the threshold that is that over 10 thousand residents who are limited english speaking that speak a specific language either chinese spanish or filipino have reached a threshold there are over 340 thousand limited english proficient residents 42 percent of these residents are chinese speaking and of the chinese speakers 65 percent are lep and 44 percent of that population is lep and although the filipino numbers are a little smaller point 06 in the city 42 percent of the population that speaks tagalo is limited english speaking. in the 2014 report tier one departments reported their lep client interactions and it pretty much

mirrors the numbers from the acs population estimates again 87 percent of the client served by tier one departments are chinese and spanish speaking with the majority 48 percent chinese and point 02 percent speak tagalo there's a slight difference in the numbers reported by tier one departments having russian slightly higher at point 03 percent but that could be because of the services provided or the requests that are made. and as you know our leo is a very robust ordinance with tier 1, 26 main departments and tier 2 which are all the rest of the departments that service the public and in general all departments are supposed to comply with the ordinance and

26 departments have to submit an annual report over 18 data points every year which include data tracking budget policies and procedures in general and other items. the leo compliance methodology is year round and it's an activity that's year round for ocf. in general want to share with you some trends. we have a hundred percent compliance by tier one in terms of report submittal and interest among departments to move this forward and also seen a good and noticeable difference in community advocates mainly due to language access networks they have quarterly meetings with invited departments and i

want to share with you some of the findings of our report. the findings have been generally consistent for the past 3 years as you can see there are still a lot of inconsistent cies and gaps. the quality of translation and interpretations are still inconsistent and the cost for conducting business in multiple languages is a burden for the departments. as you can see for the fiscal year 14-15 the proposed budget include on-site interpretation and bilingual pay make up the majority of the cost and i want to point out over 80 percent of of the $8.9

million budget reported here is comprised by 3 departments. and lastly this is a 3-year comparison of the budget that has been submitted to us. again on-site interpretation has continued on an upward trajector y. >> supervisors in may 2014 the immigrant rights commission adopted rules and regulations that have met the threshold and there's 3 main steps to the process. determination of substantial number of thresholds by obtaining evidence from reliable data

sources such as the american community survey or anything else that we can get our hands on that is being validated information and validate this information having it analyzed by by the san francisco planning department and compare with previously published data studies. the step may include a baseline study if there is no information available or the margin of error places the threshold in question as in the case of filipino where there was a difference in the threshold and certification after we validate the data we issue written notification to all city departments as with the original amendment in 2009, 18 months to implement

citywide. we're very pleased this year to to be able to certify filipino as a language. now the margin of error is plus or minus 930 and this is the specific reason why ocea wanted to do a baseline study. and at that time the 2000 census provided a lot more detailed information there were a hundred questions on the long form and changed the process of collection collecting data in 2010 with only 10 short questions on the census form so it didn't give us any information and this is why we felt in order for city

departments to properly provide language services to the filipino population the study was necessary. >> just to share with you quickly the methodology for the study is 3 fold. we had interviews with the community and other experts. we also had a survey of city departments and community organizations and residents from april through may and we also had several focus group discussions primarily with bilingual and filipino staff in the city and we're still finalizing the study as we speak but would like to share with you some of the highlights that we've seen in writing the report. in response to the survey of all departments of tier 1 and 2,

65.5 percent, 69 currently have bilingual staff available to interpret or translate in filipino and departments reported that the average time frame that it will require for them to translate vital documents are as follows -- 62 percent indicated a year and 17 percent indicated about 3 months. we also conducted a street level survey of over 75 city residents conducted with the assistance of our community ambassadors during april and may. 60 percent of the respondents reported that they prefer information in filipino and 28 percent indicated that they want both english and filipino and just 11 percent

prefer just english. we also conducted a survey and we found that 60 percent of their clients served prefer to read in filipino and 40 percent prefer both filipino and english and supervisors i might add that the surveys conducted the written surveys with information collected were distributed to over a hundred cbo's and city departments and end use ers so we tried to do the best we could in a 2-month period so since the language access oversight was assigned to ocea in 2009 i think we made a number of improvements and i have to say without our community partners none of this would happen they challenge and push us and we work together to hopefully better serve our

residents in san francisco for whom english is not a first language but some of these improvements have range from everything to standardized reporting and a language summit in which the community participates and our language access network who is here today and the advisory group meeting quarterly with the departments and identified the departments they want to meet with and do joint problem solving and this is a nationally recognized program and then of course thanks to your leadership the language access community grants program. then we have with us today our small but highly competent team of in-house language specialists who i'd like them to stand up. okay.

