 This program is brought to you by Cable Franchise Vs and generous donations from viewers like you. Okay. Good evening. Seen as we have a form of the Town Council on July 6, 2020. I'm going to start the meeting. Let me start by saying, based on Governor Baker's March 12 order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law. We are allowed to hold this virtual Town Council. I will call upon each counselor by name. And at that time they should unmute your mic and say present. And they, you will also indicate if you can hear me and I can hear you. Remember to mute your mic when you're not speaking. And after saying present. This is also how we will conduct counselor comments throughout the agenda. The meeting includes audio and video and is available live on Amherst media. And it is also being recorded. There is no chat room for this meeting. The technical issues arise. I may call a pause in the meeting until we can see if we can straighten them out. And the record will have to show that we have done that. If you need to have, if you have a technical problem being, please be in touch with Athena. If you need to have a technical problem being, please be in touch with Athena. If you need to have a technical problem being, please be in touch with Athena. If you need time, then let me start by calling. The Town Council. Individuals. So we're going to start with. Alyssa Brewer. Present. Brian. Present. Mandy Joe Hanneke. Present. Andy Steinberg. Present. Steve Schreiber. Present. Tony Ball Mellon. Present. Patty Angeles. Present. Evan Ross. Present. Kathy Shane. Present. Let me just check if anybody else has joined us. And Dorothy Pam. Present. Okay. Surgeon can take the screen down while we just spend a little time. Thank you. I do have one announcement. I'm sorry, I am going to have you put this up. And there'll be more information on the town website as of tomorrow, but the town of Amherst Amherst COVID-19 emergency rental assistance grant program is now available. And this is through community action. And again, more information will be available on the town website. Please check the town calendar for other meetings of which we have several this month. So thank you. You can take that down. In this year of COVID-19 as a nation, we have again experienced significant concerns about policing initiatives most recently. Initiated most recently by the murder of George Floyd. Upon that event, the town council joined the Amherst town committee. The board of police is the chair of the city council, the chair of the city council, the manager, police chief and school superintendent, the chair of the human rights commission with full support of the police unions, and unanimously passed a resolution in the aftermath of the death of Mr George Floyd introduced by a powerful statement. By councilor pat d'angeles. staff and with the Human Rights Commission, which is sponsoring community conversations posted on the town's bulletin board. This brings us to tonight. The Amherstown Council is taking this opportunity to begin to better understand the state of policing in Amherst. Therefore, this meeting was established to allow the council to have an informative public discussion with the police department about the police department regarding their mission, organization, operations, training policies, and accountability. The meeting will include a presentation by Police Chief Scott Livingstone, who will be supported by other members of his staff, specifically Captain Gabriel Ting, Officer in Charge of Patrol Operations, and Captain Ronald Young, Officer in Charge of Administration. Fire Chief Tim Nelson has also joined us to give questions arise about the relationship between police and to fire an EMS. After we're done with the presentation, which we're going to go through without any questions, there will be opportunity for counselors to ask questions and to discuss what they've heard. And as part of that, and after that, we will then have public comment. This is part of an ongoing conversation. And tonight, no changes in strategy, oversight, or budgets will be made at this meeting. We welcome questions and comments from the public at this meeting and following the meeting. Comments received thus far have been posted as part of the meeting package. So with that, Mr. Bachmann, would you please proceed? Thank you, Lynn. Sir, do you want to put up the slide? So tonight, as we do this, put up the graphics for us, we're here to talk about systemic racism, actually, is the broader topic. And the systemic racism that permeates our society. We know we have significant disparities in the outcomes of race and class by our health care system. We know we fight the opportunity or educational debt that we experience in our educational system. We know that housing policies continue to disadvantage African-Americans through historical housing policies. We know that food insecurity and disproportionate impact of environmental and climate change disproportionately impacts people of color and poor people. Tonight, we focus on the criminal justice system, but not in a large macro way, but in the Amherst Police Department and what we control as a community. And it's our opportunity to talk to the council about the Amherst Police Department. I can tell you that the events that brought us here tonight deeply trouble every police officer on the Amherst Police Department. I've met with almost all of them, and they are all very deeply troubled by the murder of George Floyd and feel that it was a horrible event. That being said, I am incredibly proud of our police department. It is superbly run, has very high professional standards, has a commitment delivering the appropriate level of services to the town and wants to align its service delivery with the needs and the desires of the town. And most importantly, the leadership especially of the Amherst Police Department has shown a willingness to listen, to learn, to change, and adjust. So you go to the next slide, Serge. So tonight, these are the topics that we will be focused on. We want to talk a little bit about the mission, how the police department is organized, the training that the officers go through, how we operate the police department, the policies that are in place, and then the accountability structures that are in place. And then this is a pretty comprehensive view of the police department. Typically, we would be inviting you or any members of the public for what we call ride-alongs to sit with police officers as they go about their daily chores. We cannot do that during COVID-19, but we hope to be able to open that up again and the chief can talk more about that if he so chooses. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Chief Livingstone and his team. Seeing as the next slide, Serge. Thank you, Paul, and thank you, Lynn, for the opportunity to really talk tonight about the Amherst Police Department and what we do as an agency. Paul mentioned, he's very proud of the agency. Certainly I am as well. I've been a member and you can see our team up here. I've been in the Amherst Police Department since I was 18 years old, 42 years of service. This is just gonna be, I think, a really great opportunity for us to kind of showcase what it is that we do as an agency because so much of what we do, most of it isn't really about making arrests or making car stops. It's really, policing has really changed over the years and certainly changed in the years since I've been a young police officer about what we do as an agency and where we're going and how we've had to adjust. And those are the types of things that I think, I hope we get across to you tonight and certainly welcome the questions that will probably come but also about how we're gonna move forward. I think, I know Gabe and Ron and I have spoken a lot about wanting to see what the community wants out of the Amherst Police Department to see if there are things that we are doing that they would like change or things that we're not doing that we could be doing. So with that being said, I've been here 42 years. Well, you can see almost 100 years of service to the town of Amherst and very, very proud of our agency. So I'll surge next slide, please. Paul touched on it briefly about what got us here. There was the really, no other way of saying it but from a police officer's perspective, disgusting display that we saw in Minneapolis and prior to that, just many, many events that have got a lot of people questioning, policing across America. And I understand the effect that it has with people because probably a lot of people don't understand how different police agencies are from Minneapolis, Minnesota to Arizona to a small agency like ours and Amherst. So we recognize how important this is to our community to educate people about what we do and also to listen to everybody and take directives from the town council, take directives from our community about what they want out of our agency and what we could be doing differently and a very respectful and hopefully not a prejudging on either our part or the community's part but just listening, communicating and giving some information about how we are as an agency. So I'll move on next slide. This is our mission statement. This was a mission statement that we developed with community members back probably in 2010 or 11, I think it was when I became police chief. We had a previous mission statement but I just felt it was outdated. And so I tasked a few of our officers who reached out to some of our community members and you can read it there. This is really the core of our agency and how we believe and what we stand for. And it's very, I would say very short but very to the point and it really talks all about what our agency is about. We do value this community. We love the community that we serve in and we're very much a family oriented police agency. Everybody here hangs out with each other and we are very much a family in this police department. So that's this mission statement is very, very important to the members of the Amherst Police Department. Sergeant X slide, please. This is just in our budget book but it basically is just our command staff and where we are and where we're spread out and what we oversee. So pretty basic but it lists the number of officers that we have in each capacity and each function and who were responsible for captain of operations Gabe Ting oversees the patrol lieutenants and the sergeants who were on patrol. He oversees the parking enforcement people and the operational part of the patrol officers and Captain Ron Young oversees the administrative part and the detective bureau and that sort of thing. He oversees our records personnel while our one records personnel civilian person who's very, very busy but this is pretty basic stuff right here. Also, part of our operations is the communication center where we have 12 civilian dispatchers. Carol Hepburn as our animal welfare office and we have one administrative assistant Michelle Matusko who works on the second floor with Ron, Gabe and I. So that's where we are as an agency. Surge next slide. This is a breakdown of our department. We're budgeted at 48 officers. We currently have 44 officers in the building. We have three officers who are in an academy who haven't graduated yet. So they're not considered part of the department yet. You can see the breakdown here is more specifically eight women and 36 men. We have eight officers who identify with minority group. The degree of education part of our recruitment process. Either mandate that an officer has a degree in higher ed or at least some military experience. One or the other or a combination of both. So when we're in the recruitment process, we require that. So that's a little bit different than a lot of agencies that you might see, but it's, I thought as we delve deeper into the process of recruitment and town like Amherst, which is really facing towards education principle, we really thought it wasn't that our officers or have somebody with some degree of higher ed. And then the median time of service, we're kind of transitioning to a younger police agency. And certainly, if you were to weed me out of the mixture, it would be even younger than this, but this is where we stand as an organization and where we stand as staffing levels at this current time. So, Serge, next slide, please. And I'm going to turn some areas over to Captain Ron Young and to Captain Gabe Ting, but for Ron's expertise, I'm going to turn the recruiting and training portion over to him and I'll be back with you guys in a little bit. I'll just listen to Ron for now. Thank you, Chief. As we can see that's indicated, I hear our process is pretty extensive. Hold on, hold on, Ron. Serge, can you figure out what the issue is with the garbling? I'm going to ask everybody else to mute, because sometimes that helps. Ron, can you try speaking once more? Can you hear me, Serge? I can, there's just some distortion. On my own, Serge, do you believe? Yes, do you find a chance to have a pair of headphones or headset nearby? I sure do. Serge, are you able to hear me now? Excellent. That's perfect. Oh, excellent, very good. I'm terribly sorry about that, everyone. As the Chief had spoken about earlier, we have a recruitment process that's pretty extensive. Our recruitment process is outlined by policy to make certain that there is a consistency throughout the process. So as we go from year to year, our recruitment looks similar or if we happen to have to change it for whatever reason, like everything evolves, we can amend that policy so that it would be consistent with what the strategies and kind of the mission of the police department is. Currently, our recruitment process to put somebody on the street is just short of a year. It takes about nine or 10 months to actually get somebody interviewed, to get them vetted and ultimately get them trained at the basic recruit level. And I'll touch on that in a little bit about what our recruitment training looks like and then ultimately what happens to them after they get out of the academy. We've developed here through our team. I have a lieutenant who's in charge of recruitment, some various strategies that we use in the community to try to get the best and the brightest to come to work here. It involves reaching out to most of the academies, I mean, excuse me, the universities and colleges in the area, just kind of a side note. My wife happens to work at a local university and she's the one who helped me in this area. Some of the various online and media postings that put us in touch with various job fairs to get us involved and get us exposed to some young people that may be interested in policing as a career. We do reach out to our military veterans. We try to participate in the Massachusetts Police Training Council's trainings across the state. We actually have quite a few instructors here in our agency and as a result, it allows us to be able to view some of the recruits that are out there and see whether or not they'd be a good fit for our community. You'll note down there at the bottom of the slide that a number of years ago, probably three or four years ago, four or five years ago, we eliminated our entrance exam. There was an attempt to try to be more inclusive to people in our community who may have wanted to be involved or were interested in being involved in our agency as part of a career program, but felt a little intimidated about coming in and taking the exam. That's kind of a step that I see a lot of our larger agencies going through across the country right now. And I think it's probably a good choice. We know that not everyone who would be a good fit happens to test particularly well. Next slide, Serge, please. Once we've included, as the chief said, we have a criterion. Once we've assessed them, we vet them through human resources and they begin the process here. We have a physical fitness assessment that we do internally. That physical fitness assessment is based on a set of standards across the country, and we use what's commonly referred to as the Cooper Standard. We use the Cooper Standard here to make certain that we have somebody who's adequately prepared to withstand their basic recruit academy. Following that, we have a series of interview that they go through that begin with a staff. We form ad hoc committees here and we view human resources in that process and they're actually present and part of the interview process. Once people have been vetted through that interview process, it goes to a secondary