tv Government Access Programming SFGTV June 28, 2019 10:00am-11:01am PDT
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-- we are working behind the schoons with our community-based organizations and with the street invention team, they're very well connected in the community so as much information as we can have to put out those fires before they do erupt on campus is the optimal situation. i don't know if commander lazar, klcaptain williams, wants to tak about that. but getting that information from the community, i agree with you, because if we can help to address those situations before they become something of violence and someone gets hurt, we would prefer to do that. and to work with our community partners and to address those. >> in response to this i want to let you know that the captains of our district stations are now having the officers adhere to a policy where if there's any type of crime or violence that occurs within a home or within their communities that involves a juvenile that is attending the
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san francisco unified school district, that i receive a copy of that report want upon receipt of the copy of the report i contact the sfsud and they confirm whether or not the student attends the schools and what school site that they may be at so we can provide them with services and address any type of behavioral change accordingly, and understanding that there's something that has happened, that is traumatizing this student. >> commissioner -- were you done, commissioner? >> i wanted to say how is the union involved in this? because i have seen several disturbing videos and kids are passing these around and they're getting on instagram. and some i hear are not even reported. you know, it's that tricky thing because as an administrator i'm not -- you know, i can't supervise everywhere but we have concentrated groups of children and i hear that violence is happening. this is one of those gaps
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between agencies that i think that is -- when issues don't get resolved they get more intense and then we see, you know, they can erupt with violence. >> our san francisco muni officers that work with sfmta is in constant communication with cypress and when we get those footages available, it's put out to all of our officers. frequently our school resource officers are able to identify young people. and there have been times when i've had videos that we haven't been able to identify the young person but we have just enough information for sfsud to then assist us with the crime. and we also have some people that have access to various social media platforms and even if they're not reported through cypress we find out about them and when we do we take the appropriate actions.
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>> thank you. commissioner? >> thank you, kevin, for the presentation. i had two questions. and i think that the other one we could answer later. my current question right now is, you know, we're talking about present time things that happened during the event and i'm just curious to understand where there's opportunities put in policies, places where we support schools or institutions or locations after these kind of activities. and so from my experience, you know, things happen and there is -- i mean, there's trauma that happens. so what is the follow-up? does that need to go into this m.o.u.? you know, we just were age to put a wellness center at balboa, right, but that was like advocacy through the schools and the principals and everyone. but to formalize something and put something in policy, if a school goes through something
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like this, and you know, i just wasn't clear of how do we support institutions that go through these type of trauma events moving forward. >> okay. so well, for one we do have wellness centers in all of our high schools and in all of our alternative schools. the balboa wellness center was changed for next year but they had the teen health center funded by d.p.h. so we're very fortunate in the sense that we have social workers a at all up our schools. and one of the only school districts that can actually say that. and now having a social worker at the school and now, in addition, we have in the school district an office -- and the position is open right now -- for a crisis response and school emergency preparedness and we're replacing that position because mr. kasata has moved to arizona. anyway, in addition to that, we have another office within school health programs that is school crisis response and
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emergency preparedness and that's led by a team of social workers and nurses and health care counselors that provide a direct response to schools. so let's say, for instance, that a situation happened at a school and there was -- we make sure that social worker has the support that they need if we need to contact additional agencies and provide additional counselling at the school, if there's been a tragedy, then those resources kind of kick in also. and i believe that we -- we communicate that also to the board members when there are situations and the school has been traumatized by an event, we try to tell you as often as possible of what we have done. but we're very fortunate to have the number of social workers and nurses that we have in our robust wellness initiative to also support the schools. i think that the c.b.o. partnership is also very, very important. we have a strong relationship with hope s.f. so that helps us
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in key critical neighborhoods in this city as well. >> commissioner cook? >> good morning and thank you for the presentation also. so in our presentation we see some examples of what happens with s.r.o.s and just what happens when situations come up at schools. just for the benefit of the public can we share how many s.r.o.s are at particular schools? >> all right, well, we have 12 s.r.o.s providing sayses to our schools in the city. >> and this one s.r.o. per site, right, and people are not doubling up, two per site? >> there should be one -- each s.r.o. should be functioning individually. so that we get more coverage. and they come from out of their
