 Can you, apologies, Pablo and Charles, thank you for joining us. Who would like to start interpreting for us? I'll put you in the channel. I can start. Charles, okay. Thank you. Good morning, Council. The webinar has been started and we're live. Thank you. I, Liz, this is Sue, not sure I was not aware that the meeting was going to be in chambers. I want to ask the chair if she would like me to pop over to chambers. It would be as much as this meeting as we can do in the chambers and staff feels comfortable with. That was why I thought we were coming down to chambers. I'll head right on over. Is that okay? Sure. No problem. Great. Thanks. Chairperson Fleming, I apologize. I'm still on the other side of town, so the time for me to come to the chambers would be a little more of a burden. No, I understood. Thank you. I can see that Sue's commute is pretty feasible. Thank you. Interpreter Charles, do you have your hand raised? I'm just confirming, am I still on the English side? I'm sorry, say that again. I was just wondering if I'm still on the English side. Was I interpreting into Spanish first or am I staying on the English side? My apologies. Yes. English first. Then I put Pablo into Spanish. Understood. Thank you. Thank you. For those just joining the meeting, live translation in Spanish is available and members wishing to listen in Spanish can join the Spanish channel. To do so, click on the interpretation icon in the Zoom toolbar. It looks like a globe. Once you join the Spanish channel, we recommend you shut off the main audio so you only hear the Spanish translation. Thank you. I'll put you in the Spanish channel. Thank you. A couple pieces of housekeeping for the video. a couple pieces of housekeeping for the viewing public one is that we'll save one until we're in session but one is we're just waiting on our city attorney to arrive and then we will convene the meeting so that should be in less than five minutes. Madam city attorney do you feel prepared to begin? Pardon I'm sorry I could not hear you that. Are we good to go? We are good to go and I apologize for the misunderstanding. I don't think there's too too much to worry about here. So today I bring to order the December 8th meeting of the public safety subcommittee and turn it over to our clerk for a roll call. Thank you. Council Member Schwedhelm. Here. Council Member Rogers. Present. Council Member Fleming. Here. Thank you. All council members are present. Fantastic. Thank you very much. So some housekeeping a reminder to the committee members to keep their audio on mute and also on unmute when it's time to talk. Staff will remain muted until needing to speak. As members of the public join the meeting you will be participating as an attendee. Your microphone and camera will be muted. Only today's panelists will be viewed during the meeting. If you're calling from a telephone and choose to speak during the public comments portion of today's agenda for privacy concerns the host will be renaming your viewable phone number to resident and the last four numbers of your phone number. The City of Santa Rosa is committed to creating a safe and inclusive environment free of from disruption. We will not tolerate any hateful speech or actions and we are staffed to monitor that everyone is participating respectfully or they will be removed. If necessary we will also immediately end the meeting. Madam clerk can you please explain how we will hear public hearing public comments today. After each agenda item is presented the chair will ask for committee sorry committee comments and then open it up for public comment. The host in zoom will be lowering all hands until public comment is open for the agenda item. Once the chair has called for public comment the chair will announce for the public to raise their hand if they wish to speak on a specific agenda item. If you are calling in to listen to the meeting audibly you can dial star nine to raise your hand. The chair will then call on the public who have raised their hands. Public comment will be limited to three minutes and a timer will appear on the screen for the committee and public to see. Once all live public comments have been heard the meeting host will play the voicemail public comments. If you provided a live public comment on an agenda item but also submitted an email or recorded voice message public comment your email or voice message public comment will not be duplicated read or played during the meeting. Throughout today's agenda when the chair calls for public comment an interpreter will be prepared to assist anyone needing interpretation. Those using interpreter support will be afforded additional time for your public comment as required by the Brown Act. We ask that those listening on the Spanish channel but wishing to make a public comment turn off leave interpretation channel entirely at the time you hear your name called so you can join the main channel to make your public comment heard and translated into English. This icon may now look like a circle with an ES in the middle and the word Spanish underneath. You can then rejoin the Spanish channel at the conclusion of your comment to continue listening in Spanish. Thank you. Excellent thank you. Now we move on to item two. Are there any announcements from from members of this committee? All right we'll move on to item three approval of minutes. We have August 11 2021 minutes. Does anybody have any amendments to those minutes? All right we'll mark those accepted as submitted moving on to four public comments. This is the time when any person may address matters not listed on this agenda which are within the subject matter of this jurisdiction. The public may comment on agenda items when the agenda item is called. Each speaker is allowed three minutes. Do we have any pre-recorded public comments? There are no pre-recorded public comment and I don't see any raised hands. Do we have anybody in the chamber wishing to make public comment? All right now we are on to item five chiefs update. Chief of Police will provide a brief update on current issues. Chief Navarro shows yours. Thank you Chair Fleming. Good morning and to you Council Member Schwedhelm and Council Member Rogers. I here today to provide a couple of quick updates. I have four updates for you before we get into the two presentations that we have. The first one is as you know you and the rest of the council approved the police auditor position last week. I wanted to let you know that we are reaching out. We have reached out to the OIR group which was awarded the contract and we are beginning to re-establish the auditor position back into the department. That will include unfettered access to all the necessary information that they will need to do their job within their scope of work. We'll be scheduling ride-alongs, check-ins with staff. They're going to have Mr. Genako who heads the OIR group will be having a meeting with the chiefs community ambassador team tomorrow and then we will be working on timelines for community meetings as requested by council last week. The second update is regarding in response. We have been working very hard at trying to get the in-response team up and running. Captain John Cregan has led this effort and we have been going into some of the training and pre-implementation phase. Last week we had training that was completed for the in-response team. They went through a week-long training to get to understand the radios, getting some safety instruction on safety out in the field and several other protocols that we have in place. Our dispatch team has been given protocols and those are in place. We have a vehicle that's outfitted and we have ordered additional vehicles for when the time comes where we are able to expand to a 24-7 model. We do anticipate that we are going to start the in-response team in the first week of January and there's been some delays just due to equipment and some of the agreements with some of our partners, but we are moving ahead. We're very excited about this and we will be providing more information in January to City Council when we launch the program. The other thing that's been very prevalent in the media has been the issue of sideshow activity. We have provided some information in the past, but our focus is to combat this through three different lenses and that's engagement, engineering, and enforcement. From the engagement piece we have been working with the Office of Community Engagement. They have set up several listening sessions and a survey and then we have worked on a social media campaign when the sideshow events occur. From an engineering standpoint we have worked with public works and city engineering and they have done a great job with helping us evaluate the different streets and intersections where we're having some of these issues. They have been placing what we call what's called bot dots in some of these intersections and we're continuing to evaluate additional intersections as we go along. We have already implemented some of those in several of the intersections. From an enforcement standpoint our Traffic Bureau has been leading enforcement efforts. We have been working with outside agencies to make sure that we are sharing information and working together on enforcement. Two weeks ago during the Thanksgiving weekend we had another large sideshow. Out of that we towed 10 vehicles so far. We've identified several others that we are looking for them now to tow them. We also took two people into custody and we'll continue to work on the enforcement aspect of the sideshows as we go along. And then the last thing just briefly we are in the middle of a staffing study. We are working with a consultant called CPSM. They are in the middle of their first stage of assessing our staffing levels. Right now they're looking at our patrol functions and calls for service. There's still several other areas of the department that they're going to be looking at including dispatch, our investigations teams and records. And we hope to have a final product hopefully by the last quarter of this fiscal year or the spring of 2022. So we look forward to bringing more information about that in the future. That is the end of my update. Thank you Chief. I'll bring it back to the committee for questions. I do have a question about the in-response team. I'm just curious to know do we have a firm date or any specific logistical challenges? And the reason I ask is because people are excited and ready to use this service. You know frequently I get calls when I'm at work and people would love to engage your team so I always say to them you know I don't know but I feel like I really should know when they're going to be out there in the field. Yeah thank you. So we have a planned start date of January 3rd and then we will we're planning something for before council on January 11th. And I think by that time we'll have our new city manager and then we'll be able to do an official launch on that date. But we do have they're going to be they're done with the training they're going to be going into the office and starting their actual work on January 3rd. And so I would anticipate seeing the van out there with the workers that first week of January. That's tremendous and if it doesn't constitute a brownock violation or any problems I'll just speak for myself. I'd be interested in doing a tour and a brief ride along with that vehicle at some point or at least having a look at it at your headquarters. Yeah we are going to make sure that the van is accessible and the team is accessible on January 11th for everybody to look at. And you know we're still working on there's still a lot of things in kind of moving parts right now. But once we get them all situated we are more than happy to make their their offices available and accessible to the council and we can arrange tours for you. Excellent and certainly the priority is on getting it out for the people who need it not for us. So great thank you. All right so with that we will move on to public comment on item 5.1. Do we have any pre-recorded public comment? No. Do we have anybody in person wishing to make public comment? All right with that we'll move on to item 5.2. This is one where staff will provide an update