interview session that's typically manned by the chief and the town manager or somebody the town manager designates. Once somebody's given a conditional offer of employment, we put them through a very rigorous background investigation, which again is outlined by policy. The policy is very specific on what the background investigation will entail and we specifically train people within our building on how to conduct those background investigations. Typically, a detective is assigned to that. I did them for a number of years, actually. Part of that background investigation is submission to a psychological exam and that's not done here in-house. We actually farm that out to a specific agency, whether in Boston or Worcester, so that we can get a complete psychological makeup to determine whether or not the person can be a part of our team. And then the last piece of that puzzle is they have to be medically cleared. That's actually outlined in the statute and the Massachusetts General Law requires that. Next slide, please, Serge. So some of the challenges that we have here in our agency is that, again, this is not just unique to Amherst across the state and in fact the country, the economy which was strong up until the last six months or so made it difficult to recruit. There were a lot of people that were coming out of college that had a lot of opportunity and that kind of watered down some of the typical recruiting polls that we had in the past. Particularly, we saw that with military folks, that people that had been active duty have gone on to various stages in the private sector and we would typically recruit people from that. Right now, we're expecting here in this agency probably three or four, three to five people, three or four, most certainly, that within the next year to 18 months are gonna retire. And those, as the chief said, we are in fact getting younger, but it's a slow process. There are still some people, as the chief said, I'm a little long in the tooth myself in the deep bottom of my career and I'm gonna be one of those people in the next couple of years who's probably gonna hang it up. As a result, we have to start thinking about that and playing it strategically for that. We also found that in policing again, not just in here in Amherst but across the country that a lot of the young people that come out that come into policing, they don't typically stay as long as someone as Gabe has or as the chief has that they will move on to other ventures. Amherst is a great community, I love it here. Probably the greatest decision I ever made was to come to work here. And that makes it a really challenging place to work, but there's a lot that we offer. We have a lot of growth opportunity. You can be involved in a lot of different things here in our agency and that makes it very attractive. It's a professional agency. We are the gold standard. And just about anybody who you deal with in the policing community across Massachusetts always refers to Amherst in terms of what we do and the commitment that we have to our agency as well as to our community. It's a unique community, but that's what makes it really just a great place to work. However, with that, there are some disadvantages. It is a challenging place to be a police officer. Our agency by design demands a lot from our officers and the community demands a lot from us. That keeps us on our toes, but it does make it challenging. It's a high visibility agency. A lot of people have their eyes on us. And as a result of that, it can be complex to be a police officer here. I see that as an opportunity myself, but it is tough sometimes if it's not a right fit. Serge, next slide, please. So just to touch on some of the training that Chief mentioned this earlier and I kind of began it when we were talking about recruitment. Once we have actually selected somebody and provided a conditional offer of employment to them, they must attend the Basic Recruit Academy that's outlined by statute. That academy is held here in Massachusetts at one of the five major academies across the state. It takes about 26 weeks or about six months to complete. Following that, again mandated by policy, we subject somebody to a field training process here. It's a very unique product. We just actually redid the process and revamped it about a year or so ago. That is about 14 weeks in length. That field training process involves field work, it involves policy review, it involves physical fitness assessments and so forth. It's pretty comprehensive and it is designed for the recruit officer to be able, for us to be able to assess to determine whether that recruit officer is going to be released on his own so they have some form of autonomy as a police officer. We have in fact utilized this process in the pack to determine whether or not somebody is not a good fit and they've moved on, but it's challenging. Once that police officer is autonomous, is out on their own, we're required annually to provide additional training. Again, that's outlined by statute. We provide 40 hours of training annual at a bare minimum. That's basically what the law requires. And then after that, we have some additional training. We have elective training, which typically is about 16 to 18 hours per officer. And then we have additional specialized training that occurs based on what the needs of the agency are, what the career development is for the officer and some of the other things that maybe they began in the last fiscal year for training needs. A lot of police training is sandwiched on or is piled onto a training that we had in the past. We also have some very good career development opportunities here. We have a number of officers that teach both at the state and court level. We have officers that instruct at various police agencies and actually a couple of us that teach at some of the local colleges and universities. Next slide, please, sir. So just a sample of what an in-service training would look like. Again, the mandate is by the state, the Massachusetts Police Training Committee sets the annual in-service training every year and we're required to follow that and we do in fact follow that. Typically it involves a legal update. It doesn't mean that we don't only do legal update once a year, we have a SharePoint that shares local case law review at the state level and then also federal case law that pops up. We use this opportunity once a year to go through those changes. Last year was an excellent example of that with the sweeping changes as part of the Criminal Justice Reform Act. We do use of force training. We do that at least bi-annually, sometimes more than that. That involves a variety of different things, most notably reviewing our departmental policy, hands-on based scenario training. We do a lot of very dynamic type training. Obviously right now one of the things that's discussed across policing is de-escalation techniques. We've been training that for a number of years. I just randomly pulled out a training file that I had from 2005 the other day, just randomly out of a folder. We're going through some de-escalation techniques that were scenario-based, that were outlined and very well scripted. It was actually an excellent training, I don't remember it. And then some response trainings that we do at least annually, CPR first responder. We train with the lock zone for people who have opiate overdose issues. Next please, sir. And this is just a snippet that I pulled off of some of the specialized trainings that we attended over the last couple of years. You can see them noted there. We tried to offer a variety of different things to officers over every year, not only to keep the training fresh, but also to make us relevant to what we do. One of the things that you'll note there that was kind of an interesting training was this trauma-informed interviewing. And I can talk about that a little later on, but we've learned a lot in policing over the last couple of years of just the impact that trauma has on people that are involved with the police, whether as a suspect or somebody who has been victimized yet again. Next slide, please, sir. Training review. All our training has to be approved actually by me. There has to be a written lesson plan. I must review it before we actually put it in place. I wanna make certain that the training is measurable, that it's something that's gonna be our agent, what our agency needs. Is it gonna be effective? Are we actually gonna reach all of our officers? Is it something that we can do? Is it something we can afford? There are a lot of different variables. We keep training files here forever. The idea behind it is that we can go back and see whether or not training has improved. Quite frankly, sometimes we have to revisit it just because the turnover. So we will go back and look and see whether or not something that we did 10 years ago, do we need to do again? Is it even relevant any longer? We review our training frequently, but at least annually, we put together an ad hoc committee that usually is involved of line officers as well as command staff to talk about what our training look like and what it's gonna look like for the coming year. The chief has approved of it, we keep a written policy here in our organization that's used to not only maintain and organize what our training is, but to mandate training for the future. Surgeon, next slide, please. And at this point, we're gonna talk about the accreditation process and what it's done for us as an agency. Gabe was a longtime accreditation manager within the agency and he's probably better suited to present that for the group. Good evening, everyone. My name is Gabriel Tang. So I am the captain of operations here at the Emerson Police Department. And for this first slide, I'd like to talk a little bit about Massachusetts Police Accreditation Commission and what that means for us, for our agency. Just to give you a little bit of history, there are two forms of accreditation. One is a federally funded, which is the acronym is CLEA. You're gonna hear a lot of acronyms that we utilize because the titles are really long. CLEA is a commission on accreditation for law enforcement agencies. Again, it's federally funded. MPAC, which is a Massachusetts Police Accreditation Commission, that's a state-funded agency. We have chosen to go through MPAC simply because it's a lot more stringent and it's directly in line with Massachusetts Agency and it's certainly more comprehensive. So, MPAC started in 1996 and was created to professionalize and standardize police agencies to the highest degree to promote best practices, accountability, and transparency. And out of 357 police agencies in the state, 85 agencies are accredited since 1996. Our police department here became the second fully accredited agency in the state in 2001. Amesbury was the first. So for accredited agencies, in order to attain it, you must adhere to 257 mandatory standards in at least 50% of 125 optional standards. And what are those standards? Those standards are a review of our use of our policies and procedures and rules and regulations and basically the systems that we have in place for our police department to operate. So, so far we have been assessed six times successfully and basically every three years, a commission made up of assessors that are within our peers will come to our agency and they will conduct that assessment and they review all of our policies, our procedures and they try to determine if we satisfy all of the commission's requirements to become accredited. We're very proud of the fact that we have four officers within our agency that are state assessors as well. So who is on our impact team? So currently, Captain Young, who's our administrative captain, he oversees the program but we usually designate a lieutenant to be the manager. And I was the previous manager and now Lieutenant Daley is the current manager. And what his job is is to maintain all records and the progress of the process. So currently we also incorporated a detective sergeant as well as a detective to assist in the process. Well, ultimately all supervisors are involved because when we review all of our policies and procedures and rules and regulations, we're constantly making sure that they're up to date. Every single supervisor will review the specific policies that are within their wheelhouse. In terms of the program benefits, it really provides a norm for an agency to judge its performance, provides a basis to correct efficiencies before they become a public problem, requires agencies to commit their policies and procedures to writing, promotes accountability among agency personnel, provides a means of independent valuation of agency operations for quality assurance and then enhances the reputation of the agency and promotes public confidence in the agency. And every three years when it's time for an assessment, we do publicize it to the public. We do ask for public input because that's a time when our agency is fully being examined and analyzed. So we ask for direct input from everyone. Next slide, slide, please, Serge. So what we do, you know, we are a 24, 7, 365 day a year operation. We pride ourselves on sending an officer to every call that comes in, even for a call that doesn't necessarily require an officer's presence, such as a report of a damaged mailbox, let's say. We feel that we still should send an officer directly to speak to somebody who's calling for our assistance. So aside from the current COVID-19 circumstances, believe that any community member who calls for our services for any reason deserves an officer to show up in person, unless the reporting party doesn't feel comfortable in doing so. So our officer's mission is to assist someone directly or to find the right avenue in order to solve whatever the problem is. Since our job is to be on the road and as first responders, we're usually dispatched to all medical and fire calls as well. We will often be the first unseen to be able to assess the situation and to determine what resources are needed. So just to give you a little bit of an explanation of what our patrol functions look like, we're minimally staffed with three patrol officers on the road, including one sergeant, so four cruisers that are on the street. In-house, we also require a station officer to maintain the department. So our patrol division, their usual work hours are four days on and two days off, including holidays. And our uniform patrol division works three distinctive shifts. So they work at 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., 4 p.m. to midnight, and midnight to 8 a.m. And we also at times will incorporate a swing shift from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. In regards to our supervisors, they share the same shifts, but they also have some split shifts to make sure that we have enough coverage throughout the week. During the academic months, we do require mandatory, what we consider, no time off weekends. And we have a full complement of officers on duty anywhere from five to seven officers on duty per shift. So if there's a planned event, additional officers will be hired depending on the needs of that event. During the academic season, those events are plentiful. Events may be anything from expected busy weekends to the Blarney blowout, the Hobart Holdout, or sanctioned events such as road races, incoming students from the university, graduations, or town planned events such as the Town Fair or Lighting of the Mary Maple or even the Fourth of July fireworks, which we missed out on this year. I just want to touch upon outside work details. I know a lot of people often have questions to know what their function is when they see an officer on the street doing, conducting traffic, state law mandates a police officer or flagger on state roads to be hired when work needs to be completed while on a public roadway. The schools often also hire police officer for details such as sporting events or traffic or security purposes. Even private citizens have the ability to hire officers for specific events. The compensation that pays for that officer comes from the private entity so it doesn't come from the town whatsoever. Some other functions within the department, we do have a detective bureau. We currently have a detective lieutenant who's in charge of that unit as well as a detective sergeant and five detectives who each have their own specialties of training. So their function is to augment our patrol, shift as a support system, handle complex investigations