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district stations. >> right. and those are all 12 are at high schools? >> they cover high schools, middle schools and if needed they will respond to a call for service at an elementary school and advise them what they should do at that point. >> okay. so an s.r.o. has regional schools they respond to based on the issues? >> yes, sir. >> so there's no s.r.o. based at a site throughout the entirety of a day. that is what we used to currently do? >> not currently they're at one specific school site full time. >> okay. >> so in the past before this m.o.u., the last previous m.o.u. before that we had the community orienting police in schools grant, the cops grant. i had an s.r.o. on my campus every day so that provided s.r.o.s actually on the school campus. they had an office. they were there just like a regular staff person all day long. that grant sunsetted back in
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2014. and that's when that grant required that we had an m.o.u. with the school district. when the grant sunsetted the m.o.u. sunsetted. and then i came downtown. and then they said that we still need this m.o.u. because the community orienting police in schools, the s.r.o.s went back to their station, they reported to their station and they didn't go to the schools and they did not have an office in the school anymore. but that's what triggered us to have reinstating an m.o.u. with the police department. so that's what we did back in 2014. but since then they have not been in the schools as a regular staff. >> right. and so then s.r.o.s are only responding to schools when the incidents coming up and they're not engaged in the school sites that they're connected to otherwise? >> no, that's not necessarily so. so hopefully they're establishing a relationship with that school. >> right. what are the avenues for the s.r.o.s to stab relationships
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with their assigned schools or how are we accomplishing that? >> we have -- so all of our s.r.o.s are trained to present instructions. and we have s.r.o.s now that are working with the individual schools within their district, with the agreement with their principals and they are presenting educational curriculum about bullying and harassment and proper social media and also for young people to know their rights. in fact, we're in communications right now and meeting with kevin truett and others at sfsud to expand our interactions and engagements. but we are engaged when we are requested to be there to present and we are there and we are prepared to consistently to work with the schools. >> you know, if i can just say that's going to be -- that question is directly responded to in their presentation.
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so they have one after me. and it talks about the s.r.o. roles in schools and what they do. so that's actually included in there. so i think -- >> so i see more names on the thing and we could probably just keep going around and around and i will let you to finish the presentation. >> there's two important parts to bring up also. this section, police interviews on school campuses, got a lot of discussions at the community meetings. i don't expect people to read that and, again, i wanted to show and you really illustrating the yellow is all new. so the white section is what the m.o.u. said previously and due to the community input we've added all of the yellow highlighted. so we have newly adapted board policy to require if the police are going to interview or interrogate a student that it requires a warrant, a parent order or parent guardian consent or circumstances to allow the police to have an interview by police.
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we have also added new language that requires students 17 and under to have consultation with the public defender prior to any interview. and in response to the community input we've also added that the students may contact their parents using their own phone to be present for the interview and this helps students. because if they are going to call the parent and the parent sees that the caller i.d. comes up they'll pick up that call. and the location of the arrest, this is -- this is gotten a lot of discussion as well. and the yellow is what we added. and basically what we have said in this is that it's something that got a lot of discussion, is that s.r.o.s shall take into consideration the student's right to privacy when being escorted off campus. students who are arrested on campus and escorted off should be free from the public's view and/or reasonable attempts shall be taken to conceal the
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student's identity. that's new language. >> great. that's the end? >> that is. okay, so i will call you guys in one second and i would like to go back to slide nine. so this is part of the requesting police assistance. this is the point that we came to -- >> last part, i want you to talk about that because it still leaves some discretion and i understand that there needs to be discretion in these situations, but the part that i'm talking about is where it says "site administrators shall rely on their experience and reasonable discretion to determine when police assistance is necessary to protect the safety of students and staff." and then if they have any doubts they're to call the assistant superintendent. i just want you to talk a little bit about that and see how likely that is and how real it is in real-time and/or what the
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response was in terms of sfsud and the interaction with the community on that particular item. >> yes, there's definitely discussion about schools that a lot of this discussion was about school administrators that are calling police for disciplinary matters. let's say, for instance, that you hear a rumor that there's going to be a big fight after school. you don't have any evidence to tell you that it's going to happen but there's text messages going back and forth and it's basically a rumor. and then this part about the site administrator shall -- and the site administrator probably knows by knowing the students that, okay, there's been tension here going on for a long time. apparently it's all going down today after school. and that's where they rely on their experience and the reasonable discretion to contact the police to be proactive because they anticipate that there's going to be a problem. that's an example of how that could happen. >> no, i get that point. i guess what i'm more concerned about is that those are words --