on changes made to policy 308 control devices and techniques based on feedback from the city council study session. Staff will be seeking feedback and recommendations from the subcommittee. So with that I welcome police lieutenant Dan Marek. Good morning everybody members of the council. Yeah my name is Dan Marensik I'm a lieutenant here at the Santa Rosa police department. So I'm here to provide an update to our policy 308 which regulates our control devices and techniques. So once this PowerPoint gets going I will get started on some of the changes that we made. Next slide and you can go to the next slide. Okay so policy 308 it's a policy we have at the police department. It regulates control devices and so what those are is our less lethal munitions and chemical agents. So these are things you often can hear referred to as tear gas, rubber bullets, sponge rounds, OC or pepper spray, baton all these things are items which make up policy 308. And we have a separate standalone use of force policy which is really all encompassing and kind of explains in greater detail when force is allowed to be used and under what circumstances. One of the things to note I wanted to preface before starting and going into this is that this is a policy like all of our other policies we've made changes to but it's evolving and we're fully anticipating making several additional changes in the future. There's been recent law changes that will go into how we change this policy in the future as well as community input and then just some general kind of language cleanup that we're looking at doing in the future. Next slide please. So we've been here before and we talked about how last year we recognized that there were several really immediate changes that we needed to make to this policy and I'm going to talk about a couple of those things in there they're listed in here. So some of those things are we needed a just a more detailed policy regarding when these devices may be deployed. I talked about we had our use of force policy but specifically in policy 308 we wanted to really add some guidelines in terms of when using some of these devices are appropriate to give more direction and career guidance for that. Another thing we wanted to address was the storage and issuance of munitions and really spell that out in our policy of how these devices how these munitions or the items are going to be stored when they're not in use and how they're going to be deployed out into the field. And then the last thing is we really wanted a more detailed policy on chemical agent use authorization so specifically in this policy related to chemical agents or tear gases is often referred to is who is it that allows that authorization to make sure that our policy aligned with our practice of what we were doing. And then another one of the things to note here is that our action report that we received these were all things that we recognized and they were later identified in the after action report two of things that should be addressed. Next slide please. So I talked about one of the changes being the use of when this device these devices could be used and just really spelling out more clear guidance in terms of what is an appropriate use of deployment. So we added it within the policy situations where the use of a controlled device would be appropriate and you can see four bullet points on the slide detailing those in a little bit more detail and so they come down to these additional considerations is is that person armed with a weapon had they made credible threats to harm themselves or others are they engaged in riotous behavior and have they committed a crime of violence and they're not compliant. So these were things that these guidelines were not listed in our policy before but we've added them to our policy so before people use or deploy these devices these are things that should be going through their mindset to make sure that hey is this an appropriate deployment or not and now those are spelled out in our policy of some of the things we're looking for before this device is deployed and kind of the ultimate caveat is like I said we still have our separate use of force policy and even with these considerations we need to make sure that that use of force is reasonable and it follows our use of force policy as well as this policy 308. Next slide please. So another thing that we have looked at within our policy was addressing the storage and issuance of it and really making sure that we were accurately tracking documenting and we had appropriate accountability as to how these items were being issued into the field so we knew how they were being issued in the field, how many were being returned, who they were issued to, whether they were used or not. So we added some specific language in our policy detailing where we're going to store these devices and not only that but every time these devices are removed from their designated storage locations they need to be documented and they need to be documented who they're issued to, how many they're issued to, the date and time they're issued to and also the person they're issued to cannot be the person removing them from storage. So it really it's kind of I guess you call it the buddy system or the system of two right so somebody would have to take those items issued to them a person and document them just to make sure we have proper tracking, proper accountability. So all that stuff which was not in our policy before has now been added to our policy. Next slide please. The other things that we've had in our policy to really align with our practice is there's specific language in our policy added for chemical agent deployment and what I mean by that is there's language in there now stating when it can be deployed but also who has that authorization to deploy it. So if you look at the second bullet point of the slide right there the policy now specifically states in there that what we call an incident commander or somebody who has really the it's kind of the top of the chain or the overriding person overseeing the incident they need to have the position of a lieutenant or hire and they need to make sure that it meets the threshold before they can deploy chemical agents. And the policy also includes one little caveat I didn't talk about in the beginning so even when tear gases deployed our policy before it didn't really include a notification process of how we're going to notify people, owners or residents or people who be affected by tear gas and that now is included in the policy saying that we need to notify these people who are to use tear gas on private property. Next slide please. You like all our other policies it's also available online with some of the changes that we've made. These were some of the major changes there was also some additional language clinic that was made in the policy as well too but like I said we're fully kind of anticipating there's been some recent law changes over the last couple of months so we anticipate making some more changes in the future and continuing to get public input and feedback and incorporate that and address that in our future policies. So that was really just a short summary of some of the changes we've made and with that I'm open to any questions that anybody has or anything that I can answer. Thank you lieutenant, that's my first question is am I saying your name right? You're pretty close. I'm going to give it to you it's Marensik. All right excellent thank you very much for your report. I will ask my colleagues what their questions are. Do we have a council member Schwedhelm? Thanks for that presentation. So I know you talked about recent laws being passed so is this new policy going to be consistent with AB 48? It's going to be mostly consistent with AB 48. We're going to see a few language tweaks. I can talk about the specifics of some of those. There's also another policy assembly bill 481 so those are the two bills that are recently been passed that will see some changes in this policy. Sort of the just to kind of summarize the differences one of the things AB 48 did is it almost bifurcated. So these control devices these aren't just used in a riot situation these can be used for calls for service as well. What AB 48 does is there's almost a bifurcation of separating riot incidents from incidents where we would otherwise use control devices. So I think one of the changes you'll probably see in a future policy update is a little bit more delineation between when there's a riot and then when there's not when there's not a riot so there'll be some language cleanup with that. And I know AB 48 uses the terminology of kinetic projectiles and I know there's some debate where do our beanbag munitions fall within that realm are they within that classification or qualification? Yeah our policy there's a section for kinetic energy projectiles and then beanbag rounds as well as what we call our 40 millimeter less lethal rounds those fall out of kinetic energy projectiles. Okay and then the reporting requirements too I think AB 48 is that going to be delineated about reporting to DOJ if chemical agents are used in crowd control situations? Yes that's one of the updates that's going to that is going to happen with the future policies since they're all required to be reported to the DOJ that'll be included in there as well. Great thanks. Councilmember Rogers. So when you check something out if it is not used you have to return it correct? Yes for the munitions so when you check out and what I mean by munitions those are the rounds so if it's a beanbag round if it's a if it's a chemical age around that you take out and you don't use it and you return it they have to be checked back in as well and you can't check in your own rounds that you checked out somebody else has to check those in for you. In the process of checking it back in do you report when where and how it was used or is that a separate report? There'd be a there'd be a separate report so for this process you would you check out how many you've checked out and then you would put how many you check back in but anytime we use any force within the police department whether it's these control devices whether it's a baton baton a taser anything that we use were required to document that in an actual written report so that would be separate of this would be an additional report. Just a question in that report does it ask what was used or what tactic was used prior to that use of force? In terms of so when we're I'm sorry I don't know if I understand so prior to let's say prior to using the tear gas yes um does it ask what was used prior to using that like what yeah or what was used prior to using that um and if not why was it one of the four considerations that were listed they had a weapon or like what why why wasn't something used prior to to using that what was the immediate threat or why? Yes so anytime any force is used an officer is required to write a report and that report shouldn't just take a snippet of when that force was used it should really be like a chronological report of everything that happened and what led up to that use of force so when an officer is writing a report it should be what were they what were they going to what was that call that they were going to what were the circumstances that led them to believe there what was the situation as it was occurring what what did the officer try to do prior to that use of force the use of force what happened after the use of force and then in addition to that once that officer writes that report all of our uses of forces they're investigated by at a supervisor level so after that report that report's reviewed by a sergeant or higher and they also conduct their own investigation into that use of force okay thank you so I have a couple of questions most of them were asked by council member Schwedhelm but one is where do kinetic energy or tasers fall into this policy or does there a separate policy that governs that that use of force so the kinetic energy weapons those fall within this policy the the beanbag rounds the 40 millimeter rounds per taser we actually have a separate standalone taser policy so you won't see anything in here specifically mentioning