Seattle City Council Gender Equity, Safe Communities, New Americans & Education Committee 7/31/19

quick transition.

All right, good morning.

Today is Wednesday, July 31st, 2019. It is 9.32 a.m.

This is a special meeting of the Gender Equity, Safe Communities, New Americans in Education Committee.

I'm Councilmember Lorena Gonzalez, and I know that my two colleagues will be joining me at the table a little bit later, so why don't we go ahead and get started.

This is going to be a little awkward because I have to approve the agenda and there's nobody at the table to object, but nonetheless, I'm going to ask if there is no objection, the agenda will be adopted.

Resounding silence, hearing no objection, today's agenda is adopted.

There are six items on today's agenda.

First, we'll discuss and vote on Council Bill 119589, which is an ordinance known as the DNA Bill, which will conform the Seattle Municipal Code to state law for crimes that require the submission of biological samples.

Second, the Community Police Commission and the Office of Inspector General will present their mid-year report as required by the 2017 Police Accountability Ordinance.

Following that, the Office of Inspector General will present an Intelligence Report, also as required by Ordinance.

Then we'll be having a discussion and taking a possible vote on retiring a couple of clerk files relating to the Seattle Police Chief 2018 Annual Report and the Chief of Police Audit Report as required by City Ordinances.

Lastly, the Community Police Commission will rejoin us at the table and present their 2018 annual report, also, once again, as required by the 2017 Police Accountability Ordinance.

So before we continue through the very full agenda, we will do what we always do, which is hold our regular period of public comment.

We have no one signed up for public comment.

So unless there's somebody in the audience who wishes to give public comment and didn't get a chance to sign up, Breonna Thomas, you do not count.

Any others who wish to give public testimony before we close out?

Okay, seeing no one come forward, we're gonna go ahead and close out the period of public comment, and we'll go ahead and begin the process of getting into business for the day.

So I'm gonna have Roxanna read agenda item one, which is the DNA bill, and I would invite those folks who are here to present on the DNA bill to please make your way up to the committee table.

Thank you.

Agenda Item 1, Council Bill 119589, an ordinance relating to the submission of biological samples for briefing discussion and possible vote.

Thank you, Roxanna.

Hi, good morning.

Good morning.

And I don't think we have a PowerPoint presentation for this.

This will just be an oral presentation.

So why don't we go ahead and start with introductions.

Greg, we'll start with you and then we can go and I will go ahead and hand it off to Greg.

Are you going to do an introduction and then we'll hand it off to the other presenters.

Thank you.

Greg Doss, Council Central staff.

Rebecca Johnson, part of your, excuse me, part of your lobbying team in Olympia.

John Shockett, Deputy City Attorney.

Kelly Harris, Chief of the Criminal Division, City Attorney's Office.

Well, thank you so much for being with us.

I know that this bill has been long in the making, and I'm really excited that we have an opportunity to have a discussion today and possibly vote it out of committee.

So, Greg, I'm going to hand it over to you to walk us through your Council Central staff analysis and report, and then we will head down the line to hear comments.

Great, thank you, Madam Chair.

So Council Bill 1195890 would conform the Seattle Municipal Code to state law for 10 serious or sex-related crimes that require submission of DNA to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab.

There's a list of these crimes in your staff report.

By way of background, the WSP Crime Lab processed and entered into the federal combined DNA database all DNA from Seattle misdemeanor offenders until 2014. In 2014, the crime lab informed the city attorney's office that it would no longer accept DNA samples from Seattle because Seattle misdemeanors are convicted under the SMC code instead of the RCW.

The city, however, continued to collect DNA samples and now has 650 of them stored in the Seattle Police Department's evidence unit.

In a moment, the law department will talk about the legal developments that now require the state patrol to accept that DNA evidence.

And they'll provide some history of the issue and why the bill is before you here today.

Before I turn it over, though, I should mention that I contacted the Washington State Patrol about processing of the 650 samples.

And what they had told me is that they have a statewide backlog, so they will not be able to get to all of those samples until next year.

As they enter them nightly, an FBI algorithm runs to see if there's any match with any other DNA in the system.

if there's a match, law enforcement is immediately identified.

But as I said, that would happen on a piecemeal basis sometime over the next year.

And with that, I turn it over to the law department, unless you have any questions.

Actually, before we get to the law department, can I ask, Rebecca, can I ask you to just give a quick report on, or, you know, however long you want to take, to give us an update on some of the work that you prioritized on behalf of the city and other stakeholders in Olympia this year that is sort of laying the foundation for why we're taking this action today?

Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you.

So this is a conversation that we've been having in Olympia since the State Patrol made their decision in 2014-2015 that they would not be processing DNA collected under municipal ordinance convictions.

It's an issue that we worked with the Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs on, State Patrol, the Attorney General's Office, the judges, a number of other cities.

And the question, the big question that had been happening in Olympia for several years was whether or not this was an issue that could be resolved by cities taking action such as the one we're going, hopefully we're going to take today.

or if it needed to be state action.

Last summer, Representative Orwell, who's been a huge champion of this issue for many years, submitted a request for an attorney general opinion asking the question of, is this an issue that cities can solve by incorporating the RCW?

or must the state take action?

We actually got that answer back in the middle of the legislative session this year, which is late for action, but we had several champions, including Representative Orwell, Representative Goodman, Senator Peterson, Representative Jenkins, many folks came together to put into state law a recognition that we do have this 650 samples sitting on our shelves.

And so what the state legislation does is say we and other cities who are similarly situated have until I believe January to change our laws to incorporate the RCWs and the State Patrol now has the authority to test those samples that we currently have.

So this has been many years of conversation.

I'm so excited to be, have the solution on the horizon and there really are a number of really great organizations, I'm sure I didn't list all of them, a number of awesome organizations who've been a part of these discussions and problem solving in Olympia and here.

Great, thank you.

Any questions for Rebecca, Council Member Musqueda before we move on?

Okay, great.

I'll hand it over to our City Attorney's Office.

Well, thank you for considering this bill.

As Rebecca mentioned, this is part of this process that we've been working through in Olympia for a number of years since the crime lab stopped accepting our DNA in 2014. After we got the Attorney General's opinion, which was really necessary to clarify for us whether this could be addressed at the city level or at the state level, the legislature did exactly what we needed, and now we have the opportunity to fix our portion of the issue.

So the nuts and bolts of what this bill actually does is it incorporates certain state crimes into our city code by reference.

Every city in Washington is required to have its own criminal code.

There are several hundred cities in the state and they all write their codes slightly differently.

Seattle has traditionally had a separately written code that doesn't do any incorporation by reference, but since the Attorney General's Office clarified that incorporation by reference is necessary for municipal DNA samples to be accepted by the crime lab.

We need to take this step of incorporating certain portions of state law into our code by reference in order to have the DNA samples accepted by the crime lab.

So that's what this bill does.

There are no substantive changes to any current city crimes and it would make these crimes identical in terms of the illegal elements in the city of Seattle.

and elsewhere in the state.

And just really quickly before Kelly chimes in, we're also not creating any new categories of crimes that currently exist within municipal code.

Correct.

There are no actual substantive changes to the Seattle Municipal Criminal Code.

And then Kelly can talk a little bit about the process for how we've worked with the courts and the crime lab for submission of DNA and what this will actually look like in the criminal division.

Great.

Kelly.

Thank you for allowing me to explain a little bit about how this is going to change things for the rank and file assistants who are taking these samples currently.

Like you discussed, there's no substantive changes to anything in the Seattle Municipal Code.

There's no change in how What we need to prove is not adding any additional crime categories or offenses.

It just provides the mechanism for the Washington State Patrol to be able to accept these samples.

We've been working with the State Patrol, with the jail, King County Jail, and Seattle Municipal Court to refine the procedures for how this is done, since this burden will now largely fall on the King County Jail for collection of in-custody samples and for SPD for out-of-custody samples.

And we've been working on that since, you know, for the last couple of months since this, the state law came into effect, because we knew what changes were coming down the road.

But without this change, it would only last, but to the end of the year.

We wouldn't have a way forward after this.

So this helps us move forward with one procedure that won't change for the future.

And when you say that we wouldn't have a way to move forward, my understanding is that that means that if we don't make these changes, then at the end of the year, we would no longer have a reason to collect DNA samples because we would just be creating a backlog at that point because we wouldn't be able to test them.

So that means sexual assault kits.

Give me a flavor of the types of DNA things that were that we're collecting, that we would no longer be able to, that we would no longer collect.

We would no longer be able to collect DNA for any of the domestic violence crimes that we have convictions on, any of the sexual misconduct crimes, patronizing a prostitute, sexual exploitation, stalking, indecent exposure, a lot of those crimes that we do now that we are able to collect samples on at the end of the year, this won't pass, there'd be no way to have State Patrol accept those into the system.

And so that would just go away for us, which as a public safety matter, we cannot have happen.

And remind me why we can't just test them ourselves.

Well, they're entered into the State Patrol database, the CODIS system, and that is the system that Once the samples are collected, it goes into that for the comparison that we could not do without State Patrol because they hold that information.

The city does not hold that information itself.

So we could test them, but it wouldn't get us very far because we don't have markers by which to compare the results to.

So we could have DNA, DNA testing results, but without sort of a comparison in terms of the database, it would just be information without a match.

Right.

And testing is sort of a misnomer because we're not really testing other than we're just entering these samples into the system for comparison.

So unless there is a mode to compare it to, which the State Patrol has control of, collecting them would mean nothing.

Okay.

Any other questions or comments?

I guess thank you for your work in Olympia.

I know this has been something that you guys have been working on for a long time.

Just overall, privacy protections, any conversations come up during Olympia on misuse of DNA, how this may be used in the future, any other protection sideboards that you guys had conversations about?

That's a great question.