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which is good -- but what action has the district taken to train and/or to work with the school sites? i think that's probably more important. i'm glad that there was input and i'm grad that ther glad thaf work on the language but the follow-up is probably more important than anything, because i don't know how many schools you have -- >> 120. >> how many? >> 120. >> so that's 120 -- i mean, minus probably the elementary schools based on the data, right. and middle schools and high schools are probably where this is the most important. but what has -- as a result of this m.o.u. what has sfusd done to train and/or to achieve this particular level of readiness? i mean, there's discretion involved and the reference is experience. so i want to understand that a little bit better. >> so i think that one of the things is that all of the
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administrators receive training at the beginning of the year on crisis response and school emergency preparedness. so in addition to contacting and interacting with sfsud is part of that and you know how to do a lockdown and a lockout and shelter in placeet set. on an individual basis we debrief with -- so every school is supervised by an assistant superintendent and we have every involvement when that occurs. so we've had situations where, for instance, the call to the police was not necessary. i mme immediately will meet wite assistant superintendent and with that -- who is supervising and counselling that principal on how they should have handled that situation instead of calling police. so we review these incidents when they come in -- go ahead. >> no, go ahead. >> so i did the incident report and it comes into the district
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office and there's been a contact with police and we review that and determine if it's necessary. if not, we do immediately reach out to that principal to find out what was the nature, why was it necessary to contact the police for this -- for this situation. so, again, with the school supervision they're guided and coached in that way and especially for the newer admin straighters. what will happen i would say almost the vast majority of the time is before they're going to call police, an administrator will usually call their assistant superintendent and say i'm about to call the police, should i call them on this matter. and they'll generally go into my office and say that something is happening at aptus and they think they need to call the police, do you think they should call? so i wouldn't say that is perfect and i think we need those situations to do after action to review incident reports. that's what is happening i would say probably, you know, half of the time is that reviewing them
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and counselling them on whether this was appropriate to call the police or making sure that they know to t call us before they eh make that call. >> i saw that you had data on arrests. do you have data on the number of calls to police and the children involved in that? because i know it's a big part of the conversation at the school board and also at the board of supervisors and with the police department. and we get into situations of implicit bias. so we're just concerned about that. so i'm wondering do you also keep the data on the calls that were made to police based on the students? >> we do have the calls for service. and sfusd keeps the calls of service. most are non-identified to a particular student so they're calling about a situation that occurs and that refers to a student. but when something happens to a particular student, there is a detention, there is an arrest, and then it goes on and we go
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into that student's profile and we actually write something about it. but if it's just a call for service because they needed advice on something or something was happening, it's not necessarily identified to a student. >> okay, okay. dusty ran randolph. >> i don't want to add any complexity to this m.o.u. but i know that commissioner collins at the last meeting was very interested in the enrollment, and enrollment partnerships between city college and the school district. and it's one of the issues that we'll hopefully bring back to the committee here to give an update on where we are. and when we're trying to increase the number of high school students on city college campuses, is city college covered under this m.o.u.? for example, if a student under 18 takes a class at city college, and potentially gets
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into a situation where police are coming on campus. specifically the right to privacy when being escorted off campus, does that not apply to city college? >> if they're on city college campus, whatever city college determines as safety they can call the police for any matter they want, according to -- we don't know what -- how city college staff are -- you know, whatever their safety guidelines are, this doesn't pertain to them. and i would say too that this m.o.u. does not pertain to any other city police departments. so we're talking about sfpud, but if redwood city police wanted to come into san francisco and show up at a school and arrest a kid, they can do that anyway that they are told to do it. we cannot block any police activity from another jurisdiction, so daily city police -- and this happens -- this happens when they show up at the school and they don't to follow the m.o.u. so it only pertains to our
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school sites and not city college and not other jurisdictions. >> the reason that i'm bringing this up is because i can see how this could actually be a loophole or a problem for students. i mean, not only to protect the rights of the students at the school district side, but i think that we also need to make sure they get the same type of rights and, you know, protections when they are not at the school abou but at our camp. so i don't know what the next steps are. does it mean that we have to have a separate m.o.u. with the sfpud to protect the unified students at our locations? or is that something that we can discuss and explore -- i don't even know what the next steps would be for that. but i just don't want to be in a situation where a unified school district student runs into an issue at city college and then they don't get the same rights and protections that they should be afforded to if they were happening to be at a school.
