tv Board of Appeals SFGTV August 14, 2020 4:00pm-8:01pm PDT
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temperatures performing meets client needs to support public safety and to assist in slowing the spread of covid-19. client contact to be made and programming has and continues to be offered via zoom. so in addition to the on going amazing work that my staff do, many of our staff have been deployed as dfw workers. the majority of whom have assisted in staffing the hotels, to support the city's efforts in providing safe places for people to be housed. we've had almost 30 of our staff deployed and now about 14 of them are going to remain in long-term assignments through the end of the year. so we'll go to slide 2.
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when looking at fiscal years 20, 21 and 21-22, it's important to note the significant reduction in state revenue state re-assignment, ab109 dollars and while they continue to remain fairly stable, ab109 allocation have been significantly reduced. we are projecting an increase in grant funding from the star, which grant through department of public-health, which is the supporting treatment and reducing recidivism grant, and two additional grants that adult probation has applied for to assist in expanding housing opportunities and treatment for justice involved people with mental health and co occurring disorders. both our bureau of justice funding opportunities that we are very hopeful that we be
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competitive and eventually decide. to help with that program and then certainly an increase due to the other two grant opportunities if wore fortunate to get those. the increase in rent from 2019-2021 is over a million dollars. and that is due to the department's pending relocation to 945 bryant in the spring of 2021. and that increase includes both the rent and operating costs associated with our occupancy in that new building. our materials and supplies budget represents $120,000 from jag emergency covid dollars to offset cost associated with telecom uting but over all, we have been able to decrease our materials in supplies budget and
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they go directionally to probation department and grant opportunities and based on how well we do and keeping individuals local and rather than sending them to state prison so our funding stream has been fairly significant in that regard and so we were able to realize some savings to be able to shift those positions. in addition, we're increasing attrition by over a million
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dollars or what equates to seven ftes to meet our reduction target. the $141,000 in materials and supplies. the reduction and services of $478,000 represents reductions in two cbo contracts, the termination of one contract and the expiration of one additional contract to meet that budget reduction target. additionally we're reducing our work order with department of public-health by $500,000 and to reach our over all target of $3.1 million in reductions. so we really look careful at especially with cbos and work orders. so our significant goal was to prioritize housing, and behavioral health services because those are the two most critical factors for the
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individuals that we serve in community corrections. we looked atri ducin at reducins that don't confirm programs based on outings or gatherings and we reduced funding and areas and have been historically under spent and they considered cbo over all in agencies livelihood. we offer smaller cbos the opportunity to continue of larger organizations and that really helped some of the overhead costs and so we were able by these reductions the 3.1 to meet our 10% reduction of general fund dollars and and used attrition to realize savings of an additional $600,000 to back filet shortfall in rent and two grant positions
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that have expired in our young adult court. slide four, please. so this really outlines the significant investments that we make in direct services to the clients that we supervise. they have the direct services to clients. although significantly reduced, we will be able to provide effective evidence-based services which focus on housing and behavioral health treatments. this slide represents our fte changes. so you will see a little bit of a decrease on the top table and then in order to meet our budget, we needed to hold positions foray tryin for attrie
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have seven vacant position that's will contribute to that savings. we looked at positions across the board so in the area of sworn staff, we are holding three positions and for our non sworn staff, four positions to meet that attrition amount. next slide, please. this is really an area adult probation ex sells and advancing vulnerable populations and one of our main goals long before i arrived at adult probation and since i've been here, was to ensure a support a diverse and culturally com not tent workforce. they have a great fortune of employing formerly incarcerated people in a i do verse workforce. over all, 30% of our staff are
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black, 26% are latino, 19% white, 15% asian, 6% filipino and 4% multi racial and many of those individuals are by ling wall and this is very representative of the where we serve 39% of our clients are black and 15% are latino ask even greater than that we have done a tremendous job in our probation officers and 15 staff 13 are black and brown and so we have done a very good job at
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making sure that our population of employees are representative of a community that we serve. our staff have eagerly participated in gear and 17 of our staff volunteer on our department racial equity action plan working group which they are very excited about and we contract with a diverse universe of service providers whose senior management or director level staff includes persons of color at 68% and 58% women, 33% individuals who have been formally incarcerated. the people served i am the most have you ner able of the population is everything from mental illness, drug addiction and homelessness and those factors are some of the most critical destabilizers for the people we serve and through our community strategies, effective
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and culturally programming and on going efforts to increase funding for services we are committed to help clients achieve success and permanently exit the justice system. the next slide, please. we are proud of our transitional housing programs and our rental sun sid deprograms. they provide stability needed by the clients in order to rebuild their lives whether returning from prison or seeing those releases now being released from county jail and struggling addiction housing is a key component to success. services provided through our assessment and services center provides much needed support and engagement. we partner with seven community based organizations to provide 2300 units of emergency stable says housing sro units, kong gra
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gate trans i guessal housing, women's gender transitional housing and rental housing supports. next slide, please. this is just a brief snippet of the housing outcomes so we looked back and across the board of all of our housing programs and in fiscal year 19-20, the total days reduced in homelessness was 48,000 days by just housing people in these funded programs and then the tomb total number of clients was 113 so our goal when someone is in one of our housing programs, it's to ensure they're engage in some kind of case management and services through our and also to work with them to see how we can set them up to transition to more stable housing. we were excited this year amid
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the all of the covid-19 pandemic issues we were able to launch two new programs to serve pretrial complaints so we secured beds south of market and specifically for our pretrial clients and we have served 11 clients so far since may 1 and the our most recent every do you ever as a capacity of 50 rooms, we have housed 7 78 clients. 64 are pretrial. this was a great collaboration. this was a key partner in many of our housing efforts but with pretrial division, the sheriff office and the district attorney and the public defender and they were able to bring the group
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together and we were fortunate enough in adult probation to be able to have the expertise in providing housing and the funding to back it up so we were able to fully fund this program and in that partnership with pretrial house 78 clients over this period of time from mid may to august 1st. it's a huge success and really attributed to the great work of my reentry team so making sure our partnerships in the criminal-justice system. if. >> chief, you've done an outstanding job. i knew much about adult probation but your programs are absolutely wonderful. i think that, you know, also just the people that i've worked
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with, your staff runs the council and it's excellent. i think this transitional housing is just fabulous. this is just, you know, in a time of covid, also, that you are able to house these people. this is just wonderful. i just think that you've done a great job. i just want to ask you, i know that you have 17 vacancies on the books. and are you currently hiring any or are they in the hiring process now? >> actually we were in the hiring process and doing some final interviews when the shelter in place was invoked. we have actually holding the seven positions for attrition and we have six positions we would love to hire for but we will look at strategies about how we go about that. those are critical to the operations so with the release
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of more people from prison, we're trying to fill that gap and higher those six. >> thank you, very much. >> supervisor walton. >> thank you so much chair fewer and thank you chief fletcher. just awe few questions. i know you talked about the housing facility contracts and are they going to be receiving any reductions? >> actually, we have -- we did a couple of very small reductions in one contract and that really had to do their administrative services so, no reductions all the rooms will still be available. >> from your contract standpoint and in terms of how many staff particular contract on any given
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time and i could get thaw position so our reentry team is broken up it's a very small group but they certainly we have one person that does housing and we have others that do other treatments and our fiscal staff but few people are overseeing contracts. >> and are they civilians or sworn or is it a mixture? >> all non sworn. >> all non sworn. all of our reentry team and our fiscal who do grants and any kind of contract oversight are all non sworn. >> and i do again want to commend the great work you are doing with particularly housing folks and are coming home and making sure that they have a place to live. one of my questions and i did ask this also to the sheriff's department, in terms of some of the community contracts that provide supportive services, do you think those contracts belong
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in law enforcement and the reason why i ask that is because, i know sometimes there are conflicts between the mission of law enforcement and the mission of what non profits do that you support and sometimes that can effect the ability for our contractors to be successful. >> so i think probation is really unique because we are that perfect balance between social work and law enforcement and we have to have the law enforcement peace because we have to enforce court orders but with graduated sanctions and the manner in which we provide evidence based services and we are that balance and so, that work i think in partnership and it's perfectly to what probation and with that balance. >> my last question is just,
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what would you say and i've heard from some reports that it's about $12,936 but what would you say the cost per caseload or per case for victims that are under adult probation? >> the cost for the supervision of one case? you know, i would hate to guess at that. we can try to break it down and give it to you. >> thank you, i would look forward to that. >> thank you, chief fletcher. >> thank you. >> any of the questions for chief fletcher? >> seeing none. thank you, chief. thank you for joining us today. >> thank you. >> thank you for your work. >> thank you. >> next we have juvenile probation. and, we've got another chief here. oh, are you ready? >> hi, how are you? >> i'm ready. >> sorry. the flor is yours. >> i want to make sure you can
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hear me because i have some fans on here. i'm glad to be with you six months and six months into my role i just want to give my heartfelt thanks to my staff that have worked hard to put this together and and through the last few months, i'm going to share my screen. will you confirm with me that you see this powerpoint.
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>> so i'm going to start my presentation by talking about jpd's efforts to address racial equity and how this work has shaped the budget that is before you today. we all know that we have staggering racialen equity and it's not new and it's actually gotten worse over the years as the over all number of kids have declined. and this is a really unique moment in the city and the way we're addressing it and it's a moment where leadership and diverse stakeholders have come together to really reimagine what juvenile justice will look like and i'm honored to be a part of this moment and it's also a moment where the black lives matter movement and the call to defund law enforcement and watching the impact of covid and our use of families and the last few months and and it needs
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to make this -- we are centralling racial equity and it's enhanced support. including a few different things. increased communication and probation and and minimizing the youth of juvenile detention and the kids who have been detained making sure that we view everything we can to keep them healthy and keep them in close contact with their families and their communities support. it also includes investing in the community based organizations and so that they can remain steady in this really unsteady time. the second way that the budget is supporting and around
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reforming our juvenile justice system. we have a good team here that can really help advance that work and do it in a data-driven way and a thoughtful way. the partners at the table and really be working collectively towards just and healthy communities. the third way for us, has been the establish the of our incertainal racial he can equity workgroup and examining our policies from top to bottom to improve the way that we do our work through a racial equity lense. this is a group of 16 volunteers from the department who came together loving the mother of george floyd and wanting to engage in this work and wrestel with it. the 16 members are divided into two subcommittees and we have a subcommittee of eight who are actively looking at our internal
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policy and professionals development, promotion, discipline, all things like that and also a second group looking at and the first we did is call her staff into walk us through the work that they've been doing in the last couple years around racial equity and i think they're a model for other departments. my staff is working closely with the office of racial equity and we have six racial equity leaders from our department and from all divisions and administration, probation service and juvenile hall who are in close coordination with the office of racial equity and coming back to all of us and helping us work on developing this plan. i want to acknowledge this
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racial equity work happening right now in the department is really important for us and really looks in many ways like the young people we serve in terms of communities. so we are a department 85%, 86% people of color and 40% of our staff is black and i heard a lot of really heartfelt comments and meaningful conversations this summer with staff around what it's like to stand in that reality of being part of a community of color and part of a law enforcement community so i'm glad we can do this work in this way and it's important part of our work for the next year. the last way that we are doing our racial equity work and centers our racial equity in our work is and general funds in the
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community based support for that support our use of color and it really is on the direction we all want to be on going forward with juve nal justice in san francisco and that's what i'm going to talk about now is our details. this is our proposed budget for the next year and i want to acknowledge changes to this and you will see that in particular in probation services and the lines come down a little bit more and we have made cuts across and we did meet the mayor's budget in june and the adjustments reflect across juvenile hall and it will go up and 16% in administration and i also will touch on later in the presentation that far-right
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forum, the unlearned revenue because it's something that requires a little bit of discussion and explanation from me. these cuts have been derived from strategies and i'm going to run through them from least to most. they include overtime reductions for the department, totaling $450,000. they include the elimination of some of our work orders, the service this is other departments totaling $490,000. they include elimination of a number of the costs associated with maintaining log cabin ranch but not all of them and i want to note that we have maintained in this year's coming budget our security contract for log cabin ranch so it gives all of us together time to really talk as a city about whether we want to hang on to that property and the space we have there to do something new and creative for our juvenile justice. primarily, the budget cuts come from cutting nearly 30 positions
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from our department. so the primary strategy we've used to make our budget cuts have been through the elimination of vacant ftes in all three divisions and when we submitted our original budget back in june, there were 27 positions in the department we were cutting and i'm happy to enumerate them if you'd like later. since then, we have submitted, during technical adjustments three more positions, they are positions vacated by three people and they are we have cut 15 from juvenile hall and we are committed to right sizing the department in this way going forward as people leave. the reductions we've taken
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represent nearly 13% of our ftes in the probation department. and another really important piece of our budget this year justice reinvestments and collaboration and a forensic analysis of our spending and money over the last five years and i have to really give our controllers office for helping us with this work and no stone was left unturned and through the efforts we identified $10 million in state funds that had been a portion to juval probation which were not drawn down by department and i'm grateful the mayor has reinvested these funds in the budget in two key ways. $7 million has been transferred to dcyf to ensure the community
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organization that received grants to serve our youth will not face cuts in the coming years. with an emphasis on justice involved and programs serving at risk youth and high percentages of african american youth and programs with african american leaders at their helm. and for me, i think this is a really important justice reinvestment strategy and racial equality strategy and it's a cit wall wacritical way for kids ins moment. the second piece of reinvestment has come in the form of $2.9 million that has come back to the juvenile probation department so the purpose of contracting with one or more community providers to create a community-based community-operated residential program for the youth who otherwise are detained while they're waiting to get into group homes. our data shows that this is a real need and being in the juvenile hall so anybody who spends time there that we know this this is ray real need for our kids.
