good morning. the meeting will come to order. welcome to the thursday, may 13th meeting of the public safety and neighborhood services committee. i am supervisor mar i am joined by committee members. i would like to thank sfgovtv for staffing this meeting. >> thank you. to protect the public during the covid-19 health emergency the board of supervisors committee room is closed. this is taken pursuant to local

state and federal orders and directives. committee members will participate to the same extent as if physically present. public comment is available for each item. san francisco cable channel 26 and sfgovtv are streaming the call in number on the screen at this time. the opportunity to speak and provide comments are available to you by phone by calling 415-655-0001. enter meeting id for today (187)766-9647. following that press pound twice to be connected to the meeting. when you are connected you will hear the discussions but your line will be muted in listening mode only. when your item of interest comes up on our agenda dial star 3 to be added to the speaker line. the system prompts will indicate you have raised your hand.

wait until you are unmuted to comment. best practices call from a quiet location and turndown television or streaming device. you must account for time delays that we may even counter between live coverage and streaming. you may submit comments in writing. you may e-mail me john.carroll at sfgovtv or write to our office in city hall. room 244. 1 carlton b. goodlett place, san francisco california. all of this contact information is available on the front page of our meeting agenda. mr. chair, items acted upon today will appear on the agenda of may 25th, 2021.

>> thank you, mr. clerk. please call item 1. >> hearing to consider that the transfer of a type-21 off-sale general beer, wine and licktor license to binnia pokharel doing business as 334,724th street will serve the public convenience or necessity of the city and county of san francisco. call 415-655-0001 to comment. enter (187)766-9647. press pound pound to connect to the meeting and star 3 to enter the queue to speak. >> thank you, mr. clerk. we are going to hear from the liaison unit. i believe the officer is here to present the alu report.

>> good morning. the type-21 license if approved would allow off-sale general premise. zero letters of protest. zero letters support blot 454. high crime. 209 is high saturation. mission station no opposition. alu recommends approval that petitioner shall monitor the area to prevent loitering of persons on any property adjacent to the licensed premises and as of april 30th they agreed to that condition. >> thank you, officer. i just had a question, officer. you know, again, as you stated based on your analysis. this is located in the high

crime area and also an area that already has more off sale licenses than authorized by the state. i think it is three times more. can you speak a little bit more to why the alu is recommending approval or feels that this serves the public necessity? >> we are comfortable right now. based on crime stats in the area and as well as talking to the abc licensing rep. we are comfortable with the one condition for them to be approved. without any letters of protest. we haven't received any or support letters. based on what we have our

investigation we are fine with the approval. does that answer your question? >> yes. i appreciate that mission station is supportive of this. okay. i believe we have david here representing the applicant. do you want to speak? maybe to why this license, liquor license serves public necessity or convenience? >> good morning. as noted by the san francisco planning department this application would be a continuation of a year's long public convenience at 24 bart specialty grocery matter. it had a 21 before when he

purchased it, the owner took the license with him. this is a continuation of what was there before. it has community support. we did the outreach. that is what we are all about. we just don't happen hazardly support the liquor license applications. if we feel it is detrimental to the community we will not support it. we feel comfortable. the owner is responsible. good guy. mr. pokharel. we hope you will support this application this morning. >> thank you for pointing out this is really just a continuation of a neighborhood business that has been there for a while. is this a liquor store? >> yes, for clarification, this license could not be approved by the planning department or abc

if it was a straight up liquor store. it is restricted use district. it has to be a specialty grocery store. an inspection was done by the planning department to make certain it was still a grocery store and they found that it was. we had to bring in an architect to prepare drawings for planning department. they did a site visit and we pulled the site from d.b.i. to indicate it is a specialty grocery matter. it is a grocery store with liquor. >> thank you for that. colleagues, any questions or remarks? seeing none. mr. clerk, are there any caller on the line for public comment on this item? >> thank you, mr. chair. we are working with jim smith from the department of technology for the callers.

for watching on cable channel 26 or through sfgovtv if you wish to speak on this item call in now by dialing 415-655-0001. following that enter id1877669647. press pound pound and star followed by 3 to speak. for those who have connected via phone press star 3 to speak to this item. for those on hold in the queue wait until you are prompted to begin. you will hear a prompt that informs you your line is unmuted. do we have any callers for this item? >> we have no callers in the queue. >> thank you, mr. smith. public comment is closed. colleagues i understand that

supervisor ronen supports this liquor license transfer. given that, i will make a motion directing the clerk to prepare a resolution determining that this license will serve the public convenience and necessarity and we send the resolution forward to the full board with positive recommendation. can you please call roll. >> on the motion offered by chair mar publicking the necessity will be served by the transfer and that be recommended to the board of supervisors for consideration on may 25th. vice chair stefan. >> we will move to member haney. >> sorry, yes, aye. >> very good. stefani aye.

>> haney. >> aye. >> chair mar. >> aye. >> there are three ayes. >> thank you, mr. clerk. thanks officer. mr. clerk please call item 2. >> 2. hearing to discuss the efforts by the city and county to innovate and improve city services with the focus on human centered and user centered design including but not limited to tex no lodge cal improvements to improve user experience and create pathways to city resources for residents. members of the public to comment on this hearing enter the line to provide public comment by calling 415-655-0001. today's meeting id1877669647. enter it and press pound twice

to connect to the meeting. press star followed by 3 to speak. the system prompt will inform you your line is unmuted. that begins your two minutes for comments. mr. chair. >> thanks, mr. clerk. thank you supervisor haney for calling this interesting and important hearing. i had forgotten we have an office ofsivevin innovation. i look forward to the presentation and discussion on this topic. supervisor haney. >> thank you, chair mar. thank you, vice chair stefani for scheduling this hearing today. i am looking forward to it. it is something that may be is a little different from what we talk about in committee. it has deep impacts on how our government works and how people interact with it. this is to learn from the city

departments about our efforts to innovate and improve city services with a he foe another anotherwas -- focus on what we e doing to improve service delivery. one of the three principles in the proposals innovate by focusing on impact. we know san francisco is a city of innovation, technological hub of the country. some of the best ideas have come from the city. it must be reflected in the city government services how we serve residents. our digital infrastructure connects to the government should be governed by the impact. urban 19 changed and brought to light the inequities the residents face when it comes to finding information and navigating the web of service

portal also and department. every day we are helping constituents figure out what website to register for permit or get in contact with the right person to understand what a form is asking them to fill out. that is reality how many residents experience government and how we do that better and smarter and more closely connected to the needs is critical. the function of government is to serve people in every system we set up and use should be guided by basic questions. what is the need for the system? does it do what we -- is what we are building targeting that need? what is it like using the system? is it easy to learn to use it? what are we doing to empower someone to be able to use it? does it help users accomplish the task they are using it for?

does it change in it is not working? there should be a commitment to human centered design. they should be designed to meet the need people have. residents should have clear effective and transparent ways to access data when something is inaccessible, it should be changed or eliminated. departments must have processes in place to identify what is happening. too often government with or without knowing it may design solutions for our own purposes or the purposes of politicians. human centered design helps check on ourselves, itter rating solutions to serve people effectively. as the nation expands to the social landscape we must do more as ground breaker. i do want to say that there will be a focus on technological

improvements. humanserter design is more than technology. it is something that i have spent a lot of my time in my career working on. it is how many of the companies that work in technology and in other spaces. hospitality industry will better understand the needs and make sure the solutions or products they are developing are constantly itter rated to meet those needs. we have a lot of brilliant people doing this within city government every day. i think we are a leader in the field but i do think it is important we as the elected officials are supportive and understand what is happening and expanding it and supporting it wherever possible. we will hear from the department of technology, office of civic

innovation, digital services, committee on information technology. i want to thank jamie, linda, carrie for being here today and for their hard work. they will be sharing one slide deck. we will hear presentations for passing it between each other and take questions after the entire presentation. i am going to kick it to jamie to start the presentation. thank you. >> thank you, supervisor. let me pull up the slides here. thank you for inviting us. this is a passiontroject and we are excited to work with the board of supervisors to bring in more human centered design practices to the city and the way we use technology.

i am going to kickoff things. i want to start with the question 3 that you asked us to address. i will be passing it off to linda for the department of technology and carrie to address the questions in-turn. question 3. the city has a five year information technology plan and digital equity book. we recently discussed and brought the plan forward to the board of supervisors, which was unanimously approved. to recap what the plan's purpose is. financial document to think about what are the upcoming technology lessons? the strategic plan. how do we organize city operations toward city-wide goals. we do include strategies to address the questions you

brought up around goals and human centered design. regarding your question about the digital equity playbook. that is a playbook for non-profits to be creating a curriculum to move towards the larger digital equity strategy. the city has a strategy three years ago to start aligning where we want to move forward and what problems we need to address and coordinate action between the city departments and andnonprofits. there are a lot of different players. we will show where we are going with digital equity and the things we are acting on. this plan includes update to the digital equity strategy. very short document to talk about response to covid and addressing the needs. it includes information on

digital services, innovation, network, technology procurement which are critical to this discussion moving forward. technology assessments. it starts with a large exercise and runs different exercises talking with departments to understand the challenges we are facing and where do we need to move forward. the it plan is based on the financials. we ask all of the cfos what are the things they are dealing with and the challenges? we go through the technology stack. we reach out to employees and residents for more input. the big part of this plan which is unique and new is the city-wide service inventory. the city's first time of cataloging all services and understanding digital capacity. i want to highlight a couple of

things that based the plan in the way we think about futuretechnology. a lot of them have to do with our services. 194 out of 96 -7 services were designed to be used with people with disabilities or other kinds of barriers to entree. this is a big focal point for moving forward. we have over 200 plus websites. as we look at the statistics from last year of who is going to the website, we see that 55% of our users are on a mobile device. we look at existing websites. we don't have full analysis with full website. all of those moving to sfgovtv their level is higher than our intended goal. when we asked the departments the technology issues we are

trying to deal with over the six years the it infrastructure and procurement is what they are struggling with and what we need to point to to make a difference as a city. the goals of the it plan this round is that all government services universally accessible. each goals outline ways to invest for specific goals around accessible service the, efficient operations and it infrastructure you can trust. in terms of status. we write the it plan every year. this is the fifth one i have written. each year we make progress. there is repeated themes for innovation and maximizing technology to improve services.

in 2016 the first plan i wrote we created digital services strategy which led to hiring the chief timtal services officer. that team has been off and running since. we built a digital program and worked with the board of supervisors. the working group and acquisition of surveillance to what i see is larger effort how we are using technology better in the city. where we are going next is really we need to support department in the service transformation, introducing research and testing, training and the development cycles. we hope to work with each department as they are now to submit a digital transformation road map in the next fiscal year. we need to talk about original

changes. the city needs common platforms. we need to think about transparency of shared services and look at rules and regulations. these are things we are focusing on. i am trying to go quickly. we are moving on to what is the department's goals and design and implementation of services. we will hear from digital services, our lead agency, on human centered design. office of innovative practices. partnership program to help introduce in ways of working and thinking. the it agency. these are lead voices today. there are other people that are

partners. thinking about the digital equity lens to help us with the outreach. i can't say enough how important the role is in this transformation. data is how we make this happen. it is critical. the controller have a number of roles. data academy to talk when technology. they have the second largest technology shop in the city. the city departments have a number of differently sources and experts all across the city as well. both data sf and innovation teams have innovation experts to think about moving forward. it is part of the information sharing and collaboration to move together.

we are very small team. three people. my team were focused on the policy side now as we are accommodating or working on the acquisition of surveillance technology and trying to do what we can to move forward the way we talk about technology. as we pass each it map the subsequent focus areas are on the budget. all projects over $100,000 come for review and approval. we try to introduce the innovative thinking. we have significant role in portfolio management to make sure the projects have the resources they need and we develop technology policies for those standard rules and regulations. one last slide here because you did ask how we measure impact. terry is going to talk more about it on the service level.

for the budget process, part of the process is to start thinking about what is the impact of this project? how can it message to the mayor and board of supervisors to understand these are important to improve the city. i highlighted three projects in the past of investments we made and what impact we should see from the use of these projects. i will just say a single measurement is not the right way to do this. it is a way to start conversation. i am trying to show where we are going with the investments and how to align to the future. with that i am going to move it on to let linda take over. >> good morning. i am the city cio and executive director of the department of

technology. responding to question two. technology changes rapidly. how often are we makingness updates and changes? the way i am framing this conversation around six key elements of digital infrastructure, access, tools, technology, data, resource models, skills and rights and equity. if we look at those elements, what is driving change? what drives change for city technology? it is first and foremost service delivery to residents. what are we doing to make that impact? what are we doing to target the outcomes? what is the foundation we need from a technology perspective to make this happen? we also look at improving or business processes. it is not just what is new, it

is what can be improved. a very large driver cybersecurity. all of our systems need to be safe and resilient. it is driving change in the infrastructure. cost is also a driver. we are always looking for ways to drive down the cost of technology and the maintenance of the ongoing cost of ownership. risk. risk is wrapped around not only cybersecurity but resiliency, redundancy in the system and able to recover in the event of disaster. if it is a fire, earthquake, or the pandemic, making sure our system will be operational to serve residents and business units during any sort of disaster. we are always looking at value. city has been fortunate to

implement technology for many, many years. at least 50 or 100 if you count business systems. mechanical systems. those systems are end of life. it is important that we always look at that return on investment and that value and modernize. sometimes that mean there is is an initial expenditure. we look at the ongoing cost to drive it down. you will see the city make changes to lower that cost and modernize. as we look at the results, what have the changes been? in the area of access identity management and access. multi factor authentication. 60,000 city employees, vendors doing business with the city,

contractors in the access management system securing our technology. tools and technology. some recent results are and change is the next generation network which is modernization of network technology to software defined wide air network. it improves performance, capacity and lowers our cost. that next gen network enables voice-over ip retiring end of life voice technology. it has driven hybrid datacenter. our datacenter is not only delivering technology possessing and capacity on press but with a choice of three commercial crowd providers with high-speed connections from the datacenters

to the cloud provider to give business units choice as they look how best to deliver service, optimize service delivery and keep costs low. legacy main train retirement is one of the changes recently. we are underway with that process to save $2 million a year. the radio communications system is change of technology. not only does it expand use of wireless radio technology, but it makes us inner operable with neighbors. this is incredibly important when there are shared resources during fires and natural disasters we are all able to communicate. first responders are able to communicate that is what the new radio system does. of course, our department dph and emergency

management have all been modernizes business systems. it is an exciting time to see the new systems online. even during the pandemic. that is remarkable. >> results. data sf departments are continuously creating data analyzing, models, looking at outcomes, presenting dash boards to the public. nowhere have we seen the impact as with covid which clearly communicated to our residents the status of the pandemic in our community, how it was affecting populations, and i think it is a hi, high standard that dashboard set on communication and use of data. resource models.

we continue to evolve procurement and specialty enterprising the license agreement to allow the city to buy technology, combine purchasing power to buy in large volume. we use those contracts to drive down costs and saving $3.7 million this year from the enterprise agreement. we look at shared services and enterprise systems. what are we uses for technology today? can we leverage that drive down costs? getting as much value and use out of technology is a way to maximize our resourcing mad els from a talent perspective which we talk about skills. the skills and maintenance cost for technology. in the area of skills we have

recently seen how on demand training created remote workers overnight. that ability to train people virtually and to help them be successful with technology is a very key part of our digital infrastructure. we are also pushing forward with our cybersecurity training. we have had terrific results with employees taking cybersecurity training. rights and equity. as we build out technology systems we are looking for opportunities to increase use, make it equitable. virtual meetings have definitely expanded attendance to the public meetings. we have delivered that in a way and in conjunction with the

mayor's office of disability to include disability access. how do we provide language access? we challenge vendor partners to deliver that language access and ability to use disability technologies with our meeting platforms. it is very successful. on the equity front. to close digital divide in the city and deliver internet service to our unserved areas, we have the fiber to housing initiative where we have delivered service to 7,000 units. we are working on the prioritized list for what will come this year. we are very excited about that work. the fact we were able to support over 500 students during covid that fiber to housing network

was ex spended to the community -- extended to the community hub as well as test centers and now vaccine centers. the city network is driving equity in the city and that closes the divide around technology. i believe that is my last slide. next slide. >> good morning. thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about something we are passionate about. the digital services officer with the city. feedback and how we incorporate user feedback and services in very general high level terms. i will try to keep this short. then i will welcome questions you might have.

it is fundamental to our work. the city administrator but our role is city-wide. services across a broad spectrum, housing and a lot of our work is around the covid response, vaccines and all of the information that has gone along with it. our team is responsible for the signs and posters that are around the city. wide scope for our teams. i want to make a point. supervisor haney's point that we are not about pushing technology

or digital. it is about understanding the problems residents are experiencing. how might we use technology to solve problems? we explore topics. if you are familiar with the double diamond. our designers have a lot about research and understanding and following different instincts and talking to a lot of people to narrow and define what we are doing and come up with concepts. you know, once you implement something you go back to the beginning. what can we improve, what do we need to change?

sfgov is one of the major projects. it has come to the fall during covid. there were 211 websites in the city. supervisor haney mentioned this. some departments have multiple sites. this was developed in 2016. laid out the case for a single website for the city. ultimately the residents don't know the departmental structure and they shouldn't be expected to. it is really complex to navigate. what they expect to do is with everything else go to one place and find the services they need to access.