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>> right. and it happens. and we are informed of it, but we don't have any guidance on that. so what i can do is -- i can talk to our officers too to find out what are the protocols at city college. i never would have been in a conversation of the safety measures, security, at city college. so it's kind of how you guys run that is up to you. but we can certainly -- i would be curious to see if there is any direction on when city college staff call the police. i don't know what their criteria is. you know, with respect to when we tell principals that you can call under these circumstances only -- i don't know what the guidance that city college staff are given. but i can find out. >> that would be great. it would be good for us to know. >> oh, they're going to address it. >> well, there you go. >> see, see. >> that's a good point. i think we'll take one more
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question and then we have a number of other presenters and we have a whole host of people from the community that want to do public comment. so commissioner collins? >> yes, i want to put this on the record that i still have a lot of questions when we are looking at data. i had asked for data around sieft transfers as a sense of how we can see if kids are feeling safe. and the data that show shared with me showed that predominantly the number of kids requesting safety transfers were black students, is that correct? or black and brown students were requesting more safety transfers than more races of students for violent related incidents? what is your sense? i don't know. >> the safety transfers are down quite a bit because we have more criteria that we're looking at for safety transfers because a couple years ago, of course, it was just a tsunami of transports that kind of blocked the system. this year we've had less safety
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transfers this past year than we have in a number of years. >> so i guess that i want to put this out as a request more than a question. if we're collecting data on students committing violence we should also be collecting data on students that are being harmed or, you know, targeted because we know -- i saw this at my daughter's school -- one student that was targeted was also then involved in targeting other kids. it's hard -- you know, kids that often are seen as perpetrators are sometimes targets of bullying and that's why they come to school with, you know, in defense of themselves or in conflict. so i'd like for us as a district to be tracking who is being -- when you're recording you say that you record this on the student profile. and there's other kids involved. is it possible to start recording the other students involved in those so that we could start tracking if there are groups of students that tend to be involved in being targeted? because i feel like the prevention piece is preventing
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it from escalating to where kids need to feel like they need to escalate it. and that means getting them services before it gets to that point. and then, additionally, the other question that i had is -- when we know that students are in conflict -- this happened also at my daughter's school -- when it's resolved it takes time and they both have a right to attend school. but while they're in school what i saw is that there were other fights happening after that because -- the school didn't have staffing to protect. so i want us to be making sure that while we're resolving things through practices or through police or judicial system that we are separating kids so that -- because what i saw is that there was a conflict that happened off-site and we had several other fights on campus and the school wasn't prepared to manage it. i don't want police involved in those things and that is something that we should manage but i want to make sure that
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we're staffing our schools and making sure they can attend school in locations so that they're not, you know, while we're fixing it that we're not continuing to have other incidents. >> thank you. >> thank you, commissioner collins. so just to give a quick -- i will hand it back over to you, chair. i just want to give a quick update. so we have probably three or four more presenters and there's a lot of people waiting to do public comment. so what we're going to do is we're going to finish the presentations, i think a lot of the questions that we all have, some of them might be answered in the subsequent presentations. and then we will take public comment right after that. if we have questions for any of the specificking remaining presenters we can call them back up, okay? chair haney. >> i wanted to announce that supervisor walton had to leave and supervisor safai will sub in for him officially. >> is there a motion to have
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supervisor walton for the remainder of the meeting? >> so moved. >> i need a second. >> second. >> thank you. >> okay, great. commander lazar. >> good morning, supervisors and commissioners and trustees, i'm commander david lazar with the san francisco police department community engagement division. the school resource officer program is within my division, so i'm joined here today by acting captain elonda williams who will co-present with me and i look forward to this presentation and also fielding any questions that you may have moving forward. in terms of my presentation today i'm going to talk about the m.o.u. status, some of the issues and concerns that we have and the work that we're doing moving forward and we'll talk about the school resource officer program and i know that there were questions about that. and give you an update about know your rights and we're proud of the work that we have done with both the school district and the department of accountability on that brochure and basically what our next
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steps are. one of the themes that i'd like to put out is that i know that today we're talking about enforcement and what are the citations and arrests and things of that nature but we really see that as a small portion in our role as police officers. our overarching goal and our value is how do we build good relationships with the students, how do we become better role models and how do we work well with the school district to accomplish the work that we need to do to make sure that the school is a very safe environment for our students to learn and things of that nature. so it's one of points that i want to emphasize and make today. and the other thing that i'd like to say is that we're working very well with the school district in our partnership in revising this m.o.u. and really on a day-to-day basis we have a really good working relationship. and in terms of the m.o.u. status, i know that we are moving forward quite quickly. the police department received a draft in may of 2019.
