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tv   [untitled]    June 18, 2015 4:30pm-5:01pm PDT

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cline of our jail population. >> ms.al tore, how can people get a copy of this report. >> you can go online and get that report and the stories behind it. >> now i know from jane kim's office through her aid ivy that supervisor kim is urging the jail rebuild hearing be heard with the government and audit committee. people that have already signed up, i would urge them to go to the meeting to testify. if you have to stay around and you need to testify, we will be allowing people to speak after this item as well. so, i have just learned of this and i need to know a little bit more of why this is going
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on. i don't want to disrupt our hearing on this item no. 1 right now. the next speaker and i will call a few names. amy fisherman and justin stout from legal and children services. next speaker, ma'am? >> good afternoon and thank you for hearing us all today. i'm actually here for the day. my name issala mean, a program coordinator, we provide medical and legal advocacy for women in the state prisons as well as the jail. i'm kind of here on both issues and i'm sorry i did hear you say. i'm promised to read statements from women inside the jails. i have five statements from san francisco county definition
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of rehabilitation actually makes life harder upon relief. the world is moving fast, and no air in the facility. it's all recycled air and it's bad air we need to remove the barriers. helping with jobs and education, that's where the money should go. helping to build bridges inside and outside. i would like to you please use the money instead of building a jail, but use it for more schooling. the prosecutors don't read the discovery packet. it seems to me that they look at your charges and priers. they should really read over the packets before they throw out offers. also they tend to do a lot of racial profiling here in san francisco county. my name is "mona lisa" davinci and i would like
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the san francisco to give more programs instead of punishment for the 1st time offenders instead of giving them a first strike. on a personal note, i'm a san francisco native. i'm 60 years old, born and raised here. at the age of 12, officers for justice came to my community and their approach to my community was a lot different than today. i don't know what's going on. all my years now, i truly feel that all of this is from not being able to afford housing. >> thank you, ma'am. could you leave the statements for us?
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>> next speaker? >> my name is diana block with the california coalition for women prisoners also. i want to back up a number of things that my colleague said so articulately and the statements from the women inside. i really hope that you will look at them. sometimes the statements from the people who are actually living it and impacted are the ones that are never heard. i hope you consider those statements as well as the many others that you receive. i want to point out a couple of things. one is that message you receive about women which is as shocking as the one talked about in general. that is that almost 50% of the women arrested in san francisco are african american. 50% in the city where the women's population
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african american population is lower than 4%. so you can look at all the statistics and talk about how we deal with bias, you can see it will take more than one training class even if you get the budget to do it. you really need to see that if you say, go ahead, build a new jail, expand those cells even though we don't need them instead of putting it into alternatives, that will be the message that police officers here. it won't be the message of the anti-bias training. it will be another jail to fill. >> thank you. next speaker. >> good afternoon. my name is jessie stout. i live in san francisco.
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legal services for prisoners for children. we advocate for incarcerated people to relieve human suffering and we find more social services. the jail to build would be the most expensive construction project in the history of our city and county and it will be an enormous indirect cost to environmental harm. along with two other san franciscans i filed an appeal the san francisco court is having a hearing here in city hall. i would like to ask all board of supervisors to hear the hearing in planning commission here in 400 city hall to request the planning commission to go ahead and do the environmental impact report so we san franciscans can learn about the real cost to this jail project and
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how it will affect our city and neighborhoods and people. thank you. >> thank you. next speaker. >> i forgot to call francisco department garte. i apologize. michael and aroma guy. >> next speaker? >> hi. my name is melody. i just want to make a couple comments. i have two friends that work in the unified school district as teachers and they refer to the unified school district as feeder schools to the san francisco jails. because they are not funded enough to give students what they need to not wind up in jail. so i just want
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to put that out there. it fits in the big picture somewhere. i haven't heard anybody say for sure exactly that the police department actually has been doing and conducting the anti-bias training. i have heard them use the term training, but i have never heard chief suhr or any of the police officers say we've had anti-bias training. so i would just really like to encourage you to support that or fund it or pressure them to do that. i think that's a really crucial step to what needs to happen in our city. i don't want to throw out our police department, but i just think that in the right support of environment that they can really be a lot more effective
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in a positive way. thank you. >> thank you. i did want to thank deputy chief alley for staying for the whole hearing. thank you for staying. >> hello, my name is corral fagan and member of critical resistance and advocacy project. the western regional advocacy project is an organization that seeks to cite the roots of homeless causes. in san francisco there are ordinances upon ordinances that restrict what visibly poor people can do in public including essential things such as eating, lying and sharing food. the san francisco police target poor people through these ordinances. this is not a problem of more training for the police or more technology