from deaths sexual assaults, child abuse, domestic abuse, arson and complex financial crimes, just to name a few. In terms of our administrative staff that includes the chief, myself and Captain Young, we work Monday through Friday in the daytime from eight to four. So next slide, sir. Sorry, I'm just trying to follow along here. So our calls for service used to be roughly around 20,000 calls per year. In the past five years or so, we have been averaging about 18,000 calls per year. I will go back as far as the 10 years ago, our criminal charge rates would average about 1,500 criminal charges per year. And now our criminal charge rates in 2018 were 803 and in 2019 it dropped down to 644. So we attribute much of that to our outreach efforts and our ability to discern the difference from someone who's committing a crime versus somebody who's in mental health crisis. And I know we're gonna touch a little bit upon our crisis intervention team a little bit later. The range of call types are endless though in our town. We get a taste of everything due to the diverse climate, the transient population of students, permanent residents and people from all walks of life. Many of the issues that are at the forefront in Amherst are quality of life issues, homelessness and unfortunately there's been a large uptick in mental health issues in the past few years. So what's kind of interesting is that each shift, I mentioned the day shift, the four to mid shift and the midnight shift. Each shift has its own personality. They're all equally as busy just in different ways. Essentially the day shift is usually centered on the comings and goings of the business district and the schools. The four to midnight shift transitions into the lives of people who are getting off from work and into the quality of life issues. For midnight to eight, the officers are usually dealing with more severe quality of life issues and crimes that are more serious or dangerous in nature. So our world is always changing and our agency is really no different. We're constantly adjusting and evolving to improve our methods to deliver the highest quality of service possible. The department used to be very heavy on reactivity. You know, we used to basically just wait till the call came and respond. However, over time we realized that in order to really fix a problem, we had to be a lot more proactive. We had to find solutions before it happens. So our proactive model had even risen for outreach efforts, which we learned that a commitment to educating the public and creating partnership was far more effective than just plain enforcement. So as our world is becoming more complex, so are our responses. We now spend more time on calls and we used to in the past, mostly due to investing the time to get all of our partners involved to solve a problem. Utilize other agencies such as UMass Student Life Office, Department of Children and Families, the Department of Mental Health, the District Attorney's Office, clinical support options, behavioral health network, Holy Dickinson Hospital, just to name a few. So we try to get all of our partners in play to solve whatever the issue is at hand. Next slide, please. So again, what do we respond to? Just about everything. You know, our town is really unique. We really get a taste of everything. We're fortunate we have the college community here, but we also have a permanent residency here of about 40,000 people. So we really get to touch upon a little bit of everything. I'm gonna go into some of our outreach programs in a little bit more in depth, but certainly we have our DART, CIT, Alice Hu, Adventure Academy, SEPTED, Robes Challenge Course, RAD, and a lot of our officers that coach athletics to try and reach the community in every aspect that we possibly can. Next slide, please. So I wanna talk a little bit about our, our community outreach officer. So Casey Nagel is our current community outreach officer. So the position we call the COO as an acronym, it's a result of a need that's specific to the downtown area. So we saw a need to be able to provide the community a specific conduit to the police department through this officer. The idea is to make the downtown business district a welcoming place for all residents and visitors. The COO's primary concerns are any problems related to the downtown vicinity. You can usually find Officer Nagel on bicycle or foot patrol in order to be more accessible and approachable. The COO position is also a member of several groups to help him to be more efficient in that position. So he is one of our homeless shelter liaison members. He gets to know members of the homeless population to help them with their needs. From a public safety standpoint, for our needs he provides information to other officers of what their, you know, what the homeless person's background, what their story might be, what their tendencies are, and if they're a danger or not. So that really helps us to be able to respond accordingly when we deal with a specific person. He's also a member of our drug addiction response team. So as a dart officer, he helps those addicted to heroin and other substances see treatment with an alliance with Hampshire Hope of Northampton. He also connects with downtown organizations and business owners about the use of Narcan to help reduce overdose fatalities in the town of Amherstet. It's truly been a miracle drug. He's also a member of SPIFI, which is the Strategic Planning Initiative for Families for Youth Coalition in Hampshire County. It was founded in 2002 and is a broad county-wide coalition helps local communities reduce risk factors and make it more likely youth will engage in unhealthy behaviors while increasing protective factors that encourage your youth to make healthy choices. He's also a member of our SEPTED team, which is Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design. So his team attempts to change environment to help criminal activity decrease, not through just enforcement efforts, but just to kind of decide, hey, maybe this neighborhood might need a little bit more lighting. Maybe we need to cut down a tree to gain a little bit more visibility for traffic, things of that nature. He's also a ropes course instructor, which we proudly have over at the Notch Visitor Center. And that's something that we utilize quite frequently. We have countless groups that we use for bonding and team building. So in this position, he tries to use outdoor learning to inspire that team building in personal confidence. So what's nice about Officer Naigle is he's also a camp counselor for our annual Amherst Police Adventure Academy, which we hold for Amherst kids. And that gives us an opportunity to get to know the future of this town. And in return, they have an opportunity to get to know what it's like to be a police officer and what it is that we do. We also coordinate with the University Police Department for that Adventure Academy. Um, we also have three homeless shelter liaisons with the addition of Officer Naigle. We have two more. So what their position really entails is they are a direct conduit to the homeless shelter. And while the homeless shelter is in session, they go there every single night. They check up on the guests that stay there. They check up on the staff that are there. They get to know all the homeless members that are staying over there. It's been really beneficial because they develop a strong relationship with these people and they kind of, they find out what their background is and what their needs are. And they're able to help develop a plan to try and get them to where they need to be. So they help them with their medical needs, with their addictions and their mental health needs. So these liaison officers are a great source to help the rest of the department make determinations on who's committing a crime versus someone who is having a mental health crisis. So the familiarity becomes a department's familiarity, which in turn helps responding officers make the correct decisions. So, um, our role when dealing with someone in crisis really is, is pretty simple. You know, when somebody's in crisis, you know, our function as a police officer when we respond is to make sure that they don't harm themselves and they don't harm others. Once we can establish that the scene is safe and that person's in the safe place, we usually direct them to a higher level of care. And again, I mentioned the partners that we have when it comes to mental health programs, we usually help to facilitate that. I'd like to talk a little bit about our neighborhood liaison officer who's Bill Narmie. So this program is part of our department's outreach. So we recognize that there need to be a change in how we work with our student population, which is, which creates a lot of problems within the quality of life issues for our town. In the past, we used to, the way we used to enforce student problems is trying to arrest our way through it. So we would basically use enforcement only as a deterrent. And over the years, we realized that, that doesn't really work. They weren't really getting the message and it was just a cat and mouse game. So we realized, we really need to change our methods and try something different. So we incorporated our neighborhood liaison officer who works directly with the university and the student population. So we decided to really empower the students to try and hold them responsible in an adult manner. We want them to participate as well. We want them to take part in being responsible members of our community because after all nine months out of the year, they do live in our town and they are part of this community. So our neighborhood liaison, he facilitates this by being a member of, or working with the following organizations. He works with the UMass Off-Campus Student Center with Greek Life, Dean of Students at UMass and Amherst College, the UMass Athletic Department, the Spiffy Coalition, the UMass PD, certainly with our town of Amherst Code Enforcement Office, rental property managers, property owners, neighborhood groups. Again, SEPTED, he is a member of and our CCC, which is our campus community coalition to reduce high risk drinking. And he came up with the creation of party smart registration, which was a way for, again, for students to be able to host a party responsibly. So our NLO's work has been tremendous in fostering a strong relationship with the university and its student body. Due to his work, arrest rates have gone down. Quality of life issues have decreased in terms of problems. Large shade drinks last year have entirely disappeared from the entire year of 2019, which is kind of strange and refreshing. So the culture is getting away from UMass being really a party school. The overall experience has been so productive and fruitful that our future plans are to expand our outreach unit to try and take this to the next level. In addition, Officer Larmie has been a keynote speaker in several national level town-gown trainings. His experience and expertise has become a national model where many large-scale universities are starting to adopt and develop strategies based on Officer Larmie's work. Next slide, please. So certainly what the structure that we utilize that helped guide our department is we're regulated by our policies, procedures, rules and regulations, certainly our training. And as Captain Young had touched upon, our training is superior, in my opinion, to any other agency in Western Mass. That's something that our chief of police takes great pride in. Training is at the core of the foundation of our police department. So other things that we use to regulate how we work in our performance is our collective bargaining agreements and certainly our accreditation standards, which we're very proud of. Next slide, please. So we do maintain a comprehensive list of policies governing job performance and duties. Some of the samples are in there. We have, I think we have 99 policies right now that cover anything from arrest to criminal investigations, victims' rights, use of force, traffic services, training records keeping. Of course, all of our policies are public records. So we invite everyone and anyone to take a look at our policies and certainly give input if you see as necessary. Next slide, please. So Amherst police officers receive guidance and mandates not just from our policy, but certainly from our mass general laws that we have to follow, as well as federal case law, IACP and PERF recommendations and guidelines are town bylaws. Certainly the training that we have and we do follow the six pillars that are outlined from President Obama's guidelines for the 21st century policing. Next slide, please. So specialized equipment. So all the equipment that our department uses is considered as defensive weapons, hence the term defensive tactics. It's against our use of force policy to ever use any techniques or weapons in an offensive manner. The specialized equipment that we own is a culmination of years of incident arising, experience and research. For example, in the spring of 2003, our entire department was ordered in on a Saturday to deal with the annual Hobart Hoedown, which used to be a huge unsanctioned spring party at the end of the year for university students and they would invite all their friends and they would descend on Hobart Lane and North Amherst for the last big party. So on that night, by close to nightfall, most of our department was dismissed prematurely, really due to a lack of activity. There were a lot of kids around, but just not a whole lot going on. So that left about 15 officers that were on patrol that night. So there were still thousands of students that were out and they were just milling around, but there really wasn't too many issues until a fight broke out on Hobart Hoedown, which just a mob of people gathered around to watch that fight. So as soon as the officers tried to intervene, the crowd turned on the police and they began throwing rocks and beer cans and whatever they could find at the police. So I was there that night, we were grossly outnumbered and we really lacked a lot of tools. We didn't have any riot gear to protect ourselves. We didn't have any type of less than lethal weapons to try and mitigate the situation. So for hours, we would just march in the streets trying to make the mob dissipate. So from that night, many lessons were learned. We realized that we were really ill equipped to deal with these large scale events. We needed a tool that could be less than lethal, that was effective and that could provide a longer range. So we discovered the pepper ball gun, which delivered all of those qualities. So the gun itself is really no different than a pepper ball gun that your teenage child might be interested in. The difference is that it's quick for police usage. The differences is that the projectiles that are contained within, it contained a pepper component that's utilized as an irritant. So that irritant is not long lasting. It usually lasts for about 45 minutes and then it dissipates in the air. Doesn't present any long-term effects and the pepper's really the same. It's the same as the pepper spray canisters that the officers carry. And certainly it's the same pepper that any ordinary person can purchase over the counter for personal protection. So since then, there have been several years when there was at least one riot per year, certainly a UMass that we would assist with and then development of the blood and blowout came around. So certainly we've been really thankful to have these tools. We utilize them for area denial to prevent people from going into an area where we don't want them to be in. So we never use any direct targeting techniques, which means we never shoot at the people. The rounds are always skipped off the ground or shot above a building to allow the irritant to kind of drop down for that area denial. Another item that we utilize is the expandable baton. It's expandable because it's simply easier to carry on an officer's tool belt. We used to carry a long stick, which was really cumbersome and the optics of it just isn't that good carrying a stick like that. So this tool again is used defensively for controlling techniques or to be deployed when someone who is actively assaultive. We don't, in terms of military grade weapons as something that we don't possess any and we don't subscribe to any military surplus giveaways. So in terms of tear gas, we don't have any and we never will, we also do, we don't use any rubber bullets. I