>> all right. thanks for your patience and taking the time to be here. we wanted to give you a briefing and update on our midyear crime stats. as chief gascon promised we will keep you informed to reach our ambitious goals that the chief set out with the command staff and members present. let me create a quick context. in 2008 the middle part of the year the city and county and police department decided to shift gears toward a new approach of governance in terms

of deployment of police officers using what has commonly been referred to as a zone strategy. basically saturating the areas and deploying police officers based upon statistical analysis of crime. it was not as sophisticated as it is today. but the effort has paid dividends. as a consequence we have seen over the course not just six months but candidly over the course of 20 to 24 months a substantial decrease in crime in almost every category in this city. one year doesn't necessarily make a trend but two years begins to associate itself with a trend. so, without getting ahead of ourselves, without overpromising, i don't want to leave you though with a sense that this news is new news or good news that may not continue in terms of its pace and its

trend line. i want to acknowledge as well that the zone strategy was just recently recognized by the department of justice as one of the best practices in the united states. we received this award, an ward for outstanding local police department involvement presented to the city and county of san francisco just recently. so, our efforts are not only paying dividends in being recognized locally by the community, most importantly, and by leaders throughout the city and the region and state, but now across the country. now, quickly to the stats, the chief will walk you through ain specific detail. i will say just the following. last year we saw a 54% decline in homicides in the city among the lowest rates we had in over half a century. in fact, the stats get very questionable in those 1940's, 1950's and 1960's.

but they are down to the lowest level since the early 1960's. we had crime, violent crime, part one crime in the city, drop 10%, double digits, last year. the statistics that the chief will give you today are based upon those historic drops last year. i say that to make this point. they are even more significant

working with your district captains who are also here. analyzing problems in your kennedy and determining the priority for police enforcement. this is a cornerstone of the community policing models that we have in san francisco. the one to think you because you have been an integral partner. the deputy chief was here and the assistant chief were the engineers behind this a war that is being presented.

this award here represents the hard work of john murphy as a commander that was worked. also the men and women of the organization that are responsible. [applause] the will walk you through our mission statement. i will not read it for you. i will just go through the outline. if you recall when i first came to the city, the mayor hired me with a clear mission. he wanted to make this the safest city in the country. one of the things that i told

the mayor and i told the committee is that we would come back and report on this for a regular basis. indeewe're working with the peoo achieve this. there is community policing and something that can be done. community policing is the police department and all of the participants working together, the stakeholders developing strategies, looking at the resources available. looking at the problems that are developing problem-solving

solutions that actually reach the kind of results that we see here where we have a national award. the things that we are doing here are the direct product of working with the same builders and our community board and with many other people around the city and county of san francisco. that is what community policing is all about. as you can see by the numbers you are looking at, what we did it is a year to date comparison against 2009. the numbers are even better than this because we have been able to reduce crime in the last few weeks.

there are a serious crimes in this city. and you can see that there were 22,029 crimes. now we have a 20% reduction year to date. this was compared to last year. i tell people it is hard to really conceptualize what this means until you start looking at the victimization. we're looking at this and we are looking at over 4400 less crimes today than two years ago. that equates to 4400 families in

our city that were not fit the must the sheer. to me, that has a greater significance than any thing we have today. when people get victimized, our entire community is victimized. this is what we are talking about, we are talking about real human beings. it does not whether your car is stolen or it is a violent crime. when something is taking a test taken from you, your livelihood is invaded. if your home has been burglarized and your personal effects have been ransacked, for you, for your families, that is very traumatic.

i think it is important to put this into context of the fact that there are 4400 less people in this community today that have been victimized. we are very fortunate that violent crime is much lower than property crime. i think it is important and you looked at the crime rate, this is a 60%. you see a 21% reduction from a few years ago.

i want to continue to emphasize that we need to get behind the percentage and talk about the fact that the human beings in our community today our spirit from the pain and suffering of crime. the next slide that we have, the mayor already talked about. this is a national award. i think that this is something that we should feel good about. other city departments in the police department is able to reach this. this is a point of reference for our city. with that, conclude our formal

statements and we have questions country will take questions for myself and the mayor. the first six months of the year we were up by one. today, we are down by one. the greater. to be made here is that there are 55% reduction last year.

we seem to be gaining on it. the proportion of the homicide rates are levels we have not seen since 1961. i think that that is a story. i think it is a laughable without looking at the resource allocation. this gets you to the things that we to on a daily basis when we try to assess what is the best thing to do it. several weeks ago, a couple of months ago, we saw an increase in crime in a couple of areas of

our city. we some primarily chinese victims and yen and around muni and corridors. we have the freedom today to move these as we need to. weeks took 32 people in the city. we can come up with a more sustainable solution. we are working to come will with funding to have communities. escort services that we will be training later on this month in order to come up with the most sustainable solution.

