 So, thanks for coming on call. Hello, hello. Good evening. So, my name is Mara Kisha-Smith. I am the city manager of Santa Rosa. So, I want to thank everyone for being here today and I want to thank those who are joining us online. Thank you for your time today. So, today is meant to be a two-way conversation. You are going to hear from our independent police auditor, OIR. I'm going to let the mayor do a little bit of introduction, but please feel free to ask questions. We would like your feedback and know that this meeting is for you. So, with that, I'm going to turn it over to our mayor, Mayor Rogers. Well, first of all, welcome and thank you everybody for being here and participating. This is one of a number of different meetings that we're doing to solicit feedback from the community, particularly around what we're hearing from OIR, things that we should be doing different in the city of Santa Rosa, concerns that people have or ideas that folks have. Today is one of many types of these meetings. It is an in-person one. We do have the vice mayor and council member Rogers here to listen along with myself and city leadership. We do have the chief of police as well, who's here just to hear concerns. For folks who have ideas and have concerns but weren't able to make it tonight or didn't want to be in a public venue for whatever reason, we do also have opportunities for anonymous and more discreet feedback to be given. I hope you'll take advantage of that. But for those of you who did come tonight for this presentation and to be able to give your thoughts, I hope you'll take full advantage of having our team of specialists here, particularly as we welcome the OIR group for their new role here within Santa Rosa and in our community. With that, I'm going to turn it over to the experts. Just thank you for being here. Thank you for having us. My name is Theresa Magula, and I am a consultant with the OIR group. We are the newly acquired police practice specialists, and we're the independent police auditors here in your city. Thank you if you're joining us on the streaming service. We appreciate you being here as well. I'm going to turn it over to my colleague, Brian Korr. I would also actually first like to introduce the head of OIR group, Michael Janako, who's here with us this evening, and Steve Conley, who has been working more intimately here with the city. And so we are here and grateful for your participation this evening. Thank you, Theresa. And thank you all for being here. Again, my name is Brian Korr. I am also working with the OIR group. My focus is really on equity as part of all of the work that we're doing. And part of my role is to help with convening these sorts of opportunities to be able to listen to your community. I will say I live in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, so I had a little bit of a commute to get here, and I'm very glad to be here. Obviously, issues are different in different communities around the country, and at the same time, being able to see work, as OIR does, across the country, all up and down California and the West Coast really helps us to both come in with an outside perspective, but be able to learn from what people are doing around the country, what challenges they have, but also what opportunities there are for continuing to improve public safety, the delivery of policing services, and strengthen those relationships between community members and the people who are tasked with providing public safety. So we are here to share a bit about what we're doing, but also really primarily to listen to the community. But as we embark on this tonight, we have a few suggestions, meeting agreements. Sometimes they're called ground rules that we want to share, and I'm going to now hand it back over to Teresa to lead us through that. Thank you. Yeah, so this evening, we would really like to, as Brian said, hear from you and hear the experiences that you've been having here in your city. So we want to hear why you joined us tonight. We'd like to hear your experiences with the Santa Rosa Police Department, your thoughts on the policing that's happening here in your city, and the impact that that policing might have on you, your family, your friends, your community in general. And what we always like to start with is kind of an understanding of the type of engagement that we're going to have this evening. And so we come up with these meeting agreements that we present to you as a way to understand where we're all coming from and meet in a mutually safe space that we can all share, conversation and dialogue. And so we ask that you share the time this evening with others in the community who might wish to speak. We ask that you allow others to share their ideas in a very safe manner. And so if it's something that you might not agree with or a sentiment that is not necessarily yours, we ask that just like we're doing, you listen and observe respectfully. You might choose not to speak at all. So you might be here just in a capacity to listen, and we welcome that as well. We would like everyone to please be mindful of the length of time that you're speaking if you do choose to speak this evening. And we ask again that you not assume what others in the room might have experienced or what others in the room might know about. And we ask again that you be respectful and constructive both in the own presentation that you're giving if you choose to speak and when you're listening to others here in the room. And one way that we have found is successful to kind of break the ice in the room is to have some polling right at the onset. And we've done this in the past successfully using a polling system that happens on your devices. So if you happen to have a mobile device or if you're streaming at home and you'd like to participate, you can do that here. I'm gonna move us over to our polling function. And so you can either scan that QR code if it's available for you at that distance, it may not be. Or when you have completed your entry, you hit the blue submit button. If technology works in our favor, it should populate here on the screen. Magic. I love when it works. All right, so we have here some folks have joined to understand how to build relationships with police. There's someone who's interested in increasing community engagement of law enforcement oversight. That's certainly why we're here. I'll give it another few moments in case someone from the streaming has wanting to participate. Absolutely, let me go back. It's actually right here at the top of the screen, eight, seven, nine, six, zero, nine, five, eight. Eight, seven, nine, six, zero, nine, five, eight. I'll give it another few moments for folks to type in if they want to. They wanna be more informed about our community. All right, and I'll move it on to our next question, which is what's your connection to Santa Rosa? And you'll see some choices that you can select from. So I'm a resident of Santa Rosa. I'm a business owner. I work in Santa Rosa, but I don't live here. I am a resident and I am a business owner. I visit Santa Rosa, but I don't live here or some other relationship to the city of Santa Rosa. All right, so it looks like we have resident, resident and business owners, some folks that visit but don't live here. Kind of understanding who's in the room and we appreciate your participation. Go right back to our slides. And I'm going to turn it over to Mike and Steve, who are gonna tell a little bit about the type of work that we are assigned and requested to do here in your city. Thank you, Teresa. Mike Chinaco here. It's great to be with you all this afternoon. We had a chance to spend the day in your city and had a chance to drive through your various neighborhoods and visit some of the places. We even ended up at the fair. Saw some very beautiful thoroughbreds and a pink poodle show. And we actually ran into your soon to be elected, soon to be sheriff, actually, who has happened to be there. But this evening, we are, you know, this is, as the mayor indicated, a chapter in our series of engagement efforts, which we think is critical and important and essential these days for there to be any meaningful accounting, any meaningful oversight of policing in any jurisdiction. It takes, in our view, folks to be involved who have some level of understanding and expertise with regard to police practices. But it also