Community Police Review Board - Regular Meeting

waiting for my chair to sit down board member and having reached the hour of 5 30 p.m i'm calling the may 20th 2026 community police review board meeting to order um before proceeding i would like to provide the board members some guidance on how to use the technology um to speak you will need to use the mics which are activated by pushing the talk button or not you will need to wait for the chair to acknowledge the speaker before proceeding to talk will the clerk please call the roll member bryant

Member Byrd.

Present.

Member Solorio. Present. Member Christensen. Present. Member Demerle.

Here.

Member Grant. Member Smith. Chairwoman Beasley-Day.

Present. Do any of the board members have any conflicts of interest pertaining to items listed on the agenda? Wonderful. As noted on the agenda, public comment will only be in person. Zoom will still be available for viewing and worldly translation. There is no public comment for items five through eight as these items are informational only in nature. Does anyone wish to speak on any item under public comment? This is for items that are not listed on our agenda. You have three minutes to speak if you would like to come forth. I don't have any cards here, but is there anyone here that would like to speak on public comment or anything that's not on the agenda? Eight. All right. We're going to go to the minutes from the Community Police Review Board meeting on April 15th. Would anyone like to remove the consent item for any further discussion?

All right.

I have a motion for a second clerk, call the roll for this item. Motion carries. We'll carry hopefully. All right. Onto new business. First and foremost, we want to consider the cancellation of our June 17th meeting. Scotty want to talk more about it?

all right hello chair members of the board um this was just placed on there just as a you know a point of consideration um i know that tonight we have you know quite a bit of material i know that i also acknowledge that there's work that kind of needs to be done between this meeting and the next meeting i know that after the report tonight for example you know that uh we'll be reviewing that uh the city of modest will be reviewing that and considering responses to the report The additional portion of that is, you know, if we do take June off, it provides the ad hoc committee for the annual report some time to put really some time into that and come up with and I'm sorry, produce a maybe a draft for the July meeting or a robust plan. report out so that's just the consideration we don't have any additional topics at this point to put on the meeting so we do have some items in the parking lot that we consider in the future but in working with the chair uh you know we thought we placed on the agenda for discussion and possible action does the board member have any questions

Scotty, you mentioned that there weren't any topics or conclusion on that agenda. What about the SR 911? Is that not feasible to do next month?

Not in this short amount of time. We're going to need to be able to plan a little bit more ahead for that one.

I mean, we added this to our topics for discussion for this year early on in the year. It seems to me that we're skipping an opportunity here.

Okay. Well, that's, you're welcome to discuss that amongst yourselves. Maybe you decided that you'd like to hold a meeting and make a motion for a particular topic. I mean, if that's the topic that you'd like to have on the agenda, I can certainly reach out to the director and see their availability. I do know that in the month of June, they're bringing their budget for the year to their commission, etc., So we can see what their availability is.

I would also like to note that during the discussion, it was slated for August. So accordingly, we prepared for that to be in August. It was just the shifting of topics that's made this issue come.

Thank you. Anyone else on that subject? Oh, go ahead.

The on on the schedule that we had we had the mpd response to the auditors report, and I know the auditors report was delayed a month, so I guess my question would be this mpd still think they could meet. have a discussion at the June meeting or do you need more time.

yeah i'll need more time just because we i need to take a look at the final report which which we just received as well and then uh make sure i'm assessing it talk about with the city manager and so forth so definitely gonna need past june

Yes, the function was a little disappointing.

Is there anybody else? Austin, excuse me.

Thank you. Just real quick, how long will you guys need as far as time? Like, is this something that will be able to be done in July or is this something that has to be done in August or September? How much time would you guys need?

I anticipate being prepared at this point to be able to present back in July.

can we add that to the July topics then? At least as far as you know with this. Because right now we only have the draft and we do have as I mentioned on our phone call, we do have a draft for it, although we are also supposed to when we come back.

Is there anyone else? Yes, ma'am.

or us as a board to

Do you have a comment? Do you have a comment? Yeah.

Go ahead. For the annual report, the draft, is that something that we need to talk about here? The topics that you want the board to bring forward for that draft? Is that something that needs to be on agenda if she's wanting feedback from the entire board?

I was just going to say, just similar to what was done last year, the draft was provided. The board had an opportunity to review the draft. You had your input this last year, but it did have to be agendized in order for you to be able to discuss your input. And then that's taken by the ad hoc, and then they build that into the final.