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>> also, our budget shows 9% decrease over the next two years. i want to note that the money i just talked about on the last page, $2.9 million coming back to us. when you look in the budget book it masks what our budget cuts are. we have broken them out for you. i want to be clear the money represented as $1.345 million for two years is going straight to probation and out to communities. i don't want it to be read as part of the department operating budget because we are using it for the other purpose. in closing, i want to say i think this budget proposal takes us in a new and important direction. i think it supports juvenile justice reform effort. we are getting into making that a reality and prevents layoffs at this difficult time.
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this is the lowest budget since 2013. it is the lowest staffing for this department in well over a decade. 10 years ago we were 230 f.t.e. in the department. it is a sizable reinvestment in juvenile justice funds to do what we want to support in the community. i think it is a pass for continuing with all of these things in future budget years. i want to end by acknowledging our efforts to transform the department are happening as they should be in partnership with justice system stakeholders, city leadership, juvenile hall workers and partners in the courtroom and community. we are not alone in doing this work. we are looking forward to being part of this continuing process. thank you. i welcome your questions. >> any questions for chief
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miller? yes, supervisor ronen. >> thank you. first of all, it is incredible to see you in this role. it really is a dream come true. thank you for taking on this challenge and for spearheading the effort to transform juvenile justice in the city. i can't imagine a better person to do it. thank you for all of your work. i have some questions about staffing level that i wanted to probe a little bit. let's start off. is the average number of youth in juvenile hall 10 or 11 at any given time? >> currently our juvenile hall average runs around 11 to 14 at
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any given time. obviously, we have seen the numbers go down significantly during covid and shelter-in-place. when we started with shelter-in-place back in february or march. we were in the mid-to-low 30s in term of number of kids. then it declined. we hit a low in june just under nine youth average daily population. then it started to go back up a little bit. for july and august we have seen it creep back up into the teens of course, that is a very low number for us. it also is parallelled by the significant decrease in referrals into the system entirely and arrests during this time period. i just want to add to it that referrals by law enforcement to
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us were down 67% from march to june over the year before. you can see how that translates to lower numbers in the juvenile hall. >> in total back in the hall is 78 workers. >> of active staff, correct. >> we have 52 active counselors and counselor twos. seven senior counselors and cooks, service workers, porter, laundry and director andsistent director. we have additional staff on leave. >> do you need 59 counselors for
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10 to 14 children at any given time? >> this is a great question. it sounds completely illogical when you look at the numbers. i appreciate you asking. the counselors and senior counselors can't be grouped together. they are each required under the law in different staffing ratios. i know it sounds like a lot of grownups around the children. i will take a minute to explain the way we do the assignment in the hall right now. with our low numbers we have three units in juvenile hall at any given time. we have worked on this in close partnership with the department of public health and they are on staff. one is intake or quarantine unit. any young person coming in for the first 14 days that they are with us will be in that
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community, tested for covid on the first day and 13th day. it is away for us to be separating out kids that come in for that period of time when we see covid manifesting itself in a young person. once they are here for 14 days, they are moving to one of the other two units. if we have a lot of girls, which has not been that much during covid, then we have a unit serving just girls. more often we had to spread out across the units because we have some kids who cannot be together and be safe with each other. they come from very complicated stories and involve each other in the community. if they are in the same unit, then we know they will be spending quite a bit of time in rooms. they can't be all together in programming. my feeling about this and my strong belief that we have the space and ability to have them all out of their rooms and
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engaging in programming and making the best of all of those things. we want them to do that right now. we keep three units operating with low numbers of kids. when covid started, we had some calls for folks worried about the kids asking to separate them out further for social distancing. this is not a normal time for us. we are holding true to our paramount needs to make the experience safe and healthy and have the experience as positive as it possibly can. the question about staffing. it is a good analysis in 2016 by the controller's office looking at what the hall staffing should be. at that time they did the analysis based on the four units operating. there have been some short peds
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operiods of time -- periods of time. they provided a few different staffing level. we have to follow the staffing levels. prison rate act. using those standards to have four units hope with the controller's office found we would need 62 counselors. so i want to bring that up as a point of reference as we have this conversation. >> for three units? >> i didn't do analysis for three units. for four we need 62 plus seniors. for three would be lower than 62. we don't know what it is.
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i think that it would put us out of the ballpark where we should be right now. i want to add that any moment we could have a significant number of folks go offline if we see any spread of covid in the facility. we want to have enough staff available to be on site working with the kids. >> if we did simple math, we would need 46 counselors. >> right. potentially. some of the counselors are assigned to units and some have other positions throughout the facility. it is not just dividing by the number of units. we did provide to the bla and i will provide to you more descriptions how that works in the facility. how some people are assigned to
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specific units and other functions counselors have. >> you have five cooks and five food delivery staff for 14 kids? >> we do. i will note that is for much of covid we have had half of them deployed as vfw workers at laguna honda. >> how many cooks do you need and food delivery workers? >> i don't really know the answer right now without speaking more to my staff about it. i know we haven't had them all here during much of this time. it is a conversation i am happy to bring back next week if that is possible. >> sure. just to be clear, you know, i am
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very sensitive towards layoffs. i appreciate that you have been reduction of staff by attrition, but i do have to say there are so many places and vacancies throughout the city that we need to fill those positions. i just know there is a way if we decide we needless counselors in juvenile hall because of the extremely low numbers of kids there, you know, i would do everything in my power to make sure that nobody was laid off, that people move to other areas of the city. i want to make that clear from the get-go. then on the probation side of things. per year are these numbers that
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we have 250 kids in pre-adjudication and post adjudication that are on probation? >> that has held steady. it is lower now because of the drop in new cases coming in the last months since march. >> serving those kids are 34 probation officers? >> correct. >> is that the right number? on average how long does a youth stay on probation or on the caseload? >> i can see if we can get you an average to tell you this is incredible variety in that number. some youth will come in and complete probation and be done or they will be diverted to formal probation six months and be done. other youth may be with us a lot
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longer, coming back over and over on new cases while their case is open. we have a combination of kids right now that fit both descriptions. it can be a long variety how long they are with us. different probation units have different functions. not all probation officers are case carrying. some have different functions. that is pretty standard in probation departments. it is not something you should all look at, but in terms of where we are now, for example, we have the court officer unit. those probation officers are in court every day, basically, managing the calendar in the courtroom. recording everything that is happening. then going out of the courtroom with the family to talk about what has happened or going back with the youth if they are in custody. i think this is a good example where we want to make sure we
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have all voices at the table and we talk about what we need. i say that because the court made a request to us for more court officers. they would like to have two in each courtroom to be in constant rotation. i don't say that is the right answer. we need to be on this together. >> if i am doing just simple math it would be 14 kids a year per probation officer. >> it is not a year. it is any given time. it is not 14 per probation officer. different units have different caseloads. training officer does not carry a caseload. one of the probation officers full-time job is to handle a big part of the title 4 reimbursements, federal money that more than covers the cost of that position.
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it is part of that conversation if that should be done. we have an extremely knowledgeable person doing that work. then we have a couple probation officers on leave right now. we have probations on armed duty. they come to haul on evenings and weekends. >> all of that to say that it helps all of us in these conversations to look at this. >> can someone please mute their line. there are weird noises. that is better. sorry, chief. >> so i think that -- it is not
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me. i don't know who that is. >> it is just your voice. >> i think somebody has a computer monitor on. >> is there some way for the operations people to know? >> i think it is the sfgovtv delay. there it is. i think it is working. we should be exploring more. i am happy to share this information. the caseload per po should depend on a few things. the kind of work the po is thing, the risk level, and that
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is how we are doing it. that is exactly what i wanted to come here and do. there are some pos that are required by law to go every three months to visit the placement wherever they are. that is requiring travel to go and things like that. i don't want to keep talking with that. i don't know what to do. >> i would say that i think you will be back next week. >> correct. >> would you mind compiling the questions for next week. this is so weird. thank you very much. anyone have questions for chief miller? >> supervisor walton we are having a technical difficulty.
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>> i muted someone. we will see if that works. >> supervisor ronen, do you want to continue with your questioning? >> i can turn it over to supervisor walton. i wanted to say this is an area that i wanted to explore a little bit more. of course, we know that the youth on probation are getting tons of services from the community, mental health, case management. i believe that this might be a little bit high. we can figure that out between now and next week. thank you. >> supervisor walton. >> i hope you are doing well during this crazy time. i have more clarifying
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questions. can you tell us how many probation officers don't have a caseload? >> yes, i'm sorry. that is the one thing i don't have in front of me. >> if not, we can get it next week. i want to make sure we get some clarity on that. >> sure. i am pulling it up. go ahead. >> from $3.4 million. it has been closed for a couple years and we had 21 positions. where are they at right now? >> when the ranch closed, people who were still working there were transferred into the hall as counselors and transferred to juvenile counselors. there are still and some people have moved on and some people
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stayed at the hall. there are still some positions and it is something in the budget listed on the carried with no funding. there were eight counselor positions unfunded, ghosts from the previous time we had given time. they were transferred back up here. >> what is the cost right now? >> i will have to get you that amount. we haven't in this time. we have calculations. i will do it by next week. it is not something we have done. it is a unique moment. i am happy to work on that for you. >> we could come up with our own estimate from what you term us in terms of staffing and how many youth we have. we would love to get more precise. >> sure. >> i understand there is
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security happening at the log cabin right now? >> sure. we have i believe it is a private contractor hired by the city to provide 24/7 security to individuals. do you want me to speak to the purpose for it? >> sure, why not? >> obviously, the ranch is very remote. if there isn't security down there, there could be damage or people walking off with things on the property. i want to note that we only be have that cost in this coming year of the budget. we did not include it in year two. i did keep it in this year because it seemed as a city we had to make a joint decision on whether we want to use that space as part of the new phase of juvenile justice in san
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francisco. the age of adulthood might change and a lot of factors, and we know we have the space for a lot of people feels like an untapped possibility. we have kept it in the budget. i think my ask of everybody is that we make that decision so we know whether we will let go of the property as a city or use it for something else or whether it will stay in the juvenile justice system. >> it is an untapped resource along with hidden valley right there. there are creative and wonderful things to do for young people as a whole in terms of technology, vocational services with the entire space. that also concerns me and makes me wonder about what we are doing with assets sitting. that is another conversation. this is my last question in
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terms of knowing that we are slating to close the hall december 2021. looking at staff in place now, what are you doing to support people to jobs in other places because it doesn't seem like we are preparing for the downsizing with the shifting of the closure which is going to be very important. >> i would say two answers. one, there has been a number of juvenile hall staff that left in the last year. i think they felt like they saw the writing on the wall and felt unsecure about working in the space not knowing what was coming. we had people leave. second for me is my understanding and what i think is the right way to do this is through the closed juvenile hall worker process. that is focused on facility and
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labor. we have, as you know, labor is represented on the workers and the subcommittee. my understanding is that part of the deliverable is for us to figure out what that looks like for labor working in this building now. one thing to add to that to all of you, what you see for the budget right now is not reflective what i assume we will look at a year from now for the 21-22 budget. it dent take int take -- it doee into account the work they are doing this year. >> you are right. this is handled through that process. as we reimagine the new opportunities for young people, obviously, there will be a role for the team within the new
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model. i believe that to be true as well. i do appreciate the work that the working group is doing. i am also trying to balance out realities that exist from the timeline perspective as well. >> thank you. >> any more comments or questions? supervisor yee. >> some clarification. [ inaudible ] >> yes. >> is that reflect understand the budget at all or something? >> it is not reflected in the budget because it was transferred from the city funded system to bcyf. i want to bring it up because it is money that came from the state to the city for probation. it is money in any other
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jurisdiction is used for traditional probation functions. we want to make sure that people understand and are aware that we think it is important to reinvest it. >> within the budget you said there was money also going to be transferred out of there? what is that line item. >> it is in the technical adjustment phase of the budget. it will be coming out of the line item in the budget called program it projects. it is $1.5 million because there is $1.45 million added in each year. we will be taking -- what you
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will see nor those projects we are taking $300,000 out in year one and 150,000 out in year one and those will go over as well. >> say that again. >> $300,000 in year one and $150,000 in year two for a total of $450,000. >> one of your last slides you were showing $1.4 million. >> each year of the budget. the way $2.9 million that came back to us was put in to our budget was splitting it each year $1.45 million into the budget. the full amount is $2.9 million back to us split evenly. we are going to work that down now to give those amounts i just
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gave you. >> from the point of view, okay. >> i am happy to talk with you offline if you would like. >> any more questions for chief miller? i want to thank you for the $7 million that you gave that made the non-profits whole during this time when we need to step up. i want to thank you very much. we were worried about it. the $7 million made them whole at this time where non-profit workers are making $15 an hour. thank you. it was very generous and thank you for joining us today. we will see you next week. thank you. now we have the public defender.
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welcome. >> the head of our it department is with us today. >> here we go. the floor is yours. >> it is good to see you, president yee, chair fewer, supervisor mandelman, supervisor ronen and supervisor walton. i am honored to be the san francisco public defender to serve the community. i came here and was drawn to this office because under the leadership the commitment to high level litigation, community and racial justice. the first slide.