the taser or 11 okay and then how do you define a riot so we use we use the penal code and it's actually not addressed so much in this policy we have a separate policy so we have a first amendment assembly of policy which specifically talks about some of the circumstances as to what would lead a riot the number of people the acts of the crowds engaging in is it property damage is it crimes of violence how much of the crowd is making that up so we have a separate standalone policy specifically kind of outlying what are the circumstances what's this the situation going on that would lead us to think that something is a riot and there's also the penal code as well okay what I do think might be helpful for future might be a an explanation of how the for the public's sake how we can understand what is and what is not considered a riot is we get a lot of things you know things like oh there's riotous behavior all this happening and it's a technical definition it sounds like for you guys so if we could understand that that would be very helpful I'd request to hear that come back yeah so church let me we you know one of the things that came out of the studies or the recommendations from last year was the creation of a first amendment policy and that's what we did so we can definitely bring that first amendment policy in front of this body and provide a provide a presentation on that in the future I'd be be eager to hear that and then I the the last question I had I think was fleshed out by council member schwedhelm but let me ask it more holistically to make sure that we got all the parts which is that you mentioned that there is pending legislation that's going to influence influence our use of force is that uh fully covered by ab 48 and sp 41 or are there additional um laws that we'll be looking at there is additional laws but pertaining to this policy specifically the the main two laws that are going to affect the updates with this policy are going to be that 48 and 481 so those are the main things in terms of any immediate needs in the future of addressing or amending this policy that we're going to be looking at okay um excellent so now we will go to public comment on this item we happen to have any pre-recorded public comment and I don't see any hands raised and there's no recorded voicemail okay we will close public comment then and move on to item 5.3 calls for service this will be captain litchfield giving us a presentation on calls for service morning sorry I had a little lag when it switched over there you're great good morning good morning thank you so much for the opportunity to speak on this today I'm going to talk about the calls for service work group and some changes we implemented how we came to these changes and and arrived where we are right now the purpose of this work group was to look at what the police department is doing holistically in responding to calls for service and we wanted to look at how efficient we were being were we sending the right resources the right personnel to the right type of calls and what changes and modifications could we make for better service for efficiency and also to ensure that we're not sending too much or the wrong kind of resource to handle calls for service in the city can we go to the next slide please thank you so this 12 member committee was formed in February and it had representatives from patrol which included the police officers association investigations dispatch records traffic and the fire department and the reason it's important to have the fire department there and it was very helpful for us is as you can imagine many of the emergency calls for service that go out in the city cross over with response in conjunction with the fire department and if we made changes without their input or their knowledge it had the potential to impact their response to calls for service or potentially their safety or their efficiency on their end so as that partnership is very close we had members of the fire department in the committee and which was very helpful in coming to some conclusions on some causes as you'll see later on next slide please so this committee has some guiding considerations and I want to go over those and explain a couple of them so as we go through we can understand exactly what the committee was looking at it what it meant by some of these considerations first was the police department's mission so what what is the police department what is our mission and and are we following our stated mission what are we trained to do well and where is our expertise this really for us came into kind of that mission bleed where over the years the police department has been expected to and has taken on tasks that we do not have an expertise on and we do not have high level of training in you see many of these things in response is a direct result of needing a higher level of training a higher level of expertise in dealing with mental health issues that police officers do not receive in the academy or in their training after the academy at least not to a high enough level to provide the service that the community expects we wanted to look at that in in many areas of the police department and make sure that we were sending again as I mentioned the right resource to solve the problem this next one does the liability or risk to safety associated with the call outweigh the benefits to the department and the community so let me be clear on what this one means many many things that the police department does has liability and risk it's the nature of public safety this does not mean is the call too scary to go to and so we're just not going to go because it's it's you know it's just too scary for us that's not what this means what this means is are we sending armed police officers to low level calls that can be handled a different way because when you send a high level of government authority which law enforcement is a high level of government authority armed uniform police officers into low level non-criminal situations at times regardless of the officer's intent outcome or how friendly they are or whatever you can have a response that can escalate the situation unnecessarily and I again going back to our mission and what are we trained to do well you can see how all of these these factors kind of fit together with each other so this is not an issue of we don't want to respond to shootings and stabbings and violent crimes and domestic violence in fact you'll see none of those are addressed in the presentation this is an issue of if of are we sending too much authority to certain calls and will that have a negative view and impact from the community or from the people that we're trying to interact with and solve the problem with next is what is the community expectation of how we best use our resources obviously we have a wide and diverse community here in Santa Rosa and there's many expectations of levels of service what this really speaks to is overall what would be a community interest or priority in wanting uniform police officers to respond so this really goes to we prioritize calls as you know their priority one two and three calls based on how quickly a police officer needs to be their violent crimes being priority one low level almost non-criminal or non-criminal type complaints being priority three and then cold property crimes and other things generally falling into priority two so what is the community expectation of how quickly we can get to those higher priority calls and not being tied up on lower priority calls that can be handled either by civilian staff technology or in another way who will be impacted by our decisions this would be other departments in the city other departments outside the city anyone who would be impacted by the decisions that we made during this work group we tried to identify take into consideration contact and make sure that they were informed and we didn't do anything that was going to shift workload somewhere else where it didn't belong or so on to someone who wasn't prepared to take it who's missing from the discussion we wanted to identify again this goes kind of back to the who will be impacted but are there subject matter experts did we need additional personnel in the police department which we did so the 12 committee members oftentimes were tasked with reaching out to other people other people who do certain jobs especially in the records division for telephone reporting online reporting counter reporting was important to make sure that dispatchers were well aware of what we were doing because much of this workload will shift on to civilian staff can or should the call be handled by another public or private agency similar to in response should the call be routed to other resources public or private and in the case of homelessness as we'll see later there are other resources that calls should be routed to that they weren't being routed to which was was causing some issues so a lot of this had to do with with adjustments we made in putting calls out to other resources and is it an efficient and effective use of our resources to continue responding considering staffing shortages so there are many factors here staffing is one factor not the driving factor of everything it is one factor so let me kind of explain what we experience and look at in terms of staffing the police department has 178 sworn positions authorized and 78 civilian positions many of these calls for service have to do with field level or patrol response so patrol officers and community service officers and field and evidence technicians who handle these right now there are 12 officers out on injury or extended leave so generally within the police department at any given time we will have eight to 15 personnel out on some kind of injury or extended leave so those are resources not available to us we have seven vacancies in the sworn right now and one in the field evidence technician due to fuel retirement that just occurred so what that leaves for us is 159 police officers available at any given time and as I mentioned that number is going to fluctuate by a few numbers either way plus or minus and assigned to patrol for civilian staff to respond to calls we currently have eight community service officers or FETs assigned to patrol and they handle many of the calls for service that we're going to be talking about today as I mentioned one of those positions just retired so we currently have seven and between 2015 and 2020 four of those positions were cut so we used to have four more than we currently have today who responded to cold calls and lower level calls so we had to account for our changes in staffing and what staffing we have available in order to keep our priority one response times low and our overall response times low so priority one response times are approaching somewhere around seven minutes right now overall response times fluctuate depending on time of day and time of year between 25 and 30 minutes okay next slide please okay so we came up with a list of around 25 calls for service that we wanted to look at we wanted to examine how we respond to them should we be responding do we need to modify response we didn't want to take on all 25 of those at once so we prioritized them in order of which ones are we already modifying response to have we already been working on making changes to which ones for lack of a better term are easiest to deal with first some at the the remaining ones are a little more complex and as it was a new committee in a new work group and it was it was not easy work by any means there was a lot of factors to look at for the group to start tackling this set first allowed us to really get a flow of work figure out what we needed to do as far as information input and reaching out so this turned out to be a very workable way for us to begin looking at this so this is the first part of the committee work and the second part of the committee work would be the remaining calls for service on the list and those will have to be reexamined based on on our results in our work here so i'm going to go over we're going to stay on this slide for a while and i'm going to go over each one of these and what our old protocol was and what changes and