And so if we are looking to bring the draft forward in July, then we'd want to agendize it in June to talk about what we're going to want in the annual report.

So if you're talking about bringing the final version of the report.

So it's draft, then we talk about it.

You all talk about it, and then provide your input, and then they bring back the proposal.

And that would be scheduled for August, essentially.

yeah it is currently set up like that those were standing topics that were filled in so um the last draft was for july for the first draft for your presentation and then august for final draft but in case you guys need more time then we'll have to shift that around you had something else man nope nico

Anyone else on that topic for June?

Well, it's not really about the topic. It's more about just canceling June.

Well, canceling June.

That's the topic.

I think if I could just clarifying, we're going to hear Stephen's report tonight. The department needs time to prepare their responses and our final report needs to include commentary on both pieces. So we couldn't finalize until we've heard from both anyway. So I don't think August happens, could happen any sooner for us to present final. I feel if the June cancellation assists the committee and more time to take in Stephen's report, and start thinking through some of that before we hear a response from the chief there's still use in time if we don't hold that meeting if it helps the committee at that point and i agree nancy if we don't have a topic to focus on we need a point to meet so it's you know worthwhile but

And for me, I thought June would give us that time to review the report and come together as ad hoc committee. Doesn't mean we would be excused, but yeah. Anyone else? All right, no more, all right. So is there anybody from the public that has Anything with regard to meeting for next month? No one else wants to speak on this item? We'll close the public comments. All in favor to cancel the June meeting. Is there a first motion? You said first?

Nope.

Is there a first motion?

I'd like to make a motion that we cancel June 17th meeting for July.

Wait, you want to cancel June's meeting?

Yes, I want to cancel. You're making a first motion? Yes.

Is there a second? All in favor?

Aye.

No. Do a roll call, please. Do a roll call.

Member Bryant?

No.

Member Byrd?

No.

Member Solorio?

No.

Member Christensen?

Yes.

Member Demarell?

No.

Member Grant?

Yes.

Member Smith? No. Chairwoman Beasley-Day?

Yes.

You guys need a tiebreaker.

All right. So can we open it up for discussion? And I would like to open it up for discussion as far as what topic are we going to have in June? So I would like for that to be the topic at hand right now.

Can you list out the topics for us? Yeah.

So we have MPD and SR 911, which was slated for August 2026. And as Scotty spoke to before, they do have some things coming up. So June might not be possible. There was the event that occurred yesterday, I believe, Lieutenant Clyburn for military equipment. So if there was a further requirement for a presentation on that topic, um, but that's about it. That's all the ideas so far we have from you guys.

Um, so, um, was that on the agenda and agenda is list about the presentation for. the recent May meeting, May situation that the, excuse me, the May event that the police department had, is that?

Just yesterday, that was left on here for you guys to attend the event and come back and provide to us whether you would like more information on yesterday night's event.

So those are the topics.

anyone i know i brought up the wake-up program um as a parking lot topic as to trying to get that move to create an ad hoc committee yeah that could be created as an uh like we can make an item i believe to discuss the creation of ad hocs um you can notate that if you guys want to meet to discuss an ad hoc

Tom Preston- yeah just to clarify we've had the presentation on that you're what you're speaking about Mr story was just discussion of creating an ad hoc for that.

Tom Preston- Correct yeah yeah not a presentation again, but more of I remember last time we had to say it had to be agenda is in order for us to create the ad hoc.

any other how long would that take oops it's fairly quick i mean we would put it up it would be on the agenda and then you would just pick um your two or three members and you would call for a motion and that would be that okay more of an action than a presentation yeah that's an action not per se a discussion topic

I think it would be appropriate to have a presentation at this meeting on the equipment that was seen yesterday. I went there. It didn't seem like a lot of people was there. And so I think that still trying to get the word out to as many people as possible would be good. And that certainly, to me, would be something that would fall within a meeting here.

I can defer to Lieutenant Klaiber on that.

I guess what I ask is what specifically the department does outreach. We do an open community forum at the police department. We do an annual report that's submitted through the city council. So I guess I would ask what the specifics of that presentation would entail since we pretty much have done some comprehensive reporting on that already. And I just want to be mindful of our staff's time.

Okay. A topic I asked about it previous and one of our briefings can we just get a report of the citizens Academy and how that went maybe provide some testimonials on engine. I know you guys had the citizens Academy we don't have the agenda is on any type of topic is that something that we can get a review on or presentation on is that enough time for you guys to provide a presentation.

at one of our topics?