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we are being asked to keep four vacancies open in year one and two. the pre-trial release unit is not based yet. that funding ends june. in money terms small increase in funding fiscal year 2021 due to grant for covid safety supplies and increased costs and benefits and slight increase in the rent. for year 21-22 reduction of $.8 million due to salary and benefits savings. this slide reflects over 92% of the costs are salary and benefits. professional contracts services what we used to pay experts, interpreters, court transcripts and things that nature. tiny portion is materials and
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supplies. a friend of yours the former district 9 came here and said she was shocked when she got here. we gave her a pad of paper and pencil. we had very little fat in our budget. services to other departments what we paid for the services. real estate, technology, workers comp. the next chart. hopefully you have had time to digest the newsletter we sent out earlier this week. you can see the things we do. the wide range of services that we provide for the city in addition to our felony an and misdemeanors. we include veterans court, drug
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court, pre-trial release, clean slate unit which is really amazing in terms of the barriers that we remove to enable people to access employment and housing opportunities is really a model for the nation. i want to thank the board and chair fewer you helped us create the immigration unit and the legal system integrity unit. i am so glad that the city has decided that it is here to focus on racial equity. we have been there at this point focusing on that for a number of years. i hav have been a member of the public defenders for racial justice for several years. we had the committee for 10 years focused on how to fight racism in the system and find justice for predominantly black
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and brown clients and their families? some examples are magic programs. as supervisor walton was there yesterday at the resource fair, clean state, integrity for miss conduct and reforms to local targets of community needs of color and resentencing critically when we have the pandemic which affected people in prison and county jail that is working on the habeas front to release people from prison and shorten sentences. many of you have read the story in the chronicle about paul r.e.d. who was reunited after 44 years in custody. he went on a hunger strike to improve conditions of confinement and shouldn't have
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suffered the conviction to begin with. we have pioneered community experts in courtrooms to challenge what we believe is a wrongful labeling of youth by the gang task force unit of the police department. some of our accomplishments include our immigration unit that is fighting ice and most effective local tooling for for fighting trump's immigration policies. police reform reforming the use of form and mugshot policies working closely with chief scott to make sure that happens and organizing public defenders across california for statewide policy changes. we have been working till gently -- diligently on prison releases. 200 presently. we released people from san
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quentin using 1170d which came into effect in january which enabled the district attorney to file motion for reduction in sentence after we provide local legwork and reentry plan to be successful. juvenile hall we are at all-time low. under 15 youth for a while. currently we are at 11 as of today leading the fight to keep courtrooms safe and ensure a fair trial. really proud of our young defender program. criminal justice through high school students with the hope young people will be exposed to different areas to be involved in the criminal justice reform revolution currently going on.
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we have been asked to hold four felony f.t.e.s vacant. 90% of the budget is salaries. it is very challenging to cut the budget. 100% of the clients we serve are indigents. 50% black, 80% people of color. homeless, mentally ill or both. this budget process is happening in the context of national movement to end police mistreatment and violence and centering the people we serve. right now with the slowdown in the courts functioning. we are not able to generate that as quickly as we want to which lead to resolution or the trial
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proceeding to completion. currently 17% of the trials in the court are public defender trials. we have manager in the office. almost all of the managers carry caseloads, many carry life sentences in addition to managerial duties. everything is slower and more labor intensive. we have to set up meetings to effectively communicate with our clients. we are first responders in close contact within cance within thed populations out of custody. my staff due to their own health situation or family situation may not be able to make the appearances. we have done reassigning of cases. the four positions i am talking about, two are currently open
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and two will become open when our dear friends michelle ann maria go to the bench in january. i think the reason we are seeking to fill these positions as soon as possible is to really evaluate where we are nationally in this george floyd moment. the national priorities around race and equity have shifted. in our communities are counting on us to be the defenders of most vulnerable, communities, immigrants and to be the defenders of the black community. this system has been in use with structural racism for centuries the impact of less than optimal is reaching. black leaves matters is a fully functioning vibrant and hardworking public defender's
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office that delivers. anyone with insider's knowledge knows public defenders work is more legally challenging and emotionally draining and requires far more work per case than any other player in the system. you saw the press release of the first completed jury trial during covid where our team secured clients' freedom where the da was trying to convict our clients of strike and send him to prison. i wish you could have been there for the phone call relayed to me by sierra, the attorney who tried the case, but just the emotion of the moment when she was able to communicate to the mother of our client about the verdict and to hear his 11 year
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old brother cheering in the back ground is why we do what we do. covid made every aspect of our work more challenging and more vital right now. every single day in custody increases the risk of contracting the virus and spreading that illness back to families, back to communities. our whole goal is to avoid unjust guilty pleas or convictions after trial. that is the fe phenomenon day id day out across the country. since we know when that conviction happens that creates housing barriers, creates employment barriers and separation from family, which has generational impact. the stronger the public defender's office is the more that can be avoided. i think it is important to
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reconceptionallize and understand the public defender is the public safety office. when you truly fight for someone, work on reentry from a position of love and trust, that is something we are uniquely positioned to do. i met many clients who have been convicted with the mere fact that someone fought for them and saw them has been a springboard to them moving their life in a better direction. the inecktrees and bias and structural racism on the street in minneapolis that day, that plays out in every aspect of our criminal legal system. our office one case at a time and policy change at a time will be the engine that delivers equity. that is why we are requesting to be able to filling the current open vacant position as soon as
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we can or as soon as they become unit. the pre-trial release unit is win-win for everyone. we are able to communicate back with families, to the district attorney things that will impact their filing decision, we are able to provide judges with crucial information to use in making the determination whether or not to release someone. there is a clear cost savings to the city by releasing cost savings. there is 800,000 savings in terms of days in cuscode. -- custody. i am committed to continuing to keep our office as a beacon for what a public defender office is. staff from other offers we
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recruited. we are the beacon in the field. i am committed to taking us to a higher level and providing the level of representation we would want and any loved one of ours were facing charges. i want to thank you all for your support and solidarity. every dime spent on our office is a valuable investment in the values of san francisco, equity, human potential and community. thank you. i will take any questions. >> thank you very much. any questions for our public defender? supervisosupervisor walton. >> i want to be clear that if you had the current proposed
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budget you had completely eliminate the pre-trial division? >> yes because that is a two year position. that is ending in june of next year. >> i don't know how we can cut these services for low-income people and take away the opportunity for the constitutional right to council. this is something that is 100% important to your point. everybody that you serve is in low income community and they cannot afford to handle their own constitutional rights. that is why you are here. this is something that is of particular interest to me. i know what the pre-trial unit does to make sure people have representation from the moment they get arrested on evenings or
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weekends. that lag time without council is something we cannot afford to have here in the city. how does your budget compare to the district attorney's office and police budget? if you don't have it now, i will get it when you come back. >> half of the district attorney's budget. the police budget $100 million of the police budget is investigation. we handle that with our 18 member investigation unit. sometimes people compare public defender's office to district attorney. that is not appropriate. it is the district attorney's office, that portion of the police budget also, and keep in mind there is the probation violation we defend that, too. look at all of these actors of incarceration and compare the budget there. >> to adequately defend and
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conduct investigations someone representing a client you have to take care of investigation completely from your budget but not the same for other branches? >> that's correct. >> thank you. >> supervisor preston. >> chair fewer, real quick. we had supervisor preston's appearance at 5:14. this is a special meeting of the board of supervisors. >> any other questions? >> thank you, chair fewer. thank you, public defender, for your office's amazing work. i would be interested in what the supervisor walton was asking
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to look at. comparison police investigations budget plus district attorney's budget equal some amount. how that compares to the public defender's budget, it is safe to say at least double your budget, is that right. >> quadruple. >> congratulations on the two senior people in your office who became judges. i was concerned when i sauve can't positions that wouldn't be filled. i know not too much about the office but about the crucial role that you play as you have laid out in real racial equity fighting every day in this city. i was curious on the two senior
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folks incredible advocates. those positions you are being asked not to fill under the current budget proposal, can you give more detail so we understand what those folks did? these are very long-term advocates of public defender's office. i imagine it would be hard to fill with one person. what did they do in the office and what would be lost by not being able to fill those positions. >> what they have done over years is try cases at a very high level. over 55 jury trials, maria has a very long and storied trial career. they are people that during times if you need them to plug in to do something else like supervise pre-trial release.
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someone else is doing that to make sure we are preserving our rights to meet with our clients efficiently. she is handling several cases with long sentences. there are people in addition to their own caseloads they are in specialty courts and they can do that because of the extensive experience they have. it is a lot that we need people with that amount of experience. you need multiple people. >> the public defender operates differently. the senior management are doing
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occasions themselves and so without those positions filled, i imagine those cases will have to be absorbed by other already over burdened staff? >> exactly. that is what we are trying to avoid. >> what is the total cost of the vacant positions that you are asked not to fill? do you have the total amount of what that is? >> yes that would be $740,000 in fiscal year 2021. 1,100,000 in 2022. >> $1.8 million. >> the list has that exact number that is public defender has shared with our office. that is the official number on
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that list. >> you know, i think folks are familiar with the work around pre-trial and during trial. i have been struck in learning more about the department for folks incarcerated and the work around san quentin. you reference in passing 1170d issue which is huge. i have been getting up to speed on this. inning in terms of the increased load now since the cruel changed in january. can you explain what those cases are? when we talk about racial equity and black lives matter in this city, that the 1170d work, which is substantial, is essential that we are not cutting back on that. can you explain further what that work entails?
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that is my last question. >> what that allows is district attorney to bring motion to modify a sentence. the initial work about what happened in the underlying case, how that individual clients is doing, reentry, digging back. all of that resentencing can only be driven by the work we do. the felony law which changed so there were some people convicted or sentences on homicide although they may not have been there. we have to go back and look at those cases and unearth them to bring that motion in front of a judge to allow them to make the appropriate decision. these are cases in addition to the equity work. we have to go look at the unlying work. currently the litigation is going on with the covid outbreak
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in sanquenton is he habias work. we have had to spread that out to the felony unit on top of the active cases they are carrying to file those petitions and to file the individual work on each case. that work, whenever there is a children in the law that allows some sort every form, we need the public defender's office to function at a high level or we don't get the additional funding. we have to spread that out to reach the intended beneficiaries. that is what we are doing. >> i want to interrupt. our controller has a clarification or explanation. >> thank you, madam chair. mechanics point to make. not specific to this department. in general, attrician is
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budgeted in every department in the city to acknowledge natural turnover that occurs over time. any department budgeted up to full staffing level with n witho attrition, there would be safings. the department would not spend the funds. over the course of the leave people leave and start and vacancies occur. a point to make regarding how attrition works in the budget. >> okay. supervisor preston. >> that is it. >> supervisor. >> good to see you. thank you for all of your work. quick question. this is for you answer also chair fewer or the controller. i remember from last budget year that at the time the pretile prl
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for the da budget was also cut. can you explain and there was an issue about how quickly the police department issued their investigations report to make sure to get individuals out of jail as soon as possible. could you explain that relationship? do you happen to know if pre-trial was funded in either the da and the police department budget as well or wiped off the map in all three budgets? >> i know that rebooking last year was, i believe, taken away from the district attorney's budget. you have to ask them about that. i am not sure about the police department. to explain how critical it is.
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when someone is booked into custody there is another arraignment date. that is two or three days away. the quicker we get that information, just a vital period. we can then inform the judge on day one of the arraignment about the circumstances of the case and circumstances of the individual so they can make an informed decision whether or not to release someone and communicate with the district attorney's office to impact did they charge misdemeanor or felony or strike or nonstrike? that is a dramatic impact on what an happens that has an impact if that individual remains in jail. in times of covid every day in jail increases the risk of contracting this virus. >> what is the amount cut for pre-trial from your budget? did you go over this?
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>> yes, this was in the formal. >> yes, that is what i just said. just for reference if you want to go back to it. >> quick question to ashley. every component that is necessary to make pre-trial work in the da police department and public defender's office so the individual doesn't stay in jail longer than they have to, was that cut across all three department? >> on the public defender's budget. we did not cut this. it was added as a pilot last year or two budgets ago. they were added as limited. they have the positions through the upcoming fiscal year. we will reevaluate the pilot
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with the department an and all f you. it was a pilot and they have the positions through the upcoming fiscal year. >> it is $740,000 per year. >> okay. then. >> we are talking about the second fiscal year here. >> this particular department budget, yes. >> what about the da and police department budget? >> i will get back to you. the public defender raised the weekend rebooking program. i don't know if that is what you are talking about or something different. let me go back to get you the holistic view. we implemented it and made changes when we realized it wasn't working. let me get back to you how this all shook out. >> anyone else for public
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defender? seeing none, public defender, thank you. >> wait. >> now i see you. president yee. >> when you spoke to me about this program pre-trial and you said it was state funded or something or a pilot. >> i just want to say that if we could find money for the second year, i would support it. there is a big value in that program that can't be measured in dollars. >> thank you. >> absolutely. i am glad the mayor's budget
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director said she will we look at it. it is on our radar, too. comments or questions? thank you very much, public defender for all of your work. we have next our police department. chief scott. >> thank you so much. >> the floor is yours, chief, thank you for joining us. >> while we put up the slides. i want to thank the committee, the board as a whole, mayor's office, police commission and i am looking forward to the residents of san francisco for holding us accountable and helping to lead reform while offering your support during a
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challenging year in policing. this year is unprecedented. a global pandemic and incident involving george flied who died at the hands of minneapolis police officers. the call for children in the country is unprecedented. unlike anything we have seen during our times in this profession. i will speak for myself in this profession. it was balance of accountability and support to get us through. in our city and county i am pleased overall with the way we handle our police department handles the events in may and june without enduring the problems we saw in other cities across the country. thank you for that. before and during the unrest, it is open and transparents and
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embrace what everyone has to say to us. that informed our budget decisions, our short and long-term plans for police reform. today our presentation will focus on a couple -- four different themes or categories. first is this year's budget to explain the budget including the reduction. the reductions are significant. second will be the budget impact on staffing. the organizational structure and reform have yielded positive out comes in reducing violent and property crime in the last couple years and how that impacts our cordellivery of services. responding to and investigating
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crime. third category we will illustrate how we have continued to use budgetary dollars to continue to implement and more importantly implement our vision to sustain police reform over the long haul. we will highlight our visions and plans to address some of our operational and reform challenges. fourth and last category we will highlight the weighs i the waysy plan and in that we hope to continually both externally and internally improve our position on equity and inclusion. those are the four things and we can go through the next slide. this begins the first category or theme about the budget. this represents total budget for
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all funds. general fund for the fiscal year that red column fourth column over represents reduction which is $45.6 million. if you add our reduction of $20.4 million, the total reduction in our 21 budget will be $64.3 million. you can look at the categories, operating funds, project funds, continuing projects, work order, airport and special revenue fund and see the differences between our original which is the third column and the mayor's proposed budget. as i said those cuts are significant.
