Council Public Safety Committee - Regular Meeting

Yeah.

Good evening, everybody. Today is Wednesday, 03/26/2025. It is 05:31PM. This is the council public safety committee. I wanted to call the meeting to order, and if we can have a vote.

Present.

Council member Rosh?

Present. Mayor Salinas?

Present.

No. You can. Thank

you. Next is public comment. This is reserved for anybody online or in the room that would like to make a public comment on something that is not on the agenda. Is there anybody in the room that would like to make a public comment that is not on the agenda? Yes. And then I don't know if there's cards or anything. But

Yeah. I was gonna have

So go ahead. Yeah. That's fine. Just go ahead and make a public comment, and and you can stand up if you if you can't.

Okay. Hi.

The light has to be green. I turned it on for you. I'm sorry.

Oh,

no. I just turned it off.

There you go.

Okay. Yeah.

Sorry. Couldn't be good. So, hi, I'm PJ with your concerned citizens and First time I've been here live. Nice to be with you. My comment was just that, you know, I'm speaking on behalf of all our group, and I'm sure many other concerned citizens in Hayward that we still aren't getting noticed about this public safety committee meeting. I know that Chuck Finney and crew worked on trying to be able to have us subscribe on the stack. I haven't seen it advertised on the stack at all. And then we all, you know, separately had subscribed, and nobody's gotten notice of it. You know, it's the fourth Wednesday of the month. We're aware of that, but it's nice to get those reminders.

And I think, you know, for the the broader the broader city, I think it it this meeting is really important. I I just caught up on the last one from January and just so much good information came out of that. I I think, you know, but more than just the from the staff's knowledge, I think, you know, for all of us, it would just be nice to, you know, have more notice in the meeting, be able to be more participatory. I think that there's a lot of residents have to say. And so I just wanted to add that that's give them as a way to, again, ensure that we're all getting subscribed to some things. Thank you.

Thank you. And I don't see any other public comment. Is there any other public comment online? No. Okay. Yeah. I don't know. Just a a quick comment. I would typically not respond to public comment, but I I will ask. I I don't know. It's not deliberately it's not intentional that we're doing the Yes. There you know, there's I do know they are posted on on lunch or they're posted on the website and so forth, but I know you gotta dig around. But, anyways, we will solve that for the next one for sure. So thank you very much. Moving on to approval of minutes, if I can get

motion. I'll go there.

Moved by council member Roach. I'll second. I'll second by council member Monia. Thank you. Moving on to report reports and action items. Our first report is an oral report from, the police department. This is from, chief Brian Ventus.

Good evening. Good evening, everyone. This is our, public safety committee update. So if you could go ahead and look at the very first slide, I'm just gonna get right into it, and then we'll take some questions at the end. So first slide, please. So we tried to doctor this up to make it a little bit more digestible and less convoluted. This is our time reporting update for the months of January and February. We compare 2024 to 2025. And as you can see, as highlighted by the green categories, we're down in most categories. And and there are some significant numbers in here that I wanna point out.

Motor vehicle theft has been cut almost in half, and I think a lot of that is attributed to some of our technology solutions. So when the car's reported stolen and it either comes into town or leaves town, we had notification on our flock system. They go straight to the officers, and we've had great success in recovering a lot of these things. And so, hopefully, the word is out. Please don't come to Hayward to steal cars. There are some increases that I wanna point out. There was an increase in reported rates during this time period. However, none of those involve people who did not know each other. And so I just wanted to point that out. And, again, we had some increases in our.

I do wanna point out that none of those were downtown, and we did make one arrest in those cases. And so I think that's pretty much for the slide. Next slide, please. So this next slide is reflective of, again, prime data. We did a year over year comparison at the top of the slide on the left hand side.

Again, down in crimes against persons and property, in crimes against society. Those are crimes like drug possession, weapons possession, etcetera, things where we don't have necessarily an individual victim. The top five reported crimes are pretty much the same every time we report out of this, and I think that's consistent in the region. Some of the trends we've seen during this reporting period, safe series, we've had some folks break into fast food restaurants to steal safes. This has been widespread across the strip the state.

We've had 10 cases here in Hayward. And, actually, I think I saw one covered last night on the news after the council meeting. So that is ongoing. And then we've had some delivery drivers, marijuana delivery drivers, who have been robbed as some of our neighboring agencies have also had. Next slide, please. I wanna highlight this for, you know, the public safety committee and also for the community. Our website has a new updated crime data dashboard that's far more interactive than the crime mapping system that we used to have. I believe I'm probably gonna just say this. I I think it's updated every twenty four hours. So the floor was updated every couple of weeks.

This is updated every 24, and community members can go in here and really drill down by date, time of day, geographic area to really figure out kinda what's been reported. So if folks wanna check out their neighborhood, their family's neighborhood, etcetera. This is a way to do that, and so we're happy to have that up and running. And I wanna give a shout out to our prime analyst group, Leslie Hayes and Danny Barbia, for putting that together. So please share that with your neighbors.

This next slide, please, is just a visual representation of firearm recoveries for the first two months of this year. I think we've recovered 32 of them. Seven of those have been ghost guns. I do wanna say that during a criminal investigation, we recovered our very first three d printed lower receiver for an AR 15. So this is a three d printed, fully automatic rifle that was recovered during a criminal investigation, which is quite bright.

Next slide, please. Some school data to share with you. We've got a total of 256 responses to campuses for the first two months of this calendar year. Again, the high schools are are the biggest biggest consumers of our services. We did have some significant incidents.

I think I'm not sure about the middle one. The top one where we had a student with a handgun in his waistband who was safely taken into custody inside of the gym at Hayward High School. And then the the bottom one where we had a stabbing incident where two students were injured. It was also in school. So we are, as I've said before, committed to working with our school administrators and staff to help any way we can with respect to student safety.

But these are some some concerning incidents that we've been out of this year. Next slide, please. This slide just highlights some of our community outreach efforts. So community engagement events are listed here. Homeless outreach and enforcement event incidents are listed here.

And then some of our proactive crime prevention efforts. We did hold a meeting with business folks in the downtown area to listen to the concerns and to have a conversation about resource deployment, ways to collaborate to make the downtown safe. That's gonna continue. And if you do have some upcoming events, they're listed in the lower left. School career day, Palmasia, baristas with badges, which will advertise on our social media platforms, and then we're only meeting neighborhood watch meeting, and prominence on April 22.

And then, again, we have some we've got three fatal collisions. They're listed down on the right hand side of the slide during this time period. Next slide, please. The last slide I'll cover is our current staffing update. Right now, I wanna say, yeah, we are at 20 police officer vacancies, 17 professional staff vacancies. We are doing continuous recruitments. We have six graduating at the April. We sent we started 10 academy folks. What was that on March 3? So they're three weeks in the academy.

That's the biggest group that I can remember sending. And then we're processing multiple lateral candidates and then another 12 trainee candidates. We're hoping to send anywhere from six to eight to the academy in June. And that's my update, and I'm happy to answer any questions that you have.

You wanna start? Yeah. Okay.

Thank you. Thank you. It looks like we're gonna talk about the school stuff in another item tonight. Right? The school youth related crime enforcement trends?

Yeah. But I'm I'm happy with the questions.

Yeah. I mean, I'll wait till then. But I did wanna ask about the fatal collisions. Is that number you know, just obviously, they're very alarming and very sensational when when this happens and awful. Is that up? Like, do we have an increase of that? Because, actually, can you put back the slide of the trends, that first slide, just because all my questions were gonna go towards that. Is is that yeah.

Where are

we on that?

So compliments of last year during the same reporting period. I think last year, we had a total of 10.

For the year?

For the for the calendar year, we had 10 fatal collisions last year.

What more?

The one that was the spreadsheet. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. I think I think we're at at I think we recently had another one. So we've got four total this year. So

Okay.

So

probably based on the time, you know, where we're at in the year, it might be up. But there is no one thing that we can point to as a contributing factor. Yes. I know. You know, speed seems to be a consistent issue. And a lot of these involve people who are of alcohol or drugs or a combination of both. And so just as a reminder of the community, safe, use Uber Okay. Slowdown.

Yeah. I wonder if we could do I I was wondering if we could do some sort of public announcement about this only because, you know, a lot of what how we get beat up online about this is that all of this traffic calming stuff work that we're doing, people are blaming that, that we're doing that, this is causing accidents, which you and I have talked about that. That's not true. But it would be great if we did a, like, slowdown. It's it's not the traffic coming. It's the speed or whatever. They're the outcome. I don't know how you would do that that doesn't but, you know, it is you hear a lot of, like, a lot of ranting about this that we made these smaller, like, you know, narrower lanes. And so, you know, you and I have talked to you said it's almost always speed or, like you said, alpha.

Yeah. That year over year, that's a consistent contributing factor to our major collisions Okay. Speed. And, know, I will I would argue that the configuration of the runway, you know, is is not necessarily something that's a cause causation for. Right? People are all getting to pay attention to their surroundings to pay attention to the traffic rules and to drive safely regardless of what the street And so I can encourage you to do that. Thanks.

And then And I was

just gonna not to I I don't wanna interrupt, but and I don't mean to contradict what you just said, but the majority of feedback and the majority of, you know, haters I see online are people that are frustrated that it's inconveniencing

I know.

Their life. Yeah. But anyways, go ahead.

Yeah. No. No. You're right.

I mean,

I Other than it being frustrating, is it causing access? Maybe that should be my question. And then I just wanted to ask about the the homeless outreach and interactions there. Is that sort of a trend that's up as far as it being I mean, we see more faces out there. At least anecdotally, I do. And I'm is that do you find that to be true as well, or do we know if that's true?

So the latest known data came from, you know, the one time count. I think we have a collaborative city team that's addressing, you know, a lot of the issues surrounding that. You know, doctor Young's group with the link Linkage's team as part of the the heart program is doing some of work to get people connected and to really fill gaps in service. And so, you know, I anecdotally, yes. I mean, I think that we are seeing new faces from time to time that's being relayed to us by staff.

In fact, I was driving to work this morning about 08:00, and I think we actually called Emily's group out to connect with the woman who was sleeping in the car and boarding place on. Right? Like, this person is not here from the state of California. So, you know, we are seeing that. This is a region that has a significant issue with unhoused community members, and everybody's handling things a little bit differently. Right? Some are taking a very steep approach, and people get displaced. And so it's not a problem, but it is a challenge.

Okay. Yeah. I think and then I was wondering if when there are alterations in the parks, like Weigs Park, for example, is that do we report that if or is HAR reporting that?

So, you know, crime crime reporting comes to the police department. If somebody calls in about, like, you know, part of even though it's hard property, that's something that we'd responsive and investigate. Okay. They don't have police officers per se. They have security personnel, and we work with them to address issues. But Yeah. If crime map isn't

a part Okay.

That's and we okay. Yeah. Good call. Okay. The other thing was on the gun confiscation. Is that up 32 guns for the year?

We've seen increases year over year. Think I did a presentation to the full council a few years ago in his previous configuration where we had taken we we had seized the gun basically every other day for the calendar year. So we're consistently taking somewhere in the 200 to 215 range. Guns on the street. You know? You know? I mean, I don't know if it's a breakdown, but it's almost a daily thing. Feels like you know? Okay. Just talking stuff. Okay.

And then and I guess the last thing was just the data point on the drug violations. Is that I mean, that's is that something that just goes up year after year that it never quite goes down?

It's I mean, it fluctuates. I think I would say, you know, that it's always going up. You know, it it it really depends. I mean, I think that we have seen, you know, as a region, you know, issues with, you know, significant amounts of drugs coming here from other places, many other countries. The Bay Area is, you know, kind of a hotspot for that. That could be a contributing factor. I'm not sure what the what the increase is. You know, those are individual primarily individual possession cases. Oh, okay. So not necessarily

Oh, I see. Not, like, crimes based on,

like Not necessarily large, not narcotic seizures, especially. Those are typically individual cases where somebody's found to be in possession. They use it for them. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you for this report, chief. So the 10 cases of the fast food restaurants in the Stolen Safe, that's just this year alone so far. Wow. So, I guess, are we doing anything to maybe partner with these businesses to help them mitigate this, like, maybe move their saves or, you know, do some other sort of deterrent by environmental design or something?

That's a great point. We do do what we call crime prevention through environmental design. A lot of that happens on the front end of development work that, you know, the city's doing with developers. But we have two crime prevention specialists that work out of our district operations. They're trained to do that work, and then we'll respond upon request to businesses to take a look at things like that, layout, safe location, lighting, you know, whether or not the front of your store is visible from the street so that, you know, when we're driving by, you know, we can look in and see if there's a problem or not.