know there was a proposal for a discussion on tasers. So we've looked into that in our department, certainly when we saw an uptick in the rise of mental health cases, you know, we kind of looked at tasers as a force options. That's something that we really wanted to get involved in. We consulted our resident experts, which is our defensive tactics and instructors. And at this point in time, we saw that it's probably not a good idea for our department. It's not really fitting. You just froze. It looks like the chief went to get him going. Serge, why don't we go to the next slide and I'll take it over until we get him on frozen. He froze. Okay, can you hear me now? Yep, you're good to go Nugget. Okay, I'm back in. I'll just finish this portion in terms of tasers. Now, they're not always reliable, simply because the prongs can't always penetrate thick clothing or winter clothing. Seeing that we're a northern state with a lot of, we're a cold weather state. So it can really only be effective during certain months. Also, there's a huge amount of liability that comes with the use of tasers. In our opinion, the optics of using it is just really not that good. On top of that, the training would have to be extensive to be able to differentiate from utilizing a taser versus a real gun and they're expensive. The amount that will be used, that they would be utilized may not justify the cost. So overall at this point in time, we're not sure if our community is the right place for it. So that's something to be discussed down the line if somebody wanted to see that taking place. Next slide, please. So what does a typical officer do? In our police department, a typical officer will patrol in a vehicle, a bicycle, motorcycle, or a foot patrol. The equipment that we utilize for your ordinary patrol officer, they wear a ballistic vest, they have a radio, they have their sidearm, extra magazines, handcuffs, expandable baton, OC pepper spray, a tourniquet, and a flashlight, which amounts to about 25 to 30 extra pounds of gear that they have to carry. In their patrol vehicles, they're equipped with a MDT, which is a computer, a radio fixed cruiser cam, first aid bag, not immediate external defibrillator, flashlight, flares, medical blankets, cones, crime scene materials, stop stick, patrol rifle, a shotgun, and their personal bag with maps, ticket books, law books, gloves, COVID-19 mask, writing utensils, coffee, and their lunch. So really a typical Amherst police officer is assigned a permanent sector for the duration of a six month bid. They're three sectors in Amherst. It's broken up to the North, Center, and South, according to the geography of the town. In the past, officers were just assigned any sector with no rhyme or reason. Years ago, our department realized that we needed to be able to provide the public with some more consistency to have an officer within their sector or neighborhood that could really become familiar with that officer and the officer could be familiar with the neighborhood. Realized that the officer would also become, would be able to deliver a higher quality of services with that familiarity. So the sector-based policing model was a foundation that kind of led to our community policing model. Within the patrol, there are several officers from different shifts assigned to each sector along with supervisors. So this provides some additional buy-in from the officers to be responsible for really what happens in their designated area. All the officers from within one sector are able to communicate the problems that rise in their sector and to discuss solutions from one shift to another. The model has been successful. With the incorporation of our outreach efforts, each officer becomes even more intimately involved with their area rather than aimlessly patrolling with no objectives in mind. Instead of what people would call random patrol, we wish to incorporate purposeful patrol. In each shift, officers will know what issues are popping up in their sector, whether it's a noise issue or a traffic issue or break in and entering or whatnot. So in each day, they will have a specific task to handle instead of just sitting there waiting for the call to come in. When an officer responds to any call, we consider every situation an investigation. So the officer has a responsibility to gain knowledge of what the crime or the problem is, their duties to assess the situation and then make a determination of what resources are needed or what investigative steps are needed. So they determine that there's a solution or a suspect, then they put a plan into place to resolve that matter. So that's really typically what the Amherst police officer does on a typical day. And I'm gonna, for the next slide, please. Thank you, Serge. So I'm gonna kick this back to Chief Livingstone to talk a little bit about accountability and community feedback. So thanks, Gabe. And we're getting kind of towards the end. So I'll try and get through this relatively quickly so that we can get into the second part of this meeting as far as questions and that sort of thing from town council. But on this slide, accountability and community feedback, you know, the feedback part, I think we've got the accountability down pretty well, you know, based on our policies and procedures and how we keep track of what officers are doing and what officers training looks like. The community feedback, maybe not so much. You know, Gabe mentioned that we were looking to expand our community outreach officers on the successes we've had with our campus community and we were looking at expanding that to incorporate a lot of the successes there with other parts of our community, you know, citizens and people who are feeling quite frankly left out or not involved in their police agency. So, you know, we really mean it when we're gonna be welcoming what the community is looking for from us and what types of policing initiatives they may want. So, you know, moving forward, you know, that's gonna be part of the core of what myself and hopefully the town council we're part of, but, you know, specific to accountability. So, you know, complaints, we got a lot of questions specifically on our webpage. You know, everybody could find out where you could commend an officer but it was a little bit more difficult trying to find out where complaints may be able to be filed. So we worked with our IT people and made changes and we continue to make changes to our website so that things are just easier for people to find whether it's policies or being able to make a complaint about anything regarding the department. And those complaints can currently be found online at our website at amherstpd.org but also through the Human Rights Commission and through the town's manager's office. And we kind of thought it was, we just assumed that everybody knew that you could find the information there and we, my friend, they found out that people didn't know that. So, you know, that message needs to get out there and it needs to be out there more strongly. If a complaint is filed, you know, everything is investigated even if it's an anonymous complaint. I think Captain Young mentioned that process starts either with he or I with the complaint process and then we started an investigation many, many times. Somebody will come in to complain about, you know, why they were stopped for a traffic violation and sometimes it's just, some people is having a verbal conversation with people but if somebody's not happy with that, we encourage them to go through the more formal process of taking out a police complaint form and going through that process. As far as individuals who are, want the more formal process, you know, we want them to be part of the investigation so we encourage them to participate. You know, we try and get them to stay with the process for the entirety of that investigation. Once the investigation is completed by our agency, I offer to meet with all the complainants if they choose to, just to give them, you know, a synopsis of what happened and why we do or why we did things that we do and if it involves officer corrections, we make them aware of that as well. So it gives, in the end, it gives the opportunity for a complainant to feel more, I guess, happy about the process that they've been involved in and for the agency's perspective, it gives us the opportunity to gauge training initiatives or if officer corrections need to be made, you know, those are the types of things that we consider for that. So, surge next slide please. So these are just pledges that are kind of at the core of what our agency is about and are important to us but in this process tonight is just really the start for our community. I know our officers and it starts with my office and myself remain committed to this community. I mean, I've been here for 42 years. I love the town of Amherst. There's a reason I've stayed here for so long. It's just a great, great community to work in and be in. So with that being said, you know, we are committed to progressiveness and professionalism. Again, I think, you know, what we do with our training, what we do with our policies and accreditation process kind of proves that. Totally wanna hear from our community. We wanna hear from our town council members about, you know, what they're happy with and if there's something they're not happy with, you know, we wanna hear about that as well. So, you know, all of our officers are aware that this process is taking place. They're invested and, you know, they may be watching from home, they may be watching downstairs to see what's going on, but, you know, this isn't a part about learning and listening really is what it comes down to, so. Surge, next slide, please. So, we knew that there were going to be a lot of questions that we, or we felt we were gonna be able to answer a lot of questions about the agency and just a quick overview of how we operate and what we really do. We also got some specific questions that were, you know, given to us, you know, a few days ago. So, we were trying to answer those as well. And these were some of the specific questions that we wanted to make sure that we kind of covered, you know, understanding that we're not gonna get to them all tonight. And there's probably gonna be a lot of them coming down the road with future meetings as well. But, you know, a lot of what's been talked about lately are use of force policies, including reporting the use of force. So, you know, our use of force policy, and again, that's one of the ones that we made sure was more easily accessible in our website. It's out there. We encourage people to read it if there are questions about it, let them to us. You know, it is set in standards, it is set by law, a lot of what we do in the use of force policy there. All the restrictions are based in law, what an officer can and can't do. It's something that we go over and over and over again with police officers. Almost it seems like at every training. So, you know, we review all use of force issues on an annual basis. And it is also reviewed from our accreditation committee every three years for independent review to make sure that we're doing what we say we are doing. And by law, every incident of force has to be reported. And again, we just review anything has to do with a use of force issue. So, and of course anything that involves the use of a firearm gets referred to the Northwestern DA's office for an independent investigation and review regardless of what the injury is. You know, I can aptly say that we try to go back as far as the records can, that we could as far as what I quite frankly, I knew that there's never been an officer that's used a firearm since I've been here in 42 years. And we couldn't find any uses of an actual Amherst police officer firing a weapon and which is good news. And but again, I guess I'm not surprised at that either. Next slide, please, Serge. Do we require de-escalation? A lot is being discussed about this. Again, that's pretty much the core of what our agency, how we operate. You know, we teach and teach and teach de-escalation techniques. It's part of our use of force options and continuum. It's based in law. It's based in the MPTC requirements, certainly in our written policies. And it's something that we just ingrain into the officers at every training opportunity that we can. You know, it truly is the bedrock of the training. And it does start at the academy level. And then it's just free and forced continually here in the Amherst police department. You know, we talk about it in recent court decisions, whether it's criminal law update or, you know, in our dynamic trainings, scenario-based trainings that we do, role-player trainings that we do, we incorporate it all. So next question, or excuse me, next slide, please, Serge. We got a couple of questions about our civilian dispatchers. You know, all 12 of them, do they get specific training in how to deal or recognize mental health crisis? They do. That's state mandated as well as part of their training. You know, I'd be very, very proud of the protocols that we have in place and where we have gone as an agency in dealing with individuals, dealing with mental health, it can get better. Certainly our crisis intervention team is unbelievable. I think we have 75% of our agency, our entire agency trained in crisis intervention models. So not quite at 100% yet, but close, but again, anytime we have an incident where a dispatcher may recognize an individual who is suffering from mental health issues or problems, we make sure if one's working and they usually are, that somebody who has that specific training gets dispatched to that specific call, along with a supervisor. Serge, next question, or next slide, please. So civilian oversight, a lot of questions and discussion about that recently. So as far as policy review through our accreditation, there is civilian oversight for that. We incorporate civilians in the review of those policies, specific to a local group of community members. We don't have that, but certainly I think that's where our discussion is going to go. Quite frankly, I would welcome that. I would love for members of our own community to have access and come in and discuss all of our policies and what they look like. And I'm sure there would be questions, but that's something that we kind of hope happens with our community is to have somebody so who's actively involved in being interested in what we do as an agency. So hopefully that will evolve. Again, just getting back to any incidents of force with a firearm or a death or any kind of serious injury that gets turned over to the Northwestern District Attorney's Office for Investigation. So that would be a form of civilian oversight at the legal level. Serge, next. So this is specific to resident complaints and how they're collected and made available to the public and what accountability system is in place. So if there's a complaint received from an individual, we encourage those individuals to meet directly at first and it could possibly be on the midnight to eight shift. So I may not be around or Captain Young may not be around, but they're encouraged to speak with whoever the supervisor is working at that time so that he can direct them to the proper chance to get that complaint heard and investigated. But if some people aren't comfortable coming into the police station to complain about another police officer. So again, the encouragement is that they would go through the town manager's office, the HR department or human rights commission. They can do it anonymously, they can do it over the phone, they can do it in person. And then that would begin the process of our internal discipline review and process. So there is some accountability or excuse me, there is a system of accountability in our policies, but also the discipline process, if there needs to be discipline, it is part of our collective bargaining and agreements with our police unions. And those are on the line as well. And I know they're online through the HR department as well. So if you needed to check what those, what was specifically in a police union contract, you can read that and see what's in there. So that's public record as well. Serge, moving on. Yeah, I think that pretty much covers our slideshow. I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of questions, hopefully we can answer them all. I know I wanted to touch bases kind of getting away from what our agency does specific to policies and procedures and what this