used to be here. i used to be like this, you know. i have compassion for people that are on the streets like the homeless and people that are caught up with their addiction because now, i feel like i can give them hope. it reminds you every day of where i used to be and where i am at now.

>> good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. or good afternoon, rather. and we're glad to show you a picture of how our city did this past year on public safety. in particular our crime numbers, our crime statistics. we have a lot of good news to announce and we're going to share with you the good news and some of the challenges and strategies that we have ahead for this year 2020. but i want to begin by welcoming our mayor here, mayor london breed. she's been incredibly supportive of the men and women of our police department, and the work that we're doing to make our city safer. so wowght further adieu i'd like to introduce mayor london breed. >> mayor london breed: thank you, thank you, chief and to the command staff that are joining us here today as well as all of the members of the san francisco police department who serve our city every single day.

i think that they do an amazing job. and it's one that needs to be acknowledged and today we want to talk about some of the great work they've been able to do over the past year that has gotten our city to a better place. but i do want to take it back just a little bit because i always talk about growing up in the city to give people a perspective of how things used to be. and where we are now. and many of you know that the community that i grew up in was very challenging community and there was a lot of violence. and, sadly, a lot of loss of life to gun violence in particular. when we think about what used to happen in the 1980s and the early 1990s and how things escalated and the number of homicides that happened all over the city, especially in neighborhoods that are in the western edition and in the mission, the fact that we are at

an all-time low in homicides in our city is absolutely incredible. 41 homicides, of course, are 41 too many. but the fact is that this is the lowest number of homicides that we've seen since 1961. it is unbelievable, but we didn't get there by accident. we worked hard to achieve the success that we've been able to achieve. ultimately we want to ensure public safety of all residents of san francisco, and that involves, yes, police presence, but it also involves working together with the community. and so during the time when i worked in the community at the african american art and culture complex, in fact, many of the command staff served as the captain of a northern police station, including the captain

mcgekrin and captain ann maddox who are now deputy chiefs for this department. we worked together on those issues to try and to address not only the public safety challenge, but also how do we do more to serve the community and to give back so that that never happens in the first place. and it's a very well-rounded approach and it's very necessary and we are seeing the results in the numbers that i know that the chief is going to talk about later on today. it does take a lot of hard work, it does -- as they say, take a village. and it does require a relationship with our police officers. and i will say that what i do appreciate about san francisco police department in comparison to any other department in this country is how hard they work to develop relationships with the community. and oftentimes it's not always

acknowledged for things they do to go above and beyond which builds the bridge necessary in order to cop keep the communitis safe, not just around the challenges of what we deal with with violent crimes, but we know that san francisco's largest challenge is homelessness. and we have many officers often times who are the first to encounter people out on the streets. what you don't hear about is when they're spending their own money to pay for hotel rooms or socks or food or a number of other things, when they are providing services which are outside of the scope of what their responsibilities are. they care about the work that they do to keep the public safe. they care about the people of san francisco. and they have a responsibility, of course, to ensure all residents are safe. but they are compassionate. they work hard. and many of the policies that we put into place here in san francisco, including our policies around deescalation and

anti-bias training and a number of other things have really set the stage for so many other departments all over this country to follow. and so i am proud of the work that they have done and they'll continue to do for the residents of this city. it is getting us to a better place as we can see with the statistics. but i know that these statistics don't matter when, sadly, you or your family are a victim of violence or any other crime that exists, which is why we're working hard every single day to ensure that this department is fully staffed. and that continues to be a challenge. but the fact is that we are not fully staffed. and when we are being asked for support for beat officers and more traffic control officers and other things, you know, we don't always have the capacity to meet the need. and i am definitely committed to continuing to fund more police

academy classes and to work harder on recruitment efforts, but this is going to be necessary providing additional officers, especially as the officers retire. it's going to be critical to the success of the future of this city and in keeping people safe. and we have added beat officers where we know that they're needed and the things to help to deal with the challenges that we know that a growing city like san francisco has. and we also are aware -- we're not naive -- that there is definitely more that we need to do and can do to ensure safety for all of us. so i'm grateful and to the men and women of the department for everything that they have done to get us to this point. i know that working together we will be able to improve upon these numbers for next year and