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fy21 in the original column represented second year of last year's budget. major changes to the general fund include reduction of vacant positions. that breakdown is sworn positions we will be reduced by 167.6 full-time equivalent positions. that is reagan recruits. civilian will be reduced 36.9 full-time equivalent. over time reduction a third category down the list will be reduced by $2 million. capital outlain concludes reduction of $2.5 million and that includes no funding for additional vehicles this year, which is significant. our nonpersonnel service and litigation will be restructured. that is litigation for lawsuits
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and the like. we did experience rent increases. that is -- next slide. as we look at this slide, of particular note department wide our total full-time equivalent officers or positions for officers are being reduced by 322.1 full-time equivalent positions. that includes 167.6 f.t.e. reductions funded by the general fund. this budget request will allow us to continue to operate within our current staffing level, which is not optimal but without ddegrading our core.
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reducing crime, investigating crime and continuing to implement reform. as we transition to the next category of staffing you will see in detail what we are talking about. the next slide is a model of our staffing from 2009 to the current and projected out for the next three fiscal years. you can see in 2009 we had a high for this time period that we are looking at of 1953 officers. then we were impacted by the recession and went to a low of 1,649 officers in 2015.
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mayor lee had approved accelerated hiring plan around that time. we put into action that plan. staffing levels went up for the next four years. we currently have 1,859 f.t.e., full-time equivalents officers. as you project out, what we are advocating for and requesting in this budget is to stay at current level of 102,829. -- 1829. that is where we hope to stay for the next few years. if we don't hire and lose officers due to attrition, the purple line shows what we project our staffing will look like in the next three years,
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which will end up around 1589 officers by 2023. we would lose ground. i want to point out it took us almost 10 years to recover from the last recession. the decisions made right now about staffing are just decisions that will live with us for probably the next 10 to 15 years. i know the board is thoughtful about this discussion. we appreciate that. we want to illustrate how important it is to not get there at this point. we are going to transition to employment as it relates to crime reduction and look at a five year view on the gun violence victims. as you recall on the last slide we saw lowest employment around 2015. this is anecdotal.
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we believe it has an impact on the ability to address crime. at the height of gun violence was around that same time. as we improved staffing, you can see that trend line go down significantly. this year we are down to 75 year-to-date which is lowest in the five year period. just from the last slide. we have challenges with homicides. gun violence is pretty close or low where it was last year overall. we have challenges. we want to stay on top of that and not reverse back to where we were five years ago. this slide depicts our success up to this point with our theft
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of vehicles and car break-ins. could we get the slide here. in 2017. >> chief you skipped the slide. the next slide is gun violence. there you go. >> next slide. we are missing a slide. we will go ahead to that one. in the last couple years resources supported increase in both property and violence crime. we have had significant decreases in both. 17% decrease i in violence and % decrease in property crime. command staff at each station
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have interventions and to use a business staffing to create downturn in property and violent crime. i know some of the members of the committee were part of those discussions a couple years ago when we piloted the property crime units and saw success there. however, there are challenges. we had property crimes. home burglaries are up significantly this year. we are better in car break-ins. bet thebetter than three years . three years ago we were number one city in the nation for property crime per capita. we need to change that. all of the work we have done with community engagement effort with piloting of property crime units which we saw success in
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supervisor yee's district, we need to keep that work going. staffing plays a major role in that. we understand the budget environment and our goal is to at least stay where we are staffing wise so we don't go backwards in time of crime and community engagement efforts. so this slide shows our outcome from our car break-ins, theft from vehicles in 2015 to this year. as i started to say a minute ago, if you look toward the middle of the graph, you can see the year 2017. this was a year to date depiction of those statistics. in 2017 it was a horrible year in terms of property crime led by car break-ins. that year we put in some efforts
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to balance enforcement with tried and true measures we believed we would have a better outcome. that is exactly what happened. that included the units around the city and increasing the community engagement effort, particularly, when it comes to car break-ins, we controlled out a crime prevention campaign called park smart which was done in collaboration with the community, mayor's office and we saw significant results after the three of those combinations were balanced and rolled forward. that included enforcement, id arrest for prolific car burglaries, crime prevention strategies with park smart campaign and increased foot beat
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deployment a across the city. we did research to see if deployment had an impact. the foot beat deployment did have an impact on reducing thefts and assault. we were happy. it was 51% decrease in theft from vehicles from 2017 to 2020 year-to-date. 55% increase in foot patrols. 66% from 2016 to 2017, 55% increase in foot patrols. now we have had 66% increase in foot patrols. we believe that has made a difference to shape these outcomes. we want to sustain that keeping the staffing level where they are. now transition to the third
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category which really starts to talk about cost of service and d the call volume. on the left is a chart that was completed as part of our deployment and staffing task force that president yee initiated, led the charge on. this is done by maytrix consulting, one of the country's consulting firms. what i would like to note on the colorful chart the bottom number to the right. 300,822. that is for one year period of calls mid summer 2018 to 2019. those are the calls that the uniform officers in black and white patrol cars responded to during that period. the chart on the right is a
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chart that shows response time given the call voluming. the blue line is priority calls. they are the highest priority. those are the crimes in progress, our assaults in progress and those types of things. b priority calls are lower where a robbery occurred where the suspects aren't visible. this priority calls are like if your car is broken into there is no suspect or no danger to yourself or the community. those would get classified as the c priority call. with the staffing deficiencies in the c priority call category. in some instances we have to improve. the call response time is less than what the community expects and less than what we expect. it is a direct reflection of our
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staffing level. there are things we are trying to do and will do internally to make that situation better, bottom line it gets to staffing to make that better. this is a call to really be thoughtful about our staffing, to keep us at the level that we are so we don't go backwards as we address this issue. this next slide is also from the analysis by the consultant on our recommended staffing level. i want to highlight a couple of things this slide illustrates. first highlight is if you look at the field operations line that green box to the right what that says is that we need an
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additional 207 officers, according to our workload, to be at optimal deployment. if you look at the bottom of the column. the total department wind is additional 265 officers. i want to reenvisioning. we are part of working groups, mayor's office, the board, supervisor walton is a leader in this conversation as well about reenvisioning policing and really looking at those types of calls and categories of calls in which other departments or community-based organizations or some othesome other entity mighe better suited to handle. it is a great way to go. we are looking forward to making that happen. there will need to be a transition time to get there. what i would like to submit to
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the board as we discuss budget as we get there the need to continue to handle those calls for service, 300,000 calls to service we showed you on the previous slide still exist. that is why it is so important on staffing level to not go backwards. we understand that this budget we are not asking for increase. we are going to have to find ways to address it and we are willing to work to do that. we want to make it really clear to everyone listening that we are at a point where we need to really keep our staffing the way it is and not go backwards to where we were five years ago. we believe that will have add adverse impact on response time and ability to perform our essential core functions in an
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efficient manner. so our next slide is a segway to overtime. as you see in this slide, there are reductions in the budget. what this depicts are actual over time expenditures for fiscal year 18, 19, 20. you can see 18 and 19 we were saying 20 we are significant increases in overtime expenditures. a lot of that goes back to covid, and a lot goes back to civil unrest in may and june which we spent a lot of over time to address and keep our city safe during those two months. covid response also was a stretch for the department and strain on the departments over
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time. i want to highlight a couple things on that. this year's budget as i showed in the earlier slide is definitely going to be from a reduction in overtime. it gets into our efficiency and the calls to manage over time, tighten the belt in every way possible, have efficient systems and controls and really do what we can internally to make sure we help our own situation as it comes to overtime. we accept that challenge. i know the bl a's have recommendations. we need to look at ways to manage over time and make sure we are efficient in the use of those funds. on this chart you can see from fiscal year 2019, 2020, there is a significant increase in first amendment gatherings, over time
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expenditures. the vast majority of that increase dealt with two months of civil unrest in our preparedness as a city and county to deal with that situation. so the next slides will cover the next theme. that is implementing and sustaining police reform. this slide shows the proposed budget and the ability we believe as we project out to continue our effort to transform our department. we showed slides in our hearing in july as overview. this was an overview to illustrate some of the drivers of the budget increases. as i said to this before. reform is necessary. it does cost.
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it is expensive. yes, we have to be efficient. we want to illustrate how reform has impacted our budget over time. as you can see, our reform funding included specific initiatives such as data collection, technology both in personnel and technology itself, professional standards borough, personnel for that, we have a borough that is dedicated to leading reform effort, trainings including bias, procedural justice, crisis intervention, use of force, over time expenditures to make sure we were adequately trained. tracks paraphernalitransparencye implemented fully. we believe it has really aided and transparency in terms of the
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san francisco police department to provide the public transparency to our operations and critical incidents and the like. reform also takes time. we are now going into year four almost with the collaberative reform. from the historical perspective, for the 23 other cities involved in major reform via us d.o.j. pattern and practices or consent decree, the average time expectation to get compliance is five years. very few if nip departments met that five year goal. that should tell us something. it tells us this work is methodical, largely structural in terms of changing original structure and culture and that it had to be done thoughtfully and with a vision to sustain the
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work. so we don't go backwards after things get better. >> i want to highlight what we achieved in the last four years. they are highlights. in 2016 is when the d.o.j. report was released with two 72 recommendations. that same year within a couple months we had our first major revision of use of force policy in quite some time. we will highlight the results of that in the following slide. body-worn camera, data with electronic data collection. we have a lot of work to do. these are structural and
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infrastructure type of improvements that not only has helped us as an organization to get better but we set the stage for lasting reform. we don't want to lose that site or vision reform is not a right now thing. we need to get better right now, but we also need to field the vision and infrastructure to sustain these reforms over time. you can see the accomplishments over the last five years, implementation of our policy which all of our policies have a five year review cycle, which is the first time in this department's history. that takes a lot of work with meetings, community input, command staff leading most of these policy initiatives internally, also, running the command. we had to add this body of work on to what we were already doing. it takes time and takes people
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and it takes money to do this. i talk about infrastructure and about the structure of the department. as you all know on the last slide you can see in 2017 we transformed the organizational structure of the police department. we added more command staff. that was quite a debated topic at that time and still debated topic. i want to illustrate how we compare to other major city departments. you can see the arrow in the middle. that is san francisco, that is our police department. that red line shows how we compare per capita racial command staff with other departments. we are about on the lower end, lower to just past the middle of the curve. when we had our review by the
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consultants brought in, what they told us is that this command staff and structure was the right size for the workload and the right size for the task and challenges at hand so we really want to highlight that and really want to illustrate and talk about structure and what that means for reform, efficiency and over sight and all of the things that this committee and this city and county expect of us and we expect of ourselves.
