Safety, Housing, Education & Homelessness Committee - Regular Meeting

Welcome to the safety, housing, education, and homelessness committee of Denver City Council. The safety, housing, education, and homelessness committee begins now.

Alright. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Safety Housing Education and Homelessness Committee. Today is Wednesday, April 2. My name is Serena Gonzalez Gutierrez, and I am one of your council members at large and chair of the committee. We're going to start with some introductions of council members, and then we'll go into what's on today's agenda. So with that said, I will start over here on my right.

Good morning, Jamie Torres, West Denver District three. Good morning, Diana Romero, Campbell, Southeast Denver District 4.

Good morning, Amanda Sawyer, District 5.

And good morning, Paul Cashman, South

District 6. Kevin Flynn, Southwest Denver's District

2. Stacy Gilmore, District 11.

904.

Great.

All right. And we may have members joining us on Zoom. So we'll let folks know if they do get on. We'll make sure that they get introduced. So thank you everyone for for joining us today. We have a couple things on the agenda. We have starting off an action item from the Denver Police Department. And then after that, we'll be taking a short transition into a briefing from caring for Denver. So with that said, we'll go ahead and kick it over to commander Herrera. And oh, I don't have the other name. But we'll make sure that you both introduce yourselves, and then go ahead and proceed with the presentation.

Great. Thank you, Councilwoman. My name is Jacob Herrera. I'm a commander of the Denver Police Department. I currently work office. I'm joined by, from the district attorney's office, Max sorry, Matt Kirsch. And then we also have Alex Foley from DA's office and the great Sergeant Todd Erickson from the Denver auto theft team who will come up later to talk about the mechanics, the daily use of the FLoC ALPR system.

Great. So if you want to go ahead and start with the presentation, and then I'll just if there are members who have questions, if you want to get in the queue, and then we can do questions at the end.

Great. Thank you. So the nuts and bolts of the current contract for approval amendment for approval is this is a two year extension of the Flock ALPR automated license plate reader system. So we're just concluding a one year pilot with this vendor, and this amendment extends the existing system. We're not adding any new devices.

Each year is 333,000, and it's for two years. So this chart, this graph is a brief history of auto theft in our city. The blue line is us. It's Denver. The red line is our brother and sister cities as organized, categorized by the FBI.

So that's all cities between a quarter and 1,000,000 people. As you can see, there's always been a bit of a difference between how we compare relative auto theft to our other agencies. But starting in 2020, we really started to become much, much worse. Topping out in 2022 when we had we're averaging 40 stolen cars a day in the city. In January 2024, mayor Johnston with, chief Thomas announced a three pronged program to reduce auto theft in the city.

And this was because based upon the historic levels we saw in the last slide, auto theft got to the point of community crime concern that's usually reserved for speeding, running red lights. I know all of you have been to hundreds of community meetings. And the the issues that come up all the time. Auto theft had risen to that level and other vehicle related crime. So January 2024, we unveiled a three pronged strategy.

Strategy one was the Denver Auto Theft Team to focus a detective component of surveillance, unmarked cars, give them a great sergeant, Todd Erickson, to better streamline our enforcement efforts. Number two was the investment in a one year pilot of the FLoC ALPR system. And number three were to really prioritize prevention. So we launched Denver Track, is a program where people can register to use existing onboard GPS trackers or softwares, things that are in people's infotainment systems so that in the event your car is stolen, we could get that location vehicle location seamlessly to Denver Police so we can find their car faster. We also worked with Hyundai and Kia, which those two manufacturers still make up about 50% of all our stolen cars, to do a software update that made their vehicles far harder to steal.

These were large free events that were paid for by those two companies. One was at the Coliseum. One was at Empower Field. So here's how we did in 2024 when compared to 2023 for reducing auto theft. We had a significant improvement, and we outpaced the percent decrease from our comparable cities as by FBI numbers.

So in one year to have almost 4,000 fewer cars is truly remarkable. And I'd like to be smart enough to say we attribute 16% of this reduction to ALPR, 18% to Todd's team, 12% to this change in state law, but I don't know how to do that. I don't think anyone could do that realistically. And so it's a combination of the strategies that are making auto theft much more of a manageable returning the level to normal. And in fact, March 2025 was the best year we've had since 2018.

So we're gonna we had fewer than 500 motor vehicles stolen for the first time in about four years. But to compare, in March 2022, there was four 1,448 vehicles stolen. So almost 1,500 vehicles stolen in one month in 2022, March 2022. March 2025, just last month, we're at four sixty five. So to go from almost a thousand fewer stolen cars in three years is really something remarkable.

Okay. So what are automated license plate readers? So these are cameras that are at intersections to take pictures of cars. And they take many many pictures, but it's not a it's not a live recording device. It's not a traffic camera.

It's not a halo camera. It only takes a picture when the camera senses a vehicle has in the intersection. It takes pictures of the vehicles, compares the license plate on the vehicle to a crime information database, CCIC or NCIC, that's managed by the state of Colorado was managed by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, the national one by the National Crime Information Center. So the camera takes a picture of a license plate, compares that license plate to all the wanted license plates in the state of Colorado or in the nation. And that list is automatically updated.

I think it's, every six hours. So it happens fairly frequently. We just concluded a one year pilot for the a 111 cameras. And about two thirds or three quarters of all agencies, cities our size have a contract with FLOC. So this is how it works. So this is a real screenshot of a stolen vehicle that was taken at March 21. So the system takes three pictures. Generates two an image and takes two pictures. The first is the license plate. The second is a picture of what that vehicle looks like.

And the third is just a GPS a a Google Maps PIN location so officers know where it is. So this was at 38th And Federal. This then alerts the officers, the patrol officers that are have the computers in their patrol vehicles, and it's just like you get a notification on your phone. Hey. This stolen car just went 30 went through 38th And Federal.

And there's about a sixteen second delay between the vehicle going through and the officers receiving the alert, but that fluctuates based upon how our internal city of Denver wireless connections are working. Because this is a surveillance system, we have robust policy safeguards that mirror what we put in data protections we put in place for the body worn camera system. So first off, the ALPR system, and I gotta thank councilwoman Gonzalez Gutierrez for this. It is not everyone. It is not.

This is

gonna be funny. Yeah.

Dear. It's it's fantastic. Okay. That's a

deep movie reference. Kudos to you if you get it. I did not. But Horrible bosses. This is horrible bosses. There's no facial recognition with the software. Designed to take pictures of the vehicle, of the license plate. It doesn't store what people look like if there is a picture of them.

I don't

care. Everything is only retained for thirty days. So in the movie, the guy committed a crime and they caught him because he went through a red light camera. So our system does not do that. All the data is stored for thirty days and it's automatically purged unless it's flagged as part of an investigation.

We don't use the system for traffic enforcement. It's not connected to a DMV database. We don't use it for red light speeding or stuff wrong with your car. Additionally, the hot list that the officers receive, none of those are linked to traffic offenses. So officers aren't alerted when a car goes by that's known to have a driver with a suspended license or no proof of insurance.

The number the top two alerts are stolen license plates and stolen vehicles, but we do receive alerts if the car is wanted in conjunction to whenever a warrant has been issued for that car. So that could be anything from a misdemeanor domestic violence to a homicide. So before we take action, and sergeant Erickson will talk more about this, we have to verify all alerts through a human being at Denver 911. Because there are instances where that CCIC system could be out of date or a victim got their vehicle back on their own or, you know, it was a miss it was a prank. We've I responded to these like, my brother, I was mad at him for an hour, so I said he stole his car.