So because we're not adding any new crimes, and this is actually just aligning the practice of testing DNA upon conviction, this really is alignment and like putting this and these are samples into the same category and treated the same way as all other DNA that's collected under state law or under other municipal convictions that do the same thing that we do here.

And I think that's an important distinction, and I appreciate the question, is that the DNA collection that occurs in this context is all post-conviction, so it's not, you know, I would have pretty significant concerns about both the state bill and this bill if it was a pre-conviction DNA collection and comparison mode that could, you know, sort of be used in multiple ways, and we have seen many examples of how those abuses have come to play and that have really resulted in just really broad breaches of people's privacy.

And we certainly don't want to play into that kind of a system or have that kind of a system.

But I think for me, the fact that this is post-conviction is a critical piece of it.

And we did have an opportunity to circulate the bill.

And with John's help, he created a really handy page and a half executive summary of the bill that we were able to circulate to some key stakeholders, including the ACLU of Washington and KSARC and others, and all of them came back saying that they had no substantive comments on it.

So I feel confident that we've been able to sort of structure the city's version of the bill in a way that doesn't modify the standards that were adopted at the state level, which is where the conversations and the struggle were really occurring around some of the privacy issues and other aspects related to the criminal justice system.

Did I overstate anything?

No, that's perfect.

Okay, great.

Kelly, you wanted to chime in?

I just wanted to note, too, that these samples aren't only just for finding future crimes are also being used to exonerate people who have been wrongly convicted of crimes that these are in the state database.

So it serves a dual purpose.

Nationwide there have been incidents where DNA was collected and it showed that someone was wrongly convicted.

So I think it's important for both of those reasons that we have these samples in the system.

Any other questions?

And then joining us just now at the table is Council Member Pacheco, so we'll give him a minute to catch up here, but I'm not sure if you have any substantive questions on this particular council bill.

We're still on the agenda item one.

All right, so I don't have any other questions.

I wanted to actually thank Rebecca and a lot of the sexual assault advocates and advocates of privacy interests for all of the work that you all have been doing over the last five years or so, five to six years.

on really taking this issue seriously.

I know it took a really long time and there are many victims and survivors who I've had an opportunity to speak to directly about why they believe this is an important.

step for the city to take forward and certainly thought that it was an important step at the state level.

And I know that many of those individuals that I've talked to gave some very powerful testimony during this last legislative session that really changed minds and hearts around why this was this bill was necessary.

Really wanted to also express my gratitude to Representative Orwell, who's been a true champion on these issues.

And I thought her foresight in requesting an opinion from the Attorney General's office was brilliant.

And I know that last year we had a conversation about Tate potentially passing this bill through, and I had concerns about whether that was necessary or not.

I appreciated having the benefit of the Attorney General Office's opinion on that issue that this is actually necessary in order to move this practice forward at the city level.

So really appreciate all of that and appreciate the City Attorney's Office work on this issue.

John, thank you so much for spending so much time with us, walking us through our initial concerns.

ultimately drafting the bill and making sure that we have that executive summary so we can distill a somewhat dense yet not substantive bill with our stakeholders who have really been following this issue very closely.

So thank you so much all for your work.

Okay, if there are no other questions or comments, I'm gonna I'm gonna go ahead and call this one for a vote since it was Listed as something that there could be a potential vote and it feels to me as though it is ready to be considered by the full council So I'm going to move that the committee recommend that the City Council pass council bill one one nine five eight nine Any additional comments?

Okay, all those in favor, say aye.

Aye.

Any no's?

No, no abstentions.

The motion carries and the committee will recommend to the full City Council that it pass Council Bill 119589. Thank you so much for being with us this morning, really appreciate it.

All right, so we're going to move to agenda item two, which we'll be hearing from the CPC and the OIG on their midyear report.

So I'm going to invite those presenters to make their way to the table, and I will have Roxanna read agenda item two into the record.

Agenda item two, Community Police Commission and Office of Inspector General Midyear Report for Briefing and Discussion.

All right, good morning.

Thank you all for being with us.

So we have a full set of presenters today.

So I will go ahead and ask you all to introduce yourselves.

And then, Greg, do you have preliminary comments on this one?

Okay, and then we're just going to hand it over to you all to take us through the presentation.

So just a quick round of introductions.

We'll start with you, Greg.

Greg Dawes, Council Central staff.

Bessie Scott, Interim Executive Director, Community Police Commission.

Emma Katagia, Commissioner, Co-Chair.

Good morning, Lisa Judge, Inspector General for Public Safety.

Good morning, Leslie Cordner, Seattle Police Department.

Monique Guevara, Policy Analyst, Office of Police Accountability.

And Andrew Meyerberg, Director of Office of Police Accountability.

Great.

Well, thank you so much for being with us.

Bessie, are you going to kick us off?

Sure.

Yes.

Thank you so much, Madam Chair.

And thank you, council members, for having us this morning.

Thank you for letting us present and the opportunity to work in partnership.

We're here today because of the power of community.

Through the tireless work of community and many of you, the landmark police accountability ordinance was passed just over two years ago.

The police accountability ordinance uses the power of transparency to foster accountability.

Through Subchapter 4, Mechanisms to Support Accountability at Section 3.29.400 of Reporting of Potential Misconduct in Police Accountability, I'm sorry, Accountability Issues, it does this by directing the CPC and the Office of the Inspector General to present mid-reports to this committee about the status of our organization's recommendations to SPD and the timeliness and effectiveness of the Seattle Police Department's response.

We're here to do that today.

And we'd like to take a moment to recognize the progress we've made in accountability.

Today, for the first time, we have all four agencies, including three civilian-led accountability partners sitting here together.

The CPC, the Office of the Inspector General, and the Office of Police Accountability, as well as the Seattle Police Department.

This mid-year report highlights major projects by the accountability oversight entities, recommendations, and implementation status by SPD.

We look forward to continuing to work in this partnership.

I'm going to turn it over to CPC co-chair Emmett Katagi.

Great.

Thank you, Pasi.

Good morning.

Good morning.

So I will start an introduction of the four prongs of our accountability system.

The CPC is the community voice in the police reform process.

OIG is a civilian and provides systemic review of SPD and their policies.

The OPA is a mix of civilian-led and has sworn officer handling investigation of possible policy violation by SPD employees.

SPD is on the front line of accountability and provide public safety.

Can somebody click the button on the PowerPoint presentation?

I will be the lovely assistant for this.

Thank you.

Sorry.

Not very good at it though, I apologize.

That's alright.

Okay, if there's a team so far in 2019, it's collaboration.

The four prongs of the accountability system have worked together in many issues.

We've convened quarterly meetings with SPD, CPC, OIG, and OPA to discuss our common efforts.

The CPC's major project has mostly involved creating cross-agency teams, OIG, CPC, OPA, and SPD are all working together in improving police interviewing techniques.

The OPA and SPD have worked together to create new system to better address OPA management action recommendation, which are proposed policy changes initiated by OPA.

So the collaboration includes a lot of work implementing initiative I-940.

I-940 passed with 60% of the vote in November.

It includes mandate for more training, independent investigation of police use of serious and deadly force, and created the good faith standard in Washington.

One big way we're leading in the efforts to implement I-940 is the sad faith.

Sorry, Emma.

It's okay.

So in the companion resolution to the accountability legislation, council asked the CPC to explore ways of conducting independent investigation to serious and deadly uses of force fully outside of SPD.

We convened a serious and deadly uses of force task force in May 2018. It is staffed and funded through the CPC.

The task force is made up of community and law enforcement leaders, CPC, OIG, OPA, SPD, and other system partner.

Thank you.

The task force is expected to have its last meeting on August 16. They've already agreed to statement about the values and expectation for independent investigation post I-940.

The other recommendation they'll be considering in voting in August include, but are not limited to, improving support to families impacted by police use of force, proposal for how to conduct independent investigation without relying on other police department.

and ways that police and civilian oversight agencies can come together in the aftermath of serious and deadly uses of force to assist what happened and see if there are policy or training changes that needs to be put in place that could have avoided it.

Again, these recommendations are in the draft stage.

We expect them to be voted on August 16. And Bessie, jump in if anything I miss.

So the CPC has also participated in the statewide efforts to align current training practices with the increased training requirements of I-940.

The Washington Criminal Justice Training Commission organized those efforts.

The CPC participated in other group to give community input.

Okay, thank you.

So, during the process, we help suggest line by line revision to the rules under consideration, help create an outline for the 200 or so hours of training required by I-940.

We help direct people to give their input through the training commission online public commenting portal.

We also help people with mental illness who are currently incarcerated give their input by collecting their comments and bringing them to the training commission.

Their first-hand experience with arrests and the system gave valuable insight.

We also help inform community groups with our experience participating in crisis intervention training.

The new role were approved by the training commission last June.

We're now participating in a similar training commission-led process about how independent investigation should work in Washington.

The CPC is participating with community group, SPD, OPA, and OIG in this process.

So far, there's been three meetings between key stakeholders.

We hope that this recommendation will play a critical role in the statewide roles.

The training commission planned to host a public meeting in the next month or so.

They expected to release their rules sometime in September.

OK, consent decree compliance.

The CPC has done a lot of work and put a lot of resources toward consent decree compliance.

That's largely been centered around protecting police accountability reforms after the recent police contracts were approved.

In February, we submitted a brief to the court with our concerns about how contract could impact police accountability.

In May, the court held a status conference.

While it did find SPD in compliance with 10 areas of the consent decree, the court found Seattle out of compliance in the area of police accountability.

The court ordered the city to work with the DOJ, monitoring team, and CPC to identify the gaps and weaknesses that have been created in the disciplinary system.

Since then, the mayor's office has gotten an extension from the court and hired a group of out-of-state consultants.

Community groups, many of which were instrumental in the consent decree being enacted, have expressed concern with the mayor's decision.

The mayor's consultant plans to file their draft methodology for their work with the court this coming August 15. Okay, close now.

