 everyone's time and make sure you have as much time as possible to be able to talk to Ms. Kim Neal. So my name is Catherine Huckabee. I'm with the Community Engagement Office here with the City of Fort Worth. I'm going to help host today just a couple of housekeeping tools. I'm pretty sure everybody knows how to share your feedback at this point, but real quick up in the top right hand corner, the little thought bubbles. Those are our chat sessions. So that is perfect for you to share your insights, additional resources, or if you agree or disagree with anything that Ms. Kim is saying, you can put that in the chat session. And then the very next section says questions. It looks like a classroom. From there, if you have any questions during the presentation that you would like for Kim or her team to answer at the end, then please put that there. And then at the end, I will go through and read out each question and make sure that everyone has been heard in that way. And then the third section is a poll that Kim had actually loved to know what it is that made you decide to come today. So if you would complete that poll, that would be great. And then if you just really want to see how many other people are involved in the conversation today, click on the people tab, which is three little tabs down. And you can see all of the names. If you want to talk privately with any of those people, you can click on their name and it will pop up a little button for you to not only know more about them, what city they're from, what their title is, but also you can chat with them privately. And those chats are not saved in any way in the system. So we won't know anything you're saying. So if you want to reach out to Sonya, I'm just going to pick on her because I looked at that name and talk about how awesome Vanessa is. Vanessa will never see that through this entire presentation, but you guys can definitely do that on your own. And then last but not least, Kim has put an abundance of resources for you in the poll section. So the very last tab on the right hand corner, these are all documents that have been put together and used by Kim and her team over the last year and a half. And if any of those things are referencing you want to pull down, you can just download them instantly to your computer. And that way you'll have access to them. Another quick reminder that this presentation is being recorded. The files will stay here as well. So if you want to come back any time between now and the end of August, you'll just go straight back to the virtual lobby, go to this exact workshop and you can find those files there to be able to download. So at this time, I'm going to introduce Ms. Kim Neal. She is the director and she is also the police oversight monitor of the OPOM office. We are very honored to have her. And she also has her team that I believe she's going to introduce to you. And I'm going to let you take it from here, Kim. Welcome, everyone. Good morning. My name is Kim Neal. I see I was checking out the Chattis camera was talking to somebody for bragging about the weapon that you're having in your fabulous locations that you're in. We're a little cloudy here in Fort North, but the temperature is good. So I envy those of you who don't have the clouds that we have. So welcome. As you may see some other faces on your screen, we have Vanessa Campos, Vanessa Wade. Vanessa is our office manager. She makes things happen and our gatekeeper here, the office of the police oversight monitor. Then we have Kenneth Smith. He likes to be called Kenny and he is our policy advisor. Hi, Kenny. And they're both here listening on and they may interrupt and add a few words as well that they feel like I'm not explaining something completely. And so we welcome you here today. I looked at the poll and I see that quite a few of you have joined just to build your knowledge about police oversight. As well as that, it's good to see that a number of you are motivated to contribute to positive change regarding police and community relationships. So hopefully you'll learn a lot today. It has had some great resources out there for you to further read and learn more about this topic. So to date quickly our agenda, I just go briefly over the history of community oversight and law enforcement. Talk about the three basic models that most cities work from as they develop it or enhance their current models. We'll talk about our office and our office has been in existence now for a little over a year. And so we'll talk about some of our first year key initiatives that we think have been successful. And then we'll just have engagement between you and our office just to talk about what your thoughts are, answer any questions you may have and then we'll conclude hopefully well before the end of the session. So the history of civilian oversight, community oversight of law enforcement. Oh, that's right. So before we get started just to enhance our engagement later on in the presentation, I wanted to talk about just some engagement kind of standards so that we can all be respectful of one another because sometimes folks feel a certain kind of way about community oversight of law enforcement. And so I just want to make sure that we're always being curious and ready to listen and understand that we're respectful and don't judge one another and suspend judgment and just listen with the open ears and open hearts. Note any common ground as well as differences that you may have amongst yourselves as we chat. Be authentic. We want you to be true to yourself and welcome that from others. Be purposeful and to the point, noting that we want to make sure that everybody has time to add to the conversation and bring for their viewpoints and then just own and guide the conversation so we can continue to remain on track. So we appreciate that if you can honor that. Now the history of and many times you'll hear it referred to as civilian oversight of law enforcement and I like to call it community oversight of law enforcement to kind of get from the our more military type of titles. And so you'll hear me refer to it as community oversight of law enforcement, but it is the concept of civilian oversight of law enforcement. And so initially this whole concept it's you know we've gotten a lot of press coverage in the last year mostly you know due to some of the things that we've seen in footage on the TV regarding encounters with police officers and so for a lot of us it's a new concept. But I wanted everybody to know that it's actually a concept that started in the early 1900s and it was at a time when policing was considered to be corrupt. A lot of folks believe that policing was controlled a lot by mobsters and so it was a way for the president to get community members involved to provide oversight of police to kind of clean up policing in communities. And so we've since seen much from that concept but that is really where it initially got started. Our next slide shows kind of a timeline of just the history of community oversight. So initially back in the early 1900s the president as a result of corruption in policing formed the national commission of law observance and enforcement and that was a way to have community members get involved and make recommendations as it related to ending corruption in policing. And then the first that we know of a complaint review board or a form of community oversight of law enforcement was created in my hometown which is Washington DC and that proved to not be as viable because it was at a time where it was a new concept. It didn't really have any teeth but it was their first attempt after the president's commission at the time. And then the current commission many of you may have heard of that report then recommended made a formal recommendation during civil rights era of external oversight policing and it was due to all the civil rights activities that were going on at