Public Safety Committee - Special Meeting

Good evening. We will begin public safety committee in about ten to fifteen minutes. We'll begin public safety committee in about ten minutes, and thank you for your patience. Good evening, and welcome to the Public Safety Committee meeting for today, 11/18/2025. The time is now six 06:05PM, and this meeting has come to order.

Before taking roll, I'll provide instructions on how to submit a speaker's card for items on this agenda. If you are here with us in chambers and you would like to submit a speaker's card, please fill one out and turn into a clerk representative, your right, my left, before the item is read into record. Online speaker requests were due twenty four hours prior to this meeting. The meeting came to order at 06:05PM. Speaker cards will no longer be accepted ten minutes after that meeting after the meeting has begun, making that time 06:15PM.

With that, we will now proceed to take roll. Councilmember Brown? Present. Thank you. Councilmember Five? Thank you. Council member Houston? Give me one second. Councilmember Houston, please unmute yourself. He's excused. And tier one? Here. We have three members present, excused. Houston, before we begin, Chair, do you have any announcements?

Yes. I do have some announcements. This has been a really, really difficult week, especially last week for the city of Oakland. We had two campus shootings. We lost the great John Beam and he was someone who was just who gave back so much to this community and had could have gone to coach to professional NFL teams really, but he actually chose to stay here local teaching football at Skyline at Laney College, a really uplifting disadvantaged youth, black and brown youth to give them an opportunity.

And so this this is part of our charge as public safety is to really look at the the gun violence issues that have plagued our city for the last week. Beyond that, I also just want to recognize that we have some pretty contentious items on the agenda later tonight. I want to just make sure that the dialogue is respectful on both sides. I do not want anybody in the audience jeering each other, none of that. And please just, I will, if I must, use my authority as the chair of this meeting to ask people to be removed.

You will be given three warnings and after that I will ask security to remove you if you cannot maintain a respectful dialogue. And this goes again for both sides of those of you on the debate since I know there are very strong feelings on either side. And and yes, with, the other thing I want to just make clear is public comment will be limited to one minute. I know that will be disappointing but we legally need to get through all of the public comments, all the public commenters have come forward. Clerk, how many do we have?

At least 200, right? And so in order for this meeting to proceed in a way where my fellow council members and myself and staff can actually have dialogue also with the the staff, we're going to limit it to one minute. So please do modify your planned comments thus. Thank you.

Thank you. And now we're proceeded to item one. There are no minutes to be approved as this is a special meeting. Item two, determination to schedule outstanding committee items, also known as your pending list. And you do have four speakers for this item.

Okay.

Let's go back to announcements.

It has been requested for the chair to go back to council announcements. And councilor Merva?

Yes. I will also be revising the order of the of the items. I just wanna recognize again staff's time including staff from the auditor's office and the Department of Violence Prevention who do not need to stay through the entirety of the of tonight's debate. That incurs overtime costs and other costs to the city that we do not want to have happen. So I'm going to revise the order of the agenda to start with the performance audit of Oakland's item number five, the audit. Then we'll go with number six, the report on the domestic violence activities. We'll go to four, and then we'll go to flock. Number three. Number three. Yeah.

Thank you, chair Wong. Noting that we will take item five first, we would then take item six, item three, item four, excuse me, and then item three. Moving to item two, once again, termination of schedule outstanding committee items also known as your pending list.

Okay. Let's move to public comment.

When I call your name, please approach the podium. State your name for the record. You do have one minute. If you're participating via Zoom, please raise your hands so you're easily identified. We will take in person speakers. If you are in overflow and you hear your name, please make your way to the chambers. Abu Bakr, Nancy Saddam, Paul Allen, and Jennifer Finley.

They did call you once.

Jennifer Finley, you may unmute yourself and begin your one minute comment.

Good evening. Two items that I would like to bring to the agenda. One is my professional question of what are you doing right now? We know that police staffing has been trending down. We don't have any sign of that changing. What are you doing to prepare to do more with less staffing? That's the reality, and I'd like you to keep that in mind as you're going on with the rest of the conversations tonight. Also, I've asked about OPD protocol with regard to ICE, and I've been told that OPD is there to keep the keep the peace if ICE are keep the peace and keep things orderly with ICE, and I'd like to know if their orders are to do that if ICE are the ones instigating the disorder and the aggression. Thank you. Have a good evening.

Thank you. Moving to our next public speaker, Blair Beekman. Please unmute yourself and begin your one minute comment.

Hi. Blair Beekman. I'm gonna pass on this item tonight. Thank you.

Thank you, mister Beekman. And that concludes your public comment for item two.

Okay. We do need a motion from this body to allow council member Houston participate remotely. What's the AB 2449? Council member Brown.

Excellent. I'll I'll make the motion.

Thank you. Second. We have a motion made by council member Brown, seconded by council member Fife to accept council member Houston's virtual participation pursuant AB two four four nine in emergency circumstances. On roll, council member council member Brown? Aye. Council member Fife? Aye. Council member Houston?

Aye.

And chair Wong. Aye. The motion passes with four ayes to accept his AB two four four nine. Thank you.

I'll also make a motion to move the current item. It's performance on it.

Yep. Do it. Second. We have a motion made by council member Brown, seconded by council member Fife to accept the termination scheduled outstanding committee items as is on the roll. Council member Brown? Aye. Council member Fife? Aye. Council member Houston? Aye. And chair Wong? Aye. The motion passes with four ayes to accept the termination scheduled outstanding committee items as is. Moving to your next item, which is item five. Receive an informational report from the city auditor on the performance audit of the Oakland's police emergency response time, and you do have two speakers for item five.

Great. City auditor Houston, the floor is yours.

Dogs. Thank you, committee members. Good evening city staff and members of the public. Michael C. Houston, city auditor.

Here to talk about the police emergency response times audit. So through this presentation I will introduce the audit team, identify the audit objective and scope, provide background, provide outline about outline the audit findings and recommendations. And I will be here for any questions if we have time. I'm grateful to the audit team for its comprehensive and meticulous analysis during this important audit. Assisted city auditor Eduardo Luna and who's not here, but performance audit manager Stephanie Noble and senior performance auditor Marissa Lynn who are here.

The other objective was to assess the timeliness of the police department in responding to calls for emergency services as a compliment to the office of the inspector general's police staffing study, which was presented in June 2025. The audit scope or the time period covered by the audit was 2019 through 2024. The police department's emergency communication center is where call takers answer emergency calls and dispatch sworn officers to respond. The emergency communication center handles all emergency calls for service in Oakland and transfers calls about fire and medical emergencies to the fire department's emergency to the emergency communication center. Exhibit

one in

the audit report shows the placement of the police emergency communication center within the police department. The exhibit also shows the staffing of the communication center, which are shown in the dark blue rectangles. In total, the emergency communication center had an authorized 90 full time staff to serve as dispatchers, senior dispatchers, communications operators, supervisors, and one communications manager. In 2024, the police emergency communication center received over 352,000 calls on its 911 line and over a 101,000 calls on its 10 digit emergency line. In 2022, 40% of incoming calls resulted in a dispatched police response.

We used the most recent complete and reliable data throughout the report as with as did the inspector general office during its staffing study. So we used 2,022 numbers for data describing units dispatched as there appeared to be missing data starting in 2023. The police department's new computer aided dispatch system implemented in mid twenty twenty four appears to have resolved this issue. Exhibit four here shows how incoming call volume has increased since 2020. Dispatchers assign priority level to each reported incident which they enter into the police department's CAD system.

In 2024, the police department recorded over 291,000 priority one through priority Slightly higher than the number of priority one through four calls back in 2019. The first of the three findings is that insufficient staffing and outdated minimum staffing standards at the police emergency communication center led to the city missing state targets for 911 call answering speeds. The California Governor's Office of Emergency Services, Cal OES requires local 911 centers to answer 90% of 911 calls within fifteen seconds. But in 2024, Oakland answered only 54% of calls within fifteen seconds. The police department did not meet did not meet state targets for answering 911 calls in 10 of the past eleven years as shown in exhibit eight.

OES also requires agencies to answer 95% of nine one one calls within twenty seconds. Oakland had not met this standard either. We collected and analyzed data from Cal OES for Oakland and Pure Cities for 2023, the most recent complete year of data. Pure Cities had similar populations, crime rates, and were located within our labor market and were selected with input from the police department. The pure cities were Anaheim, Bakersfield, Sacramento, San Jose, San Francisco, Long Beach, and Fresno.

As exhibit nine in the audit report shows, we found Oakland answered fewer of its calls within the fifteen second standard and underperformed all of its peer cities. Oakland also underperformed its peers by having the highest proportion of nine one one calls that waited more than sixty seconds before being answered. Nearly a a third of calls took longer than a minute to answer in 2023. On average, the total time Oakland callers spent on nine one one calls to the police department lasted half a minute or more than call callers of peer cities in 2023. The delays were driven by call wait times.

Oakland's fifty five second call wait times was a longer call wait time than those of the seven other peer agencies. The various components of nine one one calls are shown in exhibit 11, which shows that long wait times resulted in longer overall call duration in Oakland. Longer wait times are associated with a higher rate of calls disconnected by the caller. These are classified as abandoned calls. Exhibit 13 here shows eight separate line charts.

Oakland is in the upper left corner compared to the other seven peer cities. The vertical axis for each of these charts shows the percentage of calls answered within fifteen seconds. The higher the line, the higher the percentage of calls answered within fifteen seconds. The horizontal axis shows each hour of the day starting at the midnight hour and ending at the 11:00 hour, 11PM. The exhibit shows how Oakland's percent of nine one one calls answered within fifteen seconds drops dramatically and fluctuates throughout the day and more than other jurisdictions.

This exhibit also shows the proportion of nine one one calls the police department answered within fifteen seconds decreased after 5AM. In 2023, during the AM hour, the department answered an average of 74% of nine one one calls within fifteen seconds, decreasing to 35% at 8AM. And this drop has occurred consistently since 2015. Since 2020, vacancy rates in the police communications division have remained consistently over 10% hitting a high of 24% in 2021. Filling vacancies by improving hiring and retention efforts in the police communication center is an outstanding audit recommendation our office made in an audit issued back in 2017 and has been an ongoing concern in Oakland.

Vacancies mean fewer dispatchers available to meet the minimum staffing standards, increased reliance on overtime, and higher risk of burnout. Since 2020 or January 2020, the police emergency communication center was not able to consistently meet its minimum staffing standards. Current minimum staffing standards which guide allocation to dispatch staff throughout the day do not reflect current call volume. Highest call taker staffing levels are not aligned with an average day's peak call volume. This leads to inconsistent performance.

More specifically, minimum staffing does not increase with higher call volume during commute hours leading to a drop in nine one one call answering speed. Average calls per hour increased from 6,000 to over 12,000 from 5AM to 8AM while minimum staffing remained constant. Assigned staffing should match demand for service. Not adjusting minimum staffing standards for workload contributes to uneven performance. There are tools available to assist the police department in updating its minimum staffing standards for call volume including a feature in the state's emergency call tracking system, eCATS.

The state's model uses an agency's historical nine one one call volume to estimate staffing levels needed to maintain call answering speeds within state standards and is provided free of charge to California agencies. The Sacramento and San Jose police departments use this model to help determine appropriate call taker staff. Staffing. The ECATS recommended staffing levels are shown in the gray bars in exhibit 21. And more closely follows the number of emergency calls represented by the red line compared to the teal bars which shows Oakland Police Department's minimum staffing at each hour of the day.

The exhibit shows that OPD's minimum staffing does not align with the call volume. We recommend that the police department use a staffing model that considers call volume such as the one provided by the state's ECATS. We found that the police department's deviations from the state's ECATS staffing model predicted less timely handling of nine one one calls. Dispatchers trained to deescalate and obtain essential information to assess situations, but we observe callers becoming upset when they did not know when police would arrive. Talk time increases when callers become agitated, which delays responses and ability to answer other 911 calls.

Oakland dispatchers do not consistently inform callers when their calls have been sent to dispatch. We made two recommendations to address outdated minimum staffing standards and improve call answering speeds. The first recommendation was to the police communications division to adjust minimum staffing to reflect call volume using the staffing recommendations from ECATS as guidance. And this would include revisiting the current shift structure and adjust as needed to ensure that schedules reflect call volume and staffing needs. The second recommendation was that the police communications division establish a practice of letting callers know when their incident has been referred to dispatch.

Both these recommendations are in the context of the police department's continual efforts to fill vacancies in emergency communications center. The second finding was is that limited English speakers encounter service delays due to a limited number of bilingual 911 call takers. The US census indicates 10% of Oakland households did not have an English proficient individual in 2023. The most common languages among limited English speaking households are Spanish and Asian or Pacific Island languages based on US census data for 2023. Just as for other city services, language could pose a barrier to obtaining assistance.

The time sensitive and life threatening nature of emergencies make language access especially important. The city has recognized the importance of language access in its service delivery. The equal access to services ordinance requires the city to provide the same level of service for limited English speakers of languages spoken by at least 10,000 residents. In Oakland, these languages are Spanish and Chinese. And Chinese comprises Mandarin and Cantonese speakers.

To process calls from limited English speakers, the police department uses bilingual dispatchers or third party interpreters contracted through the state. For fiscal year twenty three-twenty four, the communications division reported having two Cantonese speaking dispatchers, 15 Spanish speaking dispatchers, and one Laotian speaking dispatcher. There have not been enough bilingual staff to process calls from limited English speakers and the number of interpreter requests for 911 calls have increased since 2019 as shown in exhibit 24. In 2024, the police emergency communication center used interpreters to handle more than 17,000 calls in 41 languages. Most of these requests, 89 Spanish, 5% were for Cantonese, and 2% were for Mandarin.

The process of requesting an interpreter takes multiple steps including identifying the language, requesting interpretation, and waiting for the interpreter to get on the line. By definition, interpretation requires information being spoken twice, once in English and once another in another language. Interpreted calls are an average five minutes or on average five minutes longer than the average nine one one call with some languages taking longer to secure an interpreter than others. During our audits, staff reported that interpreters do not always provide quality interpretation and delays are compounded for callers with fire or medical emergencies as interpreters are not consistently transferred with the caller to the fire department. Exhibit 27 here shows how callers needing interpretation services in Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Vietnamese resulted in longer talk times for 911 calls.

The disparity in call duration between interpreted calls and staff handled calls is significant when every second of delay could increase the risk of life threatening and life altering outcomes. Administrative instruction one forty five requires the police and fire departments to conduct regular assessments to determine the department's ability to provide the same level of service to limited English speakers. Using bilingual dispatchers to take calls eliminates delays from interpretation and risk of reduced interpretation quality. The police department's target of one full time employee for Spanish and Chinese each are not enough to ensure availability of bilingual dispatchers limited for limited English speakers all day and every day. In addition, the police department's language access policy does not describe how dispatchers should handle nine one one calls from limited English speakers.

Finally, officers are not always aware when a caller is a limited English speaker which could lead to further delays when they arrive on the scene. In addition to ensuring language access on emergency lines, it is also important for the non emergency line to be accessible for limited English speakers. In February 2024, the police department implemented an automated phone tree on its non emergency line. Exhibit 29 shows how the police department's non emergency phone tree successfully decreased call volume and caller abandonment rates. But the initial greeting that informs callers that the phone tree is available in Spanish, Cantonese, and Mandarin is only in English and is not spoken in Spanish, Cantonese, or Mandarin.

The city's equal access ordinance requires departments to maintain recorded telephonic messages in threshold languages and notes that these messages should provide basic information including the availability of language assistance. And to improve service to limited English speakers, we made five recommendations. The police communications division should develop a plan to maximize hourly coverage of bilingual dispatchers. Dispatchers. We also recommended the police communications division adjust its target for bilingual dispatchers based on regular assessments required by the city's administrative instruction one forty five.

