fiscal years, and, and i really do hope that we can maintain at this level, not just for your department's sake, but just overall for the trend and the future of what we see. how juvenile probation really should work. and that i do not hope to see the historic high, in any form or fashion, i appreciate supervisor ronan asking those questions on behalf of supervisor walton. i totally forgot about those beds, and as as a former case manager for community youth center for monolingual youth on juvenile probation, i remember visiting those spaces, and it just 25 years now, almost. so or 20 something years now. so it's been a while and i and yet they still the same. so it is about time to change. thank you. thanks for your presentation. and we're going to go to next, our adult probation. thank you.

whenever you're ready, chief. thank you. good afternoon. my name is crystal tulloch. i'm the chief of adult probation. good afternoon, supervisor melgar. supervisor chan, supervisor mandelman and supervisor ronen with me today is my deputy director, tara madison. along

with aaliyah brown hoffmeister. dina farrell, alec hartwick, thank you for the opportunity to speak today about our small but mighty department. i want to acknowledge the dedication and professionalism of our entire team. our work is challenging yet rewarding, and we are privileged to help others restore their lives. our main objectives are to support the superior court of california by aiding victims, reducing recidivism, and providing meaningful services to our population. deputy probation officers present in court collaborate with case managers and therapists, conduct field work and engage directly with individuals motivated. okay, sorry. excuse us individuals to motivate positive life changes. slide three. probation combines

opportunity with accountability, offering support and services to inspire intrinsic motivation for change. our reward is breaking the cycle of violence and ending intergenerational criminality. we are the alternative. probation allows individuals to restore their lives in the community instead of serving jail time at one tenth the cost of incarceration. our mandated pre-sentencing reports and other analytics are crucial for decision making by the courts. da sheriff, public defender, cdcr and federal agencies. we produce nearly 2300 reports a year. our community supervision is evidence based, addressing criminogenic needs. our services include the cask, which is our multi-service center, and 52 programs tailored to client

needs. nearly 1200 individuals a year housing 376 individuals nightly and serving 2900 unique individuals through our cask, our officers are active in the community and participating in public safety activities and events like apec and dmac, contributing 2500 hours last year. using our own resources. our performance highlights include a recidivism rate of 0.2% compared to the 2.6 statewide average. we attempted to notify 100% of our identifiable victims prior to attending sentencing, and additionally, 727 individuals participated in apd funded employment services and 368

exited to permanent or stable housing from our programs. our budget priorities include ensuring accountability to victims and including their voices in pre-sentencing reports and enhancing work through technology auditing our housing and supportive services portfolio to align performance metrics with program design and ensuring ongoing oversight and prioritizing well-being with significant investment. now deputy director will continue the presentation. good afternoon, tara madison, deputy director for the adult probation department. and so our proposed fiscal year 2425 budget, equals 70 million, or about $2.8 million more than the current

fiscal year of 2324, our revenues are primarily made of general fund and state, funding. actually, over the next year, our general fund support will be going down by about $1.8 million. and that's going down due to an increase in state funding. and also an increase in recoveries from our other partner departments. we're partnering with other departments to provide supportive services next slide for our expenditures. that increases primarily due to an increase in our city grants budget. our city grants budget has this. in the next fiscal year, we're going to have the her house expansion, program, which is a transitional and supportive services. housing for justice involved women and their children, we also have a couple of increases in salaries. however, those increases in salaries are due to colas and fringe benefits. next slide please. this this next slide shows a comparison from fiscal

year 1920 to the proposed 2425. and similar to year over year, the same trends, are basically the same. our budget has been increasing. it actually increased by about 19 million again, but over 13 million of that is because of city grants for the most part, our city grants now are make up 28% of our budget, opposed to 9% before, and our salaries have gone down from 58% to about 50% of our budget. and once again, any staffing increases over that time had to do primarily with colas and also with, just fringe, normal fringe, cause. next slide please. here you can see our department staffing over that same time period. and you can see that, our budget is going down from 154.4 fte to the proposed budget of 140 3.6. next slide. this next slide is very busy. it's an organizational chart and it has a variety of information in it about our

staffing. and currently right now we have two vacancies in those vacancies are scheduled to be filled in july okay. next slide please. then finally for our target reductions, we made a reduction in materials and supplies, there are some reductions in city grant funding and programmatic and programmatic projects. and that concludes our presentation. supervisor walton. thank you. chair shannon, thank you so much, just a question on slide 12. it says reduction in services of other departments. what is that? yes, that's actually work orders. so basically we've had an opportunity to reduce some of our work orders based on prior year spending. so it's work orders that we would have with rt, we have a work order with dfe, based on, spending and to