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just last month we had some initial reviews and some comments and some suggestions and we may have some additions as well. we're going to have an internal command staff and a meeting with one of our police commissioners who is going to join us to discuss the m.o.u. internally and that meeting will take place a week from today. and then i'll circle back on behalf of the department with the school district and work on the language with our goal to finalize it in july at the latest and in early august in anticipation of having our new m.o.u. in place and ready to go for the new school year. in terms of the m.o.u. and our goals and some of our concerns, of course, we are going to reflect the work that came out of legislation and the administrative code 96-c dealing with no interrogations of youth 17 or younger unless certain conditions are met and we will add language and make sure that it's not only in the new m.o.u. but that all of our officers are
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i am proud to say, as i stand up here, i am a product of the san francisco unified school district. when i was a student, i specifically remember our s.r.o. , i remember their names, i remember the interactions with them, and it was many, many years ago. they had a positive impact on me , and i know that today, our s.r.o.s are doing the very same thing that our students that are in our schools wait now. so beyond just the enforcement as a mentioned earlier, what can we do to provide that experience for one, it is for four decades, we have been taking kids on backpacking trips. we take them fishing, we do a lot of things with our youth and our schools, and we continue to do that through the police activity's league and our wilderness program.
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we will continue to do that. i'm not sure if folks know this, but 25 years ago, officers were teaching drug education in the schools as well. i was one of those instructors. so we definitely can make a positive impact. the last bullet i covered those last two, but the final bullet, is how do we do -- you mentioned with regard to maintaining a student's writes about privacy when we are escorting them off campus, and i'm glad that this issue has been brought up because we are taking what happened at balboa very seriously. we know that we walked out the door and the media was president -- present. we know what the fallout was from that. we know we definitely can do better. we evaluated the situation and we already know what we would have done differently. hopefully we do not have to do that again. i want to assure everyone that is in this chamber today that we are working closely with our s.r.o. in terms of training to
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instruct them on how to navigate that. and basically employs some commonsense principles to ensure that when we get a student from point a to point b, that we do our very best to protect their identities. i wanted everyone to know that we are taking this very seriously. all right. i want to briefly talk about the school resource officer program. this is a national program and there was a national association of school resource officers, and i want to let everyone know that they recommend three things. one, is to foster positive relationships with youth, help troubled students in -- avoid involvement with the juvenile justice system, and move them into resources. to the extent that the department and the officers can do this to steer away from the criminal justice system, we want to be about that. that is one. secondly, act as a guest lecturer, provide safety guidance to the students and
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increase the feelings of safety among students and staff. that is what we want to be about and then also, commissions to have officers, but s.r.o.s should be carefully selected -- selected and receive specialized training. i know we have talked about strategies for youth and police and the teenaged brain, the youth commission, and the department of accountability have really taken the lead in this, and we have come right to the table, what we are all on board to do this work. the other thing i would like to mention, and i will really brief is that there is a two-year study that came out of canada's carleton university that founded the s.r.o. program that have numerous benefits. it prevents or minimizes property damage to schools, it prevents student injuries and human death due to violence and drug overdoses, s.r.o. programs reduce the need for schools to call 911, they lead to reduction of the likelihood that a student will not get a criminal record,
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the increase the likelihood that the students will get the help that they need from social services, and then also, lastly, the increase in feelings of safety among students and staff. s.r.o. programs are good programs. we have 12 officers now with a goal to increase that number. at this time, i will have the acting captain williams come up and for the next three slides, talk about the resource officer program and also about some of our policies with regard to the m.o.u. >> commissioners -- supervisors and commissioners. i just want to say, first of all , the school resource officer 's program is established to build trust and also to provide education and training to young people. we are also there to provide classroom safety presentations, truancy prevention and intervention, and -- when