the new protocol is and i'm also going to give you how many responses from 2019 and midway 2020 we are 2021 we responded to to give you an idea of how often we go to these calls and additionally for some of them were that are criminal i'll give you the amount of actual arrests that occur on these calls to give you an idea of how often some action is actually taken at the end of the presentation there's a slide that summarizes the numbers so you can look at them a little more comparatively and we did not use 2020 numbers due to covid there was a lot of call restrictions traffic and certain other calls were pushed down from what they would normally be so we used again the 20 all of 2019 and through mid-year of 2020 is what these numbers represent what you'll see for 2020 excuse me 2021 mid-year through 2021 what you'll see through mid-year 2021 is we are on pace to meet or exceed our our 2019 numbers so i'm going to start with suspicious persons and vehicles so under the old protocol anytime we received a call regarding a suspicious person or vehicle what we would what that meant to us was the vehicle is not known to the neighborhood or person it may match the description of a vehicle or person involved in a crime or possible criminal activity or the occupants are acting odd or suspicious which would be casing the neighborhood for a possible burglary casing a home building or vehicle drinking alcohol using drugs or engaging in some kind of articulable criminal activity we respond to a approximately 6,907,000 calls for service of this type per year it's a fairly common call for service the modification that we made to this was we removed the criteria of simply not known to the area so under the old protocol all that a caller or reporting party would have to say is this person or vehicle is not known to the area and automatically that would initiate a police response well not known to the area sometimes also known as homeless in the area the wrong age for the area the wrong color for the area not looking like someone who belongs is not a crime and it's not reasonable suspicion in our opinion was it did not belong in the criteria at all so the criteria now has that removed and unless the activity is articulable by the reporting party as criminal activity occurring or likely to recur a public safety threat then we will not respond to that call for service just basically on not known to the area those calls result out of those 6,900 to 7,000 a year in roughly 300 arrests or citations so we do anticipate that our response to the calls will drop since we've removed some criteria and again this started just so you know all of these changes took effect on October 1st so we've had about two months into this that these changes have been in effect so they'll be looked at quarterly over the next year to see how these calls are being impacted whether or not the arrest will go down is unknown because we will still be responding to articulable criminal activity however the number of calls will go down next on the list is is vandalism we respond to about 650 vandalism calls per year out of those 650 we take about 26 actions you know 25 to 30 actions meaning a site or an arrest out of those calls under the old protocol officers were dispatched to all vandalism calls if a civilian staff was not available and the reporting party declined an online report or demanded a report regardless if there was any suspect information or not now our community service officers in our FETs they handle all vandalism calls if there's no known suspect at the onset of the investigation under the new protocol officers will not be dispatched to vandalism calls unless they are in progress FETs and CSOs when available may be dispatched to vandalism calls if the suspect information is beyond a general or generic description or if there's evidence such as video available license plates more articulable information if that's not available we will be taking vandalism calls via online reporting okay an officer or a CSO will still continue to respond and document any vandalism or graffiti that is hate crime they will continue to respond to all of those calls so that is the changes we made to vandalism we are basically shifting our cold vandalism calls or vandalism calls with no suspect info to an online reporting format next is theft and burglary calls we respond to about 3,500 theft and burglary calls per year and out of those we take around 60 arrest or citation actions out of the 3,500 so under the old protocols per law and policy we respond to all elder fiduciary abuse calls and all identity theft calls that will not change that's required by law and policy that we respond to those calls uniform officers were generally dispatched to all thefts and burglaries if a civilian staff FET or CSO was not available and the reporting party declined online report or demanded a response regardless of if there was suspect info under the new protocol officers will not be dispatched to any theft call unless it's in progress FETs and CSOs will be dispatched to theft calls if there is suspect information available beyond generic descriptions or if there's video license plates etc etc to identify a suspect online reporting will be made available to all theft reports without suspect information officer an officer FET or CSO shall be dispatched will continue to be dispatched to any residential or commercial burglary including forced entry into attached garages thefts of any firearm thefts of any DMV related registration or VINs regardless if there is suspect information or not we will still respond to all of those calls in the field FETs and CSOs may still be dispatched to significant felony property crimes without suspect information at the discretion of a supervisor sometimes we have things where we get multiple car burglaries or multiple vandalism where a whole neighborhood or a whole block is hit with burglary or vandalism for auto theft and we we will still send someone out to those supervisor will just clear that to occur the next is found property these account for around 900 calls per year don't generally make an arrest on a found property call so that's not a statistic for this one under our old protocol officers responded to found firearms CSOs or FETs responded to ammunition syringes credit cards IDs cash over $100 it's a interesting fact we've never responded to cash over $100 so that one I don't think will be a major change narcotics valuable bikes items of evidentiary value or any item that a dispatcher feels has significant value the dispatcher would tell the caller to dispose of or leave all other property so under the new protocol we will not respond to a bound abandoned or found bikes any longer we will continue to have officers respond only officers will respond to found firearms we do not send civilians to that civilian staff will respond to gather any ammunition syringes narcotics found purses or wallets with ID or credit cards cash over $100 or found evidence related to violent or felony crimes this is exceedingly rare but sometimes people will will have a crime occur in an area and someone will find something near or around the crime scene later and we will respond out to gather that the reporting party will be told to either leave or dispose of all other property or unless they want to bring it or mail it to the police department businesses who find or recover IDs and credit cards can mail those directly to DMV or the credit card company that's already a system that's in place and that's what generally occurs with those items anyways next is noise and party calls we respond to around 1600 of these a year with around 10 or 11 citations or arrest made out of those 1600 responses under the old protocol an officer responded to all noise calls if even if the RP wanted to remain anonymous and not take any action under the new protocol if the reporting party is anonymous or refuses to sign a citizen's arrest and cooperate with prosecution we will not respond to noise and party calls under those circumstances any longer dispatchers can and will assign officers to the large juvenile party calls involving alcohol and drugs out of control parties spilling into public streets or private property parties that are causing damage to private or public property we will continue to respond basically to the large out of control party calls next is check the welfare we respond to over 6000 of these a year check the welfare is a very big category it's it encompasses many different things sometimes they're medical sometimes they're mental health that there's many things that go into a check the welfare call so under the protocol the dispatchers would screen the screen and determine a problem they try not to ensure we don't respond unless the caller can clearly articulate a crime or public safety need and we do have a protocol in place that will remain in place for subject not heard from and this is generally when a family member or a neighbor calls for us to check on a relative they have not heard from in days or weeks whatever the case may be but they can't get in touch with someone and their concern for the welfare of that person we do we do respond and will continue to respond we have a protocol for that many of these calls overlap with the fire department such as man down call subjects who who may be sick or injured in some way so under the old protocol these were entered as priority two calls transferred to red com which dispatches fire and medical and then medical gets dispatched and officers were often dispatched to these calls primary as well so it was very inconsistent is the bottom line each dispatcher handled it kind of a different way it was inconsistent and many times what happened was officers ended up being dispatched primary to medical calls that were more clearly or at least on their face were medical which slows down many times that causes fire to wait until they're cleared to come in this is why it was important to have the fire department involved so we could talk about these type of check the welfare man down calls many of which are medically related so as I mentioned we'll continue to follow our person not heard from protocol so there will be no officer response to a medical call the medical check the welfare call when the caller is unable to articulate any kind of a crime or danger to public safety these are purely medical calls the officers won't be dispatched to those primarily anymore for certain calls such as man down this often happens in public it can be public drunkenness it could be some kind of injury it could be just a person sleeping it can be many things but 99% of the time it is not criminal the dispatchers will create a call on the police end and hold the call for dispatching then they will transfer it to the medical end the medical will respond as the primary responders if they need police they will ask for a police officer response some of the check the welfare we get is similar to suspicious person where it's just somebody acting strange just somebody who doesn't look right those come in and sometimes are dispatched to check the welfare calls in accordance with our suspicious person protocols now there will be no police response to that type of call unless there is a clearly articulated traffic hazard or danger to public safety so we do have a couple of exceptions because again working with medical medical has had some experiences with what's called people down in vehicles and this is generally when someone calls in that someone is passed out or unconscious possibly asleep in a vehicle they've had some instances with vehicles where that involved fentanyl and involved weapons and it involves some danger to their staff so we will continue to be dispatched and respond with medical primary to any kind of person down in a vehicle call any situation where there's evidence of a crime or there could be danger to medical personnel we will continue to respond with them to those calls as well generally this would be something like a shooting a stabbing an assault something of that nature just because the suspect is no longer there but there's a crime has occurred we would continue to respond with medical as we do now to those type of check the welfare