Those types of things we will do as a matter of routine if people ask for that. But I think going back to the the public safety announcement and comment about the speed, maybe that's something that we can look at.

It's letting the community know through that form. Yeah. And then I believe the last time I came to this meeting, there was also an update around some increased crime activity maybe at the Wells Fargo at Southland Mall. Has that sort of acquiesced a little bit with some of the measures that have been put in place, or is it still is there still an uptick?

There's not still an uptick. It it still does happen from time to time. And and, again, just as a reminder of the community to be aware of surroundings, you know, those we were having a problem with that particular branch. And I know that there's been some proactive efforts on on the part of our patrol folks, you know, to take time time of day, day to week, data to be present, right, just as a chairman. And we've actually worked with, you know, bank management staff to make sure that there's awareness around that issue. It still is happening, but, you know, based on what's been given to me from a trend perspective, it's not it's not still on the lines right now. So something that's good.

What was the word again you guys used for that crime?

It's a great question.

No. That's okay. Just remembered. Yeah. Juggie.

Juggie. That's

right. Yes. Juggie Roberts. So kind of speaking of trends, when we think of 20 officer vacancies, what is how do we interpret that? Is that, like, a relatively low number? Are we feeling good about recruitment? Is that still a high number? I mean, is it how does it compare, I guess, to past vacancy numbers just so we have some context around 20 vacancies? Sure. It's relatively speaking for us, it's still a high number because,

you know, those if those persist if those positions were filled, we have a fully staffed patrol to complement, but what it would also allow us to be able to put people into the specialty assignments, whether that's investigations, whether that's in the traffic bureau, which right now we have I think we have three sergeant, you know, for six days per month. It's just 3,000 people. So to put that in context, yeah, it is it is a significant number. Will say that we are making progress. A few years ago, we were up to 50 by zero position vacancies, and so we made great headway.

And I spoke with our hiring attorney yesterday. There's a lot of promising, good quality candidates who are in the pipeline, which is exciting. But the flip side of that is that we have 20 folks on the books right now who can retire today if they chose to do that. And then we know of a couple of people who are planning on leaving between now and July. So there is gonna be that, you know, lack of a better term. We'll chase our tail a little bit into staffing, but there is an impact. Yeah.

Makes sense. Thanks for that. And then thinking about the 256 school incidences. So I I know that we you know, that there was a decision that was made that said, you know, remove SROs from schools. But I know that a lot of, you know, communities are revisiting that.

And I'm not saying that we put kind of that same model of SROs back in school, but how do we partner with the school district to reenvision something around an SRO like program so that we are able to address these incidences and perhaps even a little bit more proactively. Because not only from my perspective, and I have nephews and nieces in high school and junior high, not only do do I perceive the incidences as going up, but I also am perceiving them as being more violent. So kind of thinking about those two things and the community sort of reaction when these events happen, how do we sort of almost I don't wanna say force, but I guess force the discussion so that we are able to create a solution that works for both of us, but that's really centers around student safety.

Sure. That's a great question. And I think one of the things that was lost with the SRO program was the ability to have consistent, reliable communication between the school district and the police department, and the officers, you know, kind of have that ear to the ground where they knew what happened on the weekend that might spill over into the school. They had the opportunity to know when things were escalating to be able to intervene. Emily and her clinicians and counselors, they're a huge piece of that, and they're still doing work with the schools.

So they are still embedded in the schools, you know, doing, you know, case management and clinical work with students. And that's been ongoing. That hasn't stopped. But I think the the routine regular punch contact with, you know, especially trained police officers that were on campus and school administrators and families, you know, that's one of the things that we've lost with them. We are always open to having those conversations.

I think there is a way to, you know, balance the concerns with having police officers on-site and also meeting the needs in terms of student safety. I think we do both of those things. And I think there are ways to to to bring a version of that program back that's digestible. You know, I'm gonna probably make everybody happy, but, you know, as as I mentioned before in in our work session, I can't think of anything more important than that student safety. We know that students aren't gonna learn. They're not gonna pay attention to their studies. They're not gonna they're they're not looking more well. You know, they're not safe. They don't feel safe. And I don't know if you wanna

Yeah. Well, I'll let two two. Okay. I'll add a couple things. HOC just did a survey as part of their fiscal solvency solutions and across students, parents, and staff.

The number one issue across all three groups was resoundingly school safety. So this is a very high importance area for them. Ultimately, we were guests at the school district's house, and I think you all have more leverage than we do to have the conversation start again. Because if we're not invited to the house, we can't be there. So I I would encourage the electeds to have the conversations amongst each other, board, school board, council, because I think that pathway is one that we that we the city doesn't control exclusively.

And so I think there's lots of ways, as the chief was talking about, to create a program that's gonna be, you know, acceptable by almost everybody. We're and we're there for the conversation. Yep. But I think we have to be invited to have the conversation because it's a partnership that we don't control. So just add those two things.

So so then I guess the question, I mean, for for us is what do we do about this? Right? Because it's now sitting in our hands. So do we I mean, yeah, I would love to hear your your view on this because it's like, do we form a plan, you know, where we, as the public safety committee, start forcing these conversations with the school district? Do we bring a referral to count? Like, I mean, I I don't know the path, but we have to do something because inaction isn't acceptable.

Yes. Thank you so much, council member Bonilla, city manager, doctor Brown Alvarez. To answer your question, there's a couple of pathways that you can take, but certainly the most immediate one that can, elevate the elevate the item and prioritize the item is that the opportunity to develop the strategic road map. That that's that's an opportunity. And there's another opportunity that also through, as you mentioned, the council referral, we can also engage begin having conversations at city council meeting.

And you can certainly there's another pathway. If there's an interest by the entire city council, you can certainly place that on their microformance evaluation for me to focus on. So there's different pathways that you can do that.

Would would and, I mean and we don't have the solution here. We can take it offline. But would an acceptable pathway be having a joint meeting with them to discuss this? Because remember we had a joint meeting with her before?

Like, I like.

Yeah. But, no, I mean,

we we had a board join.

So I'm like, to discuss okay.

Go ahead.

Yeah. So let me, first of all, to doctor Young, thank you

very much. Thank you. Yeah.

And I I should also say, to to build on what you just said about the the survey, Those survey results aren't the those results aren't the first time those results have been demonstrated. Surveys have been taken several times post George Floyd, and the Hayward Promise neighborhood has done neighborhood surveys. The city has done neighborhood surveys. And and they have been and and there have been other surveys like this one independent from the city. The number one issue across all neighborhoods, across all precincts, across everything has been safety public safety.

So that's why the when you said what you just said, it didn't surprise me. The second thing is even after a year it was a year after George Floyd, and I say George Floyd because that's when a lot of school districts were withdrawing SRAs from schools for for a variety of reasons. But, the the the first year we had national night the national night out, every neighborhood that I visited, and I visited 15 12 different neighborhoods, the number one issue that parents were asking me was SROs. I mean, didn't matter if I was in the hills, if I was in the Jackson Triangle, Ferry Park. I mean, you know, it was SROs.

So your data the data point doesn't surprise me. But to go back to your comment, in addition to what the city manager said, once a month or, I think, quarterly, the city manager and I meet with, the superintendent and with, president Bufete. We're gonna put this on our agenda, for our next, our next meeting, and and we're gonna we'll bring it up. If we if we want, I think the three of us could do a referral, to take action. You know, the action could be to initiate a conversation, you know, with the school board.

My only concern, my only concern of, holding a joint school board council meeting, you know, particularly around this area, my only concern would be, keeping the meeting focused, keeping the meeting, and and, you know, I'm not afraid of doing that, but I'm just saying the meeting has to be focused. It has to be concentrated on this one issue, and and it'll be a long meeting. You know? And so and it and, you know, the last joint meeting, and I know it wasn't a very public meeting, but, you know, this was a meeting that principals came to us asking for, support. The meeting got messy.

Know? You The meeting really got messy. And so, if we were to suggest that, I just want us to be really mindful of, you know, whatever we do, it has to be focused. But before we go that route, I would say the city manager and I would put it on our meeting with the superintendent and with with the president of Fed. That way, we can first measure the temperature and then and then do our job. I think, you know, doctor Young very eloquently politely said, we need to talk to our colleagues. You know, we need to talk to our colleagues. And, you know, it's a different board today, so we'll see.

Yeah. I mean, I like that word because we cannot compel them to do anything. Whatever referral we did or anything like any action we took, we would be referring to ourselves to make it a priority. So I think the sort of channels that you already have to sort of continue to raise it as a urgent, more urgent issue. Because but, I mean, if the community wants it, I mean, it really is up to the community to sort of rise up over this because and I know it hasn't happened, but, because they're a separate entity, we cannot make them do this. We can't make them take a vote on it. We can't, you know, tell the superintendent he has to do this. And so I think it is the strong relationships that we should have with this little district to, like, keep reminding them about this data and from the city and the

And to the mayor's point, the community wanted it when they got rid of it. Yeah. And so the community has wanted it consistently from when we have them to now. And so it was a different time, and I think taking the temperature makes a lot of sense.

And and I don't wanna sound like an alarmist, but go back to the chart of the height of the school data. Just go back to that chart. Look at the high school, seventy ninth workday. What what are we in how many days have we are we into the year? Sixty days. Like,

it's only January through February.

Oh oh, well, okay. So sixty days. Yep. Sixty days, 256 calls for service. A 162 calls to element of elementary schools. Yep. I mean, 15 to the middle school. There's only four middle schools. Right? 79 to the high to high schools. I mean, you know, this right here I know the district is going through a lot, but I have never heard this data cited from the district senate.

Yep. And, you know, I respect council member Rosha's point that we can't bring you know, we can't make them come to the table, but we can certainly compel them to come to the table. If we were to release this data in a press release and say the school district is not I mean, I know that's not the most collaborative way it would get, but at some point, like like you're saying, like, we're all saying, we we have to sort of put the niceties aside and prioritize these children before a trap a tragic event happens that we know is on the precipice of happening, especially if we just keep looking at data and not taking action. And, you know, these are aggressive crimes, and we need to take some pretty strong action to make sure that we're we're dealing with this. Because at the end of the day, we're dealing with it anyways.

So we need to we need to get on the front end of it. Right? Like, on the preventative side as much as possible so we're less reactive in these type of things. Right?

Absolutely. Anything I could just offer? Just two brief comments on this to the point you just made and to the data. I mean, when when schools call and come. Right? Well, if they need us, we're gonna be there. And as an example, the new superintendent and I were on the phone through the course of the weekend and even this morning specific to an issue at Tennyson High School, and so we were there to support. I know Emily's team was there to support. And we actually got a 15 year old kid who hopefully is, you know, getting connected to some services around that. And so that's that's an example.

And the other thing that I wanna point out is that I know people are talking about, you know, the the post George Floyd decision making. And when Sandy Hook happened, and that was where, you know, you had over 20 elementary school kids killed. I think it was in New Hampshire or Vermont or one of the states in there. There was a study that was done under the Obama administration, and the DOJ at that time set aside money and was funding, starting school resource officer programs across the country. So this is not this is not a partisan issue.

This is not a political issue. This is straight up about kid safety, and we're happy to we're happy to be a part of of solutions there so that everybody If you don't come on you.

It's not good.

Just to follow-up to follow-up on your point. Because the thing that we can do about it is how we use our resources. And if our resources aren't being used effectively because SROs in the schools would be a more efficient way to be using our resources and create less calls to the schools, like, that is something we can start demanding about, and that might be a good way to talk about the.

That's a great point.

And if I may when I when I gave you the pathways, for instance, in terms of placing it on my performance plan, that's the that's a very important tool because what it will call for me, it will activate, it will prioritize it to develop a plan, to leverage relationships, to create the right pathways, to get to the of the desired outcome, which is many different avenues. It's certainly a communications plan, a community plan, a resource plan for the police officer. So it's multiple things That sounds great. That we need to come together, and it starts with a conversation. But it it's it's an overall comprehensive approach so that we can very quickly have the the desired outcome that we're looking.

That sounds fantastic.

Doctor Alvarez's priority list on her evaluation is, like, 700

for Brandt. Brandt, 749

with you.

That's all

she's She's

our hero. Are you done? Okay. Just, just a cup a couple things. National night out.

You know, I know that's a a a fan fave. You know? And I wanted to see if, if we can start planning earlier. Just start getting the word out earlier and and really setting, setting a, you know, a big goal, to get as many different households or many different neighborhoods, involved. I'm not pointing fingers or blaming anybody, but there were, I did hear from some neighborhoods that have that have done it before and some really big ones.