takes facilitation, understanding, learning, hearing about the experiences that any particular community member has had with any police agency. And so that's, in our view, why, under our philosophy, this part of our work is so important, we need, we don't live in Santa Rosa and we don't even live in the county, so we need to have that feedback as we move forward with our responsibilities and our assignments. And one way we can do that is to have forums like this and we intend to continue to have them. As you will learn later in the presentation, we will have another one during this trip on Saturday morning. And tomorrow, we are going to be at two different locations in the city where we can essentially have office hours. I used to be a law student professor, I mean a law professor at one point and a college professor at another point and a fifth grade teacher at another point in my career. So those office hour concepts is an opportunity for anyone to show up at these locations and just sit down and talk us through. As we have learned in our experience engaging with the public, some folks prefer to have an engagement under circumstances like this, sort of a larger town hall public session, but others feel more comfortable in a more intimate one-on-one situation where they can just sort of talk through one-on-one with any of us about their experiences. We have Spanish language capability, Teresa, my colleague is fluent in Spanish, so for those who is English as not their first language and feel more comfortable conversing in Spanish, we have that capability as well. And we have already started this public engagement back when we got started November of last year. By that I mean our contact information has been up on the city's website ever since then and we have fielded a stream of inquiries from the community either through contacts or email or through calling us or any other way. We've received I think a letter or two actually, I didn't even know people wrote letters anymore, but that information ends up getting channeled through us and then ends up becoming part of our assignment. The work that we do in the next few days and the work that we have done with regard to public engagement will all end up being incorporated into our report that is due the beginning of next year. And as we think might be the best way to approach our ongoing assignment when our report is ready to be released under our assignment, we are to make a presentation to the elected officials, many, several who are here today and we'll do that. But along with that trip, we expect that that report might garner additional interest and discussion on what we have found. And there will be a chapter in that report on the public engagement efforts that we have undertaken since our assignment began last November. So that is another piece of our work. I think that what we are intending to do now in the next few minutes, but there is certainly going to be ample time to hear from each of you, is just to give a very broad overview of what is expected of us under the scope of work that your elected officials, your leadership in the city, helped put together back last year. Very much, Mike. And I saw the camera guy working pretty hard as Mike was moving up and down here. So I'm gonna try to make this a little easier on him, but I certainly want to thank all the people who are joining us remotely and of course the people who were able to come out and be here in person. Again, my name is Steve Conley. I've been working with Mike Janacco and OIR Group and more recently with Teresa and Brian for about 20 years now. And so my exclusive work experience in that time has been in the field of civilian oversight. And I want to talk to you a little bit about the work that we do and the mechanics of our actual auditing monitoring relationship with the city of Santa Rosa and the police department in particular. So one of the things that we are responsible for, I would say kind of the meat and potatoes of the work that we have done so far, and Mike was on the other side of the panel of the work that we have done so far, and Mike was alluding to some of the other kind of larger systemic audits and reviews that we are going to be working on in the second half of the year with an eye towards a public report. But ever since our contract got started at the end of last year, we have been very, very engaged in the work of actively monitoring the department's handling in its internal affairs office of all citizen complaints and all allegations of officer misconduct that arise, both internally and externally. So I want to talk a little bit about what that means. And one of the key concepts here, and I think one of the factors that is really, really important to meaningful or effective civilian oversight is the idea of access. Unless you have access to the information and the ability to actually see and understand the source material of what the police department is using to evaluate and to come to conclusions when citizens make complaints or whatever the case may be, it's obviously very difficult to be effective and to sort of knowledgeably and meaningfully assess and evaluate and contribute to the process of making those investigations as thorough and legitimate and appropriate in their outcomes as they could be and should be. So one of the things that I think is very, very striking about the relationship we have established through the city and the scope of work that the city crafted, and I'm happy to say with the full cooperation of the police department ever since we got started, we, our access is really virtually unparalleled to anything that we have been, Mike and I are familiar with in the 20 years that we've been doing this and a lot of it has to do with the real time ability to kind of see independently the things that the department is doing and as well as the investigative materials. So I want to talk a little bit about what I mean by that and that is I actually have a laptop computer and we've got the folks watching from home and we're all kind of things have changed a lot in the 20 years that I've been doing this, but I have a laptop computer that is tied into the Santa Rosa police department internal database and I can with the press of a few buttons and I gotta be honest with you, it took me a few weeks to get the hang of it and I drove the IT guys here a little bit crazy, but we are finally operational and I can just hit a few buttons and have access to all manner of pending cases that the city, the Santa Rosa police department is working on and what do I mean by that? Well, when there's a citizen complaint that comes in, I have access to the actual substance of that complaint. If it's an email, if it's a written complaint, I'm able to see exactly what it is that the resident or the citizen or the member of the public actually said to the department, what are the allegations? If there is an interview with a watch commander or with the internal affairs investigator and that has been recorded and it's supposed to be recorded, I have access to that recording so I don't have to rely on the department's representations about what anybody said or what the concerns were. I can hear that for myself or see it for myself and then I have access to all of the body worn camera recordings that are associated with a given event and therefore I can literally go back and see all the different camera perspectives of the officers who were at the scene and understand from, to the extent, the limited extent, because they're not perfect, but the body worn cameras are obviously very powerful evidence of what happened and I have the opportunity to review that and have that inform my interactions with the department. So based on that foundation and that access, the next step is interaction and I have the opportunity to communicate with the department's investigative team and its decision makers at every level of the process. So when a new complaint comes in, I hear about it from the internal affairs sergeant, I get notified, I can go to my computer and look it up in their system and kind of get some background on it after an initial briefing from them and then I can track that investigation as it unfolds over the course of days or weeks or however long it takes and when they have reached kind of a critical moment, we consult with each other and they're good about checking to see if I