It's hard for me to say if we would be able to or not, just because I would have to reach out to those that do the program itself. I do know that it's overseen by our crime prevention unit. Their supervisor just recently left a couple weeks ago, so they're a little strapped with the two that are left. I'm not sure if that would be feasible for them or not.

It could be a future identifies item because that happened in February. I don't know if you guys heard about the citizens Academy that the police department did, but you know, I heard it was very robust and it was pretty good and it would be good for, it would have been good for one of us to go to that, you know, and attend that on those Thursdays, but we didn't. And so it would be good to get a presentation, whether it's in June or whenever. So we just understand what that process looks like. If it's happening, by annually, if it's happening quarterly, what is the criteria process of getting into that program, et cetera. So that should be a future-identified item or even a topic.

I'd like to hear more about the budget of the equipment and things that we saw yesterday. I know for one, I really liked the drones that I saw, and I think that perhaps the police department could benefit from receiving more funds to purchase more drones. I certainly think that is more rational than lawsuits. The amount of money that's been spent on lawsuits pertaining to the mask ordinance, that that money could better be spent on helping the police department manage large crowds by purchasing more drones.

So I guess I'm trying to follow here. So as far as, so this particular item is about whether or not to hold the meeting this next month. I know that right now we're talking about, okay, well, if there's going to be a meeting, what topic would we have? And I think that we've explored a couple of them. We'd need a little bit more time for the ones that were mentioned. As far as the equipment that you were just talking about regarding the display yesterday and open house to the public, You know, I knew I do recall that what was discussed here is that you would go to that and you come back and talk about, hey, we would like to know more about this or that. This is one of those, for example. So, you know, I think it would definitely take some time for the police department to come back with a report on those things that you're talking about. I mean, in reality, it's in about three weeks. We'd have to have something done on that. I'm not sure what the feasibility is. It's like in like Lieutenant Clyburn, the police chief just referred to a little bit ago. It's like, there's other people that are kind of involved that we would have to pull into this. And typically if we have a couple of months in advance to pull these things together, it's, it's helpful. But I mean, um, You all can, and Alex, you can help me here. It's like if the board wants to take it within this particular item to make a motion on a particular topic for the June meeting, would that be appropriate at this time?

Yes, we can do that at this time. The previous motion failed because it didn't get a majority. So there's no active motion on the table. So if someone wants to make a motion to, keep the June meeting and, you know, identify what will be on the agenda that that would be in order.

Right. So Madam chair, I'll just, I'll turn that back over to you.

All right. Uh, have we settled on what would be on the June?

I put a motion in to see if we're actually going to, you know, right. We're going to agree motion again.

We have already, is there a topic that we can,

If I'm sorry, if I, if I may just make a suggestion, I kind of see that kind of like obviously split. Right. Um, perhaps, uh, this next, you know, this next month could be done. We could do a little business here and the businesses, you know, board members lawyer brought up a topic to possibly form an ad hoc. We could put that on there. Probably a short discussion. As far as the other topic, we could put another one on there to discuss the topics for the remainder of the year, because I think that what we're finding is, okay, we kind of came from coming to the end here of topics to place on there. There's a couple of them that have already been scheduled for a couple of months out. Obviously you have a desire to possibly dig into some additional ones. Well, maybe we can discuss that this next month that you, just like I said, it's just kind of, it's a suggestion.

If I may, Madam Chair. Yes, you may, Nico.

What about an update on like outreach material? I know we kind of had a discussion about that, but maybe.

It'll be on staff comments and report.

Oh, it's going to be on staff, not an action item or agenda item.

Yeah, because it's already been, there's already an action that's been taken on that. So we're ready to just report.

Okay, then what about an item or agendized item for the board to discuss our outreach efforts and how we are going to reach out to the community?

and what we want to do with our time once we do have everything that the city is going to provide us with i rather recall that being another um potential ad hoc committee to do community outreach planning other than us all sitting up here offering ideas.

So then it's another action item on creating the ad hoc.

One of the topics we talked about needing to agendize at some point is the formation of an ad hoc committee or two, depending on who had an idea to take action on one. So to Scotty's point, a subcommittee creation could be agendized.

Agendized for the next meeting?

Mm-hmm.

Sounds like we'll have the next meeting. All right. Is there a motion once again to have a meeting next month?

