with the burn foundation and we have members that don't get paid and volunteer and passionate about what they can do. they go into the schools provide safety education and provide it in spanish and cantonese and proud of that program and partnered with the unified school district. we have two programs related to kids that have asthma in hopes they don't miss school and have a better understanding of the disease and we have that and that has been positively received and our members are dedicated going on to continue the outreach and educate the public. that concludes my presentation. thank you. >> thank you very much. colleagues any questions for the chief before she steps down? okay. thank you very much. thank you for your presentation and for all the other fire department folks here. last but not certainly least we have our

department of emergency management. thank you anne for waiting. >> good afternoon supervisors, chair farrell, members of the budget and finance committee. it's a pleasure to be here today . i am anne kronen berg executive director of department of emergency management. we have prepared a few very brief slides for you today in our presentation. you will see just four slides because -- >> wow. >> right, i thought being the last one to present it's something you would appreciate. we did take the what we were asked by -- or at least what we thought this hearing was about which was focusing specifically on response times and so i'm not talking about our whole department but just in that one area. >> we will appreciate that. thank you very much. you realize the shorter the slides

the bigger the budget gets. >> awesome. i like that. >> just kidding. >> our mission is to lead the city in planning preparedness, communication and response and recovery for daily emergencies, large scale city wide events and major disasters. the department is the vital link in the emergency communication between the public and the first responders and key coordination to stakeholders and residents and visitors. functionally we're comprised of three operating divisions, the division of emergency communications and that's what we will be focusing on today, division of emergency services, and our administration division. in addition to that dem serves as the bay area fiscal agent for all homeland security grants that come into the bay area so we have our staff urban area security initiative here in my

area. regarding the state of the city's public safety services. 911 center falls underneath our emergency communications and unlike the last three presenters i asked my deputy director in charge of 911 to go over the statistics there because it's rob and he's behinds and got a hand on the issues we're facing and develop a long-term solution to deal with them so i'm going to turn it over to rob. i thank anthony our budget analyst from the mayor's office and of course kate howard who has been supportive of us and our controller ben rosenfeld and i

will turn it over. >> this slide shows the call volume but in the last four years we have seen what is now up to a month over month, about 40% increase in call volume. to go into that a little more detail the second slide tries to show the monthly call volume and this is adjusted for seasonal differences and differences in length of time so this is attempting to show consistent, so that's the individual bars and then there's a line that shows our service standard so as the call volume as increased one of our challenges is making sure

that we are able to answer 911 calls in a timely manner and our service goal is to answer 90% of 911 calls in 10 seconds or less. we fell below that goal. we are now coming back towards it and one of the challenges is we've done that through use of a lot of overtime and i will be back shortly on a supplemental request for overtime, but we are also ramping up our hiring. we've done three classes. we seated three classes in the last a little over a year period and unfortunately it takes about nine months when a class is seated to actually when the hire is available for doing dispatch, so there's a little bit of a lag time so we will continue to use a fair amount of overtime in the meantime but this has been a challenge. another effect of this we have a second service standard and half of the call

volume is non emergency police and non emergency wait times have increased significantly as we have shifted resources to make sure that we answer 911 calls in a timely fashion. that is rebounding but they're a lower priority than zeroing 911 calls. >> >> i wanted to briefly touch on -- >> sorry supervisor yee. >> yeah, thanks. the line that is under the red line that is going up and down what does that represent? >> yes. that you use the right hand percentages. that is our service goal, so that's the red line is at 90% which is our service goal and the blue line underneath that is our actual performance so we dip down to

the current month we're about 84% answering 84% of 911 calls in 10 seconds or less. >> thank you. >> just a translation what we're at the goal the average wait is three and a half seconds. this month it's 5.2 seconds so on average that is not significant delay in reaching help. it does translate to nobody exists in the average who exist in peaks and valley so that's why we have our focus. just a few other things that i wanted to touch on -- >> mr. chairman. >> supervisor mar. >> i just wanted to ask rob who do you contribute the increase in the cal volume from 2010 to