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significant progress in terms of building an infrastructure that will get us to success with reform. next slide, please. championshithis slide, i want te a couple of things. really one of the key things that really caused us to be assessed by the usdog with the reform initiative that we asked for, by the way, was use of force and particularly officer-involved shootings and this slide illustrates the progress since the implementation of the reform initiative in those categories. the graphs on your left at the bottom is our progress on use of force and what you see there, the different lines represents different demographics, the grey line represents the african-american population and
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the yellow line represents hispinic and the blue line is the white population. the biggest were among the african-american demographic. and again, it's something we're pleased with but we're not finished with. we have disparities with that particular population of people in san francisco and we are working hard to change that narrative. it's something we're committed to and something that as we ask for you to consider our budget that we hope and we believe that you are committed to. a 53% reduction in total use of force since 2016 is what you see there and that is significant and that is something that we hope to continue to improve on. the chart to your right, pointing a firearm is a 67%
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decrease since 2016 and the actual chart shows the decrease in officer-involved shootings and this an average, but the biopsy line is for the last 20 years or so or 18 years from 2000 to 2017, in the year 2017, we averaged just under eight officer-involved shootings per year and that has been cut in half. and we hope that gets even better. the goal is zero. you know, we know that we are authorized to use force when reasonable and necessary and appropriate, but that is not our goal. our goal is to do everything we can to prevent it and i think it's worthy to highlight the progress there and i think this is a direct result of our reform efforts. it's a direct result of budgetary support to implement the reform efforts and it's a
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direct result of your support and your pushing to hold us accountable to how we police this city. these are significant improvements and they're not the end-all, be-all because we know we have work to do and we still have challenges and challenges in who we stop. we still have challenges in the arrest disproportionalties and we're working through that and we know what those challenges are and we know that we have a plan to get there. and so, this is really a slide or statistics that we are pleased with, but we're not satisfied. next slide, please the last scene, if you will, is equity, both external and external equity in how we plan to improve
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in this area. we're really excited about our equity plan that we are building and we do have an equity officer which is our director and she doubles as an equity officer and she's the director of crime strategies and that's director tiffany sutton, one of the non-sworn command members we brought in a couple of years ago. tiffany, along with the equity committee, there are five in total and they are laying the foundation for an equity plan. we plan to have that plan ready to present on december 31st as the legislation requires and we also are already to go beyond the next step. our internal work includes or data collection, our identifying points in the hiring and promotion process, which we are currently work wi working with w
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to make that better and we pause all hiring and some of our promotional examine exams and wk through that. we want to really be inclusive in terms of recruitment in all communities but communities of color and underserved communities. we're addressing that work and recruitment, engaging with community stakeholders and we did just that. as we got through the implementation of our biased policing policy that took two years in the making and these types of policy reforms and policy improvements, we believe, are both internal and external as the internal inclusion peel anpieceand all this work is refd
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in a budget which includes technology to capture the data, the personnel to analyze the data and also the personnel to do the work necessary to get us to where we need to be in terms of equity and as it relates to reform, they go hand in hand. next slide, please. and this is our final slide. and looking ahead, we want to identify and continue to identify our leadership team that really embraces what we're doing in terms of reform, building our equity plan in terms of policing the city in the way that we can all be proud of. we will continue our work with our academic partners which is a big part of our equity plan and we're working with great academic partners and we have some really national renowned
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people and right in our backyard, stamford university, cal berkley and we are working directly with these folks and our universities to really change the narrative on how we go about equity and inclusion in the policy-making and in everything we do. and also with entities like the center for policing equity, which we have a relationship with and a working relationship with and an mou with to really look at our data and give us recommendations and a great example of how that worked in our favour, when went enhance our use of force policy, because of their research and data, being the policing equities, we were able to implement recommendations that they put forward just recently and actually, the report hadn't been
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published yet but recommendations that they made us aware of that we were able to incorporate them in our use-of-force policy and that's just an example of what can be, what we plan to continue do and, again, i want to end the presentation by where i started with thanking this committee, the people of san francisco for supporting us and we know and expect to be held accountable and we understand the environmental right now in policing and we are here to get the job done, to make this police department a department that we can all be proud of. we're not perfect, but we're definitely working to be the best department we can be. and that concludes the presentation and i'll take any questions. >> thank you, chief. thank you for that presentation. colleagues, any comments or questions for our chief of police? i see president yee. president yee, please. >> thank you, chair fewer. chief scott, thank you for your
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presentation and i have just a question about -- it's about the body cameras and having the -- who mentioned it? >> i think that -- >> probably accountability. >> that's right, i'm sorry. so the department of police accountability doesn't have access to the body camera footage until a lot later, if at all. and he was mentioning, mr. henderson? >> henderson.
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>> mentioned that in every other county in california, their counterparts can't get that footage. the sheriff's department said -- sheriff lamotto said they have an agreement where they could get it, also. and so, what is the rationale that the san francisco police department is the only one in california that doesn't provide access to the body camera footage to director henderson? >> thank you for that question, president yee, and giving me an opportunity to clarify a few things. first i want to clarify that we do provide by camera footage to director henderson and the police accountability but there are some legal requirements that we have to abide by.
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and as director henderson said, he has challenged those legal requirements and for the sake of transparency and i applaud that and i hope that he's successful in challenging those legal requirements because we want to have transparency. however, we have to comply with legal requirements and i'll just take a second to go into what some of those requirements are. the body camera footage contains sometimes data from -- it's law enforcement protected data, rap sheets, criminal history, those types of things. and we cannot let a non-law enforcement agency have unfettered access to that data. we have been warned by the california department of justice
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because there was a time where some of that data was released. we get audited frequently and we had to respond to the attorney general with a response of what we did to correct those deficiencies and releasing data that should not have been released to a non-law enforcement agency and so there are requirements by law that we have to abide by when we're wearing body camera footage and that's why when we released it to the public, if you look at the computer screen in a police car and if it has -- let's say an officer is running somebody's criminal history in their car and that's on the screen and their body-worn camera captures that, we have a team of personnel that reviews that and they have to redact that data. they can't issue that data to the public without redacting that data. the department of police accountability is not a law enforcement agency. if they were, we could release
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it, but they're not. so that's the restriction. so i definitely want to make sure that this committee is aware of that and the public is aware of that, because we do release data and all about transparency but we have requirements by law. and we've checked several times with the california department of justice. verified that, even after we corrected it after we were told that we had to correct it and because of the challenges with director henderson to the legalities of what we can release and can't release. we verified it several times and we got the same answers. we cannot release unredacted body-important footage and i just wanted to make sure we note that clarification. it takes longer longer and i apd his challenging that. but until the laws change, we can't release it to dpa or any
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other non-law enforcementen it without redaction. >> maybe i need to ask that of director henderson when he made the statement that as a police department or in other counties, so why can they do it and you can't do it? >> well, all i can say -- i'm sorry. go ahead. >> no, that was it. >> all i can say to that, president yee, we did release it a time or two before and we were admonished that we were violating release of the laws on that and we were told to correct it and we corrected it. and so if other departments are releasing it, you might want to check to make sure that they're releasing information that they are authorized to release. i can say this to just coming from another police department that had a similar type of oversight, but the difference in the department that i worked for
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many years in was that the effective general office had sworn members assigned that office. so those sworn members had access that information because they worked for the police department. we're not configure ed this way. there's no one sworn and the dpa is not a law enforcement agency. and so we can only -- you have to be a law enforcement agency to access that information. if any other city and county is doing it, i would invite them to take a look at what they're doing to make sure they're compliant with the rules and the laws. >> ok, i would like to probably ask a follow up to director henderson. thanks for your answer. and glad i asked. >> supervisor walton. >> thank you so much chair fewer. and thank you for the presentation, chief. i just have a couple of questions for today's purposes.
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one, how many academy classes in this proposed budget and what's the cost per academy? >> we are -- let's put it this way. depending on the class size, what we hope to do is hire to attrition. the class size is what the board approved last year, and i believe it was 35 per academy. and we lose about 103 to attrition a year and that's the combination of retirement, resignations, separations for services for other reasons and so, that would be about three and a half classes if we were to have the same structure that we had last year as the boar board
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approved. >> what's the cost on that? >> i'll get that while we're talking and. >> and, then, i've got the numbers and i think i have a handle on what is being proposed for actual overtime this year, seeing several reports and that 17.7 million proposed overtime for the budget this year that you listed, does that take into account the $2 million reduction the mayor already included? >> yes, it does supervisor walton. >> thank you so much. and i would love to know the cost for those three and a half classes. >> yes, i will have it for you in just a second. >> excuse me, chief. i want to piggy-back on that. president yee, do you recall the year of 2018, where i think the three academy classes, i believe, and they were for 50
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recruits each. so chief, i think that was through a two-year term and so have you -- i think you were budgeted for the academy classes and i think one of the academy classes was specifically for the airport. but i think there were, maybe, three of them and we had a big conversation around civilization and we actually, think, supervisor yee and i thought that, probably, three classes were not needed and so can you tell me whether or not those three academy classes that we approved, that those have already gone through? >> ifrom 2018 to 2019, the class size that you have all approved last year was reduced because what the challenges from 2018 is we weren't able to hire 50 in
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the academy and so that was the discussion for last year's budget and the class sizes were reduced. >> is that correct, chief, 50? >> from 50 to 35 and one class was less than that. and it was in the 20's. for this fiscal year. i mean, the fiscal year we just came out of. so that cut was made for the 2019-2020 budget. >> got it. >> we were having that conversation and the board -- and one of the points was, we weren't able to fill those 50 you referenced in 2018, but it was 2018 and then we transitioned to smaller hiring goals than 2019-2020. >> so are currently budgeted now for how many academy classes during the fiscal year of 2021 2021-22022?
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>> that would be roughlily three anroughy threeand a half classe. >> two and a half years? >> if we were to hire through atrish ship and that's over the last three years, which is about 103 per year. >> ok. so sorry to interrupt you, supervisor walton. just wanted clarification, please continue. >> thank you, chair fewer. that's all i have for now. any other supervisors in the queue? i see nobody else, but i'm sure there are other questions. please put your name in the queue so i know and supervisor preston, did you have your hand up? >> i did, but i saw that supervisor mandelman was raising his.
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>> how about supervisor mandelman first, supervisor preston and supervisor ronen. supervisor mandelman, please begin. >> thank you, chair fewer and thank you, chief scott and thank you for all of the work you've done these last six months and in san francisco to serve as a cause of reform. and thanks to your officers, as well. policing is extraordinary dangerous in in country an this. the ninth circuit found that california's laws against high capacity magazines are unconstitutional that makes your job harder and the jobs of your officers harder and you are in an environment that is challenging at lots of levels. and i would love to -- i don't know if we have it, but i would love to have more -- i think
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part of fixing policing involves, obviously, having police who are reflective of the communities they're policing. and in particular, folks who are regularly engaging with officers. and so i would just love to have kind of more information about how that is changing over time. and i am hopeful that the department is more diverse today than it was 30 years ago and that the officers were going through academy classes today are more diverse than they were, but i would love to actually see a piece of paper that shows how the department is chang changinf it, and if it's not. >> supervisor mandelman, i'll explain it now for your question and i can email the committee about what i'm about to say and just a ten-year snapshot of our recruits entering the academy, which speaks to part of your
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question and i also have the demographics for the department and here it is right here. as you see this chart from 2007 to 2019, what this represents are the demographics that enter the police academy. at 2007, 54% of the recruits in the academy were white and 15% hispanic and 18% asian, seven% african-american and four% pilll philippino and other ethnicities and races. you can see it went from 26% to
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47%. it's yerkethe trend line from 2w has been the department's classes have been really from 60 to 70% people of color in the academy, so the less tenured officers, in terms of that dem demographic is more diverse in years past and i believe it will rest the values and city's diversity and that's encouraging news and we do have diversity strategic plan and recruitment is a part of that plan that we've built out to continue to make progress in that area. >> that is in some ways a quite encouraging slide in that it shows a department that is
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becoming more diverse. although, it would be good to see what happens over time as those folks -- do they stay with the department and do they leave? it looks like black recruits are there in larger numbers than they are in the san francisco population, but in far, smaller numbers than the communities that are most impacted by policing. and i wonder how that can be fixed? >> well, we have done some very -- in tems o in terms of sc plans, we've done outreach to the african-american community that will include and continue to include from historical black colleges and universities which are mostly in the midwest and in the eastern part of the united states, specific recruitment to
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african-american communities. we are working on some initiatives right now and, really, particularly in this top recruiting environment, which has been tough for the last or so years and it's even tougher now with the environment in the aftermath of the minneapolis, george floyd officer, but we had to look at recruitment from a different lense. a lot of recruiting in communities of color includes, really, having conversations not only with the person that is being recruited but the families and friends because those influences can really shape decisions and that is something that we are working towards doing more of and doing a better job of because that is very impactful. and i can say for myself when i told family members i was joining the police profession, some tried to talk me out of it. so i understand how that pressure can be.
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and for some people, it's tremendous pressure and so we definitely want to try to address that issue and we've seen other ferociouses and we'll try a shot at it, as well. >> and i'm glad they did not succeed in talking you out of it. >> me, too, thank you. >> i asked paul henderson earlier today and we didn't have a full discussion, but i want to ask you about it, as well, the project of getting rid of bad talks. one of the things that i -- one of the sadder things i've seen over the last few months are saying there's no such thing as a good cop, which i don't believe. but i think there are people in police departments that should not be there. and supervisor walton and the district attorney and you yourself have done work to tighten up on who we're letting into the police department and
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making sure, of course, that we're not hiring people who have records of bad behaviour elsewhere. but once you have someone in the department who should be sending off alarm bells, it is my impression, without being an expert in this, that the departments across this country are challenged in getting rid of people who should be sending off alarm bells and should be leaving before something terrible happens. and so, i'm wondering about that project, how you see that work happening in san francisco and what the principle impediments or -- is it your feeling that we're good? and if we're not good, what are the things that make that hard? >> well, there are several things. number one, the accountability and i'll get back to the
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infrastructure issue that i highlight the earlier. highlighted earlier. organizations have to be set up with systems and controls to step back and look at the bigger picture. individual accountability is always important and will always be important. so if an individual officer commits misconduct, everyone in department has to do its job. if it's a department investigation and conducting a thorough investigation. and if it rises to the left o lf a police commission case -- which i have the authority to discipline up to a ten-day suspension. anything above that is sent to the police commission and they have the authority for anything 11 days or higher, including term nation. we have to do our job to investigate and make sure that we are fair and thorough and give the evidence to the police commission to do their job. and proving internal affairs, i
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will mention structure, adding a commander to oversee risk management including internal affairs is a huge step because when you're a lieutenant or you're a captain, you're operational. you're reviewing reports and you're more of a managing operations and that's at the level of organizational structure that steps back and looks at the ten thousand view expecand the trends and lookingt things that need to be looked at and if we can identify those officers who don't need to be wearing his uniform and that goes behind individual accountability. and with the addition to the structure, evacuee put good thingwe've put good thingsin plt some good systems in place to enhance the accountability. the other thing is with the department of police
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accountability, really, accountability doesn't need or should not be adversarial. one of the recommendations in the department of justice assessment is that we have to have a better relationship, working relationship with dpa. i think that we're doing just that and i think director henderson and i have a great working relationship. and although we don't always agree, just like on the body-worn camera issue, we have a great working relationship. but what that does, supervisor mandelman, in terms of accountability, we have an opportunity to hear what dpa's recommendations are in terms of improving policies and trends that they see, where we can prevent things from happening by addressing policies and officers, that they have stepped across the line and that working relationship has to be one that works symbiotically and that is one of the regulars, i think
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that we've made tremendous amount of improvement to get there. there's still some work to do but that lends itself to better accountability. and then, to really the fundamental point, i believe of your question, in terms of are we hiring officers that we should not be hiring? supervisor walton's resolution or at least part of it, tried to get at that issue. we do have systems in place where we look at the personnel records of lateral recruits, the lateral perspectives hiree hired if they show unfit patterns if what they did at their department, we don't hire them. and i think supervisor walton's resolution is meant to strengthen that. the police commission, again, they hold me accountable and hold this department accountable and that oversight body, we have
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a structure that's bit to get us to where we need to get to with accountability. we have checks and balances and police accountability and we have a model, if you read about police structure and police oversight, that's recommended. that's why so many departments right now are going to this model. model and many departments, particularly since george floyd, if you google it, there are dozens of department taz are goindepartments that aregoing t. the recommendations were to improve what we have and i think we're doing that and as we do that, our accountability increases and the public trust, hopefully, for those that don't trust us will trust us more and for those that have lost trust will truss us again and for those that do trust us, we can
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enhance that even more. >> i have two more questions and one is on the overtime expenditures. my understanding is that last year, some of the overtime that was approved was going to be for foot beats and i'm looking at chart. where does that fall? >> it was beyond the 20 million. >> beyond the 20 million. >> there was a big argument about that and i remember, chief, that we made a point that it was a deployment issue.
