in court. the judge asked him, i understand you waved your rights, do you know what that means? and he raised his hands and to me that he didn't understand the process. my question is what do lawyers get when something like that happens, oh, wait a minute. this person may not understand the process. >> not enough. when i started my career were with people with intellectual disabilities. my first interest that drew me in the mental health area was. this is a particular population that is very much under served. getting access to services is difficult. i

can talk about for an hour a. there is a section on intellectual and cognitive disabilities. we talked to someone from the arch and i don't know if it's still called that. it is? we vetted and reviewed people who are going to be trainers. we know it's time for us to give a hard look at our curriculum. i'm going to propose that lieutenant molina. he doesn't even know that yet but i'm going to grab him after. [ laughter ] now we are moving in the right direction. we need to perfect what we are doing. so your point is very well feign. something that we should look at. i know we've had a number of people in behavioral health court and it's

been very difficult to deal with. we need some education on that. >> i'm going to check in on the bridge line at this point. >> anyone there? >> we are going to go ahead. thank you very much. >> so we are going to close public comment portion and the city council going to take a break for 10 minutes. please join us when we come back. thank you. [break] >> >>

>> >> >> >> >> >> captioning, please. thank you. >>

>> >> good afternoon, everyone. welcome back from the break. we are going on to information item no. 8. i would like to welcome samarra marion. no. 8. the office of citizen complaints. >> thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today. my name is samarra marion with the office of citizens complaint. i want to talk to you about our office and working with the collaboration group and establishing the crisis intervention team model for responding to mental health crisis calls. the office of citizens complaint is known as occ. we receive and investigate and make findings

of civilian complaint of conduct and we ensure police practices. the agency established the voters in 82 and limited to just the san francisco police department, so complaints about the bart police or sheriff's department, other agencies we don't have jurisdictions over those agencies. who are we? we are a civilian staffed and we are city agency and we report to the police commission. the police commission over sees both our agent and the police department. we are a staff of 32. for the city charter none of our staff could have worked for the police department and our staff speak a variety of languages, cantonese, tagalog, french, spanish. we are on van

ness, close to market. wheelchair accessible. in a city building. we have tty, we'll soon be able to use videoconferencing for american sign language. your invitation to speak here brought home, our brochures are not in braille and we are working with the lighthouse for the blind and working on getting our borrow -- brochures translated. what kind of complaints? that maybe an officer was rude or a person says they were stopped because of race, ethnicity, transgender, to officer involved shootings where people are lodging complaints because their family member has been injured or killed. we

have received complaints from people with disabilities about the quality of service, from family members from loved ones who are mentally ill who were shot or killed by police and some individuals complain that they were wrongly subjected to involuntary detention for psychiatric situations. we have a full range of complaints. who can make a complaint? anyone can make a complaint. a victim, witness, a concerned member of our city. one doesn't have to be a victim of police conduct, one doesn't even have to witness an incident. an individual can see something on the television or read something and be concerned and if it involves the san francisco police department and appears to be misconduct, a complaint can be lodged. an organization can file a complaint on behalf of someone as well and

we also receive anonymous complaints. how do you file complaints? you can do it on our website. someone can call and the complaint can be taken over the phone. someone can write it or mail it in or you can come to the office and someone will take that complaint. obviously the more details you have about the event, witnesses, information, that will help us do our investigation. even though the name of our agency is office of citizen complaints, one does not have to be a citizen. immigration status is irrelevant. again, it's an unfortunate title, but we will take complaints from anyone. what happens when a complaint is filed. we receive the complaint. an investigator will review the complaint, we interview officers and we gather information and 911 records and we make

findings and if there is a preponderance of the evidence, we write a report and it goes to the chief of police. if it is a serious case, we file a complaint rgs , if it is less than serious, we review it with the chief. it is affecting the personnel file and they are protected from public disclosure. once the investigation is done we notify the complainant. over a month the cases we close, one can look at see the nature of the cases and get that information but it's going to be sanitized of officer information and complaint information and we also have a mediation program. so someone who wants to have the opportunity to talk with an officer through a trained mediator, there is a process of