the time and some of the encounters that community members were having our protesters were having with the police. Kansas City was the next known community oversight form that really wanted to attack police complaints and also was dealing with the after effects of the civil rights era as well. And then Berkeley California which has in all of these today have phenomenal community oversight but it's taking some time to really develop their concepts. But Berkeley California was the next known community oversight agency that we know of that created an independent office outside of the police department. Now of course many police departments had complaint departments but the idea of community oversight is that it's independent some of these cities then created their own separate complaint offices that were completely outside of the police department so that we wouldn't have police officers in effect investigating police officers and so the rest of the timeline just shows the evolution of that process and it should be noted that in 2016 it was noted that there was 144 of our agencies created across the country. NACO which is our national association of civilian oversight of law enforcement said that as early as 2020 they had about 200 oversight agencies that were members but within the last year they've had at least an additional 130 that have contacted NACO because they want to form some form of civilian oversight in our community. Now this infographic just kind of shows the concept of community oversight of policing and what its purpose really is to all of our stakeholders and the key is that we want to ensure that civil rights are protected. We want to support effective police and it's not about being anti-police it's about ensuring that our policing is equitable and it's effective and it's fair to all. We want to ensure greater accountability of our police officers and our police departments and frankly of our government. It helps manage risks so it keeps our hopefully our lawsuits down against the police department in the cities or counties or localities that they represent but meanwhile increases confidence and builds the bridges between policing or police officers in our community and enhance those relationships. So those are the key primary factors for why a community oversight agency is so important to cities. Now there as I mentioned early on there's three basic types and you will see if you ever look into this or you have looked into it there there are no civilian oversight agency or no community oversight agency is ever identical. We have to make sure that wherever you do it it has to fit your particular environment and so that's what we've done here in Fort Worth and so you want to always make sure that the models whether it's investigation focus, review focus or auditor monitor focus and those are the three primary models that we tweak those to really be satisfied the needs of your community and your police department. So I'm going to do just a quick overview of what those three models look like. So first I'm going to start with the investigation model and I've worked in all three of these models. So investigation model is where we're going to have a community oversight agency that does its own independent investigations of police officers. So they're going to work in line with internal affairs. So while internal affairs or what we call internal affairs of police departments are evaluating or investigating their police officers you're going to have a separate agency outside of the police department actually doing independent separate investigations. It could replace or duplicate internal police departments internal affairs within police departments but for the most part across the country it's pretty much duplicated. It's not replaced it and it's generally staffed by non-police civilian investigators. Now it doesn't mean that a police officer can't work as an investigator there but that person normally cannot be an investigator both in the police department and in the civilian oversight agency. Now we do have a few in the country that have police officers actually working but again you know that goes to customizing it for that community. Now the strength of the investigation focus model is that the it may reduce bias in investigations into citizen complaints because you're doing something that is separate and apart from the police department. You're also going to make sure that your investigators because they are non-sworn officers have specialized training and continue to receive specialized training so that you know we can ensure that they have the the the tools that they need to do an effective investigation and it could increase a community trust in the investigations process because so many times when communities ask for community oversight of law enforcement it's because they've lost trust in the complaint investigation process within the police department. Now the weaknesses are of course it can be expensive because you're going to have to hire a whole new set of investigators and run a whole separate sort of really internal affairs outside of the police department. Of course you're going to face strong resistance from the police when you're trying to create a separate agency that's going to hold them accountable and there may be some issues within the public that feels that doing this is basically setting up an expectation that police conduct is going to automatically change because it's a holistic approach. This is one facet of it but this is not going to be the 100 answer to enhancing community and police relationships. The review focus is kind of two twofold so you can put a board in place of community members that are appointed by the city or county or municipality and that board will then review work of the internal affairs investigations. The board could also review the work of the independent community oversight agency and that board also can serve as an appellate board so after the investigation is done a finding is concluded then that board can act as almost like an appellate board where if the community member doesn't agree with the actual finding they take it to the board as a means of appealing the decision. The board would make recommendations to police executives regarding its findings so in addition to its finding of whether the officer valed at policy or not they may make a recommendation that says that you know all officers have to wear body-worn cameras for example and then it's often headed by a review board composed of community volunteers. Usually these these members are not paid volunteers they may receive stipends in some situations but most of the time they are unpaid and their meetings are public so we want to make sure that this particular model and all the models are frankly are accountable and transparent like we want the police department to be accountable and transparent. The strengths and weaknesses of the review focus model strengths first is that it ensures again that the community has the ability to provide input on the complaint investigation process it could again just like the other models increase the public trust in the process and it is in fact at least expensive because we have a board in place they're for the most part they're not being paid but they're acting as community members who are invested in this process of ensuring that our police department is accountable. The weaknesses of course are because of that they're the least expensive then their authority is limited sometimes they have less expertise in policing matters and so it's kind of a learning on your job type of thing learning as you go and then it may be less independent than other forms of oversight because they're appointed generally by electrical appointed officials. The final model is what the city of Fort Worth has adopted and that is the auditor monitor focus and this is a newer model and this is one that we