But then, he gave me my PlayStation back, and now we're friends again. And so we don't want my brother being pulled out at gunpoint because the vehicle is still registered and stolen. So because of that, we have to verify through 911 that the warrant that the alert is valid and active before we take enforcement action because of an automated hit. So FLOC is not connected to any DMV records. So all you really get is this picture.

The FLOC system doesn't tell you who that vehicle belongs to. So that's a separate database that officers have to log in that's managed by the state of Colorado. Everything only lives in thirty day windows. So after the thirty day window, it's automatically purged. But the search records are retained forever.

And so that's because we want the ability to make sure that we have the chance to investigate any allegations of misconduct. So a search is something that officers or detectives can use to track a vehicle's location within that thirty day thirty day window pursuant to investigation. But if someone were to make an allegation that DPD was misusing that, we could investigate it. You log in to Flock just like you log in to a Citi owned computer. You have to use your badge number and a personal, password so that we can't swap information.

So everyone who conducts a search, we know who that person was, and that search record will live forever. So this is a public website. It's the FLOC provides a Denver Police Department transparency portal. We share with there's 81 agencies in the start state of Colorado that we share with. So importantly, on a thirty day average, to give you an idea of the use of this system, the system detects vehicle about 2,000,000 vehicles per thirty day period.

Within that, we're at 75 I checked yesterday. It was 80,000 alerts are generated every thirty days, and officers are conducting about 3,000 searches every thirty days. So this is public. It's updated. It clearly gives, what our policy is, how officers can access it, and the hot list policy that's used by DPD and the state of Colorado.

Here's our locations. This is also public. We felt like it was important to give notice of where these cameras are to the surveillance system. So one thing we learned from the pilot was we bought a 111 cameras, but that only yielded 70 intersection. Each flock camera is about $3,600. And what that gets you is two lanes of traffic per direction of travel. And and that's pretty good. So it's a fairly low price point for that system. It's cheaper than our old fixed site ALPRs that we have on the West Side that have been there for years. The flock camera's pretty good.

We did do some follow-up. If there's a dark opaque license plate cover, it it it doesn't work. If there's a clear cover, it does work. So that's something we learned in this part of this. Okay.

So we're just concluding our one year pilot. During the pilot, there were 209 289 arrests that were made, a 170 vehicles that were recovered, and within those arrests were recovered 29 firearms. The Flock system was bought and part of a comprehensive auto theft strategy, but something that I didn't anticipate was the tremendous tremendous ancillary benefit we're getting in terms of other very serious crimes that it's generating investigative leads in homicides, drive by shootings, hit and runs, and robberies. So we're making cases we would not have made or been able to solve, and that's what these people will talk about later. But I didn't anticipate that, but it's been a great tool for proving hit and run cases.

Here's car a, nice shiny, went through 38th And Federal or another intersection, and now there's a big dent on the right? That we can prove at the next flock that it was involved in an incident. It saw it it it helped solve close two homicides last year because of the information where the detectives were able to figure out, generate a lead on what the car was and where it came from. Also, what's really cool is the flock system automatically generates a heat map of where cars are being stolen and recovered from. So we did that and it took a look took an analyst a full day to do that manually.

But the Flock system is able to put that out whenever you want it in an automated fashion. And that has made it much easier for teams like Todd's team to identify patterns and sophisticated rings far faster than we were when we had to rely on a human analyst to go through all the cases one by one. And so we were able to look at and say, hey. Why are all these cars that are stolen on the West Side Of Denver ending up in North Adams County and be able to make cases that way. So here are some things we learned from the pilot.

The number one big takeaway was how useful it is in other serious crimes in generating leads that we otherwise wouldn't have. Like I said, homicide, drive by shootings. We're able to use the camera to disrupt arrest, a robbery scheme that was occurring in real time in Montbello. We were able to use it to solve two burglaries that occurred in Cherry Creek. The second thing we learned was we did an internal audit, and we need to get better.

About 17% of all searches, the officers weren't listing a specific CAD number for a search, which makes it harder for us to go back and track outcomes. FLAC won't let you make a search of vehicle location history unless you put in a reason why, stolen car, robbery, etcetera. But we would like officers to put in a specific case number so we know, oh, it's that stolen car from that case in time instead of generic. So that was missing about 17% of the time. We'll be updating our training policy.

There were any instances of abuse or misuse that were identified during the pilot. Before I talk about specific cases, we had a concern come up about could any of the Denver data be used for ICE civil violations in violations in violation of Denver municipal code? And the answer is no. So when we got the information, we did an audit of all federal partners that we share with. And it turns out we only share with two federal partners, the ATF and the postal inspectors, the the the branch of the mail service that investigates mail theft because mail theft has become a a bad issue in Denver.

There are currently several ATF agents who are embedded within the DPD major crimes team who investigate homicide and nonfatal shootings. And so they're a great resource. We use them to charge people where they're in a legal possession of a firearm and the consequences in federal court are often much greater than district court. Then we reached out to the vendor. FLAC does not have a contract with ICE or Homeland Security.

Additionally, for anyone to access our DPD data, any of these 81 agencies, Fort Lupton PD. Right? They wanna use it. They have to sign in a test that they won't use give the information to ICE or use it for criminal civil violations related to that. Also, Flock's business model, their primary customer base, our agency cities like Denver, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta that have some of the same restrictions on the information that can be given to ICE.

So they would they they would really be hurting their own business model if for the if they were to do that. So we have specific we could give offline specific any more specific information about that, but I just wanted to point that out. So, I'll give two brief specific examples, but then we have experts who actually do this or prosecute this as for a living, and I'll let them talk more. So this picture is from a weapon arrest that occurred because of the flock system in October 2024 in East Denver. There was a car that was wanted for felony menace, which meant that the person the vehicle was associated with the crime where someone pointed a gun at another person, and the detective was able to get a license plate.

So we are able to link that to the database. Car drove through an intersection where one of our fly flock devices were. Lo and behold, officers make a a traffic stop or sort, the special special operations response team. Inside were a slew of weapons and a hockey mask. It was also used to make, hit and run arrests where, again, we were able to document the condition of the vehicle before and the condition after, which is very good evidence.

So I'm gonna have Todd or Matt talk about how it's used, how flock is used specifically in action. So, Todd, if you wanna come I

just wanna do a quick time check because we are scheduled to be on this particular topic until 11:20. We have another briefing. So and we have one, two, three, four, five, six members in the queue for questions. So I just wanna set that up for you.

So if you wanna give a brief overview of how your team uses flock.

Okay. Thank you, everybody. So I'm Todd Erickson. I'm a sergeant with the Denver auto theft team that we just formed two years ago. I have seven officers that work for me, detectives and uniform support. Daily, we go out and undercover cars look for stolen cars, and this flock has been a great tool for all of us. And it's also been a great tool for the uniformed officers that respond to daily calls, they get the alerts. And these numbers that you're seeing are not only just from my team, it's also from the patrol officers. This is a this is a great tool. Just to give you some insight on how a a particular day or night happens when we get a flock alert.