sfgov is that. it kind of thumbs down in some way. we use simple sixth grade reading level. this is about opening up to make sfgovtv the equitable platform for government services. we work hard with our police and disabilities across the board to make sure this is comfortable for people with disabilities. we want to make sure people with low literacy can access it. we see children accessing on behalf of non-english speaking parents. everybody is busy. nobody has time to read a ph.d. paper to have access to city services. i want to highlight that sfgovtv

is to be used on a mobile phone. in the introduction around of 0% of the people use a tablet to access our site. while there is a digital divide and people with no access to the internet. during the last six months, 95% of residents have accessed the internet. we know people are using a range of devices. we are designing for the devices. a lot of things. it is simple and aimed at helping people with the most need to get the services they need. this is a term that everybody is becoming understood. people. [indiscernable]

if they are hard to load they are not costing people money. we don't want to be unaffordable luxury in our websites for people who need the services the most. these are the principles we use when we design this. it is a primary channel to find out about the government and access the services. >> four ways for feedback from the public. data analytics. we get feedback on the site. we also have it to say yes or no, was this page helpful? believe it or not we get a lot of feedback that way.

this is an example. we get about 5200 responses a month on the helpful question. we are seeing. [indiscernable] and above, yes. that is great. always room for improvement. we are pretty happy with the way those measurements are coming out. we have traffic and monitoring the region that 60% of the people access with mobile device or tablet. i love this chart showing the public traffic when major things happened. the first big is the shelter-in-place and people coming to sf.ggov for what is happening in the city. then again i think when the

vaccine. [indiscernable] vaccinations are been a core driver of traffic in the last few months as well. second way to feedback is listening to residents. they are dedicated to research. we have spanish and chinese speaking films. we need to the times we posted in the main library for the quick feedback on things. then we were more in depth with specific research. we did a research project around people looking for affordsable housing. it is something that it works

on. we also recently did in depth research with people traditionally not online. nan english speaking to determine what they access services. some important findings out of that. we see those in the language of the person who we are interviewing. this is mix and match. usability testing. is it funding like you expect it to function? that is slightly different or tied to accessibility testing. how user friends is this? can somebody use it. we had design research which is beyond the scope of digital. it is about program and policy design. we think three ways to receive

that into our program design crisis city-wide. these are exampling of that. next slide. also this is the charting the journey of somebody applies over the course of that process. how they feel about it at each stage. community-based organizations is the strongest asset as a city. we use some other community resources next door and those groups and channels. primarily community-based organizations. we do compensate the organizations for helping usurycruit.

i have a research pool if people want to give us feedback. we will reach out to them if we want it. this is what is involved in somebody signing up to be part of that. we will compensate with a $25 gift card to save way. we want to recognize that if we are asking people for feedback we are using their time. who is going to improve the city services especially for mom research. it is not enough that you get a worm fuzzy feeling. time is money. thank you to people with a small token. these are examples of what we have done at community-based

organizations. we know that we don't operate in isolation. there are other groups in the city engaging with our communities. we are working on coordinating across both departments and different organizations to make sure we are not repeating things to our communities or missing out on opportunities to make the most of it. how residents are engaging with us. then the second question how are we measuring the systems we are implementing? this is a extremely long ands. i will keep it short. we use traditional development methods in doing this. it ties together quite nicely with the design process.

as i described at the beginning. we put something out there that we think will make a difference. we weren't typically using it. it is verying the intended affect? what is happening that we didn't for see? if we are lucky we will get lucky to make improvements to that and put that back out there. really. we need to think differently about technology. it is not one and done. it is great to have capital funding. ecknology has no end. there is a lot of stuff that is end of life and we have the cri.

the fundamental core part how the city does its businesses. we need to fund it according leeway. in more ongoing ways to understand. this is not about recognizing how central technology is to the way the city does business in 21st century organization. >> we talked about the customer experience. people think about sfgovtv. it is happening and we are making sure that is a great experience. the customer experience is everything that the city is doing to create a service. that is not just the west side which is just the inter face the customer sees. they see our back end systems,

processes, structures where one set expanding multiple departments. the difficulties of coordinating. the way you design policy is informing the customer experience. more prescriptive. the harder for customers to feel we are putting their needs first. all of these things together make up the customer experience not just the front end piece. it is a mind-set shift what we they when we say customer experience. on that i will hand it over to dee. >> thank you for having us. i am the director of civic

innovation. our work, actually, we are a commission to help empower city departments by introducing new approaches, resources and technology. my role as director is to help bring in additional capacity resources and methods. we focus through partnership work. the fundamental is we are better together. experts within government and outside of it that all want to work together to make our city better for all. our role is to help chip away at that. providing small innovative introductions towards new approaches. our next slide -- sorry. my team here. the director and jane and

matthew. strategists make our work possible. what we do. we solve problems. we work on solving urgent challenges through human centered design public private partnerships. we bring in private sec korexperts. i work with different -- pro vit experts. what we run two cohorts per year. twice a year we go out discovery work with various partners to understand out of everything that you just heard, the plan that they shared, the work linda shared, digital equity. there are a lot of problems to solve. we start with square one. what is your most urgent priority today? how might we help you buy

infusing expertise? this might be a concept to let's build something and try it. that is what our work does. we work with city partners. for four months. it is an accelerated style to produce tangible outputs the city staff can implement and share. in addition to that and what folks are less familiar with. we are enablers. we offer training and support and resources. a partner in that process. if you want to look at technology, you don't have resources we can bring that to you. we do that for several city departments. we help showcase events to share best practices. everyone is an expert. we help connect the dots.

how might we learn from what other departments are doing on a shared point? we run the innovation network of the various teams embedded within city departments. ffo, hsa, they all have smaller sub teams focusing on innovation and human center design. we connect them to share best practices, what is working, how to do better. we are motivators. we built two national models. we are is only city with this program. we help build trust. we offer something that is nationally recognized. it is a model for them to participate. we are integrators to sustain the broader system. the service inventory we were a partner to execute that. when we run the civic bridge projects they are focused on

services. we partner with digital services. sometimes departments run their own website. we might start introducing best practices that we shared in bite sized ways to start to move in the collective direction that the city wants to. for technology piloting we work with dp and their leadership. we help to integrate the teams and ideas. all of these differently sources across the city as central note. to give a little data since our launch of the civic bridge. we have worked with 29 city departments, brought on 26 different partners, executed over 55 pro bono projects. 40,000 hours and volunteers. $5.5 million in pro bono contributions that we are

bringing to the city to hit the goals. on the policy we are helping departments implement those by bringing in additional resources and capacity. i will dive into how we do what we do. this slide may look familiar to many of you who have been around the designs. there are two things. challenge that has an idea, need, priority. they want to get to a solution. we do two primary things. help solve the right thing. understand and validate the problem and help them solve things to do the feedback and iteration, prototyping, concepting. we are building that muscle in all of the department partners we work with. innovation isn't held by us. we are not the owners of innovation. we bring that down to all of the departments to give them access

to private sector access building incredible product using this type of thinking in everything we do on our phones, working with the partners how do we have that rapid feedback in what we are doing? i saved some of this for the appendix. two more points very quickly. the two diamonds here in the middle are very familiar. [please stand by]

. >> we helped design a service pilot for the d.p.h. medicine. these are all short specific needs that these departments need to make external services available to residents. our most recent project is developing services for transgender and nonbinary

community, and another example, the next slide, is affordable housing. these are some of the processes that i just shared, but we've also taken board policy and implement it. so when right to counsel was passed, we helped them develop that, and then, we continued working to build a communication campaign to make that service acceptable and available for residents. so i will -- there's more here in the appendix for additional examples, but i wanted to bring that to the types of projects that we work on and how to connect internal partners with external experts and interdepartmental needs. and with that, i think i will turn it over to steve

[inaudible] thank you. >> chair haney: great. were you all done there? >> yes. that concludes o design, innov

human-centered design, usually, we go immediately to think about websites and technology and apps and those types of things, which i think obviously are a huge area where we use these types of processes and tools. are there areas where we are using these strategies and approaches in a more offline kind of situation, and how -- who would be responsible for that, and how did that play itself out?

what about somebody who's on the streets experiencing homelessness who doesn't have a cellphone or computer, what has been your experience that they're going to know how to get to shelter or housing? what if you're somebody who's getting on a bus, and the experience of getting on a bus? what sort of capacity do we have as a city to help our services better reach people and help them navigate around

our experience of being in our city offline? >> well, i can start, but i'd love to get your input. just very briefly, our civic bridge work is inclusive. we start with the problem first: like, what are we trying to address, and we have worked on offline solutions. our department is open to any solution that a department is trying to tackle. for example, we tried to work with treasure island and brought in gensler [inaudible], like, how might we make that more inclusive, so we're starting to build out more options in that realm. we're also working on a pilot project on some of the in-person translation projects for mohcd residents and how we

might improve the in-person community engagement and is traditional english language the best way to deliver services to residents of multiple languages? what i'm trying to share is there are a lot of opportunities for that. we actually did a project with oewd on designing prototypes for designing physical storefronts for owners, so there is a lot of room to bring in physical design for city's needs and solutions and pair it to where it make sense for on-line, as well; like there's opportunity to do both.

[inaudible] >> in addition to individual services, we have a dedicated services design team. it's pretty small [inaudible] and there is really a demand for this work citywide, but actually some of the things that you mentioned in your question are things that we have worked on in the past year or two. in speaking of the design center and the services design team [inaudible] designed around the needs of people who are going to be coming in. [inaudible] so actually, what's great is that we have the opportunity to do a pilot of how some of these in-person experiences might work while [inaudible] is still at 1616. and eventually, because of that work that we now have a

customer facing customer service team that are kind of the welcoming friendly faces of the permit, and they welcome people in and help them get to the right place, spending time talking to customers [inaudible] so that it's honestly a little bit more like an apple store experience than a d.m.v.-type experience. that's the kind of binary that we've come up with when we were doing the work [inaudible] mental health s.f. and thinking through the design of the mental health service centers and that kind of experience. and that is also critical work, and i think what i think i would love to see the city

embrace is not just that fundamental design, but we need to take that design thinking approach when designing these services that are critical, so that's [inaudible] that there's three people on our team who are dedicated to that as well as our research, but it will be great to see that [inaudible] around the city. >> supervisor haney: i have a follow-up question about that, which is -- i mean, i know you're still in it all the time, and you're responding to lots of requests and needs, even before covid, but have you all thought about designing your own design impact in the sense that, you know, do we

need somebody with human-centered design or digital services capacity or knowledge of presence in each of our major city departments that are kind of embedded there? do we need to train sort of our top-level managers and leaders in these tools themselves so they can do it when you aren't there? i'm worried that the way we've designed this is maybe not as efficient or it doesn't have as wide of a reach in the sense that you all have small teams, and there's a couple of teams that have specific design expertise and capacity, but it's hard for me to imagine with the teams that you just showed me that you can work on -- i'm sure you work on many different projects at once, but we have a multimillion dollar budget, and we have, at one

time, tens of problems that our departments are trying to solve. how do you embed your knowledge and how do you solve -- >> [inaudible] we are -- you know, i think that is something that plays on our mind all the time, and that's something that he -- we really want to be able to do. [inaudible] in the 967 services, we want to be able to do that, but that's not possible. we want to focus on that, but there's so much that we've had to do as a team to pull together. i'll just be super honest with you. it's just been back of mind during covid. also, during covid, there's so much recovery work that needs to be done with the city, as well, and that's a prime opportunity to breakthrough in

design thinking. i would love to [inaudible] across the city. that's my dream come true, and i think some cities are trying to do that, but there's no one that's got the power to do it like san francisco has, and i also want to say this from a technology perspective, although i know that you're concerned about the offline stuff. but really, for the on-line stuff, we're trying to make it easy for the departments to pull things together, that we have a platform for accessing things on-line and application forms for services. and then, we start to build up that kind of data platform for gathering data and sharing it across the city, and we start to kind of build in all of

these different ways, notifications and logging in, and all of these different components that go in to make a service. you have to build those services out and then they can use them for [inaudible] themselves. that's really the direction we're going in the long-term, and then, we can build it up and show them how it's done so we can build up some credibility in this very new space [inaudible] capability in the spaces of doing it themselves. and i want to shoutout to some of the departments that are doing it themselves. i think sfmta and [inaudible] are two departments that we talk about regularly. h.s.a. has a design team, as well. it's happening in pockets around the city, and we're trying to find the people and sort of create a center of gravity so we can build up communities of practice around it, as well. >> yeah, and i'll just briefly

add to everything that carrie just shared is we were starting an initiative. we launched our sfgov innovators network right before the pandemic. we were all working on similar problems, similar types of process improvements, the stuff that carrie was talking about, all the stuff in the middle, whether it's databases or cloud management, making sure that everyone has the information available to use, so i think there is room to grow in a way that is more coordinated and has more of an effort? i think training and resourcing is going up the city generally, something that other cities do. calgary, peak academy, san diego, there's a lot of places

that are trying to embed this with the status quo. i think finding opportunities to be more coordinated is definitely the gap, right? how do we work collectively, and i think the services inventory is part of our first next path on it. we collectively work on that, and our team identified this breadth of opportunities, most of which fall squarely and carry a threshold of digital services. but our departments are on different ends of that pipeline on digital maturity, and we are partnering with carrie and chloe and moving up that digital scale as our next idea of input, and we'd welcome thoughts on that, but that is something we're absolutely

looking at. >> supervisor haney: thank you. i appreciate that, and i appreciate you looking at the broader impact. you know, on a somewhat connected but, you know, little bit different type of question, i do think that i understand why, to some degree, we have these different types of groups and committees and departments in different places, but it is, i think [inaudible] i'd imagine most of the members of the board of supervisors could not list off each of these different offices and committees that are in front of us today and how you're different and what you do, and

so i wonder if we do have somewhat of a structural challenge or problem here, and if you all experience that at all? i don't exactly know what the solution is, but we've got the office of digital information and the office of digital technology. i know there's some other pieces of it, but it -- it is somewhat a challenge to really say this is the hub or the clear structure around it, and i know that there was formerly a chief innovation officer. i don't think we have that position anymore. so maybe that's just feedback. i'm not asking you to tell me

that, but i think that most people in our city or our elected government -- i don't know that you can tell me actually every department head and every middle bureaucrat or manager totally understands the difference between each of you or what you do, but if that's the case, i'd be impressed, but it's a little more confusing. >> and supervisor, yeah. i mean, i think that's spot on. we have a legacy organizational structure here in addition to organizational legacy technologies. i will just note that carmen wanted to be here, but all of these programs are underneath the city administrator, so in certain extent, we are actually under one umbrella, and so in her role, she is helping us organize and coordinate our

work, and that's how we are trying to get under one silo, but i think we are trying to rethink how we work together so that these silos have less of an impact and we can work together, and i think that linda wants to add something, as well. >> we certainly did see -- good, happy news. we certainly did see the challenge during covid, right, when we all needed to be working together across the entire city, and i'm not just talking about one single department. all 52 of them working together to try to support their employees as they all telecommuted and then support the response with new systems that had never been built. what was interesting, we had a

coordinating group that got together every morning and talked about the requests that was coming in. that was in the logistics branch, and there was a tech group in the logistics branch, and please understand, there is no lost time or effort in assigning work to the right place, and it doesn't just go to us. there's also the controller's office with all the financial systems. there's all kinds of other teams where it's appropriate for that work to be completed. so we'd make those assignments, data s.f., and everybody -- we'd have one central tracking, where we were keeping track that everybody had been assigned and completed, and the users were satisfied. i know it may seem disjointed, but this is a really big city. we understand everyone's role, and we're very interested in

getting it done, and we're very interested in customer service, and if there's something that one team specializes in, that goes to them. i hear what you're saying, so everybody, especially tech leaders across the city, are very aware. >> supervisor haney: that's good to hear, and i'm happy to hear that, and, you know, i'll provide the feedback to administrator chu, as well. i think some of the structures

are maybe sort of worth thinking about, the structure you all have together and how that reaches everyone in a most efficient and effective way. i love this stuff, so i could keep asking questions all day, but i'll send it back to my colleagues. you know, one of the other things that is a huge really principle of human-centered designed is multidisciplinary teams, and i'm wondering how you are integrating that into the approach that the departments take? you know, for example, if you're trying to solve a problem at the department of

public works, probably what you want to do is not have a bunch of high level managers sitting in a room, but you want to have a bunch of people with a lot of expertise that are more creative because they're seeing things from a different angle. is that all something that you are doing intentionally or happening intentionally? we did a lot of this in the school district where all of the -- and i mentioned this to you all when we met. the professional development that is done in the school district now is largely multidisciplinary teams coming up and identifying a problem and then having a process to work together to solve it that includes students, parents, teachers, administrators. is there anything like that

that's happening and how you're integrating that work into the overall approach? >> yeah, i can start with that. i'm sure they'll have some things to add, as well. our department, when we are designing services, we are working with staff in the departments to understand how to design what we're doing and figuring out how it works, so yeah, there are multidisciplinary groups coming together. i'll be honest. sometimes it's hard to pull stuff together. it seems like it's a [inaudible] as opposed to a part of people's work, and that seems to be a mindset shift that we want to be engaged with other departments because i think sometimes that the digital element sometimes gets

thought about last, and as i said at the beginning [inaudible] but yeah, any time we're building something with the staff running and the core bringing in that research, the dream come true would be the design team, the engineering team, and the product team all together in one group and working through stuff together, and we have, on occasion, been able to do things similar to that, but it does get tricky at times. certainly, we see that with staff when we're building services. [inaudible] office of cannabis