have any questions or if I think any other investigative steps ought to be taken. I have the opportunity to and have participated in the actual administrative interviews of officers who are the subject of allegations of misconduct so I can ask my own questions and obviously track in a very immediate way the course of the investigation and what is happening and when the investigation is complete, I have the opportunity to talk with the decision makers about what the outcomes could be, should be some of my perspectives on things like discipline and so forth and Mike has the opportunity to weigh in. I basically do a lot of the intake work and some of the initial assessment and I'm regularly in touch with Mike because he and I go back a long way, I respect his experience a lot and a lot of times he will provide me with some insights and some new things to think about that again enhance the work that OIR Group is trying to do as a team in serving the city basically. So when that decision making process is done, again I have the opportunity to kind of offer my two cents at every level. It's important to note that we don't have decision making authority, that still rests with the chief and we think in a lot of ways that that's very appropriate for the department to have ownership of it but they absolutely are accountable to us in the sense of us having all the information and if we are unhappy or strongly in disagreement with the outcome or the way something has been handled, then we're gonna have the opportunity to report out to that whether it's to the city manager or to council or to the public in our reports. So we certainly feel like we have influence and again I'm pleased to say in the several months that we've been doing this, the relationship with the department has been very positive, they have been very receptive to our ideas and we disagree about things sometimes and I ask, I try to ask as many annoying questions per case as possible, they've been very patient and I feel like OIR Group has moved the needle in a number of individual cases and one of the points that I wanna make is the cases, if it's a citizen complaint case, if a member of the public has complained about officer behavior, the department is gonna look at that and the bottom line assessment that they are trying to reach is whether that officer violated policy or not and if so, that officer should be facing an internal administrative disciplinary consequence of some kind and one of the things that I think is most striking to me about the first few months of doing this is there have absolutely been a handful of cases where the officers, that the allegations against the officers were sustained and that there was a disciplinary consequence but it's also a very common situation where the issues didn't necessarily rise to the level of a policy violation but I'm looking at it from my perspective as an outsider and as a member of the public and I'm kind of trying to stand in the public shoes and seeing ways where the communication could have been better or you could see where the officer lost patience at some point or there were aspects of the call that you can really understand where the public, where the member of the public is coming from and why the member of the public was dissatisfied or upset or agitated about the contact and what we try to do in those situations is work with the department to say, okay, we get it that this is not a policy violation that formal discipline isn't appropriate but is there some kind of intervention that is warranted and can there be a counseling session? Does this is more training for this officer in terms of communications or what have you? Would that be appropriate? And again, those are some of the extra ways, the collateral ways that ideally we're contributing to the process and in the long run helping to enhance accountability and individual officer performance. So with regard to some of the other things that we're gonna be working on, obviously all of these issues here are fundamental concerns to the public and to the community. We have a lot of experience in working with all of these issues and we're going to be providing the public with information about how does the department review force when officers use it? How robust and comprehensive is that and are officers appropriately accountable when they use force? Is there a comprehensive enough assessment to make sure that anything, any learning opportunities or anything that could be taken away from that experience is taken away because obviously that's an exercise could be making. So I'm sorry to be rattling on so long. I know the big part of tonight was for us to be hearing from the community and hopefully this will be the beginning of a process of interaction. I'm pleased to say we have had some community members reach out to us already by telephone or email to raise an issue or concern and we talked to explain to them about the process and let them know we're not gonna do the investigation ourselves, but we will certainly be tracking your concerns all the way through the process and hopefully adding to their sense of confidence that it's gonna be handled the right way. So thank you and I'm gonna turn it back over to Mike. So again, thank you for your attention. I'm just going to finish up with a few other things that we are responsible for. I think I've already touched upon some of them, but to the point that Steve, my colleague Steve Connelly was making, he started off by talking about how important access to information is and a truly independent police auditor cannot function if they don't have the information that is in the vault of confidential information that becomes the basis for a personnel or internal affairs investigation. An auditor, if the auditor doesn't have access to use of force reports cannot conduct an independent audit that's going to be meaningful if the use of force reports, the body camera footage is not made available to the police auditor. And I can tell you, based on experience, that we have been usually fortunate in working with cities and counties up and down the state of California and even outside of California with regard to that issue. But that's not always the case. We have been engaged for almost over two years now with one agency that will remain nameless, but if you Google it, you will find it because it's been a public debate and a public source of conflict with regard to the unwillingness of the leader of that law enforcement agency to provide us the information that the ordinance that was passed said we should be getting and we're not getting that information. And so while we've been able to make some sort of difference in that particular jurisdiction, it's not as good as it could be if the leader of that organization would unlock her vault of sensitive and confidential information to us and provide it to us so we can do our work. So we're pleased to say that I only bring that up because I don't want you all to think that it's always that way. But for up to now, and I don't expect this is going to change, we have been fortunate in Santa Rosa and the work that we have done that we are getting everything we want. And we're getting it in a different way than we are in some of the jurisdictions that we have worked with on a more continual basis. By that, I mean some jurisdictions, we're gonna get the stuff, but we're gonna get the stuff after the stuff has already been signed, sealed and delivered and then filed away and then it's time to give it to our group. That system can be helpful, but it can't have an impact on the initial decision that's being made by the chief of police or the sheriff in one sense and that is because the case is already over. So we can come back, look at that material and say, boy, wish that we had known this because the investigation was not thorough or the result was not based on evidence, the result doesn't make any sense to us or the discipline wasn't appropriate considering the degree of misconduct that we perceive occurred in this case. But by then, if we're getting it at that stage, it's too late. That case can never be resurrected. You can't go back and then say, let's reopen the case, let's change the decision because by that time, the officer's already been notified of that decision and therefore there's nothing really under the law, under the California peace officer bill of rights