The CPC is also- You're doing great, Emma, you're doing amazing.

Thank you.

The CPC is also focused on addressing disparity in policing.

The SPD recently completed a report called, quote unquote, Disparity Review Part One.

OIG and CPC each independently evaluated SPD's methodology for this review.

That report found people of color were more likely to be prisked by Seattle police than white people.

That's despite the fact subjects of color were less likely to be found with weapon when prisked by white people.

People of color were also more likely to have firearms pointed at them during police stops than white people.

SPD bias free policing policy required a department to consult CPC and OID to explore ways to reduce disproportionate impacts like this.

So the CPC also went on to make recommendations to the chief, Carmen Bess, after the report was published.

Those recommendations include better desegregating the data in future disparity reviews.

We encourage SPD to find ways to utilize their soon-to-be hired community service officers to help reduce disparity.

We asked SPD to engage impacted communities about disparity.

Finally, we recommended SPD leadership create a plan to address disparity.

Since then, the CPC and SPD have partnered to create a plan to hold convening.

which will engage impacted communities in this process before September.

We're working together to create focus group to review interactions between SPD and the community and gain insights from community members about how interaction could have gone better.

As far as creating a plan to address disparity as found in the report, SPD has said it's premature to discuss changes to practices.

They want to see the result from Part 2 of this report, which they will have more data.

Initial results from Part 2 are scheduled to be available in late October.

Okay, we have a new one, officer wellness.

The CPC is also focused in ways to increase officer wellness, recruitment and retention.

The CPC has been doing aspect of this work for a while and recently recommitted to exploring this intentionally with the creation of an officer wellness work group.

There are two parts to this work.

The things the CPC will be doing in partnership and the things we'll be looking at independently.

As far as partnership, CPC, SPD, OIG, and OPA have all begun conversation about how we should approach this work jointly.

The CPC and SPD leadership have also been in contact about the needs identified in regards to mental health and recruitment and retention.

The CPC has assigned commissioners to determine the scope and guide this work.

Okay, other CPC priorities.

While we're giving you some highlights, we're working on much more.

That includes community engagement.

We've assigned commissioners to all seven council districts to the liaison for the CPC in those communities.

We've finalized CPC 101, a presentation we've begun giving in community to educate people about Seattle's accountability system.

We've also focused on youth engagement by partnering with OPA and SPD to go to Cleveland High School, work with young people to help them become familiar with police accountability.

police practices.

We've been focused on oversight of police surveillance and the community service officer program.

The CPC is also looking at ways we can equitably address this spike of hate crimes our area is seeing.

We're working with SPD to improve their public disclosure process and gain more insights about 911 dispatch.

We're also sending some commissioners and staff to SPD's crisis intervention training.

Collaboration.

We're working with our accountability partners to offer some trainings and taking trauma-informed approaches to this work.

We're in the final stage of implementing our system-wide policy recommendation tracking database.

We're also working to create in-service training for SPD officer to give them more insight into Seattle's accountability system.

And CPC internal businesses.

This is all on top of some big changes happening within the CPC.

The CPC will soon be making plans on how to choose a permanent executive director.

Eight new commissioners were also just appointed to the CPC, so we have been focusing on boarding them and helping them to get to a speed to our work.

And so I'm going to hand it off to the OIG.

Now we have been doing work in partnership, especially around police interviewing techniques, and we look forward to continuing our collaboration going forward.

So, Lisa, before you kick off, this seems like a good point for us to pause in the event that any of us colleagues have any questions or follow-up comments for the representatives of the Community Police Commission who are at the table.

We've got a quiet audience.

Usually you all get a hot bench, but not today.

I just want to thank you all for your work before we move on.

I know that there's been a lot of transition happening over at the Community Police Commission, and there are a lot of demands on your time.

And I really appreciate you taking the time to come here and share with us a little bit more about your work.

I don't have any follow-up questions on this because I have an opportunity to meet with members of the CPC and staff of the CPC on a very regular basis, and so I am intimately familiar with all of the things that you are doing, and I'm grateful for that ongoing partnership.

It's very meaningful to me and the work that I continue to do on this city council, so thank you.

Thank you very much, Councillor.

Go for it, Lisa.

Thank you.

Thank you, Emma.

And good morning, Madam Chair and council members.

I appreciate the opportunity to come and speak to you today about the work that the Office of Inspector General is doing.

Before I get rolling on the substantive part of my presentation, I just want to acknowledge and really express my gratitude for the partnership that I've experienced in building the Office of Inspector General.

We've been open for business a little over a year now.

And the collaboration and relationships that we've established with OPA, CPC, and Seattle Police Department have just been invaluable in setting up our office and getting our operations running.

Also, I would like to acknowledge the communication that's mandated in the ordinance that's built in for our quarterly partner meetings.

And these meetings, I think it's a great way to have structured conversations about the work that we do together.

And we've been able to, as partners in between those moments, establish relationships that are really good to build our operations so that we're working in concert, not duplicating work and complementing the work that we're all doing.

So I just wanted to...

preface my remarks with that a little bit.

So my office has really three main functions.

There's a policy and best practices function, an audit function, which is the meat and potatoes of our office, and then a couple of folks that engage in OPA oversight.

They do conflict investigations for allegations of misconduct involving OPA members, and they provide input on classifications of complaints and certification of OPA investigations.

So I'll talk in depth a little bit more about those in a few moments, but I want to start by highlighting a joint project that we have ongoing with CPC, Seattle Police Department, and OPA in terms of working to innovate interview practices with the Seattle Police Department.

And I think my office, because we do some investigations in the Office of Police Accountability, are also partnering in the actual process itself to use what comes out of this.

But we've engaged a subject matter expert in interviewing and interrogation practices from the UK who uses science-based, oh, I'm sorry, I'm not, advancing my own slides properly now.

I thought I was really hitting my stride.

Yeah, I know.

It's easy to lose track of it.

Sorry about that.

So we're essentially using evidence-based research that's been done in the area of human communication and memory and interviewing to use that information to build a program that's internal to Seattle so that they could create their own policies and create their own training program to provide ongoing training from officers coming out of the academy to get some foundational knowledge in how to effectively communicate with residents and folks involved in criminal investigations all the way up to specialized investigators like homicide and sexual assault detectives who need special techniques and knowledge.

So it's pretty exciting.

I think, and it's been very collaborative thus far, so I'm really appreciative of everybody who's been involved in that, and happy to answer any questions about any of these projects as we're talking.

So I want to start a little bit about talking about some of the work that our policy analysts have done, just in terms of making sure that we, as the Office of Inspector General, engage our own education so that when we do an analysis of a process, we're coming at it from a place of solid foundational knowledge.

So one of the projects that we've just completed and that we hope is assistive to our partners and to community and external stakeholders is a complete mapping of the entire SPD disciplinary process from the initiation of a complaint all the way through to any sort of final arbitration procedures that go on.

And I'd like to acknowledge the collaboration that we've received from so many of the partners who play a role in this complaint process in one way or another.

OPA, SPD, including many aspects of their operations that helped us out, the Seattle Police Officers Guild, the Seattle Police Management Association, the City Attorney's Labor Relations folks and City Attorney's Office, and the King County Prosecutors.

So we had a lot of collaboration to make sure that this mapping process was accurate and that it had the buy-in of all of those who were involved in the SPD complaint.

process.

So this graphic here that's up on the board is a very general subway map overview of the process.

Each one of those processes is broken down and comes with its own individual, very detailed graphic analysis of the process itself.

And hopefully they've all been made available to you.

They will be made available to anybody who would find that assistive in their work.

So I think this is, I really want to express gratitude, Lisa, and sort of commend your staff's work on this particular aspect.

I had an opportunity to be briefed on the work product, and I was also really grateful for your receptiveness to doing the work in the first place.

When the news came out around the Officer Shepard Adley, Adley, Adley Shepard, seeing it as it was listed on a file.

Results came back in terms of that arbitration process.

I had serious and ongoing concerns about how our system was set up in a manner that might have contributed to both the delay in the public release of the results of that arbitration, but also just underlying concerns about the substance of the arbitration and how we ended up in that particular, with that particular result and had reached out to your office about digging into this body of work to give us a better sense of what the overall disciplinary process is in all aspects that are currently there.

And your office really dug into this work.

did a tremendous amount of work and produced something that I think is easily digestible, that is going to be helpful to us as policymakers in identifying additional refinements to this particular process that is incredibly important to us and incredibly important to the public.

to make sure we're getting it right and not promoting a system that is going to erode public trust in our discipline and appeals process when a chief of police does actually, in fact, find that discipline is merited.

And that's what this is going to be really helpful, particularly to those of us who sit on the Labor Relations Policy Committee who are going to be asked to consider once again how to modify and negotiate with our police unions on these precise issue.

So thank you for the work.

And for colleagues, for you all, if you haven't had a chance to have the briefing or see the mapping of the SPD disciplinary process, really encourage you to get your hands on those documents.

And I'm sure, I think it took like a couple of hours for you all to print these infographics out for us.

really strongly encourage you to dig into this information.

It's very important.

And the most brilliant part was that OIG got a sort of certification from all of the different entities who are involved in the disciplinary process saying that this was an accurate representation of their pieces of the process.

So I have a high level of confidence that this is accurate and an accurate and fair depiction of what the system is.

So thank you.

Thank you very much.

I appreciate those remarks, and I appreciate the acknowledgement of the hard work of my office.

The staff really did go, I think, above and beyond to produce something that's both detailed at a granular level and accessible to most folks.

For those of you who are like me, who aren't process-driven people, my office is very happy to come and do a briefing for you and walk you through all or any of the aspects of it that you would like.

And we will provide any training or explanation that would be helpful to anybody.

So thank you.

And I would like to say that all of the materials that we produce are available on our website.

So these materials and the reports that I'm about to talk about are available there as well.

OK. into audits and assessments, and I want to talk about a few of them that are in progress right now.

The purpose of this meeting today is to advise you on recommendations that we've made and the status of those recommendations.

As these are in progress, there won't be that portion of the show, but it will highlight the work that we've got ongoing, and then I'll talk about some of the reports that we have completed for you.

So, as you know, audits are really the backbone of OIG's accountability work.

The way we decide on projects to audit is we prioritize areas of public interest and then we do a risk-based analysis to really try to dig into the potential for harm that might result.

if these areas are going without attention, and the likelihood of that harm.

So we've got a matrix that we use to line up the projects in priority order when we take them.

The ones that we have ongoing right now, and one of them is finishing today and will be filed with the court later this afternoon, that is an assessment of SPD's force review board.

That came as part of the sustainment effort, and the previous audit was done by SPD.

But since there has been some acknowledgement that OIG will largely fold into the function that has been done by the Department of Justice and the Federal Monitor in terms of ongoing systemic oversight will fall to OIG.

We've begun folding ourselves into some of these processes and one of those was conducting, it's called an audit.

in the court paperwork, but it's really not an audit in terms of GAGAS standards.

So we are calling it an assessment in these materials.

It will be called an audit in the court findings.

So that is, it was a fairly comprehensive look at not only force review board meetings that were attended this spring, there was a subset of them that were identified by the monitor and DOJ, but also a look back at the training that force review board members have had interviews with force review board members and other things to provide some foundation and context to the makeup of the board and how its own members believe it's operating.

So I think that'll be of interest to folks.

We're also beginning a mutual aid audit and that has in some ways taken on a little bit of a life of its own because there will be some look at how immigration policy is followed by SPD officers when they're not operating within a formal SPD chain of command.

And so the overall goal of this and the objective of this audit at this point is to look at how SPD officers operate, how they engage when they're working with a task force or working under a mutual aid situation where there may or may not be a formal SPD chain of command that gets ordinary review like the work that has been really concentrated on by the Department of Justice and the Federal Monitor.

So we're going to look at those operations outside of typical SPD chains of command.

We're going to concentrate our efforts with this go-around on this process on topics that really impact constitutional policing.

So we're going to look at uses of force, how force is reported and investigated in outside chains of command, how persons in mental health crisis are dealt with, We're going to look at adherence to SPD immigration policy and how operations involving First Amendment expression are handled out there.

So those are some of the topic areas that we have on tap at this point, and we're still in the beginning phases of that audit and meeting with external and internal stakeholders to really define our objectives.

with that one.

The other one that's about to get underway is an audit of the canine operations, and we're in the survey phase at this point, so that involves meeting with stakeholders and trying to refine our objective.

So when we have more information available about that, I'm happy to meet with you and give you a brief.

Do you have, Lisa, on the canine audit, do you have a sense of how many, I don't know what the title is, chief coordinator for the canines, is it like, how do I refer to them?

other than just canines?

I mean, do they have like a title or something?

The canine unit or the handlers?

The actual dogs.

The dogs, yeah, they all have different names.

Okay.

How many of them are there?

Oh, I'm not sure.

Okay.

There's...

Four or five.

Yeah, there's at least four or five.

There's the patrol canines, there's the dog sniffing canines.

There's the dog sniffing, the explosive bomb sniffing.

Detection dogs too.

Yeah, I'm sure they do.

They say hello.

The cute ones that show up at public events.

Yeah, okay.

I was just trying to get a sense of, for lack of a better phrase, what the inventory was of canines in the police department.

It's a limited amount.

I think it's around 10.

Possibly, yeah.

And our audit will focus on the patrol canine function, not the detection function.

Okay.

Okay.

Also, if any of my colleagues have anything to add to anything I'm saying, I know that I'm running through this a little bit quickly.

Anything?

Well, it would rewind, but in regards to the interview training that we'll be doing, so a limited number of detectives went through a related training the peace model, and so we've already begun efforts on that, and I think that the other training that's going to be coming in that you referenced will really build on those efforts and speak to something department wide even, you know, and obviously we'll roll this out slowly, but I think it's going to be a good thing.

And if I would just chime in for the K-9 work that Lisa's office is doing, we really appreciate it.

That's one of the things that we had discussed and flagged for both the department and for the OIG.

We've issued from OPA, I think three or four management actions now, policy recommendations that flowed from some K-9 cases that we saw and looking at, you know, how we can revamp the policy, make sure that the manual is consistent with policy, and then make sure that we're training to the policy and training accurately.

And hopefully that's stuff that you'll cover.

But there's a new policy that's coming out.

The canine policy has been totally rewritten and that will actually be filed with the court today with the rest of the use of force policy and then be issued when we hear back from the court.

Great.

And Lisa, your audit is taking all of those modifications into account?

Or is it a true audit in terms of looking back and only looking back?

That is an excellent question, Madam Chair.

I'm always good at those.

That'll be something that we determine in the scope and the objectives of our audit, but it will certainly be a look back at operations.

I don't, in making any recommendations or looking at what SPD has already done to remedy any sort of concerns that we might uncover, that will certainly be part of it.

Okay.

So it'll be folded into the report and the discussion.

Great.

Thank you.

Yeah, I'd just like to mention that with any of our formal audits, the subject of the audit, which is generally SPD, will have an opportunity to file a report about how they intend to act on our recommendations, if they intend to implement them or not.

So that'll be part of our final reports, any SPD response.

So moving on to audits and assessments that we've completed.

The first project that we had was a firearms inventory review that came as a result of a complaint from someone who made allegations that SPD had a number of missing firearms and other inventory.

So, our audit folks did a little investigation, and they were able to determine that, in fact, over the course of a period of a couple of decades, there were, in fact, eight firearms that were unaccounted for in SPD's inventory.

And we identified a couple of processes that were largely responsible for that.

firearms that had been converted for SPD use through, perhaps they were in their property or they were evidence that were not claimed by someone, were turned over, made part of SPD property, were kept on a separate list than the regular firearms inventory list, and so they hadn't married those lists up yet.

And some of these things SPD had uncovered just as we were embarking on our audit or on our assessment.

So we made three recommendations, and SPD agreed to take steps to respond to all three of those suggestions that we made.

And I'm not sure if you want detail about what those were, because all of this is available, I think, in the reports themselves.

Do you want me to go into any detail on that?

I don't think so right now, since we're trying to keep it general for today.

I know that we, on some of these, we may need to make space for you at a later date and time to come back and do a report out on some of these.

Perfect.

Okay.

So the next project was our first formal audit, and that was an audit that's required by the code.

It was SPD's compliance with Chapter 14.12, collection of information for law enforcement purposes, otherwise known as the intelligence audit.

And I'm not going to really talk about this at all because we've got time set aside.

And if there's extra time, I'd like to reserve that for my lead auditor on this project to come and go into some detail on this with you.

Unless you've got any particular questions now, I'll just move on.

I don't have any questions.

So a little bit more about our best practices research.

This is another recommendation that was made to Chief Best and SPD last fall that SPD implement some sort of peer intervention program which would use social science and evidence-based research on the bystander effect and create a program to to teach and give officers tools to become active bystanders with each other, to essentially create a de-escalation program for officers to help peers sort of step in and take over when perhaps they're having a moment where conduct could veer into unprofessionalism or misconduct and help each other out, to be each other's keeper in that program.

My office and some members of SPD attended a training on New Orleans EPIC program, which is one of the main models for this kind of program.

And we've agreed with SPD that they will develop and implement a program.

We think the most effective program would be one that's built by the line officers and line supervisors, because they're really the beneficiaries.

of this kind of program.

And it's, I think, more meaningful and more impactful if it comes from them deciding ways that they can help each other out in those circumstances with full support of the chief and command staff.

So we're going to be working and providing some technical assistance to SPD as they develop that program.

And I just want to interrupt for a second.

Sure.

So I really think this also fits in with our early intervention system with our officer wellness program that's expanding.

It's all part of the health and welfare of the officers and the service that they give the public.

Yeah, and we're really viewing this as an officer wellness program.

It's only effective if it is non-punitive.

So that's one of the main facets of it.

That's great.

Any questions or comments?

Great.

My policy and best practices folks have also done some work with SPD's audit and policy research section to try to improve their processes.

They worked on a process flow improvement with how policies flow through their section in terms of revising SPD policies, rewriting them, generating new ones.

We discovered that there were some some choke points in areas where a policy might move along in the revision or adoption and then get jammed up somewhere.

And so our folks have worked with SPD to map out who's responsible for what part of policy development, maybe some time frames that are acceptable involved in those, and a way to manage policies as they flow through the system so it's more effective.

The work that we're doing with SPD's internal audit and policy section is intended to help them become more effective and efficient and act as a force multiplier for OIG.

We're a very small office with not much, not many resources and our staff is fairly small.

So to the extent we can have SPD providing internal looks that give us additional information that's assistive I think both to SPD and to OIG.

As I mentioned, we have three areas of operation, and the last one I'm going to talk about is our OPA audit function.

In addition to audit and policy work, we have an oversight role regarding how complaints taken in and handled by the Office of Police Accountability.

Largely, we determine if OPA has appropriately classified something for investigation and if they have thoroughly, objectively, and accurately done an investigation of that.

So I just want to, at this point, really compliment Andrew and his staff for helping us along in this process and helping us to refine the ways that we work together.

I think you're going to talk a little bit about management actions and stuff, but I just want to say that the collaboration that you've extended to us has been invaluable for us, and I really appreciate it.

So our purpose there is to improve the transparency of OPA's operations and to make sure that what they're doing in terms of investigation and review of misconduct allegations is appropriate for community trust and effective operation.

So one of the things that we asked the former OPA auditor who was a contract employee before my office was in operation, was to provide a final report about his observations of OPA and their operations.

And that is also available on our website.

But what the previous OPA auditor noted was a marked improvement in processes and operation of the Office of OPA with Director Meyerberg taking over the helm.

And so we used the observations that Mr. Francisco Rodriguez had, both in terms of what seems to be moving in the right direction and working well with OPA, and areas that perhaps, you know, still need continued attention.

And so we've really built those into our approach to how we provide oversight to OPA.

And I'm happy to entertain any questions about this process or let you comment, Andrew.

Yeah, I would just say, you know, obviously Mr. Rodriguez isn't here, but obviously we thank him for all the work that he did when he was the auditor and Ann Levenson before him.

Many of the suggestions that Tito has made, we've started to implement.

So, and we're looking forward to obviously more collaboration.

You know, we're always trying to improve what we do and get better.

Great, thanks.

And that is really what I've got.

I'm going to turn it over to Director Meyerberg so that he can talk about his OPA management action efforts with SPD.

So I think we had the same group at our last OPA presentation.

One thing that we, one ability that OPA has is the issue was called a management action, which is basically a policy recommendation that flows from an investigation.

So it can arise in a case where maybe there was something that went wrong, but it's due to a faulty policy or faulty training, or at least OPA's perception of faulty policies and training.

So what I can do is I can make a recommendation to the department to change policy, to create a policy to amplify training, and the department would then consider that recommendation.

To Chief Coroner's great pleasure, I've issued probably 60 of them in the last two years.

It was a pretty, yeah, you're welcome, right.

It was a pretty non-streamlined process.

I think when we first started, what would happen is that I would write up my case findings.

I would write out the DCM in a letter basically and send it to the chief and say, could you please address this?

But we had no database.

There was really no records going back and forth.

In the last year, I would say, Monique, who's been the lead from OPA on this, with Kathy Wenderoth and Chief Coordinator from SPD have been working to create not just a database, a working database of these recommendations, but also a process of sharing them.

So it's not this paper process going back and forth.

Now it's all done through our database.

So it's great.

It's streamlined everything.

I think it's made it much simpler to receive and respond to recommendations.

Very much so.

And I think the great thing about it is when it gets assigned within the database, one person owns it at any one time.

And so you can track it really easily.

And then all of the information that happened within it is in there.

And the other great thing, and I'm going to let Monique discuss it just briefly, but the other great thing I think is, again, being that it's in a database, it's sortable, it's trackable, it doesn't disappear.

You know, it doesn't, if Chief Coordinator left tomorrow, if I left tomorrow, there's still this record of what was recommended and what was done.

And again, for accountability, transparency, continuity purposes, that's incredibly important.

So, Monique, do you want to stress some of the high points of this?

Yeah.

Some of the really cool points that I think will be valuable to all of you include the fact that we have a tracking table on our website.

So you'll be able to find the date of submission, the letter that we submit to SPD with our recommendations.

as well as a formal response from SPD upon completion.

We also are working on, as they've mentioned, our communication feedback loop so that that's more standardized and easy to track.

We have a timeline that we've established for completion, so we're giving 180 days, which just lets people know the expectation around when the MAR may be completed.

We've also worked on clarifying the status definitions for the stages leading to a MARS resolution so that we can just keep up to date and more informed.

And then we have created a written document that outlines the processes and procedures for both OPA and SPD.

So it's wonky and technical, but it's a really big step forward, I think, for our collaborative purposes.

I mean, the one thing I think the next step for us would be, and we would welcome advice or thoughts from the council, is that how do we disseminate the information more, right?

How do we make it available to the public so the public can say, okay, It's not just, you know, this universe of police accountability folks who know what's going on, but the larger public can say, you know, here's the work that's going on.

These are the issues that are being identified and the policies that are being changed.

So that's a work in progress.

But like with all we do, you know, if we can push it out, that's great.

So any thoughts you have would be appreciated.

So I would just say that in this, this is one of those things that worked its way into the police accountability ordinance that I was very skeptical about because it feels weird to legislate the existence of a database.

And so admittedly, I had, you know, There was a lot of debate amongst me and others who were working on that issue at the time, sort of wondering whether it was really going to work.

And it sounds like I'm pleased to hear that I was wrong, and I like to admit when I'm wrong.

And I'm pleasantly surprised that it has been a helpful tool to just have documented and institutionalized in an ordinance that is really resulting in a better process and system that will really sort of allow us to, at a minimum, as a first step, be able to acknowledge and daylight the information.

I do agree that the next step is how do you make that relevant to people who are impacted by this work.

And I don't have the magic answer for that, but I do think that there's an opportunity to, once we have a better set of data and a better understanding of what it's telling us to create more of a narrative around why it matters, right?

So this isn't just about process or being wonky or, you know, are people following up with recommendations?

You know, how is it actually going to impact the day-to-day lives of people who maybe may come into contact with a system?

And I think that's sort of an opportunity to get creative around how we communicate that information in a way that is collaborative and also really relevant to people who are impacted by the system.

Okay.

That is our report.

Thank you very much.

All right.

Well, are there any questions or comments, colleagues?

Council Member Pacheco?

Fun fact, I used to fundraise for the Seattle Police Foundation specifically for the K-9 unit, and those dogs are about $10,000.

They're very expensive dogs, and their training is also very expensive.

But really quickly, So did you say eight or nine firearms were missing?

Eight firearms missing over the two decades?

Unaccounted for.

I don't know the status of them.

Missing seems to imply that they're out there in the universe somewhere.

They could be in a desk drawer.

We were not able to determine their location.

So they may still be within the custody of SPD somewhere or not.

We did run checks on serial numbers, so they are not out there.

They have not been identified in any federal databases or databases that would indicate they've been used by anybody.

So we did try to take some measures to figure out if we could see if they had left SPD's custody, and we could not determine that.

Okay.

And then if I could go really quickly just into your memo.

Sorry, let me go back in here quickly.

Page four.

So this was regarding the disparity review.

So in the report, you say subjects of color were more likely to be frisked than white subjects.

I'm just going to change this to individuals rather than subjects.

Individuals of color are less likely to be found with a weapon when frisked.

Individuals of color were more likely to have a firearm pointed at them than white subjects.

Then you go on to say that There are alternative enforcement practices which may include addressing the targeted behavior in a different way, de-emphasizing the practice in question, or other measures.

Are there other measures that other cities use as best practices that, as these discussions continue, that SPD is looking to implement or say, hey, this is a good idea coming from?

Because I see New Orleans is referenced in your report.

Are there other ideas and best practices as a conversation that you're looking to implement here?

Yeah, and I would like to defer most of the time to answer that question to Seattle Police Department.

The efforts that OIG put into this was to talk about whether propensity score matching was a good methodology for trying to assess the impact of any disparity on their operations.

So if you want to talk more broadly about it, then I'm happy to chime in.

Yeah, definitely.

So the phase one was indeed validating the methodology, the phase one report.

to make sure that we were, that the methodology would get to the data that we want to get to.

In phase two, we will dig deeper into the data and now that the methodology has been validated and to see, okay, where are the disparities and where are the unwarranted disparities?

And then really look at those and like, okay, what do we need to do differently in our operations?

You know, and certainly we can't answer that question yet, you know, and so we likely will need to look at best practices nationwide, work with the CPC on it, on all ideas on the table, so.

Anything CPC would like to add?

We're just looking forward to working with Chris Fisher to convene the meetings and his plan for community engagement in terms of convening the community, looking at videos.

There are some things that we're doing that will get to some underlying root cause issues and will be cross-referenced, I'm sure, with best practices.

I think this is, so first of all, this report was actually, it was done by the Seattle Police Department as opposed to the Inspector General as part of the assessments required by the court under the consent decree.

I just wanted to clarify that.

And then secondly, I do think, You know, we are running at the end of the legislative clock, at least for city council as a whole, because our budget process starts in September, and we're running out of opportunities to actually have more substantive policy-related committee meetings.

But this is one of those reports that came out, was it a couple months ago, maybe three months ago?

I'm forgetting the timing of when it came out.

Maybe a month ago.

A month ago.

So, I mean, I do think it would be, we have not had a hearing on this particular issue, and I can't commit to giving you a hearing before budget starts, but I do think, I do think it would be worth figuring out if maybe there's an opportunity to have you, the police department in particular, present to a full council at a council briefing, for example, or at some other time where we can, daylight these issues and the findings in that initial report and give it some of its own time, because I do think it's an important body of work and it's one that continues to come up.

not only in SPD's own review, but has also been brought up pretty consistently by the monitor in terms of his assessments as well.

So I do think it's an important little nuanced niche of the body of work that we need to pay important attention to and continue to work collaboratively on those solutions, including identifying best practices on how to really move the needle on this one.

One of the things that we did as a full as a council was pass a bias policing ordinance to take what exists in policy and make it law so that we know and we have confidence both as policy makers and as members of the public that those two will be aligned in the future moving forward and we worked closely with a lot of people at this table including the police department on making sure that we got that alignment just right in terms of the code and what exists in policy.

So I think, you know, that we have some history in working together on this issue and would welcome the opportunity to continue to have those conversations and to really ground it in some of the data-driven work that you all have done.

Yeah.

Thank you.

And I, we'd be happy to come and present to the council.

I think it's really important, you know, just as, as this, wherever this phase two leads and to focus on it.

Yeah.

Perfect.

Great.

Anything else, colleagues?

All right.

Well, thank you all for being with us.

Some of you I know are going to stay at the table, but I think some of you are going to go back into the audience and then come back.

So we will go ahead and close out Agenda Item 2, and I will have Roxanna read Agenda Item 3 into the record.

And if you are here to present on the OIG's intelligence report, I'd ask you to either stay at the table or make your way up to the table.

Agenda Item 3, Seattle Office of Inspector General Intelligence Report for briefing and discussion.

And then Lisa, is it just you?

Oh, here we go.

Here she comes.

All righty.

All right.

Roxanna, did you read this into the record?

Okay.

Phew.

This is right over my head.

So let's go ahead and do introductions once again, and then Lisa, I will hand it over to you.

Thank you.

Greg Doss, Council Central Staff.

Mary Dory, Public Safety Auditor.

Lisa Judge, Inspector General for Public Safety.

All right.

Let's take it away.

All right.

So good morning, Madam Chair and Council Members.

I'm here today to give a brief overview of OIG's audit of SPD compliance with Chapter 1412 of Seattle Municipal Code, Collection of Information for Law Enforcement Purposes.

And as Inspector Judge said, you may often hear it referred to as the intelligence audit.

OIG did this audit in accordance with Chapter 1412, which requires an audit every 180 days of SPD activity relating to the chapter.

The most recent prior audit was completed in 2015, and that was prior to OIG being assigned the function by the city council.

So the purpose of Chapter 1412 is to protect certain categories of information before that information is collected by police.

It does this by setting specific criteria that has to be met before the information can be collected.

Two general categories of information are protected by the chapter.

Private sexual information includes information about an individual's sexual practices or orientation, and this information can be collected by an officer so long as it is reasonably relevant to the incident at hand.

The second category of information protected by the chapter is referred to as restricted information.

The exact definition is quite lengthy, but it can be generally summarized as referring to information about the religious or political affiliations of individuals or organizations.

In addition to meeting key criteria including reasonable suspicion that a crime has been or is being committed in relevancy to the crime at hand, officers who want to collect that restricted information need to obtain a written authorization from a unit commander or higher before that information can be collected by the department.

So to briefly summarize our findings, we did not detect any violations of the chapter.

However, outdated language of the chapter precludes an assessment that SPD is in full compliance.

And I'm going to talk a little bit more about that in the next slide.

Essentially, the outdated language creates some gray areas in which we cannot interpret whether certain activities are in compliance or not in compliance with the chapter.

But to be clear, we did not detect any out-and-out violations.

Other findings include some training gaps identified and issues with records retention.

So Finding One, it's the one that I'm going to go into the most detail about because it most directly informs our thoughts about Chapter 1412 revisions.

Essentially, the chapter is outdated in terms of its language.

It was written in 1979 and it has not been substantially updated since then.

So it was written in a time when thinking about how police would collect this type of protected information, it was thinking about things like infiltrators and more direct means of obtaining the information.

It does not address the concept of the internet.

So websites, social media, other sort of public sources of information are not addressed by the chapter.

Without clear guidance from the chapter, we observed inconsistent approaches within SPD.

So the intelligence section does obtain written authorizations every time they think they are touching information that may even possibly be covered by the chapter.

Other entities within SPD, such as the biased crimes coordinator, discussed situations in which she felt uncomfortable collecting the information at all because she believed that it wasn't allowed by the chapter or by the department.

And then finally, we observed some incidents, only about 2% of the sample of 295 cases that we looked at, but some cases in which we saw information that might possibly be protected by the chapter collected without authorization, but because of the outdated wording, we could not determine whether a violation had occurred.

And this includes examples such as collecting protected information from public sources, such as the religious mission of an organization as published on their own website, or collecting protected information about a known suspect from a third party, such as a witness or a victim of a crime.

The chapter is just not clear enough on that point.

We did discuss with the city's attorney's office as to whether they could provide insight into the wording of the chapter and they agreed that it was difficult to interpret as written.

I think, I know Council Member Mosqueda has a question, but I think this finding number one is a symptom of the fact that we need to update our intelligence ordinance.

And we knew that and recognized that when we were going through the legislative process in 2017 for the police accountability ordinance.

And so one of the things that we did functionally is move that body of work over to the Office of Inspector General with the idea that we would have at least a baseline opportunity to evaluate exactly how outdated the ordinance was and is.

But I think the next phase of work here will include making some updates to the intelligence ordinance that sort of takes into account the fact that we also have a surveillance technology ordinance.

So I just wanted to acknowledge that I think we're all aware that this is, you know, an ancient law at this point relative to how surveillance or intelligence information is gathered.

Councillor Mosqueda.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I think you just answered my question, which was, do we have any work in progress to identify language to update the 1979 ordinance?

And given the attorney has already acknowledged that this is not satisfactory, is there a timeline or a process that the council has engaged in or that others are already influencing?

No, I would defer to the Office of Inspector General because they're sort of now responsible for the enforcement of this and also are empowered to do policy work.

And per ordinance, we are charged with contemplating proposed revisions with the CBC, which we'll get to at the end of our presentation.

So this is on the to-do list.

It is definitely on the to-do list, and she's going to talk about the recommendations that were issued to SPD, and one of those is that SPD work with the city attorney on revisions.

And at the end of this, I will talk about, because We're in this, as I learned, because I was not an auditor, as you know, when I took this job, that there are ways that we have to operate to maintain our independence in order to audit a function.

So we can't provide preferred verbiage or, you know, we can't assist in the actual wording of an ordinance, but we have identified questions that need to be addressed and considerations in moving forward and amending the ordinance.

So we hope we've identified the key issues that need to be addressed and we can provide technical assistance with that.

So.

And I think, you know, to answer the question directly, I think this will probably, this will be a body of work for 2020 and whoever the public safety chair is then.

likely not be me.

I know, it's sad.

And so before I move on to the other findings, I did want to reiterate, again, in the small percentage of cases that we saw in which there was possibly a collection of protected information, it was always directly relevant to the incident being investigated.

We didn't see any signs that officers were sort of completely off base with collecting this information.

So our other findings, of which there are three more, I'll briefly summarize them.

Finding two is, so I mentioned that the intelligence section is the only group in SPD that was routinely issuing these written authorizations to collect the information.

However, they were also following a part of the chapter that requires them to purge that information once it is no longer relevant.

And so given that the past, most recent audit prior to this was done in 2015, they had a record that they had issued authorizations, but the authorizations were not there for us to go back and look at.

And so the intelligence section seemed very well informed on the ordinance.

We saw no signs that they weren't complying with it.

However, we just did not have the records to verify.

And so it was impossible for us to confirm compliance.

In finding three, we found that although SPD policy does address the circumstances under which officers might collect, be allowed to collect this type of information, it does not include the requirement to obtain a written authorization.

And we, it seemed clear that other than the intelligence section, many officers were unaware of that requirement.

And we confirmed so it's not in policy and there is also not training within SPD that addresses that written requirement, that written authorization.

And then in finding four, we found that Chapter 1412's records retention requirements, again, not substantially updated since 1979, appeared to conflict with state law.

For example, state law requires body-worn video to be retained for at least six months.

Chapter 1412 says that if you collect this information without an authorization, It has a variety of schedules, but it might need to be purged within five to seven days, so those are in conflict.

And if Chapter 1412's requirements were followed with regards to records retention, it's reasonable to assume it might affect SPD's ability to investigate reports of misconduct or crimes.

So we issue five recommendations to address the findings.

They're paraphrased here and they are obviously in the report as well.

But our recommendations can be summarized as having SPD provide increased clarity and guidance to SPD personnel regarding the circumstances under which a written authorization is required.

ensuring records are available for OIG review and to address the apparent conflicts in records retention and requirements.

And so for recommendations one and five, which speak to the ordinance most directly, we directed SPD to work in coordination with the city attorney to make sure that everything is okay from that perspective.

SPD concurred with all of our recommendations, and they committed to implementing the recommendations by quarter three and quarter four of 2019. And then in the full report, you'll see that they've submitted a plan for implementing each of the recommendations, as well as a written memo explaining their approach in a little bit more detail.

Council Member Mosqueda.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

And I apologize.

I feel like I should know this and feel free to give me the one-on-one afterwards.

But who does, who carries out these recommendations?

So in this case, we were auditing the Seattle Police Department.

And so we issued the recommendations to the chief of police and she can delegate from there.

Okay.

And so the chief of police will delegate and then we as the council confirm language that may come forward or?

I think that's part of the auditing function, so there would be a follow-up as part of this audit by the OIG's office as to what the status of the implementation of the recommendations are.

Correct.

Yeah, there will always be a follow-up process for implementation of recommendations.

We're currently in the process of figuring out what that looks like with SPD's Legal Affairs Director, so we hope to have a formal process so that anybody can see the recommendation, the response to the recommendation and the status of any implementation or disagreement with the recommendation and other course that they've chosen to take.

So we will be updating you when that process has been formalized.

And Lisa, is that a system that is separate and apart from the overarching tracking of recommendation database?

Or is it part of that?

Yes and no.

I think all of the accountability partners are required to house our recommendations with CPC and to keep a status there, so it will be part of that database.

Internally, we'll probably have a more robust set of information about it, but they will dovetail with each other and be largely the same.

Great.

So the accountability ordinance that we passed in 2017 included the component around a database that was specifically designed to track recommendations made to SPD around policy changes and practice changes to allow us a more comprehensive way of understanding who was making recommendations to whom.

and what the status of those recommendations were.

One of the things that existed before that period of time was a lot of reports going every which way with very little understanding of who was responsible for actually tracking the implementation of some of those.

recommendations and the status of those recommendations.

So a lot of what we were seeing were there were a lot of great recommendations that were flowing from an amazing body of intense report work, related report related work that were just kind of sitting on a shelf somewhere without any follow-up.

Or maybe there was follow-up, but there wasn't a clear sense of to what degree.

So that's the tracking.

of database that I'm referring to.

Sure, yeah.

And that's one of those mechanisms that was built into the ordinance that has turned out to be very effective for all of us in coordinating our efforts.

A lot of the work that we do on that is done in the quarterly partners meetings that we have.

And I think that Interim Director Scott will probably talk about development of that database and what it looks like, how we're all contributing to it.

how it will be maintained in her report.

I don't want to assign work to you from the table, but I'm confident you're going to address that in a few minutes.

Great.

But that's a great question.

important for us to make sure we're keeping track of all this great work.

Yeah.