[inaudible] and we're really one team trying to make this happen. >> yeah, just very briefly, all of our [inaudible] are multidisciplinary, so we ask when a project comes in, that we're speaking up and down the pipeline to users, executive managers when appropriate. we also bring in similar departments when there is opportunity for a project to overlap, and so that is part of the muscle that we actually try to build [inaudible] and i

think people come together for a finite period of time but there's no [inaudible] in putting these multidisciplinary teams together. there's all these different sort of project-based groups that come together that are multidisciplinary, so it's a process that we do through our work, and it's something that we hope to expand, but it's not a citywide practice. >> supervisor haney: i appreciate that. i think it's something that i would love to see more of and intentional, building them into departments, how they operate. with all of this, i love what you all are doing. it's so important, and i really want to see it integrated, into, you know, the d.n.a. of

how we operate everywhere, so i would love to be supportive of that. last question, are there examples of, do we have design firms like i.d.o. or folks like that who are working with us on a more frequent basis or a one-off basis? do we ever bring them in to sort of take on large projects for us? is that something that you've seen happen? >> we have brought i.d.o. in to run some design thinking questions, workshops, not project-based work. [inaudible] that i think carrie and all of us are familiar with, consulting work and d.h.r. and other digital teams. they're sort of smaller minded

entities, so i think there's opportunity for that space and a more integrated partnership, but there's nothing that sort of, in the status quo, and a little bit through our innovation work, and i know that through department services contracts work with different groups [inaudible]. >> and i'll just add, as part of the budget process, we have the benefit of having a very small segment of the general fund, so we get to do a little bit more experimental thinking how our budget could change with some of these thoughts. we had [inaudible] come onto be a professional coach in some of these large projects moving forward. some of those plans got changed over the last couple of years, and some of those funds got moved to the covid command

center, but we're trying to bring in some of these high level firms to really change the way we're working. we have a lot of thoughts, and i frequently ask carrie and everyone how they can do this, and those design firms are really willing partners to try to do this. >> supervisor haney: yeah, i think there's a lot of potential to utilize them, you know, more, and they came in and fundamentally transformed the school district in something that we use to this day with how we view food. we have a lot of design firms in our city, and i would imagine thinking about a role for them, in working with them, and i'm sure you already

thought about this, but thank you. i appreciate this, and this was very informative, both the hearing and the opportunity to engage with you around it, and it's something that i'm going to continue to bring to the budget process and will look forward to finding ways to continue to support you all, and i'll turn it back over to you, chair mar. >> chair mar: thank you, supervisor haney, for calling for this really interesting and important discussion, and thanks, everyone, for the presentations and sharing updates on all the important work that you're doing and we're doing as a city to integrate technology and innovation strategies to improve our functioning at city government, and especially improve accessibility and just the customer experience for residents and constituents here in the city in their

interactions with city government. you know, i just had a question -- a few questions more around language access and, you know, obviously, san francisco, over a third of our population is foreign born, and i think there's over 100 languages spoken at home in the city, so i would -- and, you know, we have a whole separate language access ordinance, and there's a lot of work being done by the office of civic engagement and immigrant affairs to ensure that all of our government and city services are accessible to all of our immigrant and limited english speaking population, so i was just interested in hearing about how that's been incorporated into the technology, the really important and strategic technology strategies that you're working on. i mean, i know -- it seems

simps -- in terms of the digital access, the websites -- maybe not all of the websites and pages have google translate, and some of that have that integrated onto their platforms better than other. there's also 311, an important interface, doesn't seem to have language access, so i just hear -- would be interested in hearing more about how language access has been part of your work. >> yeah, i can respond to that from a digital [inaudible] perspective. we take language access really seriously and try to, you know, make sure that it's -- content is translated into chinese,

spanish, and tagalog, you know, the threshold languages. we also find that google translate is worse than nothing, and that's why a lot of the time we really strive for that simple english, as well, because if it's in plain english, then someone with limited english can understand it even if it isn't translated fully into their language. we've heard that google translate really doesn't help them that much, and so when we try human translation during covid, it's been extremely helpful to have a translation function to run things through, and it has really enabled us to

do much more rapid turnaround of human translation. we have a digital services -- we have a contract with a digital services agency that we can send things to for translate, and we've tried to automate that as much as possible through the back end so that can happen through our technology protocols rather than having to manage it through e-mails and that sort of thing, so we're trying to manage that work flow and make it a part of everything that we do. it's another reason why i want to encourage departments and supervisors move to sfgov [inaudible] and a little bit hit and miss as to how well the departments are able to do it, and honestly because i think a lot of departments don't have, you know, the budget or the bandwidth to manage human

translations of all of their content. it's a lot to manage, and it's also pretty expensive. not to say that it's not important, but that it's kind of operational, and i think that we can centralize and manage through one platform pretty much through there. and then, i think i'll just add that we're really mindful of the digital services and that's why staff, we have bilingual content and we make sure that we're designing content for all san franciscans, but it's huge. there's more than 70,000 pages of content across 200 webpages, so we're talking about lots and lots of content. so the language ordinance is pretty specific about the requirement to translate

[inaudible] so we use that to guide our work as to what we should prioritize. >> chair mar: yeah, thank you, and thanks for that, yeah, the distinction on just -- the website between human translation and google translate. so sf.gov, all the documents is translated into those primary languages? >> for the most part, yeah. >> chair mar: and do you know what or how many or what percentage of the departments or those websites have human translation versus google translate? >> i actually do, but i can find that out for you. >> chair mar: and what about 311, just the app? is that available in other languages? >> i can find that out, as

well. i do hesitate to speak on behalf of 311 since they're not here, but i can find that out for you. >> chair mar: thank you. yeah, so -- well, thanks again, yeah, for all of your work and for sharing the updates and having the discussion with us today. maybe we can go to public comment? mr. clerk, are there any callers on the line for this item? >> clerk: thank you, mr. chair. we will open the line for public comment. for those who are watching on meeting on cable channel 26 or via streaming link or sfgov.org, please call in now by following the instructions displaying on your screen. that is by calling 415-655-0001. following that, enter the meeting i.d. for today's meeting, which is 187-766-9647 and then press the pound symbol twice followed by star, three to enter the queue to speak.

for those who are already on the line, press star, three to enter the queue to speak, and for those already in the queue, wait until the prompt indicates your line has been unmuted to begin. mr. smith, could you bring us our first caller for agenda item number two? >> can you hear me now? >> clerk: please begin. >> great. david pillpel. good morning. i will quickly summarize some comments that i made in february at the meeting. overall, we do need to invest in new technology and maintain and upgrade equipment and systems. i agree with the question from

supervisor haney to the office of civic innovation, digital s.f., digital services, ocia and others need to be digital functions. i would have the operational functions reside at d.t. and the other city departments, and i would have all of the policy and outreach functions be in one central agency. i would call it the office of equity and inclusion and include some of these as separate groups within that kind of umbrella agency probably under the city administrator. i think there could be some information that could help her. i continue to support a smaller digital services team with some of the services centralized to the other operating departments. i do not find the sf.gov architecture to be useful.

i think it is a huge downgrade from the sfgov structure. i think it would be better to design the websites for a more common look and feel, but i think there's way too much white space and the sans serif font. again, the information and users areas are good and helpful to the public. departments should be allowed and encouraged to maintain and develop their own brand and style, like s.f.o. and sfmta, and finally -- >> clerk: thank you, mr. pillpel, for your comments. mr. smith, do we have any further callers in the queue? >> operator: we have no further callers in the queue.

>> chair mar: great. thank you, mr. clerk and sfgovtv. supervisor haney, what's your pleasure here? would you like to file the hearing or continue it? >> supervisor haney: we can file it. thanks, everyone. really appreciate your work and your time. >> chair mar: so yeah, i would move that we file this hearing. >> clerk: on the motion offered by chair mar that this hearing be filed -- [roll call] >> clerk: mr. chair, there are three ayes. >> chair mar: thank you. thank you again, everyone, for that really informative hearing. mr. clerk, please call item three. >> clerk: agenda item number three is a hearing to review the rise in commercial shoplifting in neighborhood small businesses and anchor stores such as walgreens, safeway, and c.v.s.

members of the public who wish to provide public comment should dial the number for public comment. i'll represent it. 415-655-0001, enter the meeting i.d. today's meeting i.d. is 187-766-9647. press pound twice and then star, three to enter the queue. mr. chair? >> chair mar: thanks, mr. clerk. thanks, supervisor safai. i believe you've joined us for this, and thanks for sponsoring this hearing. the floor is yours. >> supervisor safai: oh, thank you, chair. i know we're doing some of this together, right? i think we've merged these together, right? you had a hearing, and i had a hearing, so i'll say a few words, and then, i'll hand it back to you. >> chair mar: actually, my hearing -- we're still going to have the hearing that i called for that was on a very similar --

>> supervisor safai: got it. >> chair mar: yeah, around a very similar item, public safety in the commercial corridors. >> supervisor safai: all right. so i'm going to make a few opening remarks. for the past few weeks, san francisco has been in the yellow tier, which is the last tier before full reopening. as we reopen as a city and begin to attract shoppers back, tourists back, workers back to the offices and everyone and everything begins to reopen, we've been in the process, and i've been calling, much to the chagrin of supervisor haney, a lot of hearings to prepare san francisco to the return. we're hoping to create an even better san francisco economy

and really rehabilitate our services that we can provide that we had prepandemic. my office has also been looking at the intersectionality between drug addiction, criminality, and using an equity lens. in addition, we've been crafting legislation in an innovative way to hold individuals accountable while looking in a unique way at the reasons that cause people to commit crimes. instead of just focusing on felony acts, we've started to look at misdemeanor behaviors and the missed opportunities to divert these individuals into programs that can change the individuals actors and their

outcomes, their criminal genetic factors and outcomes. so today, we're focusing on commercial shoplifting because i personally, along with many of our constituents -- and i know you have, as well, supervisor mar -- have seen large amounts of items stolen brazenly, and from some of our commercial anchor stores in particular, which is why, when i called this hearing, i requested safeway, walgreens, and c.v.s. to present. safeway did not accept to present during this hearing, but their northern california district did provide a statement, which i'll read later once we come back to them. but essentially, we have also -- really need to get into hearing from some other people

on the frontlines. one of the group that i want to jump down to is c.v.s. i'm going to call on them first today, but essentially, shoplifting and petty theft have become a large problem in our city, and not only have i heard this over and over again, but the statistics bear themselves out. so today's hearing seeks to get a real landscape on how our city is faring within the city and statewide as it relates to petty shoplifting. also, last year, i did ask some of the leadership of walgreens to meet and talk about how their workers were feeling, talk about how we can stop and stem this activity, so we're going to hear from the retailer themselves, and we're going to have the police department, adult probation department,

juvenile probation department, district attorney's office, to present. industry partners will speak first, and then government and criminal justice agencies will speak next. and maybe i will just say, just really quickly, what walgreens -- excuse me, what safeway did send to us. so this is from their northern california division director. like other retailers, we've seen a dramatic increase in shoplifting incidents and losses from shoplifting since california laws changed in 2014 to make all theft below $950 a misdemeanor when it was previously a wobbler, either a felony or a misdemeanor based on prosecutorial discretion.

criminals have figured out a way to keep their thefts below $950. that was safeway's position. now this is back to my opinion. while evidence has shown tough on crime policies don't work in california, california voters continue to want greater investment in rehabilitation services. community members also want to see individuals held accountable that engage in this type of activity. i recognized and supported prop 47 and prop 50. i view these as bills that dismantled our draconian measures that disproportionately affected certain communities. as we move into the second decade of criminal justice

reform rehabilitation, i believe we as a city will have to make some tweaks in our policy that hold people accountable for our actions while seeking to compel individuals to address their underlying problems that cause individuals to commit crimes. as you know, this is -- this has been out of control. people are scared to go into these stores -- seniors, people with disabilities, children -- and it's just happening brazenly, and we can't just as a city throw up our hands and say this is okay. we have to come up with solutions, and we have to hold those in those positions accountable, but we have to come up with solutions, and that's a conversation that i started with walgreens and some of our community-based organizations last summer. so first, i'm going to call

c.v.s., and then we'll get into the criminal justice agencies after that. but if the individual from walgreens is here, why don't we go to them first. thank you, mr. chair, unless you want to say something before we go to the presenters? >> chair mar: maybe just briefly. i just wanted to thank you, supervisor safai, for calling for this hearing, and i appreciate your framing remarks, you know, about how as we continue to, you know, to pursue criminal justice reform and -- that we also do need to address real public safety concerns in our neighborhood, and in particular, i think the topic today around shoplifting, you know, in our -- in our neighborhood businesses, particularly the anchor businesses, is something that, yeah, we've seen across the city, and -- but i would also add that, you know, this affects -- you know,

shoplifting has impacted, you know, all the businesses in our commercial corridors, including our small neighborhood businesses, and so -- and it's also connected to other crime trends in our commercial corridors, like burglaries, and the separate hearings that i called for is looking at crime prevention strategies in commercial corridors to support our neighborhood businesses. >> supervisor safai: yeah. no, that's a really good before, supervisor. before i call up walgreens, so many people that i've heard from, as well as the large retailers, are the mom-and-pops that are saying it's impacting their businesses because they don't feel safe, and it's

something that's plaguing our commercial corridors. so thank you for having this hearing, and thank you for making that point. so if the representative from c.v.s. is here, please go ahead. >> yeah, supervisor ahsha, thank you so much for calling for this hearing. my name is ben dugan, and i'm the [inaudible] for organized retail crime. can i just share my slide? is that how we're going to do it? >> clerk: mr. dugan, this is the clerk of the committee. you will be looking across the top of your bar for shared content selection. >> yes. can you guys see it? >> no. >> okay.

>> clerk: mr. dugan, if you need, we have a back up copy of the presentation, and one of the clerks can do that if you can't share your screen. >> sure, if you can bail me out. >> clerk: they can bail us both out. >> it did share on my side, but i don't think that's helpful. >> clerk: thank you very much for your patience. >> chair mar: great. we can see it. >> you guys can see it? all right. unfortunately -- there it goes. all right. if we want to go ahead and advance that to the next -- to the next slide. i was asked to participate today and given a pretty

detailed request on what type of information that the committee might be looking for around commercial shoplifting at c.v.s., and i did put together those numbers to encompass all shoplifting and what we consider external effect. i just wanted to state to the committee, i specialize in organized retail crime, and just wanted to call to the committee's attention in 2018 and 2019 and 2020, there have been multimillion dollar organized retail crime cases resolved in san francisco, all the thefts occurring in downtown san francisco. all of them are multimillion dollar criminal organizations that were involved in the theft of product, not just from c.v.s. but other retailers in san francisco. specifically, operation wrecking ball in 2018, operation focused lens in 2019, and this year, the biggest organized retail crime case on

record was recorded in 2020, on operation proof of purchase where all the products were stolen from san francisco stores and ultimately sold through on-line marketplaces through amazon and ebay, which is where most of that product was going. we're talking about organized retail organizations and not necessarily individual shoplifters. we're talking about organized shoplifters that steal up to $10,000 worth of product a day and that ultimately sell that product on e-commerce sites. it's been a characteristic of the organized retail crime in san francisco. i wanted to mention that just before i got into the organized

retail shopping rates, and i'll be happy to answer questions about these rates or how the retailers were involved. >> supervisor safai: just a quick question, mr. dugan. >> yes. >> supervisor safai: san francisco is unique in that regard. how does that compare to other places in california and maybe even the united states? because that was very similar to the argument that walgreens made to us last summer, as well. >> yeah. lately, san francisco, thefts were escalating. we were able to track back a lot of the stolen product coming from san francisco. in other words, we're doing organized retail crime cases, yes, in california, but the product is being shipped from san francisco to new york city, to texas, to michigan, so we're able to link a lot of the millions of dollars in product

that are being stolen in san francisco to criminal enterprises across the country. so we're finding that san francisco is a major player where the lefts are actually occurring. the products are sold elsewhere, but they're stolen in san francisco, and the numbers are pretty consistent. i mean, i'm going to go into my data here in a minute, but if you look comparatively at the number of stores, even between san francisco and los angeles, we have a small concentration of stores in san francisco that are generating the majority of the theft, which is, by comparison and by percentage, much more impactful than a city like los angeles where we have four times as many stores, so it's all kind of relative to the number of stores, but comparatively, the number of stores, it makes san francisco

one of the epicenters of organized retail crime. it's not, you know, being committed by people that are necessarily, you know, looking for -- stealing something for personal use. it's all being stolen with the intent of reselling it for profit. i know that san francisco has a lot of the opportunistic organized crime, not just for personal use. if there's no other questions about organized retail crime, we can go into the data. >> supervisor safai: sure. >> which would be the next slide. so i was asked to put together

two charts, and i'll kind of explain this chart quickly for you. i don't want to take up all the committee's time, but this is how we breakdown our bay area markets, and you'll see the markets that we at c.v.s. consider the bay area, and i included how many stores were in each market, what percentage that represents of our total stores in that market, and then, the number of reported shoplifting incidents. the next percentage is that percentage of shoplifting incidents as the number of toll incidents for the bay area, and i was able to compare it to 2019. unfortunately, you asked for data in 2018, but we didn't collect data under the same system. but if you look to the right, it's the number of total dollar loss in 2019 and 2018.

i was not permitted to provide our actual hard loss amount dollars. we don't publicize those numbers, but i was able to break it down by percentages. if you look at what i highlighted for san francisco, 42% of all of our losses in the bay area from external theft came from our 12 stores in san francisco. so if you look at, you know, that percentage of what our losses were, what san francisco was contributing to our losses, 42% being caused by 8% of the stores, and all of those 12 stores were downtown san francisco stores. so you can see comparatively it's a small concentration of stores generating the most theft in the bay area. any questions on how i broke that down or -- i mean, does it make sense to everyone? >> supervisor safai: yep? >> okay.

well, great. thank you. if you want to go to the next slide, i was asked to put together the same analysis for the state of california comparatively. if you look at -- these are just broken-down by the markets. this is how c.v.s. breaks down the markets, so this is how i had to breakdown the data for you guys to review. it's just broken-down by major metropolitan areas in california. if you look at obviously, los angeles, where we had the bulk of our stores compared to san francisco, where that's the 155 stores that were all just listed on the chart i showed you previously, representing 20% of the market, and 28% of our losses statewide were generated by those 20%, those 155 stores statewide. if you look at los angeles, 55% of our market, 51% of our

losses. so you can see where san francisco is -- yes? >> supervisor safai: i just want to ask a question. >> sure. >> supervisor safai: are you saying we have 155 c.v.s.s in san francisco? >> in the bay area. >> supervisor safai: got it. not san francisco, bay area. >> i had to break it down this way. it was an exercise to get the data together, but i had to break it down. that's the 155. if we go to the previous slide, it breaks it down. >> supervisor safai: okay. that's what wasn't making sense. it's only 12 stores in san francisco. >> yeah. to break it down further would have been really, really difficult by city. it's pretty comparative to take a look at the different markets across the state and where san francisco sits. and then, if you drill down

even further, you'll see in the previous slide, essentially half of that money that we're talking about here, half of that 20% was just those 12 stores in san francisco, so if you look at it comparatively, 12 stores in san francisco, you know, generated 10% of our total loss for the entire state of california, which is significant. and i think that's all i had. i know i had seven minutes. i hope i didn't go over. we can go to the next slide just for questions and my contact information is below, and i'll be happy to hear any feedback, questions or any comments that the chair or supervisor have, and i'd be happy to answer any questions. >> supervisor safai: well, one of the things that i'd like to know is what strategies are you using to minimize shoplifting?