now and what called the huge increase over the five year period? >> i believe there are a couple of reasons going into that and i highlighted a few of them on this next slide. we are actually through the mayor's office we've had a couple of data experts volunteer their service at no cost to the department or the city to crunch some of our data and to help tease that out, but the work i did before the volunteers came on board. there are changes in phone use as people go from land lines to flip phones and smartphones you will notice on the smartphone it's easy to hit the emergency button and a lot of people's pockets hit that emergency contact button and are percentage of accidental dials have increased significantly. our policy for accidental dials even if you hear on the line

somebody muffled sound -- we've all had an accidental dial i imagine we will call that person back, try to reach them. if there was any source of concern on the other line, if we heard any shouts or noise we will contact the carrier and try to go locate that person and take action but even if we don't have a reason for concern we will call them back and often go to voice mail and leave a major an -- message and that takes time and that is one factor. another factor is more repeated calls on lower priority incidents. as chief suhr testified earlier as the number of police officers hasn't kept up with issues it takes longer to respond to some priorities and low priorities where it's just taking a report and we have

more people calling back asking is that police officer coming? it's been a while." we also have a -- this is something i am interested in what the data says. there might be a possible mitigation of calls from 311 and that was introduced in 2007 and effort to promote that and as time went on and people moved into the city we might have migration of people calling us instead of 311. >> sir, just a quick question for you. do you see the transition of more repeat calls, do you see that going from non emergency, non emergency to emergency calls? >> that's anecdotally what my staff tells me. i am trying to find ways of putting some numbers behind that and seeing what the trend is. >> okay. i have heard that from a number of residents in my district and it would be interesting to see that.

>> yes. and a final effect is the change in city. we have seen population growth, day time population growth and other changes in what we address more calls related to traffic issues and things like that, so those are some of the big theories and i have some data on some of them but are really working to tease out the causes and whether we can expect those trends to continue, to plateau or drof off or what since it takes in addition to the normal budget and civil service timeline in hiring in any department we have a similar background process to the police department that adds time and we have the academy and on-the-job training so it takes a long time to make staff

adjustments from when we decide we need to and better planning is good in that regard. a couple of things from the challenge of increase in staff we are trying to make most use of the staff that we have, reducing leave usage through a big focus on wellness. we were proud we were in the i think fifth or sixth of the 50 departments in the participation in the wellness survey of the city wide wellness campaign. we have been working with the local union and employees on making the most use of that as well as tightening some of the leave usage programs and we have seen a reduction in leave usage in the last couple of months and resulted in more staff to answer calls and a positive trend we hope to continue and increase in productivity over the work force over this same period. the challenges we've had not due to our work force being less

productive at all and it's actually the reverse, and as i mentioned we have had three classes seated and we are working with the budget office on a long-term staffing plan and in the meantime we have been using a loft overtime to -- a lot of overtime to answer the calls in a timely fashion. quickly i will highlight a couple other areas of focus. we have been working with the fire department on technology and procedural changes to try to improve medical and fire dispatch. that's a big focus for us and that relates to the third thing, the bullet enhancing training for low frequency high impact events and the fire end of the fire department focuses on are low frequency high impact events and fires don't happen frequently but have a high impact and need

to be trained for that and have an increased focus on that and we have a number of technology changes coming down. last may we replaced the main dispatch system and with that big change over that allows other systems to change over so we're going to look at replacing the ambulance mapping system and things like that. we're in the process of replacing our phone systems and that's funded thankfully by the state but happening over the next year and the [inaudible] change overand phone change over will prepare for technologies coming down and text to 9181 and accept pictures and videos that are in the industry referred to as next generation 911 enhancements. >> okay. thank you very much. colleagues any questions at this point? supervisor tang. >> thank you very much. i appreciate the quick presentation and so i know that