calls next is non-injury collisions non-injury collisions is something we respond to about 2,500 of these a year and this is something we've been working on over the past several years and reducing the the uniform response to these calls so this was one that we made just a couple more tweaks to but these are not massive changes to it most of these changes were already in place at some level so an officer or a FET CSO civilian staff will be dispatched this is the old protocol to a collision under these circumstances this is prior protocol any reporting parse D reports a collision involved parties want help exchanging info the vehicles are blocking the roadway involved parties are injured an involved party is unlicensed uninsured or possibly under the influence and any hit and run including late reported hit and runs which is most hit and runs are later late reported under the new protocol an officer or civilian staff will be dispatched to collisions under the following circumstances a vehicle is a hazard blocking the roadway or in the traffic lanes one of the parties is unlicensed or uninsured one of the parties is suspected of being under the influence if otherwise all other collisions will be referred to online reporting or front counter reporting and then Santa Rosa fire only responds if there's an injury or a hazmat situation so basically any non-injury collisions that don't meet those four criteria would shift to online encounter reporting hit and run which is also in we're talking about non-injury hit and run protocol many of these are done at the front counter we're being done at the front counter anyways which is actually a faster way to get follow-up on them because they go directly to all of them go to the traffic division for follow-up so under our new protocol for hit and run if it's uh if the victim reports in 15 minutes we will put a beyond the lookout out to all patrol officers in the area for the suspect vehicle and then we will direct the victim of the hit and run to file online or at the front counter of the police department if there's no suspect information record staff will document the call and provide the reporting party with an incident number for their insurance company if there is suspect information and the victim desires prosecution it will be forwarded to the traffic division for follow-up if they do not divide desire prosecution again we will provide them with an incident number so they can get an insurance claim going our records division will assist them with searching they can search dmb and see if the other vehicle has insurance on file our records division will assist them in checking to see if there is insurance on file and these most of these will be called what's class four collisions at this point uh dui and reckless driving there were some minor changes we made to this to get in line with chp and some other agencies we respond to about 750 calls of a possible dui or reckless driving and out of that we make about 130 arrests a year um under the old protocol an officer was dispatched regardless if they were in position or near enough to ever reach the call as long as the caller was following the vehicle and and many times out of position we consider more than one patrol beat away so if you have someone being called on rp calling on the west side of town but the officer is responding from the east side of town that's a significant response time for us to go all the way across town so these were ones that just in general we weren't going to we were not going to be able to respond in time for these so well under the new protocol there will be no officer response at all if there is no r o no reporting party following it'll be a bol will issue a beyond the lookout to all patrol units in the area if the rp is following we will dispatch an officer if we have an available officer in position near the call that means no further than an adjacent beat for the officer if we have no one in position we will get the caller's information and again put out a beyond the lookout we want to discourage people from following DUI or reckless drivers for significant differences it creates a whole other host of safety issues so we basically put our response protocols in line to what chp does for theirs and what most other agencies are doing parking violations we respond to about 2,700 parking violations a year and both officers and field and evidence technicians are dispatched to all reported parking violations and the dispatchers keep these parking violations as an open call until they get assigned and oftentimes they can sit open for hours as they are an extremely low priority call under the new protocol an officer in fbt will respond to disabled parking violations parking violations where someone is blocking a driveway and the resident cannot get in or out and blocked fire hydrants on public sidewalks and public property the fire department responds to private property once the fire marshal all other parking violations will be sent out as beat information now and they will be closed after one hour if staff if staff hasn't gotten to them or we don't receive an additional call juvenile parenting problems juvenile parenting problems is one that's been around for a long time and we can we get calls sometimes of juveniles who don't want to go to school juveniles who don't want to go to bed juveniles who are arguing with their parents these are what we call juvenile parenting problem calls under the old protocol there was no specific policy or protocol for these and that created a lot of problems many supervisors dispatch or field supervisors would cancel these calls as they are completely inappropriate for armed uniformed police officers to respond to but sometimes what we learned is the dispatchers would offer to have an officer call and give parenting advice I have a problem with that the committee had a problem with that with officers calling parents to give advice on child behavioral or family issues which we are not trained to do we have no background or understanding of any family dynamic or what's going on again in our view not an appropriate use of police officers under the new protocol we have made it clear that unless we have a juvenile who's over 12 years of age and there is a serious crime occurring or about to occur we will not be sending officers to juvenile parenting problems or arguments disturbance problems and families any longer we will of course continue to respond to crimes as we do respond to adult crimes and yes children can commit crimes and we will continue to handle those type of criminal activity we are not trained as juvenile and family counselors and it is not our our role to provide advice to people in that area to us it it raises liability and in instances it can even escalate things into a dangerous territory that's completely unnecessary inappropriate finally we have homeless calls we respond to around 15,000 homeless calls per year under the old protocol dispatched kind of triage these and they would request other resources if the dispatcher was aware of other resources such as host the DRT team which is a debris removal team the downtown enforcement team which handles a lot of these issues beat sergeants they would just kind of send them out to where they thought maybe they fit and if the dispatcher wasn't really aware of the services then they would send uniformed officers to handle these things it often led to a duplication of effort and incorrect dispatching to patrol where it should have gone to another resources so really understanding roles and responsibilities and removing inconsistencies is what we were trying to do in addressing these 15,000 calls per year so under the new protocol the dispatcher has been trained that blight non-criminal calls such as trash RV parking and etc are entered as information only and given an HRI designator and most of those are either handled through host debris removal or downtown enforcement team or or in or some other non-uniform non-sform capacity non-urgent not in progress low-level criminal activity sometimes this is well here's an area where people use narcotics city ordinance violations which are treated as infractions things that are very low level and not currently in progress I also will be entered into our system with a homeless response designator and then dispatched as beat information and those type of things again can be picked up later by downtown enforcement host or other resources so again we're trying to refer a lot of these out to the appropriate resource rather than sending armed uniformed officers to non-criminal low level or not in progress calls dealing with these type of issues as I get to the list and before before we go on here I want to give you some universal rules and exceptions to this as there are some universal rules and exceptions to these the police department will always assist people with physical and mental special needs who cannot use online reporting who cannot use phone reporting or cannot come to the police department in person if we receive calls from someone who needs that type of service we will respond and give that type of service to any of these calls additionally the dispatcher will always keep the authority to dispatch a call that they feel represents a risk of harm to the public or if the dispatcher feels there's extenuating circumstances that requires an officer to respond ultimately we want to make sure that if the dispatcher feels it necessitates a response that they have that ability to send an officer to that call we do ask that they contact a supervisor and make the supervisor aware because sometimes we get questions from line staff but they do have that ability to continue to dispatch the call right can we go to the next slide please so I talked about numbers this is just calls by numbers this gives you the 2019 full year and 2021 mid-year numbers just so you can see how many of these calls we actually respond to every year and again the impact of this we we're two months into this we won't fully probably see a significant impact till probably six months and more likely a year out so it's going to be important that for the for the work group for the police department for the community that we track these calls and see what difference they're really making and what impact they're really having so and it's especially important as we delve into the next group of calls over the next few months to see what other changes we might want to make so we're hoping that this this increases efficiency that this puts the right resource to the right problem and allows resources to work on other more high higher priority problems and the problems that they're trained and that we want armed uniform police officers to be responding to next slide and I'm sure there's questions a lot of a lot of material there was quite a bit there thank you for such a thorough report I thought I thought it was quite interesting can you go back to the last the slide just before the questions just before we get into questions that there's a clarifying question about the numbers yeah right there when we look at 2019 versus 2021 you mentioned the first six months of 2021 yes these are through June and so okay so they're not not adjusted it's not as though like you multiplied the number to average it out for a full year or something no no no no but you can see when you look at where we are we're online to meter exceed 2019 and we certainly haven't slowed down so when originally um when we posted these we ran the numbers through June I believe we posted all of this in August for our September meeting and then uh or for our October meeting you know we have a 30 day I think 30 day timeline or so that have to do in vansomene so at that time the numbers were within a couple of months so but you can see through mid-year where it's trending understood thank you all right I'm gonna bring it back to the committee for questions who would like to go first okay council member rogers um I have a few questions so I'm happy to know that uh well thank you for your report I always love to hear your reports you are very thorough captain and I like to like to hear your reports um for the juvenile calls I'm happy to hear that you will respond