>> well, we use a number of tactics, right? our number one is always -- we try to improve our customer service. we try to be present, we try to be visible, helpful to all of our customers, and most of the time, in my experience of doing this for 30 years, is, you know, shoplifters don't like attention, so we do a lot of work around not being covert. we don't play cops and robbers at c.v.s. inside of our stores. we try to be overt. we wear bright red shirts and try to be present. unfortunately, it doesn't work for professionals, people requiring to steal a certain amount of money because they're indebted to a criminal organization or they have some other criminal need that's driving that, unfortunately.

that could be drug addiction or some other drivers, but those are people that really can't be deterred that unfortunately potentially can become violent, and then, our strategy is not to engage those people, and our employee and customer safety come first. we spend a lot of time being overt, we spend a lot of time with protection devices to make it more difficult for bad actors to steal those items, but yet it's still friendly for the customers. so we do have that, and our management retail crime unit does investigate, you know, at the higher level, the professional level, where we try to eliminate those threats by law enforcement in corporation in san francisco, who have done a fabulous job. you saw the cases that i

highlighted at the start of my presentation, and we've partnered with them to try to eliminate the criminal element that causes by far the most financial damage. so we try to do preventative work, education work, and then yes, we do invest in investigations, as well. >> supervisor safai: do you all have security guards at each of your locations? >> i can't comment on specific locations and what our security coverage is, but c.v.s. does employ security officers at certain stores based on a number of factors, including threat level and a number of other factors, and of course, for everyone's safety. but each store, i have to check on that if it's every store. but in san francisco, we made a significant investment in uniformed security officers, yes. >> supervisor safai: okay. >> if you wanted those numbers, i can check.

if you need them, i would say most, if not all, had a uniformed security presence. >> supervisor safai: and do you think that that is a helpful deterrent in not the organized crime but maybe the shoplifting in general? >> it can be, and i -- and i've seen it work. san francisco's not a good example of that, and unfortunately, we've had incidents where our security officers were assaulted on a pretty regular basis in san francisco. i think certain stores are better than others. there were certain stores, 7th and market, where it was a tough job. i don't know where the deterrence factor might have been less in certain stores than others, but it does work,

and we do it primarily for safety. we don't do it to save money, we do it to make our customers and employees feel safer. that's the number one reason we put those guards in there. >> supervisor safai: just my next question before we move onto the next? >> sure. >> supervisor safai: what percentage of your shoplifting would you estimate are the habitual shoplifters or low-level shoplifters? >> i don't know number of incidents -- it's a great question. the number of incidents is higher among opportunistic shoplifters. the problem is 85% of the incidents are done by professionals. low level shoplifting, that's only 15% of what our losses

are. they're very low dollar, usually generated around specific types of products, whereas professionals have a large amount of products that they resell, and 85% of the losses we experience come from professionals. >> supervisor safai: and these professionals, are they coming in with a bag, targeting ten items, and then coming back in? can you describe the profile? >> sure. most of the time -- well, they are a part of a criminal organization, and most of the time, there's a crew leader or a crew that provides the shopping list of items to steal. at c.v.s., it's over the counter medications and beauty products. sometimes they'll work in teams and use what's called booster

bags that are lined with tinfoil to try to beat the electronic surveillance in the front of the store, but they'll go in and fill out bags -- sometimes it's trash bags. they'll use distraction techniques to try to distract the limited employees in the store away from what their partner is up to, and most of those guys will go to at least ten, if not 12 stores in the same day. they'll go to store to store and steal up to $20,000 to $30,000 a day. they sell that to a fence and then a disbursement person, and then, that goes to an official

marketplace. they're given a very specific list, very specific cost that they get paid, and they're at it every day. so the habitual shoplifter just goes in based on need and is a totally different profile. >> supervisor safai: and how are you determining this? are you working with our police and our district attorney? >> yes, absolutely, absolutely. we have several on going investigations now. we deal with san francisco police department -- has been fantastic to work with. i hope they're on the call. i applaud their efforts to help us, and the prosecutor's office specifically on some of those cases that i mentioned. san mateo, as well, has come into the city and helped us on cases, so yeah, we have a very

close working relationship with law enforcement in the area, and it's -- like you saw 2018, 2019, and then last year. and then, i venture to say, you'll see the same thing in 2021. >> supervisor safai: okay. thank you, mr. dugan. i didn't -- i didn't realize the scale of organized crime hitting our drugstores. that's pretty phenomenal, and to hear you say that san francisco is the epicenter of organized retail shoplifting is pretty astonishing >> i'll just end with this. are there things that, since san francisco is that epicenter, as you described, are there things that we could be doing differently? you said you have a good relationship with the police department. are there things that we could be doing differently? >> yeah, there's several things. i know that you're proud of

that legislation, and i don't necessarily disagree with you, but what i would say is we have to treat professional shoplifters different than opportunistic shoplifters. they have to be treated like the criminals that they are, and we have to do some things with aggravating factors and someone involved in criminal activity, it would go a long way. >> supervisor safai: if people are stealing $2,000 to $3,000 a da per store, and $20,000 to $30,000 a day, that's higher than that level. are you not seeing them charged appropriately? >> yes, i am seeing them

charged appropriately, but i think that walgreens made the point, that people know the criminal level. i'll go to ten walgreens store and ten c.v.s. stores and steal $1,000. it's a misdemeanor complaint and it gets treated differently. so what our team does -- we work closely with walgreens, as well, is we collect that information and try to charge that appropriately. if it was a different charge greater than where we are now, as as far as a threshold, it would go a long way than documenting each of those incidents independently. it would deter the shoplifter from doing that. >> supervisor safai: right. maybe that's something we need to do, is aggregate the charges. if they're staying below the threshold, but they're hitting

20 stores a day, they're over that threshold -- because this is, again, we're not talking about the opportunistic shoplifter, we're talking about organized crime. this is absolutely mind boggling to me, and san francisco is being preyed upon, and if we're not charging at the appropriate level or charging at the appropriate rate, we're going to continue to be, as you said, you know, the epicenter of organized crime. that's pretty awful for our city. >> yeah. >> supervisor safai: thank you. >> i love the city. thank you. i appreciate the opportunity today. >> supervisor safai: thank you, sir. supervisor haney, did you have a question? >> supervisor haney: yeah, i did have a question. one is, you know, you gave some

examples of things that the city can do better, and that's definitely something that we should hear and explore, and i think our district attorney's office is going to be here. are there things that you all have been able to implement in the store that you've seen make a difference, and are those things happening in san francisco or what are some of the strategies that you all take yourselves that you see making a difference? >> i apologize. i was cutoff there for a second. could you repeat that question? >> supervisor haney: i'm just wondering. i appreciate -- one of the questions i had was similar to supervisor safai, which is what can we do differently and what can the city do differently and what you see working? but my question to you was, are there things that you're

implementing in the stores that you see making a difference? what are some of the preventive things that you see in the store having a positive impact on prevention? >> it's the way we handle our product, right? it's -- we know specifically that these criminal organizations target specific products, and it's very consistent. not just san francisco, across the country, right? it's fuelled by the market of on-line product demand. we educate our employees on how to protect their product, and again, even the professionals don't like attention. so we like to dedicate a lot of our training and attention of our employees around those products and how to protect them, and how to offer great customer service to our customers and try to kind of deter once those things are going on. so we spend a lot of time

around those products and protecting them and reporting incidents around those products. the stores know how to recognize organized retail crime as opposed to shoplifting. the report's up to us, and we've had pretty good success as far as identifying who those bad actors are and the organizations that they're associated with. so customer service, product protection. obviously, we invest in innovation and technology to try to help with those identifications or how to identify and provide law enforcement any evidence that they may need. but a lot of things that might help deter shoplifting, you know? there's a lot of technology out there, audible surveillance, and a lot of things that we deploy to try to deter that activity at that level. so it all has minimal success. it has its success, but the

amount of products that these criminal organizations target are pretty wide, about 200 skus, 200 different products. we can't lock all of our stuff up. we have to balance, so we balance it with what the needs of our customers are with what we need to protect. >> supervisor haney: mm-hmm, mm-hmm. the situation is awful and obviously unacceptable where you have a store where people are constantly coming in and taking things. it's hard to operate a store, it goes without saying, and so i don't mean to gas that to say you should resolve it yourself. you're obviously taking some actions, and as a city, we have a huge responsibility, as well. what -- what about, from a -- you know, from a preventative standpoint, you know? do you see sometimes where

folks are asking for, you know, sort of more policing or food patrols or those kind of things around stores and such? do you see those kind of things making a difference or as far as how you're working with law enforcement? >> yes, yeah. and the -- and the police department has been very responsive, and we've asked for police patrols, and we've gotten them, but again, that's really focused around the amateur shoplifter, you know? unfortunately, people that, you know, you have a need -- you know, like, in certain stores, there are large crowds gathered around the store, on the sidewalk, and different parts of the store, and they'll come and kind of clear those folks out and try to do some different things to try to keep a much safer environment in and around the store, and i think san francisco has done a great job of doing that for us, or at

least trying to do that for us, but that's going to only prevent the 15%. that's not going to prevent the 85% in the store that goes undetected. those guys don't appear to be who they are, right? they don't -- you know, they're making a lot of money, you know? so -- so they usually -- usually, they drive or have a vehicle close by. you know, they dress differently, they carry different bags, they perform differently and act differently when they're inside the store. that's tough for a uniformed patrol officer to detect, right? it takes a certain eye, a certain behavior that we have to recognize and then alert that uniformed officer. so yeah, the response has been good from san francisco, but

yeah, the core problem is the professionals that go undetected that require significant investigation, detective-level intervention, and a major enforcement action to stop. >> supervisor haney: makes sense, and focusing on the more organized crime aspect and being able to collect the investigation data and everything makes sense, and i'm sure others will say this, as well, you know. for the areas that i represent, stores like these are important for access for residents, so it is important, and i appreciate supervisor safai bringing this forward and our ability to have a conversation about that, but i did just want to say that this is an important thing for our neighborhoods. i represent south of market and the tenderloin, and obviously,

we rely on c.v.s.s and i'm sure walgreens and your competitors, as well, and being able to operate and being able to operate safely, and also, the safety of your employees is incredibly important, and i'm sure we're going to talk about them, as well, in part of this conversation, but i do thank you for being here. >> yes, thank you. i appreciate it, and appreciate the opportunity, and i'd love to come back and answer any questions you have. i'm always available. >> supervisor safai: thank you, supervisor haney. next person we're going to call up -- thank you, mr. dugan -- we're going to call up walgreens executive vice president for california, jason cunningham. jason, are you here? >> yes, i am. >> supervisor safai: you're up. >> all right. if i could ask for the clerk to pull our slides up, as well?

>> clerk: hang on just a moment, mr. cunningham. >> thank you. while you're doing that -- just a second. i have a small technical difficulty here. all right. i think that got that scared away. first, i'd like to say thank you, mr. chair. thank you, clerk, for getting me set up there. i'd also like to thank the board of supervisors, supervisor safai, for the invite. very excited to be here and share and continue the conversation that we've been having with a variety of leaders both with the supervisors and the mayor's

office. my presentation -- let me get my timer started here -- is going to focus on three areas. a brief overview of san francisco. second will be a comparison of how our business compared to other major cities across the country, and then, the third piece is what is walgreens specifically doing about it? so my name is jason cunningham. i am the regional vice president for walgreens. i oversee our operations in california and hawaii. i've been in this role for starting my fifth year now, so i am based in california. so if we go to the next slide, i'll start in with -- a little bit about the walgreens footprint in san francisco. advance the slide, please. all right. thank you.

well, this slide looks like it's not coming up on my end completely, but i'll just go ahead and speak to what we have in walgreens, and we'll jump in. we have 53 locations in san francisco. we've been in san francisco since 1937. our original store, you can still visit the site, although it's significantly different, located on powell street and union square. we have partnerships with some of the most well known organizations in the city, and our footprint has changed over the last five years. before i jump into that piece, i'd like to talk about what supervisor safai was talking about, the new san francisco kind of emerging out of covid-19. our 53 locations, all are providing covid immunizations today. we do that pretty much on a daily basis seven days a week. happy to be part of the community and helping, you know, san francisco, arguably, and maybe not even arguably,

the most successful city in vaccinating its population. i've got to imagine we're pushing close to 80%, and even today, i was looking at our news, with pfizer immunizing 12 to 15 year olds, we've got pfizer appointments booked, as well. over the past five years, walgreens footprint has changed. five years ago, we had 70 locations in san francisco, and it's an unpopular and difficult decision to close a location, but we have closed 17 locations. market conditions can account for some of these closures, but the primary driver, especially over the past couple of years has been the cost of doing business in san francisco, specifically, left in my stores, and as my peer from

c.v.s. pointed out, it is the organized retail crime that is a factor when deciding to close those stores. [please stand by]

and we originally put this slide together. at that time we were spending seven times the chain averaged in san francisco. we have since invested in a variety of different areas, most significantly the program, which is the san francisco uniformed officer program. you see that our spin is 35 times the chain average for our stores in san francisco. i will call out with the program, has brought some success. it is prohibitively expensive. a store has to have significant amounts of loss to justify hiring a police officer, through the program. there's other data on here that i'd be happy to speak to. i think one of the questions that i heard, and i think supervisor haney brought up, okay, well -- walgreens, you've

known about this. what are you doing about it from, you know, from an internal piece. if we can go to the next slide. so here's some of the things that, you know, that we are doing. really talks about the different measures that we've put in. so we install locks on products. we put items behind the counters. and to be very clear, this hurts sales. this is not what you want to do for the consumer. you make it more difficult for the customer to get the product. but it is necessary to reducing theft. we've also done things like bolting down register tills to prevent thieves from taking the entire cash register till. you know, you'll hear different things with locking cases, you'll see pieces with plexiglass. we've put plexiglass around our checkout areas and our pharmacy

counters. not from a covid-19 perspective, but to keep people from jumping over the counter and taking product and, you know, or interacting with our team members in a way that would be unsafe. there is a benefit with covid-19 as well, but it is specifically there to target that and put that prevention in. you also see a picture there of a recent meeting we have. and in the previous topic around technology as supervisor haney was talking about multi-disciplinary groups and working and tieing into things we have done, especially in the last 12 months or so. we've partnered with a group with specialty that we don't necessarily do. the group is called alto alliance. it does it ties in retailers, it ties in the data. we have a group of toni that work with not only local law enforcement, but also bring the prosecutors through the system, the data that we're bringing in

the store and bringing that through. i think the last reporting i saw on that, we have somewhere close to 90 cases going through the prosecutor's office right now, really tied around organized retail theft. i think the last piece and maybe i'll bring up and pause for question. keep an eye on my time here. i know c.v.s. was talk around and downtown specifically. we monitor through data what's happening in our stores. we have a security operations center that oversees activities happening in -- across the country and in our stores. and two of the districts that we have, and i think districts -- you'll recognize the names in san francisco. the castro district and the mission district rank highest in the company for those alerts in recent weeks. crime is the top reason for those alerts. and the top 15 stores in the

company are in san francisco, with the alerts. those alerts are criminal activity, theft and threats. i covered a lot of information and i'm sure there's questions. so i just say thank you for this time. and i'll pause now and open it up to questions. >> commissioner safai: thank you, jason. really appreciate that. a couple of questions i have similar to what we have for c.v.s. what percentage of your loss would you say is done by organized professional crime? >> yeah. if i look at it from a percentage basis, and i heard that question, so i was thinking about, you know, what this looks like. we have benchmarking in our -- the backdoor strength is part of what we -- that's part of doing retail. that happens. and it can. a variety of different ways. so when i benchmark that and look at it, it's probably in line with what c.v.s. reported

in there. the difference when you see the amount of theft in san francisco versus some of our average stores in the company, that multiplier factor is really driven by the organized retail crime. it is not the, you know, unhoused citizen that's, you know, getting something out of need or necessity. it's not, you know, the youth coming in and taking candy. that's not driving the exponential piece. my peer was talking around organized retail crime. the ability to turn into cash through the online marketplace. you know, amazon marketplace is a big driver of that. we know it. we have that. it's part of why we're working federally on the inform act and supporting that to get reform at the higher levels, to help get to the root causes, where it's not, you know, so financially lucrative to, you know, pursue that activity.