All right, let's move on.

So finally, as I mentioned before, you know, we really are precluded from drafting the ordinance or providing specific draft language, but these are the issues that we think are key to consider in any sort of revisions of 1412. So are there still categories of information that should be protected by a separate ordinance?

like 1412, or is this ordinance perhaps obviated by the other ordinances and regulations that the City of Seattle has implemented with regard to intelligence and surveillance and the gathering of that kind of information?

So is it necessary?

Should it address modern technology and the ready existence of public information available on social media?

How does it intersect with Chapter 1418 acquisition and use of surveillance technologies?

What types and levels of authorization should exist?

And how can the ability to audit the authorizations be best preserved?

And how can the city retain information for oversight purposes while being sensitive to issues such as aggregating sensitive information that is potentially subject to public disclosure?

or information requests from external agencies.

So those are some of the interests that we think need to be considered and balanced in any sort of revision of the ordinance.

Great.

And to just provide a minor point of clarification that I didn't explicitly talk about in my presentation.

The reason why we keep referencing public information, such as social media, is that there is a current exception in Chapter 1412. So that if information is directly disclosed to the police officer by the subject of that information, they don't need an authorization.

They can collect it, and it's fine.

It's just unclear, according to the wording of the ordinance, does that extend to open sources.

Yeah.

Yeah, and as Mary mentioned at the beginning of her presentation, we're required to conduct some form of review every six months.

And so we're trying to decide how to do that in a most effective way, whether it's some sort of real-time reporting from SPD of authorization so that we can just keep a record, you know, track of them, ensure compliance, and then issue it in an annual report.

or how we best provide the transparency that's necessary, comply with the ordinance, and then balance that with our other audit priorities.

So we'll be updating you on that process as we move forward into next year.

Great.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Any other questions or comments?

All right.

Well, thank you for the work that you did on this.

I know it is a very technical body of work, so I appreciate your office's work on this issue and on being here today to provide this report.

So thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

We're going to move now to agenda items four and five.

And I've actually asked Roxanna to read both of these items into the record.

So, Greg, you can address just both of them at the same time since they're kind of sort of related.

And you can do the short titles, Roxanna.

Agenda item four, clerk file 314417, Seattle Police Chief 2018 Annual Report for Briefing and Discussion, impossible vote.

And agenda item five, clerk file 314423, Chief of Police Audit Report for Briefing Discussion, impossible vote.

Great, thank you.

All right, Greg.

All right, thanks.

So here to speak about clerk files 314417 and 314423. These clerk files were issued in response to the city's intelligence ordinance that you just heard the Inspector General talk about.

along with all the challenges and problems that go along with that intelligence ordinance and the fact that it is so out of date.

There are some files that are exempt from the Inspector General's analysis that she just told you about.

And those files have to do with information that is collected around organized criminal activity or narcotics activity or information that is collected from law enforcement networks.

This kind of information is not disclosable even to the inspector general.

This is information that is sent directly to the council and to the mayor.

This is information that is summarized in these two clerk files that we're discussing right now.

In the case of Clerk File 314417, SPD has reported that it at two times provided authorizations for collections of information related to a person's political affiliations.

In Clerk File 314317, The Department reports that it has obtained from the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit and Western States Information Networks 30 items and 176 items from the Western State Information Network.

The report I'm giving is vague because these are confidential files that are reviewed by the chief and forwarded to you all.

I did have a chance to brief the chair's staff.

Would ask if you have any questions about process or the overview I've given.

None?

Great.

Thanks.

Is that it?

Okay.

Any questions or comments, Council Member Mosqueda?

Okay, thank you, Greg, for your work on this and for your staff report and for the briefings that I know you've given my staff.

So I will go ahead and move both of these items.

So I'm gonna go with the first item.

So I move that the committee recommends that the City Council file Clerk File 314417. Second.

Okay, any additional comments?

Hearing none, all those in favor of this recommendation, vote aye.

Aye.

No opposition and no abstention, so the motion carries and the committee will recommend to the full City Council that we file Clerk File 314417. Okay, we'll now move to agenda item five, and I will move that the committee recommend that the city council file the clerk file 314423. Second.

Any additional comments?

Hearing none, all those in favor say aye.

Aye.

No opposition and no abstentions.

And so likewise, we will recommend that the full council file clerk file 314423. Thanks, Greg.

All right, we are now gonna move to our final agenda item, and we'll have Roxanna read this one into the records.

This is a report, an annual report presentation from the CPC.

Agenda item six, Community Police Commission 2018 Annual Report.

Thank you, Roxanna.

And I see our presenters making their way up, and Roxanna's gonna cue up the presentation while that's happening.

Welcome back.

All right.

Thank you so much.

You're welcome.

So this is our last agenda item, and we have until 1130, and it is 1107 right now.

Okay, we'll make it quick.

All right.

I have copies of our annual report that just came out of the press for you all.

All right.

All right, so let's start with introductions, and then I'll hand it over to you folks.

Greg Doss, Council Central staff.

Bessie Scott, Interim Executive Director, Seattle Community Police Commission.

Roxana Pardo-Garcia, the Community Engagement Director of the CPC.

Reverend Walden, Co-Chair of the Community Police Commission.

Well, welcome.

Thank you for coming back to the table and really excited about hearing your report.

Yeah, thank you so much, Madam Chair, Council Member Mosqueda.

We talked about some of the work that the CPC is doing this year.

Now we want to throw it back and talk about what we did in 2018 that led us here.

This is the first of CPC's annual reports since becoming permanent in the accountability legislation.

So we're going to walk you through it through the slideshow.

Madam Chair.

Yes.

This is my first chance to see you at this table, so I just want to say thank you for all your work and I'm looking forward to working with you.

Thank you.

We were just marveling at the very nice format of the report.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

It's a beautiful, beautiful publication.

Thank you.

Okay.

All right.

I want to thank you for inviting us and for us being here, Councilmember.

Madam Chair and Musketeer, thank you so much.

Wow, so this is a long time coming here, number one, and thank you again.

As you see up here, those are the commissioners that was there in 2018, and six of those commissioners were appointed in 2013. That was Lisa Dugard, Claudia D'Albro, Jay Hollingsworth, Kevin Stuckey, who was President of SPOG, and also Joe Kessler, who was representing SPMA, and myself.

So one of the things there is that it shows that we have had police involvement at the beginning with the Commission.

and we continue to hope to do so.

And the Reverend Aaron Williams also was, the picture is not there, but he was one of the original ones and he's still there.

So the new ones now listed there is Carlene Echo Hawk and Emma, who was here earlier, did a fine report there.

Melinda, it's also, her picture is not there.

Ben Goldsmith and Helen, I'm not sure how Helen says her last name.

Can you help me with that?

Deborah Mack, okay, and Joseph Sia.

So thank, and we're just, and I, of course, I'm a co-chair, and Emma's a co-chair, and Isaac, who's always here.

Isaac could not be here today, but we miss him.

Thank you.

We'll give him an excused absence today.

Yes, thank you, because he's always here.

All righty, so the next slide is, let's see, we're gonna talk about our work groups.

that we have here.

And, wow, we just, I mean, we've done a lot of work.

And we have the strategy work group and the strategy work group by the three co-chairs and the head of all the other work groups.

And at that time, it was Enrique, Isaac, myself, Claudia, Lisa, and Emma.

And also the police practice work group was led by Lisa.

She was the chair of that.

Ben Goldsmith was an attorney.

Jay Hollingsworth, Isaac Arez, and Reverend Walden.

And our community engagement was Emma, Colleen Ackerhawk, Joseph, Aaron Williams, and Melinda.

Our behavior health group, our work group was led by Claudia, Helen, and I think Helen and I is the chair of that, and also Melinda.

And now we have, well, these are the ones that was working in 2018 and did a lot of work.

Oh, and then our next slide is gonna...

And can I add that the Community Engagement Work Group as well as Behavioral Health were created and started in 2018. The Police Practices looks at policing techniques and policies, and Behavioral Health Work Group looks at the intersection of policing and mental health, as well as other social determinants of health that impact individuals' interactions with public safety and policing.

Yeah.

Thank you for that.

All right, our next slide is about, wow, we've had 31 public meetings, each running about three hours each.

That's on top of the meetings of each of the four committees that were happening on either biweekly or a monthly basis.

We did all of this with just 14 of our commission, about 21 commissioners being appointed at that time.

A lot of meetings went on.

A lot of meetings.

And just to reiterate, the strategy committee is the concentration of all the committee's leads, and it meets right before the CPC meetings to determine the agenda as well as the items, and sets the direction for strategy and the policy of the CPC.

And of course, we're talking about 2018, and we're now in 2019, so I keep having to remind myself that we're looking back here, not present time.

Yes, this is like throwback Thursday, yes.

So now we're going on to community engagement.

That's my realm.

But first, I actually wanted to acknowledge that I'm sitting at the table with another Roxana.

That is very, very rare.

With the same spelling as well.

So I just wanted to make sure that, you know, this is a historic moment for multiple reasons.

So the focus of the Community Engagement Committee, so we grew as a team in 2018. We went from a staff of one who was doing four people's jobs to a staff of four.

The biggest focus was implementing the accountability ordinance, building capacity so we could engage community on a larger scale as our work was really focused in on the consent decree.

creating processes to track engagement and inform our strategies moving forward, and as a newly permanent entity, building relationships with community members, organizations, stakeholders, and system partners.

The, we had over, so I'll clarify what we mean by one-on-ones.

We had over 200 meetings with community members and system partners.

What that means is that one-on-one conversations.

So one-on-one meetings where we went to stakeholders or we met with OPA, OIG, SPD, so on and so forth.

We attended 25 events in which the CPC either attended or presented at.

Once again, the growth of our team, three new staff members working on engagement and communications.

So the portfolios under the community engagement team grew.