slide show represented towards what our concerns are This year in particular, it was just announced recently that the University of Massachusetts is going to be opening to some degree with online and distance learning, but that also means that we're gonna have a huge influx of students coming back to live both on the campus and certainly in our housing projects or rental properties across town. I had some discussions earlier today and earlier this week with the head of the University of Mass Police Department. They have the same concerns that we do specific to COVID-19 and how we're going to deal with issues. We're having the town manager and I had discussions this morning as well with other department heads about what that's going to look like and how we're really going to deal and how that's going to affect the Amherst community. You know, just again, some of the things that we as police officers are going to be dealing with, what looks like probably about five or six weeks from now. So, you know, more to come on that and we're gonna get any additional information on about how we're going to be responding to specifics on COVID-19 when the students return for this educational year. So I think at that, I'll turn it back over to the town manager to the town council president and Ron, Gabe and I can field questions or just listen in. There was one more slide for just so people can see it. Oh, is that Gabe or excuse me, was there a search? Did I miss something? Yeah. Yes, just for more information. Again, we've made a lot of changes to our website lately based on information we were getting from the public, from the town council, from the town manager. So I expect that we're going to be make additional changes to our website, but, you know, these are areas where you can find additional information about how our operations work in the police department and who we are and what we represent, what we have invested in the community. So, you know, these are all places that people can go to get additional information. So thanks, Serge. Paul, did you have any concluding comment at this point? First of all, let me say thank you for a very, very thorough presentation. This presentation does appear in the packet and we have added the memo that came from me to the town manager, which pulled together the many things I've been hearing from the community and the council, that we hope that this presentation has addressed many of them. We're going to now move on to comments from the council and questions. And when we get them, I will call on the person and they will unmute and the question is going to go directly to Scott Livingston, the chief Livingston, and then he will decide whether or not he or one of the other captains will address it or Tim Nelson, if need be. The first question is coming or comment is coming from Melissa Brewer. Please unmute. Yes, thank you so much for that incredibly thorough presentation. And some of your people are aware that I was lucky enough to be able to participate in the Citizen Police Academy some years back. And so I'd heard some of the, a good bit of this information before, but hearing it now with my current lens is incredibly helpful. So thank you very much. One thing I want to address, I think largely actually to the council president is I really appreciate that that document that that was really took a lot of time to put together comments from, perhaps at least as many as 13 counselors past the public is while it is an excellent document, it actually doesn't cover at least 10 of the things I asked about. And so I'm wondering where we're at process wise because I'm hearing a little bit from the chief that in response to town council concerns, we're doing some things. And I was unaware that the town council had directed through the town manager, the APD to do anything at this point. This is our first conversation. And so that felt a little odd. And then in terms of I don't expect anyone including the town manager or even the president to have to like respond to every one of my literally 20 questions in my responses. And I don't want to spend our time on it tonight. But I feel like the questions that we turned in, just like the public's questions that got uploaded to our packet should probably be sent directly to the police just so they know what quantons of other questions we've had. Like I said, I have no fault with this document. It's excellent. But it doesn't ask some of the specifics. Something as simple as the police stops committee. We did used to have a police stops committee. That's very different than an oversight committee. But did we learn anything useful from it? That's the kind of question. Eventually I'd like to have answered because I think it would inform as we go forward how we can make a committee more useful. That was a town meeting created committee. I don't know anything that ever happened because of it. Maybe helpful, maybe not helpful. And just so we can learn from those experiences. So understanding what our next steps are when we leave here tonight and how we can communicate our very specific concerns because we're not supposed to just call up the chief and say, here's my 20 questions. Here's my 15 questions. How do we go from there? Alyssa, is there a specific question or two you would like to ask tonight if for the benefit of the public? I think there are so many and so many were touched on. And I think that the police stops committee only from the standpoint that we were looking for demographic information associated from that. And if we found that successful just so just as we were just talking about town manager evaluations and forums and how we get people to participate. The way we did that police stops committee was maybe helpful or maybe not helpful. And so that's something I'd just like to be assured that we'll talk about at some point in the future. And very specifically, since I'll try and limit myself to another one is it was mentioned the use and I don't want to use the wrong term but the word riot did come up in terms of not having that gear in 2003 and then later. And there have been some concerns expressed all along that on the one hand, we absolutely have to keep our officers safe. And on the other hand, what's the signal it sends to people visibly when they see people geared up to get them to go somewhere. And so just to get a sense based on all the extensive training that you guys do and women do, how do you feel like you strike that balance between keeping your people absolutely safe like you need to and the symbolism it has for people to see those riot shields and those helmets at any time. Yeah, we recognized, well, first of all when we didn't have the equipment and then purchased the equipment it was based on police officer injuries. So we didn't have used to have any of that equipment. And going back to the early 2000s when we really started to see the large outdoor parties that's when we started purchasing protective gear like that. And then as time moved on and the Hobart Hoedown turned into the Barney blowout we also recognized that there was a entity of young people who really that was a happening. So a party wasn't a party until the police showed up with protective gear and we recognize that. So now we've changed our practices again so that protective gear like you talked about whether it be helmets or shields is not brought out unless absolutely necessary. So officers may have it in their cruisers in their trunks if there's anticipation of something bad might happening. And previously we would just show up with it and hang out and realize that wasn't the right thing to be doing. So because students did recognize that, hey, if we start something maybe they'll react to something. So it was a learning lesson for us as well. So we've changed how we do things specific to gatherings. There was another question about the police stops committee. So, and I remember when Alyssa brought that up before I'm not familiar with it and I reached out to the previous chief and he couldn't remember it. So I'm gonna have to go back and maybe even get educated about what the purpose of that was for. And Alyssa, I don't know if you recall specifically but I'm not familiar with what they were tasked with Okay, we'll get that information. Moving on, Dorothy of your hand up, please unmute. Okay, well, thank you for putting things in context. I had not realized you had so many officers. So that means that it's not at least from where I live they're not an intrusive part of life here which I appreciate. And I was unhappy to hear that you actually did have that riot gear, but I'm glad that you decided not to make shows of it. I think recently we've seen some really disgusting displays of military might in the civic experiences. But I had one question. Your answer on use of firing a gun, first of all that you have to go through the district attorney and two that you don't have a memory of it happening. That was very heartening, but I did not see any details here about use of physical force and that's kind of how we got started on this particular round, which was to do with choke holes, knee holes and that kind of thing. So I was just, I'm gonna give you an opportunity to talk a little bit about your philosophy of use of physical force. So it's very specific when an officer can use any force for that matter, but specific to choke holes and knee holes and stuff, they're against the law. They aren't something that's been taught. Certainly not in this agency, they're not part of what we teach our officers and they've never been anything that we've ever taught police officers that they're allowed to do. So it's taboo in this agency and it's not allowed and it's never been taught. Thank you very much. Thanks, Dorothy. George Ryan. Yes, thank you, Lynn. And again, thank you to the chief and to Captain Sting and Young for their presentation. I've got a couple of questions that I'd like to present if I could very quickly so we can get to the public. First is, does it do with use of force and how frequently these sorts of incidents take place? In a given year, can you give us some examples of what in a given year, can you give us some sense of how many times you see these kinds of use of force reports come across your desk? You're talking in the tens, 20s, hundreds? Just curious about that. I also have a question from a constituent about historical database. There are clearly, we can access daily reports. Does there exist a database the public can access that is historical over a long period of time related to police stops and arrests? So first, just a couple of quick questions about use of force and any statistics there. And secondly, about database and whether there's a historical database that people can access beyond just the daily reports. Sure, so specific to the stop data. Yeah, we collect that and present a report annually and people certainly I can get that access. Gabe, is that on our website as far as racial data profiling car stops? I know we have it, but I don't know if we publish it in our website anywhere. It is not published, but that's data that's available. So certainly, if somebody wants it, we can make that available. And then the second part of the question, Ronnie, was the number of use of force incidents and it can be anything from using pepper spray to a hand strike to a baton strike, that sort of thing. Yeah, so Chief, the answer to that is it's in the tens. I can't give you a specific number for last year. We review each use of force every January. We have a, we look at the last years because we're assessing it for training, for patterns of conduct, things of that nature. It's not in the dozens. It's in the single digits more often than not. And if not, it's right in that ballpark. And all that is public record and I can produce that at any time, Chief. We keep track of it over time and memorandum. Thank you. Pat D'Angelois. Thank you, everyone. I wanna thank the department and for the work that you do as a sister of a police officer. I have an understanding of the kind of impact it can have on your personal life and on your own health. And I find that your commitment to the community is believable and I'm grateful for it. I do wanna say that my friend, Jackie Brown Hazard worked on the police stop thing and it was activated by town meeting 2004 and ended as inactive in 2008. And the goal was to gather information about stops and the number of stops the gender of the person stopped and easily identifiable ethnicity of all vehicle occupants. And the last time we talked in a budget meeting, we didn't quite, I didn't seem like you had the information around ethnicity and we're concerned about that. I wanna get to two things and somewhere in here there's a question or two. You talk about President Obama's task force and on 21st century policing and using that as a reference. That document, those guidelines call for law enforcement agencies to collect, maintain and analyze demographic data on all detentions, stops, frisk, searches, summons and arrests and most importantly share that, actively share that with the community. It called for transparency around that data. And also the guidelines also call for the involvement of the community in the process of developing and evaluating policies and procedures and reviewing incidents. And so I got a sense as you spoke about some commitment to the community being able to talk to you. But from in these guidelines, there's very active citizen oversight and management and design in collaboration with the police. And I'd like to get your reaction to that and also what you see as the positives of it or possibly the negatives of it. Sure, Pat, thank you. From the perspective of police policies and community oversight, I'm hoping that's kind of where we go forward with these meetings and by that I mean more specifically to our community because we do have civilian oversight but it's at the state level, it's not at the local community level. And I'm kind of, I know Ron and Gabe and I are, all three of us are hoping that one of the developments that comes out of these discussions and these meetings are just that. Getting any community and civilians involved in regular meetings of what our policies consist of, what is it that we're doing that you may not like and what is it that we could change and make things better? So, I'm hoping that's where we're going with this. No specific to the President Obama's task force on 21st century policing. They talk about the six pillars of 21st century policing. And I think we meet those standards in one way or the other. I don't think they're always as specific as they could be. Certainly we've got an awful lot of information and data that is accessible to the public but maybe not enough. And again, I think that's an area we need to be probably more specific about. Where do you find this information? How do you access it? That sort of thing. Can I just interrupt her one second? More than accessing the information, the guidelines really call for having community members collaboratively design policy and procedures. And that's different than just having people get the information. And so how do you react to that kind of active involvement? So there's gonna be a degree of education if we get a, say for instance, we get a task force together to talk about that because a lot of our policy is based in state law. So we may not be able to do some things. Without getting some sort of legislative change perhaps but I guess that's kind of what I meant but because a lot of what our policies are based on are regulated by various degrees of law. Am I missing anything Ronnie in that you think? Really the vast majority of our policies been in existence for a number of years. So when President Obama first announced this initiative we already had the existing policies. Most of them are based on what the accreditation standards were in 2002 when we first became accredited. And then they changed as those changed quite frankly as they evolved. I think what the city council person is saying is or town council person is saying is that we haven't incorporated we've taken our existing policies and just kind of ridden with them. And while we have some oversight the development portion of that was never committed or sent to the community or involved the community. And I don't mean to paraphrase what you're saying madam but is that accurate? That's part of it. Yes, thank you. So I just want to echo what the chief says that falls under my guise. I would welcome that. I would love to