fema tsa grant. their primary duty is they target the most problematic lines. they work in plain clothes, and they work a variety of not only decoy operations, robert operations, but they also conduct investigations regarding incidents that occur on muni. one thing i did not include in my slide because it is information that i just got, that i am incredibly proud of is that in 2011, this team of officers were assigned 130 cases. of those, they sold 127 -- they solve the 127. of those, 120 were solved via a rest -- arrest. that was collaborative between the group of officers and the mta partnership we have.

our onboard camera system is working tremendously to assist us in bringing people to justice that commit crime on muni. i am very proud of the results and things they have been doing. they start work at 11:00 in the morning and end at 9:00 at night. they are certainly available and have worked and the hours i have asked them to work. it is a great benefit not only to the police department but to the mta. next is our fare evasion program. we have 36 inspectors to check for proof of payment systemwide. this was one of the things that i changed when i came on board at mta. i spent quite a bit of time and read the 2009 controller study on our fare evasion program as well as the follow-up study, and

really looked at the things they suggested and found that many of them made sense. for a while, we were utilizing inspectors on problematic lines, and i really believe, after discussing it with mr. mason, that we really needed to be everywhere in our system. no matter where you ride transit in our city, you should have the expectation that you could be asked for proof of payment. we made these changes shortly after i took over the fare inspectors, shortly around august or the end of august. now, what is happening is our inspectors are in a different police district every day, and their saturation operations are in a different location every time. i am very pleased with the results of this. i have gotten a lot of community feedback. people that were never asked for their proof of payment are now being asked, and i kind of say the proof is in the pudding, as you will see in the next slide i am about to show you.

then the question on the duties between sfpd who are on board as well as inspectors -- sfpd, are they doing fare inspections as well as their scope of work? that was one of the concerns, where the community felt that that was the prime work they were doing on board, and there were a lot of concerns that the presence was a little bit heavy. although a lot of people in the community what that presence as well, but your answer would be great. >> our primary focus -- our officers that are assigned to mta is simply to ride the lines, have a presence on the lines, and prevent crime on the lines. they assist inspectors with operations. they do not participate in those operations. they are simply there in case they are needed in support of the fare inspectors.

the captains to conduct proof of payment operations in their enforcement plans. i would not categorize it as something that we are doing constantly. the books assigned to 78 from the police department are really in a supportive role -- the folks assigned to mta. supervisor avalos: just a follow-up question on that -- when officers are engaged in fare inspection, would an officer go on to the vehicle and ask every person on that line for a fare, or do they choose who they go to? >> at our officers' conduct fare evasion operations, the need to ask every patron for their proof of payment. we are not doing targeted enforcement or selective enforcement. the idea in proof of payment operations is to ask of

everybody whether they can provide their proof of payment. so that is correct. they do not single out individuals in these operations. a lot of the captains had taken it upon themselves, which i really like, to work very closely with robert wolfgang, our head of our transit fare inspectors and work with them. i would rather have the people who are most comfortable with the fare inspection doing the inspection, and our officers are doing that. to answer your question, no, they ask everybody. this slide is a typical picture of our fare evasion -- one of our saturation. you can see that the officers are in a supporting role and the inspectors are the ones that bore the trains or buses and ask for proof of payment and so forth. this is an example of our fare

inspection calendar. as you can see, they are in a different district every day. the highlighted sections are where we are conducting our saturation is for this particular month. i think this was actually the month of december. you can see they are kind of everywhere. i am really trying to move them along. supervisor avalos: commander could you explain how this would work? what are we seeing exactly in the slides? are these folks who were on the bus who would come off the bus to talk to show proof of payment? >> supervisor, i would love for you to come out and have a look. it is really amazing what they do. basically, our fare inspectors are at a bus stop.