And we recommend that the police department update its policies to reflect existing and or best practices in language accessibility such as its current practice of prioritizing use of bilingual dispatchers over third party interpreters, as well as streamlining the transfer of interpreted calls to the fire department and informing officers of police or police service technicians when they are responding to calls involving limited English speakers. Lastly, we recommended that the well, Recommendation six is that the police department analyze and report its progress towards the city's policy goal of providing the same level of service for limited English speaking populations to an appropriate oversight body such as the city council's public safety committee. We also recommended that the communications division translate the initial greeting of the department's non emergency phone tree into threshold languages as defined by the equal access to service ordinance. And the final finding is that a lack of response time targets and outdated beat boundaries reinforce disparities in overall response times. And this finding includes overall response times, not just the handling of emergency calls.

Which the first two findings focused on. The police department does not currently have response time targets or regularly report on response times performance. Lack of targets prevents the department from setting expectations on reasonable response times. Setting measurable performance targets enable an organization to assess its progress towards achieving its objectives. San Jose and San Francisco set targets for police response times.

Key elements to response times include call processing, call queuing, and driving to the scene. Oakland is divided into East And West Boroughs, respectively Borough Of Field Operations 1 and Borough Of Field Operations 2. There are 35 geographic beats, 19 in the West Borough, 16 in the East Borough. Approximately one officer is assigned per beat per shift. This exhibit provides a heat map of calls for service within each of the police beats in 2022.

You can see a wide variance in calls for service per police beat with some beats like 13 y and 13 x receiving fewer than 2,400 per year while other beats have more than four times that number. Our report dives into emergency response times for priority one and priority two calls. Priority one calls are emergencies that pose immediate threats to life. Priority two calls include in progress situations with the potential for violence or damage to property as well as incidents that have just occurred. We found that priority two call response times are longer in the East Borough than in the West Borough.

In 2022, the median priority two response times in the East Borough were two hours longer than in the West Borough. Data issues precluded us from making authoritative comparisons for 2023 and 2024 data, but the disparity in median response times to priority two calls in East And West Boroughs have grown. Exhibit 39 here is a heat map of the response times for priority two calls within each of the police beats in 2022. You can see that none of the beats in the Eastborough had median response times less than one and a half hour, but some in the Westboro did. You can also see that there are 10 beats with median response times greater than four hours.

All of those were in the Eastboro. Longer priority two response times are driven by longer officer dispatch times. Dispatch times are largely determined by when an officer becomes available to respond to a call. Priority two calls are dispatched by patrol area which consists of multiple not citywide meaning that a number of that the number of responding officers are limited to within the East And West Boroughs. Fewer officers in the East Borough resulted in longer officer dispatch times for priority two calls compared to the West Borough.

Notably as shown in exhibit 32, the travel times to priority two calls are similar within each of the boroughs. Despite similar call volume across East And West Boroughs, the East Borough has more priority one calls and calls involving violence. Because the department strives to assign one officer per beat and there are fewer beats in the East Borough, the East Borough generally has fewer officers responding to more priority one and violence related calls. According to staff, priority one and calls involving violence involved longer on scene times. In 2022, we calculated that Eastborough had eight point nine hours of priority one call workload per week per officer.

We estimated an additional sixty hours of officer time per week is spent to address violence related calls in the Eastboro. And exhibit 37 here shows how the Eastboro had more violence related calls than the Westboro. It suggests that the Eastboro needs more in order to receive the same level of service than the West that the West Borough receives. As I mentioned earlier, priority one calls are emergencies that pose immediate threats to life. Unlike priority two calls, officers are dispatched citywide to respond to priority one calls.

Since 2021, the overall median response time to priority one calls citywide has been nine minutes. However beat 31 z in D. P. East Oakland on the San Leandro border and beats in the hills 13 y, 13 z, 22 y, 25 y and 35 y have longer median response times. Exhibit 39 a provides a heat map of the response times for priority one calls within each of the police beats in twenty twenty two.

Given the high priority nature of these calls, it is important for the city to use existing technology available to minimize response times to these calls. The police department has installed GPS in its patrol cars but has not activated that technology. According to policy, department dispatches priority one calls to the officer assigned to the particular beat, but that is not necessarily the closest unit. The fire department is piloting use of GPS technology through its automatic resource locator to dispatch the nearest fire units to calls. Using GPS to automatically calculate the closest response unit for priority one calls could minimize response times as well as improve officer safety and enhance data collection on response times.

Use of GPS in patrol cars is subject to meet and confer. So we made three recommendations to address overall response times. That the police department adopt targets for each stage of its response time, set a process to revisit these targets as needed, and regularly report on its performance. The police department should update beat boundaries considering factors such as call volume, call types, and priorities, and officer and supervisory capacity. We recommended that the police department activate the GPS in its patrol cars to enable dispatchers to dispatch the nearest officer to an incident to minimize travel times.

And this recommendation again may be subject to meet and confer. The police department responded to all 10 of our recommendations and those responses as well as their implementation targets are attached to the back of the audit report. So the audit benefited from the cooperation of many departments. We thank the office of the inspector general, the fire department, the department of race and equity, office of the city attorney, and the Information Technology Department for their support during the audit. We especially appreciate the city administration and the staff of the Oakland Police Department for their accessibility, cooperation, and insight during the audit process.

And that concludes our prepared presentation. The QR code there takes you to a contact tree through which you can connect with us in various ways. And in addition to being posted in an agenda packet, the audit report and the response is posted on our website, oaklandauditor.com. We hope to have this audit referred to the full city council. And we are here to entertain any questions. And I also see that there's members of the city administration and the police department here.

Thank you so much council member Houston for your your work on this. This is so comprehensive and you have uplifted such important issues and what I see is honestly an abject failure of government. Communities have a right to public safety and to be clear, these 911 calls not only police response times but also fire and medical response. And this is showing such clear inequities in the city of Oakland. It's upsetting but I think it's it's we should all be upset when we see this report. So thank you. I just want to just take care of a logistical thing. Council member Houston, do you have somebody in the room next to you who's over the age

Present in the

room. Present in the room who's over 18. Can you disclose that?

Hold on. Yes. I do. It's my mother.

Okay.

Could you state the name?

Can you state the name?

Jodine Houston. Her name is Jodine ine Houston.

Okay. Thank you so much, council member Houston.

And and that's and that city auditor Houston, that council member Houston. We we we that's what you had called him.

I was referring to you council member Houston but yes, noted. We've got two Yes, Hustons in the

yes.

I did want to start with a few questions. One to city administrator, Joe DeBry. Because it's really important that we actually act upon the recommendations. Thank you so much for outlining some very actionable things for us to do with the 12 recommendations on page 61 of the report. Can we come back to this body in three months to see what is update on the implementation of these recommendations?

Absolutely. We'd want to schedule it at rules but for sure.

Okay. And I just want to note too that one of the communities that was highlighted in this report is the non English speaking community. Some of the worst nine one one response times are the Vietnamese and Mandarin and Chinese speaking communities that I represent in District 2. And it is I I had noted in the report that city staff are struggling with doing outreach into those communities in order to recruit those nine one dispatchers. My office, I have those connections.

I wanna help to ensure that we have those bilingual dispatchers in our dispatch call center. Okay. Colleagues, any questions? I'll go with council member Fife.

Thank you chair Wong. Through the chair to auditor Houston, thank you for this comprehensive audit. I know it's a lot of work that you have to undertake with also limited staffing. So I appreciate this information but I do have articulate for members of the public that the city council has no jurisdiction on determining what of the audit requirements that the Oakland Police Department can do. Right?

Because Because of our charter, charter rules two eighteen we cannot direct them to make any changes to how they engage. Our authorization is only budgetary. So how then are you working with or I I should say the the city administrator's office working with the police department to ensure that these audit recommendations are actuated?

Well, thank you council member Fife. Well, I'm encouraged that there has been commitment to implementing the recommendations as reading the management response provided by the police department as part of the response attached to the back of the report. So there's some level of agreement which is the first step. We're glad to have been able to work collaboratively with the police department. And we're proud that we made recommendations that didn't that really think reflect the reality that the city's in.

We don't have a bunch of money to throw out this but there are things that could be done right now with existing resources to implement those recommendations. We follow-up on all the audit recommendations until they're implemented. So we have our semi annual audit recommendation follow-up process through which we publicly report. In fact, we're gonna have one on December 2 before the city council. We're going to be following up on all the recommendations and that one is for the period through 06/30/2025.

But we will be hounding the administration until they're implemented. And although there is a like a non interference clause whereby staff to do anything. We really do rely on the city council to provide a strong oversight of all the departments including the police department and doing things like requesting and demanding updates on the progress. That's totally within the purview of the city council and this committee in particular.

Can somebody thank you.

Thank you. So when is the when would be the update for your the next audit that you would be coming to counsel with because I I did hear chair Wong asked for this to come back in three months. But if you have a regularly scheduled audit where this would be coming back anyway, when would that be?

So the December 2 follow-up, our follow-up, our status status report report on on audit recommendations reflects a period through June 30, so it takes a while. Right? That's six months after. So we don't know yet when this when we're going to be completing in house, like behind the scenes, a follow-up process where we're reaching out to all the different departments on outstanding audit recommendations, getting the status and verifying the status of the audit recommendations. That's going to commence real soon because the next one is for the period through 12/31/2025.

I don't know yet though when we're gonna be done with the report and then when we're gonna be able to present it publicly to the city council. But I will keep you posted on that. Also, if there is if if this committee wanted to have more regular updates and they wanted to bring this item to discuss, I'd be happy to come at any time.

Thank you for your responses. Thank you.

Council member Brown.

Oh. I I want so the person who managed our audit recommendation follow-up process is performance audit manager Noble, she can tell you more details about the timing of our audit recommendation follow-up.

Yeah. Council member, thank you for the question. So we would anticipate following up on this report for the as of December 31 as auditor Houston mentioned. Typically, aim to have that out three months after the date. So we would expect to publish in March and then follow that up with a presentation in the spring. Thank you.

Council member Brown.

Perfect. Well thank you so much auditor Houston and just for members of the public you can go on to the the website and there's actually been so many audits that Auditor Houston and the team have performed that have been very insightful and really working to keep us up to date. I appreciate our monthly check ins just kind of on some of the work. You know I guess I am curious if this is the kind of appropriate avenue at this time I guess through the chair to the administration and or OPD. I feel like those recommendations were quite clear around minimum patrol and dispatch standards, hiring bilingual call takers, establishing response time targets, updating boundaries as well as activating the GPS patrolling vehicles.

And so just was curious if there was like an official kind of response to those recommendations and a timeline for implementation.

And to the chair there there is on page 85 of the report or 86 is the city administration's response. And for each of the recommendations there is a target date for completion. Some of them are a little bit further out, the ones that are more elaborate such as redrawing all of the BEAT boundaries. Whereas others are are have a target date to be implemented next month, you know, such as item two that the police communications division should establish a practice of letting know when their incident has been referred to dispatch. OPD is projecting that to be done again next month. Others are December 26, June '26. So each recommendation has a projected timeline based on the department's capabilities.

Excellent. Thank you administrator DeVries. For the specific timeline around activating the GPS and patrol vehicles, the timeline on that one?

As I understand it, in order to activate that there's actually a use policy that has to be approved by this body and it went to the PAC in 2024. So both for fire and for police, they they need to have a use policy that you adopt because it is considered surveillance technology even though it's surveilling our own staff. My understanding is that the fire and police have drafted those policies. They they oh, I I was there when they took them to the PAC and then they've redrafted and are engaged in a meet and confer with our labor partners. And when that meet and confer process is done then they can bring it forward to this committee for approval and then they can turn the system on.

Excellent. Thank So

sorry. Can you just expand on that? So it's already been presented to the privacy advisory committee. Where where are they in that deliberation?

That's correct. The privacy advisory commission made on both the fire department and police department's use policies a little over a year ago. Uh-huh. At that point, we were about to launch the CAD. As you may recall, it was the brand new computer aided dispatch system. The We felt that launching CAD immediately was important and so we delayed implementing the tracking system so that the rest of the CAD could be implemented, which took place. After that, the departments needed to engage with their labor partners. And I believe for OPD that's taken some time just because of competing priorities. Okay. But I I do know that they have a policy that, we we have a PAC recommendation.

I think the big point of contention during that conversation was the data retention period, how long we would hold on to that data. And I think that both departments have diff I don't recall the exact retention periods that they're proposing, but all of that will be presented to you to take to the full counsel when they're done with that meet and confer process.

Can I ask a follow-up? So this is data that is surveilling our own employees like OPD. This and that is the entirety of the CAD system. There's no surveillance of members of the public in the CAD system and it's held being held up?

Not for this particular tracking system. Okay. This is a tracking device that is in every vehicle and the idea is to then allow dispatch to know which vehicle is closest to be to be deployed. Okay. And and so it is technically surveillance technology and then has to go through that process and that that was started. Due to the potential discipline for an employee that is why it becomes a meet and confer issue which is why it then becomes a conversation between management and labor.

Okay. I've noted in my own ride alongs with OPD that they could benefit from this technology. Sorry. Council member

Brown. Okay.

Council member Houston. I do you have a question? Go ahead.

Yes. Mine is more of a statement. Thank you auditor Houston. The audit was very disturbing to me when it comes to Oakland East Oakland. When you said when when you broke up Burroughs and you said East Borough, is that 567 how does that how's that borough broken up auditor Houston?

Yes. Council member thank you for that question. We have an appendix. I I kind of don't want to I don't know from the top of my head how the council districts fit, but we have a geographic we have a map on appendix b page 68 and also on I don't know if it neatly lines with the council district is what I'm trying to say. And you could also see them in Exhibit 35 on page 53, in exhibit 39 a on page 57.

But I think you the entirety of District 7 is in the Eastern Borough. Much of District 6 I think maybe even all of District 6 might also be in that East Borough. And then I'm kind of reluctant to to guess what 5 And 4 might also be in the East Borough.

Could I leave the chair? It it it's a bureau of field operations and the b f o one and is the West all the way to about 23rd Avenue and B F 02 is from 23rd Avenue to the San Leandro border. So Police Areas 12, And 3 are in BFO 1 and Areas 45, And 6 are in BFO 2.

Yeah. Thank you.

Yeah. I I

know those beats.

Yeah. I I I think the the hubs, right, you have the Eastmont hub for the East and then the the main building here on

Prod PAB. Correct.

Yes. But

but that's very disturbing to hear that our response time in East is is is the lowest, and our tax base is the highest, especially with the auto dealerships dealerships and the businesses on the corridor. It should be equal across the city on response time. I mean, our our my my district and and Noel's and Kevin's district president should be treated just across the board like everyone else. It's very disturbing of of the audit to me, that what my constituents', response time is very disturbing. But I it has nothing to do with your audit.

I appreciate the audit. I appreciate the details. I'm a I'm a go through it thoroughly, but I just wanted to make a comment that it's very disturbing to see that our response time is is lower than everyone else's. So thank you.

Yeah. I I completely agree. It it's totally just that's a racial inequity right there.

Big time.

Yeah. I also wanted Big What? You wanted something else, council member Houston?

No. Was telling my mother was whacked because she's because it's she she she she dedicated her life to East Oakland. There, she's 89. I'm with her now, and she's been in that house all her life and she should have the same response time as everyone else. But yet, I was talking to my mom. I'll go on mute. I'm sorry.

Mhmm. I also wanted to note, actually for the public's education, what is how do you define a priority one phone call? Auditor Houston.

