tv [untitled] July 2, 2015 1:30pm-2:01pm PDT
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a new microphone for people who were speaking after 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
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supremacy and racial profiling and hatred of 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
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together as communities to self 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 is 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
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matter 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
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to organize autonomously to 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.
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thank you. next speaker. >> hi, my name is jamie, here 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
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now and 2018 there will be 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
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the sf jail system suffer from mental 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
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about 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
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not increasing incarceration. thank 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
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person was there because they had no where 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
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reentry programming and housing. 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
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heard the undocumented fear of police. why is it there? it is very 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
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murder is exactly like ferguson. the 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
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points of the hearing. we appreciate that you rescheduled the hearing on the rebuild focus so we can have talks about alternatives to the jail because in fact of the jail situation we have almost achieved our goal of emptying out and closing the two jails that are now located at the hall of justice that the mayor and you are talking about rebuilding. >> there are 295 today. that means we
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need to have alternative sites and that means the hall of justice are not full. this is problem solving at a leadership level that we are asking you to penetrate and resolve and not do what dorsi has noted that we are working on fear and putting people in jail that we don't need to. the other point we want to make is on bias which we have in the burns report will highlight this. most of the racial bias is helped by the health bias, transgender bias. you don't ask a sheriff to intervene. >> please wrap up. >> you just don't. it's inappropriate. we are inappropriately jalg people and
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we are asking the sheriff and the police to do the wrong thing. we need community based intervention. >> thank you. ms. thomas next speaker. thank you, laura thomas with the drug policy alliance. thank you all for holding this hearing and thank you for continuing the jail hearing until july 16th so we can have a longer conversation about that. but on the topic of bias and the criminal justice system, one of our challenges is that we continue to use the criminal justice system to address problems that it was never designed to fix. we are asking our criminal justice system to deal with drug use, mental health issues and poverty and homelessness and the system is not designed to address any of those and unsurprisingly it makes the
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problems worse, it makes poverty worse and people lose their jobs while in carcerated. people are traumatized during incarceration and that trauma leads to substance use well. those are primarily in our health care system for example our education system, other things we are do, so, we need to figure out how we address these issues that doesn't rely on the criminal justice system. we have not given them any tools to manage these problems and they are not doing it well. fortunately we have models, the country of portugal for example, seattle is getting
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people directly in services and housing which has shown great success in addressed recidivism and reducing cost. i would encourage you to look at these models. >> thank you for this hearing. >> thank you. >> thank you, i'm amy, i echo everything said by the public defenders office and coalition of housing and speaking on the racial bias issue. i watched "take the hammer" where an african american author came to bayview and it was in the height of redevelopment. she talked to a group of people and said you can't even
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stand on the corner without police coming to break it up. i would like to say it different in 2015 but it's not. i'm like to tell you about a text exchange by a neighbor. he's an artist and community minding and dark skin tone. he said we need to end this racial profiling. i'm getting tired of cops stopping me and harassing me. he asked does this happen on divisadero. my friends are having the same problem. i just want to ask everybody who is listening right now, if you have never experienced what it's like for anybody signature in your home and have someone tell you that you have to leave or that you are a problem, think about what that must be like? that must
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be really challenging to be seen as a problem because of your skin tone. what i would recommend is a training issue. why don't we hire people who are unarmed and call it the peace program and train and employ people in our neighborhood. >> hi. i would like you to understand all of these points that the police officer is making it to where a lot of people get killed and not being aware of a lot of things that progress on
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item no. 3 is going to continue and will meet thursday morning at 10:30 a.m. and we will let you know when that's happening. if anybody needs to speak, please come up on items 1 and 3. >> i really wanted to ask the supervisors that over the years it's gotten harder to do. we have no resources to help our clients. it's impossible to get somebody stabilized on treatment if they don't have a roof over our heads. the number of hospital beds has been slashed in half since 2008. we lost 25 beds, 7 a was
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closed this year. we are down to one. basically the only option is to sit back and wait for somebody that will get arrested and hope that the police will take them to the general and not to the jail. at the jail people are languishing for months and months because they are not competent for trial. this is completely unnecessary and it's so costly and i just don't understand why we have millions, hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on police and new jail and we've closed yet another unit just this year, just in january, i don't understand why we have money for police and jails and not money for treatment, why we don't have money for increasing residential treatment. why we don't have money for supported housing and we are going to spend exponentially more money on solutions that are not real. lack of treatment is a social problem,
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lack of housing is a social problem. it cannot be criminalized, it can't be police. why not find money to solve our problems but to find for policing and jails. >> good afternoon, my name is emily harris and i work for the national and criminal justice policy. i want to talk about what is happening in san francisco into a larger perspective and parted of that being, that people across the country are watching what san francisco is going to do in response to violent and racist policing and jailing and the precedent we set here in san francisco is going to make a difference across the country. we pride ourselves as a county on
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our progressive criminal justice policy work and the county has done really well on things like realignment and restorative justice and having the 5 keys in the justice system in the jail. as said earlier there is only 295 people left in the other jail to close it. so just yesterday and then last week both philadelphia and los angeles los angeles are really behind san francisco.
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