keep the current service levels where we're able to make reductions to those work orders, we have, we pay the city attorneys just a variety of other departments that we work with. thank you. you're welcome. thank you. and i, i do have a couple questions, i so right now your total of fte is 143.6. and out of which how many are those? are probation officer fte 97, 97 or 97? 97. of those one, 43 are sworn officers, including directors and supervisors. understood and then what is the caseload ratio per probation officer right now? so it's a range because we manage our population by risk, not caseload size. and so the range could be from approximately 26 all the way up to 180. understood and

chief, when you came before us last year, you were i think you were still quite new then. that was my second time before you. yeah. yes and then, so and thank you. and i think at that time when we talked about when we discuss caseload, it was also recognizing the fact that there was also a significant of cases that was actually waiting to be closed out. is that still accurate or do you remember that conversation? yes i do, thank you, supervisor chan. and so not necessarily those cases were waiting to be closed out. those cases were in fact in warrant status for various reasons, mostly not rested with adult probation, but they were our population. and so we have taken a deep dive, look and look into that population. and it's now at a reduction of 2.9, however, under our supervision, our our true active population has gone

up 10. so we chip away at one end and we get them on the other . yeah. thank you. and then, to see that the city grants that you have mentioned that now it's really part of your increase in your budget. could you walk us through what kind of grants are you? are you awarding to partners or to community partners. so primarily for housing and supportive services, our therapeutic and holistic communities, you're familiar with amina trp, but we also invest in supportive services within the community as well, like. like what? goodwill goodwill. goodwill, our case management is through ucsf and, and then we have partnerships with a multitudeot oviders like senior ex-offender program, sister circle, pretty we have a pretty

robust list of dynamic providers that we contract with because we're trying to meet the dynamic needs of the population that we're trying to serve. absolutely i mean, i think that there are moments where i am definitely curious to learn more about, not today, but eventually i'd love to learn more about. i agree with you that there could be diverse, populations such as, you know, transgender individuals, and, monolingual immigrants, population. and in those cases, like, you know, how do we find and identify ways to provide them supportive services that really is inclusive of both cultural and language competency? but today, i just wanted to just let you know that those are my what i'm curious about. thank you so much for all the work that you do. we appreciate you, and, you know, i think that it's been long standing that the adult

probation has, heavy caseload. and so it's good to hear that i, that you're managing it, but also that, that there's an increase on the other hand. but so i look forward to seeing you again next year. and hopefully, to have a better understanding of how this is being managed. so thank you. thank you for the support. and we're privileged to do the work. thank you. and the next we have public defender. we've been waiting for you. all right.

good afternoon, chair chan, vice chair mandelman, president peskin, who i think will eventually be here. supervisor walton. supervisor ronen, i'm assisted today by my chief of staff, leland lacoste and chief of operations howdy razzaq. and our local policy director, carolyn goosen is also here to answer questions. as we're waiting for the powerpoint. okay, there it is. so let me say it's an honor to be the elected public defender of san francisco. i am very proud of our mission, vision and values, and we're to sum up our mission vision values. i'd say we are

informed by the answer to the question, what kind of representation would any of us want if a loved one was facing charges and we take that mandate seriously, and we want to provide that level of representation to anyone that we are charged with representing that drives our work and being a community centered office committed to providing excellent representation for the most marginalized and vulnerable members of our city. we provide a wide range of legal and social services to anyone in san francisco, both young people and adults who are indigent and accused of crimes. we have a powerful team, half our attorneys, half our non attorneys, including social workers, paralegals, investigators and clerks and attorneys that provide a variety of critical roles. we serve over 20,000 people annually and again , we're client centered, but we're also family centered because we know that the work for individuals actually impacts

their whole families. and, the next generation also. across the various services that we provide, this slide shows the demographics of the clients we serve over 75% are people of color. we defend immigrants. we defend people who suffer from mental illness, substance abuse issues, low everyone's low income and those who suffer, or are housing insecure, historic. look at the changes over the past five years. we have steadily grown over the last five years, but we remain under staffed compared to the district attorney's office and the police department, which are the people who arrest and charge our clients, and they continue to grow. for this reason, we actively seek volunteers, fellows, interns, and but we are going to continue to push for parity and there's also very critically, for the first time, been a national public defense workload study, which was

conducted by the rand corporation, to provide constitutionally necessary representation, and we try to go beyond that, but we need at least 16 more attorneys and four additional paralegals, and i think just in the ecosystem, if there are policy decisions in the city to prosecute more, we quite simply need to defend more. we're constitutionally obligated to provide that defense. and there has been an impact of the backlog, although now if you're have a felony client, you can what's called pull time and get your trial within 60 days. there have been so many cases backed up that we can't do it on every case at the same time. so the backlog continues to impact all of the work of the staff in my office. i'm very proud that we have a nimble leadership team of chief attorneys that is staff and client centered, with decades of management and leadership and ground experience. that is

