country to evaluate the program to see if it makes a difference if not to do something else. i've talked about options we'll hear in director heinecke i did not who was talk aboutlogies a family member someone might describe as awful full situations. i think the overall positive thing is the officers responding to those calls if they have been vetted by communications has a better sense of what they're going to and can prepare their stress level is lower they'll understand that mental illness folks don't mean that's indicts e it's going to be dangerous

and, in fact, calls involving drugs can be more dangerous. we've trained bart and the park rather than i love the fact that people outside of 70 san francisco areare doing it. and that is the end. we will turn it over to commissioner loftus. >> and i want to have him come up and talk about the curriculum just a little bit for you in case you have any questions, and then they have something to say. >> thank you for the opportunity to present the long road of the crisis intervention training process. and so if you can imagine the giant room when we started and we only had 3 and a half months by the chief's direction to get this done, we started with the very exhaustive literature

review of the best practices out there throughout the country and so we ended up with a couple of cities, memphis and chicago and so on and we were able to visit those cities and then we moved into the direct interviews with experts in the field, which also improved the stake holders and the end users and probably the most important piece is throughout the design, we corroborated with all of the workers and the cit working group and looked at their focus and priorities with a trained eye towards how we can then incorporate all of those ideas into a 40 hour course that is designed for the police officers. we had to change from the police culture, we had to change from running into call as fast as we can and trying to ascertain everything as quickly as possible to maybe take a step back and deescalating the situation and using voice and so on and that is really a

difficult process, but we have incorporated all of that into the training, and let me go through some of the other issues. we did and we completed site visits to the local resources such as the door clinic and the hospitality house and i think that what is a hallmark of our program today is a constant evaluation process for the students survey that we just grade their deescalation skills and that we can have a focus change to maximize the efficacy of our student learning out comes, and they will work together or came up together and working with our servers, and we worked also at our learner characteristics and just very diverse and we tried to incorporate all of the departmental learning needs into what is currently our 40-hour class and, we were able

to pass most of it, and so it has been, we have gotten a new post and id number for it and we are excited about it. but, that is also just a very small portion because even in the training of the police officers we also had to train the rest of the department in terms of having a new cit code and a new crt code and a new way to incorporate new ideas, even in the reports themselves and that was all done in three and a half months and that is a good nod towards the chief's direction, and thank you. >> good evening commission, my name is give ford smith and i am the president of the board of directors and national alliance of mental illness and the member of the oversight group that the commander mentioned. i want to give the police

department a compliment and i also want to encourage sort of ongoing vigilence on your part. and i was in this room in february of 2010, when you were facing the decision as to what to do. while we had some crisis training under way it was not as vigorous and as well formed as the current version. thanks to the oversight and the key learnings and to keep working on, one is the police department in my view is actually accomplished an impossible and which is a cultural transformation. at the time we started out, this was still, precinct captains required to find volunteers that were never volunteering to go to take this course. and now as you just heard with the example of the 60 people

wanting to go up to the cit training, this is something that actually there is a buzz in the department and a positive buzz about the people who want to do it and they see it as a pride and they see that gold, cit pin as something to admire, and strive for, and police officers have really gotten into it and the level, because i am one of the presenters, along with the group of family and consumer members in the curriculum. and a level of questions that dramatically higher people care about it and they have actually examples of this, you know, individual participants and the police participants, and can give the examples about what they experience when they are at a crisis and what this work and verses what that will work and way level difference, than kind of nodding off and just hoping for the hour to end and not paying any attention and so really key and so that it one big, big compliment to the police department, somehow or

another, the cultural change, which is not easy, from sort of a training to be a military organization, that goes in with guns blazing to a calm, reasoned engaging person, that can talk somebody down, big, big deal and so that is huge, and the other thing that has happened, is we have understood that while the police are the point of the spear, they are not the entire solution. and yes they are the moment in time and one of our key across the commission missions is to decriminalize mental illness and not have it be 25 of the san francisco jail population or 35 percent of the state and jail population to be undiagnosed and untreated because they never got early on picked up and headed into the therapeutic track and away from the criminal justice track and