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requested to do so, and to refer the students that attend the sfusd to community resources that their families and, of course, the school sites may not be aware of. we will also participate in the s.a.p. meetings. we are also there to improve relationships and create a safer environment so the young people feel like they are in a welcoming and nurturing area so that they can continue on and graduate successfully. we are also there to ensure that we have positive communications with young people, and we provide them with the proper mentorship. as far as our response to the school site, we generally try and respond whenever we are requested to do so and we are basically there to assist and follow the guidelines that are established by the educational
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code. we are not there to provide disciplinary services and we have told, and we agree with the san francisco unified school district that officers should not be called there to be strict disciplinarians. disciplinary issues will lead to -- will be the responsibility of the school and their administrators. and as far as arrests on campus is, we have two stress that quite a bit, but i do want to let you know again, that the situation with balboa has created a training opportunity for us and, through the s.r.o. program, we now have weekly meetings with our school resource officers and we also have monthly meetings. we focus on the best methods of communication. we are speaking about things
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that we have learned in previous trainings that we had to enhance our communication and we also had discussed the appropriate measures that we would take at all times to protect our young people. i'm sorry. i had to get down quickly. and the last slide that i do want to talk about is the know your rights. we have made sure that we are in the process of updating that no your rights brochure that we made sure that any young person that would come in contact with this, we added the language which is 96 c. we've also added language per d.p.a. about language access, and we are also in the process of developing and working with the recommendations, which is to
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make sure that the language that is in the miranda warning is in such a way that young people will be able to understand what we are speaking about. because we realize that young people's brains are not developed the same level as adult's and we are basing this on best practices of other police departments. >> questions are often asked about, what happens if the m.o.u. is not complied with, or what happens if there is a misstep on the m.o.u.? the m.o.u. will be signed by chief scott and is a directive from the chief to the department as to how officers are to operate at the schools. and so if there is any questions or concerns by parents, students , or whom will their -- from ever, the route to go is
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the department of police accountability. i know they are here today and they are here to talk about it. on our website, this slide talks about how to file a complaint with the department of police accountability if someone feels like we didn't provide the service that we are expected to provide. on the last slide, i would like to conclude by saying, we are glad to be here today. we're looking forward to public comment and anything that the community has to say about the m.o.u. i will be here until the very end. i will be taking notes so that i can take in everything that has been said, circle back with the department internally, and then go back to the school district next month and finalize the document. we are also in the process of updating our department bulletin because of 96 c. and the change in questioning of young people. we need to update our policy. of course, you saw that we are working on our know your rights brochure. we have added language there, and then last, we will be working on department general
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orders 7.01, which is our approximate leaf 14 page policy on how to deal with juvenile crime, juvenile victims, to reflect all the recent changes in the city ordinances and the laws, and things of that nature. this concludes my presentation. >> thank you commander lazar. next person up, we will call patty lee from the public defender's office. >> good morning, commissioners, supervisors, and trustees. i am managing attorney of the public defender's office, juvenile unit. i do not have any slides today. i have actually been off for the week with my grandchildren, but i came in because this is near and dear to our hearts as juvenile defenders working with youth who are charged with crimes. i want to stress that the
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importance of our legal education advocacy program, many folks are not aware of this program. this program has been in existence for over seven years. it was initially funded by a block two grant, and it is such a successful model that it is being replicated across these other offices across the nation. so what we do is we provide a holistic representation where we have paralegals and social workers working with youth, clients who are referred by our attorneys, and he also work with nonclient, and we also work with the probation department to support community-based organizations. we enjoy an extremely strong relationship with the school district. rebecca marquez currently is our education attorney, and frankly, her caseload has blossomed to over 150 cases.
