events that shaped the hospital and the community over time. a >> it attracts a lot of visitors, and they are all and all - -in aw -- in awe over the variety of mediums used. >> i think we have given the city of san francisco and the residents an incredible art collection. it really encourage people to come and visit the new facility, also to see the arts. >> for more information, visit sfartscommis

>> ladies and gentlemen, the chair is calling a meeting to order. please stand for the pledge of allegiance. i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation, under god, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. thank you. we will be taking roll-call now. commission president thomas mazzucco. commissioner mazzucco: present. >> dr. joe marshall? commissioner mazzucco: i think he is en route. >> commissioner dejesus? commissioner mazzucco: en route. commissioner chan: present. commissioner kingsley: present. commissioner slaughter: present.

commission -- >> commission president, you have a quorum. commissioner mazzucco: welcome to the january 5, 2010 meeting of the police commission. usually, we come out to a particular neighborhood. we have the commissioners introduce themselves and tell you a little bit about themselves, what they do in their day jobs. they say the commission job is a night job and a part-time job. i think i will have a unanimous decision that it is not a part- time job. they dedicate a lot of time and money in terms of their efforts as attorneys, handling mediation, handling disciplinary cases, fielding calls from the press, and i would like to thank them for their hard work. what i would like to do is have each commissioner introduce themselves and tell you a little bit about themselves. commissioner hammer: good evening, everybody.

i'm really glad and excited to be here outside city hall. i'm a third-generation san franciscan. my mother is from the sunset. my father is from the mission. irish background. i spent most of my career as a lawyer as a prosecutor. the last five years or so, pursuing san francisco homicide cases. before that, i was a police officer. i spent most of my career around officers and law enforcement, and i really enjoyed my job serving san francisco in this way. [applause] commissioner kingsley: i joined the police commission about three-four months ago. i have lived in san francisco for approximately 30 years. i practice law as it is this transaction lawyer for about 25 or so years. over the last seven or so, i have been doing commercial mediations.

i've lived in a number of areas in the city, including this one, for a number of years. it was wonderful coming back this evening and seeing a lot of old haunts. thank you very much for hosting this meeting this evening. it is good to see you here, and thank you for coming. [applause] commissioner chan: good evening. i'm happy to be here. i have family in this neighborhood, so i come here quite often. beautiful district. my daytime job is in a staff attorney at the asian law caucus, a nonprofit civil rights organization located in chinatown, and my focus is on juvenile education -- juvenile justice and education. i was happy to join the commission back in june of last year. [applause] commissioner slaughter: good evening, everybody. i do not want to say jr., but i'm perhaps the most recent appointee to the commission.

i'm a san franciscan of about 20 years. certainly not three generations, like commissioner hammer, but it certainly is my home lwhere i'm raising my children, who were born a couple blocks away. this is an old neighborhood. we do not live there anymore. i'm an attorney downtown. my practice focuses on about half on criminal work and half on civil work. i have enjoyed my time on the commission, and i particularly enjoyed making sure that we get meetings out in the community, so that all the residents can get more than just a channel 26 view into our work, so thank you all for coming out. [applause] commissioner mazzucco: it is a big night for me here tonight because this is where i used to play as a little boy. this playground over here playing strike out with my dad and my friends and play in football on the playground here. there used to be a freezer behind here with ice cream.

i was born and raised in this neighborhood. my mom is here tonight. she still lives in the neighborhood. my wife and i live in the neighborhood. we raise our children in this neighborhood. my father was the beat officer on chestnut street in this neighborhood. i am a third-generation san franciscan, proud graduate of sacred heart high school. i served on the police commission for close to four years. prior to joining the police commission, i was both a state and federal prosecutor and ended up my career in the united states attorney's office doing organized-crime cases. i now a partner at an office where several of the partners live in this neighborhood. it is great. the favorite part of this commission is being out in the community and seeing familiar faces. here is what we do -- we are the liaison between the community and the police department. we take our job seriously, and