majority women of color. i'm not going to go too deeply into the organizational structure in the interest of time, but i do want to share some of the details that chair chan asked us to focus on in our presentation. out of our 240 staff, we have seven vacancies in total. of these, five have already accepted offers and an additional two will be filled by the end of the month. for filled by the end of august. and with regards to the other six, we anticipate continued hires within the next few months. and again, many of these would have been filled early, but because of the attrition goals and because we were running a deficit, we couldn't fill them as quickly as we wanted to. we had dozens and dozens of skilled, qualified attorneys for each of the openings that we've had, in the courts, you know, the first two words in our mission statement is fiercely defend. and i wanted to distinguish that from competently defend. we want our

attorneys providing better representation that anyone could get if they paid for an attorney. 40% of our trials result resulted in acquittals and hung juries. 33% resulted in mixed verdicts, which means either not guilty or hung on some charges. a hung jury means when they can't reach a resolution and only guilty on some of the charges. our attorneys also fought for and secured 2715 dismissals in felony and misdemeanor cases last year. and this is, you know, a snapshot of some of what we've accomplished throughout our team. but we're really combating is a phenomenon of discharging or overcharging, and we're always going to, again, be motivated by what would a loved one want. and sometimes, you know, it's when we talk about balancing the system. the police are the district attorney's limited in their evaluation of a case on what's in the police report. once we get that and once they're charged, we will often ask extra questions of the

witnesses. we'll find other witnesses, we'll do other investigation. we'll provide the social history. so it was initially a police report becomes a much larger canvas. and that's when justice happens, when we can get the full story, one of the mottos that we live that we try to work by is reveal truth and demand justice, and we get more truth when we're able to do the work in the way we want to or we need to, these headlines are just a few examples of the huge victories for our clients, and they highlight at the same time, some of the challenges we're up against when we have a system that continues to penalize homelessness and addiction overwhelming our jails and causing increased workloads, in addition to our work in the courts, we're very proud of our magic programs. we just had a summer kickoff, which, where there were hundreds of children on the steps of city hall. we facilitate nonprofit agencies working together to provide really, really vibrant community

programing for free for hundreds of kids across the city that hopefully prevents them from ever becoming a client of ours. we have the legal education advocacy program that's in the schools, helping students and their families with issues such as school enrollment, special education, school discipline, defense safety, transfers and other school safety concerns. we have flagship and the cycle program, which is now composed of three community based social workers that get into the jail early and connect people with mentors, counseling, housing benefits, educational or job opportunities, our clean slate program is a phenomenal program. we thank the mayor for allowing us to keep the paralegal and clerical clean safes, clean slate staffing that was previously funded through foundations, and our addition that capacity is allowing us to partner with young community developers, a philip randolph

arriba juntos, to go out into the community to expunge people's records. so that they can then move on to access housing and job opportunity. we're proud of a college pathway project that we launched, which formalizes partnerships with, project rebound at sf state and city college, to, you know, do those warm handoffs so we can get our clients enrolled in college opportunities, our measures this slide answers some of those. in the interest of time, i'm going to ask you to review those separately. but one of the measures i want to focus on, which isn't in this chart, is we keep track of something called a felony plea ratio, which means that if there's a felony charged, what does that actually resolve in a felony plea, or is it a trial or a misdemeanor plea, or a referral to a special court or a dismissal and 75% of felony charges actually don't result in

a felony conviction. but that's because we hold our attorneys and staff to a very high standard. if we didn't have a strong public defender's office, people would be pleading to felonies. and that happens every day in courtrooms across the country. we track that because we know the impact of a felony conviction on an individual and their family and actually their kids, because it prevents people from accessing housing and getting jobs. so we take our charge to defend zealously, very seriously. but right now, we're in a rising crisis because of the backlog, because of the increase in arrests, because of the drastic reduction in referrals to diversion programs and specialty courts and because of increased workloads due to changes in the law, we now have some vehicles for relief, such as the racial justice act and mental health diversion court. but that takes a tremendous amount of work to get someone admitted into, a mental health diversion or to take advantage

of the racial justice act. there's also technological advances with body worn camera video surveillance footage and cell phone technology, often jail calls, which is making every file three times the size of what it used to be and entails a lot more work for each case, that's resulted in a huge jump in our caseload, bay area pd average caseloads for felonies is 40 per attorney. we're now at 75, we're really in need of additional staff to do the core work. attorneys and paralegals, the flow of the system is being constrained because of this imbalance in funding. and we've seen those issues in the jails where, you know, we can't be in two courtrooms at one time. so if an attorney is in trial on one case, that other client is waiting and waiting for that attorney to finish, and there's more attorneys waiting. and that's why we have this