We have time on our side because we're in the undercover cars. They have no clue that we're behind them. We follow them at a distance, keep them in our eyesight once we get the alert. We then confirm, as commander Herrera said, with dispatch. And then we take it a step further. We call the victim to make sure that their car is still stolen because we do have people that recover their cars and don't report them that they've recovered them. And there's oftentimes where we're following the car, we see where it was listed to and where it was stolen from, and we're going to that person's house. So we're like, okay. Something's not right here. We're going to the to the crime scene, so to speak.

So we then so we go through all these extra steps to make sure. And then once we confirm that it is, we follow them, and we follow them to wherever they land. If it takes us out of the city, we just keep following them. Usually, how we get them is they will pull over to a gas station, go ahead and get gas, and then we get out and and detain them and and take them into custody and then get the victim's car back to them right away. But it is a it's a great tool for us, and, obviously, adding more will even be more beneficial.

We will and it's it's not only a good tool for us, but it's a tool for the victims because they're getting their cars back quickly because of this of this tool. So we've had just a couple brief scenarios that have happened or one and then one that just came up. We did get a flock alert when we're out looking for stolen cars, but it was on a domestic violence attempt murder. So we followed the car and got him into custody and were able to get him arrested along with the handgun that was in there that was used in the crime. So it was a perfect utilization of the tool.

We've had a a recent homicide that has occurred that where we saw the description of the vehicle, we didn't know the plate. So we're able to follow through flock that vehicle after the homicide happened. And it led us to where the car went to, and then that led to more development to get the suspect identified. So it is a is a wonderful tool, again, not only for us, but for the victims.

So I'm Matt Kirsch. I'm the first assistant district attorney in the Denver DA's office. And I thought I would tell you just sort of a couple of broad strokes about how camera systems are proving useful in our prosecutions and then give you a couple of quick examples. I think in terms of the broad strokes, maybe the best way to illustrate how useful this is is Ali Foley, the other deputy district attorney who is here does a lot of work in our office on organized crime, including auto theft rings. In the past year, she has looked at over 50 different search warrants that relied in some part on data from these flock cameras in order to support the probable cause to get those search warrants.

So that gives you a sense that's one DA in our office who's probably a heavier user, but that gives you a good sense about how often this data is proving to be useful in helping us to build successful prosecutions. One other thing that I want to point out about the cameras, just in case it wasn't clear from the previous presentation, is that although they are great at reading license plates, they also are extremely useful in cases where the license plates have been removed, which frequently happens both in cases involving stolen cars and in other cases where people have planned ahead and don't want to get caught. Because the system also captures images of the cars and allows officers to search for those images and for characteristics, it can allow cars to be identified on the basis of a particular bumper sticker or a particular kind of damage in combination with color and make and model and that sort of thing. And that's useful in actual cases. I'll give you an example of that.

Several of you probably heard about the burglary of the Hyde Park jewelry store in the Cherry Creek Mall back in July. The mall surveillance video identified a suspect truck in that case that didn't have any license plates. But the detectives were able to use the Flock system to identify that same truck without license plates, figure out track it to hardware stores where they had purchased tools used in the burglary, and ultimately to find it westbound on I 70 as they were trying to get to California. So that's an example of a non auto theft case and how the system has been useful in cases where the cars don't necessarily have license plates. Just to give you a couple of other examples of the kinds of cases where it's proven useful, there was just last week the police department working with the Postal Inspection Service, one of the federal agencies that you heard about before, used it to identify a Jeep that was associated with several mailbox burglaries and then identity thefts that followed on those.

That Jeep didn't have a license plate either, but the system was still able to allow the Jeep to identify at or near the location both of the burglaries and the suspect's residence. In November '4, the DA's office did an indictment against members of an international car theft and drug king organization that was responsible for stealing many of the cars that were taken from DIA. The FLAC system was instrumental in helping determine the time and date of several of the thefts that occurred in that case and helped recover a number of the vehicles in that case. The last example that I'll give you is also in June year, there were two juveniles and adult involved in a drive by shooting where at least 25 rounds were fired at 46th And Pecos in Northwest Denver. After and they were in a stolen vehicle at the time.

The FLoC system helped in combination with cell phone records to help us identify the people who were actually in the car at the time of that shooting. So those are a few examples of the ways in which the system has been really invaluable to helping us build cases, both related to auto theft and more broadly, as Commander Herrera described. I'll stop there, but I'm happy to answer other questions about that. Or if people have concerns about constitutional privacy issues, I can try to address those as well.

Thank you so much. So first, I want to welcome Councilwoman Parity who joined us via Zoom, and so she's been listening into the presentation. And I also want to welcome Councilman Watson and Council President Sandoval as well. So with that, we will go into questions from committee members. I will say thank you for taking feedback on I think initially, it was, like, attributing all of the the decrease in auto thefts.

It was attributing it to these license plate readers when, in fact, it was a combination of things. Right? And so thank you for taking that feedback and and putting it into the presentation. So with that said, I'll come over to Councilwoman Torres followed by Councilwoman Gilmore.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you all for the information and for my briefing before. I found it really helpful. A couple of things just to follow-up. How cars are stolen and how that's changing?

And I want to understand what that's looking like. In 2007, when I bought the house that I'm in, my Jeep Cherokee was stolen twice in six months, probably by the same people, and recovered both times. But at that time, those Jeep Cherokees were on the top five list of easy to steal because you could just jam a wrench into the ignition and start it. But now I feel like we've migrated more to fobs. And just wondering if there are any trends in terms of why certain vehicles are more likely to be stolen.

And is there any kind of feedback on whether it's just carelessness, people leaving their fob in their car? Just kind of wondering what you see when it comes to why cars are being stolen now.

Yes. So, obviously, back in and I'm old. So back in the old days, it was Jeep Cherokees and Honda Accords. That has now changed to Hundies and Kias. It's the, crime of opportunity. So they see the the older models, Kias and Hyundai's there. They're easily can get in through the door lock and then into the, steering column.

So it's still they're using the steering column. They're not using, like, a fob that's just been left

or something. Okay. So the new ones, we just had one recently on a Hyundai, which I was a little nervous that maybe they figured out how to get through into the ignition, and they didn't. It was the victim had, dropped, her key outside of the vehicle and so they got the key. Okay.

One of the things that I speculate and and wonder often is we do unfortunately get a lot of I don't understand why victims put spare keys in cars. I just don't I can't wrap my head around that. And but some of it, I wonder when you buy a car, if it's a newer car, they give you your key, and then they put the spare key in the book in your owner's manual, they put that in the glove box that unless two of you are driving, you're never if it's just you driving at, you're never gonna pull that out and grab that. So a lot of times it's in there. In my detective experience interviewing suspects and picking their brain as to why they stole things, I one comes to my mind where he was stealing cars and doing armed robberies at convenience stores, and he said, detective, you would be surprised how many people leave their spare key in the car, which I just I just and and I'm seeing that now in this new team that I'm with that we see so many spare car or spare keys in the car.

So that is some of it with the newer vehicles. Yeah. The older ones, yes, it's still very easy to manipulate the door lock and

The

column itself. The column itself. And and so that's how they're taking those.

Thank you for that. The other question I have is about the sources of where cars are stolen from. I feel like it's still the airport. Is like the

no. It's gotten down considerably. Has it?

So where are your, like, biggest sources? In my district, when I look at the data dashboard, it's Denver Health parking lot. And so how do you strategize where you put a reader and what partnership development you do when it's institutions? I feel like at one time I looked at it, Denver Health and Elich's were the top locations in my district where vehicles were sold. What do we do when we find that these are the biggest sources as opposed to just putting all of our energy behind the recovery?