And they said that they they couldn't get it together fast enough, you know, to organize it. So I know, of course, over on Montgomery Street, they have a full blown concert series out there. But but, anyways, I guess, you know, if we can get the word out sooner and and start and and give the neighborhoods a longer leeway

to organize it. Absolutely. We'll we'll make a note of that. So we'll make sure that happens. It's always the first Tuesday in August.

Yep.

Okay. So we we make sure that we advertise your.

And then, yeah. I you know, I I did get, I was, the the the safes at fast food restaurants kinda piqued my attention. I've never heard I just never heard them before. And, you know, maybe, maybe we should start messaging to, you know I don't know how many fast food restaurants we have, but, you know, I don't know what start messaging preventive stuff, what they can do. You know, I don't know that is.

I do know I've worked at

a fast food restaurant before, and the safes are, like, in the back office underneath the underneath the the manager's desk. You know? But, you know, they really have to know where they really have to know where it's at.

Yeah. This shows surveillance video footage from one last night on the news. These individuals knew exactly where to go. Yeah. And, basically, there were three of them who carried this You're safe out and shove it in a van, and then they're gone. So Okay.

Cashless.

Okay. Thank you. Anything else? No? I guess we'll go to we'll go to fire it, and and then we'll turn and then we'll transition back to okay. Yeah. Let's break up the conversation. Chief Homer, how's

that? Sounds good to me.

Thank you.

So just kinda start off with our

Impossible. Yeah. It's

like that. I feel like I've always had an eye exam.

No. It's it's what it's

what I'll We need it.

I wanna see if I can get we can work on a new format that's easier to read maybe. And then but what I will tell you is that we have roughly 3,300 incidents over the sixteenth, the day period that we're looking at, and it breaks down roughly into what every fire department tells you that they're doing about 80% EMS and 20% fire. That's our breakdown there. Station one and engine one and engine two are our two busiest fire companies that that time period.

Engine two is where?

That's on the harder. Harder. Yeah. Alright. So just a a quick update here. Again, you can't read this. This is just some significant calls that we ran over the time period. We can get this to you to take a look at down the road, but there are a couple of that that I know without reading it that that I can tell you about. I'll start with the incidents, I think to me, one I wanna start with is a what I will call a win. A lot of people kinda down on regulations and regulating businesses.

Well, Dow Chemical is one of a business that's been in Hamburg for a long time. We've partnered with them a lot. They've been very responsible occupants and all razors in the city of Hayward. In Hayward, in our fire prevention office, we have what is called the certified unified program. And what that is is basically we have been allowed to operate the regulatory functions of the state for hazardous materials programs with our own people in house.

I think that makes us much more responsive to the community. It gets us out here, out in the community a lot more regularly, and we can respond much quicker. What this did is shows that we, a, the regulations that were in place worked in this incident.

I'll tell

you a little bit about it in a second. We had no release and no endanger to the to the public as a result of the type of incident and the controls that were put into place and the rapid response of the personnel who came in and controlled it. So it was really cool. There were two big chemical vats totaling 47,000 pounds worth of liquid material that will be mixed together in a process of making another product. Those two bats were sitting within the containment, you know, system and a system to if that if there was a spill, it would go into the containment.

There would be mechanisms in place to affect, vapors, all that kind of stuff. There was a valve in between the two that that somehow failed. The spill came. They notified us immediately. We responded, and they had their safety team in place. They worked together hand in hand. We identified what the product was. We were able to rapidly call for mutual aid for, hazardous material response teams. And the whole incident was taken care of with no threat to the community whatsoever. So I just wanted to give a a shout out to our hazardous materials Coupa.

They don't get a whole lot of credit on a day to day basis, but they work hard every day for the safety of of Hayward. And we our first responders who are going out there rely on them when that time of an incident comes. We call them. They respond, and they're a wealth of information, you know, for us. So I just wanted to go there with that and and talk about it.

We had a sad incident where we did have a fire in an ADU that did not have a smoke detector. And from what we gathered, the fire had been burning for probably a couple hours before it was actually called in. And so by the time our folks got there, we went we put the fire on, and we did find that the resident has come to to the fire. So that is quite tragic compared to what we celebrated a few month just a few months ago. But, so there was that.

And then I'll just I'll kinda leave it at that. We will, like I said, get this out to you, and then you can take a look and see those incidents that have that have happened over that that's happened last month. That picture you see right there is something that I spoke to you in our meeting about the, recruitment and spotlight. We've been very my entire career, we've been very shy, I will say. We don't like to put ourselves in the spotlight, social media, all that kind of stuff.

So we are in the process of trying to up that game. And one of the things that we did was we went to California Professional Firefighters program, and we did an hour and a half long live podcast with our fire some of our new firefighters. The two you see on the left, brand new, and then we have a deputy chief and another gentleman who's been here for about ten years. And they had what I thought was was really to me. And I talked to one of our college students down there, and I asked, hey.

Did you watch that, and what do you think? And she loved it. She said it was highly relatable to her to hear young people who just got into the job talk about how they did it even though they didn't have family in the fire department just like she did. So I thought that was a big win. Along with that and kind of taking into account our mayor's mile of Education City, You all know that we have had the RLP program going.

We just after eight years, we just reshot a new video about that partnership with the Eden Area RLP. So keep an eye out for that. It'll be coming on the city webpage here very soon. Thanks. But what I wanna point out is eight years ago, a much younger me was in that first video.

And I talked about I talked about how what would be really cool is if we had one of our graduates from the RLP program continue on to Chabot College, get their EMT, get their firefighter one, get their paramedic license, and get hired. Was standing next to a gentleman who did just that in the video, and it just it was it's it's really all the hard work that we put into that program and all the hard work that the students have put into that program paid off. And it doesn't just pay off when they get hired here. We've had students go and get hired for San Francisco fire or other places. Right?

And that just helps the community no matter where it's going. So I just wanted to point that out. Station 6, I know, clean and green. We just got the solar panels turned on, so we are now working towards net zero at Station 6. Right.

So I thought that was worthy of noticing the paramedic class with the 23 firefighters that we recently hired. You know, the majority of those were EMTs. It was a pilot thing that we did, but the caveat was that they had to become paramedics. We've been partnering with Chubeau College to try and design a program for that, and it looks like we are on track to have our first paramedic class start for the first group of them, 11 students that will be starting in '26. And we have room for other agencies to send firefighters, and I've there's a lot of interest from other fire chiefs in Alameda County.

So there is a shortage of paramedics in the area. And, I will say that part of that is, like, a lot of the folks that we just hired, they can't afford to go to paramedic school, and this is allowing them to get a chance to to be a firefighter with with ours. So thank you. That is it for my update. And, if you have any questions, please Sure. Oh, I do have one more thing. I'm sorry. The, the maps from Cal Fire. Oh, goodness. So we are in the process now of noticing the public.

The way that we are doing that is we've got on our website all the information that folks need to be able to look and see what the maps are. They can they can enter in their address. They can find out what zone they're in, if they're in a moderate or high hazard zone. I would tell you, Hayward does not have any very high. We only have moderate and high.

People can look, see where they are, and then they can post a comment, see what they, you know, what they think, say what they say about it. I will say that that comment is not gonna do anything for what Cal Fire says about their maps. Like, Cal Fire has made their maps due to their process and their science and and what they have found. What that does is it will inform you because on May 27, we will be bringing to council meeting a proposal to most likely adopt those maps for us. And what that will do is it will inform the fire department and the building department in our code development in the future.

And it and that's why the state did this is they wanna make sure everybody had this information as they're building their codes out for the future. So in that in between now and then, we'll also be putting together some information for you as we go along to kind of let you know what our plan is moving forward, but just wanted to give you a quick update on that. We're also sending postcards out to all the residents that live in Unruly to let them know that this is the process. It will give them access to let them know about the website, and then they

have a chance to comment on. Yeah. I'm

I'm curious what a what a a 25 year old air vomer looks like.

I thought it wasn't that easy.

Okay. Go ahead. Sorry. Thank excuse me. Thank you so much for that update. So many good things that we can be proud of for our fire department, clearly. So thank you again for your leadership there. Just a few questions. First is around sort of the hazardous material spill, right, or hazardous chemical spill. What I guess, at a very, very high level, what was the response? Like, were was there, like, community evacuations or shelters in place, or was kind of, like, contained on-site and managed according to, you know, their hazard chemicals? But, like, I mean, I guess, what I mean, and I'm so happy to hear that the community was safe, but can you just give us, like, a very high level, like, what went into that response?

So immediately when Dow Chemical found out that they had the problem, they had their internal safety staff started going through their emergency procedures. There were members of their staff in their facility who were sheltering in place where they were in a safe location so they weren't exposed. They had a response team that has all the proper protective gear to be able to go in with the chemical suit, respirators, all that kind of stuff. And they immediately went in and were making an assessment of the situation. At that same time, they had already called 911.

Our responders were coming out. We meet them at the door. They give us their binder with their emergency response plan, what the chemicals are. They tell us what it is, what we have. Our staff is trained to the hazmat first responder level, and that is to decide is that something that we can handle right now? We can say, do we need to evacuate? We can start making those calls. It was immediately determined that, no, this is good. Everything is under control. That's why nobody got an AC alert.

Good. Any of that kind of stuff. What we did do in order in keeping with what I was talking about with our social media presence and that kind of stuff is did ask our PIO to put a story out on our social media page, which we did to let the public know, hey. This is happening, but there's no cause for alarm. Once we discovered and realized that it was something that was gonna be beyond our scope to to deal with, we did call for mutual aid.

Alameda County sent two of their hazardous materials response rates out. They were actually very excited because they don't get used very often. Right? These kind of incidents don't happen very often. And I heard they were pretty excited and want to take pictures, you know, for training and that kind of stuff, but they were told, no. This is proprietary. Can't do that. But, I mean, just to let you know, like, these don't happen a lot, but when they do, we wanna make sure that we handle them correctly. So they went in. They they assessed the situation.

They assisted with the Dow Chemical folks. They conferred, figured out, yes, this is what the chemical is. There is no hazard to the public. And then they just they worked on a plan for how the material would be flushed into the containment system, who they were gonna call to help get the chemicals completely out of of the system and everything dealt. Does that answer your

No. That answers it perfectly because I was just wondering. Like and it sounds like it was relatively contained to the building, and they followed their procedures, and everyone collaborated in a way that really kind of made what could have been a much bigger incident almost a non incident.

Yes. I will attribute that to the quality of the the how seriously they take their safety there at at Town Campable. I also credited, like I said, to our hazmat staff for having a relationship with them and knowing what's there. And then we also not infrequently have drills and exercises at Dow Chemical where we do a scenario just like I just described where our folks will go in and will respond, and they won't know what

it is. Both crews will work together to figure out and run run an incident just like that. It's great. Thank you so much for that. And then for the February 13 incident where it there was lacking of smoke detectors, can you just talk a little bit about sort of the public education campaigns that the fire department runs around trying to, you know, increase smoke detectors in residents and make sure that they're operational and things like that?

Yeah. So the program that we have is we partnered in the past with Rotary Club, and it's about time for me to knock on Rotary's Oh. And ask for some more. But they purchased generously purchased smoke detectors for us to have, and we have those available on every one of our responding apprentice. So when we go to calls and we hear a smoke alarm chirping or if somebody notices that, hey.

I don't see a smoke detector, you know, in this house, you know, that kind of thing, we have them there available and ready to go. Also, our public information and education officer has them with him, and we will install those smoke detectors free of charge as may be. And then they can call the fire department too at our admin office. Some people can, and we can get a smoke detector within the or at the next home if needed.

That sounds good. Because I'm just wondering how we continue to promote that. I know that National Night Out is sort of a police event, but last year, I also saw the firefighters there too. So I'm not sure if there's just a way of even using those as avenues to try to, you know, install these because I'm just thinking about this incident and The last one. And the yeah.

Yeah. I actually have asked that we put a video together with city staff and our fire department, and the gentleman that was rescued from that one fire was actually had said he would love to be a part of that. So, we'll be working to make some kind of PSA involving him if he's still interested to do it, but we can just kinda have tell the story, and and we can have firsthand testimonial of someone who wished that they had a smoke detector and is lucky that now they have put him in their home.

Yep.