So then is it, I would like to make a motion to hold a meeting in June and place action items onto the agenda regarding creating some ad hoc groups or how would I word that exactly?

I think it would be appropriate to consider creation of ad hoc groups to support future board. I don't know the word I'm trying to think of right now, but something that basically supports what you all did in January, which is provide your priorities for the board for the year.

Right.

I'm going to second the motion.

Let's do a roll call. Please. Pretty please.

Member Bryant. Aye. Member Byrd.

Aye.

Member Solorio.

Aye.

Member Christensen. Aye. Member Demarell.

Yes. Aye.

Member Grant.

Abstain.

Sorry?

Abstain.

Means yes or no. OK. Yes or no, people? Member Smith? Chairwoman Beasley-Day?

Yes.

7-0.

All right. And the motion carries. Yes, ma'am. Quickly.

really don't have it after the 9-11, 9-11, 9-11. The rest of it is...

PB, Harmon Zuckerman, If I just like to call in the attorney for a second. Just Alex to weigh in because I mean we just passed the motion.

So is it are we revisiting the motion that just PB, Harmon Zuckerman, I the commissioner's microphone wasn't on so I couldn't hear what was said.

PB, Lupita D Montoya, Nancy, you have to speak right into the

My suggestion as a further agenda item, it was mentioned as we were discussing, would be to propose some additional agenda items, future topics for the meeting, the next six months of meetings.

Okay. So a secondary motion, Alex?

Yeah, there could be an additional motion if that's something the board wants to add to that agenda for discussion.

But we're going to discuss forming ad hoc committees, correct? That's the agenda item that we voted on in this motion. That's a pretty broad subject, it appears to me. And so what Nancy's suggesting, I think, could be encompassed in that.

Nancy's looking for topics for the remainder of this year, and the action items for next month would be ad hocs. So it's not the same. It's different, right? I don't think so.

Just to identify the various... So the ad hocs, we could talk about the ad hocs. It's based on your priorities. It's been discussed in the past. And we can bring back our exercise that we do throughout the year to revisit topics. So if the board, I'll just put it out there. If someone would like to make a motion to add that particular topic onto the next agenda, that's something that could be possible. We just revisit what we've done in the past.

I would move to add as an agenda item a discussion of topics for the meetings for the remainder of the year.

Second.

Roll call.

Simi's trying to capture all the motions.

Member Bryant? Aye. Member Byrd?

Aye.

Member Solorio?

Aye.

Member Christensen? Aye. Member Demarell?

Aye.

Member Grant.

Aye.

Member Smith. Aye. Chairwoman Beasley-Day.

Aye. Motion carries. So moved. We're ready to move on. Good job, guys. Presentation from staff. Oh, wait. Independent police auditor. It's you Steven, it's you. How did I look over you? You're here today, please forgive me. We've been waiting for you.