with that i'd like to take this opportunity to ask the chief to come back to the podium and to talk more in detail about where we are with our statistics here in san francisco as it relates to violence and property crime. thank you. >> mayor, thank you. okay, again, i want to emphasize the mayor's leadership and how important it is to have a city leader that really takes a stand on public safety that she does. so thank you again, mayor, for your leadership and for your support. as i said we're pleased with the way that our statistics trended in 2019, particularly with violent crime. the mayor mentioned our homicide rate being the lowest since 1961. but as most of you probably know, there's a monthly report

that provides a snapshot of where we are at any point in time, month-to-month. and you can see on the poster board that we have to my right, your left, highlights from our year end 2019 report. and what it will show you is that homicides which are down 11% as the mayor said, 41 homicides, the lowest since 1961, and the rates down 15%. and robberies and aggravated assaults each dropped 4%. all of this is thanks to the hard work of the men and women of the san francisco police department which includes our investigation bureau and the units and our plainclothes officers and our foot beat officers and also in partnership with many diverse communities that we serve around our city. our officers put themselves at great risk protecting the people of our city, oftentimes without recognition. and i want to thank them publicly today for the work that they do. none of this could be accomplished without the work of the men and women of the san

francisco police department. violent crime is always going to be a top priority. and we think that what you see from our statistics is that we're making steady progress to reduce violent crime in our city. as i said 41 homicide says the lowest since 1961, but to illustrate the point even more emphatically, since 2017 our city had a steady decrease in violent crime as we have shifted resources to impact the areas of the city, of our city that are impacted the most. now this is at the same time that we had tremendous challenges with property crime as well. and as you will hear in a minute we have reduced property crime this past year and we're pleased with the two-year reduction and car break-ins. but the mayor illustrated this and i'll reemphasize this, when you are a victim of a violent crime really the stats and the statistics really don't matter when it happens to you. and we understand that. and that's why building

relationships are so important. that's why our strategies focus on prevention, rather than reaction. and that's why we work so hard to deter these crimes before they happen. we want you to know that for the people of san francisco that we will do everything that we can to prevent you from being a victim of crime. at any event that you are, our job is to solve the crime, to catch the perpetrators so that person can be held to account for what he or she might have done. in that regard, you know, we've had a number of high-profile cases in 2019, and we have solved many of them. and now it's up to the criminal justice system and our jury system that we believe in and our court system to take it from there. but i want to reemphasize when those crime does occur, we will do everything in our power to solve these crimes and to bring these individuals to justice. and we have done just that. we don't solve them all.

we work to solve them all. but we are going to work very hard to make sure that people who can commit crimes in our city are held to answer. with that our homicide rate this past year was 71% deterrence, which is a good thing for us because we do believe that not everybody is committing homicides in our city. there's a small amount of people. and we could solve these crimes and get those people off of our streets, it will make our city safer. we want to be more visible. we want to have more officers on the street. we know that when officers are present, people think twice before they commit crimes. so it's really important and we had a non-profit or an academic researcher that came in and to study our foot beat strategies and what they told us is that there was significant reductions in both larceny and assaults when we deployed foot beats and we upped our foot beats in late

2017. we continue that strategy and we want that to continue. and that's why it's so important that we're able to recruit and get the finest in our police department to fill our ranks so we can continue these strategies and make them more robust. with that, we are boosting our policing efforts. we all know in 2017 that we took a stand in the u.n. plaza area and we put out a mobile command post there. and we increased our foot beat patrol there is, and it made a difference. we'll continue that with our mid-market foot beats and thanks to mayor breed and her emphasis on community policing with the men and the women that i'll introduce in a minute, our leadership teams, we'll further increase our foot patrols and focus continually on the mid-market area. i talked to many people, business owners, residents and visitors, who have told me personally they have noticed a difference when our officers are out there.