Correct. So, ironically, the district attorney who's sitting to my right here, Ali Foley, she has the pattern from DIA. She helped with that to put all those guys away. She also helped with the Denver Health Medical. We had a pattern there, but they're still in vehicles.

So we my team with other detectives worked those two patterns, and we have solved them all. They're they're both everything's solved, and they're just now doing the the filing now on those. If we do get a certain area and I pay attention to the whole city, I look at, you know, the end of watches and look at everything and see where everything is going on and see where I see cars being recovered and dumped. So the and then the analyst communicates with me, then I'll see we have a hot spot. In that hot spot, we will work that, saturate that a little bit more.

The other thing we do is I advise the officers when they recover a vehicle there to hold that for us. And then we do scientific evidence later on, and we're getting prints back and and and people identified. And then that's how that was that that's part of, of what my team does. And so then we're putting we're arresting people because it's like, they shouldn't be in that car. You know? I show you a picture of this guy, and you're like, I don't know who that person is. Well, they shouldn't be in your car. So that's

I guess I wonder if there's also an element. This will be my last comment so you can make a thank you, Of the the awareness development with the locations, like like the airport. They put a lot of energy into limiting stolen vehicles or reducing that number from their parking lots. But I don't know if that happens with these other locations that are kind of hot spots. If it's a Denver Health PSA, other signage around saying, you know, don't leave stuff in your invisible.

I mean, stuff like that, I just don't know if that happens. So happy to follow-up later if that's a Department of Safety opportunity to make sure that those institutional locations have some action on their part as well to make sure that they're reducing, I think, the vulnerability on this.

Yeah. So we we do do that. We partner with them. Obviously, if it's a not a business, a little more difficult. It's just in a certain neighborhood or something. But Yeah. Yes. It's definitely we do network with them and and give them prevention measures.

Great. Thank you, sergeant. Thanks, commander. Okay. Thank you, manager.

Yes.

We still have five members in the queue. So I'm gonna just ask folks to maybe just limit to two questions just so that everybody gets a chance. Next is councilwoman Gilmore followed by councilman Flynn.

Thank you, madam chair.

Thank you

for the presentation. In 2023, I attended the meeting with all the hotels and hospitality folks along Tower Road and learned that many times they employ youth. You can steal a car and whatever. It was seconds that they can steal a car and pay a young person $500, and they go on to the next. And so this is great technology, but I also wanna plant the seed if we are busting these car rings, if there are youth involved, how we're redirecting them to viable careers at, like, Lincoln Tech, which is right off of Peoria and I 70.

And so if we can pay you $500 a pop and compete, why aren't we doing that? How and so just planning that out there. And thank you for working with US Postal Service because we had a very large incident right around the corner from my house on Bowling Drive with the postal service. So that's important because that's people's checks. That's how people stay housed.

We need to do more in partnership with them. And my one question is we talked about Amber Alerts and missing and murdered indigenous relatives alerts. And did you find out any information with the technology if there's a way? If we needed to save that information beyond the thirty days, is there a better way for us to take reports that the vehicle or a license plate or something is queued up in the CAD system to save that evidence that we might be purging every thirty days that would be related to an AMBER alert or especially an MMIR case? And so that's my one question for you.

Yes. So we look into making we're looking at making a policy change for that. If we have missing persons and we don't think it's suspicion enough, we would still have the practice of logging the the the license plate and and pulling that with flock so that if it did turn into a Amber Alert or or then other other one, then we'd have that access to that.

Okay. Job. Well, once you make that change as a follow-up, that would be awesome Sure. To be able to share that out with the task force.

I I did follow-up, excuse me, with our MEP sergeant. We haven't had any since FLOC has been in in existence, anything with Ambler or any of those that has happened that has helped us. It just just hasn't. They have found everybody or or or whatever the case is, but it hasn't it it will eventually, you know, be a great tool for them, but it so far hasn't been.

Alright. Thank you. Thank you, madam chair.

Okay. Thank you. Councilwoman Flynn followed by councilwoman Parity.

Thank you, madam chair. Thank you for all your work on reducing the auto theft that we've seen. We have so many over in our part of town that we were calling it Westside Uber. The two questions.

Sorry. Be correct.

Territory work.

Two questions. Commander, you said there were 80,000 alerts in a month last month. Was that was that the number?

Yeah. It's between seventy and eighty Okay. A month.

So I'm a little confused because with all those locations, you would obviously more than 80,000 vehicles would have passed. So does FLAC instantaneously decide to take a picture only of license plates that are on the list, or does it take a picture of every vehicle and then instantly compare it with the list? And if it's not on the list, it's discarded? Or is it retained? I'm confused by the 80,000 number because it should be higher if it caught every vehicle and we keep it for thirty days.

Right. That's a good question. So it take it detects 2,000,000 vehicles every thirty days Okay. On average. And that is 2,000,000 pictures of vehicles. Then it compares the picture to the hot list and that occurs 80,000 times. Okay. If the vehicle is not part of the hot list or isn't flagged, then that individual picture remains in the system for thirty days. Then it's gone. So that's how we're able to make cases without specific license plates.

Exactly. Exactly. Alright. Thank you. Second question, maybe for Matt. Matt, I'm

sorry. Yes.

On the Fourth Amendment issue, because I know a lot of folks believe that with facial recognition at the airport and everything else, the surveillance society. But it occurs to me that this system is actually no different than, but on an order of magnitude greater than having a 111 police officers on random street corners watching every license plate and looking at a list and being able to do it like you're Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man or something. So talk a little bit about the Fourth Amendment unreasonable search because I'm thinking of how technology has actually aided in solving crimes. I'm thinking about the one, the awful one in Green Valley Ranch with the arson that occurred where it was actually challenged because there was a sort of a broad net cast on a Google search on that address

Right. On addresses

in that area.

So this system is different from that. And it's significantly different from the two most recent cases where the US Supreme Court has said that there was an unconstitutional invasion of privacy. One of those involved the placement of a GPS tracker. And the majority of the Supreme Court in that case actually focused on the physical trespass that occurred by placing the tracker on the car. Obviously, there's no physical trespass involved in this kind of system.

The second case, called Carpenter was the one where they gathered a cell phone location data over the course of about three months. The data in that case was retained indefinitely for search sort of at any time. In both of those cases, the Supreme Court actually affirmatively said, we are not disturbing our prior precedent, which says that people don't have any expectation of privacy in the information about where their cars are going on public roadways. Mhmm. So this system doesn't have definite retention.

It doesn't it takes snapshots of locations that may or may not implicate a particular person depending on where they're driving. And the information that's being recorded is all information that the Supreme Court has declared there is no expectation of privacy. And even in the more recent cases where it has thrown out much more comprehensive intrusive searches. And that this to the extent that the state Supreme Court has dealt with similar issues, the most recent case was one called Tafoya, which involved, again, a long term surveillance camera that was posted outside a person's house. But it also allowed officers to view areas that they wouldn't ordinarily have been able to see from the public.

It also involved long term surveillance and footage that was retained indefinitely. And the Colorado Supreme Court said that that was an unconstitutional search. This system doesn't have any of those features that have caused either The United States or the Colorado Supreme Court to say that there have been constitutional violations.