It's closer, okay. Try not to hunch so much. So this is great, Scott. Good evening. I'm happy to be with you in person and once again to present another report regarding the dependent police auditor auditing activities. My name is Stephen Connolly, as you know, from OIR Group. and oir group was selected as the first the city's first independent police auditor back in 2023 so uh not inspiring a lot of confidence here this is actually the third audit report for the the city of modesto the first one was a little bit abbreviated because it was a half year cycle but this is the second full year and the third time that that i have presented on these issues to your board so in terms of just kind of some things. There we go, thank you. I'm just gonna turn to you every time, it's gonna be fun. A lot of this is obviously very familiar to you. Some of this is for the benefit of the public and just as a refresher so that we're sort of establishing the parameters of what the report is and what the purposes of it are. A little bit about OIR Group. As I have told you before, maybe too many times that my colleagues and I have been working together since 2001 and, although I am. Doing the lion's share of the work in in Modesto we always like to have at least a second or third set of eyes, when we are. Reviewing materials and writing things up and I had a couple of colleagues, Michael genocco who you whom you have met. And Terese Magula, who is great, but I don't think you have met her in person at any point. They were both involved in the evaluation of the materials from the department and the production of the report. So I want to make sure to give them credit or blame as the case may be. So we do this kind of work in a number of different jurisdictions throughout California and some other states. I was actually just in Olympia, Washington last night To present to their city council and we like to think of that exposure to a lot of different jurisdictions and a lot of different law enforcement agencies as an opportunity for us to see how things are work in other places what the challenges are in different jurisdictions and ideally what are some best practices that we can kind of zero in on and maybe transfer uh pass along to some of the other agencies that we work with and as you folks know better than anybody we are part of the the model that the city created when it went through its its long process of of discernment and deciding how it wanted to move forward with some police reform issues and and social justice issues So it's a hybrid model with our office serving as the sort of the independent, like the professional experts, if you will, who have access to the confidential materials. And we'll talk about that a little bit more. And then the other piece of the model of the structure is to have actual people who live in the neighborhoods of Modesto and care about Modesto's issues providing the service that you do at your monthly meetings and obviously providing a different perspective for me as far as your priorities and your vantage points on some of the different issues that come up along the way. So, thank you, Simi. Just to review what the contents of the report each year, obviously the Cases are going to change, but the structure the categories of things that we cover are always going to be the same they're dictated by the scope of work that was set out by the city when the office was originally created a few years ago. So the whole idea of it is for it to be a review of completed cases across these three key categories, complaints and allegations and misconduct, use of force, and the last one being critical incidents. And this year's report focuses on cases that were completed in 2025. As you know, there were a couple of what we call critical things that certainly fell within the category of critical incident. Two officer-involved shootings that you were made aware of and briefed on, but because those two cases are still in the various review processes that... occur in the aftermath of an event like that. There's the investigation into the legality of the officer's conduct and then the department's administrative investigation. So there are a lot of different moving parts. So neither of those two cases was done by the December 31st cutoff date for last year's report. So I did have the opportunity to attend both of the department's internal presentations on those cases, the major incident review board where they, within the first couple of weeks, it's a process that we are very supportive of. they take a very comprehensive look at what is known about the incident so far, not so much to address the individual officer performance issues or accountability issues, but just to look at the whole thing comprehensively to say, while we're waiting for the district attorney's office, while we're waiting for these other processes to play themselves out, is there something the department can or should be recognizing or doing or adjusting to based on the potential lessons learned? And again, I was invited to both of those presentations and had the opportunity to attend both. And I think the department is doing a really good job with this concept, which is itself a new one for it. Next slide, please. So what are the goals of the report? One of them is certainly transparency to provide a window into processes that previously have only been confidential and relatively sealed off from public access and public insight into how actually it works. Theoretically, there's going to be increased accountability on the department, even though these are the department's investigations. These are completed cases that I'm not weighing in on prior to them being decided one way or the other. but the department is accountable to the public in a different way because its processes are being evaluated by an independent objective outsider and then reported out to the public. And then the third one is the one that I'm most hopeful about and it was interesting to hear the chief make reference to the recommendations. One of the things that we try to do in terms of our contribution is take advantage of our experience and our familiarity with best practices and the outside perspective that we have To take a look at some of these events and make recommendations to the department about future operational issues future investigative protocols, with the idea that hopefully the department's approach to these things, the various things that are listed among the recommendations. the department's approach is going to be made more effective somehow. So we're hoping that it's a constructive process in the end. And I certainly look forward to the chief's presentation in a couple months. But my experience from the first couple of reports was that the department very much engaged with the recommendations, took them seriously, and really made some concrete adjustments to their way of doing things. So hopefully they will find this useful and that