Yes. So we have those definitions outlined in the report. Excuse me as I just kind of make my way to it. There's a box. So priority one calls involve immediate threat to life involving violence and or weapons.

Any officer in Oakland can respond to a priority one call. Officers may be pulled from lower priority calls to respond to those priority one incidents. Priority two calls involve in progress situations with the potential for violence or damage to property as well as incidents that have just occurred. Common priority two calls include 911 hang ups, disturbing the peace, alarms, vehicles.

Okay. The national standard I believe for a priority one phone call is five minutes and we are nearly double that is

Nine minutes.

Yeah. Nine minutes. Yes. I think well, anyways, any other comments? Otherwise oh, that's right. Thank you. How many public comments? Okay. We'll go to public comment.

Thank you. I wanna call your name. Please approach the podium. State your name for the record. You do have one minute. Please note that if you're participating via Zoom, raise your hands. You're easily identified. We will take in person public speakers before Zoom. Rajni Mandal and Blair Beakman. Moving to our online speakers. Rajne Mandal, please unmute yourself and begin your one minute comment.

Rajne Mandal, District 4. I wanted to comment on the auditor's findings about the police speed mail. I agree that we need to reassess how we distribute patrol and draw out the boundaries of police beats. My current beat, 13, has zero to one officers on patrol for a geographic size larger than the city of Piedmont. But it's not just geographical size, it's also the prevalence of crime and equity that needs to be heated. I don't think the beat maps have been reassessed for over fifty years, so I hope that the results of this audit stem an effort to reassess our beat maps and more efficiently distribute patrols. Thank you.

Thank you. Moving to our next public speaker, Blair Beekman, please unmute yourself and begin your one minute comment.

Hi, Blair Beekman. I started hacking away at better tech accountability for local Bay Area communities back in 2014. CAD things are really important way to get accountability practices and accessibility for the everyday public. Is that still the CAD process still accessible to the public as it used to be? Just to ask.

And very much of a thank you that you're talking about how to develop different languages within the city government. I've been trying for years in Oakland to ask about how we can have more languages within the city council meeting process. San Jose, where I used to live, has done some amazing good work to bridge that gap. And, you know, we came from an era of the 80s and Reagan where, you know, English only was the standard and all other languages were illegal. We haven't got out of that mind frame. We're trying to get out of that. So good luck what you're building at this time with this issue. It sounds like really important good work. Let's hope to work with city council.

That concludes your public speakers for item five.

With that, I'll entertain a motion or council member five.

Can you I'll move to receive and file this in this reporting. Does this need to go to full city council through the chair to the parliamentarian? So

you can either receive it here or you can move it to city council for consideration. So it's up to you how you wanna handle it. I do believe Mr. Houston suggested recommending it go to city council but it's up to the body how they wanna handle it.

So through the chair to auditor Houston, do you wanna make another full presentation at the full city council? Is that what you're requesting?

I would. Yes. Thank you, councilor.

Okay. Let's honor the man's request. Alright.

I'll make that motion.

Second.

We have a motion made by council member five seconded by council member Brown to receive and forward this item to the 12/02/2025 city council agenda on on roll. Council member five council member Brown? Aye. Council member five? Aye. Thank you. Council member Houston? Aye. And chair Wong?

Aye. This

motion passes with four ayes To receive and forward this item to the December 2, city council agenda on consent moving to

Take the jacket.

Item six. Receive our information report on the city programs responding to domestic violence, and you do have two speakers for this item.

Nicole. Thank you. And who from staff? And and just some I want to make some remarks before we turn it over to staff. But I did last month, the month of October was actually a domestic violence month.

I'm actually a survivor unfortunately both as a child and as an adult in domestic violence and what I had noted is the last time that we had received a report on domestic violence was more than a decade ago. So I thought it was due time that we got an update on what's been happening across OPD and as well as our Department of Violence Prevention in terms of what is happening with our response to domestic violence. So thank you so much. So I'll turn it over to who I see, Lieutenant Campos and Doctor. Joshi to present their reports.

Good evening everyone. Marcos Campos with Oakland Police Department. Just to report back on the request from council member Wong on domestic violence. The special victim section at OPD responsible for investigating domestic violence, human trafficking, and sexual assaults. Right now, we currently have one sergeant and six officers assigned to the domestic violence unit.

The domestic violence unit investigates and focuses on intimate partner violence, child abuse, physical elder abuse, stalking, and intervention services, and long term case management. Our response times we're expecting for in progress calls are five to seven minutes. For priority two calls when the suspect has already been gone is expected the officers respond in ten to fifteen minute calls. There's immediate intervention and safety by arresting the suspect, obtaining criminal protection orders, emergency protection orders. The domestic violence unit is responsible for the long term follow-up.

They primarily focus on repeat domestic violence victim and high risk victims. The case management system for domestic violence year to date, right now they have 3,200 cases in their queue. That means every investigator averages about 620 cases at this time. The new facet that we are using right now is called the gun violence restraining order. The department has obtained a liaison to obtain the gun violence restraining order working with six subject matter experts right now in the field to try to issue and enforce a gun violence restraining order.

With that coming into place through recent legislation, it's more than just a police officer that can obtain a GVRO. It could be the person's employer, it could be a family member, it can be employee at a school. So it opens up to intervention the intervention process other than just law enforcement. OPD domestic violence training, I I will be DVP chief Joshi will be speaking about our partnership with the Department of Violence Prevention. But officers do receive yearly training through advocates and professional training on a year bound basis.

Officers often use a co response method, specifically at Highland Hospital or at the Family Justice Center. And then I'll turn it over to the domestic violence chief. I'm sorry, the Department of Violence Prevention Chief Joshi.

Good evening. We have a couple of slides. I am Holly Joshi, chief for the Department of Violence Prevention. I want to start by thanking this body for requesting this report. So often, I'm here presenting about gun violence, ceasefire, focused deterrence, and not so often do we have a chance to present on the other side of our work which unfortunately, in in more recent times, domestic violence and sex trafficking have increasingly intersected with gun violence as women and girls become victims of gun violence related to domestic violence in this city.

So thank you for the opportunity to present on on our piece of the city's holistic response to domestic violence. So just as a bit of background, again, the Department of Violence Prevention, Prevention, we we are are

one of

the city's youngest departments being around since 2017, just implemented through a city charter. We're charged with reducing gun violence, domestic violence, and commercial sexual exploitation in Oakland. And to do this, we invest in immediate crisis response services and near term interventions that focus on stabilizing victims and providing additional supports. We also invest in longer term intensive support services for individuals caught in cycles of violence. And in order to do this work, we perform three primary functions with essentially two teams.

The first team that we supervise is a direct practice team made up of city employees. Those city employees perform intensive life coaching, violence intervention work with individuals at the highest risk of imminent group and gender based violence. And then additionally, we have an administrative and contracts team that works directly with 21 different community based organizations to deliver a range of community violence intervention services, including domestic violence and sex trafficking prevention and intervention. Additionally, we work to build capacity among the ecosystem of community violence intervention workers. We always say that we want to be more than a funder in the city of Oakland.

We want to provide trainings, capacity building, thought partnerships, supports to strengthen the ecosystem, and ultimately provide referral pathways that create wraparound supports for survivors. I am going to introduce you to and turn it over to Sarah Serenkrist, who is our gender based violence specialist and program planner, to go through the theory of change and the specific strategies that we're funding this grant year.

Thank you, chief Yoshi, and thank you to the public safety committee. My name is Sarah Serenkrist, and I'm the gender based violence program planner with the Department of Violence Prevention. And before we kind of go into the services that we're currently funding in this grant year, I wanted to just go over the theory of change that the department uses when thinking about domestic violence. So we understand domestic violence is a learned behavior rooted in misogyny, historical violence, and prior trauma. Many survivors of DV remain in unsafe situations due to fears associated with leaving, financial situations, and involvement of children.

We know that survivors often need immediate stabilization services and longer term intensive support services for themselves and their families. We fund services that individuals change their circumstances, mindsets, support systems to avoid future violence. In doing this, we seek to reduce incidents of domestic violence, experiences of trauma, and the footprint of the criminal justice system We also wanna note that this report was we were asked to kind of focus on domestic violence but in our department we recognize the intersections of domestic violence with commercial sexual exploitation that happen here in Oakland every day as well as gun violence as chief Yoshi pointed out. So we just wanna note that a lot of the agencies that we fund that you see in the report and that I'll be the services that I'll be talking about momentarily also support services of support survivors of commercial sexual exploitation. Exploitation.

So in this current grant year, the DBP funds core services and support services for those impacted by domestic violence. For our core services, we fund crisis navigation so crisis responders connect survivors to services including emergency shelter and legal services and use flexible funds to pay for basic needs. They also make referrals to life coaching and longer term support services. Our life coaching services, our life coaches have daily communication with their clients, use flexible funds to pay for basic needs and refer clients to support services funded by the DBP. And our final core service that we fund are hotlines.

For domestic violence, we fund the Family Violence Law Center to provide a twenty four hour hotline for victims in crisis. Hotline staff can provide safety, planning, immediate referrals, and other support services for victims in crisis. And then we have a group of support services. Housing is being one of the biggest needs that we see obviously here in the Bay Area. So we have a range of housing support services for victims and survivors including emergency housing that could be shelter beds, hotel vouchers or hotel stays.

We also have money that we can use for relocation and rental assistance, relocation for a survivor who might need to immediately leave their circumstance and get to safety, and rental assistance for a survivor who may have the person who has caused harm already be removed from the situation but now doesn't have the financial ability to pay for the rent and stay in their home with their family. We also have transitional housing which is six to twelve months of safe temporary housing with a link to permanent housing at the end of that time. Our other support services include healing support which can be individual therapy as well as group or peer support. Groups are tailored to meet the needs of specific populations impacted by domestic violence both linguistically and culturally. And then of course legal assistance being a huge one for this population.

We have a range of legal support services including just advice and counseling, preparation of paperwork, filing of orders of protection, family law orders, immigration related services, and full representation in court. And then we finally want to touch upon the services that we provide currently through our school violence intervention and prevention program. In that team, we have gender based violence specialists as well as violence interrupters and life coaches. And the gender based violence specialists use a life coaching model to support youth impacted by domestic violence or unhealthy relationships that incorporates motivational interviewing, cognitive behavioral therapy techniques, and coordination of critical services to support youth in changing their mindsets, behaviors, support systems, and environments to increase safety and create pathways to opportunities. So those are our core services and we've kind of outlined them more in the reports for you to see the funding and the estimates number served.

And that's our presentation so we're happy to take questions.

Yeah. I have some questions. So I did a comparison of the 2013 report that was generated versus the one we just received. And one thing that I thought was really noteworthy is that in 2012, actually through 2009 to 2012, the number of cases that came before OPD was hovered around seven thousand to eight thousand. Whereas the most recent report, that number is down to three thousand.

Let me I I can pull up the exact number. But is that reduction why is, is that a good thing or is it because we're not getting the data? I would love to know why we're seeing such a drastic trend. And then furthermore, the number of assignments that we're getting, it used to be 5,000 in 2012, 3,000 the year before that and now we're down to 1,000.

I'll definitely let OPD answer but I just Okay. To speak from a survivor's perspective I can also say that we think domestic violence is one of the most underreported types of violence because of many many barriers including immigration status and just shame and fear. And then often that person someone who may be causing harm might be in a position of power and then the person who is being harmed does not feel able to come forward and and speak to it. So Yeah. Just take the numbers with that caveat.

Yeah, so I do think it's a combination of factors. One being under reporting. Other we're targeting the repeat offenders.

And

then just due to the under reporting, we're not getting all the cases to the investigative unit until maybe sometimes years after. So you'll see sometimes our years will fluctuate because sometimes victims will often report cases years after when they've got the appropriate support system to make such report.

But do you perceive there to be unmet need right now? We have six investigators in the department. Or is it merely just we're getting lower numbers?

The reports themselves are the reports that are being taken by the patrol officer responding to 91 one calls. So it it although the caseload is high for investigators, it it would have to be a patrol officer responding to those calls first.

Okay. I do want a follow-up on how we're using like the number of restraining orders we're actually issuing, especially in light of what happened this last year. Actually, sixty eight percent of mass shootings, there was a well documented study were actually tied to individuals who had a history of domestic violence. And I wanna make sure that we are using that tool to the fullest extent that we can here in the city of Oakland, especially given what happened this last week. And so that that's something that I didn't see it in this report but I will request just an informational report on how we're using that gun restraining order here in the city of Oakland.

So we do use the emergency protection order that allows us to confiscate firearms from a suspect's residence right now. So we've had that for several years. The gun violence restraining order being the new tool that law enforcement may use in the state, it being fairly new and it's still going through the training stages is still being used. So we are still still teaching all of the patrol officers how to utilize it. It's also a tool that the public can use as well. So maybe there may be some some use of it as far as through awareness.

That's great. It sounds like we could do some training of the public. Is somebody somebody else from OPD wants to give remarks or make a comment here?

Yes.

First name's Omar Dazekiros. I'm the acting captain of our criminal investigation division. And I think, yeah, just to answer your question, council member, I think we are extremely short staffed right now. I think our operating strength is in the 500 number. And not to distance ourselves from domestic violence, but just looking across the board.

And if we look at criminal investigation division as a whole, and we look at the robbery division, there's only five investigators for the entire city. And year to date, we're at 1,530. And then for felony assault investigators, there's only five investigators. We only have 10 investigators for homicide and we have just shut down our closed our our cold case unit. And we have only one investigator there that's now loaned back.

And I believe since 2023, they have solved over 25 cold case homicides. For burglary division, there's only four for the entire division. I'm sorry, for the entire department. We have no stolen vehicle investigator. For general crimes division, that's for investigating all assaults within the department that are not firearms related.

There's only three investigators And they're also looking at all online reports. So just to go back to domestic violence, we are extremely short staffed. There are too many cases to be handled for these investigators and for the officers and I think it's unjust for the victims and for the community of Oakland. And that's where it comes down to where many investigators are working long long hours. They're coming in on their weekends and they're having to stay overtime just to try to make those cases and to try to work and reach out to those victims, identify critical victims and also obtain any type of evidence so it doesn't go lost such as video surveillance and etcetera.

Yep, noted. I noted also the difference in the cases per investigator in the most recent report versus the one that we had in 2013. So it's a marked difference. Okay. Any questions from colleagues? Councilmember Brown.

So first question, Councilmember Chair Wong, from that report that you were looking at from 2013, can you highlight how many investigators it reflects? I'm just curious.

I think it was six. It looks like six as well. Okay

so it seems like maybe you could speak to it that consistently maybe there's just six investigators assigned. But I did have a couple questions about maybe first off kind of as what Councilmember Wong mentioned around just you know I guess I'm curious what is the actual year over year trends with some of the information that was provided so maybe perhaps we can have this as a report back just so that we can see the information a little bit with more frequency because I think it's not good to assume kind of what's going on in the situation. I do agree that more than likely folks are maybe not responding. I do want to highlight that a lot of the partners that are currently helping to assist community members all you know really good partners especially Love Never Fails and some of the work that they are doing so really want to thank them for their work and the DVP. But specifically I guess one question that I had based on the report it says officers are expected to arrive within five to seven minutes for domestic violence calls.

How does that target compare with some of the actual observed response times? That would be my first question.

So I didn't check the response times like per CAD but this is just our expectation that we have through domestic violence unit. Especially for an in progress crime where there we believe a great bodily injury is occurring to the victim.

I see. I I think that would be something we would want to add so that we're actually getting the information around the response times for that. And then what are the current requirements for mandatory arrest for d d v calls?