that can be done to revisit that situation. It's done, it's dead. The case has fallen off the cliff. That's not the arrangement that our scope of work in Santa Rosa is all about. When Steve says real time, what that means is that we are going to be able to be reviewing the material, not only reviewing the material, but in some ways creating the investigative material because we're gonna be sitting in on some of the cases with regard to the officer's interview. So we're gonna be actually helping create that record. We are going to be sitting in when a particular important complainant is interviewed so that we can ensure that that is a thorough interview and all the questions that we have in our mind are answered. Not to say that the police department isn't doing a good job with their initial investigation but we are looking at it from a different lens and so therefore we may add a few other questions as part of that interview process. And then maybe most importantly, before the chief of police and his delegates have made a decision and filed the case away and notified the officer, before any of that happens, we are going to be asked about our opinion, about what should occur. Ultimately, as Steve indicated, but I think it's worth repeating, ultimately it's the chief's decision to make. But we will have an opportunity to influence that decision before the final decision is made. And I think that's the different paradigm that makes us excited about working with your city and your city leadership and your city chief. And while we've had that, we've had 30 different relationships throughout the time that we've been doing this work. And I think there's going to be one or two other times where we've had that degree of involvement as early in the life of a complaint investigation, as early in the life of a use of force investigation that results in a complaint than any other jurisdiction. So I think this is breaking new ground in many ways, breaking new ground. And I do think it provides us an opportunity to have a serious influence on cases as they're being developed instead of after the fact. On the after the fact paradigm, we can write about it and then we can criticize the decision. And we often do, but we can't resurrect that case. We can't go back and say, oh, that officer needs to be held accountable because that's already been done. In center rows, it's different. And I think it's going to be going to be particularly impactful in a different way. The other things are up there. I'm not going to, you can all read them, but some of what we're doing today, some of what we're doing this next few days is related to this. And one thing that I think was on the previous slide that I just wanted to highlight is the critical incident. So critical incidents mean a use of deadly force, an incusity situation in which the individual dies, things that are of paramount importance because it is the ultimate exercise of police authority. Police are the only profession in our country that are given the authority to use force, and in some cases deadly force, under the appropriate circumstances. But that last phrase is critical under the appropriate circumstances. And there's nothing that potentially, you all know this because you live here and you've lived through this. There's nothing that can tear a community, a city, a county apart than the rendering of deadly force in which there is concern about the officer's decision to do so. That is impactful, obviously, for the individual who is shot. It's impactful for that individual's family who will never have their son come back. It's impactful for the whole community in a different way than any other kind of exercise of police authority. So, again, God forbid, but if there is a case in which that occurs under our paradigm and under the scope of work that's been developed by city leadership, we're gonna know about that and we're gonna know about it from jumpstart. And we're gonna get a briefing. We're gonna know the initial information within hours of when it occurs. And so that's, again, different than many of the paradigms in which we are working in other jurisdictions. So I am a reformed attorney. I could go on all evening, but I won't, I promise. And I'm gonna turn it over to the rest of my team for what I hope will be more engagement from you all. So I think it's Brian. All right, thank you, Mike. So again, we're so glad to have all of you here. And again, we wanted to give you some information about what we're doing just to make sure people have that as a basis and to know because part of what we're doing is reporting out to the community. And we'll keep doing that in different ways as you saw in the last slide. But now is when we really wanna hear from you. We've got microphones. So Danielle is going to be going around. So if you'd like to speak, he will bring you the microphone. And I think because of ongoing concerns, we just ask that you let him hold the microphone. And if you don't want to speak, or you're online watching this, you can text your questions. So you can text your questions to 310-903-0127. So with that, I just wanna open it up. If anyone wants to raise a hand and indicate you wanna share, and I'm not shy about calling on people if need be, but. Eight or 10 years ago, there was an Andy Lopez case. And I'm sorry, I should have said one thing. If you feel comfortable, it'd be great if you could identify yourself and just let us know who you are very briefly. My apologies. Tom Rose. There was an incident several years ago involving Andy Lopez. And there was a sheriff involved, critical incident report. The report was completed by the Santa Rosa Police. And there were questions. There was a PBS show three seconds in October that was very critical of the investigation. We had another sheriff's involved death last weekend. Santa Rosa is again investigating. All the things you talk about, especially Steve, but were involved in every step. Does that apply if it's an interagency thing or you're investigating a sheriff's officer, or is that only if it's a Santa Rosa police? And how will you try to ensure that when this is all done, there's a whole lot less public questioning than there was last time? You would ask a difficult question because you know too much. I'm kidding. And I'm glad we had a chance to talk before the meeting. So it's an interesting question because we don't have any oversight authority over the sheriff's department. And what we understand is you now have a new oversight person that was just, and I think announced actually as soon as today, that's going to be taking on that position for the county. And so what I, there's a couple of things. One is that since we don't have any direct authority over that investigation, we do know your new director. And so I think what we are going to do is talk with him to see whether or not there's anything we can do to assist. But it is a county that was a county deputy that was involved, not the Santa Rosa PD. Under the protocols that have existed, by understand for scores of years in the county, the protocols require that an outside agency do the initial investigation, which is what's occurred here. But with regard to our being involved in that shooting of a deputy over a jurisdiction, we don't have direct authority over. That's a little bit tricky, complicated, but that doesn't mean we can't call your incoming director and say, is there anything we can do to help with this project? Because he, and I think it's been announced as a he, we also know him, we go way back with this individual. So we have a relationship with him, but it's going to be his authority to figure out how to influence that deadly force incident, right? It's going to be his responsibility, but we can relate to him and we will be reaching out to him. All right, thank you, Mike. And I just want to, I'm sorry, I don't mean to turn my back on people. I just want to say one more time that that number, if you want to text is 310-903-0127. And I think I saw someone in the second to back row who'd like to ask a question or make a comment. Hello everyone, my name is Manza Atkinson. I'm a member of the Mejaro oversight committee. I'm also a chemistry professor, a junk professor at Sonoma State and Santa Rosa Junior College. I have a few questions for you all. First is, what are your backgrounds? Reason I asked is I'm a big fan of basketball and recently