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we need to expand that program. i mention this because this is one of the ways that we have partnered with the community, frankly with the police, and the school district to keep youth in school. and when we have problems with youth, often times we receive calls from the school sites asking us to come to the school site and intervene and work with the youth and work with the administrator. so we have actually prevented youth from being brought into custody. we have been able to work out solutions with the school administrators, and we have also made linkages between these organizations to provide more prevention for that particular youth, and for the families. so i mention this because i think it is very important that we continue this partnership, and i know that one of the
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protocols is having a stakeholder meeting, and i would urge that we consider having justice partners as part of the stakeholders, and offer our services to participate in the stakeholder process. i think what is really important is to look at what happened with the balboa incident, and also to think about the language that we used when we talk about that incident. i know that supervisor safai, i appreciate you sponsoring this. you mentioned that there was a school shooting at balboa, and actually -- >> what i said was, even if there were -- >> i misunderstood. i do think that when a gun goes off in a school, that causes great alarm and consternation for everybody, and especially for the police and the school
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administrators. actually, what happened in that case was a gun was discharged in a backpack, and then when we look at what transpired after that, i was actually involved in that process because i was contacted by tracy gallardo to provide some consultation to the mother who was on the phone, and i was talking to her. she was texting her husband, her husband was outside of the principal's office while there son was speaking with police. this transpired four, at least a good half-hour, if not more. so lessons learned here, we are talking about the new administrative code, 96 c., and we have been, our office has
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been handling attorney consultations since january of 2018. we have handled approximately 130 calls. when this administrative code was passed, and actually became effective in april of 2019, we handled a number of calls since then. it was about 17 calls, and in speaking to the police officers on the streets, and i see captain williams, the officers have informed our attorneys and myself as well, i have asked the officers that call us, are you aware of the new administrative code that this applies to all youth 17 and under? and the message that we have learned from the line of police officers on the street is that they weren't aware of this. so i think it is very important
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to implement this policy, but also to issue a police bulletin to advise the line officers that 96 c. applies to san francisco police department. and since then, we have seen some youth who have come into the frontage of juvenile hall where they have been questioned and interrogated without a call to our hotline. i am happy to share those cases with commander lazar, captain williams, because that causes us great concern. that is one lesson learned. recently, i learned that some officers went on to a school site in search of a client of ours regarding an incident that did not occur on school grounds.
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i do not want the schools to be the defaults for police to find the youth. although that youth was not at school that day, the police did contact the school administrators, and we are talking about disproportionality here and this was an african-american youth. information was conveyed by the police to the school administrators, and we hold dear the presumption of innocence. and when a police officer goes on to a youth at school site looking for that youth, not for a school related incident that occurred weeks ago, that really stigmatizes that youth with the administrators and it labels that youth as a criminal. the family was very upset about
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that. and another thing that i wanted to emphasize is that we recently dealt with a case as well where there was a police officer who was with a representative from the conservation court and our client was suspected of an incident, and there was a workaround miranda because the officer used the conservation court councillor to ask questions of that youth, which were incriminating a nature. i think it is a training issue and i know that in the letters that we have submitted to chief scott, we have offered to participate in that training process, and i really appreciate commander lazar mentioning that
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they youth have teenage brains. you have to have language that we use because -- so the youth understand what their miranda rights are. what i want to say is that also part of 96 c., and i would ask that we had this in the m.o.u., that the youth also have a private space during the attorney consultation. our consultations can take anywhere from half hour we have to ascertain whether that child really will understand. many of the youth that we work with have educational and mental health and behavioral health disabilities, and so it is difficult to really have and engage that youth in a conversation if that youth doesn't have a project space. and what we learned through our
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year and a half of miranda calls , generally, the officers do provide the youth with a private space if it is available i appreciate that. i would like that written into the m.o.u. i think it is easier to provide a private space for that attorney consultation, and i will say that it we are available, and we are close to a school. we will come to the school site. >> great. >> one other thing i wanted to mention is that i have the approval of the new public defender. i asked him yesterday. i wanted to offer our miranda hotline. we have a dedicated hotline. i believe the d.b.a. is including that in the m.o.u. modification which lists our hotline, what i would like to offer our hotline to the school administrators so that we could