So we do follow state law which they say the appropriate response to an arrest you should make an arrest. But Oakland Police Department policy actually takes it a step further and says you shall make a mandatory arrest. When they do their investigation they try to discover the dominant aggressor and that's when they make an arrest.

I see. Okay. Yeah. I think kind of upon reflection really grateful for the report and bringing this forward. I would be interested in seeing this kind of as a year over year just so that we can actually compare the information.

Yeah,

I agree. Thank you. Council member five.

Thank you chair Wong. I just wanted to state in response to what officer Dasakiro said. It's it's concerning about the numbers that were listed in terms of officers and where they're stationed. I think it's important to review the potential of moving officers that don't require a badge and a gun to do that work to move them out of those spaces where non sworn officers can do do the jobs that current sworn officers are in. There was a report that came earlier this year I believe, I think 's maybe come before the council a couple times that said there's at least 38 officers that can be reassigned to different places.

I think we should seriously explore whether that can happen even if it's not 38, 40 officers. We should consider if or I I would love OPD to consider whether those individuals can be moved to do the work that would address sex trafficking and DV and other issues that are prevalent in community. Thank you council member chair Wong for talking about mass shooters and that the percent there's a high percentage over fifty percent, sixty eight I believe. Sixty eight. That have past experience with domestic violence.

So knowing that these numbers are what they are, I think it's it it behooves this body to look at where we can move folks that are sworn to do police work to get them to do that work to help with these cases around domestic violence, sex trafficking to to do that work. Right? So I I just want us to consider that as the public safety committee coming up sometime in the near future. This is critical and thank you for bringing this forward and I'm I'm deeply sorry that you experienced the scars that you've experienced as a result of the domestic violence but I'm sure it's given you the experience to come and

do I this am speaking on behalf of everybody else who's experienced it. Thank you. Okay. Well, I'll entertain a motion. Excuse me. I always forget public speaker. Public speakers.

Moving to our public speakers, when you call your name, please approach the podium. If you're participating via Zoom, please raise your hands so you're easily identified. Blair Beekman and Jennifer Finley. Moving to our Zoom speakers, Blair Beekman, you may unmute yourself and begin your one minute comment.

Hi. Thank you, Blair Beekman. I lived in the Bay Area from 2014 well, previous 2014 till about 2022. I moved to San Diego in 2022. I'm back in the Bay Area for the next few months, so here I am. Hi to everyone. I wanted to comment quickly that in San Diego at this time, they're working on the rape kit issues and how those can be completed easier, more efficiently at this time. And it's a sensitive issue, and good luck that conversations

needed to

be had about rate kits. I don't know how you're working on it in Oakland, but they're they're having those better conversations now that have been difficult to have. So good luck how you can address the future of rape kits and what it means, the backlog, how to work on the backlog issues. Thank you for your time.

Thank you for your comment, Mr. Lose your public speakers for item six.

Okay. Colleagues, I'll entertain a motion. Counts councilmember Brown.

Excellent. I'll make a motion to move this item to the next city council or receive and file?

Receive and file.

Receive and file in committee.

Second. Thank you. We have a motion made by council member Brown, seconded by council member Fife to receive and file this in the public safety committee. On roll, council member Brown? Aye. Council member Fife? Aye. Council member Houston? Aye. And chair Wong. Aye. This motion passes with four ayes to receive the file to send the public safety committee. Moving to item four, Receive an informational report on the Oakland Police Department on crime, crime trends, and crime reduction activities in the city of Oakland, and you do have three speakers for this item.

Good evening. I am deputy chief Anthony Tedesco. I oversee the Bureau of Field Operations One. That's West Oakland. I'm here with my counterpart from BFO two, deputy chief Casey Johnson.

And we are going to provide a report on the crime data and strategies for each of the different areas. Given the number of items, I will try to move expeditiously and answer questions as we go. Starting with citywide data, there is mostly good news to report. We have reductions in nearly all categories. If you look across these crime categories, we're down in homicides, rape, robbery, aggravated assault.

Really, despite all of the staffing challenges that you heard about, a combination of collaboration technology have really come through for the city, and we are trending in the right direction. I'm gonna keep just moving through. We would expect in the summer months, this is showing the data from April to September. We would expect in the summer or the warmer months some of these points to begin to spike, but with the exception of aggravated assault, we are trending in the right direction. So robbery, I think most tremendously down thousands of robberies.

We are experiencing an incredible downward trend in robbery, and the city continues to head in a positive direction. To put that in context, year to date, we have less than half of the robberies we had in 2023, down more than a thousand robberies from 2024. Those are really incredible reductions. Assault with a firearm. The police department continues to work with DVP and other partners.

This is a key area. And again, we would expect based on historical trend that in the warmer summer months that we would see more aggravated assaults. But the good news is that we are still significantly down year to date in this this category. I'm going to move into the area presentations into for the interest of time. I oversee area ones, two, and three.

Captain Steve Terribio oversees area one. And looking at area one, we're seeing trends in a very positive direction. So looking at aggravated assaults, I can happily report that we are seeing a deceleration there year to date. So the strategies that captain Toribio is enacting, working with our bids in the downtown, working with Acorn Town Center and businesses along 7th Street, working with many of the different businesses in the downtown area to bring safety to that space is proving effective. I think that the collaboration in those spaces has been critical to our success and I am very happy to be able to work with Captain Trebeo.

Think that his ability to foster community partnerships has been critical to the success in Area 1. Moving to Area 2, I think I can move through all of the areas or I can pause at each of the areas for any questions depending on what you would like. I'll keep going. Area 2 I want to highlight that we have seen a pretty significant shift from commercial and residential burglaries. As an important point to highlight, this is Captain Smith has been very focused on this.

We saw a very large rash of commercial burglaries through 2023 and 2024 in Area 2. Many of our businesses were being targeted. Captain Smith has focused on this area with high visibility patrol and with our crime reduction teams, and we've seen a reversal in this trend. But, consequently, we have seen an increase in residential burglaries in a few neighborhoods, Golden Gate, Rockridge, Temescal. And so captain Smith has worked very closely with our criminal investigators, with our crime analysis to resolve this issue, and it is trending now in a positive direction.

60% decrease in robberies in Area 2 in this reporting period. Again, I want to highlight, I think that really the robbery trends are really pretty remarkable. Area 3, a heavy focus in Area 3 on human trafficking and illegal casinos, illegal gambling shacks. We've seen a fair amount of violence and homicides related to these two issues, particularly along the International Corridor. We've been doing operations every week related to these issues, and we've seen a pretty tremendous reduction.

And again, you see that in all categories in Area 3. Captain, experienced captain. A lot of different issues in Area 3. Everything from the issues around Lakeshore, Avenue to the International Corridor, to all of their different residential sections of Area 3. I think that captain Yu's strategy and his focus has really the the data speaks for itself. If there aren't any questions for me, I will turn it over to my counterpart to go over the East End areas.

Hello, everyone. Deputy Chief Casey Johnson, Chief Tedesco's counterpart in East Oakland. I oversee Areas 45, and six. Much like Chief Tedesco, I'll keep it brief and go over the numbers here. But overall in BFO 2 East Oakland, we have seen a downward trend in crimes.

Pretty significant downward trend. I know our captains have been working extremely hard to reduce crime throughout East Oakland. When looking at Area 4, Area 4 is run by Captain Rojas. Unfortunately, we did see an increase in homicides this time versus last time last year by one homicide, so up 20%. But there was a a really big push to reduce the burglaries and robberies in Area 4, which you saw was a 44% reduction in robberies and a 62% reduction in commercial burglaries throughout Area 4.

Captain Rojas has implemented many strategies when you see his overall Part 1 crime numbers are down 31% year to date, but he has worked closely with our SRS and ceasefire teams to continue to focus on individuals who are driving the violence. When it comes to robberies and assaults, they prioritize the ceasefire strategies and they've really strengthened collaboration with our city leaders and law enforcement partners to include CHP, Alameda County Sheriffs and BART PD. They've also engaged with partners with Dignity Project Dignity and Public Works to really try and reduce the blight and increase community quality of life in Area 4. When looking at Area 5, Area 5 is commanded by captain Feble. Captain Feble has seen a reduction in homicides by 33, as well as in residential burglaries by 46%, and robberies by 7%.

Again, Area 5 has been focusing to reduce all part one violent crimes, which are down by 24% in Area 5. When looking at some of captain Febo's strategies, again, he too focuses on ceasefire strategy, also with intelligence briefings to ensure that our patrol officers have the most up to date intelligence when it comes to escalating violence within our our gang and groups throughout Area 5. Captain Phebble also collaborates with DVP to assist with outreach to involve parties to prevent future violence throughout Area 5 and also has requested the assistance of CHP throughout Area 5 to help with our high injury network as we know that some of our driving in East Oakland has become very erratic and there have been many fatal accidents throughout Area 5. Lastly, we look at Area 6, Area 6 is under the command of captain Dorham. Area 6 is deep East Oakland.

Captain Dorham has done an outstanding job. He leaves the city in reductions in homicides in his area. 19 last year versus 10 this year. So, overall an drop of 47% in homicides in East Oakland. He's also reduced his auto burglaries by 60%.

Last year we saw a big push in the Hegebarger Corridor where there was a very large influx of auto burglaries in that area. And throughout the diligent work with our community partners, the police department, and our stakeholders, really been able to drop that number of auto burglaries and it really kind of make it feel much safer for residents and businesses over there in the Hagibar Corridor. So I appreciate his efforts on that. Some of captain Dorms' strategies when we look at he continues to all of our officers when it comes to groups and gangs in the area. He also works closely with our SRS teams and our ceasefire teams.

He also coordinates weekly meetings with all stakeholders, law enforcement partners, and city leaders to identify priorities of of all of those partners to help our patrol officers reduce the crime in East Oakland. And then also continues to enforce the preliminary investigations while working closely with our criminal investigations division on any follow-up that's needed for them. And that's it for the report out for BFO two. If there's any questions, myself or chief Tedesco can answer.

Questions, colleagues? Alright. Council member Houston, we haven't heard from you in a bit. Just checking in.

Yes. I like and Tedesco and Johnson and are doing a great job. Just doing a great job. And Durham is is the captain in our area. I just had a question for them both. Which area Oakland never had the gang violence that it has now. Back when I was growing up, it wasn't gang. Homicides and things weren't gang related. Which district or which, you call it area? Which area has the most gang violence in it?

You're asking which area do we believe is has the most gang violence?

Yes, sir.

I mean, I think there's there's different gangs throughout the city. We focus equally on all of the different gangs that are involved in any type of violent crime, and we use our ceasefire strategy and our partnership with DVP to enforce all of those involved in any type of violence and or gang, related activities. So I couldn't really say that, you know, one area of the city has more of a a gang problem than the other. There are gangs just kinda throughout the city and and different gangs in different neighborhoods.

They're not it's not more isolated in one one one area, captain? I

wouldn't say that it's it's isolated more in one area than others. There are parts of the city that do see, their share their fair share of of gang violence, but we do everything we can with all of our partners to ensure that we do address those gang problems.

Thank you. Okay.

I know our oh, we'll go to public speakers.

When I call your name, approach the podium. Please state your name for the record. You do have one minute. If you are participating via Zoom, please raise your hand so you're easily identified. Blair Beakman, Jennifer Finley, and Rajni Mandal.

Moving to our Zoom speakers, Blair Beakman, please unmute yourself and begin your one minute comment.

Alright. Thank you, Blair Beakman. A really interesting item. Thank you. Back in 2023, California cities were getting a lot of new funding from the Biden administration.

I think cities across the country were getting a lot new surveillance tech placement issues were going on, and that's what started the AOPR things. They have been working apparently to a degree. And so when Trump came in in 2025, he had all these new programs in place, but but we've been already doing our good work. And and and add on top of that, the work of, macro systems, the work in Chinatown by Chinatown merchants. There's really important work going on in in in crime issues, and, I hope that's being respected At the federal level, I think they are seeing that.

Now we're at the point I I I think we have to learn, I really wanna practice that minimal use of technology can accomplish the exact same goals as a plethora and a ton of additional tech. We have to figure out that system. I think it's an important thing to figure out.

Thank you for your comment, Blair Beekman. Moving to our next public speaker, Rajne Mandal, please unmute yourself and begin your one minute comment.

Rajni Mandal, District 4. I first want to thank OPD for all the work they're doing across the city, especially being so short staffed with only about 500 active officers. I live in Area 2 where the data shows a 20% increase in residential burglaries. The night after Coach Beam was shot, we had over 10 car and home break ins in our neighborhood. We have a nighttime security guard who called OPD, but not surprisingly, given the citywide manhunt for Coach Beam's killer, nobody came.

My neighbors were really frustrated by the general lack of response from OPD. And even though I told them to submit online OPD reports, the majority did not. This just exemplifies a spiraling issue here in the city. There's a loss of faith in response from law enforcement being either showing up or solving crime, and it's leading people to give up on reporting crimes, especially property crime. And with the decrease in OPD staffing, it's just getting worse. So in no part due to the

fault of OPD, but due to

the entire system. So even though crime is down, I'd be wary of believing the accuracy of the numbers of property crime. We desperately need to increase OPD staffing numbers because residents are just not reporting everything that's happening.

Thank you for your comment, Rajne. Moving to our next Zoom speaker, Jennifer Finley. Please unmute yourself and begin your one minute comment. Jennifer Finley, please unmute yourself and begin your one minute comment.

I just wanted to add a little bit of context for longevity because these data looks great, and it's only covered in a six month period year to date last year and this year. I was looking back because the stats were looking so good. I was looking at the stats for the past over the past decade year to date, and everything is coming in at record lows at this point. We are at the lowest year to date in ten years. The lowest rates were vehicle theft, burglary, robbery, rape, and homicides.

And homicides right now are 48, last year to date that I saw with that's less than half that it was just two years ago. I think that that's great. I think that we need to keep moving in the right direction, give OPD credit where credit is due, and also, like I said, for doing more with less because we are doing these numbers now with lower staffing that they've had in a long time. It's been steadily

Thank you for your comment. That concludes your public speakers for item four.

Okay. Colleagues, any comments? I know we have a lot of public comment waiting on the block item. So council member five.

I just won't I should probably tell the people in the chambers, sometimes we have to wait until our mics are turned down. We have a new audio system, so if you're ever wondering why the council has taken a little bit longer speak, it's because we're waiting for microphones to be turned on. That said, I want to point out that we have had month after month when we have these crime reports come to the city council, reports from OPD about how crime is trending down and I'm impressed with the numbers that we see right now. The issue that I have is that no matter what is said, depending on who's sitting in these seats, that data will be reflected incorrectly through the media. And you have signs, we're we're seeing it right now, they are telling you the people that these recallers are are saying are responsible for crime, you have the police department right here saying crime is trending down.

So I wonder what what facts and data people go by. Is it facts or is it feelings? Because feelings I'm a just leave that there. So I hope that with this item we can really start looking at what the facts are. I appreciate the information especially in B F 01 because I know I'm talking to businesses, I'm talking to residents who are explaining and who are grateful for what has happened over the last little while.

And I will remind us that even a year ago, we we went over a month with no homicides. And that does not mean that we are where we should be. We are not. We still have work to do and people in Oakland are hurting for real. And we have to figure out real solutions to get us there. But I just wanted to point out the fact that what I heard today is promising and that we need to keep those trends going and I'm happy to hear that report. I will make a motion to receive and file this item in committee.

Council member Brown. And I'll second it. Great. And also just thank you by the way for the comprehensiveness of this report to the OPD staff who developed this. Alright.

Thank you. We have a motion made by council member Fife, seconded by council member Brown to receive and file this in the public safety committee. Unroll. Council member Brown?