Thank you. Thank you very much. It strikes me that it's no different than having all the sergeants, officers out on all these corners and like I said, watching the license plates and being able to say, oh, that that car was stolen. Let's go after it. But it doesn't much

It's a lot cheaper than

that. Faster. All right. Thank you.

Thank you, ma'am. Thank you. We'll go to online to Councilwoman Parity followed by Councilman Cashman.

Thank you so much, Commander Herra, for being here. I wanted to ask, first of all, I think I have a request in to look at the contract for this, and it it I don't think it's up on Legistore yet unless it went up today. And I would love to see that because I think the difference between having all of our Denver police just as eyes on the street and this kind of tech is the third party private company on the back end, obviously, FLAC, and then the capability for sharing across their whole network and with other agencies. So that's where I would kind of want to focus in with concern is just to look and see whether the contractual provisions track what you guys have in your DPD policy manual about when data will be shared and retention and all of that. So I would just appreciate that.

And is there a reason why the contract isn't in Legistar?

Emily Locke, Department of Safety, Legislation and Policy. Council member, let me follow-up with the mayor's office and see on the timing of that. My understanding is that the contract should be available either at or after the timeline of committee. So let me

go ahead and follow-up. Yeah.

So with that, I I think my I'm I'm just gonna say that I having reviewed the DPD policy about this, it's the right policy. Right? Like, it's exactly what we wanted to say, which is that the data won't be shared when it's shared with other law enforcement agencies upon their request. That has to be pursuant to a specific investigation and that it won't be shared with a federal task force, which solely involves investigation of things that's permitted under Colorado law or purposes that violate our Public Safety Enforcement Priorities Act around immigration. But here's my I just wanna share this concern because I don't think this is something that DPD's policy really can control, but I think it's a very real concern, which is that current federal law enforcement, we saw DEA agents and a bunch of other agencies coming out in support of ICE when they raided our city a few, you know, weeks back.

And so at this point, I don't know that we can trust federal law enforcement agencies to make a data request and properly identify the purposes that it's being used for. So I just have a real concern that these kinds of surveillance networks, which we're building out in a lot of different ways, we're doing it with flock, we're doing it with drones, we're doing it with shot spotter, that essentially, because of the direction that federal law enforcement is going in, we're gonna start seeing requests that are caged as being about one thing. And then we hand the data over, and then next thing we know, we have, you know, a green call cardholder being deported or just basically used as as repression of dissent. And that's not DPD's fault. That's, you know, the direction federal law enforcement is going, but the entire Department of Justice right now is basically being geared towards repression of dissent, you know, punishment of presidential enemies, and gearing up the deportation machine.

So that's my concern about this. Not a DPD concern, but just a concern that we're creating some serious potential for unintended consequences by using the tech, and then I would I just want us to be balancing that honestly. Thank you, madam chair. That's all.

Thank you. Thank you. Is there anything that you'd all like to say

at all or respond?

I think it's a valid concern. We just have to hope our the personal relationships we have with the federal that are local, that they'll do what they say they will do.

Thank you. All right. Next up, we have Councilman Cashman. And I want to make sure, Pro Tem Rameau Campbell, did you still want to be in the queue?

Actually, my question was answered in one of the responses earlier. Okay, great. Counseling Cashman.

My questions are asked in

the Well, look at you being efficient. I love that. I just have just a few quick questions that came up during the presentation. You all reported on instances in which this was helpful and helped solve some of these crimes. Are there do you track how many times there is inaccuracies where there might be, you know, in inaccurate arrests or charges? Because we know that sometimes those things happen. Right? Because not everything is ironclad. And so do you have tracking of that? And if so, what is what are those numbers?

We don't have any formal system of tracking, let's call them false positives.

Mhmm.

But that's because we rely on so if a false positive were occur, would occur, it would be because of the underlying data and not the fact that Flock flagged it Okay. If that makes sense. It would be because that CCIC record is old or inaccurate. Because we do it's in policy. We we communicate very strongly to the officers that this isn't foolproof, that the flock you need to verify this.

You need you still need to be an observer, an investigator before you pull this car over or take action. This is just a probability. It's not a certainty. And so that's why Todd talked about even going so far as to call the victim. Is your car still stolen, or is your son driving in King Soopers? Like, there's we we wanna know. So one of the reasons we did with Go With Flock was there they did have fewer issues, at least that we researched getting license plates confused with each other, especially state to state where the the you know, there's so many specialized plates and and different patterns that they seem to do better than other vendors.

Okay. Thank you for that. I think, you know, just knowing that, yes, sometimes the data doesn't always produce the most accurate information as we've seen happen with some of, like, raids that have happened or, you know, knock warrants being served to the wrong people. Like, those kinds of things are wrong address because somebody put the wrong one wrong number. Right?

Like, it could be there are errors that occur, and we know that that's a reality. And so it just would be interesting and also helpful, I think, as this goes forward to just, you know, hopefully keep track of those kinds of things so that we can try to remedy them so that they don't happen. Right? So there there aren't wrongful arrests and things like that. The last thing I'll just say, and I appreciate councilman Gilmore bringing this up, is around our young people because I know having worked in the juvenile justice system, there are there were a number of like, motor vehicle theft is probably was one of the higher most common type of crime that we were seeing our young people getting arrested for.

And I really like where you were going with things because I think a lot of times, most of the time, our kids don't wake up in the morning and say, I wanna go steal a car because it sounds like a great idea. But really, there is something else driving that behavior. And and I think it's important to note that and also figure out how do we actually invest in the types of things constable McGillmore is talking about versus paying putting them through the juvenile justice system and creating more barriers for them to then come out of that system and be part of our community in a more productive way. And so I would love to also just know maybe going forward, and this is outside of this conversation, is, but I would like all my colleagues to know how many of the motor vehicle thefts are from our youth population. How many of those are juvenile delinquency cases?

I think that would be really just interesting for us to know. And as the mayor is focusing on youth going into 2025, 'twenty six well, I think we're in 2025. So yeah. So right now, focusing on youth, I think it would definitely be helpful for us to know that.

Hold on.

With that, this is an action item, colleagues, and so I am looking for a motion.

I'm moved.

Second. Alright. Moved by councilman Flynn, seconded by councilwoman Sawyer. Is there a need for a roll call vote? And so we are good with moving this to the full council, seeing nodding heads. This will move forward to the full council, and we look forward to seeing the contract, And we're good to go for that.

Great.

Thank you.

Very much.

Thank you all.

Thank you.

We'll have a brief transition as we bring caring for Denver up. Oh, it happened to my brother. Yeah.

Okay.

I can do that.

Hello. Alright. Welcome, Flores. How are you? Living the dream. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for the opportunity to present on our annual report. You all we sent it to all city council member, mayor, the city auditor last Thursday. You may not have had a chance to read through all of it yet, but we'll present some of the highlights.

And in this time, I think we're focusing also a little bit more, as we've been having individual meetings with each of the council members to hear what they'd like to hear, we focused also a little bit on how we do selection, how we review those grants. And so I'm going to probably go through some of the slides where you've seen them more a little quicker, but then we can spend a little more time on the other ones and then leave plenty of time for questions. So again, founded and funded in 2019 after the ordinance passed in 2018, our board is appointed by the mayor, the city council, and the DA. It's a 13 member board. In our 2024 annual report, at a high level, 95,000 Denverites were impacted by the investments that we made over the year.