they ask for everybody's proof of payment, and then they get off of the bus or train. if somebody is not able to provide proof of payment, they are asked to get off the bus and they are issued a warning or citation. it provides minimal impact to our transit system, and a minimal inconvenience to the public. pulling people on and off the bus -- ideally, and what we are doing is asking for the proof of payment while they are on our transit lines, and we simply -- if they cannot provide it, that is when they are asked to step off, and the bus is allowed to go on its way. supervisor olague: this may pertain to the later part of your presentation, but i will ask now since we are talking so much about fare evasion. it seems that the people on the front line of this are frequently the drivers. i'm wondering -- to what extent do you work with the muni

drivers, and what type of training do they receive and support? i know -- i ride the bus daily, actually, and i feel that they've really work hard and do their best to be kind of the safeguard their on the bus system -- there on the bus system. in the event and there is not someone from the police department on that line, then what type of training -- not just in this sense, but also i know they have to deal with a lot of issues that relate to mental health. people's mental health challenges, and that sort of thing. i just wonder what is the scope of their training? >> as far as the officers -- go ahead. >> ok, the operators are trained -- dealing with customer

service, the operators are trained never to dispute fare. if a person does not have the money to pay, just let them on. a lot of times when the dispute, offered -- operators get a salted. if it is an unruly passenger, the operators will call our central control center, which will dispatch police to the bus, to move that patron to the bus. they are told never dispute a fare. we have some operators out there that will challenge a person. we tell them not to because of the probability of an assault. supervisor olague: thank you. >> this next slide shows an example of our proof of payment statistic. in the month of november, fare, fare inspectors -- our transit fare inspectors contract the

thousands of patrons asking for proof of payment. of that, the issued 2821 warnings. adult citations, they issued 3901. 27 of those were juvenile citations. the juvenile piece of it, i will get into in the coming slide. what i am pretty proud of is that you can see a 38.5% fare evasion rate. this is an example of what our folks are doing. the next slide will show -- as i said, i took over the inspection program in august, late august, and changed the deployment strategy pretty soon after that. really, what you can see is this major uptick in the issuance of

citations. really, that is because we are now -- every single place in our system, we are hitting every line, as well as you can do with 36 fare inspectors, but i am very proud of the results they have gotten. december is even a higher uptick. the ultimate goal here is to encourage compliance, which in turn then brings revenue to the agency and prevents us from issuing citations to people for fare evasion. in february, the mta did a follow-up study to the 2009 study. they published it in february and it showed our fare evasion rate at 8.45%. they look at every part of fare evasion, which included paying partial fares, differences in transfers, and things like that. the cost to the mta is about $19

million a year with the rate at that level. clearly, our goal is to bring that way down, assure compliance, and, you know, get muni to where it needs to be. currently, the mta covers about 40% of the citation amounts issued by the transit fare inspectors. next is used -- youth fare evasion. there is no difference between adults and juveniles and how we act with them, but i will say, when we decriminalized fare evasion, the juvenile piece of it was not decriminalized, and mainly that is because of the juvenile traffic court system and what have you. that is why you see far more warnings issued to juvenile stand citations. as you can see here, of the 3900 citations we issued, only 27 were juvenile. most of that is that we want to educate our youth in the city

with regard to proper payment and what it is that they need to do. also, we utilize our muni transit assistance program. i will ask the head of the program to talk with you a bit about what his folks do. and i can answer any questions you might have. supervisor avalos: this might be for either of you, and that is when a warning is issued, is that in the system? do you get success of warnings? does that lead to citations? is that when citations issued for young people or juvenile? >> our inspectors, you start to know, if you are repeatedly asking the same system, this is not plugged in anywhere. it is a warning my folks give to the kids and just say, "you need to pay your fare" or "this is

how you can do it better." occasionally, they come across the repeater offender. that would trigger a citation. if we have told them and told them and they are clearly not getting the message, then the next step is to issue a citation. supervisor avalos: i know there is interest from many members of the board of supervisors to see if we could make passage for youth free. i know people who are teachers, and when they take young people and field trips, they often go on unique, and fare is an issue. how do you pay for 25 or 30 students to go on when they do not all have the fare with them? a lot of them did not have the ability to pay. i know there is a lot of interest in moving towards a fast the system for young people that is free. i know that that will be an