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troubleshoot, provide advice. many of the school sights already contact our office so that we will send our group of social workers or our attorneys to the school site and we can help de-escalate the situation. we really have dealt with crisis situations where we have presented the necessity of having the police called and it has been a very, very productive and successful relationship. we will offer our hotline to the school administrators, and this hotline is available 24/7. we have an attorney on duty every single day. >> thank you. if you could just submit your recommendations to the working room along with the board of
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board of education, i think that is some good ideas. >> thank you so much for coming here on your time off. >> my little granddaughter is probably waiting. >> thank you so much. so the next person that we will call up is newton. >> i will have the trustee who will be taking my place. i want to thank you for calling this hearing. it is also very close to my heart. i wish i could stay for public comment but i have another commitment. >> thank you for your time this morning. >> thank you. please keep your presentation to five minutes or less, that would be helpful. >> of course,. good morning. i am a staff attorney at the department of police accountability. thank you for having us here
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today. i also want to thank commander lazar and captain williams for the hard work they have done on this so far. we know they are doing their best to find a balance between a law enforcement objectives. i want to first take a moment to remind everyone what d.p.a. is. we have a lot of members of the public here. i want to take the opportunity to remind them of what we do. the d.b.a. is the city's civilian oversight agency where you accept complaints about police misconduct. we have investigators and attorneys on staff and civilians who will investigate any claim of police officer misconduct and come to conclusion and submit it or the police commission for discipline or in some cases, for policy changes. i have complaint forms here today along with other information also, if anyone
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wants to remain anonymous, you can make an anonymous complaint nor do you have to witness the incident. if you hear about peace officer misconduct, if you learn about it through a friend rethink an officer has done something wrong , make a complaint and we will investigate. moving to the m.o.u., the d.b.a. , we have a number of recommendations. i want to highlight three here. the first one is that a position of police accountability, the m.o.u. -- those need to be put into the memorandum of understanding. need to be put in there that
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officers are required to have the hotline that mr. lee was discussing. nec put in the m.o.u. that the officers need to arrange for language issues. and finally, the other one i was looking at was it needs to include the police department. they can't just rely on the school district to do it. they have to ensure this has occurred. we need all that in the m.o.u. to make sure it is clear to officers what their requirements are and there's no confusion about, does the m.o.u. take precedence here, or just general order take precedence here. i think we all agree that all the orders need to remain intact but. the second issue is we would like to see additional training regarding the psychology of youth and adolescence included
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on the school resource officers. it has been kind of discussed about the training that the youth commission has suggested that the strategies for youth training would support that. we would also like to make sure that there is training about issues affecting children, being ostracized, issues at home, poverty, fear of deportation, all these things that would affect children in a way with police officers interacting with them. the third tuned i want to mention here is which was touched on earlier, it under those changes, it started out and it was broader and now it has been there and the d.b.a. recommends the definition that recommends officers entering school grounds without notifying
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school officials where there is an immediate threat to the safety of the public or officer. if anyone has any questions, i'm happy to answer those questions. i will stay after if anyone has any questions for me here. >> thank you. if you could just submit your recommendations, that is fine. >> i also have copies of the recommendations of anyone wants them. >> the next presenter is josephine. the vice chair of transformative justice. you have five minutes. >> good morning, 20. my name is josephine.
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with me is, sorry, we're getting the presentation ready, we have our community partnership specialist here at the youth commission. so today we want to share with you about the history of the san francisco youth commission with the m.o.u., our priorities, also some of our recommendations. we've also share this with you in a packet. can't fit this all into a five minute presentation. it also give acknowledgement at the end. in terms of history, we have been a key stakeholder in the m.o.u. since 2014. we have also participated in the sfusd sponsored input session and also hosted our own. in march, we hosted a roundtable where we brought together as if p.d. officers, s.r.o.s, community members, students and elders to really discuss all of their needs and grievances.
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and we submitted for the recommendations which you have in front of you. we also met with monica, to talk about how to get more youth input into this hearing a couple of weeks ago. thank you all again. our main priority and our main stake in presenting this hearing is to make sure that there is accurate accountability and transparency from the school district as well as the police department to the community, when a case is being reviewed and updates to the legislation. this hearing is held in late june. we often want to have positive consequences. it is not like as if p.d. gets a flak for everything that is happening, but also with the administrators that are taking the calls and bringing them in as
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