 All right good morning. So welcome first of all and secondly as we gather just a reminder we do this once a month to open public safety up to some questions that you may have but also to talk about some of the important things going on. Today's a little bit different however. We're only going to be talking about one topic because it's of such importance and we're grateful to have the mayor here and council members as well along with the chief. I just want to add a few remarks to kind of set the stage. You know when I arrived here in Denver and was very blessed and fortunate to be selected by the mayor I arrived and started looking at immediately the use of force policy because of the national narrative that's going on across this country that's something that's important for any director of public safety or police chief to do. What I found however was that the police department had a self-initiated review of the policy and that the community had become involved and I think that's very good for the city very good for Denver that you had a police department that actually started this process. So with that the process continued to work. I know there's ups and downs as we've all been aware of but at the end of the day this is a very progressive and a national leading policy and I am certainly grateful to be a small part of that. I also want to thank my predecessor Stephanie for the work that she did and moving this forward as well but none of this could have happened without the seven years of leadership of Mayor Hancock. His focus on reform is something that drove this policy to fruition. He made sure that we listened to the community as a department of safety and the police department. It's that type of leadership is the reason I want to be in the city and I believe it's why we have one of the best our policies now in the country. So with that said I'm going to turn it over to our Mayor Mayor Hancock. Thank you Director Riggs. Let me do a couple things. One I just simply want to thank all the members of the use of force task force that came together. Those who are external to the city external stakeholders as well as the director's office the chief of police under the leadership and stewardship of former Chief Robert White and now the leadership and stewardship of Chief Paul Payson and I also want to thank certainly the members of the Denver City Council who leaned in and I mean this was not just a superficial leaning in I could tell you I know from conversations with Councilwoman Kinesh and Councilman Paul Lopez that they leaned in hard and gave all due diligence necessary for this very important and critical policy. When I think not only Councilwoman Kinesh and Councilman Paul Lopez but also Councilman Flynn and Councilman Herndon who also leaned in on this but we owe the task force a tremendous debt of gratitude both internal external to the city for their tremendous work on this. The second and final thing that I'll say about this is that this is a critical policy for the city of Denver all over the country there are conversations and efforts in big cities, medium cities and small cities and we learned that from Ferguson where citizens and police departments are having to think about two things one how policing is changing and the expectations of the public on how police officers relate to them and how the public relates to the police officers which requires us as leaders to not only think about today but also in the future how people expect officers to react and to respond even in difficult challenging situations and so I am proud of the fact that the task force has now formulated a policy that is progressive that is innovative and quite frankly meets the the challenges of a 21st century policing strategy that the public expects to have our officers carry forward as stewards and trustees of our community. So I'm proud to be here with Director Riggs and Chief Payson and members of our city council and the city attorney's office as we roll out this very important and critical policy for the city of Denver for not only keeping our police officers safe but also keeping the people of the city safe. So with that I'll turn it over to police chief Paul Payson. Thank you mayor. We'll get started. We'll talk about some of the highlights of the policy as well as outline the process that that brought us here. First we would like to talk about the timeline. I would be remiss if we didn't point out some of the very strong policy that has already been initiated including the shooting at moving vehicles. This was started back in June of 2015 and this strong progressive policy is really a precursor to to where we are today. As we continue down the decision making model is something that our officers utilize day to day in ensuring that we are de-escalating situations and we're really thinking through the responses before they actually occur. This is a great way to assist us in our interactions with the community that we serve. The initial draft policy started in January of 2019 and that was with a lot of input from senior command staff. This policy was later opened up to the community. Several meetings were held as well as some email that was created in an email account that was created to allow feedback from our community. Then the the tough work began and I really believe that we need to thank this committee that assisted us in this process and we can show some of the areas where their direct input has assisted us in making this very strong and progressive policy. So ultimately 19 months, 19 months of heavy lift and hard work took place in order to get us to where we are today. Essentially this policy now is in the training and implementation phase and we are going to be working hard towards that goal. We have a very ambitious timeline moving forward because this policy, arguably the most critical policy that any police department can have, deserves the training to go with it. If we are going to put this much work into developing a strong progressive policy, we need to put the same amount of effort into training the 1,525 officers in the Denver Police Department. An overview of the policy, it's really publicly stating our philosophical goals here. It increases accountability and kudos to Chief White because this is one of his phrases. Just because an officer can use force doesn't mean that an officer should use force and this is where we are elevating the bar. We are raising the standard far beyond Graham versus Connor and what the courts have ruled. We are holding ourselves to a higher account and really when we're talking about philosophical goals it's all about de-escalation in order to increase both police officer safety and our public trust with the community members. We talked about all of the work that the committee had. I would like to publicly thank the different groups that participated in this heavy lift. The Denver Justice Project, the ACLU, we had the ministerial alliance together for Colorado. I see you over there. Thank you. Colorado Latino Forum, Denver City Council, specifically the council members that the mayor has spoke of, the city attorney's office. Again, this could not have been done without the hard work from the city attorney's office. We had many other stakeholders, the police officer foundation as well, the mayor for all of his support during this as well as the executive director of public safety. We also had input from the labor organizations that represent the Denver Police Department and we want to thank them for that. Planning and research has done a lot of work in in this process as well as our senior command staff and I'll point out a couple of examples where taking a fresh look at this policy really helped us enhance the final product. Policy comparisons, this is what the Denver policy looks like as compared to other cities across the country. I want to note that these were outside agency policy reviews were conducted in October of 2016. So if they have enhanced their policy since then, this is a snapshot in time. The Denver policy as compared to the international association of chiefs of police recommended or consensus policy we can show here that the Denver policy is very strong