Aye.

Council member Fife? Aye. Council member Houston?

Aye.

And chair Wong?

Yep. Aye.

This motion passes with four ayes to receive and file this in the public safety committee moving to our last agendized item, item three, adopt a resolution authorizing approve one, approving the Oakland Police Department surveillance use policy, DGO one thirty two I thirty two one, community safety camera system, and the acquisition of security cameras related technology to awarding a two year agreement to flock safety of automated license plate reader and plan tilt zoom cameras, operating system technology, and related services that it caused not to exceed 2,252,500 thousand dollars, and three, waiving the competitive multiple step solicitation process required, afford the acquisition of information technology systems and local and small local business enterprise program requirements. And you do have a 139 speakers for this item.

Yes. Yes.

Good evening. My name is Lieutenant Gabriel Arquiza. I'm the commander of our real time operations center that operates within the ceasefire section. I'm here to present on the community safety camera systems, the policy itself, and then the contract related to Flock ALPR, and then the integration of community safety cameras throughout the city. Just to go on some of the background.

So originally, the policy was a standalone policy which was presented to the privacy commission. This was related to community safety cameras. The actual FLAC ALPR system that's in place now or currently was originally provided by CHP back in 2024, about midway through 2024. Those cameras began to be installed. Currently, should be around two ninety cameras that are installed.

There are some that have been damaged and are waiting to be replaced. So that the number the top number for that would be, I think, two ninety. As part of that, it went through kind of a unique process. Generally when we are acquiring technology, the department is acquiring it on its own behalf. In this situation, CHP was actually providing the devices themselves.

But the Oakland Police Department was in an MOU with CHP and the city still was the in ownership of the data that was captured by those devices. The understanding of that agreement was in the second year OPD would take over the contract or enter into a new contract with FLAC. But we did have a three year MOU with CHP related to the use of ALPR. As these two items moved forward essentially became in line as they're part of the same vendor they were put into the same contract. Related specifically to that process, we had already had Flock LPR.

We were looking for the ability to integrate additional camera systems being that we already had that platform. That was the first one we looked at. But we did look at other vendors in this space and determined there was one other vendor that could actually supply this technology at the scale that we're looking for. But in order to replace the existing systems that we would have, there would be significant funding that would be required to replace the current systems we have, install them, and then basically install a brand new service. So with that, and looking at the both of the different vendors as one wasn't significantly or the other vendor wasn't significantly better than this vendor, we landed on this and then requested that we move forward with this vendor.

So while it is a new contract, this is not a new vendor that we've been working with. So I'll just start with the ALPRs themselves and kind of explain how they work. So the camera systems themselves are designed to take photos of the rear of the vehicle and capture the license plate of the vehicle. They then use essentially machine learning to capture that plate and associate it to that vehicle. So if the vehicle if that license plate is queried through the system, it will bring up a photo of that vehicle.

The photo itself essentially captures a photo of that vehicle, the license plate, the location that it was taken, and then the time and date that the photo was taken. The data that's captured through the FLoC ALPR system, the cameras are owned by FLoC or and then we are essentially leasing those cameras. But, the data itself that's captured by any of these devices belongs to the city of Oakland. And, the city of Oakland has control over how that data is then used. Data retained through the FLAC safety system is retained for a period of thirty days.

That's standard across both systems. But, data is only returned or the data is only retained past that if it's related to an investigation and then it's downloaded and retained as evidence through a separate system. Like I said, data is only retained or saved if it's related to an investigation as evidence. And then the sharing of this is also controlled through basically entering into a sharing agreement with different agencies that have to be California agencies throughout California. Originally we were tasked with ensuring that was the case.

FLAC has since then insured basically siloed off all of California from sharing or being data being shared with from out of state agencies in relation to SB 34, Senate Bill 34 and Senate Bill 54, the California Values Act. Federal and out of state agencies again are prohibited from accessing OPD's data through FLAC. Like I said before, originally it was on us to make sure that that process was followed. But they've since siloed off the state of California and any agency that's within it. Including if a federal agency is operating within the state of California, they cannot see any of the state or state or local agency's data.

Just as far as what AOPR doesn't do. So, FLoC AOPR is not designed to capture photos of people, doesn't utilize racial facial does not use utilize facial recognition technology on any of its platforms. The data not searchable by a person's demographic data. The ALPR doesn't capture any personal identifying information. When we talk about personal identifying information we're talking about things like names, date of births, social security numbers, driver's license numbers, information like that.

Flock AOPR does not capture any DMV data. So that's data that would be managed by the state. And it does not include any Oakland PD record management system data. So it's not accessing or cross referencing anything from our reports or from things like the stolen vehicle or from any of our managed systems. So, with that I'll move on to actual elements of the commuter safety camera system before I continue.

Basically, genesis of this was there is significant surveillance infrastructure within Downtown Oakland, specifically Uptown Downtown Bids, Jack London, and Chinatown. Originally, they had these camera systems in place. They had requested for OPD to come up with a way to access those systems enable in order to support those communities. When I became involved in the project, I did hear that from them, but I thought it was important to allow for other areas within the city to participate in this program even if they didn't have the kind of significant infrastructure that areas of downtown did. So with that, we wanted to make sure that there was a platform that would allow this to happen so that any business that has a camera system that can be integrated into the system had the opportunity to do so.

So, there's basically three elements to the actual community safety camera systems themselves. There's a community or privately owned data owned and managed devices. There's department owned managed devices. And then there's the actual integration platform itself. What is the Flock operating system?

So, the community requires an affirmative opt in to share access to historical or real time video data that's from the actual business itself or whoever owns or manages that device. The owner or manager retains ownership over that data. So, the data is still stored within whatever video management system that they're using or VMS system or say if they have the DVR system that's actually a physical DVR in house. FLAC operating system allows OPD to access that data related to investigations. So, essentially it's providing a window into those systems related to a specific investigation.

Participants do not have access to any of the OPD systems or any of the rest of flock systems that the department is managing and don't have access to each other's systems. So, just because a business does share with us doesn't mean they can see any of the other cameras that are in the system outside of their own. For the OPD managed devices, only OPD has direct access to the data captured by the devices. This data is retained for a period of thirty days unless it's determined to be part of an investigation in which place it would be downloaded and stored through a separate system. What's very important to note about this, this data is not searchable by any other agency.

So OPD is the only one that would have access to this data or access to the system. And then they would be able to pull system related to evidence which is then stored in a different online storage capacity. These devices were intended to supplement existing camera systems or areas that don't have significant camera systems such as what we see in downtown downtown and to be in areas that could that commercial areas that essentially would benefit from having the assistance of these additional cameras. Essentially where camera system or businesses may not have significant cameras. The FLoC operating system itself is just a technology platform that's allowing the CS camera system integration.

So this is the ability for OPD to have the cameras that it's actually managing alongside the camera systems that the community is providing. And again, their data, their information is still contained within their VMS systems. It's not saved through the flock operating system. Only OPD's information is in there. There is a potential of integrating additional existing systems in the flock operating system.

This is for a more comprehensive and cohesive approach to addressing specifically violent crime. We were talking about call volume earlier. One of the things that can integrated is basically computer aided dispatch where 911 calls are coming in to be able to prioritize or see visually on the map where those calls are coming in and potentially moving resources in order to address those calls in particular. The other system that we haven't really looked at yet, but there's another 911 system where essentially if there's keywords said during a call, that would automatically alert within the office so that if it's something like a shooting before the call's even placed into the system and officers are dispatched, we are able to start pulling up information related to those cases. Again, the CS camera system is not searchable or accessible by any other agency.

That goes for OPD managed data as well as the privately owned cameras. And then within the department itself, there's multiple tiers of access or two tiers of access. One which will be highly restricted to particular officers within the department that will have actual ability to pull up live camera data related to basically crimes in progress. And then tier two which is kind of how we've done physical canvases in the past where they're looking at historical data related to a particular investigation. So essentially after a crime occurs.

As part of this project, we did a significant amount of data analysis. This wasn't just for this project but for kind of a larger look into kind of our prime trends over the last six or seven years. So, back in 2023, we've kind of mentioned here there was a huge spike not just in violent crime but crime across the city. We were looking at that point to understand what had changed from 2023 or basically 2020 to 2023 where we saw these huge increases specifically in violent crime to what was going on back in 2016 to 2019. We were trying to understand what resources may have been reallocated which we then could move back positions where they could assist with specifically violent crime and areas where we could leverage technology maybe to make up that gap if those resources no longer existed.

And then basically in 2024, at the same time that CHP was about to provide ALPR access to the city of Oakland, we stood up a pilot program for this office to essentially assist with managing the system itself, to assist with training, and then the rollout of the project itself and integrating it into field operations. Essentially, at that point, we were trying to roll this out to patrol. We took a very slow methodical approach. We started with just the admins back in July 2024 and then eventually moved that to some of our field teams, the CSAR unit, our special resource section, and then our CID unit. PATROL began to get the application in around January 2025, and then we slowly rolled out that product to make sure that everyone got sufficient training and we didn't find any particular issues relating to auditing.

Big focus of the unit itself starting in 2023 was this focus on data and how it could drive us to target particular crimes that were affecting communities within the city of Oakland. Part of that analysis was looking into specifically who was being affected by this violence and not just where. So, as I said, this analysis started where we were looking at information from 2016. This is the homicide numbers from 2017 to 2024. So what we saw in 2017 to 2019 where the numbers stayed essentially the same, 75 homicides in '17 and '18 and then 78 in 2019.

2020, we saw a large increase in homicides specifically in the second half of that year, and then that led to subsequent years where we saw significant increases in homicides from the previous four years. In 2024, it was the first time we saw a significant drop down and you'll see that we were at 86 homicides. And like I said, a big part of this project was trying to understand what we were doing back in 2017, 2018 and 2019 and how we could refocus not just the use of technology, but the use of the entire ceasefire section and the units that were supporting it. One of the other target crimes related to the use of technology was specifically carjackings. We'd seen a huge increase in that specific crime type since 2018 and '17.

If you can see in 2018 we had a 101 carjackings. In the year 2023 we had 513 carjackings. This was also reflected in robbery data where 2023 had a significant increase from even the previous two years. And one of the things that we use to measure the success of the ALPR program was looking at the 2024 where we did not have ALPR technology in place. If you look at the first six months, the average of carjackings per month was 40 carjackings.

If you look at the subsequent six months following the implementation of Flock ALPR, that average dropped down to 24 carjackings per month. And then if you look at twenty twenty five's data, we're averaging 17 carjackings per month. If we're looking at carjackings overall between 2023 and 2025, you saw a 66% decrease. That's five sixty eight carjackings to 192 carjackings. When we're talking about year to date data, this was compiled back in October.

So you'll see that most of this data is is trailing some of the current information. 2025 year to date, there's also been a 41% decrease in robberies overall throughout the city of Oakland with a 53% decrease from 2023 year to date to twenty twenty twenty five year to date. So, that's a difference of basically 1,500 robberies. Also, what we are looking is somewhat outward to kind of understand the specific issue with robberies within the city of Oakland. We were comparing to some of the cities that were either relative size or also relative violent crime data.

And if you'll see Oakland had 654 robberies per 100,000. If you compare that some of the other cities within not just the Bay Area but the Greater US, we were sometimes more than twice, if not more than most of those cities. San Francisco, you can see is at 254. For Chicago, the number was 89. And especially cities like Saint Louis where it's 221.

So we understood that there is significant issue surrounding robberies specifically within the city of Oakland. We try to make sure that we're focusing on those specific robbery crimes and then trying to determine who was most affected by those crimes in order to allocate resources. So one of the things we looked at was victim demographic data. This is from 2025. So we looked at the robberies from this year.

Of the total robberies that we had up until October, 55% of those total robberies in Oakland were targeting Latino members of the community. The second group the second highest impacted group was black members of the community and 19% of the total robberies within Oakland. We were seeing who was most affected by these crime types. And then if we could leverage technology to address those specific crimes, how we could benefit the community overall. One of the other crime types that we were looking at were shootings.

So, this is also information from 2025 where we saw that 158 of the shootings in 2025 up until September had targeted black members of the community. I believe it was 64% of the total number. And then additional 62 Latino members of the community were targeted during shootings. These are injury shootings. So somewhere where somebody was actually hit which makes up approximately, I believe, 24% of the total number.

One of the things that we're also looking at is the impact of homicides in particular neighborhoods or affecting particular communities. So, when we looked at twenty twenty three's information, out of the 125 homicides that occurred in 2023, a hundred and sixteen of those victims were people of color. Approximately ninety three percent of all homicides. That trend tragically continued in 2024 where of the eighty five homicides, seventy five of those victims were people of color, making up eighty eighty eight percent of these homicides. And then through the September 2025, there was 51 homicides with forty nine percent of those victims being people of color.

Approximately ninety six percent of the total homicides. What I think is very important to note here is that we don't think that flock is the only thing that's impacting specifically information like homicides, But it's a cohesive approach not just from OPD, but from our partners in the community, through the ceasefire partnership, and then specifically the separate but parallel efforts of the Department of Violence Prevention. One thing that we did see was a large impact on homicides. And like I said, I think it's that that holistic comprehensive approach. At this or in October 2023, we had a 104 homicides at that time.

And if you look at October 2025, we had been up to 55 homicides with a 47% decrease. And while we are seeing positive impacts in these numbers, we're likely still on pace to pass the numbers in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019. Our hope is to continue to specifically affect these particular crime groups in the assistance of the community. And we believe that technology is critical in that specifically as we are dealing with significant staffing shortfalls. Like I said, this is a continued investment in addressing violent crime, and it's not the only investment I believe that is important.

So we continue to support the ceasefire model and determining what other resources can be allocated in these areas and then supporting the department of violence prevention. As far as the fiscal impact for the system itself, OPD intends to utilize $2,252,000 over two years to fund the flock safety program. OPD has already allocated or had already allocated $1,500,000 per year over the next two years related to flock safety. That was originally just the ALPR systems. So, are not asking for any additional funding related to the general purpose fund.

These were funds that were already allocated to the department. And you can see the year one numbers are 1,155,000. The reason it's different from year two is for the installation for the additional PTZ cameras. I just want to note those PTZ cameras are not ALPR. Those are it's live and historical videos, so a surveillance camera.

As part of the process of going through the privacy commission and getting feedback from the community, from the privacy commission, from council, we are looking at specific contract safeguards. One of the opportunities that we have here is because originally we were through the MOU with CHP, there weren't stipulations that we had put in related specifically to protecting data within the city of Oakland. One of the concerns was the practice of FLAC collecting anonymized aggregated data for the purpose of machine learning from different cities. They have removed that section from the contract so they would not collecting any of that information. The other thing that's important to note is that if the if our data is shared without our consent, we were able to that would be considered a breach of contract.

We would able to terminate the contract.

Please order in the chamber. Thank you.

Please proceed, lieutenant. Please. It's tough to move. One

of the other steps that were taken related to concerns despite some of these cases being extremely unlikely was in the case if the department or the city was assumed by the federal government in a manner where we weren't able to provide agency related to our own data, the terminate would the contract would be suspended and then terminated. The other section of that is if flock enters into a contract with any federal agency that then compromises our ownership sole ownership of that data, the contract would be terminated and we'd be able to seek litigation.

The

additional safeguards of the city, the department continues to be aligned with city and the community related to immigration enforcement. We saw this recently with the events at Coast Guard Island. OPD is not assisting with any immigration enforcement in direction in alignment with the department and city policy as well as state law. The community safety camera system should be only accessed by members of the department who are trained and authorized to use it. No other access to the community safety camera system will be provided to any outside agency whether it's state, local, or federal.

One of the other topics related to the use of technology was essentially the critical staffing situation. If we looked in January 2024, OPD staffing levels were at seven eleven, that's seven eleven on paper, which was 89 fewer than the last proposed staffing study guidelines. Currently in October 2025, OPD's levels were at six thirty six with an operational staffing level of five zero nine. Since the time of actually completing this report, those numbers have dropped. The last number I heard was six thirty three, and I believe that number may be lower since last I checked.

At these numbers, we've already seen critical units being disbanded in order to support patrol, which was at dangerous levels. And we are gonna see further cuts as we draw down in the number of sworn officers.

Please order in the chamber.

One of the bigger concerns for OPD is how quickly progress has been reversed. We saw that in 2020 where we'd seen significant improvements in addressing violent crime between 2016 and 2019. In 2020 alone, if you looked at the first six months of that year, there was 37 homicides. In the second half of twenty twenty, we saw a large spike with 72 homicides within that six month period. We then saw that trend continue in 2021, 2022, and 2023.

We also saw increases in shootings, robberies, carjackings, and even things like stolen vehicles. In conclusion, we've seen significant effects on these particular crime types that are most affecting the community. I believe that utilizing this technology in a responsible way will continue to address these crimes. And if we do lose this technology, there's a potential for crime to go back to the levels that we had seen before. But like I said, this isn't just about OPD and our efforts, but it's also about the community partnerships that we have through the ceasefire strategy as well as this, like I said, the separate but very relevant work of the DBP in this effort.

And with that, I will open it to questions. Thank you.

Okay. Before we go to public comment, I just want to take a point of privilege to introduce on the floor some amendments. The point being just as we we've had a lot of public comment even prior to this meeting that I wanted to address that as a city council what we're debating and as as we discussed, we're looking at a the OPD proposal but with further safeguards from city council. So I'm just going to quickly read in this amendment. So further resolved that the city administrator is authorized to enter into a two year contract with Block Safety for the period starting at the contract signing for $1,155,500 for the first year and 1,700,000 per year too with the total amount not to exceed $2,252,500 for purchase and access to the flock operating system.

Flock's safety products, two nine one flock safety Falcon cameras, 40 flock safety corridors, PTZ cameras and related services. And here's the amendment. And the city administrator shall include the following provisions to the contract with flock safety. I'm going to embed some of my commentary but one of the things that was was written in about was that the national lookup feature was used to provide backdoor access to entities such as ICE and CHP or federal agencies. So one, block shall not enable a national lookup feature capability for the city to access.

And number two, commentary, knowing that FLoC is a profit seeking entity include we are introducing or I am introducing a financial penalty. So providing for liquidated damages in the event the contractor causes unauthorized sharing of data up to $200,000 per incident measured by the cost of a data breach and estimated cost per records affected and based on the IBM cost of a data breach report in 02/2025. Second amendment is further resolved that attachment a, this is the community safety use policy that was previously discussed at the privacy advisory committee. Community safety camera system is approved with the following additional provisions. That c s camera data shall not be shared with other agencies for purposes of criminalizing reproductive or gender affirming health care.

That c s camera data shall not be shared with local or state agencies for the purpose of federal immigration enforcement and that the c s camera system may be used for environmental enforcement efforts to combat combat illegal dumping. Okay. Alright. And with that, we will turn to public comment. I am going to request just given that there are families and students in the audience that those with children or if you're a child or a student yourself to please come forward first. That way you can go home.

Through the chair to the public speakers for all of the kids, can you please line up, state your name for the record, please? If you are a you are a youth, please sign up. Thank you.

Senior who has lived in Oakland my whole life, and I urge you to reject Fox $2,250,000 contract. This isn't just a camera system, it's a mass surveillance network that will track every single one of us making a searchable database that tracks our movements. This data will be accessible to over 5,000 different agencies including ICE. We're a sanctuary city but this camera system strips our city of exactly that protection. Just last July, more than one federal agency illegally accessed Oakland's license plates data, local police cannot stop federal access to our information and the only way to protect our immigrant communities to is to not build this database in the first place.

Even more than that, Flock is not trustworthy at all. They have already been caught using 50,000,000 stolen data points, lying to communities and even reinstalling cameras in cities that fired them. Flock cannot be trusted with our data or our money at all. This $2,250,000 is a choice. We can fund a surveillance system that criminalizes our community or we can invest in what truly creates safety and to hurt crisis response, violence prevention, and youth programs. You

You shut up.

Okay. I'm sorry. We have to keep comments to one minute at at a maximum. I'm gonna ask thank you so much.

And through the chair to our public speakers, your time can be seen at the top left.

Good evening. My name is Edwin. I am a student. I'm the resident of Oakland alongside with the Ella Baker Center. Here today I'm here today to reject the proposal

of OPD's

community safety camera system safety system and vlog safety contract. Oakland is a sanctuary city where our cameras are burnable. Mass surveillance systems like ALPR and vlogs will collect data where the Trump administration can cease and also abuse. This this resolution will be rejected because it ignores expert civilian oversight by proceeding despite the privacy advisory commissions two to four vote recommending rejection. Oconee creating the PAC specifically to evaluate surveillance.

We can't build a 2,252,500 deportation machine and act surprised when they use it. Another thing to add, contracts with the it contracts with an trustee vendor that has admitted to using 50,000,000 storied data points partnered with ICE despite sanctuary policies and and whose CEO has been documenting lying to communities. That's all for my time. Thank you.

I'm a I'm a junior student at Oakland Tech. My name is Elijah my name is Elijah Turner, and I've been in I've been in Oakland my whole life. I work with the Ella Baker Center, and I'm I'm here today to reject the proposal. Oakland is a sanctuary city and has responsibility to stop building surveillance tools that federal agency will inevitably use against us. The answer to reducing violence is not what the is not with more more police or more surveillance.

We need to reimagine what safety is beyond the model that law enforcement has created. This resolution is to be rejected because it ingraves private cameras to the government, surveillance networks, and expands surveillance transforming voluntary security systems into the mandatory law enforcement's tools. It will also expand the surveillance to beyond LRP's to include pan tilt zoom cameras that track individuals on foot creating infrastructure for pervasive human monitoring. I just ask you to reject this proposal.

If you're a student and you wish to speak please approach the podium. Thank you.

Hello my name is Bria Woodland, I'm a constituent of District 3, hi miss 5, and I'm here to oppose the contract. My safety should not come at the expense of my privacy. Once again, safety does not come at the expense of privacy. Surveillance has historically been used as a tool to criminalize and incarcerate black people and queer people of color. We have been shown that OPD is unable to our data safe by the most recent link in July, as well as seeing that they can't meet the basic standards to be relieved of the twenty two year long FBI oversight.

So I cannot trust that they'll do what it takes to protect our data from ICE or any other fascist organization or agency seeking to exploit the people of Oakland. Oakland has influenced the entire country on the basis of sustaining and retaining human rights. People seeking sanctuary for any of their needs should not have to worry that their identity will be compromised. You told us today that they haven't even updated the CAD that would help the people of Oakland yesterday. So there's no reason why we shouldn't be that we should be spending as much money as we are when they have not been accountable and they there's no excuse for spending more money when they have failed to utilize the resources we currently have. Thank you.

My name is Rakeem Naylor from the Urban Peace Movement. Are you telling us OPD rather invest in technology than in humanity? Are you telling us OPD rather watch us on surveillance screens like silly rabbits on CTV? OPD, are you telling us you rather invest $2,500,000 into cameras than in these young people's education? OPD, are you telling us you rather invest into flock than community blocks?

Watching us like Bugs Bunny isn't preventing criminals from committing crimes. It's popularizing. Are you telling us you rather watch us like Looney Tunes than invest in these young people's schools like you haven't been in these young people's shoes. You should buy them a pair or two. OPD, this is not to throw the shame on you. This is just to wake you up to what you could really do.

Thank you for your call, babe.

I wish my brother could have dropped the mic. Tanisha Cannon, all of us are none, and I stand before you today as a proud member. And I want you to hear me clearly that these cameras will not stop crime. They never have and they never will. They'll watch us. They'll track us. They'll target us. And at the end, they'll profit off of our own pain. $2,200,000, that's what they wanna spend. Right?

But based on what we just heard, officers aren't even able to respond now. How are we adding more cameras to change that? A camera can't fix a system that isn't responding to us in the first place. I wonder how much hundreds of thousand dollars went into that paid report that said we need to hire more people who communicate with the callers. We need Spanish speaking in Cantonese when we know that that's our population. This ain't about safety. This is about surveillance. You're talking about pulling data from doorbell cameras and business cameras and funneling it into what systems we don't even know. Oakland was just hacked last year. Who's to say that this data will not be in the wrong hands tomorrow?

We know the narrative. Crime is out of control. But let's talk about facts with the good captain just told us that crime in Oakland is actually down.

Do want comment?

Wanna say hi Athena? Hi. This is Athena, he's three and I am Emily Kugen. I live in North Oakland near the Berkeley border, but we've got some Oakland cameras in my neighborhood as well. Yeah, I'm here to say that, this data is not being kept safe from mice. I know they said in the presentation something about a silo but like people have brought a bunch of evidence that isn't there are out of state queries hidden California data and it's one thing for people to have their private security cameras, I'm not against people wanting to do that, but when we choose to aggregate it all together like this, we are serving it up on a plate to ICE. So if we if we wanna be a sanctuary city, we need to say no to gathering this data. Thank you.

Not a kid but have a kid. My name is Reem. I am a resident of District 6 and a former privacy advisory commissioner myself. I just wanted to say that I have to be really honest you know, as somebody who has spent time crafting these policies and writing these amendments, you know, the city has a track record of writing really beautiful policies that only are ignored by OPD later. As as many of you know, just earlier today, a very credible lawsuit was filed alleging that OPD shared data with federal agents hundreds of times, and that breaks state and local laws.

And so and and flock is no better. We know for a fact, and not as a hypothetical, that this vendor has a track record of aiding in ICE raids, and assisting in abortion in investigations. So, you know, we can't pretend if this goes forward and it gets abused that we didn't know. We all have the information right before us. And I I would just ask you, I mean, OPD themselves has raised that they considered another vendor For

your comments.

Across our safety. Thank you.

Hello, my name is Sarah, I live in District 2 and I'm a special educator here in OUSD and I just kinda have a question for everybody. What do we do to constant, to deserve being constantly surveilled? You can't convince me that my neighbors are the problem, but you guys can seem convinced that we are. You're convinced that my neighbors and I are the problem when it's this $7,500,000,000 company that's threatening Oakland Sanctuary District, city status. Despite the privacy advisory committee rejecting the motion, despite my neighbors organizing before you to reject the motion, you somehow feel it's necessary to push for this.

We reject any pathways that bear even the minute possibility of providing information to ICE. We reject being made the problem. We reject the normalization of mass surveillance, and we categorically reject the continued attempts by you to sell Oakland out. We need to keep Oakland Police Department accountable, and it's your responsibility as your as our elected represent

Thank you for your comment.

My name is Lisa Hoffman, and I've lived in Oakland for twenty five years. I'm a co executive director of East Bay Sanctuary Covenant which provides legal and social services to immigrants including free weekly clinics in the Fruitvale. Every day we hear from people who are too afraid to leave their homes for fear they will be kidnapped and never see their families again. We believe this FLOC contract will put Oakland immigrant residents in grave danger. Over the past months FLOC has violated contracts with other sanctuary cities by sharing their data with the federal government for immigration enforcement and lying about it.

As a result, many cities have terminated their contracts with FLAC. Why would Oakland choose to spend 2,250,000 building the very surveillance infrastructure that will be weaponized against our immigrant neighbors? I want my friends and neighbors to feel safe going to school, work and local businesses without fear that every security camera in Oakland could be used to deport them. Please vote no.

Good evening. My name is Abu Baker. Live and work Through

the chair to the public speaker, what is your first name?

Abu, a b u. Thank you. Baker. I live and work in Oakland, third generation here. I get tired of telling this story, but my son was killed three years ago in the front yard.

And there was some video capture from a neighbor, But there wasn't enough to track down whoever did it. So they free, and we have no closure. And flock technology could have been useful to help catch that person. Who knows who they've gone on to hurt since then. I just wanna commend the Oakland Fire Police Department for doing more with less.

Numbers are down. You're getting some help from CHP. You're doing a lot with less, but I recognize that you need the technology to do the job effectively. And so

Thank you for

your

I hope time. You all consider that and vote yes on the

I'm here to urge you to strongly approve

To the public speaker, please state your name for the record.

My name

is Tuan Ngo. I'm here to urge you to strong strongly approve and fund public safety, and that includes the safety cameras that have been solving crime, including shootings and homicides, have been helping us recover stolen vehicles, that have been stopping robberies. And one of the reasons crime is down is because FLOC has been in Oakland for over a year. During that time, it has solved crimes. We have data to back it up.

FLOC has tracked down rob robbers while they're robbing another victim. FLOC, during this time, over a year, has not caused anybody to deport to be deported. Instead, it saved lives. And I speak on behalf of my Latino friends. And

my Thank you for your comment. To the public speaker, after this public speaker, we'll begin to call the begin to call the names in increments of twenties.

Hi. My name is Luke Katz. The merchants of Oakland are rightfully concerned about thefts and assaults in their area. The Oakland Privacy Advisory Commission, which I remember, worked with OPD, and structured a good use policy for the cameras. It will give the illusion of safety while preserving privacy.

While the efficacy of cameras in reducing criminal activity is unclear, the cameras have been useful in aiding the apprehension of criminals as well as in trials. Unfortunately, the system being proposed relies on a company called Flock Safety, whose business model has been shown to collect any and all data, combine them where possible, and sell it, to public agencies, which will provide those agencies a workaround of the laws of the constitution, which restrict what data they may collect in the manner in which it can be collected. Instead, we have a vendor whose business model is to sell data on the comings and goings of anyone

in the

Trump's regime.

I'm sorry, sir. We have to ask you to step away from the microphone. Thank you.

My name is Anaya Rose from district one. I do not want to live in a surveillance society. I oppose this two year contract which some will want to refund in two more years for more money and with the possible addition of OPD drones. I am concerned that the issues brought up by the privacy advisory committee have not been answered. I'm concerned that there have been numerous data breaches in other cities, and it's clear that OPD can't or won't regulate the use of the the use of the database outside by outside agencies such as ICE and CPB.

I'm concerned that the license plate readers from both flock and privately owned cameras will have people's faces. I am concerned that we are not sufficiently addressing the root causes of crime, predominantly poverty. I do not want this data to be collected. There is evidence that the code is vulnerable to hacking, which could override any effort to control the sharing and protect our data. Flock has lied saying that they have no federal contracts.

Thank you for your service, Rose.

Evening. My name is Manuel DePass. I'm an organizer, coordinator organizer at East Bay Sanctuary, Please

restate your

name. Manuel DePass. Manuel DePass. And so tonight, are coming here to say to this commission, say no to this agreement because we know what it is. We know that FLOG has sold thousands of data collection to the different agencies as the people already said it here.

So we know that they are lying. So we are not against camera surveillance. We're against a way that they are using this into profile us. So we know that through a civilian cameras, you know, immigration has access to our information. So tonight, I'm I'm here to ask you, please, don't do this agreement. Because with this agreement, there is no such Oakland sanctuary. There is no such California as a sanctuary state because we know that it is against immigrants and against people of color. Thank you very much.

Thank you to the public speakers. We will now begin to take names. In person speakers, when I call your name, please approach the podium, state your name for the record. In person public speakers will go before Zoom. If you're in hearing one, which is overload, please make your way to the chambers if you hear your name.

Emma Wedi, Laurel Paget, mister Stray Stewart, Ted Carlson, Alex M, Issa Madrid, Madeline Baker, Terry Satterfield, Ansel Smiths, Heather Ann McCloyde, Remy Dulcet Dousse, pronounced Dousse, thank you. Jody Barbin, LJ Zhang, Matthew Lindboom, and James Dontel. If you heard your name, please approach the podium, state your name for the record. If you're participating via Zoom, please raise your hand. We will take in person speakers first and then Zoom speakers.

If you are in Hearing Room 1 and you heard your name, make your way to the chambers now. Thank you. Excuse me to the public speakers. Give us one second. Yeah.

I do apologize to the public speakers. We will

till technically okay. Alright then, let's proceed. Please proceed.

Okay. My name is Emma Welty, District three resident. I first would like to start by acknowledging the fact that FLOC's primary financial backers, Andreessen Horowitz, are closely tied to the Trump administration and have been repeatedly ill intended with their financial investments. Also, OPD says that this technology has contributed to the reduction in crime, but they have not produced any evidence showing the crime clearance rate where an arrest was made or a crime was committed and an arrest made specifically due to this technology. If they had this, they would have put it in the report, and they didn't.

So in any case, I question OPB's real motives with regard to

this.

To the public speaker, thank you for your comment. And please state your name. What's your name, ma'am? Ma'am to the public speaker that just spoke what was your name?

Hi, my name is Ted Carlson and I want to identify that the OPD representative who was speaking about flock told a series of lies to you. I'm a researcher who specializes in understanding flock's impact. He said that they keep data for thirty days. That's not true. CHP keeps it for sixty. He said that they are the only OPD is the only people with data access. That is not true. The DHS gave the FBI a backdoor to all flock data. Additionally, a lawsuit in Seattle just determined that all flock records are public records. He said it doesn't collect personal info.

That is a lie. Flock has a system called Nova that links with data brokers and uses dark web information to create data profiles for everyone that they surveil. Data ownership. Do you believe that the data that Flock possesses is the cities? It's not true. The stats? If you believe his statistics, it's like believing Enron when they give a profit and loss report. Come on now. Contract suspension, lies. ICE assistance, lies. He lied to you top to bottom. Top to bottom. I can give you concrete data, statistics, lawsuits, facts. They are lying to you to advance a particular agenda.

Thank you for your comment.

Yeah.

So excuse me. We we are going to have to adjourn into a quick recess due to the fact that we have, one council member taking this remotely and one who just walked away very briefly. She'll be back. So, bear with us. Alright.

Alright. We thank you. We are back to having quorum. And if the public speaker can come up. And order in the chamber, we are now re we are continuing the meeting. So if everyone can can quiet in the chamber. I know everyone wants to chat, you know, talk to your fellow organizers, but I need you to, you know, just shush. Okay. Thank you.

Please state your name for the record to our public speakers.

I'm sorry. We Can't hear you. If you can

Hi. I'm Laurel Padgett Sikins, Oakland resident and pedestrian. I don't consent to constant surveillance. Surveillance is not safety. Privacy makes us safer. As a data analyst, I just wanna note the data presented tonight is not enough data to draw any conclusions about the effectiveness of cameras. It takes years of data to do that. If the data exists, it will be misused. We know as we've heard from many speakers that Fox is an untrustworthy company and their product is not secure. The promises that we can get from them in a contract are not sufficient. And clearly, the police union knows this. That is why they are negotiating so hard on the GPS on their cars.

Hi. My name is Matt Lindaboom. I've lived in West Oakland for ten years. I've worked in technology for twenty. You should not trust venture backed companies. I'd like to see OPD turn on their GPS units and see how that goes before we add a new surveillance technology. And I'd love to see some of the money that we're proposing for the FLAC systems to be used to fund the domestic unit violence unit instead or some other unit.

Thank you.

Hi. My name's Ansel. I live in District 1. The privacy advisory commission is right that FLAC is a a company that cannot be trusted. No company deserves to win a no bid contract with so little transparency. More fundamentally, Oakland simply doesn't need more surveillance. We know that ICE and other federal agencies will break the law to access Oakland's flock data, and we know that they will use it to move The U. S. Closer and closer to fascism. We also know other city programs which actually are working to make us safer and which could really use this $2,500,000.

That money would go a long way towards expanding our mental health crisis response system, our safety ambassador program, or our violence prevention efforts since we have seen real documented results from them and other programs. Thank you.

Hi my name is Madeline Baker, I live in District 1. I had a friend visit recently from out of town and she told me that she was really struck by how much the people of Oakland care about their city. I think that's extremely true. I think that can be seen today. I think that has been seen in the past with the amount of rallies and protests that Oaklanders have held against surveillance and against ICE.

I fail to see how we can continue to call ourselves a sanctuary city when this kind of data is being collected, especially when this kind of money could be put towards programs that we have already seen proven to be effective at keeping our city safe. Thank you.

My name is LJ Young. Flock is a private company that has already lied to all of these sanctuary cities that it had contracts with and there's no use for doing that here in Oakland. No resident here deserves to live under the constant threat of any agency or government or police department knowing their exact movements, their face, their license plate number, the color of their skin, none of that needs to be linked in a centralized database that can be hacked and accessed by ICE. We are a sanctuary city, we do not need to be doing this. And this is a private corporation that will profit off of all of this data and sell it to third party brokers and the federal government.

No use. I urge you to vote no and it's a shame that it's being proposed in

the first place. I

am Remy Ducey,

a resident of District 3. I'm an engineer, and I have deep concerns about the security of FLoC systems. I urge the committee to not only reject the expansion, but to end all contracts with FLoC and recommend a complete removal of their systems. Earlier this year, Flock mistakenly leaked their source code exposing how their vehicle tracking system works. This leak was searchable on Google.

This month, independent security researchers identified 51 different vulnerabilities across Flock hardware and software including default passwords. These vulnerabilities were confirmed by flock itself and raised significant risk of a hack that could explode flock's database and reveal extensive citizen tracking which could enable stalking and abuse. These risks are not hypothetical. In Texas recently, the sheriff used the flock system to search more than 83,000 ALPRs nationwide to track a woman they claim self administered an abortion, including in states like California where abortion is legal. This shows how flock can be weaponized against individuals regardless of law.

I don't have remotely enough time to detail all the ways flock is a security nightmare, but they have repeatedly demonstrated that they cannot be trusted with our data or privacy.

Thank you.

Hello. My name's Alex M. I wanna say three things. The first is I wanna read from Senator Wyden's letter about FLAC. In that letter he says, FLAC does not require its law enforcement customers to use multi factor authentication.

The base level of cyber security that this company requires of these police officers is less than you require to get into Google or your email or anything like that. Inside those cameras, on the hardware, which is not secure, it has been shown through a video by Ben Jordan that they are storing data and images of people, faces, not cars, not license plates, photos of people, all the way back to the factory where that flock camera was first made. They have images in this video by Ben Jordan of the original processing facility. Those aren't cars in that facility, those are people who are manufacturing them. Last, the ability to disentangle once flock is deployed more extensively Okay.

In this

Hi, guys. I'm gonna cut the line. Forgive me. My store just got broken in again. Some of you guys probably know me. Hanita Matoyi.

Please state your name for the record.

I do have a card, but I have to go because

Please state your name for the record.

Order in in the chamber. Order chamber. In Please stop the jeering. Let me have my one minute.

Kanita. Kanita, can you state your name for the record?

Yes. My name is Kanita Matori. As some of you guys know that I ran for council twice, one time at large and one for d two. And the reason why I ran, not because I'm trying to be a politician, but our street is still not safe. Okay? If you guys against

Okay. Camera Okay. We're gonna pause.

That is okay. To pause the clock.

Sorry, Camera. We're gonna pause the clock. I I need quiet in the chamber. We are pausing the clock until there's quiet in the chamber. Nobody should be jeering, and I will I will invoke my privilege to remove people if this continues. She please, she cannot can Okay.

Order order in the chamber. So can we quiet down? Okay. So first thing I wanna say is that as each public speaker is speaking, we are honoring the time that they that they are allowed. And so what what this public speaker is saying is that she filled out a public comment card and that because her her store just got broken into

And it's cops standing

there. So can we say your name for the record. So order in the chamber. Say your name for the record.

Kanita Matori.

Okay. And we're gonna let her speak for one minute. The clock. Okay. And and let me be clear that no matter what side that she speaks to or anyone who is speaking in the chamber tonight, we have to show respect for every single speaker. So can we do that? Because because otherwise we're gonna we're gonna go on a recess and we're we're gonna continue to wait. So we want everyone to have their voice heard. So we need to respect every single speaker. Okay? So we're gonna put set the time for one minute and then allow this public speaker to speak and we're gonna keep going because everyone's voice will get to be heard this evening. Okay?

Thank you, council member Brown.

How about

the sun? Thank you.

Please.

Thank you.

Peace in the chamber. Okay. Please. Our

Thank you.

Thank you. We're going to we're going to just wait here until there's quiet. Okay. Go ahead.

Thank you for hearing me out. I am coming here with a lot of mixed feeling. I am not for ICE. I'm against all kinds of different thing, but we need public safety. The rest of all the other city using all kinds of camera. Privacy, we need to really question some other, you know, I don't know, Google, so many other things. Right? But Oakland need public safety. We have business that's all dying. I invite you to take a walk down the street.

All small business are bordered up and closed. And the reason why, because they are being robbed so many time. Like myself, who've been here for twenty one year. We've been robbed so many time. So what I'm going to spend the the night doing? Sweeping up glass, boarding up my store. We do not have insurance. We cannot provide job. We cannot continue to contribute to tax dollars and everything else because this city is still not safe. There is two cars almost collide into the

I am gonna have to respect the time limit. Okay. So

if y'all letting people impacted by crime talk, I guess I'll talk.

Can you please state your name for the record?

My name is Chaney Turner. Thank I'm an Oakland native, voter engagement director with Oakland Rising, Ugly Rise Action, and I'm here to speak against Flock. A lot of what I was gonna say is just going out the window by what just happened here, which was extremely disrespectful. We had youth that was here and you all skipped the item to go to items that's later on the agenda which speaks levels. Also also we're not accepting whatever amendments. We know that there's amendments that's that's coming. That's not going to be accepted. I've had multiple car thefts within this year. Right? No security.

OPD never stepped up. Every excuse we we don't have anybody that could come down at this moment. This this that and the other. Security is prioritized for those who y'all want to prioritize security and safety for. We walk down these streets every day. We know what what the conditions are. Right? Take that 2,500,000,000.0 and invest into healing and resources.

Alright.

Janie.

Okay. Thank you so much.

Okay. Calling in the next set of public speakers. If you signed up to speak, please go ahead and line up at the at the podiums. Please state your name for the record. You do get one minute.

Once again, if you signed up to speak, go ahead and line up. Please state your name for the record. You do have one minute. And to our Zoom speakers, we're gonna take our in person speakers first, and then, go to the Zoom speakers.

Kat Brooks Anti Police Terror Project. I can't even get into what I wanna get into. You consistently demand respect from this body of people, citizens that elected some of us, some folks elected you, but you repeatedly disrespect us. That was disrespectful. I gotta be at work at 06:00 in the morning. I got things to handle. There were children here that came to testify, but because you did shenanigans with the agenda, most of them had to go home. That is disrespectful, and that is why you don't get no respect from the community, including the fact that you ignore us when we're talking. So I'm gonna try to say so oh, I wanna solve your mystery. Where where's my g that didn't understand the crime stats.

They went up because of COVID. They went up because people lost their jobs and their housing and their health care. That's why they went up and the black new deal came in here and told city council what was gonna happen and then it happened. And you weren't able to police your way out of it, and crime has gone down not because we've got more cops, but because finally social services are being reintroduced into the community. There's your mystery.

Flock is funded by the following. Co founder and billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, that would be Palantir. Thank you. Gary Tan from Y Combinator and Initialized Cap That's one.

That's one. You got it. So how many?

Land. Slow. Slow. Period. Period. Okay.

Gary Tan from y Combinator and initialized capital. Tan has fueled disinformation that drug dealers are actually being protected by sanctuary city laws. Mark Anderson, an adviser to Donald Trump who claimed that universities will pay the price for diversity and immigration, and venture capitalist Ilya Sukar, founder of Revitalize East Bay, a PAC which promotes conservative city candidates. That's who funds Flock, so that's who gets Flock's data. Right.

Now I'm just gonna assume that the people on this body understand who Peter Thiel and Palantir are. Council member Fife rightly asked facts or feelings? And what I can tell you is that the opposition is running on feelings and not facts. Here's facts. Mass surveillance has never worked out well for black communities ever. Fact. The privacy commission, the actual expert said, this is a bad idea. Fact. There's an active lawsuit against Oakland by Secure Justice alleging that OPD illegally, willingly shared ALPR data with federal law enforcement, including ICE, the FBI, and the DEA. There are signs here that FLOC solves crime.

Well, the only report showing that FLOC is a valid public safety strategy is report done by, wait for it, FLOC. In fact, OPD had to admit that the FLOC crime solved data of 11% was false and had to run that shit back. There is no way OPD can keep this data safe. We already talked about that they gave it away willingly in July, allegedly. Where else am I at? Oh, this they they say that that FLOC targets so called criminals. Flock targets women running to California to seek sanctuary for abortions. It flock it targets people seeking gender affirming care. It targets migrant communities currently being hunted by the federal government. It targets political dissenters and folks that are already profiled by the state.

Like the black people that they pointed out are the primary Black. The black and brown people that are the primary victims of crime. And if that is the case, then maybe black and brown people should be making the decisions about how we keep Oakland safe. And we say no to mass surveillance in the town.

Tough act to follow. My name's Adam Wolf. I see two problems with flock for public safety. First, there's no solid, independent evidence that mass surveillance actually helps solve crimes. Supporters say it's common sense.

But criminologists haven't even been able to prove that more police officers solves crimes. Second, FLoC itself is a security risk. Researchers showed that brief access to a camera, pressing a simple button sequence on the back lets you take complete control of these cameras. What's more, the cameras run an operating system that's eight years old and has 1,500 security vulnerabilities itself. This is two of 22 critical vulnerabilities that were flagged in the last week.

As someone with decades of software experience, I can tell you fixing this is not a quick fix. It's a fundamentally broken design. Honestly, it's amateurish. It's a major skill issue. So we're building a detailed map of everyone's movements, where we live, work, worship, on top of hackable tech owned by an amateurish company that is clearly prioritizing its own growth over response

Thank you for your comment.

My name is Jonathan. I'm embarrassed to be represented by you Charlene in District Number 2. I wanna say they're building concentration camps and disappearing our neighbors, and some of our local politicians wanna help. They're building concentration camps a lot like the ones we already have and call prisons, like the prisons that will be privately owned by corporations like GEO Group. They're building concentration camps and catching slaves to work them.

They want cameras that track our every move to help them catch their slaves. They're hunting down brown people, people indigenous to this continent like it's 1849 and they're getting paid by the scalp. They're building concentration camps and they're shooting American citizens that dare to bear witness to their crimes against humanity. Then they follow those people to the hospital before they disappear them too. City and state governments apparently have no power to protect us whatsoever against these attacks. We have to organize in our neighborhoods to keep our own selves safe while you watch them disappear your own constituents and do nothing. But we're supposed to believe you care about our safety. They're building concentration camps. They look like the ones in Palestine.

How are we doing folks? Dante Altamirano, District 3. In September, my fiance and I awoke to gunshots and witnessed a shooting outside our window. We watched a man bleed in the streets. Last month, a hit and run driver struck my car and two others.