see a lot of cities nowadays adopting it often focuses on examining broad patterns so the monitor focus model is not going to necessarily do investigations it could do investigations but that's not its primary role. Its primary role is really to monitor the police department's investigations note any issues or concerns ensure the investigations are diligent and fair and then determine if there are any patterns that should be basically pointed out to ensure that we address those issues within the police department ensure policing is equitable. We look at the quality of investigations we look at the findings and we also look at the discipline we want to make sure that that's all going to be fair to the police officer but also fair to the community member as well. We often participate in or monitor internal investigations and we often seek to to impact change across the police department in a more broad sense and so it's sort of like the broken windows theory where we're trying to address things proactively before things actually get worse. Now some of the weaknesses and strengths of the auditor focus model is that of as far as strengths are concerned is that often it's the most robust from a public reporting standpoint it's generally less expensive because we don't have to hire the investigators but we are well versed in investigations that for example we have a whole high profile police shooting we could do the investigation and it also is very effective at creating long-term systemic changes within police departments. The weaknesses are that we focus on broad patterns whether than individual cases so we're monitoring complaints and cases against police officers but we're not actually getting into the bread and butter of it but we are monitoring them and making sure that they're fair. Sometimes their significant expertise is required to conduct systematic policy evaluations so our office what we do is we confer with experts in the field and we do benchmarking studies to ensure that we have that expertise and many times monitors we only make recommendations we cannot compel law enforcement agencies and so that's where you have a reporting piece come in who who does the monitor report to who does the police chief report to who has the ability to ensure that the changes are being made and so these are just some of the cities that have adopted the various models throughout the country again we have more than 200 but these are just some of the cities. Next slide. All right so I have an engagement question for everyone um and so I think is that the best way to do that Catherine would that be in the chat room or can we just talk out loud okay um they can't talk out loud unless they bring them in so the chat is the better way to respond and then if they want to ask questions they can put it in the questions tab. Okay sounds good so my engagement question to you is what are your thoughts after hearing about community oversight law enforcement all the models is there one that you like more than another for your community and I know many of you are from here in Fort Worth or any comments that you have about our office here in Fort Worth or what you would like us to to do differently I welcome your feedback and if you just put your comments in the in the chat box but again if you have questions this Catherine stated feel free to put that under the questions tab. So Kim one of the questions that we have is from Brian and he's asking do members of the oversight committee go on bridalongs with the officers and can they attend force on force training? Yes all that can happen and have we done it in Fort Worth yet yet no because when we started in March I started in March March second or third three weeks then we had COVID so we haven't done any of that but the intent and where I came from which was a previous city where I was director for and the investigations model the review model all of the employees as well as all of the board members had to go through a full training at the police department and from our civil rights folks about civil folks civil rights the laws that apply stops we talked about force and also there was a requirement that and there is a requirement going to be a requirement here in Fort Worth that everybody also goes through the bridalongs as well and our staff is going to be soon going to all the police departments rural calls here in Fort Worth as well. And Monique said frequent updates of projects are tasked in the community if not already done. Okay so from our perspective here in Fort Worth what we do is we try to update our website as often as we can but we just recently sent out a newsletter so right now the newsletter is coming out poorly however if we have some special news we've created a list server and then we also utilize the city's communications and department to get the word out to our residents through the delivery so we have different mechanisms that we use but we try to do it as frequently as as we're able to. I think that's all the questions at this point. Okay all right well we'll keep it moving all right so now I'll talk specifically about our office the office of the police oversight monitor not a fancy name you'll see some organizations like ours throughout the country come up with some really really snazzy names like office of police accountability office of police accountability and transparency but we're all we all serve the same purpose. Our office was established by city ordinance in February of 2020 last year and then we actually officially opened our doors in mid-March of 2020 as I stated right in the midst of COVID and so our vision is to be a proactive leader in law enforcement accountability um of Fort Worth law enforcement and the population that serves sorry for the typo and then our mission is to serve as a designated community oversight agency empowered to act fairly and impartially ensuring greater accountability of and public trust in Fort Worth law enforcement. Again you know keep in mind that community oversight law enforcement I think so many times folks think that it is against law enforcement and we're not we are really advocates for the community but we're also advocates for police we take complaints but we also take accommodations. We are the folks who kind of are the impartial body that kind of sits right in the middle and wants to make sure that the entire process is equitable and fair for everyone involved and so some of our primary functions include of course oversight and accountability but we also intake complaints and monitor inquiries so many times we get calls from citizens and they mean that amount to the level of a complaint but it's an inquiry from a citizen they're trying to get more information they don't understand why the officer did what he or she did and so we're able to answer those questions because we have knowledge based in our office to be able to know what the answers are but we can also look up matters to figure it out and if they're trying to get in touch with someone in the police department to get further information we can make that happen so it may not necessarily be a complaint but they just can't get a call back from the police department so if we can be their eyes for them or their voice for them as well we also look at law enforcement policies and procedures and we do reviews we do analysis and we do recommendations so some of the recommendations that we've issued are on use of force the city has a use of force review board like a lot of cities do we've made recommendations on that we've made recommendations or recruit practices we've made recommendations on training we made recommendations around the body one camera program and so far to date all of those recommendations have been accepted and so we've been pretty busy in our year but we've been doing some really effective collaboration with both community and police to make these things happen we