while the police are at the point in time when that change can happen and therapy can start, they also are in a broader community and all of us agencies have to kind of work together, so that one of the points on commander's slide was, kind of present more of a menu, of options and that means, for us, as various agencies to make our intervention regarding who is eligible and how you get in and what kind of treatment you can get and what age are we doing and etc., and all of that needs to be available on the comment about going for technology and we love to have that be on a policeman's smart phone and quick, easy look up and this will come to eventually highlight what are clearly service shortcomings in this city. and you know, there is a notion that this goes back to the mitch cats days that they were over abundant with resources we were not, we are shutting down hospital beds and we don't have case management resources and

so the people follow through and there is a snip et of success, and the case managers and so even though you are only about the police activity. i guess that i would ask you to be think about your responsibility and point out what we all need to work on across the whole city to fix, which is a much more comprehensive continuous in and out of the hospital, and in and out of the short stay unit set of services so the police can easily do their work in identifying cases and then transferring over to a much more comprehensive set and that should involve everybody in the room and this is why we are all feeling very positive about this team atmosphere and i think that it is ironic that the head of the homeless coalition and the commander works so well as they do, given

their political presentation at the beginning of this exercise and they do extremely well and so any way, i want to say that this is not a time to celebrate, and this is a time to yes, we are on the right track but it is an ongoing process, and we really appreciate your oversight of this in getting it launched in the right direction, but we really need to keep going here and that integration of the services and the better communication of the underlying problems in the better identifying of the service gaps, where they are, and by this commission in a more broad thinking view of city services would be very much appreciated. thank you. >> thanks. >> and thanks, richard. and so i am michael the deputy director of the mental health association of san francisco

and i have been the chair, and stepping out, and i just be brief. and i do want to start off by thanking richard specifically and i think that the four years working on this and there is a lot of ups and downs and a lot of movement and the chief said that the support and richard has really turned this around and really provided just great leadership from the departments and administrative support and i think that it has been the key. and that is such a huge difference from the beginning and we are trying to mutle our way through and figure out the logistics and he is systems oriented and just in the working relationship that we have had. and i also would say if you want to come to one of our meetings i know that commissioner loftus is coming now. >> that is okay. >> they are quite interesting and we actually are moving in kind of a big ideas phase. and really, as he pointed out not celebrating too much, we are on the right track in going

forward but our meetings are quite entertaining and we did a presentation at the anti-sigma conference, and it was partly because of the banter in some ways and also because there is such an interesting stuff and i think that we are well positioned to be one of the leadings in the country and i think that right now the department and the chief and the working groups and the collaboration and really the 911 codes and it is key and this is something that we wanted to go from a training to a team. now for the first time the officers can be dispatched to a situation and that is just going to make all of the difference and i have been to memphis and i have seen the action there when you can physically dispatch somebody and ride along with an officer and see how it works and that

is going to be happening here and it is kind of emotional for me almost, for all of us, it is something that we have been waiting for and i know that this stuff takes time and i am excited about that and i am happy to answer the questions later too. >> steve, yeah. >> good evening, chief sir and commissioners, and i am the co-chair of the mental health, and i am honored to be a member of the cit oversight working group and that is also at times, presented, as a consumer, to the officers. i want to commend him and all of the volunteers behind him that work to make this happen and they do good work and honored to be a part tf and as good as they are and they can even be better and one of the things that can help to make this better is a little more financial support, and i tell you where i think that we need

it and this is my opinion and not theirs and i am speaking for myself. and not for the group. well, i like the idea of an volunteer teaching staff of which i am a member and sometimes, and with a little extra funding we can have the on site catered lunches and why is that important, because it allows the officers to interact rather than having the officers disbursed, and it is an extra hour of training per day, if the officers and instructers could act over lunch and i think that it will tell the attending officers that they are important and it would put more pride in their participation and it is not required and it works withouted it and is tobacco is something that would make it better to have an on sight catered lunch and would cost money and needs support. i would like to advocate for

site visits and they take a lot of work and and the company officers and it requires a lot of set up to make arrangements with the psychiatric services and even with our jails and making these site visits could offer the officers something that the consumer panels of which i am a member of cannot. and they are the hype, and they are a high functioning and we give the officers a perspective of the people that have the mental health challenges and the police experience but we are high functioning but the people in the jail psych, and the doors, and they are the people that are suffering more severe mental illness who might have had more recent interactions with the police and maybe not. and like in these people and while they are in a treatment program, and it is an invaluable experience to have that interaction, to make that happen, it takes liaisons and it takes set up and it takes