One of we assigned a staff member to be our SPD liaison, the other staff member to work on youth engagement and specifically interdepartmental liaison to connect us better to the city.

And then of course the supervisor in that realm and our communication advisor.

One of the biggest engagements that happened in 2018 was the chief of police search.

Because of the added capacity, we were able to better help represent the voice of community on the chief of police search.

As you'll remember, Mayor Durkin created a community panel to help with the search that included two CPC commissioners.

Upon learning of alternative methods being used to assess candidates by the mayor's office, the CPC called for transparency and asked for some documents from the mayor's office.

Before responding to this request, the mayor's office announced that there were just three finalists and interim Chief Carmen Best had been eliminated.

With our expanded community engagement staff, we were able to conduct out-of-state site visits to police departments of each of those three finalists and vet them through a community lens.

Chief Best ended up being reinstated as a candidate and eventually was named as Seattle Police Chief.

All right, we're going to talk about ordinance implementation.

I'm going to run through this kind of quickly.

One of the things that we've been most focused on is implementing the accountability ordinance.

The ordinance was adopted unanimously by council in 2017. It was the result of years of work between community groups, the CPC, and elected leaders.

Mayor Durkin supported on her campaign trail.

It includes reforms to Seattle's police accountability system and increased civilian oversight of the Seattle Police Department.

It made the CPC permanent and increased the staffing, scope of work, and the number of commissioners from 15 to 21. There were also 21 different call-outs for the CPC in the legislation to help guide its work.

All right.

In 2018, the CPC identified dozens of ways that the new police contracts would undermine the reforms called for in the ordinance.

The CPC urged the city to reject the contract.

The CPC made it clear at the time that we're in support of fair pay and collective bargaining rights and that the contract undermined accountability.

Dozens of community groups joined the CPC asking the city to reject the contract.

The contract was approved.

In late 2018, federal judge James Robart issued an order to show cause why he should not find the city out of compliance with a consent decree.

In that order, the CPC was invited by the court to file a brief and did so in 2019. So besides protecting the accountability ordinance itself, we've been working to fulfill our parts of the ordinance.

Here's a list of some of those parts.

It's a lot, but we've made significant progress.

One of the areas we're especially proud of is the last one, looking at ways Seattle should be conducting external investigations of serious and deadly uses of force, and you heard about that earlier.

One of the things I want to go back to that Inspector General Judge mentioned was the database of recommendations.

I think for us, although very technical, it's very important.

It's one of the biggest and most important tools that we have created and built.

Our senior policy advisor built the database with the City of Seattle's IT department.

One of the things about it is that it has to be shareable as well as confidential.

So we don't want people outside of the accountability system being able to get into it.

But we also do eventually want an external facing summary for transparency.

So we meet about the database during the quarterly accountability partners meetings to align our recommendations and to go through the summary and the recommendations and the status of those recommendations.

So we're just getting started, but in between those meetings of the quarterly accountability partners, we do check in with individual offices.

And we have noticed the increase in terms of like just walking across the street to SPD, or walking down the hall to OIG and talking to them about the status of some of the recommendations.

Since we're all kind of making different recommendations, the policy database was pretty brilliant in terms of putting all of those in one portal.

But we've noticed that it's made our jobs easier to figure out the status.

We can just pull status and create reports look at trends, and we'll be also filling those with the management action recommendations as well.

So we're pretty proud of that, and it's a collaboration amongst accountability system partners.

One of the biggest projects that has come out of the CPC is the Serious and Deadly Uses of Force Investigation Task Force.

It's a legislative mandate.

This task force looks at the feasibility of establishing an investigation process external to the SPD for cases involving serious and deadly uses of force.

This task force is staffed by the CPC.

Karen Chung, our policy analyst, is our lead staffer.

It includes community leaders, law enforcement, CPC, OIG, OPA, SPD, and other system partners.

And this task force held six meetings in 2018.

Alright, so here's again a quick look at the status of the 21 projects for the CPC called out in the accountability legislation.

There's more details in the actual annual report, obviously we can put them all on the slide.

14 of the projects are being fulfilled and are ongoing work and responsibilities of the CPC.

These are things like oversight that we will continue to be engaged in.

Five projects were in process in 2018 and moving towards completion.

Just two of the projects were on hold at the end of 2018. The first was the CPC's District Liaison Program, which assigns commissioners to all seven council districts to act as liaisons between the CPC and the community.

That got underway actually in 2019. when more commissioners were appointed to the CPC.

We added those eight new commissioners and their first CPC meeting was May 1st of 2019. The second is assessing the need for a complainant appeal process.

We're working toward getting the work underway, but capacity issues have kept us from doing it so far.

It turns out that we can only do one task force a year, so in 2018 and until SADFID wraps up, that is a task force that we will be concentrating on, and then we will start a task force on the complaint and appeal process in 2020.

I think that's very smart.

You know, you all are volunteers on this commission.

I mean, some of you all who have, some of the commissioners who have needs-based issues receive a stipend.

It's very modest in nature.

But I do think that in order to take on a meaningful chunk of some of these really serious bodies of policy work, It can get tricky to have that quality continue to follow through if you're taking on too many of those efforts and certainly the SADFIT work and the implementation of I-940 is a massive policy shift and major culture shift and does require a lot of time and attention.

I appreciate the thoughtfulness around acknowledging capacity and bandwidth and really just prioritizing a massive project that requires a lot of time to make sure you get it right.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Looking forward, and that's where we are right now, looking forward to be, actually to be in 2019. And I'd like to just have a statement to say before I say this piece, is that we're so absolutely are glad to have our interim director here, Bessie Scott.

She is doing a tremendous job all over the city.

Everywhere I go, I hear people talking about her.

She is just doing a tremendous job in the office.

I just wanted to say thank you to Bessie Scott and all that she is doing.

and making us look good.

We thank you.

Thank you so much.

You know they'll let you know when you're not making them look good.

That's how this works.

And we appreciate that.

Thank you.

Yeah.

And looking forward, that's one side of our meeting.

We have now increased very much so.

And that's a picture of all the new commissioners that we have on board.

I think we only just have one more.

to onboard.

We have a very quiet room, a very full room, so we might need a larger space after a while for all our meetings.

One of the things with the increased numbers of commissioners and increased staff, increased responsibilities, I think we have done a great job in 2018. However, we are looking forward to keep the commitment up in some of the guiding principles in 2019. We're here to center the work and the voice of the community, continue to fulfill the mandates of the Accountability Ordinance and Consent Decree, and to conduct a long-range planning for the commission and to further guide us as we grow.

And it's been a pleasure for me to sit here.

It's 29 years in the making that we've been working on police reform.

And it's very auspicious that we've come this far in order to be able to have a body of civilians to be able to work for transparency, and for police oversight.

I think that we are a great model.

I think as we look across the nation, it is no one else that actually has reached this level of work with community.

at the table and community people who have been doing this work for a long, long time.

I want to thank you, Councilmembers, and all of you all for your work on the foresight of being able to work on the legislation in 2017 that made this day possible.

We really want to thank you for that.

All right.

Anything else from you all?

I think that's it.

I think as we look forward, we're really excited to begin our long-range planning, whether or not that includes life after the consent decree.

And the long-range planning will also include succession planning.

So we're excited to get our theory of change, which includes a community-centered approach, as well as longevity within our strategic plan.

Well, I want to echo Reverend Walden's accolades of you, Interim Director Scott.

I think it's been a real pleasure to get to know you and to see you in action and to really see you taking very seriously the role of that you have right now and you're certainly not behaving like an interim.

You're making use of every minute and moment you have to improve the Community Police Commission and leave it on solid ground and to make sure that it's improving with every moment that you're there and I really appreciate that and I appreciate the continued work and collaboration that exists between my office and the Community Police Commission.

I think, you know, we don't always have an opportunity to agree 100% of the time on the ways to get to a place, but I think we are in agreement on the destination.

And I really value the relationship that I've been able to develop with so many of you on the commission and really respect each of you individually and respect the work that you do collectively.

I think it's a really important entity and will continue to be a champion of the work that you all do, even when we disagree on the mechanism of getting to the destination.

It's kind of like, you know, when you're in the car and you're with your friends or your partners and you're like, go this way.

No, I want to go that way.

We're going to get there.

We're going to get there.

I'm committed to getting there, and I know you all are committed to getting there, and I'm excited about figuring out how to continue to work together to accomplish that, because it's really important for us to get there together, and I acknowledge that.

So I really want to thank you all for your support of me personally and professionally, and really, appreciate the voice that you all fill because I think it's really important.

Thank you so much.

I think it's a short question, but how often do you all get to meet with the mayor's office directly, the chief of police directly, and share recommendations to the executive?

Not as often as we would like, but are planning on more often.

We have meetings set up with the chief of police that are ongoing, which started last month.

We do not have a regular standing meeting with the mayor's office.

We do have regular standing meetings with Councilmember Gonzalez, as well as the OIG and the OPA.

Okay, thank you very much.

Yes.

And thanks for all your work and this report.

Thank you.

And part of the accountability ordinance and to your point around this question Council Member Mosqueda is like we acknowledge that in that unless there was something in writing that required a minimal amount of meeting it would be difficult to make that happen and so it's a little bit of a built-in accountability system so you've heard um Bessie and others reference the quarterly meetings amongst the accountability partners that was part of our attempt collectively to make sure that we had some at least some minimal requirement for interaction between the accountability agencies.

And those provisions weren't necessarily included for whomever was the chair of this committee or whoever is in the mayor's office.

But I think it's, in my mind, a good practice to have those regular check-ins as policymakers with with you all and with other members of the accountability system and I certainly have prioritized that on my calendar with all of the various entities related to this work and it's been very helpful.

All right.

Anything else?

I think that's it.

So thank you so much for the report.

Really excited to see the 2019 report.

And this is our last item on the agenda.

So we are now adjourned.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for having us.

Yeah, thank you.