also audit law enforcement practices so body one cameras for example that's a big program that's constantly being audited by both the officers or supervisors that within the police department are at our various divisions as well as by our office we're looking for patterns that we can identify community engagement like we're having here today we've done probably over 200 community engagements throughout the city of Fort Worth and all of those were virtual because of COVID and so we've met quite a few people and gotten a lot of information out and also we've also learned a lot about our communities in Fort Worth to ensure that we're doing the best job that we can a big piece of what we do is research and data collection and analysis so we always want to look for look at data because data shows us where we need to improve and so we're getting together now data together for our annual report but we plan to put out to just talks about the types of complaints we receive what the allegations have been the demographics of the complainants the demographics of the officers and is really to look at see if there's any patterns or trends that we need to be identifying so that we can address them proactively and then my hope is to create a mediation program that will in essence be a not a voluntary it's a voluntary program a confidential program but it is in lieu of the complaint process hopefully where we can get community members and the officers that they encounter in a room to talk about an encounter to hopefully erase some mutual awareness but also raise some cultural sensitivity of both individuals and then last thing I want to say with the community engagement piece the other big piece of that that I'm an advocate of and I've done in previous jobs is the know your rights campaign so I want to we're going to be developing a know your rights campaign for community members where when they have encounters with police officers what what what should they do and then talk about some of the key laws around stops whether they're auto bicycle pedestrian and then actually bring police officers in the room and work out scenarios and talk about a bad scenario versus a good scenario and this is a great way to get kids involved early on and ensure that they understand what the laws are as it relates to things that I mentioned so all of these are functions of our office that we do every each and every day Kim there's a couple of questions the first question is from Steve given your experience so far in Fort Worth what one or two improvements would you think would be the most beneficial I think one would be the mediation program we have we have community several communities in Fort Worth and so depending on which community you go into you're going to get a different perspective of policing and so it's it's I think it's in our best interest to particularly a more marginalized communities to do a mediation program where we can talk about these issues but it doesn't necessarily it doesn't necessarily show as a red flag on the officer's file it really is a way for the officer to hear or have a community member felt and then there's a good way for the community member to feel what the officer's thoughts were when they had the encounter and that way we can raise an awareness and an understanding between the two parties I think we can really impact relationships in some of those communities if we do something like that the other piece of it would be to I think really just do more encounters with police and community I'm sorry not encounters engagements last year we did a police community engagement virtually where we had breakout sessions and I heard overwhelmingly from community that they want more of those they want to be in the room with officers not necessarily coming there for a specific program but also to give them a problem and to be able to solve it together in a breakout session that is a problem in their community and actually have officers and community work out what the possible solutions recommendations of solutions could be and then to actually get them involved and I think in the long run that really helps the police department because now you're building up trust in that community but also it helps the community because they also know that they're being a part of the solution and so those are two things that hopefully we can get going with Texas opening up and you know us being able to get out in the community more and the next question is for Miss Geraldine and she wants to know if there are any regular citizens on the board okay so right now in Fort Worth we don't have a board as of yet so the first record so what we did was the city prior to me getting here we had a race and culture task force and it was appointed by city leaders and that race and culture task force came up with the recommendation either do a board or we do a form of civilian oversight for the city of Fort Worth and the administration chose to create this office which was the office of the police oversight monitor and so the idea was that this office would do a lot of things of what the board would do now that doesn't mean it's going to be the final solution and what we're working on right now is creating a board or making a recommendation to council I should say I have key members of the community working together and meeting periodically who are coming up with a recommendation for a policy review board that would review policies and procedures of the police department and make recommendations to the police department and that ad hoc group because it's just a temporary group we put together of community members it has community members it has city leaders and it has police on it so we're all in agreement when we reach the consensus of what that board should look like and so and so that board if and so what we'll do with that is that once that recommendation is finalized I'll take that to council on behalf of this ad hoc group and then it's up to the council to determine if they want to move forward with it hopefully they will I made the suggestion to the council back in December and that's why we move forward with talking to this ad hoc group creating and talking to this ad hoc group and then we can make some progress there so right now we don't have a board but we hope to hopefully we'll have one in the near future okay and the final question so far is from Monique and will there be a program that targets working with youth that interact with the police yes so when I talked about the know your rights campaign that's one of that's one of the components of the program and that's what I've done in the past is that we want to specifically tailor that program not just for community of folks or adults we also wanted our children in the school system so I've had at least one school reach out to me it's a specialized school but one school reached out to me to actually do something like this and bring the officers in the room now I can tell you that there's some situations where folks just don't want officers in the room when we talk about these issues and I try to encourage that we bring officers if it makes them feel more comfortable if the office is out of uniform then we can probably work that out but it works better if the officers are in the room but we will definitely be focused on young people and specifically our junior high and high school students we definitely want to make an impact there so that's definitely something we have going forward hopefully we'll be doing our first program in summer alright so the organizational structure we're a small office right now and so David Cook is our city manager and I report directly to him and when I talked early on about the structures of some of our civilian oversight offices and I talked about it's all about who reports to who so just to give you an example I report to the city manager but the police chief reports to a deputy city