crying out for a touch of the neighborhood to make it theirs. >> is that it? >> thank you. liz lerma. sfgov. org there is a phone book where you type the last name and you can find their phone number it's called the street parks program much the sfpt. org has a link on their web page about street parks and what kinds of possible and what some of the resources are. it's quite a rebust set of possibilities. >> thanks very much. one last question?

which school? monroe. uh-huh. >> no. yeah. it has to be a physical improvement we expect you to figure out to get somebody to volunteer that. we will not hire people. what happens when the grant runs out? you don't have continuous funding. we will fund the improvements. we have done that at james middle school to help them with their garden. [applause] thank you.

>> thanks sorry for the delay. i'm valerie brown with the lower hate neighborhood organization. we are here today at the neighborhood empowerment network to talk about safety on your

streets. this actual workshop is what we call a 30,000 feet aerial view of what we do. the lower haight motd we created a few models for safety and some are complex and a lot of information. we are going to give you just a little bit of this today. we will talk about how to connect with the different city agencies, your supervisors, your captain at our station. the city attorney's office and beat officers or street officers. one of the things that i would like toit introduce the panel. captain from northern station. regina from the legislative aid of ross mirkarimi one of our

supervisors. from the da's office. the president of our merchant's association of the lower haight. ron, a beat officer and antoine another beat officer. the city attorney was at our morning session this morning and had to leave. regina and i work with the city attorneys office and will talk about that today in the lower haight or modo is to build a safe and caring neighborhood and foster that. we believe to build a safe neighborhood you have to build a caring neighborhood. it goes hand and hand. one of the things that when we started our neighborhood group which was a couple of years ago. we got together, we did small neighborhood building events

like community clean up. started a neighborhood google group and started to out reach to the community in the neighborhood that nay not participate in the events or have a computer. we went to the senior centers. we hand fly erred public housing in our neighborhood. also we went to our surrounding neighborhood organizations like hayes valley association that has been around for many years and a strong neighborhood association. and collaborate and take your best practices and bring them to the lower haight. some of the things we have done with the da's office stem from hayes valley best practices. but really or philosophy is safety for all. when we want to reach out in our

neighborhood we felt like having it safe for your children to be on the streets was vital and important and if the children could be on the streets everybody else could safely. we decided to do things with community events that would involve children and all the children. like safe path day where the first day of school we tell the neighborhood come and stand on the streets while the kids go to school in the morning and wish them, have a great school year. get to know them. tell them education's important. we had the merchants and different people donate and healthy snack ands back packs and school supplies we gave to them. we involved the beat officers and they handed out the school supplies and healthy snacks. what we realized was our schools

were important in the community. us with our community partners around our neighborhood went into our elementary school and started a pta. there hadn't been a pta there for 15 years mua lot of us don' have children. it doesn't matter you don't have to be a parent to be on the pta. i never knew thachlt we do events for the children with the pta. we also started and promoted and pushed to get a learning center in the public housing. and we get volunteers from all over the community to come in and volunteer in the community room in the schools and things like that. where that connects with the safety is because we feel that if you know your neighbors and they know you and especially the children that what we are

building as a family. we want to build a family in our community because this is a great way to be safe. it would builds and opens a door when people in the community need support service like drug rehab. if we have homelessness and things like that. that we can actually build around the support network. we brought in our law enforcement and beat officers to help us. they are involved in every positive thing we do. not just enforcement and get to know the whole community. we do have an enforcement issue. like probably a lot of neighborhoods. there are things we have to enforce. today we will talk a little bit about that. the first person that's going to talk is captain al. and he's at northern station.

>> thank you very much. i'm the captain of northern station and i want to take a few minutes to give you an over view but one of the things i will encourage all of you is to really get to know these panelists because you don't really need to reinvent the wheel wherever you are located. in your neighborhood, they have done a lot of good work. valerie's done a tremendous amount of good work and everyone on the panel is part of the team in the work in the hayes and haight et cetera. learn from them. copy what they did. really it would be helpful. the city attorney i think i'm getting some feedback. >> i think the technical problems are over wchl the city attorney's office earlier today

talked about code enforcement. every district captain has a code enforcer officer and a liaison to the city attorney's office. if you have a problem property a problem business, in your area you can all the captain or district station and ask for the code enforcement officer. and somebody should get back to you. you can check with our district supervisor's office and they have the liaison to the code enforcement. i just want to make that point clear. we will hear about it again. this is a service the district captain should be able to provide for you and get you into the city attorney system. i want to talk about the patrol plan that was implemented as of 6 a.m. this morning at the