advanced calling and takes it to a hire a staff person to make these site visits happen and so without support it is not going to happen it will happen more informally and sparsely the way that it happens now verses a site visit and so that is all, those days will move our program, i think from state class to world class, that would really elevate us to the next level, and so submitted for your consideration, and thank you commissioners and thank you chief. >> hey, commission, my name is jessy and i am a doctoral candidate at berkeley as the commander introduced me and i am here to give you if you are interested i have a short letter of the research that i am trying, or that limits the effectiveness of the cit training, and they will create the cit model, and put in the research, that is not enough data on the quantityive data

that exists in the system and there are numerous articles in the east coast about interviewing officers and asking for self-report and very little data exists today in the literature about the effectiveness, and with the research design in place, looking for the 801 calls and with this new bulletin that was implemented in may in 2014, this research design can co-exist with that and produce results. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> good evening, jennifer. >> hi, director of the coalition on homelessness, thanks so much and i am so happy to be here. and you know, just wanted to come in and follow up on some of the other comments that were made and i wanted to thank the commissioners of course, making this happen and the chief making it happen and it is really when you look around the country and seeing which

programs have been more successful, it is really the ones where there has been a very strong leadership, in trying to make it happen and i think that you know, people have been thanking the commander and i think that it is spot on because he has really done work above and beyond to try to make it happen. you know, and when i think about this and i was actually involved in this a long time ago, and when we originally were calling it the police crisis intervention and i guess more than a decade ago. and we, you know, what we do with the analysis is tried to create the systemic change and so what that means is that we are working with a variety of system to try to make that change happen. and you know, a lot of times we get change to happen, by kind of shoving it down people's thoughts and we will get the legislation passed with the board of supervisors or we will do these kinds of things and that is really fundamentally what happened with the police

crisis intervention originally and there was not a lot of buy in for the department and we see that in other work and we are more of a human service agency and we push for something that is coming from the constituency and which is the homeless people and it never gets implemented in the way that it is supposed to be and there is not the buy-in for the department and it should not be surprising and i am challenging an earlier comment that we are from the coalition on the homeless and we work closely with the other departments, and things that have really made the fund men shall divisions in the lives of people and so it really takes all of us working together and developing that kind of trusting relationship and to make it happen, and for this particular, notice, when i think about crisis intervention and training i think about the consideration team, i think about it in terms of the training being the first step. and we have really spent a lot of time over the last couple of years on that first step and which is really important,

training has improved immensely and i think that the officers are getting a lot more out of it and there is a lot of attention on the curriculum to really make it an effective program, but it is, it is that first step. and it is really, that is really just the very first piece of it and so the other piece of it is talking to the dispatch is another important piece but there is a bunch more to go, but if you look back to the resolution that this commission passed, you will see, you know, some other elements, for example, training the police officers at the 20-hour level and there is, you know, we have the evaluation piece for the training, and we are starting to get the evaluation piece for the whole, you know, the whole bit, but there is a lot more stuff around that in terms of when you look at the successful programs over the country and looking at specific incidents and figuring out what is working and roping that back into the training and the practices that are happening every day and so the evaluation piece is a huge part of it.

but it is also, you know, really changing the way, these incidents are responded to, and that, you know, that takes as i mentioned before a cultural shift or we will call it an institutional change and the coalition of homelessness and that takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of leadership and so the leadership from the commissioner and from the chief to really kind of changing the way, but also it has to change in writing, it has to change in the general orders and how things are responded to and whether the command and control was used and whether the elevated use of force was used and all of these different elements and so it is really a fundamental change, and we are heading into the amazing process, i think, to see and how much success and i think that you know, in the commander presented the statistics on the program, i think that everybody can feel really, proud and good about how far things have come along. but we have quite a ways to go