manager and that was something specifically that the Fort Worth community asked for they did not want me reporting to the same person that the police chief reported to they wanted me reporting to someone that was higher up than who the police chief reported to to show some form of accountability and then as I mentioned we have Vanessa Campo she's our office manager we have two interns one right now is on break Tiffany Dale she's from our local law school but then we also have Owen Crum who's been an intern in our office for a while and they both both been very helpful in doing research on policies and procedures and and other components of the program Tiffany's been very helpful with trying to create the mediation program that I talked about and we're starting up an internship program this summer where we're going to bring in a bunch of law school interns to work on some other matters like the know your rights campaign help us develop that campaign and so forth and then in the fall we are partnering with the law school to create a community oversight a law enforcement clinic program where students will take a class but then also work in our office for credit to learn more about community oversight and do some research and benchmarking in that area so it's really going to be state of the art it's something that's unheard of in the country and so I'm really excited about that we have a deputy director position that's vacant right now in the process of hiring for and of course I introduce you to Kenny and we also have Nathan Benson who's out of the office today he is also a policy advisor in our office the next two slides are just I won't go over them specifically but they are just a timeline this shows you how much work we've done in just a year that I'm really proud of one of the things I wanted to mention under March 2020 you'll see acquire a CGIS certification which is a criminal justice information systems which comes under the justice department and so I encourage my peers in the industry I talk to them all the time and try to give them some assistance and how to create their offices and enhance their offices by encourage folks across the country all the time to get their CGIS certification and CGIS allows folks that are non sworn officers to be able to access the records of law enforcement and you have to attest to confidentiality and there's certain procedures you have to follow to ensure the confidentiality of law enforcement records and so everyone in my office with the exception of the interns because they don't deal with police files are all CGIS certified and so we are able to access police systems and do our research that we need to be done and I can tell you that having that ability and that all my peers have that ability across the country sometimes they have to make the request of the police department but for us to have unfettered access to the police department really goes to the testament of our police chief and our prior police chief who really want to ensure that our police department is transparent and accountable so I'm grateful for that but the rest of the slide just talks about different things that we've done since day one we did a survey that was absolutely I thought was a good survey particularly in light of all the all the pressure that we were going through with COVID and in the documents that I provided you today that you can look at at some time in the future I did provide you with our survey analysis report that was done by an independent PhD student that just shows we did a survey of community and of police officers and we'll talk about that in a minute briefly but that survey report just gave me kind of the a lens the open lens picture of what you know residents and police officers thought about community and police relationships and Fort Worth and so that report is about 50 pages I gave you as a sample of one of the documents you can look at and then the next slide just talks about some of the other things that we're doing we serve on the the oral board the oral board is something like an interview panel for new recruits for the police department we monitor that we also monitor the use of force review board which is the board that is uh as a police department board but it reviews every use of force that has been done by a police officer and so we monitor that um all my peers don't have the uh have the fortune to be able to do that and so that's a good thing and then we just continue to always make sure we're we stay in tune and are current on promising police practices so that's a big thing we have a virtual employee collaboration session starting up next week and we'll have community collaborations starting up this summer so we just continue to move in groove as we develop our office this right here if someone files a complaint with our office and Vanessa put this together this is a great piece of work here where it shows our flow chart for receiving complaints in our office and how we receive them but then the process that it goes through it's a pretty tight process and we will we tell one of the things that when I came on board one of the things I've heard from community members overwhelmingly was that when they filed a complaint with the police department a lot of times they didn't know the status of their complaint and that's what a lot of cities here and so um so we wanted to we so we talked to the police department they have made their complaint process more accountable they're communicating with citizens more through the use of letters and calls and so forth and making sure they're aware of what's going on but we also wanted to make sure that if we're going to serve as an avenue for a complaint taking that we also have a process that is transparent and accountable and so we have timelines in there to make sure that citizens know when they're going to hear from our office and you know if there are at senior waiting circumstances where we can't do it within 90 days we let the citizen know that but we're always in constant communication with community members about their complaints so some of the initiatives uh next slide in our first year was of course the establishment of our office we created various communication mediums so we can make sure we can get the word out about our office we created the complaining commendation intake and review process and I can tell you right now if you go to our website you'll see a form where citizens can fill out for complaints but what we're working on right now that we hope to go live fairly soon is a more interactive form where once a community member fills out the complaint form that they're able to then that information will go into a database and we're able to do queries of information to look at what type you know what types of allegations are we getting is there one allegation that we're seeing more of than another against officers the demographics of the officers the demographics of the community members so that we can start studying these issues and so the the form will work in hand with the database to be able to track some of that information as I stated we continue the research promising police practices and making recommendations and some of these are the recommendations that we made in the slide on this slide and then we continue to monitor complaints and inquiries of the the PD investigation system as I said earlier we monitor use all uses of force including critical incidents like officer involved shootings since I've been here a little over a year we've had one officer involved shooting and so so we monitor that one and we are monitoring that one very closely deaths and custody and then use of force resulting in severe bodily injury or death we've had multiple community community stakeholder meetings we can continue to meet with the police department regularly the chief police has a staff meeting a fan staff meeting every Monday that I attend