when you are looking at national comparisons. A centerpiece as we spoke of earlier to the use of force policy is making critical decisions and we have given our officers a decision-making tool. This has assisted us in our efforts to keep our officers safe as well as keep the community safe and really taking the time, time and distance to think through processes and making critical decisions is something that has proven very valuable particularly as we stated with the shooting at moving vehicles. I would like to point out a couple of examples here where the committee in working with the police department has really helped us enhance this policy. As you can see over a hundred committee recommendations have gone into this policy. That's quite significant and I'll give an example of that. As you can see right at the beginning the purpose of this policy the white text is committee language and the gray edits are DPD edits. So this is the prime example of committees language being incorporated with DPD language to create some common ground and ultimately have a stronger policy as a result of that. We did have some areas where we needed to agree on our overall declaratory statement here and reasonable and necessary is where both the committee and the department came together. This is a good example of how the committee saw things as well as the police department and finding common ground and we're gonna say that a couple of times here. Next is this was a big point of contention and I am very thankful for committee members for bringing this to our attention. This was again something that having our team work together with the committee and in the final hours of the policy review and coming up with areas where we could really work together. This is the the prime example of that. This is an area where our officers clearly know what the policy is when we're talking about the amount of force necessary versus the type of force and kudos to the committee and our team for taking a second look at this and ultimately coming up with a better product in the end. Because we were able to take a second look at this we put some fresh set of eyes on the entire process and here's an area where I would like to applaud our team our senior command staff here. This is a direct benefit of having two former commanders that led internal affairs as well as two former commanders of the major crimes division. Those areas intersect with this policy quite a bit and getting their input to this ultimately comes up with a stronger policy and I want to specifically call those out. So this is an area with rip restraints that we are again holding ourselves to a higher standard. There are some positional affixiation issues that could be utilized in this and we are clearly defining that those are not allowed under the new policy and we are solidifying those in the new policy as it moves forward as well as some of the highest levels of use of force that could be utilized clearly articulating in the policy when a body worn camera can be viewed and when it cannot. So this was an area where our staff you know again identified an area where we can improve. We didn't try to trade back and forth with the committee we just saw it as the right thing to do and so we implemented that. I know I blasted through this 27 page document five different sections in rapid fire succession but really what we wanted to highlight and focus on is thanking the committee for all of their work but really this is what we want to point to the training aspect of it in order to honor this 19 months worth of work in critical decision making critical policy. It is important that we put forth that same type of effort in training all of our officers and we believe we have a very comprehensive training program moving forward. So 2018 starting the week of August 20th our team is led by a command officer and supervisor that represents both the training bureau and internal affairs. A cadre of instructors will start in District 6. We have a plan that doesn't interrupt calls for service on the street but we have a very let me let me go backwards for a second it's a very ambitious plan because we want to get this policy out and trained as soon as possible so it's starting in District 6 it's going to be eight hour training on the policy this includes lectures based as well as slides and videos discussion based with our officers to really get an understanding of this new policy. As you can see we are delineating that the supervisors will get an additional four hours worth of training on this. We need to make sure that the sergeants that are doing those initial on scene investigations clearly know and understand their role and how important the investigation and the documentation on scene is so we are separating or adding the additional four hours for the supervisors. Again this is a phased approach each district and division with that very ambitious target of getting the training concluded by the end of the year start of next year. Moving forward in 2019 this is an area that we are really excited about because I think that this is going to assist not only the officers and their level of understanding but again the entire city and more importantly the community that we serve so we are in partnership with the police foundation working towards purchasing an additional module for that Virtua 300 training simulator that we have virtual reality is what the Virtua stands for and we will create our own videos our own simulations of prior use of force incidences in order to completely train out the gray areas to make sure that our officers know exactly what is expected of them with this very strong comprehensive and progressive policy so we're really excited about that it's going to take us a few months to get these types of scenarios built but essentially we're going to build on that foundation the eight hour foundation of 2019 and it's going to be ongoing training on critical policies ultimately helping our officers with a deeper understanding of this policy and essentially that's it we can take some questions now we do have some members of the committee if you want to I don't want to actually I probably should have checked in before we said that right Wes I'm I'm sorry the council members as well that way you can get their perspective of this heavy lift that took place the 19 months worth of work so you can grab them after the meeting if that's okay that's not a question is it no Alice just a it goes right back to that philosophical approach right when we're emphasizing de-escalation I think that is the the perfect example we want to make sure that our officers are making decisions consistent with our values utilizing that decision-making model with that strong emphasis on de-escalation yeah all those things I mean that's the absolute absolute truth that you know you watch not only the the transforming moments across the nation but also here you might recall when I was running for mayor in 2010 right you know 2011 that we had some pretty high-profile incidents that were on video which made me and others really contemplated it was time to move the department in a different direction and then on top of that you start having national stories that have evolved and so this conversation is taking place but I also want to just remind you that over the last five or six years under you know chief white director O'Malley chief director is and certainly at the time commander but now chief pays and spent a lot of time having conversations in the community beyond before the task force was even formed and this use of force concerns around use of force a lot of these incidents were top of mind of people for people and we've got a final way to create that balance where citizens and police officers are valuing life and getting through these very tough dangerous potentially dangerous situations so that everyone will get where they need to be and ultimately we can have justice carried out but not in those moments so these have been critical conversations that have helped them to evolve and begin really taking the lead of implementing this type of very progressive innovative policy all right well thank you for being here