northern station. we divided the northern district into sections. each section there are 3 section sergeants responsible for the section. one days, one swings and one mid night. within the section there are radio car sectors and beat officers. the beat officers you see are in section one of the northern and their beat falls within that section the officers assigned within that section are responsible for the quality of life issues and the crime issues that occur within the section. their mandate is simply this. they are to remain on their beats. they are to get to know their areas. get to know the people in the beats and address the problems in the beats. that's it. it's simple. i will be judging them

evaluating them and the successes they have by how much crime goes down and how much your confidence level goes up in the neighborhood and how your feelings are and your perceptions about the neighborhood. really that's what it's about. if you will safe in your neighborhood you really got to feel it from inside. that's what this is all about. bringing together the neighborhood, the merchants and all of the city services that can come through. all the city services and the people that are in city service we are part of the neighborhood also. so it means a lot to us. i would measure success if in one of the primary goals i would say is i would measure real success of the whole community if we as police officers work

ourselves out of a job. think about it. if there was no crime and no need for police officers what would police officers become? they would be our teachers and our coaches. in essense that's where we are headed if we could eliminate the police. who are the primary recipients of our service the young people who need positive direction. that's where valerie went with the pta. positive direction. with the youth. and you know, that sounded weird at first when they said, join the pta and you are not a parent. or your children are grown or you know, about that's important. that's where it really starts in the neighborhood. you got to stop that. i will take a moment because we

have an opportunity to talk to the audience at home. i really in advocating legislation on a state wide basis to somehow or another change the law so that there is a front end to the criminal justice system that will allow us to take persons on the street who are don't fit the mental health criteria for 5150 but to try to take the people that are experiencing mental problems and also have problems with substance abus and be able to take them and put them in a medical facility to triage them, detoks them and introduce them to services all at one time. now i will give a couple of

examples. one, somebody picked up on drugs or alcohol and transported to the hall of justice. we determine they are a veteran they walk out the front door of hall of justice fort mily is 7 miles away. it mine as well be 70,000 miles away. if we could hold them for 10 days and transporting them to fortmily we have a tremendous problem about the young prostitutes. they are 16, 17, 18. the ones under 18 we have a better chance of breaking them with the pimp the 18 and 19 we take them to the hall they are cited 4 or 5 hours later they

their pimp is waiting for them on 7th street. if we break the hold because we have to detox them bautsz they can't do the job they can do on the street because they have to be high. if we can clean them up they would be no value to the pimp because the pimp would say i don't know what she's told the police. may be we can send them home or to a safe haven of some sort. there's a couple of other issues like that. i would like to plant that seed with you today about that legislation. we are talking about it in different forums and if anybody wants to get a hold of me go to the sfgov website and go to northern station. again, going back to this program i really want to

encourage to you what you hear today really take advantage of the resources because they are there for all of us. thank you. >> thanks. [applause]. >> also in your packets you have the resource information back there in your packet so you know who your police where our police station is and the contact information. you might want to check that. the next 2 people i will introduce are our beat officers. you know we are talk about how you find your liaison in the different departments but they actually i didn't find them they found me they hunted me down. and like i said in the last workshop if you knew my

background i didn't have trust for the police. i didn't step forward much to meet them. they came after me. that was really amazing and so i said, okay let's try this context in relationship. anybody else can contact their captain and who they might suggest to be the liaison for the street officers the street officers are the officers that know what's going on in your neighborhood day to day. the first person who will talk he will talk about enforcement. and then the support. because we really strife in our neighborhood to enforcement and support go hand in land that's in everything single thing we do. here's ron laberta. >> thanks for coming. and with valerie we didn't hunt

her down we sought her out. >> that was because we had heard so many good things about her in the neighborhood. sometimes police have alternate motives we didn't think that about valerie. we saw here out picking up trash and lending a helping hand. we trusted her. we thought that she was sincere and wanted to improve the community. we went to her. when we started the beat a year and a half ago and developed a great relationship and continuing to move forward. what we do as beat officers is go in to valee's neighborhood.