Also, we're consistently subject on our doorstep to unhoused individuals, openly defecating, littering, aggressively harassing passersby. I support FLOC because I think it helps to provide evidence to hold people responsible. To those skeptical, I say that the only Only those who break the law have anything to fear for that level of transparency. Law abiding citizens are the ones harmed when leniency and lack of evidence allow offenders to go free. Indeed, as Adam Smith said, mercy for the guilty is cruelty for the innocent. Thank you for your time. Thank you, uncle Pete.

Come up. Come up. So let's keep it moving.

Hi. My name is Sara Fathala. I'm a District 3 resident.

Please restate your name, ma'am.

Sara Fathala. Sara. If you yeah. I wanna because you moved item six before this one, I wanna comment on something that officer Dasa Coroz talked about where he found a way to sneak in video surveillance when talking about domestic violence prevention. I'm a domestic violence survivor. I work with survived and punished with a group of criminalized survivors of violence. You know what has never helped us? Video surveillance. You know who helped us? Our neighbors and our community members who intervened, who formed defense campaign committees around us, who gave us places to stay when we were feeling unsafe.

If we had a sliver of the $2,250,000 to support domestic violence prevention, we would feel more safe. OPD at every single time only made things worse. And I really want you as a committee to see through this transparent and quite frankly disgusting effort to capitalize on our survivorship to advance a mass surveillance agenda. This is not okay. Don't do it under our name and shame on you.

Thank you for your comment.

We keep first name. Matthew.

Hi. My name is Shilpa Joshi. I'm a District 5 resident. I think you're faced with an impossible task because you are a body that is responsible for public safety but you don't handle any of the parameters that control crime or improve people's lives. So you're just dealing with the symptoms and you can't deal with the root causes.

So you really have like a bum deal and I'm sorry for that. But what I will say is we're at a time in this country when fascism is at our door, it's creeping down from the federal level and I love Oakland and I have with all my heart for years and my question is I never thought that this city would value modeling those kinds of fascist values and bringing them here and that's exactly what using a venture backed capitalist Peter Thiel program that is open to hacking, that surveils us, that collects all this data and that just makes profiles of us for the federal government to use. We are guinea pigs in a lab and we deserve better as Oakland residents so please vote now.

Hi

I'm Zerena Diaz. Considering this proposal tells me that you are not connected to the immigrant community in the city, folks are not even leaving their house to eat, to get groceries, kids are not going to school. How do you think having flock all over the city will impact them? You're you are telling them that their safety doesn't matter. What message are you sending?

And the 200 k penalty per data breach, so you're telling me that a life, the price of a disappeared person's life is 2 worth 200 k? We do not need to be reactive. Oh, if we lose people, we need to be proactive and prevent these people from getting lost in the first place. And look at how little support that you have for flock. You think that these cameras are gonna last? You're gonna spend $2,000,000 and they're gonna be destroyed, and that money is gonna be wasted that could have actually gone to services that, again, have proven to support mental health services, education, community leaders.

Your comment?

You are wasting $2,000,000.

Please go ahead.

Hi. I'm Anna, District 5 resident opposing flock. I was adopted from Paraguay when it was under military dictatorship and here there's cameras on street corners instead of soldiers. As a current Oakland educator in majority low income Latino schools, I've witnessed students attend it sadly decreased this semester as their families are understandably too afraid of ICE abduction to continue bringing their children to campus. Many of those now absent kids relied on the school's meals to get fed enough during the week. Oakland is a sanctuary city on paper, expanding flock surveillance with its publicly documented history of police departments leaking data to ICE would deepen the harms on our immigrant neighbors. So I urge the council to take the cameras down while investing in truly safe ways to protect and enrich our communities. This Ohlone land deserves flocks of birds, not flocks of cameras.

Hello. My name is Wang Di and I call district two home. And I come from a place where the surveillance apparatus is very much a part of everyday life, and it takes the pulse out of the places that we live, and I do not want to happen in my home. And I'm asking the city council to where is the line if this is going to keep happening year after year, and this is going to be under consideration. And what I'm asking the city council is to only not move forward with this vote but also take down the existing cameras.

My name is Lakshmi Rajagopal. I'm in District 3.

Hello. Public speaker, what is your name? Lakshmi. Thank you.

I find it ironic that OPD claims to care about Latino victims when they are openly trying to fund a system that has been deporting and stealing people out of their homes, away from their families, and is FLOC has been actively working with ICE. They have admitted to this. They I know that there are some contract amendments that will supposedly cure this issue, but we both know that ICE regularly flouts contracts. Flock regularly flouts contracts. They have lied before.

They cannot be trusted. I know that OPD, we saw in item five, OPD has multiple issues. They clearly not run very well. I think $2,500,000 would be much better suited towards reforming that system and fixing the current system we have instead of wasting it on cameras that are gonna be broken and destroyed and killing people, basically. Thank you for your time. Yeah.

Hello. My name is Anam and I am in District 3 and I've been working as a product designer in the tech industry for the last decade. I attended the last privacy advisory commission meeting in September where Flock presented their security solutions to prevent ICE from accessing OPD's data again. And I've just been stunned for months that they were calling cosmetic design fixes security fixes. Their first solution was prohibiting word filters.

They said if a federal agent types a prohibited term in their search, they won't see Oakland data. This just means agents will avoid typing certain words. Calling this a security measure is wishful thinking that literally anyone can bypass. Flock software sounds like a security disaster. I personally have seen much stronger security in high school hackathon projects And I'm just stunned that there's a $2,250,000 proposal on the table with such a flawed company when the city could invest that money in prevention programs that we factually know improve conditions Thank

you for your comment.

Reduce crime. Thank

Hi. My name is Navi and I'm a resident of Oakland District 5 where I work as a worker owner at Hasta Muerte Cooperative. I have both experienced a burglary in my own home, and our business is no stranger to break ins or robberies, and we urge you to see that no ALPR or surveillance system will bring us public safety. Aston Muerte is an Oakland business that has has been in operation for eight years. Despite and throughout incidents targeting small businesses and their patrons from forced entry break ins, robbery to vandalism, experience has proven to us again and again that showing love and care for people on your block goes much further than policing and surveillance solutions.

If you have an extra 2,000,000 to spend, give it to small businesses to help feed and care for our neighbors in need, to help clean up trash, to replace lighting on unlit streets. Give it to programs that actually care for our community and you will see just as we have, the neighbors will watch out for each other and care for each other. Yeah. We adamantly oppose flock or any surveillance infrastructure as they are not solutions in crime prevention, but mere transactions in the heyday of billionaires, an era which compels

Thank for your comment.

Of everyday life for the rest of Thank

you.

Please come up. My

name's Matthew Lieberknight.

And I'm Victoria Trujillo and I'd like to yield my time to him.

Thank you.

I'd like to go over some of the things in the proposed contract attachment b for tonight's agenda. On page eight it states, if legally required to do so by warrant subpoena court order or similar judicial authority, the legal order, contractor may access preserve and or disclose the footage and or city data to law enforcement authorities, government officials and or judicial officers. To the extent legally permissible, contractor will use its best effort to notify city in writing within twenty four hours of receipt of such legal order. That seems to me to be a loophole you could park an aircraft carrier in. It is, I'm not an attorney.

Maybe our city attorney could advise us about that. But it seems to me that Flock is begging for some sort of legal order reminiscent of those national security letters that gobbled up all of our phone metadata and then bar the telecom companies with gag orders from disclosing that. FLAC seems with this clause to be begging somebody to do something similar and get all of our data. And OPD would have no way to counter that at all. On the page, so if that were to happen, we would then go to page seven.

One page in front of it which states, the city is not permitted to remove, reposition, reinstall, tamper with, alter, adjust or otherwise take possession or control of flock hardware. Which reminds me of what happened in Evanston, Illinois where flock reinstalled the cameras against the city's wishes forcing the city of Evanston, Illinois to cover the cameras with garbage bags. That is now prohibited in the contract. So my question to the city council, I know this is a comment period, but would you consider removing those phrases from the contract? Thank you.

Hi. My name is Kenyatta Thomas, resident of District 3 and I work at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit. And while I'm here as an individual representing myself, EFF has done multiple investigations into both flock and ALPRs and it has proven how invasive this tech is and how many lies this corporation will tell in order to continue profiting off of the data of millions of people. Across the country, other cities are demanding that are terminating their contracts, demanding cameras get taken down, and like the speaker just said, they're either putting them back up or refusing to take them down entirely. A lawsuit was quite literally filed today because of data violations that are being alleged that the OPD has fallen has done sharing data with ICE, FBI, and the DEA.

This invasive surveillance is a deep violation of privacy that makes Oakland unsafe. You should not trust the words of this corporation. I want my neighbors to be fed and housed, not watched twenty four seven. I urge the city not to move forward with this acquisition and to instead invest those millions of dollars into programs that will benefit community members and not the surveillance machine. Thank you.

My name is Phoebe and I am an executive director of ReproCare, a national nonprofit abortion hotline. We supported 4,000 abortion seekers last year and I live in Oakland. Oakland should not be investing in surveilling pregnant people including those driving to California. So many of the people I support are in abusive relationships. Abusers use abortion bans and the threat of police to further terrorize their victims and flock furthers the surveillance they're subjected to.

Cops in Texas have already used flock this way after a woman's abusive partner reported her to the police for getting abortion pills from California. The police used a flock search during a death investigation into the woman's fetus then lied and said they were searching for her out of concern for her. Police criminalizing abortion almost always happens under the guise of non abortion laws being broken and you cannot trust them to be honest about how flock will be used. If you support reproductive rights, oppose flock in Oakland. Thank you.

Hello. My name is Diana. I live in District 3. I'm a registered voter and I also convinced my company to move from Emeryville to Oakland in January. I strongly oppose I strongly am opposed to flock coming to to with Oakland.

The University of Washington researchers released a report on October 21 showing federal immigration agencies like ICE and Border Patrol had accessed the data of at least 18 Washington cities often without their police department knowing. So who's to say that they're gonna do that here in Oakland? The other thing that I noticed in their report that they provided to us, they said crime was down, they gave us the statistics for that. However, not one statistic was given how these cameras lowered the crime rate. Not one. So all I have to say is cameras, they maybe help solve crimes but they do not prevent them. There was not one data that proved that.

Can hear

a comment? My

name is Kian and I may be new to Oakland but I damn sure wasn't born yesterday like some of y'all up there. You think we're stupid in not recognizing that some of y'all have already made promises to approve this contract with like over a month before like chair Wang up there? Right. You think we don't recognize that flat like that, the only support which out of 86 comments registered about 30% supporting this contract were taken verbatim from Flock's own August 25 product updates and their own marketing materials? I'm gonna I don't need to share provide data.

I'm just gonna lay out exactly the overarching strategies y'all are falling for. They're gonna be referencing Flock's own materials as independent sources such as the claim that Flock led to about a 100 arrests in just six months. Guess what? That exact statistic is only found verbatim in flock safety press releases. Not OPD reports or anything from the city. And they make those claims without any verifiable information. So rather than asking for like Thank

you for

your comment. Asking for evidence.

Okay. Okay.

Thank you, sir. We do have to ask you to step away. Thank you. For the next speaker, please come up.

My name is Olivia Livoplanis. I'm a District 1 resident and a third year law student at Berkeley. I'm also a lifetime East Bay resident. I'm horrified by potential mass surveillance of Oakland which is a black and Latino city and this violation of our right to privacy. Block has repeatedly lied and even broken state law in Illinois.

This is an untrustworthy company and it is not only a possibility but a given that they would share this data with ICE. I love Oakland so much and do not want to see it turned into surveillance or police state. Mass surveillance is the primary indicator of totalitarianism. I am asking you to protect our rights of privacy and uphold Oakland's status as a sanctuary city. There are many better uses for $2,250,000. Y'all are so worried about how dangerous unhoused people are, maybe we spend that money on housing them. Thanks.

Hi. My name is Srishti. I'm a Berkeley Law student and a District 1 resident. I've been emailing with council member Unger and was hoping to see him engage tonight with stakeholders which he stated was so important to him in his emails. Here is what I heard from the presentations that you made me sit through tonight. OPD has not activated its GPS systems. There are huge disparities in response times between West Oakland and East Oakland. You do not have enough investigators across OPD. You don't even have a stolen vehicle investigator. You have not adequately invested in domestic violence research, you don't know OPD's response times for domestic violence incidents and crime is actually down in Oakland.

Pick something better to spend your 2,250,000.00 flock dollars on, Spend it on reducing response times, spend it on responding to DV incidents, spend it on community based programs Right. Invest it in more in small businesses apparently, pick something else. Please vote no.

My name is Jean Moses and I live in District 2. As I wrote in an email to council council member Wang yesterday, I've lived in Oakland since shortly after retiring ten years ago. I love this city in all its gritty diversity. It's home to my three children and three of my grandchildren. Their safety matters profoundly to me and I am convinced that their safety could actually be compromised if you expand the contract with Flock Systems.

Even with the data storage in a California only cloud and every other possible security measure, I believe that a federal mandate could force us to share this data or it'll happen even before we know that they're looking for it. FLAC has lied and violated their contracts thereby impairing the safety of residents of the cities where they operate. If you're going to spend 2,250,000.00 on security measures, let us spend it in the Bay Area and not send it to Georgia. Thank you.

Uniskovankaya, District 3. You so much council members for being here. I'm voicing opposition to FLAC. Although OPD told us that this is supposed to make low income communities safe and we got some amendments to try to protect private policy, I have little confidence that either of these things will happen. I grew up in Florida post 09/11, so the Muslim community has been the subject of mass surveillance for as long as I can remember.

And we were told that we had nothing to worry about if we didn't do anything wrong, and the cameras would keep us safe. But crime in our communities remained, and paranoia skyrocketed because the police used the footage as probable cause to detain us and then pressured us into accepting guilty pleas. So, go figure when you're low income, you can't afford a lawyer. And now I see Oakland is considering the same things. We're not here because we misunderstand the terms of your contract. We're not here because we're misinformed on the risk. We're here because we have intimate knowledge of the violence.

You so much.

Sir. Yes, sir. Yes sir. Yes

My name is Adriana. I'm a third year law student at Berkeley as well and I'm a District 1 resident. As a Mexican woman and as someone who has spent years doing immigrants rights work, I'm here to express concern about flock security camera contract you guys are considering. As you are all aware, I'm not the only one who shares these worries. Based on a multitude of concerns about flock, US senator Ron Wyden and his office recently conducted an independent investigation into flock.

In doing so, they uncovered flock's refusal to audit its government customers to prevent abuses. The result of this investigation led senator Wyden to believe that abuses of the product are not only likely but inevitable, and that flock is unable and uninterested in preventing them. So in his view, he found that local elected officials can best protect their constituents by removing or refusing flock from their communities, and I urge you to do the same. Vote no to protect our immigrant communities, ones that are already facing an incredibly challenging time and continuous threats at the hands of ICE. This is supposed to be a sanctuary city, keep it that way.

Hello. My name is Alejandro, District 3. I just wanna open by saying it is incredibly insulting. Do you believe a $200,000 fine meets anything to a multi billion dollar company? That is less than 1%. You have to be kidding. Like, this is childish. Right? Like and I just wanna say, this flock company is helping Trump and his associates further their their ethnic cleansing campaign of brown and black people in this country. They wanna unite a white nationalist government here. Right? And you wanna support them by giving them access to our data. You wanna make it easier. Donald Trump has said Antifa is a terrorist organization. Fighting fascism is terrorism. And FLOC, apparently, will help with this process. Right? They will help Trump find us, hunt us down, and give information to the federal government. And you're gonna sit there, you know, and and just be okay with it. Right?