issue that will perhaps make your work easier as, moving forward, we are able to achieve that. >> we are happy to assist in whatever plan is put into place. certainly that is not a decision that i make. we are happy to assist any way that we can. >> good morning, supervisors. i am the manager of the mtap muni transit program. we worked very closely with the schools. we have even worked with some elementary schools in the half because of some of the problems with the bigger kids bullying little kids. we are currently concentrating at phil and sally burton, martin luther king, and marshall high school. we are also working with mission

and some of the schools in the mission. we are working in the west corridor, which covers washington, presidio, and some of the school's out there, which also covers wallenberg and some of the junior high schools in the area. we also work with galileo marina, covering the northeast part of the city. we also worked at the 1 08, which is the only line that provides transportation to treasure island. treasure island has a community with a number of kids and families that commutes back and forth to school, and also the job corps, which holds 600 or 700 people. currently, i think they are close to 600. and 75 students from all across the country. they are housed there.

they come off the island to attend school, and also have trade schools available to them at treasure island sites. we have noticed an increase in problems with regards to electronic devices. we are trying to mount a campaign to work closely with high schools and junior high schools because we are seeing that a lot of the u.s. are not only becoming victims, but they are suspects in the issues -- a lot of the youth. we are trying to lower that because we do not want to see kids be put in harm's way. we're working with the schools to identify problems before they escalate into major problems. our latest adventure that we have in dealing with -- and it is not really an adventure when you think about it, but it is really a mindboggling -- we have kids @ marissa middle school bring electric tools to school and after-school are getting on the buses and literally taking

out the window and doing gang recruitment. these are the kids from chinatown. predominantly around jackson and presidio. we found the kids who were involved and worked with the school, and we were literally going through the kids back tax because they put them in their backpacks and take them up. little power screw drivers about that big, maybe 80 inches in length. they take it out, and the window comes out really easy with a power screw, and then they are pushing kids up against the window and doing all kinds of crazy things to get them to get involved. we were able to nip that, working with marina middle schools and working with mrt. it has been a real joy working with them.

anything that involves someone getting really hurt, we are able to bring them in, along with the officers at the school. basically, we have been writing thet -- the t line. we have been noticing a lot of things going on there, working with the williams street police station. we have been able to bring closure to some of those issues. kids who get on usually free usually cause a lot of the problems, so we welcome the fare officers to check for that. if we minimize that, i think we will get away from a lot of things like vandalism, harassment, bullying on the buses. these are all things that concern mta, concerns my boss and the commander.

we tried to stay focused to work closely with the troubled kids by referring them to programs. there's a number of programs throughout the city that these kids can be referred to. if they do not get it by then, usually we bring in the officers, and they will get a citation or sent up to juvenile for some counseling. but we try to work closely with schools, and we work with the full diversity of kids in the city, all of them from the mission to the bayview to chinatown and also out in the sunset and richmond. basically, we just try to work with them. we provide education, and we also try to work with them to make sure they understand if they do not follow these rules, then they will get either arrested or cited.

i'll answer whatever questions you have. supervisor avalos: thank you very much. ok. >> supervisors, mr. reiskin mentioned earlier our strategic plan and focusing on safety. one of the things we have task the commander and security folks and safety faults with about goals -- one is to reduce crime on muni by 5%. redos graffiti incidents on muni by 5%, and also obtain a fare evasion rate of 5% on the system. the only area we are having problems with right now, which the commander has truly changed the deployment plan, is the fare evasion rate. we are seeing that steadily increase. what has really helped us to increase our enforcement on the

system with fare inspectors -- we move them from our metro east facility to our south van ness location, so they are centralized now and can travel throughout the city as opposed to writing the t line to a specific location. we move them downtown, and they can go wherever they need to go. we have seen a reduction in crime. we have seen a significant reduction in graffiti incidents, and we are working very hard to reach that 5% goal that we have set. this has never happened before. some accountability within the division, within safety and security, and now, we have established that, and they have to meet those goals. we are now moving -- we are doing better. we are going where we need to go. supervisor avalos: i think that is great to hear. it is an important change for a