the Lakers hired a new coach and there's always the, okay, what's the experience? Has the coach been a player before? So you mentioned, Mike, right? That you were reformed attorney. So I'd like to know how many people are on your team? What are your backgrounds and what does reformed attorney mean, Mike? All right, well, since I have a microphone, maybe I can start and if I forget to answer everything, I apologize. So one, I appreciate it because I started my life as a chemistry major, I was gonna be an organo-silicon chemist, ended up studying Russian and went on to a life of activism and organizing. My first job out of college, I was an organizer working to stop the nuclear arms race. Back in the 1980s had done some of that in college, went on to work for a number of different nonprofits working on peace and social justice issues, international development, then went on to work at the ACLU of Massachusetts as their first organizer. So I'm not an attorney, I've never been an attorney, never will be, but I've done lots of work around diversity, equity, inclusion from an organizing lens but always with the idea of bringing all stakeholders to the table. So my day job now is that I work for the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I'm responsible for civilian oversight of our police department, and I also am director of our peace commission, which is everything from sister cities to our commemoration of the Holocaust, Martin Luther King Day, and also a lot of what I do is helping the community in the wake of traumatic events. I'm part of a team of state department heads that respond to those traumatic events both in the immediate term and then doing longer term work using the psychological first aid model to address issues of trauma and healing, again in the short term and in the long term. So that's a little bit, and I guess the last thing I'll say is I spent three years as president of the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement, so I bring all those different experiences as I am part of this team at the OIR group and that was longer than I intended but perhaps helpful. Who'd like to go next? Yeah, thank you, that's a great question and I appreciate that you asked because we did not do that in the introduction, so thanks for the opportunity. My background is in public policy, much like Brian, not an attorney, and so I bring a different perspective to the team. I started working with my degree in crime policy. I went to look at the way that policing was happening in what was then called the Skid Row area of Los Angeles. It was at the time when Chief Bratton had first come into the city and was trying some new policing tactics in that particular area. So I did my thesis on that work and quickly became a bit alarmed, quite frankly, at the way that policing was occurring in that particular district and that sparked the interest in doing this work and I've been doing it ever since. I moved into the LAPD's office of the Inspector General and there I was first looking at civilian complaints and similar to this process, although as Mike mentioned, at the back end, so once the case was completed, providing some insight there and then was doing the reviews of their deadly uses of force. So I was a force expert for that particular team. Was grateful to join Mike's team around 2017 and have been working with their team ever since. As Mike mentioned, we do jurisdictions up and down the state of California. We also have different jurisdictions across the country that we work with and I have also recently started working with the Department of Justice as one of their consultants in the cases where they are looking to investigate for consent decrees down the line in a variety of different jurisdictions around the United States. That's my background. I'll turn it over to Steve. So I can see people with nervous expressions on their faces because I've been given the microphone again, but I promise this is gonna be faster. I'm a big basketball fan too and I will be curious to see how the new Lakers coach does. He's got his hands full, that's for sure. So I have been working as a lawyer for 21 years. I worked hard to get that law degree so when Mike says he's dismissive of that, I'm proud of being a lawyer and still put that on my resume. But the vast majority of my time as a lawyer has been in the field of civilian oversight and pretty much the entirety of that has been working with Mike. When I was in law school, I was actually a teacher for about 10 years and went to law school a little later. While I was still in law school, I took a class with Mike. He was the adjunct professor and it was about criminal civil rights. So basically federal civil rights cases, he was a federal prosecutor in his department. So I have worked with agencies all over the state of California. We've worked in some other jurisdictions as well. This is all I've done for the last 20 years and obviously I've developed a lot of familiarity with law enforcement and best practices, but we work really hard to keep grounded in community-based issues and concerns and wanting to bring that outside perspective to the law enforcement agencies that we work with. So thank you for your question. Thank you for the question. The older I get, the longer this could take, but I'm gonna try and give you the 50,000 foot answer. I did, my parents were both educators. I was an educator, a fifth grade teacher for a few years. Then I did go to law school. When I got out of law school, I ended up at the U.S. Department of Justice in the Civil Rights Division. And did, for a couple years, did voting discrimination cases back when there really was a Voting Rights Act that has since been sort of torpedoed by the Supreme Court. But in those days, we were actually able to bring lawsuits against states like Mississippi and Northern New Mexico and other jurisdictions. We sued the city of Chicago for voting discrimination. We did that for a couple years. Then I moved over and did, then I was moved over to the prosecution side. So I was a prosecutor for the U.S. Department of Justice in what they call the criminal section. And I was responsible for three kinds of civil rights violations that can be prosecuted. One involved prosecuting individuals who were involved in hate crimes. And so we ended up prosecuting the head of the Aryan Nation Security Department who came down from the state of Washington to Southern California and shot up a Jewish community center, shot kids who were at the summer community center program, shot a 71-year-old receptionist, and shot and killed a postal carrier because he was Filipino-American. And I ended up having the fortune of getting that case and prosecuting it. I also, the other area that we ended up prosecuting was human trafficking and human modern-day slavery. So we had a number of cases involving individuals who were brought to this country against their will, locked up, and forced to work for years and years in a confined condition. One case involves 60 garment workers who were locked up in a condominium and forced to sew garments for years and years without receiving any pay. And I was fortunate enough to bring the perpetrators of that crime to justice. But maybe the most relevant piece of what I did when I was a prosecutor and an attorney was police misconduct or official misconduct. So I prosecuted officers who were involved in violating the civil rights of individuals, usually the Fourth Amendment, usually an involved excessive force or lying under oath kinds of activities, and ended up investigating and prosecuting police officers for that kind of criminal conduct for the time that I was at the U.S. Department of Justice, which is all told, about 15 years. Interest, and so that's my background, but what I learned, one thing that I think is important, is what I learned in conducting those kinds of investigations where cops were going to jail for their misconduct because it was so egregious, was that, I can't think of one case in which had there been accountability early on, had the agency taken care of the problematic behavior of the officer involved appropriately, had there been accountability at the earliest opportunity, I don't think any of those officers would have found them looking at a federal prison because of the egregious acts that they ended up committing. Because once you take the badge away from an