we want to hear what you have to say tonight, especially after the captain's presentation. with us tonight is police chief george gascon, who usually sits with us at the podium at city hall, but he is sitting here now. office, -- also, the director of the office of citizen complaints, who usually sits on the right side of us, during the hearings, but before we get to her tonight, we have a special guest i spoke with over the weekend, our new supervisor for district two. mark farrell wanted to be here tonight to greet everyone briefly and get a chance to meet the commission. [applause] >> welcome, neighbors. it is great to see a lot of you. welcome to the police commission in particular. i grew up a few blocks away from here. i played basketball here at 6:00 a.m. my father and i would be out on the playgrounds when i got up. just to let you guys know how

proud we are of captain mannix out here in district two. i hope you find your way back here to the married a pretty soon. mostly, we hope you have a great evening, and i look forward to working with you. -- i hope you find your way back here to the marina pretty soon. commissioner mazzucco: lt., please call line item 1. >> reports to the commission, a discussion item. 1a is the chief's report, a review of recent activities. >> good evening, mr. president, commissioner, commission members, and members of the public. what i would like to do today is briefly go over our crime labs. this will be a discussion of the years 2010, 2009, and 2008.

too early in the year to have 2011 numbers. we had a press conference where we discussed the accomplishments and the crime numbers for the year. this was another good year for the city of san francisco in terms of crime reduction. we close the year with an 8% reduction. by comparison, we ended up with 39,743 serious crimes in 2010 as opposed to 43,032 crimes the prior year. it was even more significant, if we take a two-year comparison, is that two years ago, we close the year at 300,000 42,069 crimes. -- 342,069 crimes. another piece of good news concerning our crime numbers is the number, while the -- homicide numbers. although we had a slight

increase over the year, it is still a significant historical low. you would have to go back to 1964 to see the same level of homicides from the city of san francisco. for those of you that have been around that long, i'm sure that if you go back to remember what the city look like in 1964, it was certainly a less complex and much smaller city. this is a very significant number. we could say it is even a historic low number. in 1964, it was 51 homicides. you really have to go to 1963 to get into the range that would be slightly lower than what we are today. another comparison that i think is really important -- sometimes when we look at raw numbers, what does that mean in terms of per capita crime? we took 2008 numbers, 2009, and 2010, and the reason we are

taking the three-year comparison is because the important trends at least for three years. frankly, earlier toward 2008, the increase would be significant. to give you an idea of what we're talking about is when i first came here in 2009, we were looking at about 53 serious crimes for 1000 residents. we are down to 57.12 at the close of this year, and our goal is to get down much further than that. we are looking to get down in the area of around mid-30's. at that point, we would be in the category -- one of the things that always _ is it is important we compare ourselves to urban centers. often, you hear other cities that are frankly very large suburbs that are being compared to west demographically and in

density of population, it is not a good comparison, but when we compare ourselves to new york, los angeles, chicago, boston -- those are the comparisons that i think are really meaningful. also, we wanted to see how we compare ourselves in homicides against those cities. again, we compare very well. as a matter of fact, we came in per-capita homicides -- we have come lower than those cities. our numbers are, for those past years, if we look at them, we have 1059 homicides per 1000 residents. by comparison, the city of new york is 0.063. l.a. at 0.074. boston had 0.111. chicago had 0.150. these are very meaningful numbers because it is really comparing us to urban centers,

high density, populations demographically very similar to us. interactively, if you were to look at two years ago, we would have been -- our homicide rate would have been the highest of all the cities. we would have been at a significantly higher number because we closed the year with 98 homicides. when you look at where we were two years ago, 90 homicides, 2008, 45 last year, and then 50 in 2010 -- those are very significant reductions in crime. the other thing that i wanted to cover today -- the commission recalls -- there has been a question commissioner hammer has been asking for months, to come up with the total number of officers that would be impacted by the brady decision. for those of you not familiar

with it, in 1964, there was a u.s. supreme court decision of brady vs. maryland, and the court said basically that the government, the prosecution has an obligation to release to the defense in a criminal case any information that may impact in the credibility of witnesses. so the decision by a large at the local level remain very diligent. there was not a great deal of activity concerning how to release this information. until probably around 10 years ago. it was hard to see a movement around the country, especially around the country, some policy to deal with this issue. frankly, the city of san francisco, city and county did not have a formalized policy geared by the way, most policies still today do not have a formalized policy. but as a result of the problems we had with the crime lab last year, this was one of the areas