he and I meet every bi-weekly to keep each other we also do a lot of media interviews media presentations as well as I talked to you about the community and officer perception survey and publication of that report and then we're looking to produce our first annual report hopefully this summer we serve as the monitor on the or recruitment board which again is the interview board for new recruits we serve as a monitor on the use of force review board which again is the every use of force that an officer has committed we attend and observe Fort Worth law enforcement training and both Kenny and Nathan have received some additional certifications as a result of that we continue to research and draft our complaint mediation process and partner with police on some key community of problem oriented policing initiatives and then you know like I said most proud of the partnership that we've reached with Texas A&M law school internship program because that has really proved phenomenal for our office particularly because our office is so small and I often recommend to my peers in this field when they have a small office and they feel like they need more staffing than interns interns experienced interns are really the way to go to do some of the things that maybe we can leave some of the other things like the sieges related stuff to our staff and have the interns do the research and so the law school externship program is proven to be great because they can do the legal research and and do the benchmarking for us that we need can we have there's a question from Dennis he wants to know what type of training you have as far as use of force is that for staff or is that just in general police department or he doesn't talk about both so the the training that's done is training is done at the police department so we have a fairly good relationship police department has what they call a use of force coordinator and he is a lieutenant that works for a deputy chief and he is the one that generally gives most of the training or he has other folks that work with him to give training in the academy and so that training is something that staff has attended and attends regularly we we attended in mostly in the auditing sense to just kind of look and see what the officers are learning and so the other piece of that would be if they receive outside training from leaders in that field then our staff has also gone to that training as well and generally that's in the police within the police department is at the academy so hopefully I'll answer your question Dennis all right and then continuation on with our first year initiatives as I stated earlier we created this working group is working on a recommendation to counsel that hopefully we'll hopefully we can get that recommendation to counsel sometime in June or early July we've been meeting since December 31st for every two weeks and we continue to meet we took a little break from March to April but we're starting to meet up again to talk about that recommendation we're creating that tracking and reporting system for complaints findings and recommendations so that's the database that we're working with our IT department to create on our behalf and we meet with Vanessa and I meet with them every two weeks or so to ensure that they're coming along and they're doing a great job we continue to conduct policing trend review and identify policing patterns which is big because we again we always want to be proactive in identifying patterns but also recommending policing trends we always want to be proactive we don't want to ever be reactive and then we are coordinating with the IT department on our database now the surveys as I mentioned and I just want to give some bragging rights here so we did the officer perception survey we did a community perception survey and we had it open for two weeks we got over 51% of the sworn officers to respond and I can tell you that even the police chief was surprised at that number and then we got we got about approximately 0.5 percent of total population which was about 4,000 and I understand that that's a pretty good number even though I thought it was pretty low it was a pretty good number and what I was more concerned about was the diversity of the population that responded and we had pretty diverse population from our areas of the city responding to the survey so it was good to see that would I have like more people to respond absolutely but the diversity of the respondents was really key for me as well from the officer survey excuse me next slide we had 68.5 percent believe that ongoing de-escalation training is necessary and that was key for me because it's good to know that officers want to know all the key you know areas of de-escalation that's the big topic nowadays with so much footage being put on TV and so that was really good to hear that more than the majority of the force want the de-escalation training many know that the need for increased transparency they want to participate in the community and outreach and engagement efforts and they want increased understanding in the role and actions of the police they want the community to understand what their roles are so when I talk about that mediation program I think this is the exact venue that we can use to increase that understanding and mostly important they want to establish partnerships to address problems in the community again that's a problem oriented policing standpoint that's a big issue that came up in the president the president obama's 21st century policing standard and so we want to just honor that and we're happy to see the officers were for that no need for more support from leadership so they want more support from city leaders improve recruiting efforts and they want improved diversity efforts within their specialized units and so we've worked with when I talk about us making recommendations to the police department on recruiting efforts it's around those issues diversity and you know unfortunately although most respondents offer constructive responses what I call constructive criticism some did depict issues with morale and disconnect and the perceptions of community police relationships so we want to we want to help facilitate that we want to feed off of that and we want to turn some of those minds around so that's our goal here in this office so we just picked one response that we thought was was a good one when there was a question about suggestions for assuring the public that police are held accountable an officer said this will never be accomplished until the mode of talking is established real-time information podcast long-form conversation until police and public can dialogue like co-citizens there will never be true trust on police bad ideas and misinformation must be addressed and challenged on both sides so we thought that that was an excellent perspective from a police officer to share now from our community standpoint 62 percent have a positive view of the police department's performance the majority of all racial groups because Fort Worth is a very diverse city knows that they were treated fairly by police department and when I say FWP as Fort Worth police department except our black Americans 41.2% did not believe they were treated fairly so that's where we need to do our work majority of residents 52.6% notes that community oversight of Fort Worth police department is very important and I can tell you the percentage was not as high for police officers which it never is when you talk about someone else coming in and providing oversight and while many respondents remain hopeful that hopeful that relationships between community and police will improve they had caveats about it they recited that the need for additional community and recreational programs so mental health resources and more funding for schools and after school programs in order to reduce and prevent crime so it as you can tell