Alright. That that sounds good. Do whatever we can do, obviously, to try to get more smoke detectors in people's homes. And then okay. So for the CAL FIRES map, and this is my last question. So are we going to so I get kind of the forward looking view of, like, know, we can update codes and do all that kind of stuff for, like, new development. But are there gonna be, like, programs in place to help current residents, like, maybe mitigate some of the risk, like, in terms of guidance or funding or, I I don't know, just something? Because I can only imagine someone, you know, now living in a high fire risk area and not knowing what to do about it. Right? So So that will be part of what

the informational memo that we'll be preparing for you will have this information in it. Right now, what we do is every year we have grant money, and we have we do have our current codes that are well outsized. And every year, we send out letters to every property owner in the wildland urban interface. And we let them know that it is time for our we're gonna be doing our inspections. And we do a drive by inspection above every neighborhood in that area where fire crews drive by.

We have software and a program that we can look, see what's there, find anything that we that is out of code with with our fire code, and then we will send them a notice saying, please fix this, and then we have a process that has placed if they don't down the road there. The other piece of that is we also have grant money we do in order to help encourage people to do the defensible space work around their yards is we have the chipping program that we pay for residents to they get notified, and then these are the dates that are coming up. And what the whole plan there is is they go and they do the work, but there's so much slash and debris there. What are we gonna do with this? Right?

So to encourage them, you know, go ahead and do the work. We're gonna have a chipper come by on this day. So they time when they do their work, and then they put their slash out on the street. And then the chip the night before or, you know, the day before, and then the chipper comes through. They grind it all up.

The resident can either keep it there for mulch and and weed prevention, or they will haul it away. So that's one piece of our program. And then we have a resident assistance program. If folks qualify due to age or disability or economic impact, we have grant money that we go out and we assess, and we figure out the best way to work to make their home a little more fire safe. So that could be anything from usually, it could be weed eating.

It could be debris removal, living. There have been some places where we've cut a couple trees down, it gets pricey. But depending on how many requests we have each year, we start around the home and work our way out to and and try to make it as safe as we can for each individual and try and help as many people as we can.

Thank you so much. And it would so great to hear kind of the array of programs that we have in that last one is really good too because I was gonna ask about that. So thanks so

much for We will have to try to increase that a little bit now because this is I mean, we're gonna be in the future, we're gonna be asking a lot. But don't get a lot kind of thing. You're right. If we wanna be fire safe. So Yep.

And we have to because it's such an evolving threat that's, you know, right here facing our community today. So thanks again. Great great responses, and thanks again for your leadership with the fire department.

Thanks. Dude, I'm gonna piggyback on a couple of things that comes from everybody had talked about. Because, you know, besides, obviously, the fire map showing that people potentially live in higher risk fire areas, The second biggest issue is obviously insurance. So I was wondering if are there any trends, you know, where if it's an effective partnership with the local fire department and help you with mitigation, does that help people keep their their insurance? I mean, is there any trends on this or information on it? Because or even just individually, they're doing a good job with mitigation, is that helping them to keep insurance?

These these are two separate things. Alright. So this Cal Fire Pro project, like I said, is to give us, the local response area agency, the tools to take a look and see what what they see. And what they're looking at specifically is the fuel, the topography, and the weather conditions of the area. They are not looking at homes at that point.

They're looking at strictly the wildland area. Right? And so that's for us to take a look at and interpret, okay. If these are the conditions, what what are we going to do? Will that influence how we regulate with our codes? Insurance agencies look at it in a whole different model. They have another way to look at it, and they are looking at the home as fuel as well as the the brush and the trees and all that kind of stuff. Then they don't just look at the home. They also look at the entire neighborhood. Right?

My understanding, the latest I heard from the insurance industry is that they are looking more at a neighborhood should have 70 to 80% compliance. So it's not just you. You can have the best defensible space around. But if all of your neighbors don't, your home is still at threat. Because if you look at all your neighbors and surrounding homes burning, the likelihood of yours catching fire is much greater.

But if you have 70 to 80% of an entire neighborhood, now you have essentially a fuel break in in the process. So that's what insurance neighborhood or insurance companies are gonna be looking at. One of the things that I think will be very effective in the future is things like neighborhoods grouping together and to make make fire safe communities. And there are ways that there are programs where they can join these. And then I I envision us in the very near future working with neighborhoods to try and lead them along that path.

Okay. That is kind of partnership I think would be great. Yeah. I can totally see us doing fire safe community town halls to educate people

on Right. In in the very in the different neighborhoods. Okay. And but the thing is they're gonna have to get buy in from their entire neighborhood. Right. Right? It's gonna be easy, you know, if they've already got a homeowners association. That's gonna be easier to do. But if it's if it's not, it's gonna take a little more work, and that's where we may need to find some more grant funding to find peep ways to help people Okay. With that work. Because that kind of work also is not cheap Right. And it's ongoing.

Yeah. Well, I look forward to what we can do to partner on that one. I mean, that would be really helpful. Guess

Yeah. Go ahead.

Go ahead. So so speaking of the fire safe communities, is is there a way to maybe broaden that perspective to, like, resilient communities so that we're able to get as many multiple benefits from preparedness as possible from fires from from disasters like earthquakes? You know? Because, obviously, if we prepare you know? But but I think focusing on fires is maybe fine, but I just also think that if we could broaden it to really look at how we create more resilient communities, that would probably I

think once

once we get I think once once you get a a group together and they're thinking about wildland fire safety, it's a very short step to have them working with other other stuff. Right? The thing with that, though, is the wildland community is in one area primarily up in the hills, whereas earthquake is the entire city. So I don't know if I mentioned it. I thought I mentioned it at our at the update that I gave you on that Saturday.

But one of the things that we're doing is we've got a pilot starting where we're doing working on building a a resilience hub in one of our local NGOs. And that is right now, we're in the process of working with their staff to teach them CERT, the members in a CERT program, and then look at the likelihood of what they have available. Can we build a, set up shelter? They're an emergency shelter after an earthquake. Can we set up a a kitchen?

Right? Do they have a kitchen space? And if they do, how many people can they feed? And then we're getting them in touch with the city for how, you know, how we will get food to them. Now we have that partnership already built up. So when an emergency like an earthquake hits, we've got contacts with somebody from that organization. We will be in touch with them. Hey. How many people do you have there? What do you need? We'll bring in this food. And then so the goal is is after we get this first pilot set up, now we know what works, some things that that we can do, improve on for the next one, and we're gonna try and do that type of, resiliency hub throughout the city in different districts. Yeah.

That makes sense. I was just thinking about kind of fires following earthquakes, and that's, you know,

been That's part of CERT. CERT, we do talk a little bit about fires. We do talk a little bit, you know, how to shut off gas, all that good stuff. How to use the fire extinguisher, what you should do to be prepared for that type of thing. Some of those, like a lot of fires after an earthquake are going to be gas fed. So if we can shut off the gas before a fire starts, that's an important piece of it. So

Thanks. Yeah. So I also wanted to ask about the incident. So it was it's, you know, 3,300 incidents and 80 were EMS. Of the of the 80%, how much is being served by the heart keep

the heart program? Because I thought

we were talking about the heart program, but I guess we're not. Right? It was on the agenda. We are tonight. We're not. Okay. We're bring the bugs. It was on for March 26, but it's so so how much is that being served by the heart, and how much how many of those incidents are for the in house community, if you have an idea?

I don't have those numbers off top of my head. But so there's the HARP program, and then there's the fire department, which is the mobile intensive health unit. And they're not as busy. Like, they don't get called out as frequently as we initially were thinking. But when they do go, they do do important work. And what they end up doing a lot of the times is just making sure that we can set people up with the right resources. A lot of times what we end up doing is getting them in contact with Doctor. Emily's group and getting that resources through the Link team.

Well and when I mean, that it's a good question because my understanding there isn't a number to call me who are the heart partner when it comes to dispatch. Right? So, I mean, is could that also be an issue of

That could be. So, theoretically, what what we're trying to do with the Mihoo program was to reduce the number of calls that are going to the emergency room.

Mhmm.

Right? And so part of that is if we can get, a program that we're working with our PD partners is emergency medical dispatch. And so what happens then is the dispatchers are trained to the EMT level, and so that allows them to go through an interview process with the patient and assess with the call taker to see just what medical needs there are for this call. Is it appropriate to send a full ALS response within the engine and ambulance and get paramedics on the scene? Can we do it with a basic life support type of ambulance?

Or is it something that, you know what, it doesn't even sound like a medical call, but it's somebody who needs some help. And that would be the type of call a lot of times that we would send a Mihoo to.

And could the caller say, like, I think this is a Mihoo issue or a hard dish? I mean

If they knew. But they knew. Yeah. But the good thing about having the emergency medical dispatch is they would be able to ask questions to get that information from them. Okay.

Okay. And then when are we doing the update on the Hire program? Is that since it was supposed to be today, I'm just wondering.

I don't know if we've rescheduled it yet.

Okay. Yeah. Because, I mean, I will be curious just about, like, what the breakdown is of that 80%. You know, are these, like, house calls where people are having incidents? Are they is it mainly street calls?

Most of them are gonna be calls, like, to folks' homes who are having a medical issue, people at work who are having a medical issue, vehicle accidents. We we usually qualify those as a medical call unless they're trapped, then it's qualified as a a rescue.

And same thing with the 20% fires. But is the majority of those structural fires?

It depends. They could be anywhere from, like, a fence that was on fire, a tree that was on fire, some of the fires that we were having downtown to a full blown structure fire to to apartments. And

I don't know if that data but maybe we can get that data sometime, the breakdown of that.

I can get a a more serious.

More granular breakdown for you guys.

Okay. And then let's say I think you guys oh, I last week, had talked about doing some public service announcement post the Palisades fires, and I think you guys did that. I saw some of that stuff online. So thank you for doing that. I just yeah. I feel like we have to capture these, like, moments where people are really freaked out about all these type of things. And then last one of the smoke detectors. Do we ever partner with the Red Cross? Remember back in the day, was the Red Cross. No.

Have not. We have not partnered with the Red Cross today. In the past, what we've always done is, like, it's been a number of years ever since I can recall that we've been partnering with Rotary. Uh-huh. With Rotary. Okay. And we have throughout the years done public, you know, campaigns where we put a video out or put a flag you know, flyers out, that kind of stuff. So that's something that definitely is on our list of accomplishments to to do in this next year.

Thank you.

Thanks for the word.

I just had one question. In terms of, know, like, emergence and and catastrophic events, shelters for neighborhoods, you know, for first places for people to go, is it still I I don't know whether it was a formal policy, not just in payment, but just generally speaking, the first place to go in the event, like, an earthquake and, you know, get homes that are, you know, down, is it still the case where the first place to go is, like, a school where you know? I know, like, the first place to report to, I guess, if, you know, the name of school, is that is is that written anywhere in policy, or is that just sort of is that just sort of, like, just that's just where you go? I mean

People people would generally try to congregate in places where they know that there's a large open space Yes. Especially after a nurse, like, right, where they can congregate, they they feel like there's not gonna be the chance of buildings falling or or whatever. Right? And people know that schools have large places, and we do have a number of schools that we have gone. This is one area where we do work with the Red Cross.

And we worked with them to go out and assess a number of sites within the city that we can use as shelters post earthquake. Some of those sites will be like Chabot College, Cal State East Bay, the Matt Jimenez Center. And what we'll do is we'll go walk through with them, and they check off whether it meets their criteria and what we can and cannot do, how many people we can shelter there, you know, that kind of stuff. Post disaster, we will be going out and assessing. We will be looking, okay, where we have the most need.

Are our shelters that we have already kind of prepositioned and preplanned? Are they damaged? Are they going to be available? You know, that kind of stuff. And then we're gonna be reaching out to the community to let people know where to go for those places in those areas to shelter.

So that's where down the road what is really going to be helpful is when we do have the neighborhood resiliency hubs so that at that point, you know, my goal of the division that I have is that each district will have at least one resiliency hub, maybe two if they're a larger, more populated area where we can build each of those out, and then we let the community know that, hey. This is where you will go.

And then when you say district, what what do you mean by district?

By district, when when I speak of district, I look at our fire district. District one, we're engine one response. District two. Perfect. Okay. I mean, you guys you've

read my mind. Okay. Okay. Well, I appreciate that. I do not have any more questions, but I did fail to open up for public comment on the first one. But I did catch myself here. So what I'll do is I will open up for public comment to see if there's any public comments. And if there was anything you anybody wanted to comment on chief Matthew's presentation, I will allow that too. So is there any? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's all.

Go back to me. Thank you. Yeah. TJ again. So going back to the issue with the SRO, and know we're gonna be talking about that in detail, but they just felt compelled to jump in now to speak to council member Bonilla's questions. I think they're all good. So I'll just say, you know, we followed this from the very beginning. We've been a group for five years now. So we as as nurse Salinas knows, we kind of follow the trajectory of this. And even though the climate has changed, just to prepare you, the the board of trustees has changed very little.

So I think I'm hopeful that you can have that conversation, but I agree it's gonna be very, very focused. I know there was one joint meeting between the the board and the council, and it did not go well. I remember. But I I agree it needs to be very focused. I also wanted to say that I as I recall, I think the SRO program was a fifty fifty.

Correct? So the the the district the district paid half and the city paid half for that program in the in the school district. Knowing that they're going through this fiscal solvency disaster right now, I know that they they're already having you know, they had to do very severe budget cuts. And some of the staff that they let go, my understanding is, are the the CSOs, the campus safety officers. So that's another real big concern.

And and I think it's made very difficult if you're talking finances. I'm hoping, you know, that the city can somehow help too, but I think that that will be a challenge because I know by the board price their budget, and I and I do worry about these kids. I had one myself in high school, and I worry every day because if now we're talking about public safety being the primary issue or the primary desire to have public safety in our schools and now the SROs are I mean, the CSOs are being decreased, that's another big concern. And that could ultimately cause that data to continue to go up. So I think the time is now.

I I definitely advocate. I I think we all, you know, very strongly advocate for it. And so I I hope that it will happen. Thank you.

Thank you. Seeing none. Not seeing no more. Oh, one more.

Yeah. I'm just. To

the or she's question about. Among the board of directors, I'll mention that to our board meeting and let them know. I'm sure we'd be happy to partner with you again.

And I'll be happy to be happy to show up there with my open hands. And

but I can also I'll I'll I'll that. It will be it will be soon to be able to

just to tell the stories, you know, that that we've spoken about in the last couple, you know, the the sad ones today and then the the one where we we were able to, you know, make that rescue of that junk. So

Well, you know, you happen to be sitting, next to a rotarian in front of a rotary. A rotary has to be sitting behind you. So

Perfect. Perfect. Okay.

Seeing no more public comment, I will close public comment. Thank you, chief. Appreciate it. Next item is update on update on Hayward's response to potential immigration enforcement operations, and this is a oral report.

Alright. Thank you. Yeah. We don't have a PowerPoint presentation to deliver because I know we've had some pretty extensive conversations around this, you know, not just here, you know, city hall, city center, but with the school district and some other community groups. But just to reiterate, know, the neighborhood police department does not give you any federal immigration enforcement.

We have not only state law, but a policy, policy four fifteen that governs that. And so just wanna reassure the community that we we don't engage in those in those activities. Really wanna kinda put it up for any questions for council. I will say that the city does have a working group that meets on a weekly basis to discuss this. We've collaborated on some written and also, you know, oral presentations and and messaging for folks.

And we we give updates on, you know, immigration issues. I will say that since the first of the year, know, ICE has been to the city of Hayward, Illinois State four times with arrest warrants looking for specific individuals. So they're they're out in those sweeps. And I know that we were managing a lot of misinformation kind of on the front end of of some of these issues or or the the transition in in Washington. So happy to answer any questions that anybody has, and and it's really all I'm

Thank you. I'm sure. Anybody? Nope.

Just I I don't remember the do

you remember the name

of this website that the county because the county has sort of sort of a coordinated effort for people to get information, and they put oh, yeah. I'll turn

it on.

The the city actually has one too. Oh, okay. There's there's one that so on the city website, there's, like, a slash residence slash undocument undocumented residence. There's city policies and a Okay. Pollutions

Okay.

Document, and then there's also a host of resources that people can Great. Can access.

And that's through the main website or for

the city? The city's main website. Yeah.

Okay. Good. Thanks. Yeah. That's helpful. And I know we definitely have talked about this before, so thanks for what you're doing to keep reiterating the information. Thank you.

Yeah. I just just want to re reiterate that. I know at the very, you know, at the very beginning, or during the January, I know there was a lot of, nervousness, anxieties. I I I haven't seen much over the last couple of weeks, few weeks. So message has been getting down. You know? And and so I appreciate all the work you've been doing.

Thank you. We wanna make sure that, you know, we we we don't ask any questions about immigration status, so we wanna make sure that folks who are in our community that need city services, including police and fire, and not people asking for it. Absolutely. So we wanna be helpful there. Thank you.

Thank you. Appreciate that. This is an oral report report, but I'd like to open up for public comment. Is there any public comment on this? Seeing that, I will close public comment, and I'll move on to Oh, yeah. Do mind? Yeah.

Just for the record, in case anyone's listening, it's acilep.org. Right. That's it. Okay. And that's and they've just they've done a really good job of giving sort of regional help and information for everyone. So I'll just say it again. It's acilep.org. And I know our local county supervisor has put efforts towards this. I just wanted to get that out there.

Thank you. Yeah. And if you type in city if you just go to Google, type in city of Hayward immigration, it'll take you right to the website. So, okay. So next item is, school youth related crime and enforcement trends, and this is a little old report. And the fact that I see doctor Young here, we're about to get get educated. School is in. Ding ding.

Thank you very much. So going go to the first slide. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna talk about some crime and enforcement data related to juveniles just in a general sense. This is not school specific, but we wanna give you kind of a little bit picture of what's going on in the city since the beginning of the year, January and March to date. And then what I'll do is I'm gonna turn it over to to doctor Young to talk about some of the problematic efforts through YFSB with some data that she's gonna share along because, really, our goal in dealing with young people and juveniles is to keep them away from justice involved and justice system and to make sure that we support them in their efforts to get educated, etcetera.

So enforcement is really a very small percentage of of what we do when it comes to juveniles. But for the time period that we're reporting on, we had a total of 43 cases where there was an identified offender that was a juvenile, weapon possession being the most frequent offense. So we had 11 cases there. And then there were physical arrests made in 13 cases, and the age range was from, you know, 13 to 17 years old. And when I say physical arrest, that doesn't necessarily mean taking them into custody and transporting them to to the hall.

There's a whole host of ways that they can these cases get dispositioned. They can be released on notice to appear, etcetera. So and I will say that one of the trends that we've discussed at the county chief's level, which, you know, has been disturbing, this goes back into the last calendar year is the age of some of our offenders. We've seen cases where there have been very, very young kids who are involved in very, very serious crimes. And I think I shared with the council at one point, we had a case where we responded to a reported carjacking, located the vehicle, trying to make contact with the individual in the driver's seat.

The individual ran one of our police cars. We were able to take this person into custody without using force, was armed with a gun, and was 12 years old. And so that is a reflection of not just the city of Hayward, but concerns that were shared, you know, with the former district attorney and some of our community stakeholders. We actually held a series of meetings at Glad Tidings, you know, with the the bishop and his team where we're talking about some of these issues. So very concerning about some of the ages. And I'll turn it over to Doctor. Young just to talk through the slides that have to do with what we're trying to accomplish in youth

and family services. Doctor. Young. Alright. Thanks, James. So as Nishi said, you know, we exist to keep kids out of the system. And while we're presenting sort of in two parts, chief shared the crime data, and I'm sharing the prevention activity. There's actually overlap. So when he talked about kids who get arrested receive a notice to appear, they're coming to work as being more often than not. We also work with kids who are coming out of custody and after spending time at juvenile hall and Camp Sweeney, which is Alameda County's detention facility for kids that actually get incarcerated for some length of time.

So there's a lot of overlap. But, you know, at 35,000 foot level, if a kid is becoming known to law enforcement, something is going on with that youth and their family. And so we really have been we and we've been around since 1976. For almost fifty years, we've been taking this approach of, okay. Let's figure out what's going on and actually address the black issue.

Let's address the root cause instead of just punishing the crime that's at the end of this long series of events. And so I'm gonna share some program data from 2024 just to give you a sense of what we're up to and the scope of what we're providing, and then we'll take questions. So across all of and to and I wanted to note, this does not include any link or heart data. So this is just we're in this new territory of now we have adult and juvenile program. So this is the YFSB juvenile side of the house is everything I'm gonna talk about today.

So we served 3,321 youth families and school staff in 2,024 no. 2024. Right. And partially funded through contracts with the Albany County Probation Department here working by the the school district and Albany

County Health

Care Services Agency. We generate about $1,300,000 a year to offset the cost of the services. So we have 15 FTE providing services, and we get about $1,300,000 from county and district to do that. And notably, in their budget conversations, we're gonna be okay for next year. So HSD really values the work that we're doing. Next slide, please. Thank you. So YFSP programs fall into two big buckets. One are our school based programs, which I'll talk about first, and then the other is everything we do in our office at the police department. And we also offer some satellite services at Hayward Unified's hub, but those are just an extension of our office based services.

So our school based services are where we serve the bulk of the the people that we serve. You know, one of the best things we can do to keep kids out of trouble and away from the system is keep them positively connected and engaged in their school environment. And research shows the single most important factor for later positive outcomes in life is a relationship with a caring adult. And so if that's the parent, fantastic. If it's not, who's at school?

Who's their coach? Who's someone that can be that caring adult for them? And just one caring adult, three is better, but just one is enough to really help with long term outcomes and avoidance of the juvenile justice system. And so we do a whole bunch of different programs at the schools to help schools become environments where those caring adult relationships and caring peer relationships can flourish. And so we work we do a lot of school climate initiatives to help make the schools these positive places for for students to be. And then for people that need more focused intervention, we also provide individual and group therapy and positive youth development

groups, which

are things like leadership groups or social skills groups or group really things that teach those tangible life skills. So we serve nearly 3,000 people in schools. The primary focus areas, what we're focusing on are social emotional learning, social skills and relationship support, and mental health issues. And we see that repeatedly. But, you know, again, if we take care of students' social emotional needs, then they can learn math and reading really easily.

It's when they're dealing with all of the stuff, the baggage that they brought in with them that day that the learning, the academic environment becomes hard. And so the breakdown below is for our individual group and development. I don't have do you have my data sheet? The I think it's 300 change folks who received I oh, lied. There was a 300 133 students got those more focused interventions. So most of what we're doing is a large group. Next slide, please. Now I'm gonna talk about our office based work. And so we are funded by the probation department to provide partially funded by the probation department to provide a crisis intervention, counseling, case management, diversion, life skills, education, and restorative justice. And we do that from our offices.

It looks like I think most of you actually have been through. But if you haven't been through, come on by. Looks like a mental health clinic, and it's it's friendly and soft and warm, but it's inside the police department. And we searched two seventy five youth in in 2024. And the breakdown below are the types of cases that we serve. So it's a pretty good scattering of kids. Six zero one is what we call the kids that are sort of that elevated risk of being on probation. Those kids are truant. They're fighting with mom and dad, what we call beyond parental control, using substances, running away from home. They're the kids that are really showing us signs.

It's common. If you let me stay on this path, I'm gonna do some more serious stuff. So about forty four percent of the youth served fall into that category. Thirteen percent of our youth served were on formal probation, so they had already committed offense and or spent time in custody for that. Nine percent were law enforcement diversion to mental health services. So that's when a police officer prior to arrest or instead of arrest said, let me divert you to mental health services. We're not even gonna bother with your arrest. We're gonna go straight to mental health. And then 9% was what they actually did do the notice to appear paperwork, the formal arrest, but still diverted to services. So just because a kid got arrested did not mean they actually had to go to juvenile hall.

They came to YFSB instead. 23% got case management and life skills and then the little bucket of others. So this is my favorite slide because it shows you where people like, how people access our services. And 24% law enforcement, 14% probation, 25% family self, 33% school. And why I love it is because it tells me that the people that I want to be using our services are.

So 33% means we have real and this is not our school based services. So this is our office based services. 33% of those are coming from schools. We participate in coordination of service team meetings at all of the middle and high school sites, and we take referrals directly from the schools to us. If a kid gets an expulsion contract, we're part of that contract to provide the support that they need to hopefully not get expelled and be able to stay in their school environment. So a fact that a third of our referrals are coming from the schools means we're doing something right with that relationship because there's not, like, the school's kids and the city's kids. The same kids. We all work with

the same

kids. Another 24%, law enforcement. Right? We we exist to keep kids out of the system. So if the cops aren't referring to us, that's a problem. And so I've talked to many cops over the years who don't work for any word PD who say, we hate it. We can either arrest or do nothing. And I don't like either choice. And I always say YFSP is the third choice. Instead of arresting or doing nothing, send them to YFSP. And so I tell that to new cops when we train them, when they come through. We are your third choice. If you know something is up, you know intervention is needed, but you don't it's not an know arrest isn't gonna solve the problem, and you just don't wanna walk away. That's my way exist. A quarter of our referrals are coming from them.