we asolving problems. we are arresting and talking to people. warning them. we are doing some nontraditional, creative, invade innovative ways on handling the problems. a lot has to do with educating the community. not by believing what you see on tv you can't call thecops and say there is somebody outside doing drugs and we will come arrest them and that's the end. we have to know with the person is keeping the drugs, there is a lot of stuff we have to know that we need to educate the community and we work together

to stop the drug dealing or the shootings or homelessness. we all work as a team and that's the most important thing to get across to everybody. i want to say that the best tool so far that we used is the stay away orders and we will get into that. my partner will talk about the good things that we do besides just arresting people and putting them through the system. so -- here you go. >> thank you. [applause] >> hello. i'm officer antoine baron stationed at northern station. my partner ron. i'm a sports fan i will use analogy. those of you who are not bear with me. i like what we do at foot beat

officers to playing basketball or basketball playerers. you are close to the court. you see the playerary faces that way we get to know the community. if we are in patrol cars what they are doing all day is running from call to call to call to call. what we get when we talk to people i don't see the cops they are driving by and don't stop or get out. the reason they don't get out or stop because they are going to a call. i liken them as football players you are significant in the stand and far away. i like it better because i can spin on the corner and talk to somebody for an hour. it may be police related issues

or personal but i'm not responding to the calls like the cars. that s getting to know people in the community on an individual basis. we go down to the african-american cultural center a lot on fulton street. we call it our second office. in that center, they have kids ranging from you know, 5-6 years old up to 15, i believe it is. and they do all different activities whether it's karate, drill team class. whether they go to picnics or back pack give aways. ron and i go to almost all of them. the ones we can make i think we rarely miss one that was big

enough they asked us to come to. and during those activities we play with the kids. football, basketball whatever you name it we do. one example i will give, too, they had a black and white ball a couple of fridays ago and that night and in the fillmore district. you had kids from as young as 34 up to adults in their 80's. and everyone stayed until it was over like 11 o'clock. it was just a good atmosphere for us to see and look at and see how different people in the community can come together and have a good time without problems. and that's another way we give support. another example. we get kids we know all the time we see everyday.

the kid we know say, they are cool that's ron and antoine come over here. for me personally, it's rewarding for me because by ron was saying on tv you see a lot of negative perceptions about the police. just to have kids have a different perspective that they are living everyday like we are not out arresting their friends and cousins everyday we interact and play with them as well. another example of support this goes with adults, have your addicts and homeless people in the lower haight and hayes valley. every where not just down there it's all walks of life. one lady that we know we had been on the beat a couple of months.

she used to see us everyday on haight came up and talked to us and said you seem like you are nice folks i want to get help. she's a homeless crack addict. we gave her resource cards. she's taking care of traffic sitations before she goes to walden house. we can always give you resource cards but you as an individual have to want to do better before we can help you out. okay. thank you. [applause] >> i want to say that ron and antoine once they cornered me and i said, okay. what we did is we invite them to everything. we invite our police officers we also have other officers that are wonderful.

we invite them to everything. ron and antoine are on the pta. so, we invite them to every good event and a lot of times we see them in bad situations also. we always invite them. we opened our doors to them and that was important and i think if you are looking for a ron and antoine the best thing to do is probably if you don't know your officers on the street and their personalities to call our captain and ask him or her if they know of someone you can work with. that's really important. and a lot of the stuff we do we also they wrote a grant for mayor's office of community justice. we actually, i worked with them we got a grant to educate the community of what we need to do to help them in their work. there are things you can do with the mrapolice officers if you st

from scratch and think creatively. the next thing is with the da. we have a strong partnership with the da and the liaison with the da. there is a da liaison in every station. you need to get to know that community liaison from the da's office. they are an attorney at the da's office. we took this best practice from on hayes will valley. we have people in our neighborhood with their support, care and love are not coming through the door of light. and getting away from their criminal activity. when there's an arrest and there are repeat offenders. we have the officers tell us the arrest number when they arrest the person. then we hand over letters they

are called stay away order letters. they are letters from the community, all of us. we are the ones that have to do all of this. that's an important message. we write letters to the judges saying that we would like this person this individual to be not be able to come back in our neighborhood. just because that disconnects them their community as far as the criminal community. the da hands the letters to the judges and the judges read the letters and realize it's a real impact in the community. that way you don't see the person back on the street within 5 or 6 days. if they are doing the same thing or in the area these guys can arrest them right away without probable cause or anything like