lot of people in the bayview- hunters point area, who felt that there t line was really concentrated heavily by the fare inspection program, felt that they were being targeted, and i think that that alleviates some concern. i am glad to hear that change was made. supervisor olague: along the lines of what supervisor avalos just said, it seems to me that there is a concerted effort to avoid the profiling of youth, and i am heartened by that because that has always been a concern of mine. i am glad to hear that you are committed to it. >> absolutely, supervisor. like i said, it is important for us to be everywhere in our system and no single demographic should ever be targeted or have

the perception that they are being targeted. a lot of times, perception is 9/10. it seems to be working well, and like mr. mason said, moving them really stops the sort of piling on of the t line. in order to go anywhere in the course of their workday, they had to get on the t line, and they get on en masse. it created the perception that we were targeting that line when they were simply getting from point a to point b. we put us on the line when it is part of our operational mode only, and second, it is the effect of morel. they are happy to be centrally located and going all throughout our system easily. i thank you for your comments. >> also, the work you're doing with the captain in with the station also seems to be

effective. as you mentioned, there has been a decrease, so hopefully, you just keep on that. >> part of that, too, was we have seen a bit of an uptick in the electronic device larceny and death of those devices -- staffed -- theft of those devices. we're working with schools on a campaign. within a couple of weeks of introducing a major campaign at mta, which is designed to educate all members of the public's to be aware of your surroundings when you're using electronic devices. we are in this mode -- i was on a bus the other day, and almost every seat had someone looking down and texting with had bones in their ears. clearly, they are not paying attention to what is going on around them. the importance is to educate the public fully about when they use

their devices, just to be aware. we are moving in that direction and look to have that campaign out in the next couple of weeks. i am excited for that to hit our transit system. supervisor olague: given that this program seems to be moving in a very successful direction -- there are a lot of successes you could point to -- the collaboration between the sfpd and the mta, to the extent that a successful, it alleviates some of the burden from the operators. that has been something i have always been concerned about, just as a rider. so much falls on their shoulders. so glad to see this is moving in a positive direction. supervisor avalos: thank you for your presentation. we will go on to public comment, and we might have other questions that, after that. thank you very much. very informative. this item is up for public

comment period and a member of the public who would like to comment, please come forward. >> good morning, supervisors. i have lived in san francisco for 59 years. i would like to thank supervisors cohen -- supervisor cohen for having this hearing. it was a little strange that i noticed it was assigned to public safety back in july but it did not come up for hearing until today. i am wondering why it took six months before today's hearing. i just wanted to bring that up for discussion. second, i would like to question why there was only one item on today's agenda, given the state of san francisco. we think that we should have at least five items.

then, in order to be proactive, i would like to make a suggestion for the public safety committee has a possible hearing. i would like to bring up the subject of why a gay man and city employee died at san francisco general under mysterious circumstances that in 1999. to this day, i still have not found one person inside city hall willing to even discuss the situation. in my opinion -- supervisor avalos: this is not general public comment. it is, on the hearing we have before us. >> i am trying to relate to that. i feel this is a public safety matter because in addition to muni's long history of crime, i see that there are other crimes in san francisco that deserve the attention of the public safety committee, and i feel that muni is long overdue for

the beneficial programs it has now. i think we ought to start in some other areas. thank you. supervisor avalos: thank you very much. any other members of the public who would like to comment? seeing no one come forward, we will close public comment. want to thank supervisors cohen -- supervisor cohen for bringing the item forward pierre just a question of whether we want to get an uptick in the future or continue it to the call of the chair. >> [inaudible] supervisor avalos: ok, that is what we will do. we will continue this item to the call of the chair. also want to thank again commander aye. -- commander myra tello and mr. mason. thank you very much. and the other items before us? >> no, mr. chairman. supervisor avalos: