d.p.w. to make the area cleaner, safer, less expansive. i'm worried about this slide because as we're trying to engage dp.w. to get ready to enforce the street vendor legislation, they're just at capacity and we keep adding more and more work on to d.p.w. without any additional personnel, any additional funding. >> supervisor, sam dodge, department of emergency management. i'm pretty familiar with the system. i worked for public works for a long time. as well kind of looking at these similar problems. i did try to plain this to the budget & legislative analyst, but i think maybe it was a little confusing for them and everyone. but when the cdc issued warnings

about dispersals of encampments during the covid pandemic, 311 started to issue a pop-up screen in their 311 app about when you start to put in a concern about an encampment stating the cdc guidelines and the policies of san francisco about removal of encampments. what a lot of people have done is use the 311 app and look at other similar issues that they could report the encampment as. some are blocked sidewalks and others. so it's a thing. so it's not like the calls were moved from 311 from one category to another, but it was more like user initiated using other sort of levers they could pull in the city. on the backside, this is one of the the things that hsoc can help with. we can reallocate amongst ourselves when issues come up,

when they look through and see the picture sent by the citizen about a situation, we can reallocate it back to hsoc that is it is a homelessness concern. that's what hsoc can do, make sure we're sending the right resources and not the wrong resources. we're still able to assist at public works and not wasting their time so to speak. >> chair ronen: i guess i just want to highlight -- and, sam, thank you so much. you do such an amazing job. i know -- my staff and i have seen you out on the streets at all hours cleaning up yourself. so i know you do a lot of street cleaning work yourself, so i just can't thank you enough for everything. but i just want to flag for the budget and appropriations committee that i do think we're continuously putting more and

more work on d.p.w. and it's perhaps the only -- around these issues -- and it's the only -- it's the department that doesn't actually have team to deal with this, you know, in a similar way. so i just needed -- i saw that slide and i need to flag it for the committee. and then my last set of comments/questions is, you know, i wrote a letter to the police chief about, you know, work of their officers and he sent me a letter back on march 24th in which he, you know, lays out the number of calls for 800, 801, you know, anything involving mental illness or substance use disorder. so 800 calls, mentally disturbed

person, 5150, mental health detention. 801cr, person attempting suicide. and then check on well-being. and, you know, showing from 2019 to 2021 that those calls have pretty much remained consistent. and so, you know, again, it's just we're spending an enormous amount of time and money and energy on 10 street teams and as i said in the beginning, they're not all up and running and this is still a work in progress, but i do think that we have to be looking critically and making sure that we're -- we're lean, mean and effective and part of me worries that, like, if -- if to the public it looks like

things get consistently worse on the streets, not better, if we're not successful in getting, you know, a large amount of people into care, if the calls for service for police are not declining and if we add more and more money to all of these units -- like there has to be a point in which we look at the entire system and say, what are we doing? and that is -- i'm not there yet, but i am -- but these statistics worry me. and i have been out on, you know, ride alongs with the ems and scrt and the police. and the individual work and is phenomenal. and the respect and the way that all of you and your staff are treating people that are very

sick and these are not easy illnesses to address. and it's not one go. one treatment and done. it's a long-term process. and i understand that. i just -- we've got to make an impact. and we're investing so much time, money and energy. by this time next year, we've got to see movement. that's why i wanted to call this meeting and this hearing now, because i called it last year and the year before that. and we didn't have all these teams up and running in the same way. but now that we have one into development and almost fully staffed, we're going to have the others at this time next year will be a year old. we have got to see movement in the numbers. and the public has to feel a difference in the streets. because otherwise we're going to

lose any goodwill we have left, you know, for investing so much money as i think we should be, but we it has to start to produce results. so, with that, those -- i will shut up now and supervisor safai and then supervisor chan is next. >> commissioner safai: thank you, chair ronen. i just have a few questions. most of my questions were asked. one of the things that is not making sense to me and i have seen this played out, because i personally called the street crisis response team on a couple of individuals. they still remain on the street. and the data that i see here on page 13 that says repeat scrt clients -- what time period -- it says d.p.h. avatar data,

2,927 contacts or encounters with clients. and one encounter only, 81%. then when you go back up to the slide on the previous two slides, it talks about street crisis response teams, you know, the people that you're transporting to the hospital, other and then it says remain in communities, 60%. so how it is possible you're only interacting with people one time 80% of the time and then 60% of the people you're responding to remained in the community. how is that possible? can someone explain that to me? again, i'm happy with the work you're all doing. it's having an impact. but in my district alone, i literally have called a couple of times. those individuals still remain on the street. so they can't be the only, you

know, i don't have the same volume that supervisor ronen's district has or some of the other districts you have highlighted on the map, but we do have some what i know you all refer to as frequent flyers. they do remain on the street. they're still on the street. this doesn't make sense to me. so if someone can explain how 60% of the interactions you have, they remain in the community, i'm assuming that's on the street and then 81% interactions you had is only one time. that doesn't add up. >> i apologize, the slide on page 13, that's not a slide that i created. and dr. alameda has to leave for child care, but will be joining remotely. she could perhaps address that slide.

for the other slide -- >> commissioner safai: again, i'm not trying to -- this is not a gotcha. this doesn't make sense this you all have encounters one time with 81% of the people you're encountering on the street. something doesn't make sense to me about that. you see up here, 28% of the encounters result in transport to care. that makes sense to me. that seems plausible based on what we're seeing. psychiatric being the highest number of transport. 60%, i understand we need more services. not enough. people can refuse those services. but to see you're only interacting with 80% of people one time. something is not making sense. >> i can't speak to that. >> commissioner safai: let me ask you, your teams are out on

the street. would you say that 8 out of 10 times you're interacting with people, it's the only time you're interacting with them for the first time. does that make sense to you? >> what makes sense to me, they did a data pull straight from the database and this is -- >> commissioner safai: it's too bad the person that i waited patiently -- >> chair ronen: maybe we can go to supervisor chan? >> commissioner safai: that was my only question other than all the other questions that was asked, because i want to understand it. the way you laid out the way the calls come in, that's important. we might have disagreements on 911 versus 311, but i think you need one system. people know those numbers. there might be some anxiety or resistance, but i think the over

the last 20 years in the city, we've designed call 311 or call 911. we don't want to overwhelm people with numbers because people forget and won't use it. this makes sense to me. the callers are the ones that are screening for where to triage or redirect people to the right place. that makes sense to me. and i think that's why we're seeing, you know, the number where it says here on the slide -- the other one, it says 3.6 only result in a request for police, because it sounds like they're being routed in the proper manner. that shows the hard work that the call folks are doing in terms of routing. but this part does not make sense to me. i can tell thaw number does not make sense. it does not play out -- >> supervisor safai? this is dr. alameda.

i apologize i had to transition to join remotely. i can answer your question. so this is accurate data in terms of the 81%, but to your point, there may be some cases where we don't have identify able information to know they've had contact with our team. this is based off the best data we have, and that is something we're always trying to refine in the follow-up. so we can truly track the impact and have multiple contacts. >> commissioner safai: so maybe we can talk for a second. i heard you say there are some individuals that won't give you their name, refuse. how are you doing the data collection? because that might be skewing this in a way that doesn't seem to make sense in practice? >> we track every encounter that we have and so we use every tool

we have available and every electronic health record to identify the individuals, so we track that closely. when we know that someone is identified as contacting before, we correct that information so we have that true data pull. we also work to merge charts so we can manage that. but there are some cases where we're never able to fully identify a person. >> commissioner safai: if you're never able to identify them, do you put them in the one encounter category? >> they have a number attached to that them. but if they had a subsequent encounter -- >> commissioner safai: how often are you not able to collect data on the people you're interacting with? >> supervisor, i appreciate that question. i would happy to get that information and get back to you on that.

>> commissioner safai: that seems to be one of the most important things for today. if we're really trying to track how well the system is working, how effectively people are being referred to services and who we're dealing with, particularly the amount of follow-up, it seems as though it would be good to know. i understand. it seems like this is an ongoing conversation. but that is something that i think is really important. data is going to tell us a lot of the story. again, i just used my own personal when we've had to call a few times on people on the street, when we asked for street crisis response to come. i saw him on the way into work this morning. i know i called three times personally. i can't imagine my one individual would be only one of the few that fall into the 19% that are having multiple interactions with your team. i think i made my point. do you want to add on? >> chair ronen: i just wanted to

follow-up. you explained, chief, that all of the fire department teams, so the four teams, they all use epic, so they can tell when each other is working with an individual, but do the other five teams also use epic? >> our four teams do push information to epic, but what we use is a custom-built database that all of our teams use. so we're able to see what each street team, who has been touched on by each team and how many times. >> chair ronen: but does -- so you're all using the same system. that's a very large number. it's a strangely large number. okay. that's something to keep looking at. >> thank you for the feedback. and i will take --

>> commissioner safai: again, i think -- i'm a numbers person. when numbers don't make sense. that would be -- that's an off the chart. 8 out of 10 the first time you're interacting with them. not based on the population that we have on the street, particularly when you're responding, you know, in these repeat areas over and over again. a lot of the people don't go very far from where they are, because somehow they have some type of connection to either service or house or community where they resided in or where they first became drug addicted. i'm telling you all the stuff you know. that's why it doesn't make sense to me. we can come back to it. >> commissioner chan: thank you, chair. i think my question is similar along what chair ronen have talked about earlier. it's really i think chair ronen

please -- touch on the point about measuring success and results and how do we show results. i would like to start off with perhaps the median response time which you've shown you have decreased from 17 minutes to 14 minutes. so my question would be, if that is a gauge for success, what will be your ideal response time for a situation like this with the street crisis response team? >> thank you for the question. these are dispatch code one calls. so anything under 30 minutes would be acceptable. of course, the shorter the response time, the better. 14 minutes -- 14-15 minutes is an acceptable time in my opinion.

>> when it comes to the numbers, are there specific elements or key elements that when you come back to us and talk about, you know, the street crisis response team, that you are actually are going to be -- these are the criteria or these are the elements that you're going to look at, you want us to look at, as a way to evaluate whether it's been successful or not? >> the question is when we come back, what are the performance metrics that we would like to share with you? >> commissioner chan: yes, absolutely, thank you. and not only the performance metrics, but within that, what

is considered success to you? >> for which teams? street crisis response? or all of them. >> commissioner chan: sure. but street crisis response team is my focus. thank you. >> there are many. there are the basic ones with response times. the number of calls we've successfully responded to as an alternative to police, because if we go, that means the police don't have to go. but long-term we would want to see how many people we successfully connected to resources, shelter, primary care, mental health care and treatment. and we'd also like to see what graduation rates are like from all of these programs. and also whether 911 call volume has decreased for people experiencing homelessness. whether e.r. overcrowding has

decreased. there are many different performance metrics that we'd like to see. now it's very, very difficult to get a lot of this information. i'm looking forward to the robert johnson evaluation piece which is a more of a quantitative analysis of how we're doing for street crisis response. i want to say that the very -- the most difficult thing that i have to put my finger on for why it's difficult to improve street conditions is the fact that everything the city is doing, whether it's a social worker or a community paramedic, a hospital, it is all entirely based on someone voluntarily accepting resources. we're only as good as we're

resourced. we've seen that when we have a shelter-in-place hotel, versus congregate shelter, it's much easier to get people to accept shelter. we know that if we have expanded intake hours it would be easier, but there is not going to be a magic wand no matter if we had 4-hour in-- 24-hour intake or not. it's challenging. we will work hard to have performance metrics to show you, but i have to say that the number one thing that we have to recognize that it is not entirely up to us. we cannot coerce people into change. >> commissioner chan: thank you. i totally understand what you're saying. what i'm expressing a concern and connecting the dots between the response time, there was a slide showing that 47% of the

clients have left the area. so i'm trying to understand that is it because we need to decrease the response time, meaning you getting there faster and then we decrease the clients leaving the area? is there a correlation there and how can we make that? >> supervisor, the slide that you're referring to is not in front of me. the 47%, i'm not sure which one. if that's office of care coordination or the percentage of times something is unable to locate or gone on arrival. i don't know. i don't think we can improve on the 14 minutes. when we go on a code 3 medical call, we attempt to get there in 10 minutes. that's when someone might be in a life-threatening situation, so i think 14 minutes is reasonable. one of the difficulties are that

a lot of these calls, most of the calls are third-party callers, where somebody is no longer on scene, they just drove by. they call 911, giving a description and location and we go. and that person has indeed walked off. but it's very challenging if we don't have a reporting party that stays on scene and is continuing to visualize the individual they're calling for. that is a minority of cases. >> commissioner chan: okay thank you. thank you, chair ronen. >> chair ronen: thank you so much. thank you, everyone. i did want to call out commander rachel moran, since i never met you in person, i didn't realize that was you. so good to see you here, thank you. mr. clerk, can you -- madame clerk, can you open this up up for public comment? >> at this moment, if you walk

like to public comment on this in person, please line up along the windows. at this time i'm not seeing anybody in person. no. we can go to our virtual queue. >> dear supervisors, i would not trust any data reported by sfpd as they have been known to not report or to skew reported data to support increased annual staffing budgets and overtime pay. there must be objective third party overseeing law enforcement data gathering reporting and analysis. especially data that emerges from 911 calls. by design annual law enforcement

budgets must be decreased at the same time rate that alternative response teams are scaled up. sfpd annual budget would absolutely be expected to decrease year on year going forward with nine alternative street outreach teams. thank you so much for this hearing. >> thank you for your comments. anybody else in the queue? >> can you hear me? it appears we have someone on microsoft teams. >> can you guys hear me? >> looks like we do have someone in our virtual teams. let me -- samuel peoples, you are welcome to start your public comment. >> yes. hello, president walton, chair

ronen, supervisor mar, supervisor chan, supervisor safai, i just wanted to respond with the public works. i want to respond to supervisor ronen's response or question around public works needs as these programs grow and as the city for taking on new initiatives. >> mr. peoples, this is supervisor ronen. let me close public comment. you're an employee. stay right there. i'm going to close public comment. >> we do have one more person in the queue. >> oh, my sorry. >> mr. peoples say right there. i'm going to call you up and i'm going to call up commander moran to say a few words after this. but let me just close public comment. thank you. >> we do have one more person. would you mind putting that caller forward?

>> caller: supervisors and all of those who are involved with the city-wide street team services, i think what's missing is a sounds needs assessment. and i see -- providing the services, the teams don't have racial equity. and this is a fundamental flaw. we have people, the same people trying to do a job for which they're not qualified. we do not have when it comes to our emergency services anybody qualified and experienced like a

commander. so, it goes down the line, down the ladder. we have people that can talk a good talk, but they cannot walk a walk. so, we have $13.7 million -- billion. we waste money. and you guys talk about it and the supervisors also talk and talk and talk and talk. the quality of -- in this city has gone to the hogs. >> thank you for your comments. is there anybody else in the queue? >> there are no further callers in the queue. >> chair ronen: public comment is closed. mr. peoples, did you want to continue? >> yes, appreciate it. i just wanted to respond to your

-- regarding public works capacity. i had a conversation today regarding, you know, where we are with deputy director of operations and there is a need for some funding regarding additional equipment and staff for some of these initiatives. we're kind of stretching our budget funding because we haven't had increases. all these initiatives that are being proposed right now. i just wanted to share that and respond to that. i really appreciate you bringing that up. that's a tight spot for public works. >> chair ronen: thank you. thank you, yes, definitely going to be something we're going to laser-focus on during the budget process. so thanks for coming out and speaking.