And then 25% are coming from the community directly. People pick up the phone and say, can I come see you? And that means we're known and respected and valued in the community. That's significant to me. Family we have generations of families. Oh, I was there when I was a kid. Can can I bring my kid? Like, the fact that we have such a reputation with community is really great to me. We had an inspection this week from the juvenile justice coordinating commission, and our inspector, she goes, hey. Is Cecilia still here? And I was like, no. She's not here today, but she's still here. She's she was my counselor when I was getting into trouble. And, like, now I just wanna tell her I turned my life around. And, like, it was just so cool to see this 25 year old young woman who came to inspect her.

Yeah. I know. Said that

she's the inspector.

They're not the inspector, but she's like, I was here. Was a kid. I appreciated some like, I was 13. I was going through some stuff. And, like, we have those experiences with some regularity. And so it really is reinforcing the work that we're doing. So metrics of success. So I already spoke to sort of the top one. But our referrals are coming from the people that need them most. So over a third of all of our referrals are coming from the police department or probation, thirty eight percent, meaning we are intervening with youth at the highest risk of system involvement.

But importantly, eighty eight percent who come through are not yet system involved, and we're able to avoid system involvement through participating in our services. And we've run the numbers repeatedly to see recidivism data or arrest data for those who haven't been arrested. And consistently, we're in the high nineties of people not committing crime or not being arrested or rearrested after they successfully complete our services. And over every time we run it, we're between ninety five and ninety eight percent successful at preventing recidivism six to twelve months out. They talked about the partnership with HUSD.

Sixty four percent of our families of our youth are seen with family members. It's something we really work hard to try and get you know, you can give a kid the best therapy in the world for one hour a week. But then if they go home to the family, you're just gonna be so much more successful if you're working with the family. And eighty five percent of our youth are being successful at case closure, meaning they meet their treatment goals. They completed safety plans. They completed the terms of their diversion if they're they were diversion referral. And so, you know, we think we're doing pretty good work. And so that's, I think, what I have.

And that's that's all that we're going to be doing. I I do wanna add that Emily and her team are accessible to anybody who lives in the city of Haiti. Right? And not only do they do this work in school, they have a dedicated staff member who is a crisis counselor of the day, who is ready and prepared to deal with anything that comes in the front door or anything that our staff members reach out in the moment in the field about. They'll come out to the field.

The other thing that I wanna share about their program is they they are on hold. So when we have these major traumatic events and family members are left behind, whether it's, you know, a homicide, suicide, those high impact incidents that create trauma for people, Emily and her team are prepared to respond 24 a day to to be able to be a shoulder, be a something to listen to and to provide services in that moment. So just great work with you and happy to answer the questions you have.

Thank you. Thank you. Questions? Let's go first. Sure.

Okay. Thank you so much for that. Just have a few quick questions. Can you give an example of your school based programs?

Sure. So we have four FTE that are devoted to four different schools full time, one elementary, and three middle schools. And they do a combination of school climate and group and individual work. So And a school climate initiative that's pretty popular are what they call lunch bunch groups. And so they sort of hold spaces for lunch and games and chatting with an adult trying to facilitate and keep it prosocial and and positive.

So, like, a day in the life of a school based counselor might be maybe they have a morning group where they have, you know, six kids who are having trouble regulating because they've all experienced grief, like a grief and loss group. Right? So they go to pass. They pull those six kids. They do their grief and loss group. Then they do lunch, bunch. Then the principal calls and says, you know, Johnny is off the hook. Can you please check-in with him? If you do, Johnny's parents got into a domestic violence incident earlier in the morning, and he's just not able to focus on that. Right?

So they'll do an individual crisis assessment and see what's going on, what the needs are. Then maybe they have a couple of other kids that they are on their caseload that they provide services to, so they'll see them. And then the day wraps up. They come back and

do an all good.

So don't if that gives you, a but it I made that stuff up, but just an example of the type of work that they're doing.

So okay. And that makes a lot of sense. I'm just thinking, like, you know, elementary and middle schoolers. But what about high schoolers? Because it seems like they have they're more sort of off the walls emotionally and Sure. Know, and all of that kind of so, I mean, they probably need more, I guess, than the elementary kid.

Sure. But, I mean, I'm

just saying that from my own view

and the data behind it.

We we have we are in a very close partnership with HUSD, and we're one piece of HUSD's map of service providers. And so HUSD has a lot of their own people that they hire that are that they call SEL counselors, social emotional learning counselors, who do the exact same work. And so a few years ago, we were in conversations about how do we look at the entire district and what the needs are. And at the time, we were providing services half time at twice as many school. We had four one of our FTPE was at we had four and then six other sites.

We were at 10 sites. And we decided, let's pool our resources and give focused, dedicated people because that's gonna be a more effective strategy. And then HUSD was able to fill in those other places. So all the high schools have the services. They're just not provided by us. I see. But we meet with them regularly to make sure we're all kinda doing the same stuff.

Yeah. I actually had a personal experience meeting with one eight Hayward High on behalf of my niece recently. And in that interaction, we actually have a follow-up meeting with her too in, like, a a couple of weeks. But she actually said that they're they've been cut next year because of the budget. So that's gonna be pretty interesting to see the kind of demand that that creates

Okay.

On your guys' program

Yep.

Which sort of further underscores the need for us to talk about safety more holistically with the school district. And I love the way that you framed it. Like, these are children of our community, so there are no boundaries of who does what. We all need to coming to the table collaboratively to push forward a priority around improving youth and student safety in our community.

Absolutely. Okay.

And then are do you ever experience, like, any kind of issues with children who have already maybe experienced trauma coming to the police department for services even though you have it set up so beautifully? Absolutely.

It's a it's a great question and something that we're incredibly mindful of because, you know, we we we're a community provider. Right? We know our community. We know their concerns, and they're real. They're legitimate for people.

And so from the very first phone call, our folks are introducing themselves, explaining our services, and the fact that we are located in the police department, we are not police officers, confidentiality is maintained, is this something you will be comfortable with? And so from the very first phone call, that's a top priority to explain what it is so we're gonna be surprised or we're tricking them, making sure people are comfortable. More often than not, people are okay with it. Sometimes they're not okay with it, and we get that information from the beginning. Like I mentioned, we have the HUB look, the HUSD parent hub on So to.

We have an office space reserved there once a week. So if they're not comfortable with the police department, but they are comfortable with us, we'll meet them at the hub. And if they're not comfortable with any of it, we'll connect them to another provider. And we have no problem doing that. So it comes up from time to time, but I think not as much as people think it would. And it's something that we are ready for because we wanna be respectful of people's bad experiences.

Yeah. I mean I can see it kind of in in the other perspective as well, which is maybe they do feel safe coming to the police department after they just experience something traumatic, and they know that they can be vulnerable because they're I mean, so I can kinda see it on both ends, so I appreciate that perspective. And then, lastly, when when an officer diverts a child to the program, is the child required, like, legally to participate in certain programs?

Yeah. So none of our programs are, like, mandated even whether it's a probation officer or a police officer. But life's full of choices. And so there are choices if you don't participate. And so they depend on the program and the circumstance. But if a youth receives a notice to appear, so say they were shoplifting in JCPenney's, they get a notice to appear instead of being put in custody. They are referred to YFSB. If they participate in our services, the NTA can go away, and their record can be sealed. If they don't, it gets forwarded to probation for processing through the regular system. And so it's not mandated, but there's very much a, okay.

If you do this, this is the path. If do that, that's the path. Which one do you choose? And so there's encouragement, I would say, if the negative consequences outweigh above participation. Okay.

These these are just, you know, great programs. It's so good to hear that we have these and the great impact that you're having in the community. And I'm also really pleased that, you know, you've diversified your funding, and it doesn't just rely, you know, on the general fund even though it's something that we would always prioritize because it's so important. But to see how and to see how the community comes to engage with your services throughout these different avenues, like you so clearly said, is really a testament to how you guys have integrated these services sort of in the fabric of all these different places to be able to touch the youth that need these services the most. So thank you so much for your leadership in this space.

Well, that's exactly what we're going for, so thank you for recognizing it.

Thank you. Yes. Well said. And I and I have personally experienced it, so I am very grateful for this. I so I wanted to ask one thing about like, are you helping kids, you know, with undocumented parents deal with plans for if the kids are left abandoned, if the, you know, inadvertently there was no family member to call or anything.

Yeah. So I don't know if you're the red cards, if you're familiar with those. So we ordered a stack of them, and we have them in the office. And so we have the majority of our one, two three out of our four current in house counselors are all Spanish speakers. The supervisor is a Spanish speaker. So we have really, really good language capacity around working with the the Latinx population. And it's in every converse I mean, people are the anxiety is so high, and so it's absolutely something we're working on from the from from the

beginning of when this starts. Yeah. I just wanted, like, if the schools left with no one to call, what they end up calling you guys.

There's lots of resources. I mean, you already spoke about the website, but there's so much material out there. We're putting some stuff together for our bulletin board so people sitting in the waiting room can see the resources.

So The kid. You know, like, if they didn't think a million years I know. They didn't have a plan for something. And you know what?

What would happen to those kids? And the schools. Right? Because likely the kid would be at school. Yeah. And you know the first call from the schools would be to us.

Yeah. That's what I was wondering. Was gonna I'm glad to hear that. Good. The other thing I was wondering, with the school based work, does the kid have to somehow have been reported in some way or been in the system or okay. No. So that's No.

So the way I think about our work is everything falls into two big buckets. We either increase access to things that are good and positive and supportive, or we mitigate the harmful effects of things that are negative or bad. And it's a spectrum. As far as school based work is gonna fall more on the the the increasing access to

the good. Okay. Okay. I'm sorry. Sorry. Like, was Johnny in the system to know to call him that he had a bad day? Okay. But that's what's I'm just curious. Okay. So the other thing I did wanna ask about the substance abuse stuff, and, you know, particularly being spent my, like, a little bit of, like, you know, issue lately. I because I was reading how a lot of kids, you know, they they started school. It's cool, and it's interesting. They don't wanna tell their parents they'd like a little bit of help, but they could use a program at school or anonymous program at school that they can access without having to sort of get in trouble first to get it. Absolutely. And and I'm wondering what you're doing on that.

So we have an alternative suspension program. So it's exactly that. And so the our we have

If you did the parents have to be involved in that one.

No. No. No. So so something that we've been doing in the last year, maybe six months to a year, it's related it's the same team. Okay. So Minette Nayeli, the team that does this amazing work, has started pushing into the schools and partnering with our school based counselors, so at the middle schools. And so and the school based counselor, and then she delivers the the curriculum around with that stuff. And so it's as and like I said, it's alternative to suspension. So they kind of are in trouble, but instead, they get to go through this life skills experience. And so we started pushing into the schools to deliver our office based services. And is that

because would that still have to be if it's an alternative suspension, does the school have to report that to the parents that they're being tortured? I don't know. Okay. Just curious. I was just reading about this I wonder. Sort of anonymous, like, passive information that

I mean, get permission slips from the parents before we put kids in a group. So I don't know if the school is reporting it, but we would reach out and say, hey. I'm gonna put your kid into this group, and this is the purpose. So I I can't I don't know. I I'm not positive, but

I would imagine yes. Okay. Yeah. Well, I'm I'm really glad you're going to school. So it just seems to me a lot of kids are getting in trouble because of vaping, not because something else started, but they got that that was school. That was not true. And they get trouble at school. That leads to other things.

And it snowballs. So, like, if

we can nip it at

the beginning. Yeah. Let's do that. Yeah. I'm glad you're pushing the schools. Thank you. That's that's a great update. Okay. See, I think that's it. I think that's all my questions. Yep. Thank you. That's the update.

You know, the question I had is all the way at the beginning, but you said that all your part all the partnerships generates about 1,300,000.0 a year. And I was just curious how much of that makes up for the whole budget?

No. I could get back to you.

Okay. That's fine.

I don't know. So what does 15 FTE cost? Like, maybe a third? I don't know. You get a more budget conversation. Yeah. I'm not sure.

Yeah. Okay. Alright.

That would

be fluctuates, and we're always looking for new funding sources. I mean, we're continuing to apply. And and I I will say it's grown in my like, I've been here fifteen years, but we we've added programs. We've added people. Like, it's it's dynamic.