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thought that foot beats were never guaranteed. i think this was also, if you recall, a conversation around bart stations. they wanted to have more police presence around the bart stations at that time and i believe this is one we got a call from many of people on the board and that was about the beat package, also. i think it was a $2.4 million increase, if i'm correct. >> it was. and at the bart, that specific overtime was the specific time but i have our chief financial officer, patrick leon and i'll slide over and let him get the mic. >> for any overtime added, if it
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was in the general fund, it would be included within the line for crime response, critical incidents and hospital watch, et cetera. and if it was included as a part of the annual project fund, then it would be -- then it would not be included within this table, but i would have to get you the numbers separately. >> what's the annual project fund? >> i'm sorry. within the general fund, it's cacategorized into three differt funds. there's an annual operating fund. there's an annual project fund and then there's a continuing project fund. for an annual project fund, it's supposed to be for projects that are allocated on an annual -- just for and annual year.
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and any amounts that are not expended would go back to the general fund. it's primarily used for one-time allocations. >> well, i would love to know if it is on that page, because if it is on that page, it seems we may have gotten less foot beats than we paid for and i'm curious about that. last year i chaired a meth task force and we looked at, you know, treatment and ways to help
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reduce harm to people who were using meth. and to the communities surrounding them, but we didn't look at ways the city could disrupt the commerce that's going on. and i think that, you know, i completely agree with the notion of taking the police out of homelessness response. if someone has a problem with someone being unhoused in their neighborhood, i don't think that should call for a criminal justice police response.
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and certain parts of town, including som a couple of placen your district. >> it's in lots of districts. >> yes, where you have particular locations, a lot of disruption is a combination of present, foot beat present, enforcement either with our narcotic's unit or patrol unit expect investigations and really, to get to the upper level of suppliers, those really call for longer-term investigations because usually those individuals aren't on the trees. so if there'streets. if there's a process to develop that type of information and know who those individuals are, those take more time. so we're doing a combination of
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all three. and in some parts of town, like downtown area with our covid response and some of what we're seeing with the safe sleeping sites when we first started to implement them in the city, there was a need to do all three of those and we redeployed the majority of our narcotic's units to the tenderloin for awhile and they focused on the street sales and made over 250 arrests in the last three months. the majority of which the district attorney's office filed charges and, you know, we have challenges with the criminal justice system as the public defender spoke up with the jails and all but the charges have been filed. the criminal justice system with the challenges, we'll go from there and see what the appropriate measures are, but that working relationship with the district attorney really
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yielded to positive outcomes in terms of that and that's just scratching the surface, to be honest with you, and identifying repeat offenders is a big part of this because even with the stay-away orders with the court and arrested three or four times in the last couple of months, they're back out there and so we try to focus on those individuals and work with the district attorney's office and our district attorney and looking to see whether we have some higher sanctions for those individuals in terms of not allowing them back on the street. but the other part -- and this is where the work really becomes complex and nuanced, the mixture with some of our most vulnerable populations, particularly with the mental and heroin use, are some of the folks that are
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unhoused and we don't want -- we want to make sure that when we're doing enforcement to keep drug dealers out of safe sleeping sites and places where people are sleeping, that we do that very thoughtfully. we're focusing on the people that are selling drugs. >> it's my impression that the dealing is most significant is a problem in the unsafe, unregulated sleeping sites that are seemingly persisting in many parts of the city and seemingly without interruption. but my other colleagues have other questions. anyway, thank you, chief. >> thank you, supervisor. >> thank you very much. i think that supervisor preston, you were in the queue. >> sorry. i was muted. thank you, chair fewer and chief
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scott, thank you for your presentation and, also, i just want to thank you for always being willing to have discussions on some of these challenging issues right now with what's going on locally and nationally. i wanted to follow up with a handful of questions. i just wanted to get at -- and i admit to being a little confused from information i've gotten from bla, information in the media, information in your presentation, around what the cuts are. you know, what we are using as the two things we're comparing to decide what the cuts are. and i think it's important, because, obviously, there's a push because of the fisca fiscal responsibility and i think it's
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important that we have clarity for the public and i would like clarity for myself. your slide shows a decrease in fy21 of $64 million and a decrease the following year of $62 million. and i'm trying to understand, there's been a claim of $120 million in reductions. is that what this is based on. is it your position -- and it's fine if others want to answer, that the claimed $120 million in reduction or am i getting that from the wrong place?
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>> i think miss croffenberger wants to chime in. >> i'm the acting director and i'm happy to pull up the slide to illustrate how we're getting to our 60 million in each year. the important thing to know and all understand is that we do two manufacture year budgeting in the city and the second last of last year's budget becomes or starting point for this year's budget deliberations and reflects policies and choices and expenditures adopted by the mayor and the board and that becomes our starting point. so when we're doing budget, we're starting from that point of 2021. and i realize that's kind of confusing because, you know, we think you look year over year to see trends and budgeting, we're starting from the second year is
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making decisions from that starting point. and so that is to clarify that point. >> just before you goo int go i, when i hear other departments, they are not doing what you describe. in other words, they take what they spent last year, right, and they compare it to what is in the mayor's proposed budget for what's coming up and they describe the cuts or the increase based on that. when it comes to law enforcement, and i'm looking forward to your slighted, bu yoi believe it's done differently. >> so for all departments, when we do our budgets in the mayor's office, it's all that same starting point. so for purposes of the presentations they've been asked to give to you, we're arguing that comparison from 1920. when we're talking about savings that we'll generate, either starting from that starting point which is the second year
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of last year's budget. >> right, and just so we're all clear, so that means if the previously approved budget called for, say -- theoretically, a ten% increase in the budget, and you eliminated that proposed increase, then even if the actual budget, from last year, then the exact same as what comes up for the next year, you would say there's a ten% reduction in the police budget? >> from the previously adopted budget. it's important to be clear what the starting point is, right. >> i think it's very important and maybe you can show the slide. >> happy to. >> and it's been highly confusing and i can tell you from members of the public, this is the number one question over and over, where are these cuts where it shows the budget is being reduced? >> sure. i'll show you an overall slide and it might be helpful to show
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you more detail. so let me pull this up. ok, is everybody able to see this slide? is that better? i'm hearing no ob investigation. objection. this is how we get to our 60 million each year. we have the four main law enforcement department, district attorney, police and sheriffs and the first column in the 1920 budget. let me step back. we are looking at net general fund support for these departments and that's really important because when we talk about our deficit, our $1.5 billion shortfall, we're talking about the shortfall in
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the general fun budget so we need to find one.$5 billion over two years to make up the gap that we've identified in our general fund budget. and so, what these numbers reflect, these are all the general fund expenditures in these four departments, minus any general fund revenues these departments collect. in the police department's case, their expenditures are higher than this number but they collect revenue that offsets the general fund support that the city needs to contribute to cover the cost of this department. does that make sense? >> yes. >> so that's what i'm looking at, because as a budget director, closing the deficit, i need to figure out how much general fund supports do these departments need. the first column in the '19-'20 support and this is included in the previously adopted '21 budget and then the third column
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is what is included in the generate fun support, the net general support and mayor's proposed budget. the difference between those two numbers add up to this column, which is $60 million a year and a little bit more than 60. we had a shortfall and we had to use some of the savings to use the shortfall, but 60 million are reinvested in the way the mayor has described. >> ok. and just looking at the police line item there, and so you're choosing to -- or you are characterizing the decrease there as $38 million as opposed to -- and i'll tell you how i look at it and most people look at it is the 530 last year's budget minus the proposed budget, which is 15. i'm just curious, not one of the
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slides -- and let's from a policy perspective, no one in the public cares what was proposed for next year. if someone is calling for defunding the police or for taking police out of homelessness enforcement or whatever, they're not looking at what was budgeted for next year that we're not spending, right? they're not looking at that. the public is looking at that there were x dollars spent last year and how many dollars are spent next year, right? is it possible for future presentations and to provide to our office a column that shows the reduction in the fy '20 to fy '21 and the following year, not at the 20/22 budget, what was in there prerecession, whatever, not some theoretical thing of what was butched for fy2022 but an actual comparison of last year with what is
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projected for fy '22. because if we're going to talk about whether and how much we're reducing police budgets, those are the relevant numbers, to me. and i don't see those in any of these presentations. yeah, is that possible to distribute that? >> certainly, and i hear your point and i think it's valid and i understand that the concept is to your budgeting and comparing to previously adopted amount is not the way the public might look at this, i completely acknowledge this. but i am explaining from my perspective as a budget director who is charged with closing the shortfall in the upcoming two-year budget, that's what i look at and that's the perspective that we come at closing that shortfall, so it's similar but different in that way and i want to acknowledge that, as well. >> yes, and thank you for that.
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>> supervisor, it seems like the number you're looking for is in this booklet, i think. >> no, it's not, president yee. what is in that booklet and presented is the comparison of what is seen projected with the -- it the same thing presented today. with the previous lay proved fy '21 along with the statements that there are these reductions in the police budget. and i think an important point when we -- i just want to clarify that there's another number that's very relevant and it's buried in the budget book but not in any of the presentations. and please correct me if i'm wrong. the actual decrease, from last fiscal year to what is proposed
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is $18 million reduction in the police budget less than three% of the budget. do i have that right? >> no. i just saw the numbers for the first time that ashley put up. when i look at the numbers, it was the difference between the original thing and it's about 15 million and that's what i'm seeing in the budget book. i mean, i don't know what the presentation is, but that's what it says in the mayor's budget book. so i'm indicating that you can probability geprobably get it ft booklet. that's all. i'm not arguing. >> president yee, i appreciate the -- what's in those numbers and then there's what's in the presentation and the description of those numbers and there's a real difference and i think that's what i'm taking issue with. so i think the characterization of some of the cuts, like -- i
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just want to be clear that you referenced the 15 million. that'sle actual reduction from the fy '20 to what is proposed for fy '21 is approximately $18 million less than three% decrease in the police department. is that correct? >> if you're comparing to that starting point, that's what that math is, but we start from 2021 because we end up with those budgets. >> i think i understand. so, again, though, using the starting point i'm asking about, which is the fy '20 budget, right, and comparing that to t the2022 budget, what's of the difference? i see an $1 millio $18 million e first years and not compared to
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arcfuture budgets but when you compare last year's budget, you drop 18 million, less than three% in the first year and then you add, you don't reduce the following year, you add $1.58 million to the police department budget the following year and i just want to, like -- i think we all know that there are different ways to characterize this. is what i just said accurate? >> that math is accurate. >> great. >> i have to admit, i'm not the budget committee expert. i ran an organization for a long time. if my board of directors told me, when i was nonprofit, if we had a million-dollar budget and the board said i want to reduce the budget by ten%, i wouldn't be saying, oh, well, previously last year you approved future budget to go up 100,000, we can
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what i see being proposed does not propose any changes, and i want to ask you about just a few before i wrap up because i don't -- and it's hard to tell from the budget book and from the materials what programatically what's being cut. like, let's talk about hsoc and police operations matter. the question is should police be involved in that or not? my understanding is it's in the neighborhood of $9 million. is that -- is that -- in this proposal, is that reduced, is it cut, or is it left the same, like, as a police involvement in that program? >> that issue goes to what i said earlier in the presentation. we are in the process of
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working with all the entities that we need to work with. chief nicholson spoke about e.m.s. 6 and responding to some of the calls, hsoc calls that we get, trying to transition some of those response to from a p.d. response to a fire response. those have to be funded. the groundwork for those have to be laid. we're part of that conversation, and we're supportive of that. the caution is to cut the budget and pull the plug on those types of things before you're ready on the other end leaves us a void because we still are responsible for those programs before we change those programatic depends to some other entity. the question is how does that work get done? so i think we're probably
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saying the same thing, but it takes planning and transition. you know, we're really two months into this -- this push for reallocating these funds, and we have to think through these things of how we're going to make it work. >> supervisor preston: yeah. i'm just trying to, in the budget process, get clarity, if this is something on the table for discussion, there's something happening at the community level. there's no way for us or for the public, right, and for the people who are concerned around police funding and who contact us, none of the materials that i have tell me -- and i'm thinking you just answered it, or maybe you can just clarify -- it would be helpful if, in the interests of time, we could just go through a few
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items if they're funded this year and into the next? >> chair fewer: supervisor, if i may, i think this is -- i think when we reimagine police services and what are some of the things that we want the police to respond to, we need to look at what, as board of supervisors, we need to grow funds for the police that is more efficient and more effective than calling police out to hsoc. when you speak to hsoc, they will tell you that 33 police officers are there, and that a community paramedic might be the best choice. but then, we have to grow.