officer who has offended, officer is no longer has the authority and can no longer abuse that authority. If you course correct and advise officers early on in the officer's career through that course correction, that this is not going to be tolerated by the agency, then you're not going to get a situation in which that officer continues to worsen and worsen the conduct to the point where it ends up being a criminal act. And so that was my experience. And then I thought I could be more effective instead of the nuclear option that I had as a federal prosecutor, I thought I'd be more effective if I could work on the front end, providing oversight, ensuring that there's accountability early on because no one wants a situation where it devolves that badly where we are now looking at criminal conduct. And so that's my background. I say reform lawyer because in the 20 years I've been, after I left the US Department of Justice and left my prosecution responsibilities behind, I'm no longer in court, I'm no longer before a jury, I'm no longer before a judge, but I'm before other important people who are making important decisions about keeping us safe and making sure that officers are following the constitutional obligations that they swore when they took an oath. And I think I've learned that I can be more impactful to a broader segment of policing doing this job, getting in front of it, providing guidance, providing policy, ensuring that there's accountability and doing our best to ensure that we don't get to a situation where it becomes a lawless behavior. So that's our answer. One more question. So I heard you get, so we're gonna have to be a little quicker because that was one question answer, so but where are your next two questions for us? First of all, I'd like to thank you for providing your backgrounds. You all sound very knowledgeable and I'm super delighted for the citizens of Santa Rosa that you all, and thank you for the leadership, for having you all in this position so that you can provide service to the community. Thank you, Danny, for holding this microphone too. The next question is you talked about, Steve, Steve, you talked about complaints. What's the minimum amount of complaints before a red flag is drawn? So if you could talk a little bit more, in terms of when you say a red flag, complaints about an officer, maybe, I don't know, is it three, is it five, is it 10? I would imagine some of those complaints maybe you have to filter through, but what's the minimum amount? So it depends, how's that for a lawyer answer for you? But absolutely, that is something that the department keeps track of and that we keep track of. When there is an individual officer who is the subject of multiple complaints, all of those records, in terms of uses of force, traffic issues, there's a lot of different data points that officer, by which officers are tracked. And the department processes all of those things through their computer system that again, that we have access to. And I will tell you, there have been a couple officers in the short time that we've here that I recognize this name. This is the third or fourth time with this individual person. And obviously it's gonna depend a little bit on are the complaints about the same thing, right? Because if that's the case, then obviously there's some sort of intervention that's needed and if the complaints are sustained, then there's a concept called progressive discipline where the department may intervene more strenuously the second time than it might have the first time in terms of a consequence. But then there's also other opportunities as well that we might encourage, whether that's training or just kind of a mentoring program of some kind to address the conduct that is prompting the complaints. If the complaints are all different things, but you know, and maybe a couple of them are not sustained, but a couple of them are, you have to look at it on a case by case basis, but I can tell you it is absolutely something that the department is conscious of and that we are conscious of and there's different ways to intervene. But there's not necessarily a magic formula where after three there's gonna be this or that. A lot of it's gonna be depending on the substance. Thank you. I guess that my other question was, I think one of you mentioned metrics of assessment. So I guess that kind of touches on metrics. So in terms of our assessment or the department's assessment or more specifically. Your assessment. Yeah, so one of the things that we're, so it's interesting, there's the individual case by case situation and that's where the department has to be looking at each case on its merits and saying what do we have here? We're gonna look at this in isolation, but then you also have to put it into a larger context. And again, part of what we are going to be doing is taking a look at the department's systems for addressing behavior more holistically as opposed to the individual case outcome. So we might have four cases involving the same officer and two of them were not sustained. Two of them were, the allegations were sustained but they were about different kinds of behavior. We might still be curious at the end of the year to look what is your, and in some agencies they call it an early warning system. What do you do besides the consequence in those individual cases? What do you do to intervene with the officer? And that's absolutely something that is gonna be part of our overall assessment of the department. Does that make sense? Kind of, Steve. Okay, it helps, it helps. Yeah, you're welcome. So yeah, I'm happy to talk to you more offline if you want to get into the weeds a little bit more of how it works. But yeah, the department, the key thing to understand is that all agencies, well not all agencies but many agencies with all the technology that's available now, they have the ability to track officer behavior in a comprehensive way much more accurately and quickly and thoroughly. And so then the trick is to your point, what are you gonna do with that information, right? It's one thing to have the information available and then how are you going to process it? And that is something that we have looked at with other jurisdictions and absolutely when we kind of take the broader lens to look at department systems as a whole, that whole early warning and intervention concept is something we're gonna be inquiring about. Thank you. All right, well thank you for those questions. Okay, very close. So we have, thank you. We have a question from our remote participants online. So let me read this and I think, well we'll see who wants that, I think it's probably a question for Mike. Does the city manager review the investigations and what is the accountability at the city manager level? I think the same manager who's here is actually going to answer that question. So that's great. I guess I will answer that question. So what OIR does is they will give me a comprehensive report. The information will let me know if the investigation has been sustained or not sustained. We go over that, we meet on an ongoing basis. I think you ask a question when you said, I'm looking for patterns. I'm looking for names. I'm looking to see if there are names of an officer who's been on here two or three times. But what I'm also looking for is what discipline has the department taken? You heard that, I think it was Michael or Steven basically said, since they've been here, they have had some issues where accountability or discipline has been issued. So when that report comes to me, what I am looking for is the accountability that the police department is upholding within. If all that's fine, then there's nothing that I need to do. It's important for me to message that information to the city council and the mayor's office. But every month, every 30 days, we'd look at that information. How many investigations do we have? What has been sustained? What is not? And what is the discipline that has been taken? It's important that the discipline remains within the police department. And that's critical because leadership is important and that lets you know that the person who is sitting at the helm of that organization is doing what we have hired that person to do. So that answers your question. That's actually the way to do it. Oh, Dan, you get the microphone. Thank you. I got the microphone. Let's see, so another