>> commissioner safai: is there something we could be doing differently here? one of the things i heard c.v.s. say, mr. dugan, aggregating the charges, since these are organized crime, if they're hitting multiple stores in the same day. i know you have cameras. i'm sure you're probably catching that information. do you take that documentable information and present it to our police department and our district attorney? and what has the response been working with them? >> yes, supervisor. we felt we needed to do a better job of this. we have the data. you know, our -- at the end of the day, we're running drugstores, right. our purpose is to champion the health and well being of every community in america, not necessarily trying to solve, you know, these issues. so we had to go and look -- to find different investments to bring that. i feel great about aggregating the data, the alto alliance

partnership that i talked about. we have tremendous response from the prosecutor's office, the police department and aggregating that data, being able to get that together. i don't think that, you know, there's a specific -- i think it's really part of a piece where the city, you know, have to look at where do we want to put our resources and what is the, you know, effects of not doing that. does that mean supporting it? i think things like community business districts. i like that. we can talk about what is the consequence. i go back a little bit further and think about if we had 70 stores in san francisco right now, like we did five years ago, we would have # -- 70 stores doing covid immunizations at

this point i don't think anyone thought putting that in, the idea to impact health care in san francisco. that's never the intention. we can see what the consequences could look like. >> commissioner safai: i mean, the reason i ask is because again you show -- see this is something different from what we met last summer. you know, this is the first time that i've heard that 85% of the losses are around that -- are from organized crime. so you can put a police officer out there, it's going to deter some what. you can put a community ambassador. you can put, you know, more pressure on store staff. but at the end of the day, you know, it seems to me that if we're catching these folks at some point and they're doing, you know, what was estimated from dugan $30,000 in a day and they're a main cause there, there's something different about san francisco than new

york, chicago, l.a., you know, the other markets that you identified. and so that's what i'm trying to get to the bottom. why is organized crime targeting san francisco, versus those other places? and if it means that individuals need to be charged differently, it's not the threshold. the threshold is one incident at one store. but they're doing thousands of dollars over multiple stores. and you all have the information, working with our police department. we should be able to put a department into this. this is not -- when my elderly mother goes to the walgreens in our neighborhood, and half the store is empty because you don't have those products or any of our constituents go to that store, i mean, it's not only difficult to get to it, because it's locked up. there aren't -- the products aren't there any more.

in a covid crisis, there's 17 stores left that are not doing vaccinations. so i just have to say, i will ask you again, it seems as though we need to be doing something differently in terms of aggregating the charges, getting the individuals. because this is not the opportunistic. this is not the unhoused. this is not the person dealing with extreme poverty or drugs. this is organized syndicates that are doing millions of dollar. again this is a revelation to me today. i had no idea that it was on that scale. and appreciate what everyone is doing to break these up. but it sounds like we're not doing enough, if we're still shutting down stores and we're at the epicenter of organized retail theft in the country. >> i will echo, we're turning

the data off to law enforcement. that's not something we're sitting on and keeping to ourselves. >> commissioner safai: okay. great. well, you answered my questions. looks like supervisor haney has a question. supervisor haney. >> supervisor haney: yeah. thank you. thank you for those questions. some of those are some i had. i was wondering about trends and kind of the growth of this, you know, 10, 12 of the stores that have the highest level of shrinkage or loss in the country are here in san francisco. did i get that right? or in the state? >> in the state. >> supervisor, i'll clarify that. when i referenced that data on those top stores, they called in incidents to our security operations center. these are criminal activity that we track and report in, threats made in stores.

not necessarily just, you know, actual theft/loss. >> supervisor haney: got it. and do you have a sense of the trends around this? i mean, has it been that way for the last ten years? did that just become the case in the last five, in the last two? and similar around the sort of general loss or theft. is it something that is more recent? has this been an issue in san francisco for the last ten years? i mean, this is obviously awful and a huge problem that we need to address. but this is a newer problem, a very new problem or sort of a consistent problem that has been in san francisco for a number of years? >> yeah. i've been -- since i've been in california, we're going back about four year ago. four years ago we had some theft, but not at the

exponential rate. if you really look in the last 36 months, when we look at our internal projection and part of the reason why you see the investment in the variety of different methods, we look out and see it's not sustainable, you know, that's part of the reason on some of the closures. you can't -- sustainable, not a way to do business, then that's when the tough decisions come in. really the last 36 months, you go back and seeing the trends pick up in 2017. really 2019 is when -- i saw it really starting accelerating. and we've continued to see it accelerate, you know, in 2020 and even into 2021. >> supervisor haney: got it. and do you have data on that in the sense of where it's shown growth, those sort of things? i think that would be helpful. i don't know if you can share in a follow-up. obviously i take your word that you've seen in your professional role the last 36 months.

i'm wondering how san francisco has compared? is it in the last 36 months you've seen a growth everywhere, but san francisco more so? or everywhere has been consistent and san francisco has really seen the growth. i don't -- i'm trying to understand the -- when this started getting really bad and did it get bad across the state, across the country. sort of at the same time or worse in the city? or did it really get worse in the city in the last 36 months? >> yeah. and we had data. there's some things that i can't. we monitor all of those things, profitability, sales. those pieces. here's where i've seen it. california has been an outlier to the rest of the country. san francisco has been an outlier to california. so it's a double piece. we're seeing it in new york city somewhat as well. and, you know, on a day-to-day basis. i work with my peers there. they've taken the similar steps

around the amount -- like the $950 per shoplifting. but really kind of post-prop 47 where california took a few years to become an outlier to the company and san francisco an outlier on top of that. >> supervisor haney: all right. thank you again. and again i appreciate all the work that you're doing in the cooperation with law enforcement and the district attorney. and, you know, echo what has been said by others about the real importance for us to put a stop for this. because it really is -- as i said, can't operate businesses in this kind of situation. you know the type of business that you operate and basic essential goods that you provide are really important for many of our residents, including the ones i represent. thank you. >> commissioner safai: thanks, supervisor haney. supervisor stefani. >> supervisor stefani: i have a few questions in terms of the incidence. we're talking about shoplifting at a certain level and things like that. but i'm wondering if you're also

documenting the level of violence that is involved? because this is not just taking things off the shelves at times. i just attempted to go to walgreens the other day with my 11-year-old daughter in the evening, around 8:00 at lombard. and we couldn't enter the store because the security guard had been pepper sprayed by someone they tried to keep out, as someone they recognized as a person who continued to come into the store and shoplift from that store. the entire store had been pepper sprayed. there were employees still there coughing from the pepper spray. that's not just an incident of shoplifting, but also an incident involving violence and assault. also i've heard reports of customers trying to film people, because they're so astounded at what is happening in the stores, that they've been threatened by the person who is trying to shoplift. also i've heard stories of those

brandishing knives at your employees. and i would like to know if you have any information on the level of violence that are involved with some of these, not just purely shoplifting incidence, in my opinion. >> supervisor stefani, thanks for the question. i'm sorry for the experience you had at the store with your daughter. that's unfortunate just as i think, you know, for anyone regardless of who caused it or what's looked for. we do track those information and that type of thing. and i think there's a couple of things that i will speak to. we train our team members. this is a shift over -- i've been a greens for 23 years. i started out in the stores. i was a store manager working in that. i was not in california at that time. we've shifted over time, we've had to evolve the way we treat our team members. there was a day you confront a shoplifter and you would go and have a discussion and catch someone past the point of entrance.

we don't do that any more. we invested in training our team members, especially over the last couple of years. we've trained internal, for public safety. it's -- it's a recipe for, you know, something dangerous happening. it is part of why we employ security guards and police officers, as c.v.s. mentioned, really around team member and customer safety. if someone comes in and wants to pepper spray someone, i don't have a policy that initially stops that from happening. i think that's a piece where we also have to continue to report to the law enforcement, both as businesses and also as citizens, as well as so those are addressed. it's putting team members and customers in harm's way. i think team member safety is the reason why we've made the investment that we've made. you see that 35 times. there's definitely a loss piece and business area that goes with it. team member safety and customer safety is the critical piece on

that investment. it's not cheap. but you go through and look at it, you have the data, you know it, you have to go and take in, you know, different actions and align our own resources. that's also when you talk around store closures. look at it and say we can't operate this store in the manner we want to run it and keep it safe. so that's where some of those decisions have happened as well. and i don't know if i captured everything there on your question. i'm happy to take a follow-up. >> supervisor stefani: given the policies in place, that the suspects are often long gone before the police arrive. and, therefore, making it much more difficult for our officers to apprehend those who are involved in these organized crime rings, that know how to evade, because they now your policies. they know how to leave in time before the police arrive, making it, thus, much more difficult for them to be apprehended at a later date. so, you know, i think that that -- i mean, i am not shocked that these are organized crime rings.

this is something that i have known for a while. so i think that those that are participating in these activities, those that are in the crime rings that where you see all of the products ending up on amazon and ebay, which is a whole another thing that needs to be taken care of. they know what they're doing. and they know how to evade the police and they know how to evade prosecution as well. so i thank you for trying your best. and i look forward to more presentations to see if there's any way possible to get a handle on this in san francisco. >> thank you, supervisor stefani. thank you, jason. appreciate you coming, continuing to be a partner in trying to work with us on this. but sound like we have more work to do here. so we will move on to the next presenter. next i'm going to call on rachel

michelin, who represents california retail association. and i know that she doesn't have a presentation. but i know she'd like to make some comments, if she's -- are you still there, miss michelin? rachel? >> through the chair to member -- guest safai, we see that rachel is connected to the call and her microphone is unmuted. so we're ready to hear from her. >> commissioner safai: okay. rachel? while we're waiting for her, i'll just say one of the other things besides aggregating charges, sound like we need to reach out to amazon marketplace.

sounds like from the presenters here today, this is a big problem in terms of people's ability to steal items and then use marketplace to resell those items. so we certainly will be following up with them, see what can be done and if it's federal issue, we'll certainly reach out to speaker pelosi's office, because that is,er, because this is a driver on the other end. miss michelin, are you there? rachel? maybe her microphone is not working? i think she just called our office to say that her microphone is not working. is there a call-in number, mr. clerk? >> clerk: that's right.

so on the individual invites that went out to today's presenters, there is also a call-in number with a conference number as well. i'm not giving out that conference number on our live meeting. but if miss michelin would caught her invite, she can find the call-in number there. and we'll watch for her call. >> commissioner safai: okay. maybe we'll skip down to our government agencies. the next person we have, that is going to present, is from the san francisco police department. i believe it's acting deputy chief. are you here? >> yes. i am. and actually i think commander walsh will start the presentation. >> good afternoon. so sorry. this is lily with sfpd. could you grant me access to share our presentation, please? >> yes. >> thank you.

>> great. >> clerk: the access is updating. >> great. thank you. give me one second, please. see if i can see it? can you all see the presentation? >> clerk: yes, we can. >> great. thank you. >> good afternoon, supervisors. this is commander peter waller, san francisco police department. i am the commander in field operations, which is patrol. i will be going over this presentation with act the acting

act --the acting deputy chief in investigations. i'll lead in with what happens on patrol. and some of the stats around that. and then acting deputy chief will talk about follow-up and investigations. and how that moves forward. next slide, please. >> the computer didn't connect to my audio. >> so obviously i believe some of the supervisors have mentioned this that in general, taking away what some of the speakers from c.v.s. and walgreens said about tend being present, where an officer is hired by those businesses, your typical shoplifting in most cases simply works like every other prime. when a business will go ahead and call in, patrol will arrive and gather as much information as possible. one of the things that we do,

especially with businesses who tend to be a little bit more tech-savvy and have more video, is try to get as much information from them immediately and post up photos once the investigation again. i'll leave that to deputy chief swanny. we take an original police report. we try to get as much of the information as we can, in regards to how much or what items were taken. and again as you all know, that can help us versus am misdemeanor which is not under 900 $50 -- $950. [ please stand by ]

>> the stores larger places such as wall greens and app 8 can't t afford that type so our best method of keeping awareness and preventative measures is to have an active set of officers in patrol or on the beat which we do. so, next slide.

here are some of our shoplifting strategies. obviously as i mentioned, foot beat and commercial corridors, consistent passing calls and i know this is off topic but we have been doing a lot of patrol at night in commercial corridors and everything from putting our lights flashing through and we're taking all aspects of theft there it's bug larry at night or the incidents in commercial corridors very seriously. we use. >> sandra: data-driven policin. known on areas of shoplifting. marked patrol vehicles parked outside some storefronts and then we've already touched on 10-b. i'm going to let you talk about the investigative strategies but let me jump over to outreach we.

we have a strong district level group of captains that meet with the merchants and their associations and their larger retail so if you take the supervisor mar, captain has excellent relationships with everybody from pops out on ter a bell to stones town which is clearly a large retail star and we try to keep those partnerships and those data exchanges together so that the captains of their stations know what is going on in their district and our safety walks and not just station personnel and you see the i am flux of our community engagement and reaching out and we use a steady by wing wall officers and officers that know the community to get messages out because if there's anything that we can do the best way to stop this, if

you stop is there's not a statistic to show it's not been stopped. that is i very costly proposition. if it's a cost-benefit analysis it's available to any business in san francisco. i'll go ahead and turn this part over to the investigation side. >> great. i just want to, i'm just going to interrupt for a second. some of this presentation now

feels -- not because of nueces anythingon your end but based oe information that we're provided, about how 85% of the theft is by organized crime. it seems to me like we should spend conversation talking about that a little bit. that requires more coordination between you and the stores and police and the district attorney and what are we actually doing to great up this organized crime, given the fact that it seems, based on the ta advertise statisticspresented today, we ar ahead of any other place. i understand for each passing calls and the other staff that is more important, it sounds like the opportunistic shoplifter which is a smaller percentage of the shoplifting. certainly it's important and i think we're all working on those strategies. i've been asking for foot beats for the last four years and i

haven't gotten them so, i would prefer to focus in on what your strategy to break up this organized crime that is happening in these stores that is impacting the entire city. >> yeah, absolutely. that's more on the investigative side so as stated, i'll use an example that was given. if a individual walked into store a and took less than $950, even if they were going onto the next store, that single incident is still a petty theft. so, we used to have, again, in this -- i know that prop 47 gets knocked but it's one of the thought processes that needs to be really kind of maybe thought of as it goes to this organized retail theft. you can walk in, as described to a wall greens, a maceys,

whatever area you would like, and there is no burglary charge like pre prop 47, if that amount is it under $950. so if i walk into wallgreens and i'm going to steal $700 worth of items but i have a bag that has foil inside or other security defeating mechanisms i've shown the intent, i'm going in there to steal. under prop 47, the change in the law does not come in until we reach that $950 mark. so, investigations even at that level, would have to put together that string. again, i'll leave that to that. as you know, in that earlier cvs presentation, that's a regional effort. crime may be focused in san francisco but it's definitely regional. i think that's probably a good segway to turnover to d.c. to how we go after this --