track record will continue. Next slide, please. So the how it works is we don't look at every single case, but instead we get a sampling. And again, that's set out by the scope of work. We're going to be looking at all cases that involve an allegation of bias in discriminatory policing of some kind. We're going to be looking at all cases in which a supervisor is the named subject. Because those are particularly sensitive to make sure that the higher ranking people in the agency are not being treated differently or protected more than the rank and file officers. So that's something that we do in a number of the agencies that we work with, and it's part of the model here in Modesto. And then we're going to take a sampling, a random sampling of the other cases that do not fall into one of those two categories. So what literally happens is Lieutenant Kleiber provides me with a list of case numbers with no other information on it, and I just highlight a mathematical selection of them, choose them at random, and then the department produces the investigation files for all of those cases, including the body-worn cameras, the police reports, any other evidence, the interviews, any other evidence related to the department's investigation into those matters. Similar to, with the use of force process, again, we don't look at every single use of force, but we look at all, we get a list of the different case numbers, We do a random sampling of those. Sometimes I will ask for particular examples, not a particular case, but just to get a range of force options to make sure I'm seeing some of the different force options that are used. But other than that, it really is strictly just a random sampling. And the goal, as I was saying before, is to, again, provide a report card of sorts in terms of how the department is handling these very important matters of internal review and internal accountability, and also to potentially provide some suggestions for adjusting or improving those processes. Next slide. Okay, so again, these are the categories that we looked at and we'll focus for the next couple slides just on the internal affairs or that complaint and misconduct investigation process and set aside use of force for a little bit next slide please. In terms of our findings and again one thing I would tell you is i'm certainly going to i'm going to give you a high pass. In this presentation I absolutely welcome any questions that that you folks have about specific aspects of the report, but one thing I would say to you and to the public. Is that the report itself is is long and very detailed in a way that that you know doesn't lend itself to a public meeting, but I certainly would encourage anybody who's interested in these issues to please do review the report which is available on the city's website so. In terms of our overall overarching findings, there was an increase in the total number of cases. And I talked about that with Lieutenant Clybur. That's a phenomenon that we see from time to time in different agencies. And so what does that mean, that there was a spike in cases? Sometimes it's it's hard to read a lot into it in terms of it does this indicate that the department is struggling somehow that the number of misconduct cases is going up. Does it could mean a lot of different things and and just to give you a counter example we've been around agencies, where the number of complaints might be very, very small in the course of a year. And that's not necessarily because that department is just hitting a home run every day and the public is completely satisfied. But maybe people don't even have enough confidence in the process. They don't know how to file a complaint. So some of it just relates to accessibility and confidence that the concerns are going to be taken seriously as opposed to it being a super accurate measure of overall satisfaction. But one of the things that is new, and I think it's a positive thing, but I think it might have generated more business for the department, is that they really did kind of improve, enhance their online portal for submitting complaints. It's much easier for electronically dialed in people to file a complaint. And they obviously saw a lot of folks taking advantage of that new process. So I guess that's what I'd say on that subject. The two categories or the division, I guess, one important division to point out is between public complaints, which obviously the investigation is initiated because a member of the public has gotten in touch with the department somehow and expressed dissatisfaction with one or more aspects of a police encounter. And then the other category is internally generated cases. These are cases where the department administration, the department's leadership, has become aware of a concern and they have opened up the investigation themselves in order to address that concern. And those oftentimes end up being some of the more significant misconduct issues in the course of the year. as i say in in the report there are a few major cases that were disappointing in terms of officer behavior it didn't reflect well on the department but the other side of that is okay so that that is going to happen officers are going to fall short of our expectations individual officers are going to make mistakes the department hires from the human race like like everybody else does and there will be there will be shortcomings i think one of the things that that for a lot of members of the public that the question is if the department becomes aware of a misconduct concern, do they take that seriously? Is there accountability in the agency? Are the standards that the department asserts, are those lived up to? And is officer misconduct, when it is identified, is it addressed appropriately? And that certainly was my experience in the internally generated cases that we looked at. As far as some of the public cases, One of the things that we like to do for better or worse is just to say, were there any common denominators in terms of topics? Were a lot of the complaints revolving around similar sorts of activities? And you might recall last year, one of the things that generated a lot of complaint issues had to do with pretext stops. People were very upset when they were stopped over something seemingly relatively minor, an equipment issue on their car. And they felt like that was a strategy by the department that was maybe discriminatory in nature, that they were being treated unfairly. We had a few cases where people were upset with the police for shining really bright lights on them as they're driving or as they're at the beginning of a traffic stop. And so when we see multiple examples of the same kind of concern, then that is, again, something of interest. And obviously, you want the individual case to be looked at appropriately and for the outcome of that case to make sense in light of the evidence and the known facts. But it's also good for the agency to