and we have a huge mental health crisis in san francisco and like it or not, police officers are very often the first responders to those crisis, and it is often times the very first interaction with the system that someone is having in psychiatric crieses and sets the stage for that lifetime and that person and help to relate to the recovery and further traumatized and whether they are developing trust in the system and they are engaging in the treatment and so the police officers do really play an absolutely critical role in that and, and so that kind of leads me back to the whole part of us all working together and making sure that our system is not failing people in the psychiatric crisis and is really responsive and that the folks are able to engage in service and get to a place where they are more healthy and they no longer have the crisis that they were feeling. so, any way, thanks again and i

really appreciate everybody's leadership on this, thank you. >> >> you know, i just want to say, and end on this note, san francisco's program is getting attention as far as the united states congress. our experiences are are read into the congressional record and while the senate judiciary committee was weighing the mental conditions and we have three pages of stuff that i would say, and it is listed under the table of content and however i did not check it carefully enough and so i will e-mail it to you and so i would say that a third of the material was out of the san francisco experience chatting up the cit and the collaboration, and effort and so here we are, you know, having state input and also at the national level and i think that is good recognition for the department, and for the chief's vision and that i think

it started with, you know the response to, you know, armed folks that only presented a risk to themself and a slow down and in this piece, about, the folks in crisis who are not armed, any way. and any questions that you may have, and i will answer. >> what the commander said, and one will recognize that the commander and some colleagues of mine in new york and new york state put in touch with me and as a result of talking with me and the commander and new york state actually put in the funding for the cit and several jurisdictions in the state and which is impressive and i want to thank him for that and also for his testimony and the judiciary committee which we were able to get a lot of work on the cit and ended up. >> and but, you know what? he did not. >> he will not believe you any way. >> he didn't ask me tonight. >> yes. and i do want to join in the

refrain and which, did not thank him either, and i think that you know, as the chief, we were, we were moving but we were not moving fast enough. and then being able to ask with the commander to take it on knowing, how good he is organizationally and can really bring the groups together and this is a home run and i think that you are, and you are able assistant, and it is your, and it is just a great job and i think that if we never, ever, ever, harm anybody in a crisis that will work for me and the san francisco police department. >> yes, so, thank you, chief. and thank you, for the presentation, commander and the mental health working group. we really wanted the presentation as a representative from the police commission to reflect that it

is a working group and the issues are being worked on and that the power of sitting around a table and talking about these issues with the experts on both sides and identifying what works, is absolutely consistent with the san francisco values and so it is so important for all of you to be here and so i want to thank you and invite denny ing up to share his story and i want to start off by saying, i met vinny and learned of the tragic loss of his sister, while i was a san francisco police commissioner and i was so struck by his commitment to identifying anything that he could do and use in himself and in his network to make something good out of an

unspeakable tragedy. i invite all of you to consider what he has to say in the spirit of why we do this work and what the stakes are, and no matter how well, we are doing, that there is always more to learn. so, vinny. >> thank you. >> so, my name is vinny and i am 12-year resident of san francisco. i have the great honor of telling you two stories today, thank you.

>> my parents and my three sisters are in san francisco. as refugees who survived camboida and so this city has been a special place to me, and i am really encouraged by the progress that you all are supporting. in this program, and i am here to tell you that even though the ultimate recovery of my sister's life is not within reach, that this work will directly and positively impact the recovery of countless numbers of our community. people who self-identify as consumers all have a very unique and life long struggle. to try to find a way to

integrate their conditions into their daily lives. i am fortunate that i don't identify as a consumer, but i also identify as a family member of someone who struggled with posttraumatic stress. for a good portion of her life. my sister jasmin, was in treatment for over a decade, due to an incident in her own personal life, her posttraumatic stress was activated in the early 90s, and she attended a community clinic for over a decade. she was a known patient at this facility. and a volunteer. and she had a psychotic episode at this mental health facility

down in southern california, and the emergency dispatch called this place from the clinic to the local station where two officers were dispatched. and this is an agency that does not have a formal crisis intervention training program or any sort of training program that deploy deputies that are specifically trained to approach a situation with known or with individuals who have known mental conditions. and within eight minutes of the caulk placed my sister was shot dead and this was within eleven seconds of four deputies entering the known mental health facility and within eleven seconds two tasers were deployed and two bullets were fired. and so, i want