>> before you do that, i just want to clarify. if someone does x amount in one store and the other store in one day, you can't aggregate that to a larger amount and you have video evidence of it? >> each one is a separate separe victim. i'll leave that if the d.a. wants to correct me. if you have the possession of all those items, could you go felony possession of stolen property over $950 so if you have two stores $1,000 each, now you are in possession of $2,000, i do know that you would have stolen property over $950 which is a felony. >> right. that was my point of classification. yeah, d.c. -- >> good afternoon. so mine is acting deputy pointed

i oversee investigations and within investigations i have the burglary unit and it's basically responsible for investigating shoplifting. there's also a specialty within the units of all 19 investigators that we have 19 general investigators that are all trained in shoplifting and crimes related to retail theft and crimes related to organize retail theft and in addition to that, we have two investigators whose full time it is to investigate organized retail theft and they work regionally and just to go into kind of an idea of what our investigations focus, we focus on the serious repeat offenders. they're serious because they have multiple open cases and

repeat offenders, they're serious because they've endured someone in this store and i can talk a little bit about how that goes into different crimes which is handled by our investigative units or they are violent. so, on the organized retail front, what kind of outreach we do. so these two specialized members, they're both sergeant. they do outreach with the store. they do educations with the different stores. they actually monitor the different stores and have regular meetings with some of their security personnel, managers. they work with district stations. the captains of the district stations and some of the investigators that are assigned to different stations. they do lock for aggregate crime patterns. they work with a company under

wall greens, they've worked with the alliance but even outside of that, they'll take multiple cases in different locations and look for the same person committing the crime, they'll look for data and it takes hours and hours of watching the video and getting the police reports together, looking at the history of the individuals, and putting a case together and bringing it to the district attorney. we actually have a specific meeting with the district attorney that we meet with to go over just retail theft and then on another level, organized retail theft and in addition that, they are also members of the california organized retail crime association which looks at all california retail theft and they meet regularly with them to look for patterns and a lot of our stuff is connected to l.a. outside the area and some of it

outside the country. they work with the security not just at the corporate level but each individual store and they troy to come up with ways that the store can physically change the environment to troy to reduce crime and they work with security that is hired by the store and go over protocol of best practices and the other thing they do is they try to get video from these different stores than in once they get patterns, they separate those cases into organized retail theft. so the one thing i wanted to talk about, i know listening to cvs, waltgroans, mr. cunningham and duke and they're looking at the total loss as a profit loss and they are is a segment of organized retail theft that's associated with that and the thing that police department

also has an obligation is for general public safety and communities so we do look at the individuals that are committing the crimes and we focus on the repeat offenders. they have multiple open cases with not just shoplifting, their committing auto burglary, residential and street robberies. wove had members within the store staff that have been stabbed, attacked, pepper sprayed, so those are the kind of things that they're looking at not all of that is organized retail theft so those are what

types of call for service and times of call for survey so we can relay that to patrol this is what we're seeing and pattern wise this is where foot beat officers need to be because that's what we're seeing and -- >> do you have statistics or are you just reading that to us? >> i can go into it in slide 4. let's go to slide 4. >> let's go to the statistics, that will be helpful. right now we're looking and since you'll see in 2018-2019 as far as the arrest we've made 2,449 arrests over the three

years and we have a law that helps us aggregate. repeat shoplifting offenders that are committing this in multiple stores and ex see thing that over the multiple stores. >> what law is that? >> 409.4 of the personal code. it's under ab10-65 and supposed to sunset and it's currently extended from january 2021 to july of 2021 and we work closely ex our retail task force works with the state and we have a team that addresses the high

level and rehave in our investigators that sit with their teams for high-level people taking this product. we've recovered millions of dollars of products including a semi truck of stolen proper stores in union squares and cvs, wallgreens and then if we can go to the next slide, that can give you an idea of the trend. >> before the pandemic, you will see it so between that march, it's slowing down and then it stopped for a little.

it was lower and starting to trend back up again. the one trend we are seeing is if they're stopped by security or store person and it escalates and it becomes a robbery and i'll go into what that is in a second. when it's basically a shop lifting that is elevated by use of force or fear. it's actually based on a 1983 case that occurred. what that then does it makes it a violent crime and we charge

them with felony robbery section. we see a lot of repeat is offenders. they have a guy that's been out on pa role, 2020 open cases and he has been charged several times. he has been charged under the prc as parole and currently he has throw or our fourth case in 2021. he is still out and he has open cases and we rarely see them going to state prison like they were supposed to go under prc acts. >> why is that? >> >> i don't and i think a lot of it is because of the pandemic, a lot of the jails were prioritized for just very

violent offenders. i think that's part of it and i just think just part of it is in the totality of so they take priority. >> what is prcs again? >> so it's post community row leaf and it's supervisor re lease what it did is it takes someone who is sentenced to state prison instead of sending him to state prison they released him to the community on patrol but they're now the responsibility of the county and adult probation. >> we have adult probation coming up.

anything else? >> i have a question, deputy chief. the slides around the trends around shoplifting over the last three years. i think the prior slides shows 2018, 2019, 2020. so basically it looks like there was a significant decline in incidents in 2020 and then if i look at the bars there was a decline in the percentage of this and that resulted in arrests in 2020. there was a further decline compared to 2020 in accidents? >> ok. if you have further slides, even though there's a decline and

we've seen a decline in shoplifting incidents which seems the staff seems to do a little story that was portrayed and described by cvs and wallgreens that there is the types of incidents have changed. >> we've heard from investigators and officers that a pretty significant number of it is not reported especially the lower level we're not just auking about wall greens and all kinds of businesses so yao have a slide because the data was pulled so these robberies not

reflected in this but we're seeing a decline that it's trending up and in so that usually where so that's not reflected in the slide. that's about what i'm hearing from my investigators and a lot of my and the cases are pickupel together and one of the cases we're looking at the person had -- they committed 15 robberies. they were all bundled into one. they were all wallgreens pharmacies in our city and the person got probation and two months later the person gets another charge for robbing someone at bart. he gets adult, young adult court and then he gets probation and he has been released from

custody since then. these are the robbery cases and we'll take priority on and then organized staff. we've had successes with the district attorney also we have a list of frequent offenders that will take to them on burglary on residential burglary but we also have them for organized retail thefts where we'll take this and say hey, this person is involved in these number of cases and we show connections with this group or that group and some of these groups are gangs within the city and some of them are from outside, either oakland, san -- >> go back to that slide.

everybody thinks habitual and all kinds of and that's not just the shoplifting they're doing. they're telling me that is a high percentage. >> so when it says shoplifting incidents district these arrests. >> i was having a few more questions, i'm sorry, supervisor mar.

>> i think i'm good. it looks like supervisor stefani is in the cue for questions. >> ok, yeah. i'll come back. i just wanted to make sure that you guys, it would be good to see how many arrests were made related to shoplifting and theft and how many related to organized crime and repeat offenders. we can come back to that. supervisor stefani. >> thank you. i just have a question for deputy chief. with regard to repeat offenders have been individual has picked it up for theft and that individual is on parole or probation, are you keeping track whether or not that individual is charged or received new charges or whether or not they're just referred to patrol or whether or not they're referred to probation to have their probation revoked. is anyone keeping track of those statistics? >> my retail left will probably

be better able to answer that. i can tell you that a lot of the people they're making up have stayed orders and they're and they're on probation and just by our conversations i had a detailed conversation with them recently to see what patterns they were seeing and from both from the organized and just the general population and commit something of these violations. and also, just the feedback from the store is like want to know what union square, what the different corporate and? of the ving mom and pop stores and the smaller businesses like what are they hearing from them because they have community meetings also. the main thing i hear is also that some of the stores, they have really hard timekeeping employees employed because they

feel unsafe. [please stand by]

>> like what happens down the

road, if it's being disbound to a some of them are committing other crimes so when you think of organized retail, it's just a group of people that know each other and they plan retail theft and they're very sophisticated. they bring in stolen cars, they change the plates and they'll go get a store. we've had success with the stores. many times they know who some of these people are, they'll call us ahead of time we'll track them to other locations

in the bay area. we'll track them and do cases on them. >> thank you. i don't really know what to say in terms of, i mean, i'll withhold my comments at this point. >> thank you supervisor stefani. i just want to see if you guys have statistics on the number of people that have been arrested related to this type of shoplifting and how many of those are repeat offender. if you don't have that today, you can follow up with us. we have adult and juvenile probation. so is there something else you want to wrap up with. >> thank you, deputy chief. so just quickly, the slide that's in front of you is from

2019 and 2020. obviously, you can tell that with major timelines of san francisco being closed to retail and other things. and just so we are clear, what we are able to gather are basically camera stores, department stores, drug stores. grocery stores, liquor stores, and supermarkets. so if you have a business that falls out of that or listed in the police report because it doesn't fall into one of the major categories, that may not be captured in this slide. as you can see, i'll just use the central district because it has union square, so it's easy to end to notice. i mean, that's a huge drop between 2019 and 2020 for shoplifting incidents for those districts. so this was just to kind of highlight that, you know, obviously there has been a significant drop in most of the areas with the exception of the three. you can see northern, mission,

and angleside. next slide. and then, lastly, this is incidents and events just for the year 2020 for each district. and, again, just for that single year based on the stats. again, as you can see, those numbers going back, i'll just use central because it's the largest. one of the things to note depending on where an incident does happen, obviously, some areas have security versus other areas. for instance, if you took the westfield mall, although not completely open during 2020, they have a lot of security that either detains or stops which also assists in arrests. they have much better video systems compared to like

japantown. so like when we see or investigators see some of our officers on the street who are familiar with people, they're able to match up a lot of these incidents based on either vehicles, photos of video of the actual crimes and also obviously with the help of security from some of these areas. then, that next slide, i think we've taken a lot of your questions. we're happy to answer anymore in regards to that as it affects not only the patrol side, but the investigative side if there's anymore? >> no. thank you, commander. we did see the number of arrests. i would like to see the number of repeat offenders i'd like to see how many of those are

related to organized crimes. we're going to move to mr. david campos from the district attorney's office. thank you. mr. campos. >> thank you very much, supervisor stefani, char mar, vice chair stefani, supervisor haney, chief of staff for the san francisco district attorney's office. i have from our staff a kayla rebenowits who is going to run the slides so we can give her access and she can share the presentation. >> mr. benowitz already has the access. >> great. so mckayla, go ahead.

we are grateful that we're having this hearing, this discussion. i think it's really important for the citizens of san francisco to hear about what's happening and the work that's being done and we're especially proud of the relationship and the partnership that we have with the police department and with a number of the players that you heard from today who were all working very closely to address what's happening in the city. i'm going to begin with the next slide which is chair's information which we received from the san francisco police department. so if we can go to slide number two. >> and if i can just real quickly jump in, if we can change the display settings for the slides to full screen. >> okay. so mckayla, if we can do that. >> sorry. it's showing full screen on my

computer. >> it's been corrected on our end. thank you. >> okay. wonderful and, what i note is that obviously when this kind of theft happens, you feel that there has been an increase in the city. the reality is with that as noted, the number that the police department has on shoplifting and petty theft show a decrease about 1/3 decrease in the number of incidents that have been reported. whether or not that's actually a reflection of what's happening out there, it's not entirely clear, but we wanted to note that to you. the one thing that's important to provide in terms of context and we know we worked closely with the police department to make sure that there are arrests, the number of arrests actually, you know, identifying

a suspect is really critical for us to be able to do the work. and, unfortunately, here, as you can look at the numbers in the blue, only about 7% of petty theft incidents actually result in an arrest. so, for us we have a situation that most of these cases don't end up on our desk, if you will and, of course, with covid, there are challenged that come with arresting individuals and one of the things that we are doing to work with the police department and our business partners on that front is to identify those frequent fliers, if you will and that's something that has been very useful especially since we

created the community liaison that designs a team of prosecutors and staff to each supervisor district and we're finding that community liaison team works with the businesses, works with the police department to identify those frequent fliers, if you will and, in fact, has worked to make arrests in some of those cases. if we can go to the next slide. and, again, this shows the trend in, you know, what we saw in the prior slide that has been a decline in the number of arrests that have been percented to our office and the two trends, its blue one basically our cases where petty theft is the most serious charge and as supervisor stefani noted, you know, there are other things that go when

petty theft occurs including violence and so you can see in the orange the cases where there are other kinds of crimes or incidents that occur. if we can go to the next slide. and, this really goes to the crux of what i think has been discussed here today that even though we only see a small number of cases in terms of petty theft. what we have tried to focus or work on, supervisors is to figure out how we address the organized crime and the networks that are behind the petty theft that is happening in the city. and this is a team-based approach that we have put together that includes prosecutors in our office, that

includes crime analysts and also investigators. by investigators, we obviously mean police department investigators, but also our own investigators in the district attorney's office. normally, arrest warrants are issued by the police department, but as we have seen with a number of cases in i think the wallgreens representative noted that there are dozens of investigations that we are right now have undertaken in conjunction with the police department and the business partners and those investigations and those cases are the result of this team effort. if we can go to the next slide. you look at in terms of your strategic hot spots, but it's very neighborhood specific and one of the benefits of having

community liaisons is that it allows us to go in depth in a granular way about what's happening in every one of the stores and i'll take wallgreens as an example. as the wallgreens representative noted, they hired a consultant to assist in their efforts. we review cases and engage in data mining to see if we see trends in some of the incidents that have occurred throughout different stores in the city, we also look at in terms of identifying suspects, we look at social media, we look at phone records and so a lot of different investigative work and tools are used to identify the people of interest in a given case. if we can go to the next slide

and so one case study that i think has been used and it's essentially the model that we follow is that we having identified key players that are targeted retail and, in this case, it's the organized retail incident where we focused in the last couple of years on individuals that were targeting high-end retail and what we saw in different stores is that this theft in these areas, in these stores, these high end stores, the rate of theft was actually increasing if we can go to the next slide. so we used different tools, as i noted, we worked closely with the police department. we used strategies where we look at where incidents are happening. a lot of times these

individuals use social network tools to communicate with each other. we also partner with other agencies and i think you saw in the presentation from cbs some of the arrests that were made under george gascon and also chasa budine has been the same strategy that's guided this work. next slide. that's just some of the stories that we dealt with. and, as you can see, this isn't something that's just specific to san francisco. what's happening with these cases is actually a national problem and they're actually regional trends that show that many of these individuals are actually coordinating their work. next slide. in that particular case, as you can see, there were a number of incident reports that we've

reviewed. we interviewed a number of witnesses and the one tool that we are using which has been a limited tool because of covid is the grand jury which can serve as an investigative tool for purposes of getting an indictment. we are right now awaiting for the courts to impanel a new grand jury which we hope can be a useful tool with respect to the cases that are pending. and this is the final slide. something that supervisor safai noted is these charges. we are mindful, supervisor, in every one of these cases what the limitations are, whether it's because of pop 47 or something else and we are actually strategically figuring out the best way to approach a case. i don't really want to get into the specifics of a case, but i will tell you that there was a

recent set of robberies involving scooters in the city and county of san francisco and we worked with the police department, with our own investigators to eventually make an arrest in that case. and, again, that was an example where you had an individual that had been engaged in the theft of different units. if you focused only on one unit, that wouldn't meet the threshold, but if you actually aggregated the theft, it gave you more leverage in terms of what you can charge. so that's where we are. we very proud of this work. i think that we are i think at this point working on multiple investigations. i think it's fair to say there are dozens of investigations and they're all focusing on organized crime and, you know, i think they mentioned 85% of their loss comes from that kind

of activity. we're not sure if that's the right number, but we know that the people that we need to prioritize are the people that are essentially making a living doing this and that are targeting these stores and we're proud that we have taken the time to work with companies like wallgreens using their partners like alto to go into these stores and interview witnesses and i'm sorry to hear about the incident with supervisor stefani. and we would be more than happy to follow up on that case. you know, we want to send a very clear message that we're taking this seriously and i'm proud of the work that we're doing to make sure that, you know, we target these individuals in the same way that they're targeting this industry. so i'll leave it at that and

happy to take your questions. supervisor, i think you're muted. >> supervisor safai: okay. i just had this great speech and it got muted. i don't know if i'm supposed to call you supervisor campos, i'm glad you worked in the part on organized crime. my question is and i didn't see that, maybe i missed it in the slides, how many arrests have been made related to repeat how many have been prougt and how many cases have been prosecuted in the last two years. i know we've seen a dip because of covid in terms of some types

of and then the number of wallgreens shutting down has just been shocking and so just want to hear from you all and i'm glad to hear you're working in partnership and you're continuing some of the work that was done prior over the last couple of years, but i just, can you give us a better picture of how many people have been prosecuted and how you've been able to use the aggregated arrests to bring these people down. i know you showed the map of the united states where this is happening. or when walgreens shows chicago, new york, san francisco, and l.a. and we're an outlier, something's different about here and we need to figure out a way to get to the bottom of it and can't just be prop 47 because l.a. has to deal with the same thing. >> i think i can tell you that we have dozens of cases that

are ongoing right now. i can come back to you and give you a more specific number and what number involves repeat offenders. in stores, it's in fact some of the same players and the one thing that i think we have recognized is the sense of frustration that many workers have and this is something that our prosecutors and our investigators have reported to me as they have gone to these stores to investigate people, you know, often times, they feel why report it because nothing has happened before and as frustrating as that is, the reality is the only way we're going to make an arrest is, in

fact, it is reported and so you have to take the time to make sure that people understand that we're taking it seriously and that's one of the benefits of having our community liaison program is that we're trying to do that in ere one of the eleven teams and every district supervisor because every district even though it has some of the same challenges, the situation might be a little different and the players might be different and often times it takes having that personal relationship with the police department, with the district attorney for people to come forward. >> so, before i call on supervisor stefani, i'll just say the police just shows statistics on the number of arrests related to this type of crime. it would be good to know from those arrests what the outcomes were. probation, so on and so forth because, again, supervisor stefani might of known this in her background, but i'm absolutely shocked to hear that 85% based on their estimates

are organized crimes. that to me says it takes a much more coordinated effort between the police, the district attorney and potentially adult probation who's also going to speak here today because we have to figure out a way to break this up. and i too have witnessed it in my own store, you know, 15 juveniles came with garbage bags and one stood outside and within two minutes, they're all walking out with stuff in their hands robbing with impunity and this is something that's happening over and over again. it would be good to know how many people were arrested and then we're going to follow up with the police and then we're going to also ask the district attorney to tell us and you all to give us numbers on how many people have actually been prosecuted and what is the outcome of that prosecution. so i'm glad that you were

prepared to talk about the organized crime. >> if i may, supervisor, in terms of the prosecution, the one thing that i would note is that even though with have filed numerous cases, most of those cases, the prosecutions are still pending because the courts have not been allowing trials. in a typical year, the office has 250, 270 trials, i think we've had, you know, probably a little bit over 20 trials and those have focused on the more serious, you know, violent crimes and so, but the one thing to note is that, right now we actually have about 500 cases that are set for trial as soon as the courts open. so, as you can imagine, we're getting ready for that change. that's one of the reasons we're

in negotiations with the mayor. that's the reason why we have the level of staffing. these are cases where if you don't have an expedited trial, that could lead to a dismissal and none of us want to see that. so we're getting ready top ramp up for that. >> supervisor safai: okay. we'll follow up so you guys can see what's happening. supervisor stefani. >> supervisor stefani: thank you, supervisor safai. and you forgot another one of david's titles which is "vice chair." >> thank you, supervisor. >> supervisor stefani: yeah. i had a question. you mentioned that 7% of the or the police made arrests and 7% of the thefts and i'm wondering if you have an aggregate number of what that is do you know how many cases that is.