when there um is a mental health involved because I noticed that even know the age may be um young that there can still be a threat um when we have some juveniles that uh have a mental illness um when they are escalated so and their parents cannot handle the escalation um that poses a threat to both themselves and their parents so I'm happy that you guys will still respond for the the parking um parking violations um the fact that they're closed after an hour um does that mean that residents or people that are complaining need to continually call because that's it that's what I'm hearing is that people need to continually call but I've always thought that once you call you should just leave it alone because it takes more resources to keep calling they don't need to continually call what we find is so going back and looking speaking with dispatch and talking to the field officers what generally happens is those calls were sitting open for three plus hours in many cases and usually and much of our civilian staff respond to these so we lean heavily on them normally when they respond if they don't get there within an hour the parking problem is gone so that it was more based on that so when you leave a call open it just sits open in the system so if there's been no if the staff has not been able to get there within the hour and we haven't received additional calls within the hour that allows the dispatcher to simply close the call out and so yes you would have to call again to reopen that call for service but this was based on what time frame based on the experience of the people who go out there is appropriate to leave a call open before dispatch can close it that's generally what it means so you don't have to call every 10 or 15 minutes these will go out as information in the area and many of them that people really get upset about are the fire hydrants handicap and block driveways because I now I can't get out to go to the store go to work and we're going to all of those those won't close out so these would be more general parking calls that we get those type of things now when you have things and in all of these that elevate to a neighborhood nuisance where it's constant parking problems constant noise complaints like we get things of that nature those generally are addressed differently than a standard call for service if that answers your question so really what we're talking about is kind of those one-off parking calls which would be it's sticking out too far into the roadway it's parked in a no parking zone a yellow zone or a red zone that's not a fire hydrant or parked the wrong way on the street those type of calls are more the ones that are going to be closed out after an hour if someone can't get there or we don't have a return call and and what if someone does come out and there is really no response I'm I'm sorry what if someone does come out but PD does there's no response there's no ticket the car is still there what is the next step for the well that that's if as in anything if someone responds to a call and takes no action those come back and are you generally reported to a supervisor so if someone came out to any call and took no action whatsoever then that would have to be explained and generally that would have to be explained to one of our supervisors when the reporting party calls back okay um in addition are there uh non-sworn officers around the clock or is that only between certain hours it's only between certain hours right now so they work on the two earlier teams so most so they'll work they come on around six in the morning and they're gone by 11 o'clock at night and right now we have seven spread out over four patrol teams half of them on the week days half of them on the weekends okay and then my last two things I'm not quite sure what order to put these in I don't think that there's a right order but I would like to to commend you guys for being able to take inventory and to kind of take a step back to see who's missing from the discussion I think that that is not done too often and people need to do that more um because too often we we miss that there's a crucial part or a component that's missing and so we're missing a piece of it so I think that that is great but it was in the same breath which I wish these two didn't have to go together it was a little disturbing to know that for a while suspicious persons and vehicles that people could be discriminated against for no apparent reason just for the reason that people felt like they didn't belong in a neighborhood and that could be because of their color ethnicity or their car didn't look right or for whatever reason and they could very well just be visiting someone but just because a neighbor or someone didn't know who they are so that was a little disturbing to know that police have been responding to to calls and that they only resulted in 300 arrests um for almost 7 000 calls so that we were actively um paying our law enforcement to to allow for people to be racist or discriminatory towards people for their own bias in their own reasons so that was a little disturbing but other than that thank you very much for your presentation thank you councilmember schwadhelm thanks for the presentation captain litchfield uh let me start more global what are the metrics for success that you and the department are looking at with all these adjustments well there's a couple of things we're we're looking to and this is kind of very timely because it's in conjunction with a significant staffing department wide staffing study that we're doing in past years our staffing studies have really focused on on patrol which is very important how many patrol officers we have available to respond to the public at any given time very important but we really are looking at everything holistically and globally as you said and the staffing study for this year is enveloping the entire police department every section every division for efficiency of staffing and what shouldn't we shouldn't be doing so as far as global metrics for this to tie into the staffing study now um what i would like to see over the next year is number one in in numbers what are the pure number impacts to these total number calls for service so when we get through obviously we have we'll have three months of 21 that'll be somewhat helpful but really for next year what was the impact to how many of these calls we responded to we would certainly expect under these criteria that we are sending less uniform patrol officers to these calls for service and that would have somewhat of a positive impact on their discretionary available time to construct conduct self-initiated patrol to work on neighborhood complaints more significant neighborhood complaints and more significant community and neighborhood issues and we would hope to see some kind of improvement in our overall response time on priority one and priority two calls i think those are our best global metrics that we uh we follow very closely anyways what are we responding to and how long does it take us and are we getting to the most important stuff fast enough now another metric that we're already tracking is public response what what has been the public response to some of these changes because some of them especially in party complaints per se that over the past couple of months i've been checking regularly with dispatch how's the feedback been because they're of course it's a concern when you make changes you know the pushback or feedback from the public positive or negative what is it most of it as you can kind of guess has been in the noise party complaint realm where they have to be more involved in the process take you know more action actually be known that they're calling that's really been a couple of complaints we've received about that and of the complaints we've received about that we actually transferred a couple of those into neighborhood oriented policing problems because they weren't just my neighbors playing as stereo too loud they were things that were impacting neighborhoods because they were a commercial facility that we had to see to make sure they weren't violating the noise ordinances and their permits it was the franklin park cemetery issue where people were partying in the cemetery that is something that as an organization we want to handle on a beat wide level those are more community problem oriented things than the one off my neighbors throwing a noisy party or playing the stereo too loud etc where we're now sending several thousand times a year armed uniform police officers to knock on a door and ask a neighbor to turn down their music so that's really the the metrics that we're tracking right now and to see how that impacts our positively impacts our discretionary and response and I know some of this may come up with the staffing study but are you specifically tracking the obligated unobligated time for the field resources yes so I guess I would ask this might be for chief navarro for the response to emergency priority one calls we I know you've shared with us that we're approaching seven minutes which I know is not a level of comfort that I have with that but is there a target that you're looking at because for me what would be helpful for council to have that if you believe responding to priority one calls should be at six minutes we either do what this presentation has been about stop doing some things or having additional resources and I'm just interested in chief navarro what are your thoughts about that specifically with priority one calls sorry are you asking about allocated unallocated time or is that what you're asking about sir well that pretty much leads to in other words if there's more unobligated time it might equate to quicker responses to emergency calls for service priority one yes so yeah so I'm looking is there a figure that we have a goal for well historically what we've done in the past is we've always shot for a 50 50 50 percent split for for the officers during their time so it would be 50 percent of their time would be obligated to a call for service 50 percent would be a discretionary time where they could go and address some of these b complaints be a little bit more proactive in in traffic enforcement and and any other issues that might be coming up so you know we're look we're going in and one of the things that we're asking the consultant is you know what is best practices now that has that changed and so is the allocated unallocated time percentages are they have they changed right are there isn't 60 40 70 30 or is it still 50 50 so we're having some of those questions but ultimately the goal is to make sure that we have emergency responders who can respond to those higher priority calls in a quicker manner because we are not we are not at that point right now and so that may take again this will be part of that as far as an impact the other may be the you know we may need additional staff as we go forward and the staff may come in both sworn officers and also civilian personnel to address some of these some of these things I think you know Capitol Lichfield had mentioned you know community feedback is an important piece of this and you know when we ask you know what kind of policing service does our community want and does council want you know if some of these things are you know if we've historically responded to these and we're not doing any more than those are some things that we're going to have to address but that would be addressed through civilian personnel such as FETs and C.S.O.s and and councilmember Schwedhelm from my perspective as the field services division captain that goal for me six minutes much closer to six minutes not seven and I think that what's to understand is we hear most of us here understand what it means priority response time seven minutes or six minutes and many times I think the public thinks well so you're telling me if someone's kicking in my door and about to assault me and my family it takes you six to seven minutes even six minutes is too long priority one calls are a category of various type of calls and yes some are in progress shootings in progress stabbings in progress felonious assaults are part of that category and generally it does not