comment or question? And again, if you could identify yourself. My name's Jim Duffy. I've got three things I don't necessarily want responses from you guys, because I'm cognizant that I'm only a fourth person to get to speak, and we're running out of time, so I want people to be able to say their thing. Since about 2015, the people at Santa Rosa have been calling for some kind of community body to do front-end oversight work, dialoguing with the police on policies, procedures, training, hiring practices, initiatives, things like that. OIR is the perfect group to help them create that in Santa Rosa. I live in Runner Park. We're creating something like that in Runner Park. They're struggling to do it because, unfortunately, the most senior member of the city council doesn't want to work with NACOL because it does want outsiders coming in. So for the front-end oversight, so it's a rocky start, but they're getting there. I really hope that Runner Park's contract with OIR looks half as good as it does with Santa Rosa, because this is awesome. Second thing I wanna ask for is, I think you need to do some Spanish language outreach specifically, and you cannot call the event, the hearing, because you're not credible messengers here. You're from the outside. So I encourage you to work with LoCN or the Day Labor Centers or North Bay Organizing Project, or there's a slew of credible messengers, Spanish language organizations. But that community is the community that tends to have the most negative justice system impacts in Sonoma County. And people were talking a little earlier, the gentleman who was killed six days ago was a Spanish language individual, and his family is saying, this is fishy, it doesn't sound right, he's never had mental health issues, never had drinking or drug issues, what's going on, and things are not matching up. And it's a community that really feels unrepresented, so I encourage you to work your magic, Brian, and use your old skills and get a credible group to have a Spanish language event for you. The third thing is, back in March of 2021, the Sonoma County Commission on Human Rights passed a resolution calling on all law enforcement agencies in the counties and their governing bodies to review the sworn officers for white supremacy affiliations. And in June of 2021, Committee for Law Enforcement and Accountability now, and I believe also the NAACP in North Bay Organizing Project also issued supportive letters to that and said, yeah, this should be done. To my knowledge, nobody's done anything in Sonoma County. In January of 2022, there was an article on the press Democrat highlighting white supremacy issues within Sonoma County law enforcement agencies with a particular focus on affiliations with the oath keepers and highlighting specific problems in Santa Rosa Police Department alleged problems. So I am encouraging you guys to do your magic and audit that so that at least the largest city law enforcement agency, you know, you can give it a stamp of approval and say, hey, we checked it out and there's no white supremacy problems here. Thank you for taking my comments. Well, thank you for those comments, Jim, for all of them. And I also just personally appreciate the shout out. It's very kind. And I do want to say, I understand what you're saying about, I mean, if we were the conveners of this as outsiders, I think that would be highly problematic. So I do want to give Magali Teyes a chance to speak from the city. Thank you. And thank you so much for that comment. We actually very much actively, well, here, especially in this area, seek out our community, especially our monolingual Spanish speakers. We do have Pablo here today who is ready to translate. We have reached out to NBOP, Latino Service Providers. So we do appreciate also any opportunity for you all to help us. We definitely get the word out. We notify our schools. We have a couple of events coming up tomorrow, as they've mentioned. So we definitely, the outreach has been done. And I believe we also have done some radio ads as well, unless I'm getting it confused. But so that just wanted to add that piece. Well, thank you. And just to say in addition, I think we recognize how important it is that we hear from all parts of the community, but that we do make that attempt. And I think that's part of why we're here in the southwestern part of Santa Rosa, why we have sessions at community spots in Southwestern Santa Rosa, so that we can do everything we can to make it easy to hear those voices. And also we are really, we're partners to the city in this. I mean, we are really, depending on the people who live here, work here, have experience here in this community to help us here effectively. Other thoughts, comments, let's see. I have a question about the contract the city of Santa Rosa has with OIR group. What is the value of that contract and the duration? That is, how long is the contract and how much money are we paying you? Nobody knows. Someone's gonna try and help us with the research there. I don't know is the answer. I know that we have, the city has been very generous with regard to the resource dedication. They recognize that if you know, maybe you don't, but there was an auditor several years ago. I know that. You know that. And that scope of work was a lot more compressed than our scope of work. And in recognition of that, when the scope was designed and the contract was designed and the RFP was produced, we got a lot more dedication of resources. I just don't know. I'm sorry, I don't want to be rude. I just know that we're running out of time and nobody has an answer on those two questions. I guess, three years. Three years. I've got good researchers in the back, three years. Pardon me? $270,000, so almost $100,000 a year, 80 or whatever it turns out to be. Great. One of the gentlemen, I have just a couple of questions. One of the gentlemen who was speaking earlier said that you would have this immediate information if there was an incident. And you would have, he said, body cam footage. Is that raw footage or edited? So yeah, it is the actual body worn camera recordings. It's raw footage, unedited. Yes, ma'am. Okay, thank you. Does your organization in any way participate in the establishment of, you like to call it civilian oversight. I like to call it citizen oversight because I don't like to see the police as a military organization. Do you in any way participate in the establishment of a grassroots, in this community, civilian police oversight organization? Because I appreciate that you have the contract, but you don't live here and I do. And so it's different skin in the game. Well, why don't I start? So there's OIR group and then there's also, as you've heard a couple of times mentioned, NACOL, the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement. I mean, I'm also speaking for everyone, but I know you know. And there, I guess I'll say first, there's no perfect term. Because if you say citizen oversight, that can imply people who are not US citizens have no role. And so we tend to avoid that. Civilian oversight definitely has problems because it implies there are civilians and non-civilians. It's a long used term that people tend to use. People sometimes say community oversight, but then that implies that the law enforcement agency and others in government are not part of the community. So it's always trying to find the right term for each community. So I recognize that there are problems with all of the terms that we use. And we do our best to try to talk about what it is and move away from those specific terms. I think it's really a question not so much for us, an OIR group, because we certainly participate in those sorts of things, but it's really up to the Santa Rosa leadership to determine if that's something they would like the OIR group to do. And I see that the mayor has the microphone and perhaps can weigh in and explain a little bit about where things are. That's exactly what I was gonna say is it's a policy question. We did amend the contract when we first approved it to make it so that if Santa Rosa moved in the direction of having a civilian or a citizen oversight committee that it would work directly with OIR. So that's built into the contract. We did bring up a discussion at a study session a couple of months ago about whether to do that right now. And there wasn't majority support to do