have somebody participate in that. It would give a fresh set of eyes. A lot of what we do the accreditation requires us to do but there is some flexibility in what we do as well. And quite frankly if we're not doing what we're supposed to be doing if it's not meeting with the community standards are we need to work on that. And I'd be part of that wellfully. Is that any other comment? Not right now. Okay. Thank you. Steve Schreiber. Hi. I was wondering if the chief had any opinion on three bills that are being considered by the state legislature right now. So I'm going to actually read these off in the email that the ACLU said. So one is called the act to save black lives and it rewrites the rules for the use of force and it enacts serious consequences for misconduct. Another one is an act to secure civil rights. This bill would remove qualified immunity from Massachusetts law and allow victims of lease brutality to hold officers accountable for civil rights violations. The last one is a face surveillance moratorium. It would immediately pause. Government use of face surveillance. So just wondering if there's any comments, opinions of that. Sure, I'll take them in reverse order, Steve, because it's surveillance, the face recognition surveillance thing is an easy one for us. It's not an area that we're looking to, we were not looking to go into as far as that's concerned. And I know there was some discussion already about potentially a bylaw that would prohibit that. We're fine with that. I don't think that's going to a factor and inhibit our ability to do our policing as we are currently doing. So I don't see that as an issue, certainly not from our agency, that we're to move forward with a bylaw. I did get a chance to start reading the House and Senate measures today. I was sent to me this morning, as a matter of fact, I think it's 75 pages long. You had specific ones about police certification and where that may lead us. I think it's a great idea. I think there needs to be a system in place where officers receive some sort of annual. I think they're going to do it a three year certification process. I think it should be annual. There should be mechanisms in place to be able to weed out officers who aren't behaving properly. I look at agencies that are attached to the civil service process and what a disaster that is. Just trying to, from a police chief's perspective and out discipline or training measures and stuff, it's just, it's a mess. And so I think this would go a long way in correcting that and then moving forward with a post system where officers are all held at the same standards. I think it makes a lot of sense. I'm trying to remember what your last one was specific to. It rewrites the rules for the use of force and enact serious consequences for misconduct. Right. Violent police tactics like tear gas, rubber bullets. Yeah, I saw that there was a section in there about tear gas and canines and how that would be affected. The tear gas one is an easy one. Again, especially with this agency, but I think there needs to be regulations that are statewide so that all agencies are abiding by the same rules, so to speak. You've never used tear gas. I've been subjected to it in the past. It's not pleasant. I don't see the need for it from a professional standpoint, so I get where that's coming from. Thank you. You're welcome. I want to go on. Yes, thank you so much for your presentation today. I had a couple of questions. The first one is maybe you're familiar with the eight-con wait list and it's what we're hearing from you today. It seems like we very much do adhere to that list, but could you just confirm that we don't do any of those things? Can you confirm that? Yeah, I can confirm that. Matter of fact, most of what's on that list, we follow those protocols for many, many years. We called at the eight-con wait. I knew that was a new term, but we were reviewing it. The captains and I were like, we've never done show calls, we've never allowed it, and we went right down the list and we're like, oh, these are part of our policies already. So it was very, very simple for our agency to abide by it. Excellent, good to hear. We can let people know about that in our town that we at least got that down. Yes, the second question was like, I heard that you do a lot of outreach in the adventure camps with kids, and I was wondering what is the turnout for those things and how can people, how do people hear about those? So we used to always list it on our website and did a lot of just publications and flyers and that sort of thing when we began those camps. I think 20 years ago, we started those initiatives with a, and it was a one-week camp where we took kids from Amherst. It was specific to Amherst kids. They never, it was free. We paid for it from the grant and then we lost the grant. We just continued the camp and we incorporated University of Mass in that with that and it's a week long camp. It was so popular that we had to turn people away and we were actually considering doing consecutive weeks of camp and then COVID hit and so this year's camp had to be canceled. Unfortunately, I know it's one that our cops like as much as the kids like. It's an opportunity for police officers to basically just go hang out. It's very, very specific to half the days divided up into what does a police officer's life look like and then the second of the day is mostly just goofing around, having fun, going to swimming pools to our ropes adventures camp and doing team learning procedures and stuff like that but no, it's basically just a fun week for kids. Yeah, I think that's really important to have that sort of outreach and building relationships and the last thing was, what percentage of the calls do you know are for crisis intervention and crisis management and what are some of the best practices we come in and yeah, how can we improve that? Is that something you'd like to continue doing or do you feel that could move forward to have having a dedicated line or something that is handled by specialists? Sure, I'll probably turn this answer over to Captain Young because that's really his expertise and he was part of, he was the original grant writer how we got this crisis intervention team going so I'll take that question, a response over to him. Certainly, so percentage I don't have for you I can give you the number of calls that we responded to last year. So my notes here say that it's been very consistent over the last three or four years. We responded to 362 calls for people in crisis last year and then coupled on top of that we conducted 107 follow-up calls which were self-initiated calls on the part of our agency. So about 500 calls per service and that's been very consistent the last three, four, five years so CIT, the way we do it we practice the Memphis model there are a variety of different nationally recognized models. The Memphis model was actually driven from tragedy. There was a young person who was shot by the Memphis police officer who was suffering from a behavioral health issue. And that portion of CIT came from that tragedy and it's one of the reasons that we practice it here. CIT just so as not to confuse matters we're not clinicians, we don't pretend to be clinicians we don't masquerade as clinicians we don't purport ourselves to be clinicians. Really what it does it kind of bridges the gap between crisis response and getting people connected with people who can have long-term health concern effectiveness. So we've bonded with CSO, clinical support service, clinical support options in Northampton as well as the behavioral health network BHN down in Springfield. It allows us to connect with them whether it's something like veterans issues as they said mental health recovery, behavioral health issues, de-escalation process in the training that they provide for us. The CIT officers that are trained have to go through a 40 plus week program and they cover all of those items, things like human rights and stigma, law enforcement education, autism awareness type things, trauma trauma informed interviewing process, de-escalation techniques and just basically what these various clinicians bring to the table. Again, we don't try to solve people's problems we try to assist. Our follow-up process, usually that follow-up involves people who have been involved or are seeking our assistance in that area and sometimes with our dark program it involves like aftercare type calls. We provide access to people who are looking for recovery coaches or maybe access to naloxone, Narcan and so some of the follow-up is involved with that because we kind of don't always disassociate behavioral mental health calls with people that might have substance abuse issues, substance abuse disorders. Does that answer the question? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, great, thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. You're muted, Lynn, but I think you were calling on me. I am and thank you, Mandy. Thanks. Thank you so much for the presentation. It's good to hear for some of the items that we asked that our department does not engage in some of these use of force techniques and has very few force complaints and use of force reports where force was actually used. But I still have some concerns when you have so few complaints, that's a good thing, obviously, but it makes it hard to really determine whether implicit biases or any biases of officers are actually being shown through on calls. And so I'd like you to address how we, not just train, I saw on the list that there's implicit bias training, but how do we screen officers for their responses or how they might respond to calls, interactions, potential use of force on holstering a weapon or almost using force, but also how they might charge individuals based on racial bias or if they have a racial bias, how do we screen for those things? How do we train for that? How do we determine that it's not happening? I know I had one example that you probably didn't get, which is firearm training. My father was a cop for 29 years and I don't know whether they do this now, but they used to firearm train with sort of things popping up and you had to determine in the dark whether that silhouette that popped up was a hazard or not, a risk or not. And you could use stats from whether a weapon was fired in that type of firearms training to determine, especially if races are used and different racial makeups are used on those to determine whether there's a implicit bias there. So could you discuss, sort of address those issues and how we would determine that and then how would we correct for that? So specific to the firearms training, we do firearms training. It's only mandated by the MPTC once a year. We do it three times a year and it's pretty extensive because we also incorporate defensive tactics, de-escalation into all of that training as well. You know, getting back to the targeting pop-up systems. I know what you're talking about. We don't utilize those. And again, the course of instruction for firearms is based at the state level. So we're mandated on how we instruct that and how we, you know, right down to the last. Everything's gotta be accounted for. So it's really regulated at the state MPTC level through firearms instructors and that sort of thing. You know, the original question, Mandy Jo, about I guess we can only analyze what we can see. So, I mean, we do an extensive, you know, interview process through hiring and in psychological evaluations, but, you know, I guess we kind of go by, even an eye on our officers having proper supervision, having an unbelievable amount of training so that if there are questions or concerns there, I think we would recognize them. But I don't know if there's a mechanism in place to kind of see something, you know, in the future. I don't know exactly if that's what you were asking, but, you know, it's really about making sure we hire the right people who an extensive amount of training have proper supervision. You know, there's two things, reliability and police officers and police departments really become an issue and it really comes down to training and supervision. I guess one of the things I was getting at was, did you ever analyze in terms of stops, but whether, not who stopped, say, or what the call is, but whether a suspect is actually charged with a crime and what that crime is based on racial bias, as we know in the court system in terms of sentencing, there's a lot of racial bias in sentencing. Have we ever looked at our statistics to determine whether the decision to charge and what to charge with is also informed by racial bias? I think the simple answer to that is no. Most of what we do as far as tracking is based on vehicle stops and maybe not criminal charges. I aired, and I think it was the finance committee meeting when I said that we didn't always track or have the ability to track the arrest numbers and race makeup and Gabe corrected me on that and told me I was wrong. So my correction there, I wasn't sure that in every booking process of booking procedure, we were able to go back and get all that information, but as far as criminal charges, we can track it. What's in an officer's mind at the time of making a decision and making an arrest? All we can do is track those arrest numbers and see if one officer is arresting too many 21-year-old females or if one officer is stopping too many people who are Hispanic. So those types of things we track, but getting into the minds of the officers not so much about why they did something. Okay, and I have one other question that relates to juveniles. We have a fairly robust detective system and a patrol officer system. Do we have anyone dedicated to dealing with juveniles and for interviews for either whether the juvenile is a suspect or someone involved on the victim side? But also, what is our policy or do we tend to have a policy as it relates to juveniles who might have committed a crime to keep them out of the system and do some sort of counseling that does not involve actually charging them with crimes? So we sure do, and it's a lot of it's based in law. And I'm gonna again turn this one over to Captain Young because he ran the detective bureau for her and probably had many more dealings with juveniles. And Ron, if you don't mind me putting on the spot. No, happy to achieve. So it's ironic because I just rewrote the juvenile policy while reviewed and amended it about three or four months ago, right when COVID hit. So back probably February and March. As we know, there were some sweeping changes that relates to juveniles. I'm here in the state at the statute level. So we do have a juvenile officer while we don't call him a juvenile officer. He actually wears a bunch of different hats. He's our liaison to the juvenile court system, Detective Marcus Humber. And he meets and deals with both the prosecution and the clerk's office over that on a regular basis. We charge very few juveniles with criminal acts. I wish I had a number with you, but I'm gonna say it was less than 10 last calendar year. We tend to do diversion before diversion was a thing, quite frankly. We haven't really ever made it. And this was before the juvenile diversion or before the juvenile laws changed. We just never really have charged a lot of juvenile people here with crimes. As it relates to dealing with people for being interviewed on the victim end, we have people that are specifically trained here that do that. And what we are incapable of doing, we kind of put our head on the shoulders of the Northwestern District Attorney's Office for forensic interviewing, if need be. We've long supported that process. We are a member of the SART team, the sexual assault response team. And the sexual assault response team, and while this is not just indicative, just if children have been victimized by sexual assault, but it gives us a great platform and a roadmap on what can happen if we re-victimize victims. And we kind of utilizing that paradigm and kind of bring it down to other levels. I recognize how impactful it is for a police officer to deal with a juvenile. And it's really something that's outlined by power. We actually have a very extensive policy on juvenile law. I hate the term, we call it handling juveniles. I really should change that. I have the power to do it and I didn't do it. But that's what we use as a platform. Yeah. Anything else, Mandy, Joe? No, not at this time. Okay, thank you, Dorothy, Pam. This is a question about the gun training that comes down through