a chartered position and whether or not we should have a public um the community oversight and so those are issues that i will be taking up and then tons of notes here sorry guys the the other thing about the auditor position is that i would like to see the um community member come from from not from one of the people that the chief picks not because i don't think the chief would pick someone great but because i think we need to have it be both in reality and perception completely independent and to that end if we um if we pick somebody from the community or if the mayor picks somebody from the community advisory board perhaps um somebody who who he sees um as appropriate in that body i think that that would lead to an even greater sense of um enhancing public trust in the process and then what what my plan is i've taken careful notes and i'll go back and listen once again i intend to meet with staff and i intend to um work closely with our dei officer as well as director tas and the chief and then um in preparation for the next public safety subcommittee meeting i intend to agendize a discussion of what we heard here today and a prioritization from council member rogers or excuse me vice mayor rogers and council member schwedhelm about what they believe we should um take up first and then once we get a timeline in in order we will present that to the full council um i'm gonna um turn off my mic and go back to taking notes so thank sorry if i missed something thank you council member council member tidbits did you have something you wanted to add i did mayor thank you um the one thing that i forgot to state that i also wanted to state is if the public safety subcommittee you know as soon as state law allows just makes the body camp footage from that night available to the public as quickly as possible i do feel that that's important um i think it's important for people to see the same things that we see in closed session and to kind of make judgments about the situation themselves see what we did right see what we did wrong um so that they can form their own opinions on what policies and procedures uh we should be implementing uh to be better so thanks for the additional time thank you council member vice mayor so one i think alexis made the she said that there was some video um so i would actually like to see the video also um i participated in the protest uh i'm a council member for four years i'm a black female for the rest of my life so i thought that it was needed that i participate in the protests because no one can advocate for myself and my children like i can um and while i was out there i must say that i did see protesters that were antagonizing that were doing things that i personally wouldn't do um and when that happened i had to excuse myself because i didn't feel i didn't feel safe protesting for myself and for my children and for you know everyone else that wears the skin so um i will say that um i'm a mother and i've said it before i'm a mother of eight beautiful uh brown children and uh at times a lot of times i am more terrified when my four boys walk out of my door um no one knows that their mother is on the city council no one knows the roles that i play in the community um all they see are black males and in many cases people including uh officers are intimidated or um if they're not intimidated they want to show that they are in charge and i have always taught my children to express themselves verbally um not really realizing until a few years ago that that verbal expression or them feeling like they have a right to say what they want to say can uh get them beat down uh killed or grown in jail so um i guess people said don't get emotional i don't know how you do that when this is what you live with but i have to have um trust in our police department i have to have trust in chief navarro because if i don't then uh at least where my children live i don't think that we will ever see change and so chief i am calling out to you i'm thanking you thus far i am calling out to you to continue to make policy change i'm calling out to you to continue to get the officers off of the force that don't need to be there that have continued um incidences where it's not looking right um that we have to uh turn a blind eye to cover up um things don't just keep happening or um incidents don't keep occurring just because people have bias they have things that they need to deal with themselves and they just don't belong on the street uh trying to figure it out there so um i i do i thank you for what you've done so far i ask that you continue to do it i know that you have uh some good officers out there i have met some of them um that you continue to give them training uh to maybe identify bias that they don't know that they have we all have them including all of us that are sitting on the council um for people that work in the city for people that don't work in the city um so just we identify them we address them uh and we keep moving forward like i said yesterday i want us to be the example um someone asked me what it is that i wanted uh from our police department and i you know or what i wanted from our community and i said i want to build morale within our police department and i got some stunned looks and i said i want to build morale in our police department because i know that the only way we can do that is to build trust from our community and i think that those two go hand in hand i think that when we start to build the trust in the community um that we will build the morale within the police department because they will feel like they are serving a community um that's and that's what they love to do and so um just putting that out there thank you guys for listening to me ramble on i just think it's very important that people know um i can't speak for everyone else but i am not against our police department although i think that we definitely have to make some changes some policy changes and it's not just about a protest it's about our BIPOC community and people of color being able to walk down the street and feeling safe whether there is a protest or not we are looking at this because of the protests and i'm grateful that we are even looking at it but just so you know