that. Majority of the council wanted to see how OIR group would be integrated in the community and then come back for that discussion at a later time. Thank you for those questions. So it's 7.19, so we still have time. If there are other questions. But also we're here to listen. I mean, we're happy to answer questions. We're actually, I'm very glad that we're getting questions but if you have other comments you'd like to share as we've had a bit of, we are here to listen. So I, just a couple, one quick point of clarification that the number $270,000 was mentioned and that's for the life of the contract. That's the total, it's not per year. So it's a cap of 270 for the three year life of the contract just in the interest of accuracy. And while I was in the back getting some clarification, there are some people that are kind of participating online in the chat function and Alex shared a couple of questions for me that I just want to mention very quickly if we have somebody else, that's great. So somebody asked what is the volume of citizen complaints that we have looked at so far this year. And I think the number since January 1st that the number is about 41 that have been opened. And of those 41, several of them are still pending but many of them have been closed but the total's 41. I hope that's helpful just in terms of giving people a sense of the volume of stuff that we're looking at. And the same individual wrote in to say, hey, what would you say, which I thought was a very nice question, what would you say has been the most positive influence that we have been able to have so far? And I would say, first of all, we're very happy to say that we have been impressed with the objectivity and the thoroughness and sincerity. That's the impression that we have. In terms of a contribution that we've made, one thing that matters a lot to us in the different jurisdictions that we work with is the effectiveness of the communication with the complaining party. And in terms of the notification letters that happen at the front of what is the interview like with the person to make sure that all those persons that concerns are being addressed appropriately. And then at the end, what the state law requires law enforcement agencies to provide notification to somebody who has made a complaint so that all agencies are obligated to share what the outcome of the investigation was. And there are limits to what they can share because some of that information is confidential personnel records and it's protected. But the person who complains is entitled to know whether the complaint was sustained or not and any other related information that, again, tends to be very minimal. We have worked in a lot of agencies where they do the bare minimum in kind of the boilerplate three lines. Thank you for your complaint. Our officer didn't do anything wrong. We appreciate your participation. And we've worked with the Santa Rosa Police Department to really try to strengthen those letters in terms of encouraging them to share more detail than they were in the past. But this was our process. This was how we were able to arrive. We understand exactly what the issues were that you were complaining about. And so we're gonna summarize those so you know it's not just a form letter. We really, we made an effort to take your case seriously and this is how we reached the result. And talk a little bit about the process. And of Iolero, I live on that very edge of Santa Rosa but my address is Santa Rosa. And I wanted to just in recognition of what Mayor Rogers was discussing, I wanna say that and I wanna remind people what Jim Duffy said and that is, is that the request for a community council in Santa Rosa has been asked for since 2015. And I hope that you would work with the leadership of the city council to encourage them to adopt such a program. Thank you. All right, thank you, Nancy. I see a question back here again. This is probably my last question for tonight. I'm, the individual here had mentioned something about, he had mentioned the fact that our community, I don't know if it's changed, is roughly about 40% Latinx. And so I'm curious, are there any demographic data that comes in, do you keep track of the demographic data and if you have a complaint where someone may not speak the English language, do you feel like something may get lost in translation? My wife is from Michoacan, she came here when she was 15 and a lot of her friends live here in Santa Rosa, so I just want to reason we moved here and I go with her to, you know, we attend Quinceaneras and all these different gatherings and they don't like speaking English and that's okay as I like learning Spanish but things get lost in translation a lot. So how do you cope with that? And so could you answer those two questions, please? Yeah, I can absolutely take that one on. You're right, things get lost in translation and so I am, as mentioned at the start of the session, I am bilingual in Spanish, it's my first language and so I have the ability when or if necessary to review the material in the native language in which it was submitted. So if there is, for example, body worn camera footage in which individuals are speaking in Spanish, I'm able to review that and provide that to the team. Again, if there's materials or complainants who wish to reach out to us in the Spanish language, I'm able to facilitate that. It's certainly not perfect, but certainly the city as well as the department have made a very concerted effort to reach out to those communities, including in fact having me come on to do this series. Tomorrow morning, we will be meeting in the Tía María Panadería, which I love. And so I will be available there for anyone who wishes to come and to share their stories. And so I'll repeat that in Spanish. Mañana por la mañana estaremos en la Tía María Panadería para cualquier persona que quiera venir a hablar conmigo personalmente puedo hablar con ustedes en español o inglés. Y estoy aquí para escuchar exactamente su situación con los oficiales de esta comunidad. And so thank you for the question and for the opportunity to provide that invitation. Thank you, Teresa. So I think with that, we should probably close our formal presentation. We know that there are people who work here, custodians who care for this facility who actually need to go home at night, so we can't keep them, but we, as you just heard, we have two drop-in sessions tomorrow. Really, we'll be there just to listen, to hear, to take notes, to incorporate this into our work and bring it back to the city. And then we have another session like this. So if there are people who are watching this live or see it later and want to come in person, we will be at the Finley Community Center in the senior wing of that building. On Saturday, August 6th, from 10 a.m. to noon. So we'll be similar to this. And again, we wanted to do something in the evening for people who could do this, something on the weekend. Again, this was all arranged by the city of Santa Rosa and we are very, very grateful to the city staff who have helped put this together, who put this together, not helped, who put this together. And we're just so grateful for the opportunity to hear from you and also to share in more detail about the work that we're doing here in and with your community. Just know again that you have three members of your city council, your city manager, other key city staff, the police chief, other key police leaders who are here to listen, to hear from you and to make sure that the work that's happening with the OIR group as your independent police auditor is serving the needs of your community, creating more public safety that's responsive to the needs of every individual in your community. So with that, again, I thank you all for your participation, whether you spoke, whether you listened, whether you watched, it's all important. We are here and we are available to get feedback from you. We'll put up on the screen. Again, you can talk to us while we're here. You can visit our website at www.oirgroup.com or you can email or call us. You can email info at oirgroup.com or call 310-906-0259. So on behalf of my amazing colleagues who I feel very grateful to work with, thank you again and we look forward to continuing this conversation and continuing to be of support to the entire community here in Santa Rosa. Thank you and have a great, great evening.