because you're probably trying to keep it short i am wondering if off line you could send me data of general topics people are calling about in an emergency. some of the issues i i have been interested in working on and people are interested in calling 911 if they're victims of human trafficking and even though there's a national hot line they don't know where to call or am vs of domestic violence and there were efforts to code some of the calls to make sure they get adequate services and document how many are calling 911 for those things and again off line if you send me more of the high level issues people are calling about. >> absolutely. >> thank you. >> supervisor yee. >> thanks for the presentation and i had an opportunity to go visit the building i guess

recently, and after visiting the building and seeing the operation i feel a lot better about our chances of getting through emergencies in san francisco so thank you very much. >> thank you supervisor. >> okay. colleagues also thanks to dm for being here for your presentation. i think it's critically important that we have you here as we think about public safety and integral part and 911 dispatchers are a critical part of the city and when we think about earthquakes and other disasters and thank you for being here and i look forward to the conversation. colleagues that is it for the presenters and departments today. thank you for being here for these. at this point we're going to open -- unless someone has a comment open it up for public comment and i have a number of speaker cards but i am pretty sure most of the people aren't here anymore so anyone that wants to speak on public

comment please go ahead and line up on the far wall. everyone will have two minutes and that way we can take them one at a time and if you filled out a card it slb submitted so you're name is on record for being here. everyone will have two minutes. thank you. >> thank you. i am a member of the senior and disability action california alliance for retired americans and a supporter of the partisan defense committee. now you know it's a historical fact that any society that is corrupt and greedy requires more protection and security and certainly in a city which the disparity of wealth is greater than any other city in the country and knowing what we have in the city now running it and the tech industry. we have basically the gossip columnists like twitter

and capped at $35 million and other tech moguls and talking billions and don't produce a damn thing for society. they want the police protection of the rich always want the police protection and meanwhile it's on the backs of the poor except we have the philanthropists that get breaks from the police force. i have been a political activist for 50 years and been in political protests in tokyo, cacutta, glaiveg koa, london, new york, baltimore, british colombia, los angeles and -- [inaudible] has there ever been more police presence at a protest than this town. i also know that the police have quite a bit of money they spend on overtime for that and also on

agent provokttories and spies. we know they're getting money to do this to whatress political protest in this country and especially this city and that's all this money is going to be spent on -- [inaudible] put it down in district 1 or in your district -- >> thank you sir. >> -- since the chamber of commerce gives you orders -- >> thank you sir. next speaker please. thank you. >> good late afternoon supervisors. my name is mr. ali and the homeless advocate to encourage you to consider your priorities on budget issues. handcuff -- house keys not handcuff and homes not jails. those two phrases should guide any discussion around public

safety budget considerations and decisions. more police, more jails don't create a sense of safety for homeless and people in poverty and the budget should take into account those that are victims of the current homeless and housing crisis. again whose safety? black folks comprise 6% -- from what i understand the population of san francisco but make up over 50% of the jail population. additional police officers will mean one thing, acceleration and people into jail of people that look like me. the budget shouldn't be balanced on the backs of those already leaving on the [inaudible] of survival and i would like for your consideration to know this that the police department -- excuse me, that over 3,300 children have no place to call them and

elders and people with disability are losing their homes and living on the street and again whose safety are we talking about? are we talking about safety of a few affluent people because there is no space and room for people that look like me, elder people, people who are poor in the communities and the police keep them sai. building more jails -- so i ask you and encourage you to consider those factors when you're laying -- >> thank you sir. >> thank you. >> thank you. next speaker please. [applause] >> good afternoon supervisors. my name is lisa and an organizer with the coalition on homelessness and we are out here today at this hearing because we are really concerned with the -- not only the level of resources but the number of police we are

proposing to add to our current ranks. one of the things that really concerns us is this staffing level is based on a population level and not need or crime. what we have seen through the police department's data we have a decrease in crime particularly since realignment and ab 109 and proposition 47 and some of the data was misrepresented (change of captioners).