that's why we need our officers out there and we need them engaged and to do the job of preventing and deterring crime. this will also support our deployment to other issues that we have to respond to throughout the downtown area to make the place safer for all to enjoy. the next thing that i want to talk about is education. which is a key part of our crime prevention efforts and we've had our smart campaign for a number of years now, a couple years now, anyway. and we really do believe that that made a difference. but i want to go into detail on how that came about. and we'll have the chief there along the wall and we had many campaigns to reduce property crimes but the point is, number one, it was a collaborative effort. when it was assigned the deputy chief was captain lazar and with the community members it came from the community and we all helped to foster that but it came from the community. what we intend to do with that

message is to be vigilant and be resilient. don't leave your property to make it easy for somebody to make you a victim. lock your doors and don't leave things visible in your car, because you have more of a likelihood of being a victim of property crime. those public education campaigns work, they're effective and we have to do them to work in partnership with our community. this is a community effort, a drop in property crime is a collaborative effort and we have to have that continue. next i want to talk about our gun-related violence. as we know the majority of the homicides in the city traditionally have been firearm related. in 2018 -- or 2017, actually, under the leadership of the then commander greg mccapern we had a crime gun investigation center with. that our focus is really on two things -- first of all, identifying those guns that are

used repeatedly in crimes in our city, not only in our city but in the region. and the second is to identifying the individuals that use those guns so that we can hold them to account for their crimes. last year our crimes gun investigation center led to the seizure of 96 firearms, not 96 in total but 96 from this investigation center. some of which you see on the table to my right. these include unregistered machine guns, short billed rifles and silencers, and their efforts helped to bring about 90 federal and state arrests and indictments and generated over 300 leads to multiple firearm incidents. this has been a game changer in terms of building strong cases to get people who are willing to use firearms against another human being off of our streets which in turn makes our city safer. now this is a key component of our strategic plan and our strategic initiatives which emphasize the collaboration with other city agencies and

community members. in october we also hosted our first gun violence summit which is led by our director of crime strategies director tiffany sutton who is also to my left. in that summit we sat down with the community members to reduce strategies and to reduce gun violence, particularly in the bay view direct that is hard hit by gun violence. each district has specific challenges and we have to be nimble and to work with community-based organizations and community members to address our strategies to each neighborhood across our city. our crime strategy division, they're really doing the work of crunching the data and providing officers with the feedback on how to deploy resources to best meet the needs of our city. ultimately we want to do all that we can to improve our responsiveness and to make our city a safer city. we have a lot more work ahead, we know that. it's been said, and the mayor said it, and i said it and you will hear us say time and time again, one homicide is too many

and we know that we have challenges, but with that we intend to work with the community, we intend to continue to reinvent ourselves and to make the adjustments that we need to make in order to make our city the safest city that we can make. with that i thank you for joining us today. mayor breed is on a very tight schedule and we'll take a few questions and she'll have to depart in a moment but we're glad to answer a few questions before she has to depart. thank you. >> (indiscernible) how many do you need? >> we want to put them in the streets and our charter number is 1,971 and we're about a hundred away but let me explain a bit of detail and that number does include our airport and it doesn't include other issues that have to keep the officers off the street so we're about a hundred away and we're doing to recruit and to put the people in the academy and to get them on the streets because that's where

they're going to go and and the bodies are needed and the officers are needed in the streets and so that's where we plan to put them. >> (indiscernible). >> i know that in previous years we saw something less than 2% of the break-ins. >> if you are talking about car break-ins, that is hovering around 2% and that's a difficult crime to solve. however, what we have done in the last couple years and we have said this publicly is that we try to focus on those crews and individuals who we know are prolific and i think that our officers do a good job of that and we track who we arrest and we also track when they get out and if we get evidence or receive evidence that those individuals are involved in further car break-ins we try to devise strategies to kept tiewfer them -- capture them