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i think what chief nicholson said today is to grow the community paramedic program. and so the question is -- and i don't want to dissuade you from asking the question, but i think it is part of a revisioning of police. i think we all agree, i think the chief agrees, and i think the police officers that we speak to on the street feel they shouldn't be responding to these calls. so what are the things that we fund during this budget season that gets us to this point for year two? and i just think that -- so when i look at the police budget, i am looking at public safety as a much larger umbrella than just law enforcement. public safety is investing in
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c.b.o.s and other things, and actually, law enforcement is . just one piece of public safety, but public safety has sort of overreached where we want public policing to be in the realm of public safety. so i think we need to ask ourselves, can we substitute out for something more efficient that better serves our public and then depolice these things. and then, we should decide what are those things that we want police to respond to? police respond to crimes. police do not prevent crimes. so what is that we would like -- and this is where we would shape the budget.
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we would say we want more supports and training to get more community paramedics to come out and get the job done. when i've had conversations with chief scott and when i've had conversations with chief nicholson and when i've had conversations with hsoc, i think they agree that these people can be better served by a nonpolice entity. our job in the budget committee is to get to those dollars, and the chief knows -- this is not his first rodeo. we get to these dollars so that we can actually repurpose some of them or push it back in the direction of where we want to go. so i don't mean to speak for
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the chief, and i don't mean to actually re -- restrict your question, but i think this is a larger issue about, as a board, that we reshape what we think of what public safety should be. and it's just that we have disproportionately funded the law enforcement arm of it, of public safety. when you look at c.b.o.s and other things, we have deeply underfunded them. i just wanted to say that if you would like for the mayor's budget director, actually, to produce a metachart that actually is -- thinks that it explains more or displays more of what you're saying, then we can request her to do that. i won't interject again, but i will say that i am looking
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actually at how can we sell those -- the people -- the 100 and something that retire with police officers that we already have because they're no longer doing this or perhaps they're no longer out at our airports. that's another discussion, quite frankly, and then, i don't want to interrupt you. i just want to do a time check. it is 7:00, and we have speakers in the queue and we still have public comment. the police chief will be with us next week where we can dig in deep. supervisor preston, if you would like an analysis of something else, then please request it at this time so it can be prepared for the meeting for next week. thank you, and please continue.
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thank you. >> supervisor preston: thank you, chair fewer, and i appreciate the -- the comments. i -- but i think that -- i think there are kind of kinds of cuts here potentially. i think, chair fewer, you've identified some cuts that you believe may be appropriate or things that need to be looked at, including academy and so forth. i think the problem is that i look at a much broader lift, and i think a good starting point, i think the advocates have done a really good job on the defundsfpd website. around these aspects of policing, i don't know what's been cut and what's not been cut, and that's what i intend to ask about today. and here's what's so essential in my opinion: there are areas,
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as you say, chair fewer, that are very important that if we decide something is not something that a sworn officer, an armed officer needs to address, and in fact, it is better done by another department, that is a big decision, and we can discussion that. but there are others, including healthy streets operations center. i think police involvement in hsoc in itself is a problem. it is a team. it does not need police, i think, and we need to be discussing simply whether not having police involvement in hsoc and saving $9 million a year is something we should be discussing now whether there's a replacement or not. i think when we look at police in schools at over $3
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million -- i don't know -- the schools have said they don't want that. i don't know, from looking at the materials, if the full $3.4 million has been eliminated from that. i don't know, in terms of what supervisor walton was asking earlier, of eliminating policing at public housing to the cost of $8.6 million. so we can go line by line, but i want to challenge the premise that we always have to have the replacement lined up. there are communities in this city that believe and experience policing as a negative thing, that elimination in itself in some of those is a positive, whether we base it in some cases or
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there's even a replacement necessary. so maybe, chair fewer, a way to shortcut this is -- i realize this is an outside-city-hall website. there are millions of dollars worth of items on the defundsf defundsfpd.org website. there's things like an alcohol liaison unit for over $1 million, that we have to ask whether we should be defunding them in this cycle, whether we should be defunding them next year. are we worse off without those staffing positions by police? so perhaps those can be divided, and we don't have to go through them item by item.
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advocates have made a list of things that they believe can be struck from the police budget, and we owe them a response. in the budget, if there's a defense for that expenditure -- chair fewer, i'm happy to not go into each item. i realize the time is late, and i don't know, chief scott, if it is possible to address those different things. there may be a defense of those expenditures or a reason they can't be cut, but they're laid out quite clearly, and many of them are areas where i think cuts would be appropriate. >> chair fewer: i'll just say that i -- i think that it totally makes sense that we're asking these kinds of questions. these are actually city policy, too. i just don't think that during this time of the budget process, that we will answer all these questions.
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i think that it is -- you know, i agree that there are places that we all agree where there shouldn't be policing in there, absolutely. i guess this is where we differ. you think that we shouldn't have a substitute to be there to do some of the same duties. i don't have that assessment yet. when i speak to hsoc, they're telling me something different. they're telling me well, we're going to get rid of them, and they would like to have community paramedics. so this is what i'm hearing on the ground. so i understand that there are things that we would rightfully like to not handle, and i think is the police would -- i think the police would agree that they don't want to handle it either. but i would caution us that these are some policy things
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that actually, as a legislative branch that we could maybe do legislatively even. but i will say, in the budget process, i am looking at deeper investments into other public safety strategies that we could be using so that we would cut police dependence on these things. that is why i think the community is saying these things. or are we doing things the same? are we setting up supports or are we setting it up the same? if we don't set it up now, we will have exactly what we have. i think it's just a difference of opinion. i think at hsoc, you might think there doesn't need to be community paramedics.
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i think this is something we should invest in. i think that we can invest in those things, and we can train them by next year, and we can look at midyear cuts, and we can look at those kinds of things. supervisor preston, i am happy to have you ask questions. but i will say to my colleagues that we have kept our wonderful city attorney for several hours, and then -- supervisor ronen, i see you, too. you're after supervisor preston, and then supervisor walton. we could keep going on this, but we have public comment, and there's people that have been waiting since 10:00. we can keep this conversation
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going. it is 7:20 now, and maybe we have this conversation going until 8:00, and we give time for other folks to speak, too. and then, let's continue this conversation at the next budget meeting, when the chief will be back. supervisor preston, i will say that, now, can i say that you might wrap up your comments in the next few minutes? it is 7:20 now. >> supervisor preston: thank you, chair fewer, and i don't think it will even take ten minutes. the discussions -- i don't know that we agree or disagree on some of these things. i think the discussions that i hope we are having or will have around the priority of cuts of certain police functions, replacing them with something else, the fundamental thing that i'm focused on and trying to concentration on in the
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budget process, the starting point for that conversation is to know what is or is not fully funded in the budget. and i guess that's where i was not tending to have a conversation and engage the chief about these items and engaging the chief into whether this is appropriate for defunding or not. i was simply asking for a list -- and if the chief would like to provide that outside of hearing time, that's fine. i -- on healthy streets operations center, is the police budget for that going up, down, or staying the same? on police budget fore schools, is going up, down, or staying the same? i can do it now, and it would
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take a few minutes. but i understand, in the interests of time, if the chief would be able to, you know, work with the mayor's office to provide with. that's what my constituents want to know. that's what, like, matters out there for people who are trying to have less than a police presence. i'm not trying to use the budget hearing to have the longer conversation that i'm sure, chair fewer, that we will be having in the days, weeks, and months to come. so i can go through item by item, and see if they're being cut or if i can send you the list. again, it's the same list that's up on the defundsfpd website, and then, we can later debate or discuss which things should be cut. is that -- chief scott, is that
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something that you can provide to us? >> yeah. supervisor preston, i've seen the website. we can provide answer by answer to that list, and along with any discussion that any on that -- does it increase, decrease, or stay the same in year two? that's what i've been unable to ascertain in the budget documents, and i think that would help us as a board as we discuss the policy implications of potential cuts. >> yeah, sure. >> supervisor preston: thank you for the time, chair fewer. >> chair fewer: thank you for joining us, supervisor preston. supervisor ronen? >> supervisor ronen: yeah. i do want to associate myself with a lot of the discussion and questions of supervisor
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preston. i appreciate your analysis and what you had to say and was planning to ask many of the same questions. and my understanding, chief, is that -- and this was going to be my main question. i think we are ready today to get police out of hsoc for the most part and out of the h.o.t. team for the most part. if there's some qualifications to that statement, then we can debate those, but i've been saying that for years, as you know, if there's criminal activity happening by unhoused people, then it's appropriate for the police to be there. but being homeless in and of itself is not a crime, and why we are spending so much money on police officers doing public health work for years, and
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every year more than the year before has always been beyond me. and it certainly hasn't made the situation any better on the street, we can attest. situations are worse on the streets than they've ever been before. so i don't know why we wouldn't say, from this point forward, as we build up the crisis response teams with paramedics under mental health s.f., that we are building a better alternative. but what's happening right now isn't working, either. and i've talked to officers that are doing this work. it's not police work. it is work of social workers, of mental health professionals, of doctors, of pure counselors. it is not the work of police officers. but if we said, let's say these 33 officers that have been
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assigned to hsoc, we no longer need them performing those duties, my guess is you would just assign them somewhere else. and that's where i am so hungry to get the exact same answers that supervisor preston is looking for. like, what does it mean if we cut, you know, in these specifically areas where we think we -- that there shouldn't be police doing this work? it doesn't necessarily mean a reduction of the department, right? i mean, can you just talk to us about that and explain it because it's very confusing? >> sure, and thank you for the question. i think i'll start with your most recent question. it doesn't necessarily mean, nor should it mean a reduction
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of the department. here's fundamentally how hsoc was developed. it was really to create an efficiency in how we were responding to the thousands of calls that we were getting to address some of those issues that you mentioned. you don't -- i'm not disagreeing that some of these calls could be better handled by other entities, but even now, those entities don't respond to those calls 24 hours a day seven days a week because those entities don't exist 24 hours a day seven days a week. so when we created hsoc, it was really meant to be more efficient because so many of our calls that were going to patrol districts, like, 25% of our patrol-related calls were related to some associations with street conditions, homelessness, those type of things, and some of them were
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criminal activity. some of them were not: welfare checks, wellness checks, those kinds of things. we wanted to take some of that away from district stations because number one, the district stations were having to answer to higher priority calls, and it just pushes those types of calls lower into the queue. the time handling them was not effective, so efficiency was one of the factors there. the other factor was to work in partnership with those other agencies that have been mentioned in this discussion, to work for collaboratively with those agencies. public health, public works, d.e.m. so that was the idea. so i say that to get to this point. we know that we are 265
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officers short department wise. we're 207 officers short in operations. if we did away with hsoc, where these noncriminal calls could be handled by other entities, the need for these officers would still be needed that we're having some issues with in terms of response times, in terms of responding and deployment in those district stations. as that conversation evolves, and as more things are worked out in terms of the type of calls for service that we either get transition away from the police department, then, that conversation needs to evolve, as well, because we have to makeup the deficit. and so taking the officers out of the schools, doesn't
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necessarily equate to a budget cut, it equates to reallocating officers to makeup a deficit that's already there. that's how we would do it if we were to do it at this moment because the calls are there, the workload is there. we want to be efficient and make sure that if we do get some deployments by these reimagining of policing, that we can shorten those deficits. in an ideal situation, we would not have to hire those officers, maybe. so i hope that answers your question. this is an evolving -- evolving topic. >> supervisor ronen: right. and truth, it is a dilemma that we have on the budget committee, and especially talking to supervisor preston, with his great line of questioning, if it -- i mean, we're between a rock and a hard place, because if we say, okay, we're no longer going to have
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police involved in hsoc, and we're going to remove those 33 officers from hsoc, the chief just said he's going to redeploy them to district stations. so this is wherein lies the dilemma of cutting the police budget, and what we're really talking about and the conversation that -- that we need to be having here, right? it's the chief that makes the decision about where to deploy officers. so we can't -- it changes how we do this analysis and how we have this discussion. i know in other -- you know, in other police departments, like in oakland, i think they just cut x amount of the budget, and was like here's the rest of the budget that you have left and do with it what you will, and that's not the way that the mayor's office has gone about addressing the sfpd budget this
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year. >> well, you know, i would just respond by saying the way i look at this, and i think others, this budget reallocation, i don't think it meant to be a punishment. i believe it's meant to reallocate, and the mayor's initiative to reallocate to the african american community, who needs it. i believe it's meant to force efficiencies and the things we all want to have a healthy and stable police department. i think some see it another way. i think from people that i've talked to and heard from, some see it as a punishment. we're not in a situation where we're taking the five-year-old's allowance because they misbehaved. i don't see it that way, and i don't think the board sees it that way, but sometimes we get
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into a lane of punishment. you asked me a question as chief of police, what i would do if hsoc were to go away right now, my answer would be to redeploy those officers where they're needed. i'm sorry. i just want to make sure that's said because i've listened to a lot of people, i've heard from a lot of people. i've been on that site, and, you know, to specifically say cut the police budget in half by 50%, you know, just because, i don't know where that's going to get us, and i don't know where that's really -- i can tell you it's not what i want, but i don't know that's really what we're trying to do here. i think we're trying to have a healthy, stable police department, listen to the public concerns, and those areas where we don't need to be, let's get us where we need to be.