Yeah. Well Quick one. Sorry. What do mean? I was gonna make a final comment, but go ahead.

Sorry. Go

ahead. Yeah. No. Go ahead.

Go ahead. Just really quickly. So so you had said that 3033% of the referrals are from HUSD. Is that higher than normal than when the SROs were in there? I'm just wondering what the relationship is. Because if the relationship is still as good getting the services where they should be, what, like,

what piece are we missing out? But as far as that would be different without SROs is the law enforcement referrals. So I'm thinking our law enforcement referrals were probably higher when we had SROs because that's what that would count as. Okay. And so we're doing the prevention work as well or better than we've ever done it. The piece that's missing is when the SROs when, like, a kid gets known to the SROs, they would be able to work with us. And we used to have SROs bring us kids for crisis sessions at least twice a week. And I don't remember the last time an officer brought a kid from the school, got their family, and came directly in for a crisis session. So that's the piece that's different. Okay. Thanks. That's helpful.

And the SRO program actually structurally with the organization was under the lane. So unique compared to any other police department in the country. We have a clinical psychologist running not only this program that she's talking about with counselors, but the around the SRO program too. Okay.

That's what we

I mean, hearing that she ran the SRO program really even,

like

Yes.

Makes me wanna push this even more because it's, like, it's in a good it's in good hands. And you you like you said, all of the the perceptions and maybe the realities that existed back then in safety now and especially with kind of how dynamic and, you know, competent and culturally of what you provide, that just seems like such a unique perspective to house a kind of program like that. But my question was so on on one of the intake one of the methods of intake, it's like, you know, the community can come to you directly. Right? Can you just, like, briefly in, like, one minute say how that works?

Yeah. They pick up the phone, and they call.

What do they say?

They say, my kid is driving me crazy. I need help. Oh. Great. When would you like to come in? So do you live in the city of Hayward? It's our first question. Right? Because it has to be they have to have some access to Hayward. So Hayward school, Hayward resident, etcetera. Right. Totally free. English and Spanish. Immigration status does not matter. Wow. So it's they just pick up the phone and call. And we're actually this is off little bit off topic, but you had mentioned a phone number for heart services, and we're using the same intake phone number for Link now so that the community can start to call Link directly because that phone number is answered during the day by a clinician who can assess what the needs are. 704.

So 29 So (510)

293-7048. That is the direct line. You won't get a dispatcher. You will go straight to Heath and Family Services, and that phone will be answered by the crisis counselor today.

Can you

say it again?

(510) 293-7048. Thank

you. Thank thank you so much.

Just wanted to sort of wrap wrap this up, before I go to public comment, but wrap this up by saying this. You know, I I I think you said something interesting at the very beginning of this is that we've been around for, you know, 1976. And we have been providing these services, for you know, next year will be fifty years. And, and I just wanna, just really sort of highlight that. That is the important sort of part of this story.

You know, a few years ago when there was a lot of awareness, a lot of activism around mental health and mental health in kids and so forth. You know, the conversation, I felt was, it was, you know, a bit disingenuous in that people were talking about it as if it didn't exist, as if we never had it done or we had never even done it, or or, you know, or we were tone deaf, to the needs of the community and so forth. And and as somebody who has seen these services, you know, not just by my time here on the council, but for somebody who has worked in and amongst the Youth and Family Services Bureau for just over my entire career, it was you know, it hurt because, you know, I thought it just dismissed the nearly, you know, forty five plus years of innovative work and creative work that, you know, that we've been doing. I personally know, you know, a lot of your colleagues. I, you know, I have known them for twenty year thirty years.

They are they're incredible professionals. And, and I know from firsthand experience, I know that your team, you know, they're engaged in the community. They're engaged kids. They're engaged with their families. I mean, the fact that four of the five are bilingual, bicultural, binational, You know, they they know the schools. They know the neighborhoods. They know the families. I mean, I don't think you can get a more competent, proficient group of of mental health professionals. I'm, you know, I'm not just saying that because you're sitting here, and I'm not I'm here. I I'm just I'm just telling you.

I just really wanna emphasize that because there has been a lot of work around this, decades of work around this. And, the Harris Police Department, and the Youth and Family Services Bureau has been at the at the forefront of this work. And, and so I just, you know, I just wanna say thank you.

Thank you.

I wanted to, open for public comment. Is there any public comment?

Thank you for everything you do. Thank you. Happy to do it.

And, yeah, just for the record, Nelly was a former student of mine.

She was?

I have to get a

cut. Good to see.

It's good to see my students.

She's doing great. Okay.

Being at no more,

I'm Do we have this?

Yes. I know. Maybe because I could take it to it.

I'm sorry.

So they're gonna end it. They're good. Sorry. Sorry there.

Moving on to the next item, which is police department organizational assessment, organ, oral report.

Thank you again, Sonia. You're gonna hear me talk tonight. I'm gonna try to get through this, point relatively quickly just, as you all know and and for the folks in the community. The agenda has a link to this report. It is a public document. We encourage people to take a look at it. But if we could move to the first slide, I'll get into the presentation itself. So I wanna talk briefly about what our goal was with this work. We are always in a state of kind of this assessment for the purpose of making ourselves better. And, you know, for us to sit there and talk about ways that we can improve, that's functional, and that's healthy.

But I also think that there's value in having somebody come in from the outside, somebody that doesn't have relationships with people in the building, somebody that hasn't seen our department before, with a fresh lens to be able to tell us, you know, what we're doing well and what we need to improve upon. And so we enlisted Jensen Hughes. This is the firm that is based out of Chicago. They go all over the country, continuing pattern of practice investigations and talking to police departments about how to improve, particularly police departments who have documented issues including consent decrees. This is also the same company that we contract with for some of our administrative investigations for some of our critical incidents.

And so we reached out to them and asked them to come in to assess our operations to conduct a staffing analysis and really to examine data to make recommendations for the improvement efficiency, effectiveness, and health of our organization. And so in doing that, they came out and they reviewed everything from our structure, mission, and values to our policies. They looked at our call for service and investigative data. They reviewed our protocols and practices. They came off-site for about three days, walked around the building.

They went on ride alongs. They settled with their comm center staff. And the interviews of staff and community members, including some we wanted to make sure that not only did they talk to the people who were knowledgeable about the police department, people that were also, you know, maybe a little skeptical or informed about the police department. So they did a lot of interviews related to this. Go ahead.

Next slide. So I wanna share pretty much two things from the report at a high level, and then we'll get to questions because I know there's a lot of information in here. So they they brought us 12 key findings. They I won't go over all of these, but I do wanna highlight a couple of them, particularly our improved hiring and recruitment processes, and that's not just an effort in the police department. You know, Brittany Fry and the HR team have been instrumental in streamlining processes and being able to identify quality candidates and get them in the building because we are in competition with everybody else.

Ohio had the strong partnerships to address homelessness and mental health response. They were impressed with the heart program and the work that was done through the policy innovation efforts that included both staff and the community. They did point out that we have an integrated beach structure, very uninformed when it comes to data. We've had the same beach structure since I started here in 1999 and probably going on before that. It was a minor modification that was made in the beginning of February February where

we went from

'8 to nine. But how they do the geographic boundaries and no clue about that. So we are currently looking at that. One of the things they they provided us with feedback on was the lack of direction that we provide for staff during discretionary time. And and that, I think, is is an important thing to point out because, you know, when people call 911, there's a call for service on the board.

That's easy. We know how to handle those things. But when an officer is working a geographic area and they're not attached to a call for service. What is our expectation of them with their free time? And so those are things that we are in the process of building out, creating documents internally that we're sharing with staff so that is very clear and happy to talk about some of that stuff.

They did an analysis of our patrol schedule. They looked at minimum staffing and the impact on our staff as it relates to mandatory overtime. So we're looking at that facility, I won't get into. They did also comment on the potential for civilian staff to be used in other areas, including the field. And they talked about our tech and data and how it's at the time that this was ineffective at driving decision making.

And I think we talked to you all about some of the solutions that we're using to make improvements there. And then based on their interviews, there was a community's community desire for increased presence and positive interactions with with our staff members. So on the next slides, we'll just go through these real briefly. And you can see on the far right, they're either in progress or we haven't started them yet. So we're in the process of starting an internal communication plan.

External communication plan, we're not started there yet. The strategic staffing plan was meeting expectations, the beat restructure, all of that stuff is underway. The culture of data driven decision making, I think, is something that I know, mayor, that we've had conversations about based on our training, you know, through the Harvard program that we went to. But that's something that we're we're gonna continue doing. Thank you.

Case management review, we're formalizing that. We're gonna formalize, like, technology, strategic plan. Pre academy training, we wanna make sure that folks are prepared when they go to the academy, so bringing them in a little bit early to to orient them to what what is gonna be expected of them. One of the things that actually came out this is it's interesting because this was one of the topics of discussion when we did the community innovation work in the aftermath of of the George Floyd murder, incorporating community members into selective training. Right?

And having some of our training be community informed, and I think that's something that we're looking to expand upon. I think everything here is pretty self explanatory. The the bottom bullet, what's in process there, that actually came out of our CLIA assessment. EIS stands for early intervention, early identification and intervention system. So this is a a system that has specific triggers that generate employee review.

So for example, if in a six month period an officer gets, you know, let's say, three community complaints, that'll generate a performance review that involves the supervisor and the manager to make sure that we're not going down the path of getting worse results like some of the intervention work that Emily and her staff do with youth. This is for employees to make sure that we're not missing some behavioral performance patterns that are gonna end up creating not only issues for them, but issues for us as an organization. So we're reviewing what those triggers and those indicators are, finalize that hopefully this year. So with that, we'll just open it up for questions. I know there's a lot of information in this document, and I imagine we'll be talking about it, you know, as as time continues on.

But, before before questions, I do wanna say so deputy chief Will Deplich was kind of the project lead for the police department, very involved with the project team when they were on-site. So I wanna give a shout out to him for a lot of work that he put into this, because I think this is a very functional and build out for us. We're excited to get to work on all of this.

Thank you. You know what I would recommend? You know, it's it's, you know, it's 07:30, and, you know, we just had a very lengthy conversation about two other things. Perhaps we can agendaize this for we'll have a we'll we'll have questions now, but perhaps to have a more robust conversation about this, maybe we could agendize this for another meeting. You know? Because I would like to because as I was looking to the recommendations and stuff, there are some things I wanted to highlight. But I just I just didn't want it to be. Councilmember, what do you mean? Sure.

Sure. I'll I'll try to I'll try to be quick.

I I was really glad you were

I didn't say the time to rush you. I just Thank you. Yeah.

I was really glad you were doing this because, yeah, there's some questions you come in as mayor council member. Maybe we do this a little different. So I was glad to sort of get the questions and to sort of to have to think through. But, I mean, I appreciate your leadership and taking and being open to do this kind of work and then take the recommendations seriously and and do them. So I guess the one thing I'll ask about is so so it was interesting to beat structure and the discretionary time. Because is that sort of that we could find like a downtown beat or could ask, you know, officers when they're on that discretionary time to hang out in certain areas while, you know, while they're in between them to to act as churn or just to see watch what's going. Is that the area where you would find that?

Yeah. Absolutely. I think there's a combination of recommendations that speak to what you're talking about. I think that, you know, being data informed, you know, the Peregrine system, everybody's been trained in that now, so that's a functional solution for us. And so we can direct people to certain geographic areas of the city where we know these issues are happening, especially in getting brand new pronounced at the time of day and the day of week.

Right? Like, the the value of having meaningful data at our fingertips to be able to make actionable, you know, without having to wait, you know, for somebody to to kind of bully them two weeks, you know, two weeks later. We have that now. And so I think the expectation is going to be drawn upon that data and identifying the areas that are in your geographic beat and being present there and being engaging with community members in those spaces when you're not assigned to a global service. The downtown is is certainly something it's an area that's been on the radar for a long time.

We actually pulled some data out of Peregrine. Officer involved initiated work in the downtown from January 1 to March 15 if you include traffic stops and all other forms of self initiated work, there's like 70 785 suffering incidents that officers have. And that's not talking about calls for service. That is officer initiated work. So we are paying attention to areas like the downtown.

I think that, you know, obviously, we can't be everywhere at once, but and that we are looking at repurposing staff internally to be a more consistent resource for the folks who are downtown. Conversations internally about, you know, they can start a position with maybe a purpose to disregard the things for the purpose of not only engaging in the relationship work and being a, you know, sounding board and to be able to elevate voices downtown to us based on those issues, but to manage some programs that we're hoping to maybe bring back and help to help downtown. So all the those recommendations for you to.