take a step back and say, why are seven people complaining about this same thing? And do we need to adjust our dials a little bit, even though maybe in none of them did we actually think the officers violated policy? But there's a disconnect between the way our officers are acting and public perception that maybe we need to think about or look at. And two of the areas that just kind of unusually came up with higher frequency than I was familiar with previously, these are two super sensitive areas that law enforcement ends up getting involved in pretty regularly, one of them being custody exchange issues where parents who are unhappy with each other and maybe kids who are unhappy with their parents, it's a very dicey dynamic to begin with, and law enforcement gets pulled into that in ways that are sometimes very, very challenging. And a few of the complaints this year related to people who were unhappy about the police response to custody exchanges. And then the second example is resident searches. The police have a warrant. They have a perfectly valid or legal justification. It might be a probation search for somebody that's part of the search terms is that their residence is searchable by the department at any time. Those searches are, again, inherently disruptive to people, as you can imagine, and upsetting to people. And a lot of times the complainants were not the subject of the search, but they were family members who felt like they didn't understand what seemed to them to be the aggression or the over-the-top aspects of the department's behavior. I think I had to admit in the report, I don't have any magic answers to how to resolve to make a custody exchange go more smoothly. Because sometimes you've literally got a 16 or 17-year-old, very strong-willed, maybe physically capable person who is just resistant to going with the parent that's supposed to be taking over for the weekend. And it just puts the police in a difficult situation. Again, I don't have the answers to how to do it exactly right or what the department can or should be doing better. My point was really just, look, these are situations that seem to be over and over again creating friction points with the public. And maybe some of that is inevitable. And I will say in all but one of the cases, which was one of the resident search cases, There was no finding of misconduct and the departments that yeah we you know we understand what the officers did and it wasn't great but but. we didn't feel like there was a policy violation. There were a couple of those where we thought officers could have done differently or better. Maybe we agree that there's no actual formal policy violation, but can we take a step back as an agency and look at these situations and maybe give our officers some more tools and some more training about how to approach it differently or better? Easy enough for me to make this suggestion, then turn it over to the police to figure out the details, but again that that comes out of the review of the cases that we saw next slide please. So, in terms of the recommendations that emerged from the internal affairs half of the report. One of them had to do with intake interviews. That's a super important part of the process as far as we're concerned when a member of the public is aggrieved in some way and wants to make a complaint to the department. A big part of the legitimacy of the process and the perception of the legitimacy is that they feel like they are being heard and taken seriously and that their concerns are gonna be addressed and investigated objectively. and we saw several uh examples of the investigator who ended up being a little bit more i guess i would say a little bit more confrontational than than we would prefer in terms of clarifying and oftentimes the investigator was exactly right in the things that he was asserting or the correcting of the of the complainants misunderstanding of a concept or legal standing or whatever the case may be, but it just really did create, I think, the wrong environment for what we consider to be an intake interview that really should just be, we just want to hear you, we want to make sure we understand where you're coming from, and we'll take it from there. It shouldn't necessarily be cross-examination or debate or anything like that. One of our very common themes, and it's been true since we first got here, and it's been true in all the jurisdictions that we work with, we are very, very big proponents of agencies using processes like the internal affairs process, like the misconduct complaint, the public complaint review. Use it as an opportunity to go to school, basically, on how your officers are doing. You're getting feedback from the public you're watching this body worn camera and maybe the there is no. there's no policy violation identified and again that's oftentimes the case and we agree with that finding. But instead of that being the end of the discussion, can we look at the incident look look at the way it was handled and say okay there's no policy violation here but. Here's a communication suggestion, or hey, maybe if you wait for your partner or switch off with your partner if it isn't going well at first, there are oftentimes ways, and we talk about that in the use of force arena also, oftentimes ways where the department can take advantage. The supervisors are experienced, and they're very good at this stuff, so take a look at it and find ways to use these cases as not just as an accountability measure, but as a way of improving officer performance. And then lastly, as far as investigations of bias, there were very few of them. And we concurred with the department's finding that there was nothing discriminatory or biased based in the department's handling of the call. Those are sort of famously, famously difficult cases. The numbers are staggering in terms of the percentage of bias allegations that end up being unfounded. And I think there are a few reasons for that, one of them being that you know that the most obvious reason, maybe the most hopeful reason is that the officers are not engaging in discriminatory or bias policing behavior that's. I think what we would all like to think and I, it is my belief that oftentimes that is exactly what's what's going on here and why the investigation is coming out the way it is. But it's just very, very hard to prove discriminatory intent, so much of it is subjective and so much of it's just gonna depend on the officer's representations about his or her intentions. Our only suggestion here, we didn't think the department's investigations were flawed or mistaken in terms of their outcomes. But we feel like that there should be some ways to creatively look and say, hey, the officer is saying, no, I wasn't discriminating. OK, and that's helpful. And again, we would certainly like to think that's always true. But is there anything we can do to support that by looking at, and just to give you a very concrete