that really came to the surface as to what we do when we have to release this information to the court. generally speaking, we know that we release that information on a regular basis, that it was a very informal process, and what became evident was that we needed to have a more formalized process. i noted to get there, we have to deal with the unions. we also set of protocols that were going to be legally acceptable both to the prosecution and defense, so there were a lot of hurdles that had to occur, but we finally after about six months in negotiations with the union and other stakeholders, came up with a policy in the summer of last year. the following step was that we needed to go through the records of every member of the organization and quite frankly, in some cases, especially for senior members, it could be going back as many as 40 years, and you also have to look at pre-employment records to

determine if there was any contact in the history of the officer that would be subject to the disclosure of this process. the good news is that after we went through this very extensive process, we have determined that relatively speaking, we have a very small number of officers impacted by this. in fact, if you take the total number of employees, our percentage would be points to 3% of our current employees impacted by that. i will be frank with you -- i have not been in this is that -- i have been in this business for many years, and i do not think you are going to find any organization that has records like this. furthermore, the people that are being impacted, people actually working in the field assignment, is 0.02. most of them, the conduct is either sold or so minor that they really are not going to be a service problem, but the total number, so that you know, and i want to say before i go to the total number that this is a

number meaning that people will come in and out of the list on a regular basis because the employee can make a mistake in engaging in conduct that could put him on this list tomorrow, and other employees are going to appeal some of the process. but here are the numbers -- we have 20 members of the organization that are retired or no longer with the organization. that will be impacted by this, that were impacted by this review. then, there are a total of 75 members that are active members. of the 75, there are 61 that are currently working in public contact assignments, and we have reviewed their conduct, and we feel comfortable that they can continue to do so. by the way, when you have an employee that is still engaging in police work, and they have some of this conduct that could be very minor is that the way the process works is when they have to go to court, the prosecution and the defense meet with the judge, and the

discussion -- the police department brings the concerning conduct to the attention of the court, and the judge or the court decides whether this is going to be relevant and should be brought to the attention of the jury or not. anecdotally, i can tell you that so far in some of the cases we have seen, actually, the court has deemed the conduct not to be relevant. primarily because a lot of the concept is very old. you are looking at concept that goes back as far as 1967. in some cases, it could be pre- employment, such as a young person perhaps getting arrested for shoplifting. obviously in other cases, there is conduct that is more serious. up to 75, we have nine individuals that will be not working in the field assignment for the foreseeable future, but the good news is that those individuals have been removed

from the field quite some time ago, and there are five that are on medical leave. again, you have a total population of active members today that is 75. i want to reemphasize that this is a moving target. some on this list are appealing the process, and they may be removed. another thing that is unique about our process is that unlike any of the other formalized systems around the state that i'm aware of, is we actually have a retired judge that sits on the panel that determines which employees are going to be impacted by this. what this does is it offers not only a great deal of transparency, but it offers the employee the assurances that they will have very robust due process but there is going to be a review, and it is going to be an above-board evaluation, and i think it offers defendants the

assurances that this is not some back room deal being conducted by the police department. you actually have a retired judge or some one of high standing in the legal community of san francisco that is taking a look at this before a determination is made one way or the other. based on the numbers, quite frankly, i had a strong belief that we are struggling with the norm. i do not believe the san francisco police apartment has any greater problem than any other agency around the state or the country, for that matter. i also believe that based on the process we have got, we probably have what will be the standard for the state. i know for a fact that even the few agencies that today have a formalized process, it is nowhere near what we have done. based on the numbers, i can tell you with complete assurance that this is not really going to have an impact delivering police services, so i feel very

comfortable now that we have done an exhaustive review -- that the we have not done an exhaustive review, we have a good point to begin. i believe moving forward, we will have very solid grounds as to any issues that have to do with brady. with that, i conclude my presentation and will entertain any commissions the commission may have -- entertain any questions the commission may have. commissioner mazzucco: thank you. i appreciate you giving the numbers related to brady. the reality is police officers are human beings and they make mistakes. if the mistake is serious enough and comes before this commission, they are no longer police officers. it is not a serious mistake, sometimes, they stay in the department. we have over 2300 sworn officers. to have this low a number is very significant. having seen some of the mistakes, they are not significant errors. they are human beings like all of us in the audience, and they have made mistakes. i applaud the chief for his

