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 distort the numbers because everyone has a want to aggregate them and it's going to double and triple good things and will seem like we're over embellishing and if the supervisors would just accept that we're happy to aggregate any information you would like within parameters we can do it we just don't have the ability to do it per supervisor ial district. >> i certainly am fine with information by the station and you are able to compile that

data by station? >> yes. >> i'd be curious to see that information particularly if you are able to compare what your language capabilities are with the specific demographics for example i don't know what that information is would love to know what it is for the tender loin or mission or others. >> every captain has that available i can have make sure it goes out to all the supervisors exactly per police district how many officers you have at each station what languages they speak and what watches they work. >> if you can give the demographics within that station it would be good for us to see them as well. >> great. . . >> chief appreciate you being here i hope i know all of us here we're very happy about the increase in the number of

police officers that we see in the coming years and hope that will reflect the diversity of our city. >> we can't tell you how much we appreciate your support for the hiring plan and keeping it on schedule. so it's really important if we're going to get them where you all want them and there isn't anybody on on the board that doesn't call and want more police officers yesterday. >> okay great. >> next invite up oewd sorry i didn't see you behind the big podium. >> good afternoon. it's great

to be back before you today. as you all know the office of workforce development the mission of our organization is to retain and train san franciscans for those jobs and we see language access as a core fundamental aspect for our job to achieve that mission to be successful we see it as a core function of our department the slide in front of you actually gives a little bit of background and we remain very very focussed on not just serving and providing language access to all of our business

and workforce clients but also making sure that we're working closely with them so i want to go through two key areas that we focus on first in our economic development and then workforce development. economic development we have bilingual staff who are specifically focussed on providing direct business service to small businesses in particular where they are located. this team in our office it's part of the mayors jobs plan and it's two team members. working throughout the city to provide direct services to businesses. one of the key aspects of the job squad initiative is not waiting for a business to call us and saying i have a problem but being proactive how can we

help. and the ada program but also to ensure that we're selling other programs and making businesses aware of other programs. the office of small business which, supervisor, i know you were a leader in helping to create, continues to provide services to small businesses another key area where our small business team is focussed is on the implementation of outreach workshops designed specifically to address appropriate specific programs like the ada program and i want to spend a second talking about how we designed this program. this really came out of -- supervisors, you know

well, many times just sending a letter to get a letter with all this intimidating language citing statute and with the support of all 3 of you supervisors we've implemented a program and expanding the program that works with these small businesses to provide information about what they need to grow and be successful and we conducted a number of bilingual workshops principally with spanish speaking and chinese speaking small business owners. again language access is -- we have a number of training programs specifically designed for both chinese and spanish speaking populations this slide gives you a couple of examples of a number of

those including a culinary program at city college i want to point out the key program as part of our program we discovered is key and intregal we have bilingual staff at these 4 access points and it lists there what languages are spoken at each of those and we have begun providing services for the tagali population and we continually want to improve and do better. so we need to

continually do better we're going to remain focussed on leveraging our resources and help them better serve these populations we need to do more to translate our written material and see provide translation services. we want to continue to work with miss pawn and finally we certainly want to work with other tier 1 departments to share best practices and happy to take any additional questions that you might have or -- >> do you have data on how many requests come in for different languages? >> specific languages? >> yeah. >> i can get that for you. the numbers that i have in front of me are only the ones that are -- i only have a number of

served but i can get for you. >> how many of them are coming from different places and are we addressing those needs. we're certainly addressing it for chinese and spanish i'm concerned about the others. >> all the requests we received were in spanish and chinese then i don't believe we ended up using the language line service. >> so you don't have a sense of demand for other language needs? >> not in front of me i apologize i don't have that. >> then the question i asked do you think it's necessary