It was 43,000,000 in approved grants. Those grants might have been for one, two, or three years. And 103 organizations received grants. And then a lot of our our focus is on inclusive access. So really, how do we have access to care that works for people?

That attention to fit, where people feel respect, understood, and have trust? And then really that care over time. As councilwoman Suhrer has asked us many times about those systems change, this really falls into that as we think about all those places where people transition in care and then get lost in care. So in 2024, we had $45,000,000 in grant dollars available. That is the draft reconciliation that we just received.

And 40,600,000.0 almost 43.7 was awarded. So these are we wanted to also just lift up the grant summary. So in the five years, we have received $2.00 8,000,000 in tax revenue. We have distributed or allocated 196,000,000 with about 12,000,000 being unallocated, which is about a 94% disbursement rate. Our financial policies always have us between 8597%, and we like to be on that higher end so that we know dollars are in community and not being unallocated.

And then on the left side, it really just talks about what are the funding areas that these dollars went out in. We fund across the city. As you'll see, the darker, the orange, that means higher levels of investment. It aligns or has aligned with city priorities, city neighborhoods, and we continue to monitor as the city sort of neighborhood needs change, we're trying to align with that as well. So wanted to just spend a little bit time now on the due diligence.

How it gets started? First, there's an review. So on average, we are receiving over a 100 grants per cycle, typically around 40,000,000, and we typically have about 11,000,000 to give away. So the requests are getting more and larger, But we look for their eligibility. We look at their finances and budget and then look for the completeness.

We leverage the expertise of community reviewers. So if we're doing our alternatives to jail, we look for folks with lived experience, look for folks that work in this space to help give us a sense of what do they think the strengths are in the proposals, what are the challenges, what are questions we want to ask, and how do they show up in community. We use that as information for program officers where they then do a site visit where we ask clarifying questions, try to understand how they wanna use the dollars, what are the impacts, what are the alignment with our ordinance and with the priorities in the call for proposal? And then how does it align with the shared impact plan? What is the geographic disbursement?

And then just the the general impact as we're trying to prioritize of the grants to be funded. And if there are questions, I'm happy to take questions in between or just go through it.

I'll I'll

go at the end. Okay. Thanks. The factors for grant selection, you know, how does it align with our ordinance is first and foremost. It's driven by entities, so these applicants that are the right fit, giving the community context. So it's, how do we look at the organization, where they wanna serve, what's their trust in that community, how they fit the community they wanna serve. There's sometimes a lot of people that wanna serve communities, but maybe don't have an experience or a connection to that community. And so we look for that. Engage people being served to help inform the program design and outcome. So how are they using the community members that they're serving to help shape, inform, evolve the programming?

If it's youth, how will youth leverage their expertise in designing the program and or evolving the program as well? That it increases access to mental health and substance misuse supports or suicide supports, and then reach communities that have been impacted by trauma and maybe haven't had the same access to resources and supports. So then during a year long, whether it's one, two, or three years, we only release a year of funding at a time. In the first three months, we talk about what are the intended outcomes. We help build a learning framework so they can say, this is what we intend to have happen in this grant, and then what can we measure within our capacity to measure.

Then we do a midyear check-in where we're just saying, how's it going? Does this framework still feel right? Are things on track? If not, we can make amendments or we can look at sort of what needs to shift or pivot or just say, great. And then at the eleven, twelve month is where we actually, get some initial data, and we spend an hour long phone call with them walking through the data, trying to understand the data sources, how they get it, how do we leverage that.

And then also, what we have found is that in talking to somebody, we get more information around learning, around what's working and what's not working, than if we ask them to put it in a report, whether that be because of language, whether that because of time and resources. If you're like, did everything go the way it should? And you just say yes. Because if you say no on that report, you're gonna have to fill out a whole section, and you're not always sure how that information is gonna be used. So we found that we've gotten better data because of that.

So, again, I think I've talked to many of you about our learning driven evaluation. So it is this learning framework of where we really try to understand what's the impact of their work and help the grantees share in designing something that lets them measure the impact. I think many foundations have focused really on process measures. How many people showed up at a meeting? How many times were you in the newspaper?

And they can be important. It is part of where we got to our 95,000 reach. And yet, it doesn't always tell us if that program's having impact. And so how do we really learn into so that it's really a tool for the grantees as well to say, if this isn't having my intended impact, what do I need to shift, do differently, or do less of, or more than to actually have the intended impact? So they use measures that make sense for them for what they wanna learn and what they how they judge that impact.

They tell us what's meaningful, possible, and relevant in real time. And then we make sure that there's alignment, not just with what they're doing, but how do we make sure that intentionality is aligned with the mental health and substance misuse. And then really, how do we look at the care systems, and where are those issues, and how do we address those. I will say we were written in peak grant making for this approach and have been asked to present at grant makers for effective organizations on our approach. And we're actually able to bring one of our grantees, Florence Crittenton, to talk about how this learning based approach has impacted their ability to serve their community.

So this dives in a little deeper. There's much more of this in the annual report, but have sort of focused pages on that access, fit, and care. And so, again, you I'm I'm not gonna read all of these numbers to you. And if there are any questions on any of these, happy to talk about it. But, we also try to not just do sheer numbers, but then also share an example of.

So Boys and Girls Club. And by providing the social emotional learning, the licensed clinical social work, it has meant 1,100 kids have received one on one case management from licensed clinical social workers. And then they talk about why it's important from their perspective and what are some of the tools they are leveraging. Attention to fit, again, how we really think about community being reflected by the care they receive. We know that makes a difference.

We know it makes a difference if you don't have to explain your age, your gender, your culture, your identity, but can show up and just talk about my challenges, the trauma I've experienced, and really focus on the care being provided. So Qumun is a perfect example of that community led mental health programming for teens, adults, and elders designed by the community in partnership with licensed professionals. Fifty five percent of the people they see have never accessed care before. And again, that's the difference of having that reflection in the care. And then care over time, really how we think about those transitions and how we support that.

The DA really in sort of diverting through the program we find diverting individuals with mental health or substance misuse away from the legal system and into care through peers and licensed clinical social workers and the partnerships that they have. And then I wanted to talk specifically about some of the system changes as well. Again, some of the grants that we recently made, and thank you to the council members that were also able to be there. But MSU, we were able to create a behavioral health scholars program. So we know that as students graduate, one of the things they need to do in that first year is get a certain number of clinical hours.

A lot of times that doesn't come with payment. So what this will do is place 25 to 35 graduates of behavioral health into Denver settings, provide them a stipend for that first year, and then they will agree to stay in that second year. And what we anticipate is that it will reduce the financial burden. It will get them into community practicing sooner. And MSU reflects a lot of our community and so that we'll have a diverse set of providers also being able to provide that care.

Because we've heard and we were part of the I was a co chair of the mayor's mental health task force, and part of that workforce issue was we need more providers that reflect the diversity of community. And so this is an effort to specifically do that. Denver Health, we have two grants there. One is the Thrive Grant, which is really about creating a virtual mental health campus on Denver Health. What we have found in the first after the first year, there were a certain number of patients that were leaving care.

And some of Denver Health's proposition was that they were better. And we sort of said, hey, why don't we try to add some peers and other professionals to really and so they went from 60% to 90% retention of clients through some of those transitions with the addition of peers and other workforce to maintain those connections. And then the trust grant is supporting students. Again, we know that a lot of students hit our Denver Health emergency room or hit our outpatient, and they weren't always connected to care at the school based health centers. And so this actually connects them to that care so that there's a continued connection, as well as places three licensed clinical social workers or behavioral health therapists at three high need schools.