that uh women of color that have children or fathers of color that have children that have to send their children out of their homes each and every day live with a consistent fear that their children may never come back so again thank you very much for your time and thank you to the community members that took the time to express themselves um and be here today and yesterday thank you vice mayor when i listen to the vice mayor speak the thing that i am most struck with is the fears of a mother who is not afraid of an individual officer uh who isn't worried because she knows the personality of somebody but because of because she's seen and understood the systems that are in place or the policies that are in place and is calling out for changes to the entire system and and i i want to echo some of the the comments that i heard that i appreciate our police officers and i know many of them and know that they are good people and yet that doesn't matter within the context of inequalities in racial outcomes within our justice system uh from head to toe and listening to these reports over the last couple of days i've really looked at it through two separate lenses one is the individual and one is the systemic and that's really kind of where i want to focus uh my comments reading about individual either officers going against policy or having outcomes that were uh against city policy those officers are being held accountable for those actions they're being held accountable for the outcomes as they should appropriately and then the rest of the report is focused on areas where officers did what we as city leaders ask them to do uh what we tell them the policy is when it's right to engage and how it's right to engage and we need to own that i've been trying to stress that over the last couple of days is when we talk about morale within the department part of that i think is also hearing from officers that they feel like they're being held to a standard and then when they reach that standard we still are critical of them and and i understand why that happens and how that happens and i as the mayor and we as a council need to look at what the expectations are that we're asking them to meet and having a conversation about whether that meets the expectations of the community and i think that the appropriate place for us to do that is through the public safety subcommittee though we've spent a number of of hours the last two days talking about it as well what i've heard from folks is an interest in talking about uh less lethal ammunitions uh the the rubber bullets the tear gas uh we have heard about the barricade rounds and i know that the community uh acknowledges uh that was a mistake uh we're hearing about the lrad system uh and i i will say chief i understand the the balance you're trying to strike between moving quickly to to meet the recommendations that you see in the reports while we also see an example with the lrad system of where a community conversation about how we intended to meet those recommendations could further a better outcome for our community so i'm hoping the public safety subcommittee will look at that as well i know you've put out a first amendment policy i hope that the the public safety subcommittee will also look at that and ask folks within the community that crucial question of is this how we want to police in order to keep our community safe in order to keep our officers safe and i do hear from loved ones of officers who are worried about that critical component as well and so i don't want that to be lost in the conversation we do need to get the auditor position uh hired you heard that that'll happen in the new year the new budget year uh here coming up in june we need to get the cahoots model off the ground and i know captain cregan has been doing a great job as well as others to move that program forward and then we do have a substantial conversation that many folks in our community want to have about civilian oversight uh independent oversight of law enforcement and what that looks like and it is not lost on me that over 60 of our community voted in favor of measure p and iolero uh for that oversight for transparency and accountability of the sheriff's office we have a window the council does later this year where we embark on a charter review which every 10 years santa rosa's get a chance to weigh in on the decisions that matter the most to them and how the community how this city is going to be run it makes the most sense to me for us to ask the charter review to have that conversation with the public and let the public have a chance to weigh in about how they want to be policed how our police officers want to engage with the community and that to me is the best representation that we can have for folks throughout our community i'll stop there i know that the the chair has been taking notes and we'll be having a item at the next meeting to prioritize through those but as mayor those were my expectations of the conversations that i expect to see and i want to reiterate again i want everybody to be involved in that conversation yes folks who are involved in the protests yes people who want to defund police and don't think that we should have any police officers yes line item police officers who actually have to execute the policies that we're asking them to their loved ones who are worried when they have to go out each and every night for those stops that council member sloyer mentioned my expectation is that we do a better job of including our entire community in this conversation about how our community is going to be policed and i'll stop there mr assistant city manager i know you jumped in here towards the end as as the city manager had another another commitment he had to reach it five o'clock i did want to check in and see is staff clear on direction uh yes mayor roger staff is clear on the directions we appreciate the comments okay well council members with that that is the end of our special meeting i know we'll all be interested in follow-ups from the subcommittee and i know that we will be very interested to see many of those items come back to the full council once they've been vetted and discussed with the public with that we will adjourn thank you