take a police department six seven minutes to get to all those type of calls you could be you could have officers on scene in 30 seconds to a minute 30 seconds to a minute still an awfully long time if someone's kicking in your door shooting at you or stabbing you but it's it's fast in the world of police response so priority one calls do encompass a variety of different very significant calls but again I I would like to see if six minutes as the field service division captain and I appreciate that because I know for the fire department let's say their emergency response is actually I think in our charter where five minutes you know is is their time and with police departments been kind of a moving target so I would appreciate chief coming in in budget times that if we are saying here's what our goal is if it be six minutes and again thank you captain litchfield that education is to what priority one calls are but if that is a goal I'd like to see a path how are we going to achieve that and for me it's either doing a what we've just what we're talking about here on this cost making more available time so that they can respond to those emergency calls or we may need more resources and framing it that way I think it's a little bit easier for the community to understand and then some specific calls I have or questions I have let me just start with the parking violations can the volunteers and police service issue parking citations not as of now they cannot we've explored that in the past and they have they have asked to be able to issue parking citations and we visited that with the city attorney's office I think when I was when I was personnel services lieutenant so over two years ago two three years ago we visited that and I think we may want to revisit it at the time it was the decision was made to not give that authority to the vips to the patrol vips but in light of the changes we've made here it's probably a good opportunity to revisit that because they are much more available and they definitely would handle those calls much quicker than staff who's tied up on other calls thank you that I would be very supportive of at least looking at that because I the question I'd have why wouldn't we give this opportunity to some folks that want to help us out with these and I think members of the community would also appreciate that and on the same line with the vips with abandoned or found bikes did I hear you correctly saying we will not respond to those type of calls we are not sending any any longer sending our field of technicians and cso's to those type of calls that's correct our vips an option for those type of calls vips have done that in the past and they are an option for that type of call and there's you know there's the debris removal team which is an option when when certain criteria are met as well which is a new resource so the the main point is not to have our staff are especially especially our sworn who don't respond to those calls anyways it was fbt's and cso's to free them up for more of the other calls and not be hauling bicycles around but yes we I believe the vips do have that capability and have responded to those the vips were out of the building for 2020 so a lot of that fell back on to cso's and fbt's but our vips are coming back although our patrol vips are a little light at the moment we're hoping to to increase that right yeah I was I was just going to add councilmember schoenhelm that as just as captain michael said we have dwindled the numbers not only in our staff but also with the our our vips program we are working to get those numbers up the one thing with vips is that we can't we can't schedule them I mean they're volunteers so they're working when they can and so they're not always going to be available but they may be available for some of these abandoned abandoned property and we can schedule times for uh pickup so we can we can definitely look at that and how we start re-implementing them into some of these uh some of these areas yeah thank you for that because I would think that would be a great use of them and and so cap militia is it I'm a little unclear is it part of the protocol dispatch protocol it's not an option that if you go through the checklist if no one's available yes we will send a message to the vips whenever they come on duty to pick the bike up is that again discretionary is that part of the actual protocol it's not the protocol it'd be discretionary because of the way the vips work um so dispatchers can already dispatch a VIP to an appropriate call if they're available and they do do that the issue we've had as of late is just availability so um if there's a VIP available dispatch can always send a VIP when they're out and about and but we do need we we need to recruit it as in all areas we need to recruit more vips and get more patrol vips one thing to to understand about vips to I know you understand this but just in general for everyone is that there's patrol vips and then there's vips who volunteer in the police department not every volunteer works out in the street on patrol do they want to or are they certified to you for various reasons so patrol vips are are a little harder to come by than general volunteers who do a ton of work inside the organization or say go to go to many events and things like that and then what advice or direction do dispatchers give to someone let's say I call up say hey there's two bikes so I think that you know could be a chop shop could be stolen and if we're not going to come pick them up what advice or direction would the dispatcher give to the rp if it's on private property then it would be their responsibility to get rid of the property if it was found there now I would assume though if it was a private person calling on a chop shop scenario they would know if that was going on in their property so if maybe they're seeing something on public property or an adjacent commercial property that's suspicious just like an auto chop shop then that's a different call than an abandoned bike that's a crime so the dispatcher should be picking up like that this is a theft ring this is some kind of crime it's not just an abandoned bike that should be dispatched as a crime to patrol officer to investigate and our dispatchers are are pretty good they're very extremely well trained not saying that anyone can't miss something sure that happens but they would dispatch that as a crime now if you had a lot of abandoned bikes on public property we do have removal teams for that and those those would just be removed and trashed okay and then when you were discussing the vandalism you mentioned graffiti do we still have a graffiti abatement officer could you talk to us how the department handles graffiti on public property and how it's handled on private property who handles each of those responsibilities yes private property graffiti is handled by the property owner they're responsible to abate that remove it or cover it up paint over it we do not have a graffiti abatement officer any longer that position was among the four that were cut so we do not have that that was a civilian who worked with property crimes in our property crimes unit on graffiti abatement so we don't have that any longer on public property the city has a team that responds to cover public property graffiti and so who does a dispatcher make that referral someone calls hey i see graffiti on front of city hall okay and then on private property who who holds those private property owners accountable for cleaning up that graffiti well councilmember it's the graffiti abatement program has been switched over to code enforcement yeah okay so referrals are made to code enforcement they follow up on the private property right yeah it's out of the police department now thank you that's what i was looking for okay and then on the noise and particles you talked about it what impact does it have if the rp is willing to prosecute and sign a complaint so the the difference is if an rp is willing to sign a complaint that allows us to issue a citation and send it up to the district attorney's office for prosecution what it basically does is it gives it does two things one it allows the police department to actually take action against the property owner because without someone signing a complaint or being a victim on that type of of lower level misdemeanor crime the officer is not going to take action on that crime as far as an arrest or a citation the other thing that we believe it does i know for me is people in general have gotten away from just talking to their neighbors and going and knocking on the door talking to the neighbor or asking them to turn music down or to tone the party down or go inside and have defaulted more to calling us to come out and do those things for them so if it's not egregious enough that you want to take action against the person meaning it's not an ongoing problem or this person is just you've already contacted them once or twice and they're just hey forget it i'm going to do whatever i want to do then it's appropriate to get us involved but the reporting party as a victim has to have some skin in this game too and be willing to assist with the process because that's how misdemeanors work so without that reporting party there's very little that we can do other than be a very expensive door knocker right so just to confirm that was the question if i call up on my neighbor and i say i'm willing to sign a complaint against them the police officer will respond to investigate that crime okay and then just for clarification on the check the welfare i heard you say if it's if it's a medical call it's going to go that direction what about the calls for service that you get where i haven't seen my neighbor he or she is elderly newspapers stacked up would an officer still respond to that type of a check the welfare yes we've always had a protocol for that the fire department does not respond primary to those type of calls they respond but not primary because sometimes it requires forced entry into a residence which the fire department is not going to do for that type of call or there could be a potential crime there too oftentimes that's not the case but it could that has happened so under the old and new protocol we respond to those and check that welfare ourselves and determine what's going on great thank you those are all the questions i have thank you councilmember councilmember rogers i saw you raise your hand oh i was just going to say i had a meeting with the vips coordinator in some of our current vips and um they're hoping to reinstate some training and the there are some um vips that are on the list to start soon but uh due to the orientation and training process and how you have to go out in teams and they can't double up in cars and things like that um it has been quite a delay but there is a list of vips that are or potential vips that are are eager and i'm waiting to to get trained and get out in the community so we're uh eager to get them trained sounds like a great way to spend spend some time helping out of the community captain litchfield i do have i had a bunch of questions but my colleagues took them so good on them my last question is is this a proposal or is this a implemented change and it was a one was it implemented it was implemented on october 1st and have you seen any change in the last couple of months i know it's a short amount of time in terms of the amount of uh calls that you need to respond to and the availability of your staff to meet those calls we wouldn't run a first a first full report on that until early january so we could have most of a quarter in um anecdotally from staff on the street yes there has been a change and they have noticed it but the first full reports will come early next year where we can start tracking it and i believe you will have to go a full year for the full year comparison to 1920 to really see the change and see what impact did this have and is there anything we need to modify or change in what we already decided sure and how has this been received in the community in general how much pushback are you getting we're getting very little pushback almost none again we've had some on the party calls the noise