And they serve two to three schools so then can see students in that moment as they have those needs. And then capacity building, I know this been this is sort of part of our sustainability. I know Councilwoman Gutierrez Gonzalez has talked about this a lot Gonzalez Gutierrez, sorry about that Councilwoman is just that we know that a lot of these nonprofits have so much going on that we also need to help them focus on organizational capacity. And so how do we really think about that? Because if we can make them stronger organizations, they can deliver better program.

They can get additional funding. And then they're stronger in being able to talk about what they do and more present in community. And so we have been working with HARANU, Latino Coalition for Community Leadership, Rocky Mountain PBS, and both Results Lab and the Evaluation Center at CEU to really provide those additional supports. And really learning into is not just about us. And we always tell people, you're never required to take part in these services.

And we can think people need services, but really there is a readiness that needs to be present that we're learning into with all of our capacity builders to say, how do you assess that readiness for them to really be able to spend the time and resources to truly take advantage of these capacity supports? And then I think as we continue to do community engagement, it's part of our larger focus. You know, we again hear about the importance of integrated approaches. So how do we co locate these mental health services where people are already at, where they may be receiving workforce training, where they may be receiving other supports? Can we embed licensed clinical social workers there so they don't have to navigate to other sources?

How we continue to increase accessibility and really look at those community based solutions. And that first and third are pretty tied. It is about embedding some of those resources in CAMON or in the Center for African American Health where people are at so they can access those services, again, in a way that feels safe and trusted, as well as supporting our larger care systems. And I believe that's everything. Great.

Thank you so much. All right. I'll make sure that I didn't miss anyone getting in the queue. We have four members in the queue. I have Councilwoman Cashman, Councilman Gilmore, Pro Tem Romeo Campbell, and Councilman Torres. Is there anybody else that wanted to get in? You can still after. I just wanted to make sure I didn't miss anyone. All right, we'll go over to questions. Thank you so much for being here and presenting, Ms. Salus. Next, we'll start with Councilman Cashman. You're up next first. Thank you,

Madam Chair. So in one of your earlier slides, when you're breaking down the dollars, there was a giant lump of about $60,000,000 I think it was called community center solutions. What does that mean?

Sure. So we have three funding areas. They're really broken down almost into populations. So community centered would be we're serving birth to death. So it would be like lifespan local I'd

want more

of a breakdown on what that looks like. What are we actually spending the dollars doing?

It's all on mental health or substance misuse services. So everything is first and foremost mental health services. So then there's a population that is a legal involved population. And so that's the alternatives to jail. But it's all mental health, substance misuse, suicide prevention. Then community centered solutions, same. Always the first tier is mental health and substance misuse. But it's the population they're serving is the general community. And then the third is, again, mental health, substance misuse, suicide, but youth. And youth is zero to 26. So there's three ways. We have three applications in a year where if you're wanting to do programming around mental health or substance misuse for young people, you would apply in our youth theory.

Community centered is substance abuse mental health for adults.

Or elder adults or

Yeah, there are adults too. Right. Okay. Cool. The other thing, and we we spoke about this for a minute in the hallway. I wondered if you could comment a little bit about what you're seeing due to the current insecurity and what federal funds might appear or not appear.

Yeah. No. I think we're already seeing a request and emails from some of our current organizations whose grants have recently been cut by the Behavioral Health Administration through SAMHSA CUTS, the large acronym for the federal agency that does mental health and substance misuse at the federal level. And it might not only be cuts in the behavioral health, but many of these organizations provide food or do other services that are also being cut in different ways. And I think many foundations are trying to understand and think about what to do in this space and that many, we can't just backfill budgets as we work on program.

I think we're also trying to think about, as different policies occur at the federal level and there are different needs that arise for newcomers or different needs that arise for LGBTQIA populations, and or we might see more influx come into the city of Denver because of our policies as a city, how that impacts our grantees. We're also trying to sort of assess that. And that might be an area, honestly, we might be able to step in more easily than cuts in federal funding. We wanna be careful that we're not supplanting at the same time. But if if people are seeing a higher need or need to serve a population differently.

So I will say, as we've talked to some of our organizations, whether that be Jewish Family Services or others, where they have served a diversity of students, have seen some of the newcomer students no longer coming to school. There may be different ways to serve populations. And so trying to be open in our conversations to understand where is the appropriate or right place for us to be. But I think we don't have a good sense right now how overall our communities are being impacted by the stops in city funding or state funding from federal decisions.

Thank you for that. Thank you, madam chair.

Great. Thank you. Next up is Councilwoman Gilmore, followed by Pro Tem Romero Camp.

Thank you, madam chair. Thank you for the presentation. And wanted to kind of pick up the conversation where you left off. I guess I would like to understand what the specific steps are going to be for you to get that data around exactly how our immigrant and refugee population is being affected. Do you have a survey planned?

Are you asking organizations to ask their participants what is happening? Because I've been it's been curious that there hasn't been more of a connection made between homeschool groups and our immigrant and refugee population because there is more flexibility. And I know personally because the folks that live on my block, high schoolers are no longer going to school when they used to. And so time is not infinite in children's lives. So just wanted to understand what you're going to do to elicit that information sooner than later.

Sure. So we do do surveys, and so we'll have some sort of because as part of our community check-in, this is what we're hearing. When I showed the different points we check-in with grantees, the midyear check-in is a call or a visit, the end of the year. And it's where we can ask about challenges. What are you seeing? And we've asked I've been asking as I we had a program officer leave, and so I was helping out with some of these just a year and asked them about the challenges they were experiencing. What were they seeing? Especially if I knew they were serving newcomers or immigrants in the community or if they're serving transgendered individuals, how we sort of say, like, what are you seeing? What have been the challenges? So we are asking those questions specifically so that we can try to understand.

And there's a complexity to it as well. Sometimes they they know where they are or sometimes they are the safe place where they are and trying to I think they're all also trying to navigate this new space place with sometimes more of a federal presence at the city level as well how they protect and keep safe. And so we've also been just sharing resources from the Colorado Lawyers Committee with some of our applicants that serve newcomers so that they have some of those resources and TA support on the legal side as well. But I think we're doing it as much in real time as we can. But we find sometimes they're not always willing to share it in a survey or written, even with us.

And so it tends to come up more in conversation. And so it is a little more antidotal than it is going to be a formal collection because, again, I think everybody is nervous about how data is used, even though we don't share that broadly.

Right. I think there's different ways. I would hate for us not to ask the question, especially we're caring for Denver. Like, you're funding these organizations. So I would hope that you already have a certain level of trust built.

And I think it seems tone deaf if you in that place of power and privilege using taxpayer funds don't even ask the question to them directly to say a phone call to all the EDs that you fund. Like that would be a commitment that I would hope that you feel comfortable making because if you don't ask question and you expect for it, you put the onus Mhmm. On the entity that's serving. I think you have a role to play in asking these questions and a summary of data because that's information that people are telling us. And you're part of an institution.

And, like, I wanna know that information from Healthy Food for Denver kids. I want to know that information from the Denver preschool program. And we know that info is not going to the feds. So we need to know it so that we can do better to serve them real time and not at the end of the year. I think there's a response to that. And I know we're short

No.