Okay. Thanks. And then the the other one, another one too. You know, the the community policing strategy. Because it's not something you know, we sort of had that pre COVID. Right? And then I feel like they kinda went away for a while. And I assume there are especially young officers that come in and didn't necessarily police that way and to get back to I mean, that was one of the conversations I had during the interview. Like, is that part of the community policing strategy?

Yeah. It is. Community policing is a concept that we subscribed to back in the eighties before any of us were here, and I think it's something that we try to get in but we also have to be thoughtful about something and how to do the work. Right. Like, exactly. And it goes back to the expectations. If if you're not attached to a call, there's a problem in an area like, you know, a business, you know, like, let's say, a like that, you know, go down there, get out of your car, and go in go in and talk to people.

Right. Yeah.

And ask them how it's going and how and how we can support those things. Yeah. That's an expectation that I think we need to be a little bit better about communicating. So

Yeah. Great. Thank you. Yeah. There is a lot there, and I'm really pleased that you've joined this work. Thank you.

Hey. Thank you, Mary. Thank thank you for this report. Actually, a lot of my comments, council member Rochette, I I agree that. I I think it's such good discipline to have an outside fresh lens, you know, instead of perspective, especially from experts look at evaluating, you know, the way that we're doing things just as part of our sort of commitment to continuous learning and continuous advancement as an agency and as a city.

So I also really commend your leadership for, you know, commissioning this report and pulling this together. So, basically, the 12 findings led to 18 recommendations. And then maybe not for tonight, but if if you want, or we can discuss it when this comes back. But, basically, can we maybe see a timeline of, you know, when we those things are gonna start and finish, and is there a certain sequence to them? And then the other thing that I'm really curious about is you know, and I know it's a hard conversation, but it's such an important one.

Do you have the funding for all of these 18 recommendations? Right? Or is that gonna have to be another discussion? So just really wanna know kind of the practicality of the implementation of it, the timeline, the cost, and sort of what your view is on that. And then my last question here is, were any of these findings, like, surprising to you? Like, was there, like, one or two where you were like, oh my god. That's, like, so surprising. Or were you like, I kinda knew this, but it's always good to have that external validation instead of eyes confirm what you guys already know is in, you know, zillions of the department.

Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, we we spend a lot of time so I'll answer that one first. Right? We we spend a lot of time going, you know, what are staff members doing with, you know, their free time. Right? You know, your twelve and a half hours on shift. A lot of that is, you know, call response, and and, you know, there is proactive work that, you know, people do. They do traffic stops and things like that. But but, you know, what else are they doing with their time? And then, you know, these folks came in and kinda said, well, you guys haven't told them what you expected to do

at this time. You know

what I mean? Like, that was I I don't wanna speak for anybody else, but for me, that was like, that's their you know, something that totally was sitting right in front of us that we missed. And so I think and the other thing is that we have constant communication even now with the project team. And because they go all over the world and, you know, all over the country doing this work, it's like, okay. We talk about creating, let's say, a tech plan. Who's doing it right? You know? And and let's let's reach out to them and have that conversation. And so, you know, those are some of the benefits that, you know, just to be brief. We do have a we do have a timeline.

I'll share that at a future update, but what I will say is that the command staff in December went off-site, spent about three hours together, and came up with kinda, you know, tier one, two, and three, six, twelve, eighteen months kind of a schedule based on priority and also what we believe we have the capacity to do in those time frames. And our commitment is to sit down, you know, quarterly in the same fashion and really revisit the list, and we'll adjust as we need to adjust. But we have taken all 18 of them. They are mapped out, and that's the work that's ongoing. I'm happy to talk about that in detail maybe in the future. Can learn about that later on time.

Perfect. And then so for some of the 12 findings, they were, like, positive things too. Right? Like, we have a lot of employee pride. We have high expectations. So continuing to build on that momentum is also, I'm sure, part of those 18 recommendations too. Right? It's not just the things that necessarily need to improve, but it's also continuing to build on those things that are working well. Right?

Yeah. Absolutely. We we ask, you know, to summarize, you know, what do we do well and how do we model it. Yeah. What do we do? Right? Yeah. Exactly. And so that that work is gonna continue. Excellent.

Thank you so much again.

Thank you, man. As I was looking at this, I was thinking, can we tie any of the any of the the successes or sort of the outcomes to any of the c and k one metrics? You know? Can we you know, we can report these to you know, this is the work that we're doing. This is how our investment in how our investment in public safety is paying off. You know? That would be the only thing that would

We can. We can get creative, and and we can figure out. I mean, there's one that you know, one of the recommendations, you know, spoke to the facility. One of gives you the recommendation of finding spoke to facilities, and I think that's part of the c and k one conversation as well. But, yeah, we just really

Yeah. And I did the the sub part of that was just, you know, and to sort of riff off of councilor Bonilla is just, you know, tell our story. I mean, I think there's, you know, there's parts of the report where, you know, the story needs to be told, what we're doing, how we're doing it. You know? The other part was incorporating community members in in the trainings. I thought that was kinda interesting. And, I don't know if you thought about that, but, know, what would that look like? You know? How, you know?

You volunteered?

Yes. I mean, you know, no. But

definitely what that what that was.

But I know a couple of people who were, you know, who asked five years ago.

No. But, no, I just And an example. How might that work?

So what about we have limited training time, and there are things that we're mandated to train on. Right? So if you set that stuff aside, there is some wiggle room discretionary training. And a few years back, you know, we brought in some community stakeholders from our local NAACP chapter who there was a panel of them. Miss Freddie Davis was there.

Was there. Was there. Jimmy Wilson was there. And so we had this group who came in and spent an entire training day with all of our staff members talking about community relations, talking about community relations from historical context. And that's that's a great example of, you know, really a community led training that is going to help us understand, gonna bring perspective to us, and hopefully help, you know, us do our work better. And so that's just, you know, when it comes to the top of top of my mind.

Yeah. I mean, you know, it would be, abs I mean, I think, along with NAACP, you know, we bring in other other groups, who have, you know, who can make good data driven, you know, contributions to the training, I think, would be really, you know and when I say data driven, I don't mean, you know, quantitative metric stuff, but, you know, all the personal experiences and case study stuff and, you know, and so forth. But, anyways, okay. That I that was the one thing that sort of stood out. But okay. I will move to have public comment. Any public comment? I'm sorry.

Since the city is moving to districts, and on the report, it said, and I have to put it beats, would it be possible to have districts as the new weeks or is that a possibility? We're actually working on that right now. Okay. I think that's the goal. And there's a couple of things that I think that that will kind of, you know, obviously, aligning geographic policing beats with voting districts.

People will have dedicated officers. People will have, you know, from a leadership perspective, people can send it in charge of each one of those beats. You have a dedicated point of contact for, you know, dialogue and feedback. I think there's just a better way for us to, you know, to be responsive and to be engaged in community, you know, under that model. So what we're doing right now is, you know, we we know what the voting districts look like.

So we're using the Paragon system and some of our analysts to really pull data because one district based on size and call volume might need, you know, two cups and and one might be three per shift. Right? Like, so we have nine beats now. We have nine officer minimum on patrol shift. You know? So there's both you know, there's at least gonna be one cop in each district, but probably some of them are gonna have multiple officers per shift. And so just a better data informed way to do business that aligns with, you know, other parts of the operations of. Yeah. Nice.

Okay. Okay. Seeing no more. Is there anything online? No. Okay. So thank you very much for that. Appreciate that. We can move on to bless you. We can move on to proposed 2025 calendar and agenda planning calendar, review a comment,

the I don't know if

it's necessary. But if, you know, if if we wanted to have those items brought back for sort of another review, we'll see you available.

Well, yeah, but maybe later when there's an update on some of the Yeah. On some of the items. Would that make more sense?

We're happy to talk about it when we talk about it. I'll show you what the is on. So we'll list things at least on.

The first thing I would I would like to get me a survey back there. We're gonna just talk about it. Yeah.

Yes. That's wonderful. I I pulled this item from this meeting because the intent is to bring it as a focus topic as part of the strategic road map work session that's coming up in a couple of weeks.

Oh, okay. And do that first and then decide if we wanna bring it back or something like that?

Well, that will be part of the that will be that will inform inform that decision. That's why we align them with the strategic plan. Okay. Okay. I'll wait I'll wait on that then. Okay.

Just a question for you. So if you look at September 24, there's an update on PCSOs for sure. Then portion of that too is that was lot of recommendations that was made using civilians, that bunch of stuff. I don't know if you wanna replace that item with this and incorporate that into it.

Yeah. With with with the support. Yeah. That's great. Because that's one of your goals or one of the recommendations. Right? Yeah. That sounds good to me. Yeah.

So so let me ask this question. Is September too late of a time?

You mean to be talking about this? Well, I mean, I would just think by then, he would have a little more data and maybe more plans in place on how they're gonna do these recommendations.

The reason is yeah. That's fine.

We can do it in May too.

I mean No. No. No. I I think good. No. September's September's on. Okay. Yeah. That's good.

And then update on future. Yeah.

Would put

that one too. Yeah.

Definitely.

Base building design, but I guess we need more information on that. Right? So maybe that is better that that one's in December. Mhmm. Doctor. I was thinking that's great that we okay. Yeah. No. I don't do have anything else to add?

Yeah. I was just wondering if it would be possible maybe as a standing agenda item to have something around the schools and the youth stuff just so we can get an update on, you know, how the city manager is coming with her plans, how the your conversations are progressing there, you know, how how the work of everyone is coming together. But I think we should really keep this focused, like, every time we talk because it's that important to all of us.

Yep. So, I mean,

could that be a standing item for the chief's report, and then we're prepared for it to

write it.

We the slide with the data, but if you want, we can add a talking point.

Like, more like, yeah, like, what are we actually doing about the data? Because, I love the data, but I'm like, I'm I don't know. If those numbers go up again, it's just it's not gonna make me feel any better. Right? I wanna see this plan that the city manager is gonna put together, this multi kind of pronged approach and initiative. I think that's the way you described it, I thought, was perfect. So, like, can we just see that and kinda get an update and then work together on it? Thank you.

The the other item is the Saint Regis Center update. When are we supposed to see people actually moving in there? So

my understanding is that they are providing limited services there now. One of the sources of grant funding for balance required that they open at the January. But I don't know the timeline. I think other city staff members probably have that information on the timeline for the full center. Do you know?

So they're currently having very minimal services, and the timeline is as I understand it, the last because it shifts, it moves. My understanding that they had something planned for early summer. And so I'm suggesting that we bring this and reach us update, in May. And then That's what I was asking. Yeah. Okay. And then, also, I'm gonna be sending an informational memo to city council Mhmm. With a board conference. It would it would be great to get you that one at me.

And one of the I forget the gentleman's name, but there was a guy from Vaxx who came up to me after the state of the city and said exactly that. And and to them, they were on time. Their timeline was it mirrored what I had said during the. Yeah. There was there was a

Right. So we agree that it's gonna come

with May. May. Yeah. May. It's through.

Okay. Anything else? Calendar is okay. Alright. Any committee members that have announcements and referrals?

I just left the of tonight's meeting, so thank you.

Yeah. Great information.

I

just you know, since we're public safety committee, I just wanted to, again, congratulate the police department, chief Matthews, and his command staff for, again, renewing and and and getting the the Hayward Police Department as CLIA certified. We were in Garden Grove, over the weekend. I wanted to thank, Laura for all the arrangements. Yeah. When they, at the hotel, when they asked me, do you still want the receipt sent to Laura dot Gomes at the kinda threw me off a little bit.

I said, oh, yeah. Yeah. Send it there. So you have all my you have all my receipts. But but, yeah, I just wanted to congratulate the the police department.

You know, clearly, you know, just watching all the other police departments that were there, I mean, the the you know, everybody was hitting the standards. Everybody was you know, the the there certainly was this level of professionalism and and this level of the caliber of policing. And it it was no surprise to to also know and be mindful of less than, you know, 5% of all police departments in the country are certified under this, certification. And it's it's an it's it's a process that's not, it's voluntary, and it's it's not an easy process to get to. And, and so, congratulations to you and your command staff.

No doubt.

Wonderful. Thank you very much.

Appreciate it. How many agencies in California have this again?

Is it only, like, 12 or 15? There's 440 something law enforcement agencies in the state of California, only 14 have the law enforcement accreditation. There's a couple of communication centers that have it. So if you have the communication centers on there's 18, congratulations. Okay. If

there is no other business, ladies and gentlemen, Yep. Thank you.