>> none of you asked those questions. that is dev straighted when with what we are asking for is housing, food, a place to go to the bathroom >> thank you, next speaker, please. >> thank you supervisors. laura thomas with the drug policy alliance and first of all, i want to applaud the san

francisco police department for reading on addressing drug yus as a health issue. the san francisco police department became the second law enforcement agency in california to issue [inaudible] to their officers to prevent death from opiate overdose and i appreciate that. but i suggest we haven't maximized the taxpayer savings or community helt and safety benefits we can get from continues to look at how we can address drug use in our community and people that use drugs as a helths issue instead of a criminal justice issue. we are doing a lot in san francisco, but there are a number of cities ahead of us in different way. seattle has a program called low enforcement

assisted diversion that allows police to take people to housing and other services and see a saechb 0 percent in recidivism rates and reaarrest for those that went through the housing serves and it is something we in san francisco need to think about if we invest 30 million dollars to give police officers to the tools and connect people with the sorts of economic and social justice approaches that can really help them in stead of additional police officers to arrest and incarcrate people. >> thanks very much. next speaker, please >> good afternoon. my name is mohammed sheck with critical registance and i'm also here to oppose-strongly oppose the allocation of fundsing to

increase the police department, the officers employed. the issue of systemic violence of racism has come to the for oaf any policing and when the recent revelation of the text messages and sheriff gladiator fights in the jails of abuse of instance, san francisco is no exception. to the city and coupty has one of the luest rates of imprisonment historically and in the state so we should work to continue that downward trend. sfr visor wiener says we must look that human impact, but look no further than chief [inaudible] comment which he saiz more police mean more arrests. why

would we be wasting resources and turn around it trend of decreasing arrest and crime rates when we know that the only reason that chief nob made the compant is to justify the jail where 238 million dollars will be wasted on the jail. but, instead of these things-when we take all this into consideration somebody that comes fraul p from outside looking at the statistics would think it insane sooexnand ploos department. we should be diverting the money to pree trial diversion programs and alternative to imprisonment, to resources that we know incraes safety like housing and helt care and access to food and shelter. >> thanks very much. next speaker, please >> my name is nutosha and a community member that spent

many unpaid hours here today. i had am here at a time when people around the country are mobilizing gaerns police browtality. because it is caught on video people are making it a big deal, but it has been this significant forever. also people are rising up about mass incarceration so at a time like that san francisco, a progressive city is talking about increasing the police department, building a new jail or wing of a jail and it is a very curious thing. this is also a a time when the majority of people who are arrested are in jail for non violent drug offenses. in san francisco 75 percent of the people in jail at any time are there because they can't afford bail and it is at a time when 3300 homeless children in san francisco are homeless and we know that who

gets arrested in the city and the cuchbtry are poor people, so this is the criminalization of poverty, nothing new. that is who will continue to be effected and arrested and those chern will-they are already in dire straights. this isn't how we build for our future. also, there is informal research done by the coalition on homelessness which 70 percent of the people who come out of jail seem to hit the street homeless. they have no where to call home. i think it is a time to look at community resources we know are significant, effective, look at restoreative justice, we can be a leader instead of a follower. we have [inaudible] and alex neato in the city and those crimes have not been justly [inaudible] and also for the people who did not at the board

challenge-i have been here for 4 hours, i want to say for the board members who did not challenge chief sir what so ever and all there were was applause for his comment. i want to recommend a book to you called-michele alexanders book, the new jim crow >> thank you very much >> i agree completely. my name is irish [inaudible] a retired nurse and appalled. i do not support the increase money to the sfpd and training new officers. i feel less safe in my neighborhood when i see police. i'm a senior and white woman and feel less safe. i have seen people young men of color, african americans and latinos being