As far

as time, but but I think it's an important Yeah. Conversation because for so long, we've just been like, well, if you feel comfortable telling us, no. We know Mhmm. Fear and terrorizing your community is happening right now. And so are there leaders, are there community members that this is their gig day in and day out? And they're not gonna balk Right. At telling you directly what they're hearing from folks who they're serving. And so I think it's a unique time in history for us to hold space and elevate those leaders and collect that data and that information. And I know you're you're doing that work, but I would like to see it with every

Yep.

Entity that gets funded so that we have that information. Because if we have to detaper at the state or we need to do different things to push for the state to help us, I think that's important. That data and that voice, now is the time for

us to elevate it that way. And there are I will say proactively we've been reaching out to the organizations we know that that are leading in transgender work and newcomer work, and it is impacting others that we don't always know until we are doing this call six month in. But we will make sure that as we do this survey that we're a little more explicit about specific populations that are feeling attacked.

Great. Thank you. I have council pro tem Romero Campbell followed

by councilwoman Torres. Thank you, madam chair, and thank you for the presentation. I think we're all kind of a little bit on the same wavelength for how we're looking at this opportunity. So I just there there are a few things that are bubbling up, so not to repeat, what my fellow council members have already said. But I think that the pipeline with MSU to diversify mental health workers is a really innovative and exciting approach and something that has been asked for.

Are there other systemic opportunities that have surfaced? I think right now, as we're thinking about not only moving forward, but what are those other things that need

to be embedded into our system that help the overall ecosystem of serving people. Yeah. So we have a bucket. If you see the innovative bucket there, that's where we try to do some of the that's where we do these system issues, where we started the conversation with MSU and really cultivated that. I will say the other two areas that community have said is important and just as a reminder, we open up a call for proposals.

People apply. And so it's usually they're driving it based on what they see their needs are. But sometimes it isn't that systems level. So the other two areas that we've heard significantly from community is one is substance use for youth and active step down therapy for youth. Hopefully soon, will be able to talk to you about we have been working with Urban Peak and a substance use provider to potentially do on-site recovery at the mothership as a way to start saying, how do we start providing more of this?

After somebody leaves a mat bed at Denver Health, how do we continue to provide care and treatment? And it isn't just going to be about what is at Urban Peak, but how do we open up these other community settings where youth feel many youth aren't going to necessarily go back to Denver Health. Not that is no dispersion on Denver Health, but it's a big institution and not a place where sometimes young people feel comfortable. But there are community settings where there are mental health services being provided. Could we embed some of substance misuse?

So we're working on that right now pretty actively. The other area where people have said there's just not enough dollars going to is severe and persistent mental illness. Agreed. And I think trying to figure out what does that look like and how do we better surround and support people with severe and persistent mental illness. We've made grants to Heartland, which used to be CHARGE Resource Center.

We've made grants to KARIS that really supports. We've done a little bit of competency, but I think we're really trying to understand severe and persistent mental illness shows up throughout the continuum and has needs. But we see it particularly in our legal systems. And so how do we create alternative pathways and better supports for? So those are some of the two other areas that we're working on, including, I think, we have some sort of resources as it relates to transgender and newcomers and sort of other issues as it comes up if we need to sort of pivot and figure out what are those right pathways or new ways that we need to better serve our communities.

So we are always trying to listen to community. That's what drives. Then how we it just sometimes requires it goes back to what Councilwoman Gilmore was just saying. Sometimes we have to say, okay, this is the table we'd like to set. Help us work through what that right solution is and who are the right players and pilot it so that we can learn and figure out then how does it grow throughout the community.

Just one last just thought for the my background is in nonprofit organizations and thinking about what that capacity building is. So I'm excited to see that you do have a capacity building learning thread, so important. And now, knowing that these are

I think you said that they're one year grants? The the grants for the capacity, capacity, we have contracts with these providers. Yeah. And usually the the program agencies. Yeah. It's Multi year depending on dollars that come in and so forth. And sort of like a hadanu might come in one, you know, sort of do a boot camp with somebody, but Muslim Youth for Positive Impact sort of went through their sort of initial training, but then needed some additional touch points in year two and three. And so it really depends on the organization and what are the resources they need. Sure. I think it's really important not to lose that thread to continue to support the organizations that are doing the work.

Oftentimes, that's seen as the first thing that goes when you have

grant making opportunities, but I think really investing in those organizations to be able to better serve, better track, and connect with one another.

I appreciate that. It has been a core value. So we've been investing capacity building almost since the beginning. I will be honest, we've learned a lot in this. Again, that readiness being so important.

And then what are those right supports that really benefit the organization, which also really depends on you finding that right capacity builder that's the right fit for the organization so that they can benefit the most from it. But again, I think it goes back to the sustainability question of many of these organizations that we feel like we own that with the nonprofit. It's not just go find some more money, but what resources and how do we help them leverage their work, their expertise, their their skills and resources to be able to and and what I'll also say is, while we have those capacity builders, we also feel like it's our job and responsibility to share connections. So I have relationships with other funders, and I make those introductions, the sort of warm handoff that even if it isn't funding right now, how do you have this relationship with a funder so that then in future that you might be that right fit? So I appreciate that.

Thank you.

Thank you. You. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you. And last in the queue, we have Councilwoman Torres.

Thank you so much. Thanks, Lores, and appreciate all the ways that I think we're thinking about how does the entire network and environment become more clear. One really quick question. I noticed in the innovative section that Caring for Denver is a recipient of Caring for Denver dollars? What's that about?

Usually it's in the capacity building session. Not everybody so typically we fund nonprofits. Some of our capacity builders aren't nonprofits. And so we are funding ourselves to fund the capacity builders. So typically, it happens in the evaluation space.

So Rocky Mountain PBS on the communication side, they're public. Well, I should say also some of our we also have some independent video makers communications that are part of that support network too. So I'll say it happens in communications and evaluations mostly, that we have those grants to then be able to fund that communication and that evaluation support.

Okay. Thank you. And

I'll actually add that there's also one instance. Sorry. This might be more detailed than you want. One instance of when we do these big system grants, so when we are doing it to Denver Health, that we actually brought an evaluator to that in addition to theirs so we could really learn into what does it take to create that system change.

Okay. I appreciate your annual report showing who received grant funds, what goals they're reaching. Maybe the next time we talk, I'd love to better understand too how you evaluate if they're achieving those goals. What's the value add in something like that? I'm sure every nonprofit in Denver, which is thousands, would love to have a social worker on staff, right, and that caring for Denver would pay for But what are we actually trying to move a needle on? And how is caring for Denver contributing to that piece as a city is really of interest to me. So follow-up comments.

Yeah, we will definitely and one thing that we can follow-up with too, it might look a little complicated, but we build a learning framework with each organization, each grant, and then that's what they're reporting on. So we can at least share the framework so you can see the structure. And we can talk more about it because I think it'll look a little overwhelming. It's usually a document we fill out, and then we share back with, Okay, this is what you said that you would be able to report on, and then roll all that data together to then try to show a picture. But yes, we can talk more about that as well.

Very good. Thanks. Thank you, madam chair.

Great. Thank you. All right. Well, you, Lores, of course, for always being available and presenting. We look forward to the next time around.

Thank you.

And with that, council members, we have two items on consent seeing that nobody has pulled those down. Those will move forward to the full council, and we are adjourned.