ballooning of the jail population. so we have now is a call for equity. this is a snapshot of our budget over the past three years, versus the budget growth for law enforcement agencies like the da. the sheriff and police department. we've been fighting hard to close this gap. and we thank the board for its, your help in doing that. however, we continue to be by far the most underfunded agency in the criminal legal system. and we think the most critical, though, to race to address racial inequity and achieve genuine community safety. our budget is less than 4% of the combined criminal legal system budget. when you include adult and juvenile probation, the da, sheriff, probation and police, this is something i'm going to continue to push back against this year. we're 59% of the da's budget, and that's incredibly far from a place of equity, the

national workload study was conducted by a team of national experts and the rand corporation , that's why we're asking for the additional 16 attorneys and four paralegals. now, the good news is, you're not going to find a staff that's more dedicated, compassionate, hardworking, skilled. so every dime spent on our office has a huge impact on our most vulnerable populations, it's not fair. and our community suffer tremendously when the public defender is funded so poorly compared to the other, players in the criminal legal system. we're also trusted connectors. our clients trust us, and we're in the best position to connect people with those services that are going to enhance their life, we're a vital part of the ecosystem, but the ecosystem is out of balance. and i presented

these charts and graphs. but at the end of the day, what matters is the work, and what matters is the people. we do the work for. the theme of our calendar this year was, is and is, public defenders for community safety and, you know, it's about katie, who after our policy unit lobbied to amend an arcane statute in sacramento, was released from prison from a life sentence, and now she's a paralegal in her office helping dozens and dozens of people to go through a clean slate. it's about mary, who who did an internship in her office in the magic program and now has devoted her life to public service. it's about jonathan, who served in the army, finally acknowledging his ptsd and transforming his life in veterans court. it's about kenneth who addresses his addiction through successful treatment at golden gate for seniors residential program, and then got an apartment and got married. it's about josé who got

released from ice custody after launching a hunger strike to protest the horrific conditions. it's about belinda being resentenced and then reunited with her family and becoming a successful mom, grandma and employee. it's about gregory being acquitted after being in locked up for five months, complete acquittal, but then having to come out, fight to regain his housing and to reinstate his son's scholarship because his son had to leave college to support the family while he was locked up. i could go on and on and on about these stories and a lot. these people are actually on the front page of our calendar and throughout the pages i sent, all the supervisors a copy of our calendar this year, but none of that happens without a skilled public defender who's willing to put in the work and to make it happen. so we as a city want more empowering care. if we as a city want more community safety, if we as a city want more racial equity and we want more justice,

we need to find a way to fund public defense. thank you. thank you. supervisor ronen. thank you, thanks for walking in, towards the end of the presentation of the, superior court and, i got a chance to go over some of these figures with you, yesterday, actually. and, they they were really worrisome to me. so this study that you were talking about says. i just want to make sure i understand correctly that a proper caseload, in order to provide a constitutionally, sound or, proper defense is about 40 clients at any given time. is that right? well, it's actually it's a workload study and not a caseload study explicitly. okay.

because because all the cases are different. so really does it does a, it looks at the kind of cases and how much time it takes to work on each kind of case. so we actually did the analysis looking at that and mapping it to the california criminal code. okay. and that's why we need at least 16 more attorneys and four paralegals in order to provide explain what what what is an average caseload that makes sense for a public defender? and what is the actual caseload today? our caseload right now is 75 on average. for our felony attorneys, it would be down around 40 or less than that. so it's almost double. it's almost double what it's supposed to be. yes. yes. and what what is the impact of this. the impact of that is that there are clients waiting in jail for their attorney to be ready. the impact of that is attorneys burning out because there's just too much work. the impact of that is

something that happened to me when i went to see my client in jail the other day, had to wait for two hours, couldn't see them, had to turn around from san bruno and come back for my next appointment. the impact of that is attorneys can't devote the amount of time they need to each case. so wrongful convictions can happen. the impact is just a lack of justice for our clients. fundamentally and a staff that is really overburdened and exhausted. so is this the first time since how long have you been at the public defender's office? i've been at the public defender's office since 2008. okay and is this the first time that caseloads have been this high? yes this is the first time we've had an average caseload this high. so what how does this compare, for example, to last year's caseload or the caseload the year before 2020, the average caseload was 50 for our felony attorneys, and now it's 75. so significantly more. sorry. that was in 20 1020.

sorry 20. so just three years ago. it's gone up by 25 felony cases. yes so. what are caseloads and surrounding counties like in santa clara, in alameda and marin counties? yeah. and the average between santa, we looked at santa cruz, santa clara, alameda, solano, contra costa. it's between 30 to 50. the high is alameda with 50. santa clara is at 30, santa cruz 30 to 40. solano 40 to 50. contra costa 40. so we're. and these are felony caseloads. felony caseloads. yes. so we have a caseload in san francisco of 25 cases, more per attorney than all the surrounding counties. yes. and more in some cases, yes. have we lost any attorneys to surrounding counties because of time? there are some attorneys who come here and like we appreciate everything you're doing. we appreciate the standards and the

support. but the caseload is just too high. and we had an attorney who came knowing about our reputation but went back to his county because he just couldn't handle the caseload. and we've had others go to surrounding counties for the first time. okay. and i just want to point out, i mean it, we talk about this every single year, but it goes without saying that despite there being only a population of 5, african american in san francisco, 51% of your clients are black. yes okay. i you know, i, i'm just once, you know, again, i said this, i said this when we talked to the superior court, i said this when we had the hearing on the conditions in the jail, something is seriously off in our criminal justice system in san francisco, and we've got to fix it in this budget, it is dangerous. what is happening? conditions in the jail are

dangerous. the fact that we have the highest caseload by far in any surrounding counties for a pd, i mean, we used to be known for being on the cutting edge of criminal justice. we used to have, the pd's office, which was the best in the entire country with with attorneys clamoring to come and work here. now we're losing them to surrounding counties, we used to have, some of the most cutting edge programs in our jails so that when people, you know, when 50% of the jail population is black and only 5% of the population is black, people were actually leaving better off when they came in. now we're on lockdown most of the time, and our sheriffs are getting beat up. you know, maybe this hasn't gotten the attention that it's gotten because the victims are black or the victims are poor. the victims are mentally ill, the victims are addicted to

drugs. so maybe we can just say we don't care about what happens to them. but that's not the way that i feel. and i don't think that's the way this board of supervisors feel. and i don't think we should let this budget go through. and in fact, i'm going to say i've never voted against a budget before. never in the you know, this will be my eighth budget as a supervisor. and i was a legislative aide, you know, in six budgets. and my predecessor, i staffed him many, many years, never voted against the budget. this will be the first budget i vote against unless this is fixed. we cannot have an overcrowded jail where our employees are getting beaten up. we can not have, our, san franciscans not have a fair trial where they have a robust defense. we cannot have people leaving the public defender's office for the first time ever, because the work conditions are so poor and they can't provide a proper defense because their caseloads are so high. and going

to surrounding counties as a result, this is off. if the district attorney and if the mayor want more prosecutions, want less use of diversion, want to charge felonies more often, want to incarcerate more people, then you have to, at minimum, give them the public defense that they are constitutionally provided, provided you have to at least give them jail conditions where they have a right to education, where they have a right to a fresh air, where they have a right to be treated as human beings and where our employees in the jail aren't getting beaten up because people are so, stressed out and, and, and so overwhelmed by the conditions there we are off, and we have to fix this in this budget, or i certainly will be voting no against it. and i'm looking forward to having a

conversation with you, director dunning, and with the mayor as soon as possible. this is not getting enough attention, and it's not getting enough attention because the people that are suffering are poor, and they're people of color and i think it's disgusting. supervisor walton, thank you. chair chan and supervisor ronen ask that, most of my questions, i mean, you know, i'm i'm just literally really starting to wonder what the point of the constitution is, the district attorney's office receives about 40 more million dollars than the public defender's office. and it also just seems to focus on public safety here in this city. has nothing to do with preventing and stopping crime. i mean, we don't want to address the reasons people offend, like poverty, higher cost of living, unemployment and for some reason, this mantra of lock

everyone up, is what people are focused on and they think they're going to solve the problems, even though we know historically that has never worked. but even with that being said, if we are going to have our jails overcrowded, if we are going to have a situation that is unattainable, at the very least we need to make sure that we meet our constitutional mandate to provide and make sure the rights of people are protected. and, you know, we have so much more work to do around addressing safety in the city. people need jobs. they need training. they need stable housing. they need a way to eat. they need so many things that we actually can provide, have the resources to do, because if we're really interested in stopping crime and keeping people safe, we would make those investments so that we don't have these situations where so many people, make mistakes. the

more opportunities you have, the better choices you make. that's just that's just a fact. it's just known it's data supports that and it's proven. and so like supervisor ronen, i'm definitely going to be working to, to change, with this budget looks like and particularly in support of the public defender's office, i do have a question. just and i, you know, i guess it's philosophical, political, however you want to frame it or shape it. but do you have an idea why the public defender's office is so disproportionately funded, in comparison to rest of the safety network in the city, well, that's a great question, and i appreciate your question. supervisor ronan's. i mean, i think the reality is, you know, we represent primarily poor people of color who are vulnerable. they don't have a the political backing necessarily to go in and fight for that. and that's why we're

here, and that's why i take this charge very seriously. and that's why the people in my office who come here, they come to our office because it's a calling for them, because they know we have historical years of oppression in this country, that we're unfortunately choosing to deal with by funneling people through the criminal legal system. it's never worked, and it doesn't make any of us safer. we believe that really fighting for people, really seeing them and fighting for them empowers them and actually is often a step for change, for people. we also know that we have a problem in this country of mass incarceration that for two many, for decades, we've tried to use as a solution to, to structural issues that it hasn't been working. we need to re devote resources in other ways. but when we look at our over our asp, which is 3 million in the overall ecosystem of this of our city, that is not very much. and you're going to get with that 20

dedicated professionals who are some of the most skilled people who are really going to create more justice. when you have a public defender who is not really skilled, fighting with all the implicit bias, with all the dynamics, with oftentimes not having as diverse a jury as we should, you will get wrongful convictions. and that's not just going to impact that person, it's going to impact their children. and that's happening. and there's a lot of places where people will just plead people out because they don't want to put into the work. we don't accept that. we demand a very high standard of our staff and the people who come here want to do that, but we need the resources to be able to do that effectively and i just say, you know, i mean, we can vary in our our political beliefs here in the city, but the one thing that we are all supposed to be adhering to is the constitutionality of our decisions. and that needs to, of course, also be a part of how we budget. and, you know, again, it's just it's sickening to continue to see this disparity

that continues to exist. and knowing what's happening in our in our jail system, what's happening in our city. and so again, we will definitely be fighting to make changes because this is this is unacceptable. no thank you for that. and i think it's crucial that we finally have this workload study. there hadn't been one conducted for 50 years, and now there's been one that the rand corporation did. and it should be a watershed moment for public defense and realizing how much we can do for this system. but to your point, the constitution, we don't have a choice. every client that comes in, we have a constitutional mandate to take that client and represent them. we can't choose to not do to, take a case, and we want to take the case because we want people to provide, to get the representation that we as an office demand. but at a certain point, we i can't let my staff, the numbers get too high and we're going to have to declare unavailable, which again, wouldn't be fiscally good for the city because we can't have

our clients and staff suffer if the numbers get too high. supervisor ronen, thank you. there's just a couple questions i forgot to ask you. one, how does the this high caseload impact the jails in terms of, you know, the overcrowding, the high census at the jails? sure. that's a great question. one, it impacts just on a day to day level. if your caseload is too high, you can't go and visit your clients as often as you would want to because you have too many clients. you're in court too much, and that is very unsettling for clients, sometimes i'll get calls from people i haven't seen my attorney in a while, and i'll make sure i draw back on that, find out and make sure we have a visit. but there's a structural problem when you have to be in court and you have too many clients. so that's that piece. the other piece, however, is that when the caseloads are too high, you can you can only be in trial in one case at a time. so you're in cases now that might take three weeks. it might take

three months. and that's time during which that other client is waiting, for the attorney to finish that trial. and meanwhile, there's 70 other cases, several in the trial calendars. so a case that you might be ready to try in 3 to 4 months might get tried in 3 to 4 years down the road because we don't have another attorney ready to take on that case. so it leads to extended jail, stays pretrial, which leads to all sorts of physical and emotional damage for our clients and separation from families unnecessarily. we have to we need to be able to prepare the case and get it ready, and once it's ready, either it's a trial or maybe a resolution, because now we have a full picture, but there's too many cases. we can't do it as quickly as we need to. and the jail population continues to balloon. and if you got more positions, could you fill those positions immediately? immediately. we have hundreds. we there will be dozens of applications for every single opening that we have, because that's different from the from the sheriff's department where we're dying for more sheriffs to apply. and they have the positions open. they

just can't hire the positions you have people dying to be public defenders for san francisco, but you don't have the positions available to hire them. but both situations would improve the situation in jail. so if we have one department that can hire and has people clamoring, to, to be hired, and that would relieve some of the jail overcrowding situation and another department which has open positions but can't hire because there's not enough applicants, again, something's off, and we need we need to look at that, and there was one other question i had, and i forgot it. darn it. i should have written my notes down and i should say immediately, as long as the attrition rate is not too high. because if we need, we need if we have for running a deficit and we're not able to, that's a problem. so we need the attrition rate to be low enough so we can hire quickly too, right? yeah. okay i forgot my other question, but i'll ask you it if i remember it later. thank

you, thank you, thank you, thank you. and then i'm going to we're good, we're good. okay i'm going to go to thank you so much for your work. we appreciate you. and then the next will be the, sheriff's department. thank you so much. good afternoon, madam chair, members, while we get our final technical setup, i think i can be a little more efficient if i just say ditto to the last comments that i just heard as part of our presentation, i came

in with a presentation for you, and we have that provided, and i want to deviate just for one moment. and i know i have a limited amount of time, but i want to carry on part of the conversation. i know that you've had the opportunity to hear other department heads from members of the, criminal justice system and my fellow elected justice partner just mentioned to all of you the needs that we have in our justice system. and i think i caught at the tail end one of his comments about highlighting the work. we need to keep people out of jail, and that is one of our goals as well, because it is harder for our staff and it is harder for our department when there are more people incarcerated, as evidenced by our recent committee of the whole presentation where we gave you guys a very clear picture of what is happening right now, how we are at a critical mass, how we are at a critical point, at a flash point, if you will, in our justice system. right here in the city and county, we've done what we can to improve those conditions. we have about a 20%

increase in our electronic monitoring and our community based programs for people that are justice involved, but out of our custody, but even with that, we've had an increase of about 36% of our jail population. and a lot of what we talk about today is going to be about putting people first, putting our staff first, putting the incarcerated first, making sure that as much as it has been communicated that we have received an increase in our budget, there is still a need to put people first here. and that is directly in regards to the justice system, our staffing, as you will see in the following slides, i if we can go to the slide presentation right now, our first slide just highlights what our goals are. these strategic plan goals we've had since i came into office have not changed, and are a part of what moves our budget process. and those are the six goals we have. i'm going to focus today in our presentation on our

public safety and our improving accountability. and enhancing our workforce, next slide. we've done a lot of good work with what we've had. as i mentioned earlier, we had an increase in our budget to help us address immediate problems, but last year, in working with our budget, we were able to move forward on some things, but still haven't gotten there. when it comes to our staff. next slide please. and although our staff represents the very best of san francisco, represents the diversity that we share as a community, although it represents a number of accomplishments in terms of getting out there to try to recruit people, to try to bring people in, to try to fill those vacancies that were referenced in the last presentation, to continue with our hiring process and our training process, which involved five different regional academies. last fiscal year, which involved the hiring of a number of individuals but not near what we need. if you go to the next slide, please, you'll see that our workforce service plans, in terms of the age we're

concerned about the attrition and matching just attrition. this year, we're going to be asking for 75 positions to be filled. that's our goal. but it really doesn't meet what we are trying to achieve, which is also to match the attrition rate that is occurring. and that's why we provided this slide for you for your review later. next slide please. our hiring numbers, as also referenced in the previous presentation, are somewhat dismal in regards to how many people we are able to bring in. and despite our best efforts, we have been having challenges in doing so, which has been reflected in our overtime because we have been running on overtime and we appreciate the support there that we have continued to receive from the city. in regards to that, it's not for lack of trying regarding our workforce recruitment, we are right now with our 39 current hires and probationers and trainees. we're at about 30% for one of our initiatives, which is to replace our or to reach our 30 by 30 initiative,

which is to get 30% of our workforce to be, reflective of women by 2030. and we're encouraged by the work that we are doing. but we can do more right now. i wanted to highlight that our current, hired numbers reflect that percentage, and we want to continue that. our goal, again, is to hire 75 individuals, we're committed to that 30 by 30 initiative. we have streamlined our processes in regards to bringing people on board and testing and hiring, we have a personal touch where we have actually one recruiter. the one recruiter that we do have has spoken to hundreds of people personally, not by email, not by text, but personally spoken to people before, before, during and after the testing process, let me skip the next slide that highlights our community engagement efforts, but i want to make sure i focus on three things for what we're asking for in terms of improvements to our budget, all directly related to putting people first in regards to the safety of our staff, in addition to making sure that we

have the right recruiting budget to bring more people on, we're asking for support in getting more body worn cameras for our people that are currently working so that we can create a safer environment. there are many benefits to that. we have not gotten enough cameras on our people and we need more, we are also asking again for money in the recruitment area in terms of getting people on board, just being fair. i think fairness was mentioned earlier in regards to how everybody has a piece of the pie here in the justice system, and it is true we have focused publicly efforts out in the community on an agenda to which resulted in bringing more people into the jail. and i think we are at that critical point now where we need to ha some more investments in our system itself. i do want to highlight one thing just in terms of health care in the jails, we have a very dedicated group of employees who work to make sure

that we bring the same level of care to those that are incarcerated, as we do in our public health system. and yet that reflects 1% of the budget of the department of public health in regards to what we have invested in our incarcerated population and some of the requests that we have reflect a commitment to making sure we improve on those numbers, in the interest of time, i won't go over the other remaining slides, which reflect what our budget, our department wide budget sources are and what our uses are, in order for you to have the opportunity to ask me any questions. so i thank you for your time. i want to reemphasize that we are looking towards help, where we need the help the most with our people. thank you. supervisor ronan, thank you, thank you so much, sheriff. did you say that

increase is 36% in the jail population? i think our snapshot from may 14th is the one that we referenced in the committee as a whole. and we saw a 36% increase in the population from that time last year to this year, from year to year. yes and just in terms of the conversation that i was having with the public defender that you caught at the end, there, given this massive increase in the jail population year to year, do you think that if, public defenders had a lower caseload, that that would result in, lowering the jail population to some degree, would it make the cases move faster? i think to be realistic in regards to that, we would have to also take into consideration an another justice partner, the court system itself, because we can only process cases to the extent that there is accessibility in

the courtrooms themselves. so there would be another partner that we would have to make sure that we coordinate with in order to see that. and it was interesting when the superior court was here, they said that the backlog has gotten significantly better. do you agree with that or do you disagree with that? i think there's been a concerted effort, just as we've seen reflected on the streets. there's been a concerted effort in the courtrooms to process cases faster, and we do see that reflected in the work being done. there so you would agree that it's gotten it's gotten better from the last from last year when we talked about this, where it was it was unbelievable. backlogs. yes i think what the effort has been is to and i don't want to speak for another department, but what we've just seen anecdotally from my staff that are involved in the courtrooms is the calendars. yeah, a lot of cases which were backlogged have moved forward and started processing a little more. it doesn't mean they're completely closed and finished, but it does mean that they're moving forward. okay and then in terms of are are you i read this

in a, in an article in the newspaper, but are you or maybe someone told me about this. now i'm trying to remember where i heard this, but i heard that you're that you're looking at removing sheriffs from some of, other duties to put them in the jails to deal with the staffing crisis in the jails. and the and the increased population. is that happening? and is that true? and if so, where that is part of our planning process and in our partnerships with moving towards making sure we have a budget that meets the needs of the entire city, we've worked to , to eventually move away from staffing the medical examiner's office with deputies. those are sworn positions which we'll see an immediate impact on going back to the custody division and having impacts on on staffing. there so that is one example of where we are moving towards putting people back in the jails. i mentioned to you that

even with our efforts with deputies that are deployed on our safe streets, those are being detailed from units and divisions outside of the custody division. so we're no longer using people from the jails to do those, those detail assignments. okay. and then are there programs? you know, i was talking about this as well, like educational programs, therapeutic programs, that are not operating in the same way that they used to before this staffing crisis and in increase in population, that you would like to see, you know, be up and running in a more consistent basis? absolutely. we have had historically had successes with our programs. in fact, today i'd like to just say, coincidentally, that today we marked our in-custody graduation of, individuals or students from our five keys program. we had 16

incarcerated individuals who just graduated this afternoon. i missed that event because i'm here, but we still celebrated the fact that we got people through that process and we are very hopeful through the summer months that we're going to continue to have an increase in some enrollments in those programs. we've done this before. we plan on doing it again, and we just need more people to help us get that done. okay. thank you. vice chair mandelman, thank you, chair chan. and, thank you for your work. thank you for your presentation. i mean, the staffing crisis is real, and acute and highly problematic for deputies and for and for and for incarcerated folks. now i am trying to think about this sort of historically and the jail population is no higher today than it was when i started as a

supervisor. i think it's very close to that number. it's more reflective of pre-covid numbers right before we close the seventh floor at the hall of justice. and it is, i think, well below what it was 10 or 15 years ago. yes. our numbers back in that time reflected about 100 to 200 more. so i mean, can you talk about the way i mean, there are many factors that have made that have added to the staffing challenges is just to revisit it, is not it is not just the overall population, because the population is sort of back to pre-covid levels, which was which were down from from historic levels. so what is driving the staff? i mean, there aren't enough staff, but it's also more there are greater challenges now which are creating a greater need for staff, right? that's correct.

back in the pre-covid days and the days that reflected a higher population in ten, 15 years ago, we had additional jail space as well. so we had the ability to spread our population out to address what we call classification factors, individuals who couldn't stay together, special needs individuals who had to have a specific type of housing arrangement, we don't have that ability anymore with only two locations, the opening of the dorms has been one in which we have been able to create a space which is safe, all of the challenges we've had in terms of assaults on our staff, in terms of individuals who get into, donnybrooks in the jail, have all been in spaces other than the dormitory spaces. so we've had the ability to expand out into a safe space, however, our numbers, as you mentioned, are more reflective of pre-covid numbers. now, where we did have an additional jail. anwo