so you can see we only have two full-time chinese specialists one doubles as the outreach and education media and production coordinator and then we have one spanish person speaking person whose position is temporary we'd love to make her permanent and one filipino tagalo speaker who is also our research and a backup spanish interpreter. she's the unit leader and supervisor and our lao compliance officer and in addition to serving as our analyst and my right hand and everything else. then the community ambassador program assistant who is a full-time program assistant is the as-needed russian interpreter so we have the capability of

specialists who do both interpretation and translation work and this is really rare because these are entirely different skill sets. the unit is overwhelmed i have to be honest and including commissioners and community members and often requests for very complex translations that normally take months and cost thousands of dollars we're able to do this work at probably a fraction or not even a quarter of the cost to contract out and we could do more if we were adequately staffed and resourced we have the competency in the group and finally since 2010 we've conducted regular surveys of city departments we want to hear directly from departments particularly frontline users and this is what departments have been telling us for the past 4 years that the leo

language requirements are not always clear so there could be tweaking done to that that a centralized unit would be highly desirable. while we admin ister -- we negotiate the lowest cost and highest quality service departments would also like to see this done for document translation because that's also quite expensive lower the cost and increase the quality of the program that would really be advantageous for the city -- save us a lot of money. and the working group -- this year we did initiate round table discussions with our first group and public contact coordinators and these are useful so we plan to blend that

with our language access working group so we'll have departments and community groups talking to each other all the time and finally departments asked for a clear process and policy and so some departments are unclear on what level d h.r. tests at for instance document translation and complex interpretation required different standards and competency above the basic speaking ability which is what is currently tested for so something to consider and finally our recommendations -- we agree with what is being said by departments and community members we should eliminate the tiers and every department should comply with the language access ordinance. we recommend changing the reporting period to every 2 years because from year to year doesn't really show much difference and it's a large burden on city departments to

have to collect all of that data and then we also recommend eliminating any redundant or irrelevant data requirements in the lao also using a single standard for determining language thresholds right now the lao has two we think just 10 thousand speakers of a language is much simpler and clearer and we can validate that it's easy to get that information we do recommend that we determine this every 2 years rather than annually because again it doesn't change very much year to year and 4th and fifth ly we recommend providing adequate resources for language services across city departments and a centralized language services assistance unit for city department and see that would help to tear down the costs as well as make us more efficient and we'll be glad to answer any questions if you have any.

. >> i want to thank you for all your work and putting this information together i have a number of questions and i think i'll ask one and go to the departments. first of all i think the recommendations that you have are things that i could be open to although i do think i understand that we have redundant data requirements that we should eliminate. i think doing an inventory every year is important so that every department -- quick question i have -- have you been able to think about what an ideal budget would be to meet the needs that you see in the demand for these services across departments? they have some sense of what the demand is but it's difficult to articulate what the staffing might be to address that.

>> we've done some baseline studying and you know benchmarking i know that the san francisco unified school district had 8 to 10 full-time interpreters so that's their full-time job you know demand will vary you may have tremendous volume for spanish and chinese we know that and not as much for other languages but we think 8 to 10 full-time interpreters and translators who can also go out and conduct community outreach and education would be sufficient to handle citywide requests. currently we have requests that range from emergency public safety and crisis requests which we give always first priority to. we got one just a

week ago that involved contracts and very complex information there's a drop down menu of one hundred different terms that we can't even understand in english so it would take someone full-time working on that a couple of months so we think 8 to 10 people on a full-time basis is adequate based on the current volume that we're experiencing. >> okay thank you very much. we do have a number of departments the so-called tier one departments. i want to thank you for your work. >> it's it's our pleasure to be here i have officer stokes our coordinators. obviously we can speak to whoever needs our assistance is a top priority of

the police department the nice thing is we're a department of orders so there is no negotiation if we say that that's an order then the officers shall comply and having been that department now better than 3 decades there are certain things that just make sense and are the right thing to do and this is one of them so to that end our policy on language access service for limited english free language service and lep persons do not speak english as their primary language and have a limited ability to read write speak or understand english. language barriers between law enforcement can jeopardy eyes safety and prevent individuals it's critical to ask that this

does not happen. nothing in this policy prohibits members from using other informational skills to gather information necessary to protect public safety identify the nature of an issue brought to their attention or provide basic information in addition to this base policy over the last few years we also have updates and other things that we added to what was already a very robust policy. in june of 2012 we put out a department bulletin that prescribed how it works more in concert with the different provisions of the leo and updated in may of 14 so whenever we have a modification of policy it lasts for 2 years. we keep it current. it's