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for police accountability. this is a problem of people who have access to the things that they actually need to survive to exist and to thrive. we do not need more police training or the new proposed jail. we need real solutions for the people in san francisco for the people in my community. thank you. >> hi, any other name is jess feigne with the political justice commission. i hope you saw the people's report which we gather together from the input of a lot of community organizations in this room to expose the human impacts of building a new jail at this moment in san francisco. it's available on our website. i will leave a copy for reference. so it's shocking
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that the city is entertaining a massive increase of sfpd while it's very clear that the police department resistant to investing $5,000 compared to the million dollars for the cadet schools for these training. this demonstrates that there is a deep rooted unaccountability. i'm not advocating for accountability as the answer. we see this in splikably linked to serves that they need to thrive and to resources such as housing, education and other things we are seeing dwindling in the public at this moment. also the d. a. spoke at the link of people convicted in the jail system. i heard repeated baffle by folks
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by the way the police are unaccountable to the d. a.'s office. we know this is why there was cage fighting instigating by the sheriff's system. i'm begging you not to expand this system. that this system is going to continue to function as it is doing very well. so i have heard you say before, if any city than san francisco would, so if any city is going to -- >> thank you. could you leave the report? >> yes. >> hi, my name is cameal oligo
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. this is my second time here this week. i'm really amazed at the level of hypocrisy going on. it's one thing to come here and talk about our status. we know what happened in south carolina. we need to talk about white supremacy, i'm talking about the board of supervisors. ms. julie christensen. you talked about dead black people. >> please do not address individuals. >> a deputy to get a new microphone for people who were speaking after
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a mother who talked about being here for 4 hours with her son who police officers pulled guns on him. wiener asked for a new microphone. are you people serious? is it just me because i have been here twice in a week so maybe my level of tolerance is lower for this ridiculous of white supremacy like for more officers when it was intentional when you came out thursday evening and only gave us 3 days to do it and it was to organize and in those 3 days somehow malia cohen had 20 minutes to listen to multiple police officers but less to public comment. when you put this much money into a city, we could not act that the outcome is white supremacy and racial profiling and hatred of
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people. >> thank you, next speaker. >> hi, i'm morgan hughes of industrial workers of the world. i was a member of the general executive board of the union. basically what i have witnessed today is a lot of radical language that came from you all that is basically here pacify people to make people feel like this system can be reformed but it is inherent that these police and this process is made to disempower working class people. what we need is is a strong community accountability to come together as communities to self
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organize to drive out violent police from our community. we don't need to call the cops. we need to call our neighbors. we need also to get the different unions to disbanned the police union. because the police union one that is used to escape accountability. they use this union to pressure the state to be further oppressive to people. also i wanted to say that the sf labor council was harassed by the police union for just considering the resolution to shutdown the port on may day on solidarity for the black lives matter
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movement. this is a level of intimidation that is beyond reform. with all this during pride last year, abolitionist were attacked by the san francisco police department who were at the same time claiming to the lgbtqa accountable to those people and inclusive. what we really need is direction actions with the union and intersectional coalition like the new jail coalition to block the development of the jail because i don't believe that we are, that this system is meant to listen to us. we as a community need to organize autonomously to
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stop this jail from reconstructing. body cameras can be turned off with no accountability and a tool for surveillance and police lawsuits. the whole civilian review board, it's all corrupt because all that evidence and all those testimonies and the surveillance footage is used against people who are survivors of police brutality myself included. >> thank you very much. please wrap up. >> so, body cameras are just a part of the national reform called by the president pacify the masses. >> thank you very much. please respect the other folks behind you in line. thank you. next speaker. >> hi, my name is jamie, here
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with critical assistance. deputy chiefly said there is not enough time to give every police officer bias training. he also reported the police department is going to hire 250 officers by the end of the year. he can't address bias, why are they hiring more officers, that's dangerous and reckless. when we talk about bias in the police force, police chief suhr explained that since marijuana was criminalized. he said "when we replace 300 officers between now and 2018 there will be
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60000 more shifts by police officers a year. they are going to make arrest. he then predicted that officers might make one arrest a week at a minimum. we are looking at 12,000 more arrest a year at least. this cancels out the drug war legislation. it's simply to arrest. who are they arresting? hiring more police officers does not see justice. building a new jail for those officers arrest does not seek justice. justice looks like pretrial program, justice in community organizations that are responding to people for health care and after school program job training for people coming out of prison. thank you. >> thank you, next speaker? >> hello, my name is okay den peters and a teacher in san francisco.