again. but the numbers are important in terms of holding people to account. but here's another thing that we all need to try to remember. ultimately, you know, our leaders and our city and in our state and our voters have decided how they want to see things play out in terms of incarceration. the prison population is way too big and everybody has been working to reduce that, including our city leaders, so we have to be strategic and focused on those people that are doing most harm to our city and that's what we try to do and that's what we'll continue to do and we have had success with that so we'll continue that strategy and, you know, even if we were to solve 100% of those crimes, if we're having 25,000, 26,000 car break-ins every year and some are repeat offenders, we know that, we don't have the space in our jails for that type of population. so we have to think past just

arresting people. that's why prevention is so important and the backside of what type of programs they get involved in is so important. and the mayor's programs and the jobs for all and those things to keep people out of harm's way in the beginning, they all come together and they are presenting a strategy. so we need to support that. >> (indiscernible) the practices going forward and looking towards 2020, in other words, working with them. >> number one, it tells us where we need to focus and we always assess what is working and not working. for instance, we made it definite to michael's question about the enforcement strategies a few years ago, we were arresting a lot of people. but the part that was missing is that we didn't complement that

with the presence and the foot beat presence that we know that works. so now we're trying to balance that and when we look back at 2019 and see what works and what we need to work on, we'll make those assessments again but it's the balance of the enforcement side and the preventative side and making sure as much as we can that we focus on the preventative side. that's our job, really to prevent crimes from happening in the first place. so we'll continue to do that and to focus on that. >> a follow-up. looking forward then, and working with the new district attorney, how does that work in templeterms of making sure thate arrests that you make are then prosecuted? >> well, a few things that we have to do -- and i want to -- i want to, you know, to call out and thank my leadership team and our leadership team, and the assistant chief mosher and mcchecker rercen. and we're all on the same page,

we need to provide the best cases that we can provide the district attorney so that his prosecutors -- when it's appropriate to charge these cases can charge these cases. we have to stay focused on our jobs, our job is not to prosecute cases but to -- when those crimes do occur we do our investigation thoroughly and we make sure that we get the evidence there and we give the district attorney and his team the good cases to prosecute. and we need to be open to ne ideas. we have to be open to new ideas. and there's been a call for changes in the criminal justice system. and we're one piece of that system but we have to be open to strategies that hold people to account but past that as i said, what next. what happens after they do their jailtime, are they going to come back to our city and be assets and good for our city, or come back and victimize people and harm our city? so there's a lot that goes into that and it's not just about

policing and we have to support those programs that help us to do that. and equity is an issue in policing and we have to be equitable with how we approach our jobs and all of that matters. so it's a lot to look at and very complex but we're up to the test and we're going to continue to push on. >> getting back to auto burglaries. you have talked about prevention. is there more that could be done there, particularly with people from out of town and rent cars and go to places where tourists go. >> there is, and we're questioning -- questioning that and i know that when the mayor was on the board of supervisors they crafted legislation for the rental car companies to make it less obvious by the markings and that on the rental cars. they are big steps in the right direction and we can't control what happens outside of our city

and county but we have been working with the rental car companies on safety messaging. you will see the park smart campaign, posted in the rental cars, and the offices, those things help. working with our consular officers so when they have their constituents coming in from their respective countries that the message is consistent about prevention. people come here to visit our city and their cars get broken into or their luggage is stolen and their passports and all of their papers are gone, that's a big problem for people. so we have to spread that message anyway that we can and those things are continuing. we're always looking to improve them and to evolve in that regard. but there is more -- always more that can be done. >> a couple more questions or one more question and then smaller groups. >> chief... (indiscernible) this is a national emergency with the break-ins.

(indiscernible). >> for car break-ins, there is not a whole lot of -- well, as far as i know there's not any federal prosecutions directly related to car break-ins. and some of the side issues that come from car break-ins and guns are stolen and that type of thing, sometimes it's appropriate to pursue federal -- pursue those relationships with our federal partners to hold to account those type of violations and somebody gets caught with a gun and they're they're a convicted felon and those issues, that it could be appropriate to pursue federal charges on those. which car break-ins, many times that happen. and we will pursue federal charges when it's appropriate to

do so, when we want to use every opportunity, every resource and every partnership to make our city a safer city. (♪) (♪)

>> president