these aren't policing issues right so these are concerns about community and how we operate and so it's a holistic approach that the city needs to take it's not just about policing and so that's when when I started this presentation I've talked about how community oversight is a solution but it's not a hundred percent solution there are other things that need to happen to make all of this work and so these are some of the things that we agree that we need to improve on and that we need to encompass in this holistic approach and so we're going to so from the perspective of my office and community oversight of law enforcement you know we're making recommendations about how police off police department work with mental health resources and the police department has proactively done that we're talking about recreational programs when we're talking about know your rights that can easily be a recreational program that we take into the recreation centers and then after school fun after school funding for programs as well where we can also take that know your rights program into and then so one of the responses that we thought was was a holistic response to a question that was about whether a person was hopeful that Fort Worth community police relationships will be better in the future the quote is while I remain hopeful that anything is possible I believe that we must begin to be totally transparent and fair of the policing done in communities of color this must start by putting those who look like the communities they serve relations are not will not improve until there is a shift and truly engaging in the communities when there is no crime but learning understanding the communities and culture and so when we talk about the perceptions of community oversight I just wanted to show you in that survey when we say police officers and then community members not at all they didn't think it was important 54 percent police officers versus a lot thinking community oversight was important community thought 52 percent so it's interesting that those percentages are similar but there are different ends of the spectrum I see that we have one question what levels peanut powers does your office have into matters low medium or high my office at current currently doesn't have any subpoena power and so what you'll find across the country some community oversight agencies do have subpoena power and some oversight agencies do not have subpoena power and those agents are there's generally a the previous agency I came from I did have subpoena power but there's usually steps that you have to use to employ that subpoena power and generally that involves involving your legislative body so if you have if you want to use a subpoena then you have to go to generally your legislative body to ask to basically state your case and then that legislative body would agree to it now the key is do you ever have to use your subpoena power and I can tell you the agency that I came from where we had subpoena power for over 20 years we never had to use subpoena power and that was because anything that we needed we we we received and if there was any hesitancy again I reported to the city manager the police chief reported to a deputy city manager the city manager would intervene or the police chief would intervene and make sure that the information we need it was received so it is about relationship building between the two departments versus I've spoken to some of my peers who use subpoena power all the time but they of course have a more contentious relationship with their police chief and sometimes they're their city leaders as well so I think it just varies for the community perceptions about community oversight most importantly we thought it was interesting that both officers and community members thought that advancing fair or professional policing that the responsibility of community needs was the most important where they varied was what was least important officers did not want community oversight to investigate complaints and provide recommended findings versus the community thought that the you know our officer as a public speaker and disseminate information it's not that they didn't want it they just thought that they wanted us to focus on more specific tasks as it related to enhancing relationships Kim there's a couple of new questions Dennis is asking to do the police interact with kids at community events do they participate in sports football basketball with them absolutely they do and the chief has just created a probe a unit called the community partnership the community safety partnership unit and that unit he has selected officers to be in that unit and that unit is supposed to specifically focus on reaching out to the young population as well as the population as a whole and and and ensuring that there's some collaboration with those communities so we're going to use that unit in the know your rights program to act out some of the scenarios that we talked about and so yes they are absolutely there in events they're absolutely there in sporting events with young people is it consistent throughout the city no but they're they're definitely doing that and I think that it also answered Brian's question that he was asking if Fort Worth PD has a police activities program and so I see that Ella is saying she did not receive a survey so Ella we we used several medium to get the survey out so I'm not sure if you're signed up for gov delivery Catherine I don't know if you want to say something about that but that was one of the medium that we use which a lot of city residents have signed up to receive information regarding that you know things that are going on in surveys because the city does surveys all the time of its residents so I'm not sure if that's something you've signed up for yeah miss Ella so anyone that's on this uh that's in this session right now that is from the city of Fort Worth one thing you can do is go to the city's website forward texas.gov and when you first come on if you're not a member of the gov delivery city news system then it you'll see a pop-up that says do you want to receive this information and sign up for city news you just share your email address and then you can choose what types of things that you want to receive notifications about from the city so that's one way that we will push out information including surveys another way is to be on next door facebook twitter or to work with your neighborhood association and make sure that they are signed up for our community engagement weekly bulletin all right so next slide so some of the separate sample recommendations that came out of the survey analysis um was that our office should engage the police and community in a more positive and constructive methods in order to improve relationships so we're all on that and we're all in favor of it and because we definitely want to eliminate assumptions and as well as unfair biases so hopefully a lot of the information that shared with you they show that some of the tools that we're using to actually do that um the city should ensure that communities have the tools and information they need to address community issues and concerns so for example when we did our community collaboration sessions last summer one of the things that came out of that consistently was that some of our community members our neighborhood association said that you know if we just had uh uh uh if police officers were able to give an information sheet to our citizens um that gave key numbers let's say they're responding to a situation that involves someone with a mental health concern um and so if that person needed further help what what are the resources that the police officers could recommend um you know that person contact and so um talking about that that new unit that was put together I've already uh conversed with them they're they're on it they're creating um we're