>> i do. i do think i have that number and let me see if i can find the exact number, supervisor and maybe by staff -- >> it was 800, what we had on our end was 820 and 1380 in 2019. >> supervisor stefani: and so, out of those, this goes along with -- do we know how many of those cases were actually charged. >> i don't think we have an exact number. i think that we would divide up

the action into groups if you will. there is the cases that we would treat as individual cases where it is your typical sort of your kind of i don't know individual shoplifting incident, you know, homeless person or someone like that and then you have the other group which is the more serious one where it's organized crime, you know, and so we can get back to you with both. >> supervisor stefani: right. and i think that's good for us to have the data with regards to these 800 or 1,300 cases that the police are arresting or are bringing to the d.a.'s office to understand what's being charged. what does that look like in terms of the charges filed? in terms of organized and repeat offenders or those that are, you know, you mentioned

homeless and then what is happening to those cases that are charged? are they going to programs? are they being diverted? are they being let out? is there any time in custody? to get an understanding and to really understand the picture of the 7% that you mentioned and to understand the number, 800, 1,300 cases, whatever, what then is happening with that? and, also, we know a lot of those cases are the repeat people or the organized crime that we've been discussing, what is happening and i think to get a full sense of that is how many were pled and i know the courts and covid, we haven't had access to courtrooms like we have had in the past, but how many of them are out on pre-trials. what is that universe look like? i think that would be helpful for everyone to get a clear picture of, you know, what's being dismissed, what's being diverted, who's out on

pretrial. how many cases does somebody have and i think we can get a better idea on how to tackle this if we have a clear picture of what is actually going on. >> supervisor, happy to provide that and these are all misdemeanors by the way, so it's petty theft. we will get that to you and not just the charges, but also what the dispositions were and, you know, what individuals are going to programs and what the outcome is. >> supervisor stefani: okay. thank you. >> thank you. >> supervisor safai: and also just to clarify that, how many of those are being prosecuted under aggregate charges? so people are creating theft at future am locations, it would be good to know how many of those you're looking at to bring up aggregate charges.

>> okay. >> supervisor safai: okay. great. supervisor haney. >> supervisor haney: thank you. and thank you chief of staff campos. i'll just choose one of your titles and go with it there. i wanted to ask, we talked a lot about the organized crime and the importance of focuses on that and the investigations in collaboration. i wanted to know a little bit more about what you all do for the folks who are not part of organized crime. you know, i know that this is petty theft or misdemeanor. what are some of the ways that, you know, you can help to get those folks whether effective consequences and/or other ways of addressing whatever it is that led them to be in that position. how are you dealing with the

folks who are coming in who are maybe repeatedly on a regular basis engaging in this type of petty theft even for their own constant sort of survival in some ways? what does that look like from your perspective? [please stand by]

[please stand by] can work collaboratively to help stop the spread of organized retail crime. so thank you for the opportunity to speak today. happy to answer any questions. but please know that we are

willing to roll up our sleeves with each and every one of you to solve this problem. we have information and data we're happy to share. we're happy to bring in subject matter experts with other companies to talk about this issue who have stores in san francisco. and we really believe that together we can find solutions based on what we've already done as an industry, based on what we're continuing to advocate for as an industry and looking forward to future collaborations to combat organized retail crimes in san francisco and california. so, thank you. >> supervisor safai, your microphone is muted. >> sorry. thank you, ms. michelin. i would ask you the same question i asked the other representative retailers. what do you think it is about san francisco that makes us

very much an epicenter for retail organized crime? >> you know, obviously i'm not the expert as some of the other folks that you have present. but in looking at national statistics, california has three cities that are in the top 10 for organized retail crime. los angeles is at the top of the list. san francisco rates number five. and then sacramento is actually rated number 10. i think part of it is -- it's the geography of the city. i think that people look for easy ways to get in and out. i think you heard from law enforcement that you have folks that are very sophisticated in what they do. and then what i'ves been hearing from our club from an organized retail crime side is that it does come down to they are finding folks who they can do the dirty work for them. and so when you're hearing juveniles being targeted and

seeing homeless and people that need $100 that they might be paying someone to go into a store and steal things with a list that they need to steal, these larger cities are where you are seeing the most uptick in organized crime. >> thank you. colleagues, any questions for ms. michelin? all right. thank you. we'll follow up with you. what was the senate bill you said that was making its way through the legislature? >> so there is two. there is assembly bill 331. that is to extend the funding for the organized retail crimes task force. and then also some of the statutes that were out of ab-1065 passed in 2018. and then senate bill 301, which

is by senator nancy skinner. that bill is a two-year bill so we'll be debating that next year. that is specific to the online marketplace and organized retail crime. >> got it. >> thank you so much. now we'll hear from chief provision officer catie miller. are you here, ms. miller? >> i'm here. good afternoon. i will put my slides up myself. can you let me know when i have the ability to do that? >> you already have the [inaudible] right now. can you see my screen? >> we can see it but it might be best if you can put it into presenter mode. there we go. >> does that work? oh. thank you, everybody. i will be actually quite quick

with my presentation today and happy to answer any questions. we are very much a tiny part of our conversation that is happening and i just want to really echo what folks have said. this is a really important conversation, the information coming out and being shared is really critical. i'm going to share this small part of it that relates to our juvenile system and i'll start with just showing what our numbers have looked like in terms of juvenile arrest coming into the juvenile system over the last two years, from january 29 through april 2021. and i want to show you a couple of high points. high level points. one is we have on the left with the orange line, what we would kind of consider our prepandemic average in terms of the number of cases being present every month for a combination of petty theft, shoplifting and organized retail staff. and then you can see starting

in the march of 2020, what the average looked like from that window from then until now. you can obviously see the dramatic drop-off. this is not just related to these three charges. but these three types of activity that's [inaudible] in all the crimes coming to us. it's also very much reflected in these kinds of charges because they are associated with stores being open. and with people going into stores. so you can see the dramatic decrease. prior to the pandemic, we were seeing an average of eight juvenile arrests or referrals into the juvenile system with organized retail theft and then you see it dropping off to an average of two cases per month coming to us. of all of these cases combined, 15% of them were for organized retail theft.

the others are petty theft or shoplifting. i do want to just be transparent about two data limitations here. one is that we have very robust record stealing laws that govern our juvenile system for a number of reasons. but that means when a case is [inaudible], we don't have the ability to access that data and include it here. this does not necessarily expect the full universe of these cases as they come through in this time period. if we had cases sealed by the court which would generally happen at the end of probation or in the last appearance for that young person, those numbers wouldn't be carried into this analysis. and then i also want to note that this does not include the robberies that the penal code 211 charges that was referenced earlier. if a young person is engaged that turns from a shoplift into

a [inaudible] on a security guard, that is actually a robbery. it is not in these three categories. but when you see on this slide is the aggregate that characterize these behaviors. in terms of repeat referrals, we went through four other cases of that first slide. and looked at any instances where we saw a young person coming back. there was 150 rogers on that flag, representing 126 unique minors for that time period, of those charges. of all of those, we saw 11 young people coming back to us again. there was a 9% return. for those young people, they had an average of two referrals. the highest number any of them had was three during this time per. coming back to these behaviors. and i want to talk briefly

about that, interventions that the juvenile justice system offers for these kinds of offenses. in san francisco, most misdemeanors and also some of our lower-level felonies at the point of arrest, the police can bring a young person directly to carc, or community assessment and resource center. that has been the practice in san francisco for over 20 years so it's diversion [inaudible]. there is a probation officer on site at carc saols they are involved in the oversight and support of the young bhaoem go to carc but it is a young person arrested purely on a misdemeanor and brought to carc, they generally will stay there in between that probation officer and primarily the carc case managers, they will support and determine the interventions for that youth. very rarely would a misdemeanor like that make it into juvenile court in san francisco. more even up to our central probation department to make a charge -- to forward to the d.a. if a young person comes in on a

felony charge, they can still go to carc on their way in, if it is not an at least requires detention. but the case itself still gets forwarded to probation and then we still have an obligation to bring it to the d.a.'s office for charging. but from a lot of this behavior, you'll see that carc is that frontline intervention here in san francisco. generally if a young person is coming in for petty theft or shoplifting, then i will be a reflection essay and then going to the life skills course that they refer to through carc. we values in san francisco, juvenile system "make it right," which is a restorative justice program of the d.a.'s office. it was one of the people who helped start that program when i worked at the d.a.'s office and it can take some of these cases, generally for low-level felony offenses but it is purely sort of justice. young person and harmed parties facilitated working outs a plan together. and it's really ideally for cases where there is an identifiable victim.

generally where retail cases could come in would be for more mom and pop type stores where there is an identifiable kind of small business owner. there's not a lot of cases of this type that go through make it right, but i did it include because it does take some of those thefts and make it viet a very heavily structured program. it is actually being evaluated by california labs and it is actually showing significantly positive results in terms of recitivism for kids who go through that. versus kids who go through the traditional system. so i want to highlight that. sometimes what feels like a step out of the system actually has better long-term results for our kids in terms of their ongoing behavior. obviously some kids who go through these arrests will come on to probation and will be supervised by probation. and the intervention attendees are the life skills program operated by huckleberry east

program for us and for carc. what's called b.t. express, which is a program of the success center, nonprofit success center. takes kids through what's ro*fed with a community service and curriculum for this kind of activity and then a class that we use for some of our kids. for us, we tend to be relatively small number cases of kids coming in and don't see a whole lot of them coming back to us on subsequent cases. i'm happy to take any questions. >> thank you, ms. miller. i think that the thing that the slide that jumped out the me the most is the small in number, but manageable number of youth that are involved in this and then those that would be being prayed on by organized crime to be involved in, you

know, repeat activities and jeopardizing themselves. i would imagine that most of those youth are, you know, more lower income or indigent and being taken advantage of because of their financial situation. can you talk about that more and what you can do to rehabilitate, because we certainly don't want to incarcerate young people at that age. we really want to help rehabilitate them and get them. >> the cases that would end up likely in court and on probation and are with us serving in that intervention and supervision role. it really would likely be more those robberies that was mentioned. generally if a young person is coming through and just to shoplift. if they're not stealing large quantities, large value of goods, right, or there is no

kind of assaultive behavior, and rival a robbery, those cases likely will have a lighter hand for us. s so what you are talking action, do tend to be the cases where we see more of that behavior and they will much more likely wind up working with probation for the entirety of what they would write. that would be an in-depth assessment of someone's risks and needs and full case plan and full court report. it could be a whole range for them. but by and large, the things you see kids do in the city is shoplifting. it's hard to remember that most kids who come through on something like this, we will never see again. and that is like the most important thing to remember about kids. they are coming through in a repeat way, for more serious behavior. it really is going to be the full weight of the way that the

juvenile justice system starts kids, including ongoing court appearances and probation. in some cases for kids who have been engaged in repeat behavior and we need to have an intervene and winding up out of home placement for some period of time. it depends on each young person's particularly needs and risks. >> what percentage do you think are taking advantage of organized crime? >> it's not something that we can look at specific cases and happy to follow up on that. i will say on the whole, i came to this department from the d.a.'s office. i feel like we saw a lot more of that for our youngest results than we did for our kids. but i'm happy to come back with them in more information. >> one of strategies that we're

looking at is having more community-based organizations and not necessarily having police officers, but groups like urban alchemy be present to protect these and one of benefits of that is that very often, particularly when it comes to opportunity shoplifting [inaudible] situation with juveniles, these are members from the community so they identify and know these young people or know these individuals. and that in and of itself is a significant deterrent. did you want to comment on that?

>> those interventions can make a real difference. >> we had a similar situation particularly because we have two bart stations in our district where a lot of juveniles were stealing technology. smart phones. laptops. other things. and immediately they were able to identify a good majority of them. and more to reach out to them and their families and let them know that they are aware that this is happening to deter the crime. and i think when it comes to happening, that is the most effective way to deter that behavior so we're -- we're definitely interested in increasing that investment in more community -- what we like to call community ambassadors or folks from the community like urban alchemy and street violence intervention that can

be present and identify individuals from the community to deter that crime. >> absolutely. >> great. colleagues, any questions for chief juvenile probation officer miller? ok. thank you so much for being here today and we will follow up. lastly, we have chief probation officer fletcher. >> good afternoon, supervisor safai. thank you very much for the opportunity to provide some of our data around this very important topic. the research director for adult probation is joining me and she will put up the slides for us. all right.

anything -- tara is going to start off with providing the data that she was able to pull specifically regarding commercial petty theft and shoplifting adult probation clients. >> thank you, chief fletcher. good afternoon, chair mar, supervisors safai, haney and stefani. thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. as chief fletcher mentioned, i'm the director of research for adult probation. and we were asked to compile information on petty theft and shoplifting trends for 2019 and 2020. so, we're actually going to present data that we've compiled for a three-year period of 2018 through 2020. and overall, we're going to be showing you data that represents sort of a picture of our client population as it relates to petty theft and shoplifting and then show you arrest events for theft and commercial shoplifting.

and these are some of the projects that we included misdemeanors and felonies and talk about that more when we get to the second slide. the first i believe that you see on the left hand side of the screen, just gives you an idea what our three-year average population is. for adult probation so we have about 5500 clients for the three-year period as an average. to the right of that, you can see the percentage of our clients who have experienced one of these arrest events in each of the three calendar years.

>> you're watching "coping with covid-19" with chris manners. today's special guest is katie birdbaum. >> hi, i'm chris manners and you're watching "coping with covid-19." my guest is katie birdbalm. she's here today to talk about

san francisco city programs which transforms city streets into car-free spaces. the program's beginning to start up again. ms. birdbalm, welcome to the show. >> thank you, chris, i'm excited to be here. >> before we get into the details, can you give us a brief overview of how it works. >> yeah. it's san francisco's open streets program and it was founded in 2008 as a mayoral initiative under mayor gavin newsome the now governor. the climate change equity program. to be able to transform our streets. the community spaces allow communities historically underserved and suffer from higher rates of preventable diseases can be connected to healthy eating, active living activities and really connect to the rest of the city as well and so that's how we got

started in 2008. >> i know that some small scale events started up again in april. could you police man where they were. how they managed safety and what they managed to do? >> yeah. absolutely. we still are in the waning days of the pandemic. we're there, so we do have some safety protocols in place. but we really were able to bring back sunday streets this april. we celebrated the opening of a biking and walking path in the bayview indian basin shoreline. we were able to offer fitness classes and things like that as well as covid-19 testing. along the water front and a way for people to basically celebrate our new walking and biking path and be able to get outside and exercise while still being totally safe in

terms of covid compliance and plenty of social distancing and ability to control who and where you're around. >> that's great. what can we look forward to in may? i've heard there's going to be new ways to celebrate carnival and cinco de mayo. >> yeah. so one thing we've been partnering with san francisco and carnival. there are a lot of large festivals. they've had to change some of their programming to compliance needs and the health and safety needs of our community, but that does not stop the fabulous spirit of carnival coming to san francisco. but we're going to continue our partnership this year and they're going to continue a health and wellness fair. so they're able to access the critical covid-19 resources and also be able to experience some

beautiful cultural performances in a safe, compliant format. we're able to do that with them again this year, so we're really excited to bring that program back out and we're helping offer some fitness classes around their health and safety fairs. that's going to be a beautiful way to celebrate spring and celebrate the culture that san francisco is known for around the world and then also with that, we're going to be doing a bike ride with them on cinco de mayo, so helping support the latino taskforce food hub and they're organizing a bike ride and active living. we're going to be supporting that and riding out with carnival on cinco de mayo. >> that's cool. we haven't talked about walkway weekends yet. is that an ongoing event? >> yeah, so walkway weekend is one of the anchor sites for

this year. so, you know, as part of covid compliance, we're not able to do big events, but we're doing a lot of smaller activation city rides and walkway weekends in chinatown is one of our anchor sites throughout the year. so we were able to access grant avenue car-free, that's from california to washington car-free every saturday from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and it's full with kind of the beautiful culture and art that is chinatown all the time. kind of a fun way to experience that with plenty of extra room in the street. also, as little extra room for us to have things like a lion dance. there's an exhibition that's there every saturday. we're also going to be offering some fitness classes as well as other cultural programming as we're allowed to do it as things open up. >> these events take a lot of planning.