review and this transparency on this issue. it is good to have a retired appellate court justice on the panel, who is also a retired police commissioner, and i think we have done a thorough the rights of the officers. we all the men and women to a high standard. they see things on a daily basis that none of us ever see. we have to appreciate that they make mistakes at times. we must respect them and give them another opportunity. i will turn this over to commissioner hammer. he is chomping at the bit here. commissioner hammer: i want to second what the president said to you. you walked into a couple of messages in this department. you took on this job. i think this is one of those areas that the public, who pay the taxes, is concerned about.

there was a hesitancy to reveal the number of some point. it builds confidence to do what you just did, to tell the public what the impact is. the number we have been concerned about is how many cops are not working because of the brady issues. i am relieved by the small number. you seemed concerned it might be a larger number. >> frankly, the problem was -- it is important to make this comment. we were not hesitant about making the number known. the problem was the complexity of arriving at this number. to show you the enormity of the task, we were looking at employees who had 40 years on the job. some cases were not in the police department. they were record warehouses. in some cases, they were

misfiled. the process of going through the file -- it is not like we went in front of a computer and punched in a name, and here came the printout. in some cases, we spent hundreds of hours on one employee going through files, having to read all personnel complaints. the kit -- many times, the complaints were hundreds of pages. you have to read every page to determine whether the conduct would be impacted by the process. then, we package this thing. we presented it to a board that included the appellate judge that had to review it. they had to make a determination as to whether they felt this would impact the employee. the employee is given the opportunity to respond. when they respond, we have to review the response and determine whether the appeal was going to be granted or not.

even the numbers here -- it is still in moving number because we have not reviewed all of the appeals. this was not an easy process. i have been in this process a long time. i participated in the development of similar policy in 2002. the lapd policy is nowhere near what this is. it was at the leading incedge of that time. we are the top of the better policies around the country, if not the best. it is a very arduous process. we have to provide due process to the employee. what we often found is that when you review the conduct, it may not necessarily rise to the level -- you could not do it. we could not simply go through allegations of misconduct and say yes or no.

we had to go through the allegation and read the file. sometimes it was finding the file that was terribly difficult. we do not have a good warehouse system. we do not have good, automated personal files. in many cases, they are not automatic. if you take pre-employment files of people hired in the 1960's, it is a nightmare. commissioner hammer: kudos to you and everyone in the department to work on it. some might see this as some how doing a favor to attorneys or something. when a prosecutor puts on a case, three years later, it turns out something was not turned over, something gets unraveled. this was incredibly important. we're proud of the work you did in the department. thank you. >> this is the right thing to do. if we have an employee that is

not credible, the defense need to know that. commissioner hammer: thank you. [applause] >> i will take this opportunity to introduce dr. marshall. commissioner marshall: sorry i am late. i work with kids. i run the omega boys club. i have been on the commission i guess seven years. here i am for the northern district. thank you for coming out. president mazzucco: thank you, dr. marshall. line item number two. >> item 1b, occ directors report. >> members of the commission, chief gascon, captain, and members of the audience, i am the director of the office of

citizen complaints. also in the audience this evening is an attorney in the back, as well as a senior investigator, dennis mackson. it is a pleasure to be here to speak with you and talk to you about the functions of the office of citizen complaints. the occ is one of the largest oversight of law enforcement agencies in the u.s. the offices created by the board of supervisors-sponsored chart for amendment adopted by voters in 1982. it became operational in 1983. it was originally an office in the san francisco police department. it was later placed under the direct supervision of the police commission. as an independent agency, independent civilian agency, the office investigates civilian complaints against san francisco

police officers for either misconduct or failure to perform a duty. the occ make policy recommendations for the san francisco police department. in california, law enforcement agencies are required to have a mechanism in place to receive complaints from members of the public. the office of citizen complaints performed that function in san francisco. our office is staffed by a diverse group of civilians who have never been san francisco police officers. some of them have been police officers or other law- enforcement officials in other agencies. we have a 35-member staff, the majority of whom are investigators. the balance consists of attorneys and support staff. if our goal to increase the public's trust in law enforcement by being