working with their office to create that that resource document and ensuring that the officers have that in their car um they're working on it right now so that they can pass that information out and then within our office um Vanessa is is is has been creating a bunch of resources so that when folks call our office we're able to um actually give that information out numbers tools and so forth websites for those who need additional help this outside of the parameters of what we do um and then finally um they felt that the police department uh should include diverse community members input in its problem-solving projects community policing efforts and its development and changes to policies and procedures and and so that's where I feel that my office comes in because when I talk about the different boards we serve on you know I'm also having a conversation with the police department about how can we get community members on these boards um these police department boards so we serve as a voice for our community and that leads into the to the quote here real engagement is more than just conversation it means giving the public a voice in how their communities are policed and that's exactly what our agency is here to serve to make sure that communities have a voice in that process so our final slide is just some engagement questions or any questions that you may have or comments you may have um but the engagement questions are what are ways to enhance community and police relationships that you know that you feel are ways to enhance community and police relationships how do you feel how do you feel when you view footage documented a community member police encounter I mean it seems like sometimes every week you turn on the tv there's some type of footage showing that whether it's positive or negative um how can you contribute to the enhancement of community and police relationships in your various communities and what are your hopes for community police relationships so we have about 10 minutes left um you know anything anybody wants to add or any comments or any responses to those questions um we welcome and um uh Kenny and Vanessa I don't know if you had anything you wanted to add as well okay so we have one person no preference at this time let's see and doc Kent from our office has shared some information so that you can find out for city news and then and Vanessa compost put the website on there as well yeah see doc Kent says I think the hybrid model you describe seems best um it does and again you know it's just a matter of that community and what you feel is best I think no model is going to be the answer to any one community I think you really definitely have to tweak it for the community that you that you live in work in reside in um and are looking to have community oversight in wow Kim it looks like people like you it's always good to hear that I try to be likeable you know we have to collaborate all the time so we you know that's the only way we're going to get things done if we collaborate try to understand where everybody's viewpoint is so again the documents in the file section we have a copy of this presentation um and I know this I guess when we converted it some of it didn't convert properly so forgive us for that there was some words I saw kind of hanging off to the side but I think it must have been a conversion issue some of our media information that I call it media but it's not for the media it's for a community but we it's in our media kit we call it um we have a pamphlet that we've created for our office that we have there we also have the survey report the final server report that I talked about um the latest newsletter that came out um this month um or in the last month I can't remember uh the spring newsletter is there for you uh our informational sheet which is just a two-pager that we use to just kind of let people know about our office um one of the things that you know that I'm most proud of is our business card it's not anybody's specific business card but it's a little card it's just a business card that says if you have a concern or a accolade of the police department or a police officer call us and it gives our website our email it's just a business card and you can fit it in your wallet and you'll be surprised at the number of people that will take that card you know and walk right into our office and show that card that I didn't be previously and it used to happen all the time so the card works and it's good to have that and then of course um I I have here just kind of a document um that is on the nacoa website which again is the national association of a civilian oversight and law enforcement um that is called paves the road to police accountability but it just talks about all those models that I discuss again their strengths and weaknesses it talks about examples in the various cities and what they did and so it's just kind of further elaborates um on what we talked about here today so hopefully all of that is helpful to you and again if there's any information I think the last slide Catherine provides our contact information um there is one other question that we have one of our residents steve asks if your office works with miss brooks they watched one of her sessions yesterday yes yes we uh well you know and I work with all the directors but absolutely Christina and I actually started just a month or two apart and so we have we're both dedicated to improving police and community relationships and often she gets a call and I particularly if it's a call about somebody's concern about their civil rights being violated or a discrimination claim generally both our office gets gets to call so we we work together hand in hand to try to figure out who's going to take on the issue uh initially and then kind of try to keep both uh both parties aware as we move on in the review so you absolutely um lots of comments about individual cities and what they are doing and what what some of them are not um but no additional questions um looks like we have just a couple of minutes so I do want to thank everyone especially Kim and her team for being here this afternoon this has been an extremely productive and well attended class um lots of great questions uh and comments and just as a reminder this is being recorded and it will be available after Monday on this same site and you'll be able to access all of the files that Kim has also so graciously shared with us so thank you to everyone for being here all of her contact information is on the slide up front um and if there's anything else that Kim any other parting words yes um I do want to recognize uh Frank Scott's comment um where he talks about being out with his grandson and just stopping to talk that's exactly you know the thing that I'm talking about when I when I ask you know what can you do to enhance community police relationships it's not about implementing the program it's not about you know getting the whole group together and talking about the issues it's just about you know talking to your grandson or talking to your daughter or talking to your friend or talking to your neighbor about you know police and community relationships having that conversation and knowing who the cops are that uh that are you know patrolling your neighborhood and creating that relationship so it's something as simple as that it starts the dialogue so thank you uh mr scott for for adding that and I and I hope that is uh that proves to be a pretty good relationship that you start for you for your grandson absolutely okay y'all have an amazing afternoon and we will see you hopefully you guys are going to be going to the 1230 session where we're going to be showcasing the awards finalist presentations and then at two we have our awards ceremony so we hope to see you at both of those events and then our next workshop I believe starts at 3 30 so y'all have a great afternoon thank you