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as an abolitionist and educator i'm calling for a halt on this jail system. we need more public education and after school program. i see day after day students coming to school with little to know sleep because they don't have a safe quiet place to get rest. i see students not able to stay after school because they need to make it in time for the shelters they live in. i see them terrified and traumatized because they have seen their mother, sibling, taken away because they are criminalized for being black or brown. i see students who are not able to complete their iep plans because of mental health issues. at least one in five people in the sf jail system suffer from mental
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illness. jails will not be a safe place to treat people with mental illness. this is pretrial. they have not been convicted or sentenced for any time but locked up because they can't afford bail. there are more viable, equitable and economical solutions that san francisco can use instead of building cages. if this city is vaguely interested for the issues that are kachd to -- attached to and created by this system you will listen to the people of this room. >> hello, my name is annie fisherman. i teach in san francisco city college. what i want to say is it's not about
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addressing individuals but about the harm and policing and the poverty criminalized mental illness. so, we know that policing, that incarceration doesn't make our community safer. we know what does make our community safer, things like access to jobs and education at city college to affordable housing to opportunities to mental health treatment and community based services and that fill the infrastructure and the support and connectedness to community that drive incarceration and this increase in policing that really does destroy the thread and the community that are most impacted by them. to me that's what we should be spending those resources on and not increasing policing and not increasing incarceration. thank
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you very much. >> thank you. next speaker? >> hi, my name is irvin from the justice project. we know that the proposed increasing in policing is intimately tied to the jail expansion. he said that the jail will justify every new jail. we facilitate each group every friday and we are clear about the conditions of our community. one of our members was interested as a result of a situation and not offered services and one was harassed by an officer and told he would be put in a tank if he didn't comply. 1 person was there because they had no where
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else to put her. we had to advocate for gender appropriate clothing that they are supposed to get and given to them. we have to advocate for them to have access to more than one bra so they don't have to be naked in front of guards while changing and now to the women's facility, and potentially for women who have access to choose their facility based on their gender. these are much needed reform and long over due. and once had access to these reforms and access of reconfiguring the population and it was intentional. these issued would not be resolved by building a new jail. this is for programming that is accessible. alternative sentencing through the sentencing commission and reentry programming and housing.
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affordable housing will serve the community instead of more police and new jail. >> what is tci justice again? >> the transgender variance project. >> thank you. >> next speaker. my apologies. >> my name is francisco garte. i thank you supervisor campos and mar for holding this hearing. i work at the public defenders office, i'm the immigration attorney. we already know that african american people are arrested disproportionately in this city. but when it comes to latinos, we don't know because this city is violating the law in not maintaining statistics. we've heard this before. we heard the undocumented fear of police. why is it there? it is very
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real because police have been away to put people into deportations proceedings. and for 8 or 9 years we've seen people arrested for crimes, not formally charged with crimes, but ice detainers are issued because the fingerprints are shared with immigration. thousands of people of these communities have been deported from local law enforcement. we don't know the disproportionate levels of latinos." it's not often that a public defender will refer to a representative of a district attorney to quote them. but kristin said she supported transparency and accountability and not to consider the review of our work with
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hostility. the police department is not the only department that suffers from endemic racism. it's endemic to our society and we all have an obligation regardless of our skin color including white people to challenge this. we desperately need you as leaders of this city to make change and to hold people accountable. thank you. >> thank you, next speaker. >> the gray panthers of san francisco strongly oppose the construction of a new jail. i have the testimony i was going to give on that. otherwise there is 3 points we need to say. one is we have to is to the the rhetoric of san francisco that is not ferguson. with no charges against alex diego's murder is exactly like ferguson. the
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second thing, this has to start from the top. on the murder of perez, that he charged the police with a knife raised over his head and yet an independent autopsy shows perez was shot in the back. where is the retraction from that statement? where is the apology? in addition is chief suhr has also said that it's going to lead to the continued increase in population of homelessness and black and brown and poor people in areas where they want to -- gentrify
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the situation. the latin member and women in the mission areas which is a huge area for gentrification has stepped up until it became an economically hot area. we have to say that police racism and profiling is economic. so no new jails, no new police. >> thank you. >> thank you. next speaker. >> thank you. aroma gallo. you received our report today about the rebuild. i'm trying to link up the 2 two 2