the state. One of the things, I'm the daughter of a nationally ranked marksman. And he would often comment that when police would shoot and they would kill somebody, what all they need to do is to stop them, which would mean get them in the leg. Are your training standards, do they teach you just to go for the easy spots, the torso in the head, or are people actually taught how to use a gun to stop somebody as opposed to kill them? So the whole question of that is that the standard doesn't get that specific. It doesn't say, if you're having to use a force of that nature, the specifics are that you would shoot center mass and the leg may be a center mass if that's what their individual is showing to the officer. But the training doesn't get that specific where you would just trying to shoot somebody in the hand or in the knee or something of that nature. It's not that specific about where to shoot that individual. Chief, could I just interject there, sir? You bet. It does say in our policy, madam, that we don't shoot to kill. It says we shoot to stop. It says it right in our policy. And we train the officers that way. I was muted, so you didn't hear me say thank you. That's very good. Yeah, Melanie. Yes, two more questions. One was about the role of the unions. Could you say more how the unions might reward police officers who are doing a good job and how they might be responding to police or the bad record? And the second question was about data. Did you point us to where we could get access to data about the kinds of calls and specific by demographics? Like if you could see that, see the data about the last five years based on the demographics, including race. Sure, so the specifics to the data, whatever you need, you would go through. If it's not something that you can easily access on our website, and if you need it for five years, you won't easily be able to access that. You'll need to go through Captain Chang, if it's specific to a rest and or motor vehicle, stop that and he can get that for you. It might take him some time. As far as the role of the unions, the unions have a role in protecting officers if there's an internal investigation. And they have some spelled out as we do as an agency about the process of a potential internal investigation. And the unions do play a role in protecting officers. There's no question about that. It's a tricky one because I used to be a union president and now I'm a police officer executive. So I would like to see unions go away where in my previous life I was a union president. I think from, I would say, at least say in Amherst, the relationship between myself, the Captain Chang and Captain Young, who are administration and the police union is strong. We have very few grievances. I think our officers understand how professional we are and the need for all of the policies and everything that we demand. An example, we just changed the policy on things like what officers can post on social media, that sort of thing and changing that. And it wasn't real popular with the police officers because we've had to oversee things like taking photos with your kids in uniform at home and we have to regulate how that happens and it's not real popular. So, it's really about communication and why we're doing the things that we do, but the unions have very specific roles and it's about protecting their officers. And we have, I have a different role and it's about making sure the community feels secure and safe and also about the fact that we're doing the right things for the community. Kathy Shane, you have your hand up. Yes. You touched on the training that police officers get before they get to you and afterwards on issues like opioid, mental health crises, domestic disputes, I put in a large range of social issues that aren't, you were speeding. You were in Bergerley. Are there any examples outside of an airmarist where a police force has said, we want to staff the police force with at least one person who's not actually coming through the police academy, that's coming through a community mental health service academy that would work side by side with the police. Because I think getting some training on these things, if you frequently encounter them, you'll get better and better and better at it. But if each of you has a few incidences a year, how do you de-escalate or deal with it? No, I was just reading, it was on front page news in Connecticut of someone who was in the middle of a, because of a breakdown and ended up not surviving and they're saying, but he had a record of those problems. And if they hadn't wanna check, they could have called in a mental health person to calm him down. So I'm just, I saw that you have vacancies on the force right now. So it's a question of would there ever be thinking about, then you can't get something else done. So it would be a whole extra person. Do you do that with grants? So that's my question. Do we have examples out there? I mean, I'll start off and then I might have Captain Young jump in, but so we have civilian advocates that work with us in the police department specific to domestic violence cases. And it's a grant that we started, at least 10 years ago through the University of Massachusetts. And it's been very, very successful. She has a civilian advocate with specialties towards domestic violence. She has an office here in the police station. She works with the police department and then the detectives, but more importantly, she works with the victims all the way through the court process or the counseling sessions and that sort of thing. Before COVID hit, we were looking to write a grant to have a very, we were gonna mirror what we do with domestic violence for mental health issues. So we wanna have a professional in-house with an office in the police station and do exactly what we're doing with domestic violence training. And I don't know if that completely answers your question. Ron, is there anything you wanted to add on that? No, I think that's accurate, Chief. Kind of where CIT programs have evolved across the state and for that matter for the country is to have a clinician for corresponds. So there's always gonna be a safety concern. So if a clinician goes by themselves as the issue, but as you bring up, if a police officer goes by himself, that expertise doesn't really, it's really kind of the idea is to team the two of them together to form a team so that you have both things. You have a safety, you can deal with the safety issues there, but you have somebody that has maybe a greater level of de-escalation skills on board or maybe some, maybe can give some recovery ideas or some crisis intervention ideas to that person so that we can get them to where they need to be, whether it's back to clinical support options, whether they need, in the most severe case, if they have to be seen at the ED and so forth. So that's really where we'd like to be is to have a clinician here for corresponds and for follow-up calls. Because the Chief pointed out when C-19 hit, it kind of disrupted exactly where we're gonna head in terms of grant, the grant funding or grant applications and things that have nature. And I guess, I was thinking of a team as opposed to one, but if you're grant funding the people, they aren't necessarily gonna be a permanent feature of the force unless you find a grant funder who will give you a grant every year in perpetuity. And you're just, you know. Which would, that's my favorite kind of grant person, by the way. Yeah. So I guess, you don't need to answer tonight, but I'm just curious whether there are any police forces of towns of our size and that big police, big cities, who have said, we could have a different composition on our regular police force where the slot is, give them whatever name you wanna give them, but they didn't come through the police academy. They came another route. Those kinds of examples, cause I think, and maybe there's some in Europe, I think people are starting to think through that because we have these other issues, the support services, the police can't be trained for everything. Yeah. Agreed. Yeah, I think it's a great idea. And it makes a lot of sense, quite frankly. If I may jump in, there is Eugene Oregon, which has is the home of University of Oregon, has a program called in Cahoots, which is, it's a separate from the police department, but they work in tandem with the police department. And that's something I've looked at at least. Thank you. That's exactly what I was looking for, just on, do we have some models? And then of course, it's how do we fund it if the model works well? Thank you, Paul. Pat, you have your hand up. Yes. I missed some of Mandy Jo's questions and the response because, so if I'm overlapping, I apologize. We've seen lots of episodes recently of people of color being Karen is what it's called now, where they're doing something simple and normal and they are targeted by white residents or white visitors or whatever. That happens in Amherst. And there was recently an incident I found out about where three or four black teenage boys were playing in the backyard at four o'clock in the afternoon. And they were, the police were called to stop the noise or whatever. So I'm kind of interested in your reaction to that. What happened? What happened when the officer got there? Because you said that you respond to all calls and how is the white person who called or Karen dealt with? Sure, so I can't, I don't know specifically about that specific call, Pat, but I certainly can find out if there was a timeframe you could give me and we can talk off camera at a different time for sure. But it's happening and it's an area where we're starting to now have conversation with our dispatch center personnel to do just that, do more screening about, okay, why are you calling? What are you calling for? And I think about the individual that happened last year with the UMass gentleman who was walking across campus and somebody called and it barely, you know, same circumstances. The guy was just walking across campus and it was a UMass incident but we were made very aware of it as well so that it needs to be involving more screening process through the dispatcher. And then what we're also doing is have the dispatchers forward those calls down to a police supervisor or a police officer so that we can screen and get more information because you're right. Does somebody acting suspicious as typically how those calls come in need to be vetted more? You know, it just doesn't make sense. It's an area we're looking at and there will be policy changes on that as well. Thank you. You're welcome. There are no other, no other counselor questions at this time. And we have a very robust audience. In fact, you're the most popular since we've gone virtual. And so we at one point we've had as many 60 attendees and that is not counting the people on Amherst media. So I'm going to ask people who have raised their hand. If you want to make public comment, please raise your hand so I can get a sense of how many people we have. And so I can decide how much time we can give people. Given the number of people that we have, I'm going to ask that you try to limit your comments to two minutes. I'm going to call on you. I call on you, please state your name and where you live. I do want to be very straightforward and say we are looking for comments from Amherst residents first. And if we have time, we will move to out people who do not live in Amherst. And I also want to say that given the awkwardness that we've run into of trying to bring people into the room, we're not going to try to do that because we may lose connectivity with you. It all has to do with how you signed on and so forth. So I'm going to start with the person who's on top for me. And so Lydia Irons, would you please tell me your name and where you live? Hello, my name is Lydia Irons. I live in Amherst. I'm in district five. And I have a couple of things that I'd like to say about the policing in Amherst. The first is that according to all of the public data, 93.6% of calls that our police get are for nonviolent behavior that clearly don't require weapons. I'm wondering why these needs aren't filled by EMTs, mental health professionals and community resources. There are plenty of community resources here in Amherst that could respond to these calls. Only 6% of calls, the reasons are including disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, assaulting, police officer, are violent calls. So the source for this information is the F21 budget, page 52, 1132 calls involving violent behavior out of 17 plus. So that's something that I think is really important to be pointed out about the Amherst police department. Also, Amherst is policed differently depending on where you live. And there is a lot of data that can be collected about where the Amherst police department does their patrolling. They are constantly patrolling the apartment complexes when they haven't been called or asked to be there. And there has been lots of community talk about that you don't need to be there. The richer neighborhoods are not patrolled in this same way or with this same frequency at all. There's plenty of data about that. And you can even see data visualizations of maps of where these patrols are happening. By far the most officer initiated calls happen in North Pleasant Street, about 600 last year, which is double the number of officer initiated calls in any other street in the same time frame. The Puffton apartment complex is on North Pleasant. The Craig Shelter is also on North Pleasant. And I think that there are also the numbers that the amount of money that the Amherst police department spends on gas alone is astronomical. It's 42,000 from June, 2009 to May, 2020. That's about $117 a day on gasoline for 38 officers to patrol Amherst, even though most calls are for help in quotes that happen on just a few streets. Why are officers spending so much time in money patrolling areas that don't need to be patrolled? The community doesn't want them there. I don't know how much time I have left when, but I have a testimony from an Amherst individual that had asked to have it shared here. But I would also like to see the floor to anybody else. Thank you. First of all, I appreciate that. And actually you have reached your time limit. So if you would please send the testimony to town council at amherstma.gov. And I failed to mention earlier that we will not be responding to the questions from the audience, but we will be taking note of them. And as with the other unanswered questions from council, we'll be looking for answers to them as well. Mattia Kramer. My name is Mattia Kramer. I live on East Pleasant Street in Amherst. I wanna just specifically say that this conversation is here, we're happening now because of anti-black racism. And my experience at recent protests has given me the opportunity to hear from a number of folks of color sharing their experiences with local policing. And so this is a question or comment both for the council members as well as the police, which is to say, will there be efforts as these conversations are happening now between council and police? Will there be efforts to solicit explicitly solicit feedback probably anonymously from affected communities? So whereas right now this conversation is happening primarily among folks who are not the constituents that we're most concerned about. So making concerted efforts to bring that voice into the conversation is what I'm concerned about and would implore all members on this call to do. Thank you. Thank you for your comment. Next hand up is Irv, and would you please identify yourself and where you live? You need to unmute. My name is Irv Irv, I live in South Amherst on Pondview Drive. I've actually, this has been an impressive, the entire presentation by the members of the police department has been really, really impressive. One of the things that comes through when you look at the data is that for whatever reason police departments have more than to social service agencies and that really needs to be looked at in a closer fashion because when you think about the training that you're talking about to deal with mental health issues, opioid issues, domestic abuse issues, those are the kinds of things you would think would be handled in other kinds of ways. And I understand that when you have a call that's a domestic abuse issue or an opioid issue, there's also a safety issue there. And so an officer may be required to go along with someone from the social