cases. another part is the collaborative aspect that our agency has. we investigate complaints but also based on complaints and based on what community members come to us about, we have the opportunity to work with the police department and community organizations. so cit is one of those examples. in 2010, the san francisco police department they issued a five year study on officer involved shootings. they were looking at officer involved shootings from 2005-2009. in that report in the officer involved shootings, 5 of those involved individuals who were in mental health crisis and had a history of mental illness. in response to that study. our agency was asked to participate in the study and we were asked to make recommendations. part of what we did was look to see what was happening across the country and what are the best practices for mental health crisis

response and we learned a lot about the model and we wrote a recommendation to the police department and police commission that we in conjunction with community based organizations with the police department really look at study with this model of response. the police department to its credit sent officers to memphis and also sent myself and paid for me to go which was really, a really huge collaborative step and we were able to work with the actual founders with major cochran and meet with mental health groups there and come back and work with community based mental health department and there was a hearing before the police commission and a great discussion about the memphis model and how that can enhance the police response. it was really an historical event in 2011 when

the commission adopted the model. there is a whole resolution that outlines the model and also some aspects on how the police and community can work together in enhancing response to crisis calls. so that's kind of the thumbnail sketch of our agency and our role and hopefully moving forward with cit. but i wanted to make one last comment and that's about president obama, he had pulled together a task force in november, december. it was a task force specifically to bring together and listen to organizations and law enforcement about how to really enhance police community relations especially in the light of everything going on in this country. the task force issued their final recommendations in may and part of the recommendations highlight cit and it's remarkable to have

that really underscoring the role of cit in communities. the other part of you know there is a whole host of recommendations, but one that really stood out to me was that the task force talked about how important it is for communities to work with law enforcement to review police practices. so in that regard, i see our agency is a bridge that works with the police department and community based organizations to have an opportunity to really review police practices and to work together to improve them, to design new ones. so i look forward to working with all of you and other members of the communities to advance these changes and policies. thank you, i welcome your questions. >> thank you. we are going to open up for public comment and cochair supanich has a question. >> hi, thank you for your presentation. i know nothing about the citizens office for complaints. this is

educational. i was wondering, you say you have a staff of 32 and most are investigators. about how many complaints do you get annually? >> between 700-800 per year. >> that seems high to me but i don't know. is that national average? >> i think san francisco, our agency is a fairly unique model and it depends on the size of cities. most certainly there are other agencies that have larger and smaller numbers of complaints. >> i was wondering if you could recite your website address slowly and also the phone number. >> yes. it's sfgov.org/occ. our phone number 415-241-7711. i don't have the tty phone number with

me right here. i do have it in my briefcase. >> okay. thank you. >> any other questions from the council? staff? >> thank you very much for coming to speak with us today. i'm always interested in policy, can you tell us about what sort of policy initiate ives you are working on now and in the future. >> what i'm working on to put together the department general order on cit. there is a whole program, but it also now will involve revisions to already departmental orders. that's one

of my projects. i continually, i do a lot of work around language access. i do a lot of work around youth and right now arrest of parents when a youth our child is present at their parent's address. also in looking at complaints at policies and in general bulletins that enhance the way police interact with the different communities. >> that's very much how our office operates as well. we look at the complaints and help to identify the initiatives that might be needed to fix problems more structurally. so we certainly appreciate that. we look forward to working with you. i would like to offer my staff to support your efforts on policy development and also participating in some of these round table conversations to help improve the quality of the training which

sounds like sits -- it's had a lot of great work done so far. >> any other questions? through the chair. >> thank you for coming and i want to publically apologize for the miss pronunciation of your name. i have a question about mediation. who decides if a case gets mediated. can the complainant say i want to have remediation versus going through this long process and the second part of that question, what's the percentage of cases that goes to mediation? >> that's a great question. >> most cases the complainant says i want this case to be mediated. mostly they are the less serious occasions where there is

miscommunication. it requires the complainant and the officer to be interested and most of the time we have complainant and the officer interested and we have many community trained mediators who are involved. our agency a ranges the mediation but we are not actual mediators, we have community based mediators. >> great, thank you. >> thank you. i want to check in with the bridge line. >> anyone there? no. we are going to close public comment. thank you very much for being here. >> thank you very much. >> we are going on to information item no. nine. i would like to welcome cecilia