 So this is timely all over the country right now. We're starting to see a lot of protests involving police and the community and We're seeing what happens when police departments don't have good relations with their community and here We wanted to do something a little bit different and this isn't anything new For the past 60 years if you really think about it most of the major Conflict riots there's always been a flashpoint and it's usually police-sinnocent interactions that go poorly All right, so what we did back in 2013 the Human Relations Commission decided that they wanted to Start a subcommittee to work with the police department on how we can improve relations and then also how to deal with with some of the Profiling and bias issues that that have been kind of plaguing our department just like every other police department for some time All right So the one of the things that we started to focus on was just the lack of trust or the mistrust that people had with our Citizen complaint investigation process. So that is what happens when somebody actually does have an encounter with the police And it goes poorly. It doesn't it doesn't come out the way that they wanted to people file complaints and Traditionally police departments have had, you know really kind of formal investigative processes Quite honestly, we handle them like we would any other criminal investigation. So we call in people we do formal interviews We interview officers we interview witnesses and then when the investigation is done We basically say it's a confidential personnel record and we don't tell the public really what happened It's not a transparent system Furthermore the person who complained Really all they get at the end of the day is a letter saying we investigated your complaint and here's the disposition Trust us. We did a good job Well, people don't trust us and that's what we wanted to fix So this subcommittee what we did is we took a look at what's going on out there in the restorative processes And how can we use that in a kind of it handling complaints in a different matter? So we really had to work for over a year and we came up with the pilot program And it's an alternative conflict resolution program We had to get by in from the city attorney from the police officers association from their attorneys from police administration because this is an entirely new way of handling complaints and Really what we did is is we took a look at what people really want at the end of the day is some face-to-face Interaction with the employee that they had the encounter with They want to sit in a room with them and tell them this is how I feel This is how you made me feel and this is what I want you to do about it And you know at the end of the day our employees in a lot of cases They actually want that face-to-face encounter. They want to explain to them. Well, this is the job that I was doing This is why I did what I did. Here's what I was thinking at the time Well, the formal complaint process just doesn't lend itself to that face-to-face interaction So using this model we can actually move all the bureaucracy out of the way Get the cop in the room with the person who has the complaint work with trained facilitators to actually have that face-to-face dialogue Now the cool thing about this process is the police department We really do step out of the way the circle keepers and we're using a circle process They're actually trained community members So we've picked community members who have an interest in the police department talked to them about how to facilitate these meetings and then the the Department just kind of steps out of the way and lets this happen And then at the end of the day they tell us this process is done what we're trying to do is work through the conflict and It could be just that everybody gets to talk about how they feel there could be an agreement There can be an agreement to disagree, but the end of the day We're hoping that the the parties are kind of restored All right, and then finally the types of investigations We were really trying to get to the the core of the matter Which is the bias complaints people who say that there's racial profiling going on So primarily we're going to be focused on complaints dealing with racial profiling But it can be rude conduct or any other type of complaint more importantly on the restorative process There's certain types of investigations that have to be formally investigated, you know things like excessive force or you know more serious allegations illegal searches Things like that so we have to do a formal investigation after the formal investigation though We will open that up to a restorative process So we can get the person who filed the complaint in the same room with the officer who is involved and have them work Through it in this restorative matter rather than through the other traditional processes. Thank you We've seen the price that you pay right at our own University When things go wrong in that interaction and so this will be very exciting to see how this turns out Best wishes with that