basically an index of what language someone speaks i believe there's 19 languages on the cards and the person literally points to the language and in september of 13 den initiated software that can readily allow them to identify officers that are certified in tagalic and vietnamese if vietnamese i think it's also important that we actually hit

a huge milestone thankfully to the board of supervisors and our smartphones we are the only department in california maybe the united states with department issued smartphones and on those smartphones it has google language access five core languages english spanish chinese korean and vietnamese and every single officer assigned to the streets has one of those phones on their person. any officer navigating on a smartphone via google language so we're very proud of the strides we've made we worked very closely with the director and immigrant rights commission that everybody knows their rights and knows what's

in bounds and out of bounds and how we treat folks in this world-class city we like to think that we're that world-class police department. we have fallen short in 2012 we did have one compliant sustained where an officer didn't know these different policies that i spoke to and in 2013 we had 3. those officers were admonished regarding policy but to put into perspective because of the mass retirements we're hiring about 150 officers a year where this is all new information for them and in both of these years where we had one compliant, the san francisco police department handled over a million calls for service so we're not perfect we want to be perfect but i think that's not a bad margin for error in light of

the workload the officers handle and measures taken to make sure we get it right with everybody in the language they are most comfortable speaking. >> thank you i have no doubt that your department is absolutely dedicated to the goals and visions of the ordinance and want to get a sense of how often if there's a 911 call do officers arrive on the scene and there's a language issue such that there has to be a call for other folks to help translate and move things forward. >> i don't know maybe ken has that we don't have that but i can get that you mean how many times we actually use the language line or call for an officer? >> how often do you have officers arrive on a scene that speak the language that a

victim or witness may speak and i guess what i'm getting at is whether or not your staffing station by station is such that if you are in the mission do you have enough chinese speakers or do you have enough chinese officers on the west side of town? just in making sure you have officers with language skills to address whatever need you have. >> i can tell you if you have language skills we're hiring so please go to the sfgov website and apply. >> that's part of what i want to get at. i do hear you could always use more and i wonder if you have enough incentives and i do know there's a dedication to it but seems like we're always a little bit short. >> absolutely and i think that's why the phones are so

important it raises the bar and i know for myself i worked many years in the mission district. i'm not a fluent spanish speaker but conversant enough so once calm is there and everybody is safe it's really important to get somebody down there that's the most comfortable, the person is the most comfortable talking to and i think the officers are very very good at that and i think all the officers at stations are very familiar that who the go to people are that are fluent and we try to make sure whether it's the mission district or certain ly we try to get the officers to where they can be to make the best use of their language skills. >> but in those stations do you feel there are enough officers

that speak chinese or -- >> i can tell you it's like anything else in a police department that is union shop it starts that way i make it that way but i can't preclude any officer based on seniority from transferring to somewhere else. but as we do the large higher right now i can commit to you and i know i have to the mayor to make sure that the folks who can be the most useful and most converse ant and again they can move around based on seniority and that does happen. we do try to rebalance when we hire. >> i know before you became

chief in 2010 there were a number of issues particularly around immigrant populations in the southeast and crimes happening there wondering if you had any comments or perspectives on how the situation hopefully has improved. >> there's an annual event now takes place at the bay view ymca i forget. >> cyc. >> and the bay view y where it's a great event largely african-american and those of api decent lots of kids it was a coming together over that incident where mrs. chin was thrown from the platform but i think tremendous gains have been made we do try to put a

lot of chinese speaking officers as we can in the bay view there are a lot of needs out there to be able to speak chinese the demographics change all the time in the bay view but i know captains have remained committed to. >> do you think we need more incentives around our hiring policies? >> officers do get a pay premium for being a certified speaking another language that they are certified in so the incentive is already there. i think that you know to be a police officer in san francisco if you are a person that would like to be in law enforcement i don't think there's a better police department certainly not in the state let alone the country to join, so as long as all the things keep happening they are happening in san

francisco there's an awful lot of people that are wanting to union the police department. to join the police department. >> one of the questions we had is whether to centralize more our requests that are not immediate or urgent. >> the one request in the ordinance we have no mechanism by which to comply with is to report our calls and or officers assigned per district there's no mechanism by which to do that because the police districts don't match perfectly. we can tell you per police district but some police districts have as many as 4 or 5 supervisors included and i think if we start reported out to all five it's going to