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i'm in agreement with that, but not at the expense of undermining other things that call for police officers to do their job. our investigation bureau is under deployed with what we looks from this story -- or consultant analysis. those things need to be shored up. those things, they do relate specifically to the level of service that we deliver to the city and county and the people who live, work, and play here. so i just want to be clear on that. it's not -- i'm not being recalcitrant or we don't need to be in the situations of responding to where we're not needed or where we can do better. >> supervisor ronen: i'm sorry. i'm going to make my last
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comment and move onto the next person, supervisor fewer. when i am thinking about your budget, and when i am considering about the unprecedent unprecedented demands of the community rising up not just in san francisco but across the nation, asking for tangible material change in the way that this country does policing, i don't think it's coming from a place of wanting to punish anyone, it is coming from a place of saying the status quo isn't working. there are many communities that are not safe and do not feel safe in this society not because there aren't enough police but because they're overpoliced. and we have put -- meaning the government, both local, state,
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and federal -- putting more onus on police officers as we trump education budgets, housing budgets, job workforce development budgets, and we have gotten to a place where we are completely lop sidsided an need to rebalance on the prevention point. supervisor fewer, i have a right to make my point without rolling your eyes -- >> chair fewer: this is exactly what i just said, too. yes, we've overfunded the police department, and we have underfunded everything else that is public safety, absolutely. that's -- i'm sorry. superviso supervisor, i'm looking at the clock --
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>> supervisor ronen: okay. i've been in hearings for 13 hours, too. i would just asking to stop rolling your eyes at me when i have my right to say what i believe because i'm a member of this committee and a duly elected supervisor of this city. and so i will end my comments by saying that i just want you to know, chief scott, that i am not engaged in this process evof looking at a place of punishment at all. and that concerns me, and i want you and the officers that work with you every day to know that that is not the place that i am coming from. i am coming from a place of wanting to reimagine and redesign a system that both takes care of the public safety as a whole in a much more
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effective and humane way, and that's what i'm looking at. for me, it's very confusing to go about this process when -- when, a, exactly what supervisor preston said, we don't even know what's been cut and how it impacts programming. and then, also knowing that if we -- if we make a strong statement in the budget committee or through legislation, saying we no longer want police involved in hsoc, then that doesn't at all meet the community demands of reducing the demands of the department. so we're in kind of a catch 22 here, and i just wanted to explain that like it or not, we all need to be engaged in this conversation and figure it out somewhat together before engaging in a longer and more detailed process of reenvisioning and restructuring
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that other entities can take over your duties, some of which have been wrongly placed on you, and i will wrap up my comments on my end. >> thank you, supervisor. i was talking about websites that call to defund the police, and some of those websites do have a tone of punishment. so that's the point of my comment, not directed at you, so i apologize if you felt that i directed it to you, but i wasn't. >> supervisor ronen: sorry. i'll apologize for that. >> chair fewer: president yee, are you in the queue? did you want to speak? >> president yee: no, i think supervisor walton has been waiting, and i'll talk later. >> chair fewer: supervisor walton? >> supervisor walton: thank you so much, chair fewer. i am going to defer my
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questions to our next conversation with the chief. >> chair fewer: i appreciate that very much. president yee? >> president yee: i want to say to my colleagues, this is -- these are discussions we need to have throughout the year, and i think one of the things that we need to do is to have a more thorough discussion on any of these particular activities that we feel others could do better or maybe replaced by others, and i think shall at least i've tried over the years, to point out the civilianization piece of it, and then to actually reduce the number of police officers that we need eventually because they're actually deployed to do police work. we've talked about -- i brought
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it up one time -- more than one time, do we really need to be security at the airport, and that needs to have a more thorough discussion, and i think others on the board have mentioned it, but nobody's really spear headed a serious discussion around these things. and so it goes on and on. there's all these programs that, yeah, maybe we shouldn't have that. at some point, you know, maybe when it's only 30 officers, you can redeploy them somewhere else where you need them, and then at some point, when policy is driving enough of the officers, the number of officers in terms of what you need, there's actually going to be a surplus.
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but i think without having a thorough discussion in each one of these, it feels uncomfortable, just, like, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. i'll leave it at that. >> chair fewer: then i will just say, chief, that, you know, we have been looking at your budget for the last three years, quite frankly, and i think this is the time that we need to really look at the overtime budget. but i also wanted to say the performance audit of the san francisco police department that was really prepared but our b.l.a. in 2018. i have asked everybody on the committee to review that. i think that was really telling around overtime, and particularly in response to overtime that your department did to some responses around arrests and investigations after hours and how we can cut the overtime budget. i think, actually, this november, supervisor yee has sponsored and authored a ballot
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measure that would actually give us an opportunity to reexamine staffing levels. and i hear the call to defund these police officers. i have witnessed many, many face gestures at me, so having said that, thank you very much chief. i'm going to call our next speaker, the district attorney, chesa boudin. >> thank you. >> chair fewer: thank you very much. district attorney, are you on the line to jo
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>> supervisor, it's christine dubarry. he's been monitoring, and he'll get right on the line with me. >> chair fewer: yeah. i think we can all agree, it's a very hard topic, and so is racism and sexism. >> president yee: chair fewer, is this the last department? >> chair fewer: yes, it is. >> hello. i think i'm here now.
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>> chair fewer: district attorney, you have the floor. >> hello, supervisor. i was watching the hearing. sorry to take a moment to join in. i didn't want to decrease everyone's -- >> chair fewer: you have the floor. >> i'm having a hard time hearing you now. >> chair fewer: thank ycan youe now? >> not sure if you can hear me, but i don't have any audio. >> chair fewer: madam clerk, can you please assist the district attorney? >> president yee: i can hear you. >> chair fewer: we can hear you. >> it seems like you can hear me. i see you, supervisor mandelman, president yee. it's going to be very hard for me to answer questions if i can't hear them, however, and i was just listening to your
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hearing for the last several hours and was able to hear fine, but i do not have tech support at 7:45, i'm afraid. >> christine, i can try to -- >> i'm going to try to exit out of teams and reconnect, if you'll give me a moment. >> chair fewer: supervisor walton? >> supervisor walton: i'm here, chair fewer. >> chair fewer: would you mind chairing the meeting for the next few minutes? >> supervisor walton: i got you. >> clerk: vice chair walton, if i can suggest maybe holding
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a ten-minute recess so we can hopefully get the district attorney back. >> operator: he's here. >> now i'm here. i just want to thank you for the opportunity to present, and to go last, but not least. >> supervisor walton: thank you very much. you have the floor, d.a. boudin. >> thank you very much. i'll share my screen, if you'll give me a moment. well, again, thank you all for giving me the opportunity to present today. it's an honor to serve the people of the city and county of san francisco. it's an honor and a privilege to be here to share some of our accomplishments and some of our goals for the year ahead. as you all know, i've been in office barely eight months. it's been a very busy and a
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very productive period in the midst of truly unprecedented change, and i come before you to share some of our accomplishments, some of our vision, some of our goals, and also to ask for your support in fulfilling the promises that i've made to the people of san francisco that i know we all share when it comes to making san francisco a safer place, a more equitable place, and a place where our criminal justice policies and practices are not only effective and smart and humane and efficient, but also can serve as a model for the rest of the state and the country. i believe that we're well on our way. i think that the staff and the team that i'm privileged to lead have done a phenomenal job of navigating circumstances of having three different department heads in just a few
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months at the end of last year, and also now adjusting to the covid pandemic and many other changes with regard to our office space and real estate, which we'll talk about. we cannot continue to provide our critical services to the city. we cannot continue to fulfill our mission if we do not have adequate resources, and so i'm going to talk about what we've done and what it costs to keep doing what we aspire to. as you all know, our core mission is to promote public safety in partnership with many other agencies. obviously, one of our closest partners is the san francisco police department. we also work every single day with the san francisco public defender and the san francisco sheriff and the san francisco courts and many other agencies that are critical stakeholders in building and maintaining safe communities for all san
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franciscans. i want to take you through, very briefly, our overview of our expenditures. as you can see, the vast majority of our expenditures are locked into salaries and fringe benefits. the services of other departments that you see accounting for the third largest portion of our budget is primarily real estate expenses, and that's, again, not flexible because the city has negotiated long-term leases that account for most of that 14%. and so what you're seeing is really a budget that has extremely limited flexibility. even if you look to our program attprogram -- programatic programs, which is our fourth or fifth largest
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expenditure, that is our police accountability and personnel costs. so we have very little ability to save money without decreasing the size of our staff which impacts our ability to provide services to the city and county of san francisco and the state courts and all of the stakeholders that we work with every day. if you look at the budget changes that are in place and have been proposed, what you'll see is the budget from last year to this year is almost exactly flat. we've managed to keep the increase to .15%, or about $100,000, notwithstanding a significant mandatory increase in personnel costs, fringe benefit costs, and real estate costs. we've done that through a tremendous amount of hard work
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by the team, creativity, trimming anywhere and everything we can, decreasing subscriptions to periodicals and to paper copies of law books, decreasing things like our shuttle between our office and the hall of justice, and being extremely creative about ways that we can save money around personnel costs without having to lay staff off. but it comes at a cost, and it comes at a cost to the staff i leave, when it comes to our ability to carefully review evidence and present it to the court with the candor and rigor that the court expects. it comes with decreasing caseloads of support staff to meaningfully and fully support our attorneys in the courtroom,
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and you'll see that in a moment. but notwithstanding the increases in what account for roughly 90% of our budget, we've still managed to keep our budget flat. and here, you can see where the savings are coming from. they're coming from decreased in staffing. we are looking at basically going back to our 2015 staffing levels. in some ways, you know, it's consistent with the vision that i presented over the course of last year as i was seeking this office. i did not intend to seek to grow significantly the number of lawyers in my office, but i certainly didn't expect that i would have to decrease my staff by 3% within my first year in office. and the impact of that is quite significant. we have a number of really substantial responsibilities
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that we have to engage in and we have to do carefully and quickly because it's mandated by law, constitutional rights of crime victims as well as rights of people who are jailed, who are facing criminal charges, are implicated. and if we don't have the staffing, if we don't have the support and the lawyers necessary, then constitutional rights get violated, and that's something that i am doing everything in my power, and my staff are doing everything in their power to avoid. we don't want it to happen on our watch. it doesn't reflect well on san francisco, on the district attorney's office, on the courts, but without adequate staffing, that's exactly what will happen. now a 3% decrease on our staff is already putting a significant strain on the current staff, and we'll talk more about that in a moment. but we're basically looking at
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going backwards to 2015 staffing levels at this point. so as we looked at ways to work with the mayor's office to decrease our expenditures, because of the very limited flexibility we have -- as i said, roughly 90% of our budget goes to fix expenditures that we have no control over and which increase year over year because of city negotiated contracts for fringe benefits, salaries, and real estate expenses. we had to be extremely creative in order to -- in order to achieve the savings that we were able to achieve in our process with the mayor. what we look today do was minimize impact on the department's core operations in terms of meeting the obligates we have under the u.s. and california constitution to
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crime victims, to defendants accused of crime, and to all of the other agencies that we interface with. we looked at ways we could continue to promote safety of victims of crime, to prevent proactively crime from occurring in the first place, which we all know is far more effective and efficient, and to make reductions that did not impede our ability to fulfill another major promise of mine, and something that i'm proud to say we are on the cusp of achieving thanks also to the leadership of supervisor fewer, the closure of county jail number four. we all know it's been a high priority of the city for a number of years, and to do that, the county jail population had to be reduced by a significant percentage, and it had to be done in a way that did not negatively affect public safety.
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i want to take a moment to reflect on what we've done as an office and as a city, again, with thanks to the board of supervisors and supervisor fewer for your leadership on this issue. for years, the city has been working through the board of supervisors, through the sheriff's department through various working groups to find a way to safely close county jail four without building a new jail without transferring incarcerated people from san francisco to santa rita jail or any other jail outside of san francisco. for years, we tried to figure out a way to do it. i've been in office eight months. my office worked hard, and we figured out ways to decrease the jail population safely to be able to close county jail four. the board, as you are aware, passed a resolution last
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november to close the jail. the efforts of my staff to identify people who can safely be released, to develop programming, supervision, support, to allow for successful reentry of those individuals has allowed us to move quickly towards a goal the city has long shared. we cannot continue to do that work. we cannot continue to ensure the safety of san francisco as we reduce the jail population and keep those who are incarcerated safe from covid and other threats that are endemic in jails and prisons across this country if we don't have staff to review the bookings and cases on an ongoing basis. we also we wanted to be very sure that we weren't laying off staff, and i'm happy to say we should not had to layoff staff.
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we've presented the savings that we've presented to you to you and will you -- to you today and will be presenting to the mayor without laying off staff, but it will come at a cost of vacancies. so here, you can see a summary of our reductions. obviously, the main reduction is through attrition savings, and we are prepared to incur significant savings through attrition as we've discussed, and we also found other ways that are really much more marginal to save money, but i'll just go through them. as you're aware, we recently vacated the hall of justice, relocated office space at rhode island and 16. the goal is to help the city close of hall of justice, as you're well aware, and to ensure that we don't have staff working in a seismically unsafe
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