service agency. So that's one comment. The other one is that I'm also aware of and impressed with that you have implicit bias training. The question I would have is that, is this implicit bias training done on an ongoing basis with all officers on a regularly scheduled basis? And the third one is the access of data to the general public. I just heard this other person go through some data. Those data points are quite important so that the public can have a sense of what exactly the police department does on a day-to-day basis. It's really important because it's an impressive kind of array of data. Most people, citizens don't have access to their data on a day-to-day basis in a kind of way that would allow them to be able to look at the police department and say, wow, so this is what they do on a day-to-day basis. And here's how they're spending their time. And then from there, if you're looking, if at some point there is a decision to go ahead with some kind of oversight, then that will give us some reference points to whether that is needed or not. Thank you. Thank you for your comment. Rick Last, you are next. Please identify yourself and where you live. Hi, everybody. This is Rick Last and I live on Middle Street in Amherst and listening with a lot of interest here to say the least, you know, these are time when racial justice is at the forefront and no department is immune from systemic racism. You know, things go wrong, they go deadly wrong at times when police encounter people of color. You know, change is being demanded around our country as everybody sees. And a thorough examination of the role of the police in public safety in our society in terms of public safety is really demanded right now. I was listening especially with a lot of interest around this specialized training and echoing what a lot of people have said already that there are professionals out there. And I think Kathy was the first one to bring this up that a lot of these calls, I'm sure don't end up with any kind of enforcement or arrests and yet the first person that gets seen is a police officer with a gun and it might not be the certainly best thing to de-escalate no matter how much training you would have. So the best thing would have would be some professionals and I'm really happy that Paul brought up the Kahootz program and that is in Eugene, Oregon and when the police get 911 calls in their non-violent in nature, the calls get rooted to Kahootz and they send out a medic, nurse and a mental health professional to get dispatched. In 2019 of the 24,000 calls, this is a town of 170,000, 24,000 calls that got rooted to Kahootz, only 150 ever needed any eventual police backup. 99.4% were handled without any armed police and these were, you know, and the calls they got were approximately like 30% of the calls that came into 911. So it's a manner of redirecting our public safety budget and thinking about that. We can do all the training we want, but if they're trained professionals to go out there, I think it's something about a quarter percent of the police killings in this country happen with people with mental health issues and no matter, and as I think Detective Young said, we don't try to solve the problems, but we try to assess the problems and we don't pretend to be clinicians. Well, there are clinicians out there, so it makes absolutely no sense that armed officer would be the first on these calls. I think of the, if I've gone too far, but I think there was about 18,000 Amherst police calls last year and about half of the police, at least, and you can correct me, arguably didn't require any armed police response and would be better served, you know, by responses from medical, social, or mental health professionals. You talk about last, but you really need to complete. That's it, but thank you. Okay, we have other people waiting and I really want to make sure that they have an opportunity. Terry Mullen, please raise your hand and tell us your name and your address and unmute your bunk. Hi, my name is Terry Mullen. I live in Amherst on Northeast Street. I wanted to read a testimonial that about an experience with the police that I was asked to read by someone who didn't actually feel safe enough to come on this call themselves, which I think is nerve wracking to me. An Amherst community member who is disabled, a person of color, reached out to share that they have faced abuses from an officer in the area who uses his ties to APD to gain information and harass people he has abused. For this specific person, the harassment from APD has looked like unfounded wellness checks and officers showing up at their friends' places without clear reason. APD has never taken accountability for this behavior. Every time this community member reports the continued harassment, they were told the officers can never find any, the officers can never find any proof that the police did those wellness checks or that anything was reported to begin with. This person and others who have had experiences similar to theirs have been told by officers and members of the court that they're exaggerating and only looking to ruin the police department's credibility. But what this anonymous community member wants is safety and for their wellbeing to be taken seriously and for town accountability for employees' behavior, both on and off the job. I also wanted to add that at my apartment complex just a few weeks ago, we did get a wellness check that was, I was not involved, but it was very serious. It looked, and there was a lot of force for what looked like three very young, very scared youth. Maybe they were female, I'm not sure, but it was a lot of force and a lot of people on site trying to help someone who ended up being handcuffed to a gurney and it just looked really scary and really traumatic for everyone involved. And I wonder what other things could have happened to help that person. That wouldn't involve so many people with guns. Thank you. Thank you for your comment. Elisha Descharnes, and if you would like to correct my pronunciation of your name, I will not be all be offended. Please state your name and where you live. Yeah, my name is Elisha Descharnes. You're very close. You headed towards the fancier pronunciation. I actually live on campus, on the UMass campus. I'm part of district two. I'm a resident instructor who lives in the halls and have interacted pretty frequently with both the Amherst police department and the UMass police department. I just wanted to share and echo and elevate a lot of the other voices that have shared. I don't think that the police need to respond to a lot of the calls that they are responded to. I appreciate that you're trying to be proactive and thinking about ways to not like work and free actively and harm people. And it's like pretty clear where those pain points are. Most of the calls that happen, happen in September and October and in May. Those are where new members are joining our community and I think that there could be some other ways to address that other than just policing. If you're truly wanting to do proactive work, there could be work done to like connect with the community, help them to understand how to connect with their new neighbor is to address noise or suspicious behavior in a more meaningful and community-centered way. I'm also concerned because based off of information I've been able to find, between May 2019 and May 2020, it seems that a lot of the calls that were logged were initiated by police themselves. Only about 13% of activities logged as police calls were initiated by someone calling 911, well, 44% of calls seem to be initiated by the police themselves. I'm curious as to like why that's the case or where those calls are coming from and why the police are initiating so much interaction with the community when they don't seem to be calling or asking for it. I'm wondering if that happens to be because of some of this proactive police that happens to be happening. So would encourage Amherst Police Department and both the town council to really think effectively around what does proactive policing mean and how does that support our community or does it not support our community? Thank you. Thank you for your comments. Nathan Diplock, please identify yourself and where you live. Yeah, my name is Nathan Diplock. I live in district one. I think first question, so Captain Young during his section of the talk mentioned that one of the challenges to policing in Amherst was that the police are highly visible and that would suggest that being less visible is easier in terms of policing. And so if it's easier to do your job without the public knowing or seeing what you're doing, isn't that a problem? And I would think like if you're proud of what you're doing, right, you would want as much visibility as possible. So I thought that was interesting. I also at some point in the talk it was mentioned that the police department was looking in to tasers due to an increase in calls related to mental health crises. And I think as a member of the community that's a bit different from how I would like our community to respond to mental health crises. I mean, even the fact that that was being considered, I think speaks to the fact that we need more transparency and oversight in how these decisions are made for the community. Yeah, and overall, I think we need to just rethink the role of police in our society and we can start doing that in our own community. I think we need to defund and disarm the Amherst police department and reinvest in other avenues to support a community. Thanks. Jamie Fisher-Hertz, please identify yourself. And yours, William. Hi, yes, my name is Jamie and I went to Amherst High School and I'm applying to Amherst to UMass Amherst Graduate School right now, but I live in Sunderland. So I'm wondering if it's okay for me to give some testimony right now anyways. Do you're not a resident of Amherst? Is that what I'm hearing? Yes, I live in Sunderland. I attended Amherst High School and my whole family lives in Amherst, but I'm currently living in Sunderland about 0.1 miles from the Amherst line. Please go ahead. Okay, thank you so much. So I have been really inspired and excited to hear about all of the ideas that the people on this call have shared about wanting to transform our town to being a more safe place for all people. I'm really grateful to be a part of a town that is so active in wanting to change things and also was excited to hear that the police are hoping to have a task force and wondering more about that process and sort of what kinds of community impacts will be most helpful. I think that there are several agencies that are already in Amherst that are doing a lot of work for our community that we could redirect funding to at this time. For example, the Crisis Stabilization Center at the Clinical Services Outreach, they have locations in Hampshire County and they respond immediately to mental health emergencies. There's a number that both youth and adults can call and they can respond on location or people can come to them. There's also the Bridge Family Resource Center which is in Amherst. I work in early intervention and a lot of the families that require social services get a lot of them through this Family Resource Center. So there are definitely agencies that are already in place that we could work with. I think that the Kahootz program has been mentioned a couple of times and I just want to reiterate that there are organizations that can do that work. Thank you so much and I see you the rest of my time. Thank you. Zoe Crabtree, please identify yourself and where you live. Hi, I think I'm unmuted, is that correct? Yes, my name is Zoe Crabtree and I live in South Amherst. I believe that I'm in Darcy's district. So I just wanted to speak to a couple of things about some of the money that the department spends. They have 77 staff members, which includes 38 patrol officers for about 14,000 residents. And if you divide the amount of money that is spent on staff wages, that's about $72,000 per staff member in a year and those numbers are from the 2018 wage numbers were posted online, which is significantly higher than teachers are paid in our area. I'd also like to mention again that the department spends just under $43,000 the past year on gasoline and about the same on vehicle maintenance, which if you kind of divide that out about around the 38 officers driving in maybe eight hour shifts for about 40 hour weeks for at least 20 weeks a year to give them lots of vacation. That works out to just over 30,000 hours a year of time driving or idling in their vehicles. The website says that the patrol officers spend most of their time in their shift in their cars. So if you do the math out, that's about 3.4 years of time driving or idling every year where they're just sitting around kind of running their cars or driving their cars around. So I think if we're gonna be having a climate change agenda or really thinking about having climate change being central to our agenda, then we want them to be using that many resources every year. Thank you. I think we're gonna move back to the council and we've completed public comment. Is there anybody else in the council that would like to make a comment at this time? And otherwise we're going to stop. Andy, you have your hand up. Yes, thank you. As chair of the finance committee, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about some of the budget questions that have been talked about. Including making funds available for bringing in other agencies that could contribute to the work of the department. We are very tightly budgeted right now, even more so than in a normal year because of how COVID-19 is affecting our revenues or stream right at the present and for the next year or two years. The reality is that the police department that was just pointed out has about 38 patrol officers and not all of them are available. Some are in training and with vacation and trying to cover three shifts. It is a real question as to whether it is ever going to be feasible to diminish the size of the department, staffing for patrol officers and still to be able to meet the needs to service the community. So the idea that we would easily be able to just transfer some money in order to be able to take on the kind of different approaches that have been suggested. I'm concerned as to whether that's really a feasible alternative. So that's, thank you. Just one last check before we adjourn the meeting. Darcy, you have your hand up. Yes. I want to say that we had an incredibly good presentation by the police department and we've had excellent questions by the town council and some townspeople. But I really enjoyed hearing the voice of young people and their points of view are not easily absorbed sometimes into what we're thinking. But I just feel so much of my time here at Amherst, I don't hear that voice in the town of Amherst. I don't hear it and our committees which require so much time and work are filled with older people with experience in what they're doing. So when we do come up with our new committee which I think Meg Gage has some very good words that it should not use the word civilian and it shouldn't use the word oversight and I agree with her arguments. But this committee that we're talking about looking and examining at the police department working together that we must have some young voices on that too because we just need to, we need to hear them and we need to integrate them into our voices. So thank you. So just let me conclude by again thanking Captain, I'm sorry, police chief Scott Livingstone, Captain Young, Captain Ting and for this very, very thorough presentation. While it hasn't answered all of our questions, I will confer with the council and also with Paul as well as looking at the tape and see what other questions we need to advance to you. Some of those in fact will be data and obviously some of that may take some time and some transparency. And down the road, as we hear more and more from other constituents, council will make a decision along with the town manager as to what kind of committee there might be to work with the police department in creating that greater transparency for our community. Again, I wanna reiterate, this is just the beginning of a conversation but it was an extremely informative presentation and informative comments as well. So I just wanna thank everyone and particularly our police department for putting this great effort forward. So with that, the meeting is adjourned.