complaints um other than that i've received very little input that there's been a significant pushback or issue and some of these things dispatchers were already doing anyways trying to do anyways outside of an official protocol so some of these such as in traffic or maybe minor theft and so on the public which probably already used to some of these protocols to begin with because they were were more or less being put out there but now they've been been formalized and published and put out that these are the new protocols and the way we're handling business for these areas and thank you and the last question i have for now is how has this been communicated with officers um so that when they do hear pushback from the community they understand what's going on and why everyone received the presentation that i gave today the detailed presentation the notes of the old and new protocols all of those were given to staff and trained out to staff so they could see what the changes were why the changes were made they got some talking points regarding in the weeds legal details about the police department's responsibility to respond to certain things and so those were all put out to dispatch records and field services staff so they all understood the work of the committee they could see the specific changes and they all received the same information and talking points to give out okay thank you so much all right with that having no more questions we will move on to public comment i will take public comment in the chambers first before going to recorded public comment and then or i'll go to zoom public comment and then report a public comment is there anybody in the chambers wishing to make public comment seeing none um i will call on Annette Arnold who's got her hand raised thank you can you hear me we can go ahead great um i am on the police chief's ambassador council and went through the police community policing experience and i want to commend our entire police department because they have so much to do and so little resources to do it with and i just i think we're lucky to have them and i think they need all the support that they can get um i do have a few questions one is how are online reporting handled is there a time frame which they have to be responded to because i think there might be a sense from the community if all nonviolent crimes are going to be reported online that we're basically nothing is going to happen so how are those calls going to be handled is there a protocol that they are responded to with a certain time frame my second question is i'm not sure what a VIP is but do we have a volunteer program where say i live in south park we did some surveys here and the neighbors said what would make them feel a lot safer living here is to see more police patrols in the neighborhood if there were a volunteer program where non sworn officers could drive around in a police car it might have the same effect of making people feel safer without needing the resources of armed officers so i'm wondering if that is a program that could possibly happen and um that's it for now thank you thank you very much annette i think no other raised hands will go to a pre-recorded voicemail comments so my name is samantha right i'm calling about agenda item 5.3 about senator as a police officer staffing i just wanted to go in and make sure that uh my voice was heard that we need more officers so incredibly badly there are hardly any officers around on crazy peak nights when we should have plenty around we just literally don't have anything crime is getting worse in our city every single day more gruesome more horrific and they can't do anything about it when they don't have enough staffing additionally i think that we need to look at some incentivizing for more um improvements to the pay rates i know that's not at all in discussion but you can't get good talent without paying enough money for it so if you want our cities to be protected by the right people our law enforcement you need more of them and you need good ones thank you okay yes so wish to provide my name and this is for section 5.3 but i permanently believe that you need law enforcement and without law enforcement officers our city is not as safe and the way senator rosa has defunded their police is absolutely ridiculous more crime has happened i don't feel safe to take my family downtown no one goes downtown anymore because it's not safe because it's filled with homeless people there's crime there all the time apple store gets hit all the time so the more officers we could have the safe our city would be so you guys need to look at yourselves and actually reap on the police hello my name is susanne farino and i am calling regarding the agenda my item number 5.3 um on your next meeting the public safety committee meeting uh i am a tax paying citizen who has lived in san rosa for over 28 years extremely concerned about the severe staffing and shortage and all the crime going on in san rosa and we are asking that you please fund the additional positions being requested by the police department um it's very important for all of our safety thank you goodbye hi i don't want to state my name but i'm calling about agenda item 5.3 um i'd like to request that more uh staffing for the police officers they need more patrol officers i live in san rosa i have a family in san rosa and i don't go downtown at all we don't go downtown if we have to go anywhere we go up to winzer to the square or healdsburg to the square downtown is not safe i've had my vehicle attacked by homeless people and people in mental health crisis um throwing things banging on my windows all of this and it's just not safe i don't bring my daughter i don't do anything um my husband and i we still live downtown and we moved about in 2016 and when we lived down there it was great we'd walk around everywhere we'd go to movie theaters we'd do all sorts of things and now we just don't even dare the other day we had to go to the san rosa plaza to do Santa photos with our daughter and i was like stressed out about having to go downtown and be in that environment um between gang members at the mall and downtown and just the homeless situation it doesn't feel like a safe environment and given that we live in the bay area and pay bay area prices and bay area taxes to live here you'd think that we would utilize our downtown and encourage businesses to want to open up downtown but all santa rosa does is cater to the criminals and to the homeless people and the city council could care less about whether the taxpayers and the families that make this place home feel safe and feel like this is somewhere where they want to spend i think it's honestly kind of a joke that city council thought it would be a good idea to open up an ice rink i can't think of a single person that i know that would ever want to bring their family down there to spend time with what it's like being downtown and there's just parts of san rosa that you just don't drive around because you know that there's it's a bad area and you know that the police department is so understaffed that if something were to happen that it'd be a little while before anybody could get there because you guys don't seem to care about increasing the staffing along with the population with population growth should come increased police presence so i'd really like it if our city council could stop being disrespectful and treating our police department like there are a bunch of criminals when they're not and actually encouraging them to hire more people and make this a place where people would actually want to come and work and not where officers want to leave thanks yes i'm calling about the police item agenda 5.3 i want us to get a more of a police presence crime is just rampant it seems that we are having shootings even in good neighborhoods hearing firewoods and guns go off in the night and they are just so stretched we need more of a police presence this funding has not worked we need to be for refunding the police and doing more training and more hiring i want more of a police presence we have a big city and we need a lot of help thank you hi i'm calling with a agenda item number 5.3 i'm calling to support our police department and increase our police force thank you good afternoon i'm a resident of santa rosa and i was calling about item number 5.3 public safety subcommittee hearing and i think it is absolutely critical that we do everything we can to retain and increase the staffing of the santa rosa police department the city's motto for the longest time was the city designed for living it will soon be the city designed for leaving if we cannot adequately protect the taxpayers and visitors of this great city i've lived for over 35 years in santa rosa and i never remember it ever being this bad with officers either retiring or seeking interest in other agencies or other professions because of a lack of support from the city government i know the police chief and his command staff are going above and beyond to try to recruit and retain applicants but we need to make sure that we put public safety first not only with police but for fire and ems as well i think we need to concentrate our efforts in again like i said bolstering police and first responder staffing maybe redirect any money that's going towards people that are housing challenged maybe get them back to whatever community they came from and we could focus on the people of the city of santa rosa again this is the city designed for living not leaving so let's try to encourage our police officers through not only financial reimbursement for their efforts but also let's support the police department with what they need to do to get the job done to make sure this city is one of the safest cities in america thank you very much chair flaming that concludes voicemail public comment excellent thank you i'll look to my colleagues to see if there are any follow-up questions and or comments i do have one uh well a big thank you for going through this process the amount of detail and attention that was paid to each of these items and the implications is uh is really impressive and one request is that um that when we talk with our officers or when you talk with your officers about this that um there's a fine point on the the why of why we're doing this we're doing this to reduce impact on our officers and improve service where it's most needed um i've had the the fun experience of calling for service and being told that i can't get it because the city council has uh you know decided that that my call is not important which is you know ironic and and disappointing so it is ultimately does rest with us but there are specific reasons why we made these decisions and um it would be fantastic if that was communicated a little differently in the future um so i think that that concludes this item but um as a point of privilege well not agendized i'm going to congratulate you captain on your upcoming retirement and want to thank you for your service with the city and see if any of my colleagues have anything they would like to to express um to you for for your outstanding and exemplary service thank you yeah congratulations eric that's here it looks like you're making it out of the profession safe and sane you know so i know we'll provide you more opportunity to watch more silver and black games unlike your chief so thanks and congratulations eric thank you um this is news to me um so i guess i've had a year to work with you and it definitely has been great and thank you so much for your service to our community it has been wonderful working with you and enjoy retirement i hope that we can see your involvement in the community um in any capacity i think that um it will be a gain for the community so thank you so much thank you very much thank you everyone thank you and lastly it looks like the vips program could could use um some more patrol patrol volunteers i i think you might qualify for that i i threw an application on his desk yeah excellent thank you uh so with that let's see where we are here um we're at adjournment so with that i i hereby adjourn this meeting and thank everybody for their participation we'll see you again in a couple of months