i require a variety of resources to get off the ground. i know you work closely with the sfmta and the department of public health to organize them, but could you talk a little bit about the partnerships that make the sunday streets program possible and explain why they're so important? >> yeah. absolutely. sunday streets really at its core, you know, i work for a nonprofit called "livable city" and we hold the city streets program and at the center of it, it's been a partnership program. so they're transforming miles anywhere from 1 to 4 miles of city streets into car-free community spaces filling those with community groups, nonprofits, business activities and just kind of unique san francisco treasures wanting to bring their specialness to the streets. it really has always been a partnership program. it's quite literally magic when all of these streets can transform within just a couple of, you know, we end up doing it in about 30 to 45 minutes

where we transform 1 to 4 miles of streets into car-free community spaces. every city agency supports it as well as hundreds of community partners. it's a whole family of partners that are stepping forward to make sure that that space and that opportunity is being offered to the community in san francisco. >> could you talk about the four concepts of sunday streets. i understand you have something in the planning stages for october and, do you think our residents will be ready for large events by then? >> well, we do have something brewing for october and very much, you know, to answer your question, are people going to be ready to be together and in crowds again? that is part of our strategy for the rides together season as we are starting now with small, like i said, very small comfortable, safe format with not that many people at it, so people can start getting used

to being out and about again, right and that it is an activity that can be safe and enjoyable and really just start getting their feet wet in that type of community activity. so the hope is that, you know, we are able to throughout the spring and summer and into the early parts of the fall really get people used to being again in community again for ability for us to be able to come back in full force, sometime in the late fall. so we're looking at october is what we're looking at and the hopes is that we can actually create miles of streets for us to come out and celebrate in. you know, we're obviously going to be watching the public health directives and as they unfold and follow them and make sure we're keeping all the community members safe and we'll make adjustments as needed. but the way things are trending right now, we should be able to

be out together by the fall in a way that looks and feels a lot more like it used to for sunday streets. >> i'm really excited to see the city open up again and what you're doing with the sunday streets program is promising. and i want to thank you for coming on the show today. this has been really encouraging. >> thank you, chris. we're excited to see everybody out in the streets sometime when it's safe. >> thanks again. that's it for this episode. we'll be back with more updates shortly. you've been watching "coping with covid-19." for sfgov tv, i'm chris manners. thanks for watching. >> the market is one of our vehicles for reaching out to public and showing them how to prepare delicious, simple food. people are amazed that the

library does things like that. biblio bistro is a food education program. it brings such joy to people. it teaches them life skills that they can apply anywhere, and it encourages them to take care of themselves. my name is leaf hillman, and i'm a librarian, and biblio bistro is my creation. i'm a former chef, and i have been incubating this idea for many years. we are challenged to come up with an idea that will move the library into the future. this inspired me to think, what can we do around cooking?

what can i do around cooking? we were able to get a cart. the charlie cart is designed to bring cooking to students in elementary students that has enough gear on it to teach 30 students cooking. so when i saw that, i thought bingo, that's what we're missing. you can do cooking classes in the library, but without a kitchen, it's difficult. to have everything contained on wheels, that's it. i do cooking demonstrations out at the market every third wednesday. i feature a seafood, vegetable, and i show people how to cook the vegetable. >> a lot of our residents live in s.r.o.s, single resident occupancies, and they don't have access to full kitchens. you know, a lot of them just have a hot plate, a microwave, and the thing that biblio

bistro does really well is cook food accessible in season and make it available that day. >> we handout brochures with the featured recipe on the back. this recipe features mushrooms, and this brochure will bring our public back to the library. >> libraries are about a good time. >> i hired a former chef. she's the tickle queen at the ramen shop in rockwood. we get all ages. we get adults and grandparents and babies, and, you know, school-age kids, and it's just been super terrific. >> i was a bit reluctant because i train teachers and

adults. i don't train children. i don't work with children, and i find it very interesting and a bit scary, but working here really taught me a lot, you know, how easily you can influence by just showing them what we have, and it's not threatening, and it's tasty and fun. i make it really fun with kids because i don't look like a teacher. >> in the mix, which is our team center, we have programs for our kids who are age 13 to 18, and those are very hands on. the kids often design the menu. all of our programs are very interactive. >> today, we made pasta and garlic bread and some sauce. usually, i don't like bell pepper in my sauce, but i used

bell pepper in my sauce, and it complemented the sauce really well. i also grated the garlic on my bread. i never thought about that technique before, but i did it, and it was so delicious. >> we try to teach them techniques where they can go home and tell their families, i made this thing today, and it was so delicious. >> they're kind of addicted to these foods, these processed foods, like many people are. i feel like we have to do what we can to educate people about that. the reality is we have to live in a world that has a lot of choices that aren't necessarily good for you all the time. >> this is interesting, but it's a reaction to how children are brought up. it is fast-food, and the apple

is a fast-food, and so that sort of changes the way they think about convenience, how eating apple is convenient. >> one of the things that i love about my program out at the market is the surprise and delight on people's faces when they finally taste the vegetable. it's been transformative for some people. they had never eaten those vegetables before, but now, they eat them on a regular basis. >> all they require is a hot plate and a saute pan, and they realize that they're able to cook really healthy, and it's also tasty. >> they also understand the importance of the connection that we're making. these are our small business owners that are growing our food and bringing it fresh to the market for them to consume, and then, i'm helping them consume it by teaching them how to cook. >> it connects people to the food that they're buying. >> the magic of the classes in

the children's center and the team center is that the participants are cooking the food themselves, and once they do that, they understand their connection to the food, to the tools, and it empowers them. >> we're brokering new experiences for them, so that is very much what's happening in the biblio bistro program. >> we are introducing kids many times to new vocabulary. names of seasonings, names of vegetables, names of what you call procedures. >> i had my little cooking experience. all i cooked back then was grilled cheese and scrambled eggs. now, i can actually cook curry and a few different thing zblz . >> and the parents are amazed that what we're showing them to cook is simple and inexpensive.

i didn't know this was so easy to make. i've only bought it in the market. those comments have been amazing, and yeah, it's been really wonderful. >> we try to approach everything here with a well, just try it. just try it once, and then, before you know it, it's gone. >> a lot of people aren't sure how to cook cauliflower or kale or fennel or whatever it is, and leah is really helpful at doing that. >> i think having someone actually teaching you here is a great experience. and it's the art of making a meal for your family members

and hope that they like it. >> i think they should come and have some good food, good produce that is healthy and actually very delicious. >> cooking is one of my biggest passions, to be able to share, like, my passion with others, and skills, to h >> today's special guest is dr. andrew tanner. >> you're watching "covid with covid-19". today our guest is dr. andrea tanner at san francisco's command center that is located in the musconi convention center. she's here to talk about the city's high volume vaccination sites and san francisco's vaccination efforts. dr. tanner, welcome to the show. >> hi, thank you, it's good to be here with you. >> let's start by talking about

the high-volume vaccination centers and the new mission neighborhood center. how many centers are we setting up? and where are they located and how many people will they be able to vaccinate? >> so we're setting up three high-volume sites. so we tried to locate them in some of our highest prevalence neighborhoods that are easiest to access. so we have one located here at musconi center at the south of market area. another at city college of san francisco which is in the oceanview and ingleside neighborhood. and the third one that is coming down the pipe is our produce market that is in bayview. so as far as the number of people that we can vaccinate, we are hoping that once we have adequate vaccine supply we'll have the capacity to vaccinate over 10,000 san franciscans a day combined across san francisco. as i'm sure that you have heard in the news and other settings,

vaccine supplies have been a big challenge. but our goal is to try to make sure that we have the infrastructure in place so that when vaccines are available that we can -- we can get it into arms as quickly as possible. we also though have some other sites in addition to the large-volume sites and the mission neighborhood sites, for example, set up in an effort to expand the vaccine access across the bayview as well as the other neighborhoods with the highest infection rates for covid-19. and it does have limited access to health care services. so that site, when our vaccine increases, we may expand to have 200 to 400 vaccinations a day. and we have through the department of public health a network of community clinics and neighborhoods across the city that are providing vaccines. so we're trying to give people as many options and in whatever way is comfortable for them to get vaccine when our supply increases. so we're trying to have a menu of options available so that we can get people vaccinated as

quickly as possible. >> i think that the city college location has a lot of capacity as well, right? >> yes, they can do 3,000 plus and right now it's limited by the vaccine supply. but, yes, it's got the capacity to do quite a few patients. >> that brings me to my next question, where are we getting the vaccines from and who is providing them to the state and to the city? >> so a really good question. so it's distributed by the federal government who procures the vaccine and it goes to each of the states. the states then distribute the vaccine to large multicounty health systems. so kaiser permanente and the university of california, and the remainder goes to the county health departments. and those health departments then can disseminate to other -- to other entities. unfortunately, we don't determine how many vaccines we receive per week, so while the supply is still very low, the state has been determining our

allot mament. that's based mostly on population size, and somewhat on the number of health care workers that are registered as working in that county. but we take any of the vaccines that we're offered and we're hoping that the supply will pick up soon. >> do we know how many residents have been vaccinated so far? and as we move forward, how are people going to know when it's their turn and how to go about making an appointment? >> yeah, so the health department and the hospitals and clinics within san francisco have administered over 130,000 vaccines per date that that is a significant portion with those with second doses. this is a higher number than the state recorded number of san franciscan residents who have been vaccinated so far. because the majority of people vaccinated to date have been health care workers in san francisco. and more people work here than live here, we have a disproportionate responsibility for vaccines relative to our population size. as far as knowing when it's your

turn and how to get an appointment. we have set up a website at sfgov/getnotified and people can check their priority status, so based on your age and type of employment. and sign up for an email or text message when your priority group is authorized to be vaccinated. there will be links to sites where you can make an appointment. as we get more and more sitings online and as our vaccine ramps up, that's the area, so sfgov/getnotified and you can see what groups are available. right now because the supply is so limited, there can be limited vaccine appointments but keep checking back and as we get more and more supply, and more and more appointments will open up. it is though for us and for the system in general important metric to track how equitably the vaccine is deliberated to ensure that it's going to neighborhoods and populations that have experienced the

highest prevalence of mortality. and the highest prevalence of mortality and our interventions for the covid-19 response has sought to intervene to try to reduce disparities in health care. so we are anticipating that these efforts are going to help us to advocate to receive more vaccine quickly from the state once the systems are implemented. >> can you pick which vaccine you get? and do you think that we'll be using the johnson & johnson version shortly? >> so currently there's two available. one is made by pfizer and the other is made by moderna and they require two doses each. and the johnson & johnson is the newest to apply for authorization and it is being evaluated by the f.d.a. obviously, we have to wait for the f.d.a. to give it an emergency authorization before we can give that vaccine. but it has so far in the data that has been reported has been shown to be very effective and only requires one dose, which is

great. so all of the vaccines are distributed to local entities and we don't get to pick which supplies are distributed to us. they make an allocation and we receive whatever they give to us. so in an effort to make sure that we have as many appointments available as possible, we just assign -- as you register, you original for the appointment and whatever vaccine that is available is the one that you would receive. the good news is that all of the vaccines have been shown to have great effectiveness in preventing death from covid-19 as well as great safety protocols. and on a personal note i work also as an emergency physician at san francisco general and i received a second dose of the vaccine and i have not had any problems, which is great. i had a little arm soreness and that was it. so, you know, i think that we're very excited that we've seen such good results with the vaccine so far. >> well, that's excellent. well, as we wrap this up, do you have anything that you would like to share with our residents about vaccines? >> yeah, so my hope is that all of our san franciscans are

learning all that they can about the vaccine and preparing themselves to get vaccinated. i know that it can be a scary thing to do something that is new. but there actually is very good data available about the vaccine and so i'm hoping that people can learn about this, we are trying to help to put out information around the vaccines so that people can make an informed decision and get vaccinated as soon as vaccines are available and their turn comes up. as an emergency physician, i was not in the very first group vaccinated. i think that i got my vaccination appointment a few weeks later, but as soon as my turn came i jumped on it. so i'm hoping that others will do the same. i do truly think that this is our ticket out of this. and i know that this has been a long road. and everybody is tired. san francisco has done really well throughout the pandemic, thanks in large part to our citizens. and the people listening to science, and wearing masks, social distancing, doing all of

the things that science and public health experts have asked them to do. i think that this is -- this is our way out and i'm just very excited. i wish that everybody had their vaccine yesterday, but we're getting it as soon as we can. >> that's great. have been helpful information that i hope that has shed some light on our vaccination program. >> i think one of the hardest parts has been, you know, how -- how the supply issues that we just wish that we had, you know, we wish that we had all of the doses on the first day and we could just give them out. but i'm hoping that that will improve and hopefully, you know, this will be behind us soon. >> i hope so too. well, thank you once again for coming on the show. >> thanks, it's good to be here with you. >> that's it for this episode. we'll be back with more pandemic related information shortly. you have been watching "coping with covid-19," i'm chris manners, thank you for watching.

my name is doctor ellen

moffett, i am an assistant medical examiner for the city and county of san francisco. i perform autopsy, review medical records and write reports. also integrate other sorts of testing data to determine cause and manner of death. i have been here at this facility since i moved here in november, and previous to that at the old facility. i was worried when we moved here that because this building is so much larger that i wouldn't see people every day. i would miss my personal interactions with the other employees, but that hasn't been the case. this building is very nice. we have lovely autopsy tables and i do get to go upstairs and down stairs several times a day to see everyone else i work with. we have a bond like any other group of employees that work for a specific agency in san

francisco. we work closely on each case to determine the best cause of death, and we also interact with family members of the diseased. that brings us closer together also. >> i am an investigator two at the office of the chief until examiner in san francisco. as an investigator here i investigate all manners of death that come through our jurisdiction. i go to the field interview police officers, detectives, family members, physicians, anyone who might be involved with the death. additionally i take any property with the deceased individual and take care and custody of that. i maintain the chain and custody for court purposes if that becomes an issue later and notify next of kin and make any additional follow up phone callsness with that particular death. i am dealing with people at the worst possible time in their lives delivering the worst news

they could get. i work with the family to help them through the grieving process. >> i am ricky moore, a clerk at the san francisco medical examiner's office. i assist the pathology and toxicology and investigative team around work close with the families, loved ones and funeral establishment. >> i started at the old facility. the building was old, vintage. we had issues with plumbing and things like that. i had a tiny desk. i feet very happy to be here in the new digs where i actually have room to do my work. >> i am sue pairing, the toxicologist supervisor. we test for alcohol, drugs and poisons and biological

substances. i oversee all of the lab operations. the forensic operation here we perform the toxicology testing for the human performance and the case in the city of san francisco. we collect evidence at the scene. a woman was killed after a robbery homicide, and the dna collected from the zip ties she was bound with ended up being a cold hit to the suspect. that was the only investigative link collecting the scene to the suspect. it is nice to get the feedback. we do a lot of work and you don't hear the result. once in a while you heard it had an impact on somebody. you can bring justice to what happened. we are able to take what we due to the next level. many of our counterparts in other states, cities or countries don't have the resources and don't have the

beautiful building and the equipmentness to really advance what we are doing. >> sometimes we go to court. whoever is on call may be called out of the office to go to various portions of the city to investigate suspicious deaths. we do whatever we can to get our job done. >> when we think that a case has a natural cause of death and it turns out to be another natural cause of death. unexpected findings are fun. >> i have a prior background in law enforcement. i was a police officer for 8 years. i handled homicides and suicides. i had been around death investigation type scenes. as a police officer we only handled minimal components then it was turned over to the coroner or the detective

division. i am intrigued with those types of calls. i wondered why someone died. i have an extremely supportive family. older children say, mom, how was your day. i can give minor details and i have an amazing spouse always willing to listen to any and all details of my day. without that it would be really hard to deal with the negative components of this job. >> being i am a native of san francisco and grew up in the community. i come across that a lot where i may know a loved one coming from the back way or a loved one seeking answers for their deceased. there are a lot of cases where i may feel affected by it. if from is a child involved or things like that. i try to not bring it home and not let it affect me. when i tell people i work at the

medical examiners office. what do you do? the autopsy? i deal with the enough and -- with the administrative and the families. >> most of the time work here is very enjoyable. >> after i started working with dead people, i had just gotten married and one night i woke up in a cold sweat. i thought there was somebody dead? my bed. i rolled over and poked the body. sure enough, it was my husband who grumbled and went back to sleep. this job does have lingering effects. in terms of why did you want to go into this? i loved science growing up but i didn't want to be a doctor and didn't want to be a pharmacist. the more i learned about forensics how interested i was

of the perfect combination between applied science and criminal justice. if you are interested in finding out the facts and truth seeking to find out what happened, anybody interested in that has a place in this field. >> being a woman we just need to go for it and don't let anyone fail you, you can't be. >> with regard to this position in comparison to crime dramas out there, i would say there might be some minor correlations. let's face it, we aren't hollywood, we are real world. yes we collect evidence. we want to preserve that. we are not scanning fingerprints in the field like a hollywood television show. >> families say thank you for what you do, for me that is extremely fulfilling. somebody has to do my job.

if i can make a situation that is really negative for someone more positive, then i feel like i am doing the right thing for the city of san francisco.

>> executive order.cisco. emergency proclamation suspending and modifying requirements for in-person meetings. during the coronavirus disease emergency, this meeting will convene remotely. public comment will be available on each agenda item. each speaker will be allowed three minutes to speak. public comment will be available via calling (415) 655-0001. access code 187 735 4661. again, it's 187 735 4661. hit pound and then pound again. when connected, to hear the meeting discussion. you will be muted and in listening mode only. please dialta