this could put every community at the same level. i don't have the freedom to be able to move people around and deal with an immediate need. >> they don't have the courage to legislated. this is this solution to a problem. this is a solution, this chief has delivered results. the supervisors want to submit their names for police chief. they did not do that. they are out of their league. this is very damaging legislation.

we have to stop this in the tracks. we need to call this what it is. i am here not mincing words because this is a serious time and a serious business. we have that. let them continue to do our jobs. this has nothing to do with the merits but it is pure politics. >> these are daily things that

we do. the pull down and the rest of the command staff are here in the room. we go through this stuff on a daily basis. we are trying to assess why it occurs. when there are no shootings and stabbings, this is a daily staple for us. we are increasingly getting better. in my personal opinion, this is not only very dedicated but this is an organization that leads on a daily basis by what can we do to avoid the next event. we did it with a trial.

with this -- we did not just wake up and decide that we wanted to play a bunch of cops. they're trying to avoid problems in the city and they are ready to react to. policing is not only react if. the more elegant type of police in this is not a crime that occurred.

mego a larger step further. we meet with our community. but need to the community have to look at the resources that we have available that we deployed and we apply to this based on the partnership and this could be the tool. this is not the only tool and i think it is extremely simplistic to say it could be equated it to community policing. it could be 200 years ago in an annex that we would -- when i started in this business, i was there for anyone to say

what we were doing was community policing. to walk into the neighborhood and get to inertia, that is community policing. community policing is a much broader concept. to put this, this is absolutely so. we have more police and then what we have had in many years. this is a tool to slug it is talking to the neighbors and trying to anticipate what might happen in the neighborhood is like having the patrol in some areas, just like it is improving our technologies that we can get better. this is simply a tool.

peres and approximately 1600 robberies in the city in the first six months. that's still represents a 4% reduction. we have a city where on any given day, there is 1.3 million people interacting in a 49 square mile area. nexpublic safety is a journey, t a destination. we have to get better. this is an area where we are working on the two friends but

the cold is committee members will be a bird to seek help. we are looking to have a very diverse group of experts that will be providing the services to people. these are people who will train on crime prevention strategies, how to avoid becoming a victim. we completed our investigation weeks ago. we were waiting for some decisions to be made whether the prosecution would be taken and

what the prosecution would be. we started reforming the crime must -- reforming the crime lab. the reason why we were able to do so was because we were drawing from a larger pool. the crime lab would have never been able to draw upon the resources that we did very rapidly in order to address the problem. the first thing that we did is we stop the hemorrhage. we shut down the controlled substance lead because of the problem that we first noticed. we had agreements with other regional partners. then we started to call the management. i reached out to the department

of justice. they pointed out to the areas that we needed to work on. we needed to take corrective actions. on track the work in those areas that do not able to have capacity immediately. my commitment is that we will never go back to the problems that we have had before we had people who are terribly overworked. because of the size of our

facility, we realize that that but require that we start contract in. the short term solution has been an immediate infusion of management, contracting out some work. the long-term solution is still evolving as we identify funding sources and we find the best model for the city and county. this would have not occurred if the lab was independent. i question whether it would even have the courage to come up and openly say what went wrong. there are crimes going on around the country. this is a fast-moving industry. the police agency is one of the two agencies that on our own we

blew the doors open and expose their own problems. this is not the problem with investigative reporting for anyone anywhere else. this is a sad moment for policing in the region. plus it -- public safety is so intertwined that a reduction in public safety resources will have an impact on san francisco. we were together very closely. it is closely monitored. during the post -- event, many

were sent to open. the mayor said that it will put together a budget and i believe this was approved. we're hopeful that the process will be okay for us. >> it is important to understand the point. there is no divorce, we are all in this together. look at the crime statistics in the last couple of years. i've seen more crime scenes and anyone should in a lifetime. and many of the victims were not from san francisco and how many of the suspects were not from san francisco. i am open to the idea that some

things can be reconciled. we're dealing with a difficult budget and the constraints are a little bit different. we are looking to keep our police officers out on the streets. we're also looking to keep our fire stations open and have our firefighters deal with the challenges. we want to continue the collaboration with oakland. we have some ideas and we have some staffing models to get us to where we need to go. i am familiar with the minimum

staffing that was established. the chief recognizes the budget and he is satisfied he can continue the budget. there are some very interesting stacking models. we have been looking five weeks out, five months out. key we are shifting and we have been handled. he