example, if it's a traffic stop and the person says, you only pulled me over because of my race. And the officer says, well, I had no idea what the person's race was until I got up to the car. And you can look at the body worn camera and see that there would have been no way for the officer to tell what the race of the person was. Because it was dark or maybe there were tinted windows or just the angle that they were coming in. So are there some supplemental things besides just the straightforward questioning of the officer that can be done? Is there a history of complaints? Can we look at the officer's track record of citations given and traffic stops and say, is there a pattern here where somebody is... sort of seemingly focusing more on one racial or ethnic group than another. So again, I think the department does a good job with these cases and certainly takes them seriously, but the goal would be to try to flesh out the investigations in creative or innovative ways to the extent possible. Next slide, please. Okay. One of the things that was certainly a focal point for your 2025 was the June, the aftermath of the June 14th protest arrests by the police department. This has been the subject of a lot of attention in this room and with this body and with the city council as well. And I know that there is pending litigation related to a lot of these issues as well. So I want to start this part of the discussion by saying that the lane of the independent police officer here is pretty restricted by the scope of work. We're not taking a full-fledged analysis. We didn't do an after-action review of the entire department response to this, from pre-planning to post-incident analysis. after action on the department's part. Not addressing the ordinance issue, legality of the ordinance, that's a discussion for other bodies to resolve one way or the other. And again, there are some pending processes there. Our focus was basically on the two complaint investigations that emerged as a result of that day. And that really did give us a window into the, department's overall actions on that day, but a very specific concrete way of looking at some of the things that the public in general was concerned about. And they really were reflected in the complaints that this particular person made. So there were two separate complaint investigations. As the report says, they were both generated by the same person. It was a third party, not one of the people that had been directly affected by one of the arrests. And it was someone who had actually been a witness to a couple of the arrests, and those were the things that she was focusing on. And interestingly, she was also somebody who attended, and I'm sure there were a number of people who fit into that category. She attended both of the different organized protests on that day, the protests. Ice out protest that was earlier in the morning period of time and then the no kings with a larger no kings protest in the afternoon. So because she was at both that gave her a frame of reference and a perspective and just raised questions in her mind about the department's approach to those those respective events so as far as our findings were concerned we looked at it in terms of we took a deep dive into the body-worn camera and a very extensive investigation that the department did in response to this person's complaints and by the way i will tell you we were talking about intake interviews um a couple of slides ago I was very much struck by the care with which this intake interview was conducted. First of all, to make sure that there was a complete understanding of what this woman's concerns were in perspective and very much going, the interviewer was very much going out of his way to avoid putting his thumb on the scale or making the person think he was trying to convince her she was wrong or anything else. It really was handled as objectively and carefully as you would like. So I thought that was a good start to the process. And through the detailed questioning, The investigator was able to zero in on which specific two arrests the person was concerned about. She didn't know either of the parties that she was talking about, didn't know their names, didn't have a personal relationship with either of them, but there were two very specific events that she was focused on. And so that became the focal point for the report. The investigation was excellent. And the finding was that the officer's actions had been consistent with their training, consistent with the action plan for the day, consistent with policy, and that they had been legally justified in terms of the arrests that they made and the handling of those arrests, which the person's perspective was she didn't understand from her vantage point what happened there why are we grabbing this person and then later on what did that person do to be arrested and oftentimes there was a a significant at least a few minutes of of time lapsing between the department's decision to go ahead and arrest that person based on their conduct based on something that had happened so the woman seeing it you know five minutes later and saying, the person just standing there, I don't get it, but the full investigation showed that this was the result of identified conduct that the department just took a few minutes to get organized and to address, if that distinction makes sense. So there were no violations of policy in terms of the complaints that were raised by the person, and importantly, One of the kind of the backdrop for her complaint was to say, I felt like the afternoon was treated differently than the morning. And I wonder if there was a kind of a discriminatory or political motivation behind that in any way. And the department really did drill down on that very extensively. There were a number of interviews that were conducted with the department leadership in terms of the people who planned the department's response and kind of organized it and the senior supervisors who were monitoring and sort of managing events in the field as they unfolded. And several of the involved officers were interviewed as well about their understanding of the difference between the events and why here and this and what was your thought process. And the department determined and we concluded that there was not a content based if that makes if that kind of legal term makes sense to you. It wasn't whatever differences there were in approach. We're not based on the content of the political speech that was being being raised in the respective places instead with the department basically said they made two significant distinctions. One being they really did focus on the morning activity because they wanted to set a tone, if you will, of making sure that people understood the parameters of accepted behavior and the concerns that they were having about some of the potential for problems. So they wanted to take a... a firm approach to enforcing the ordinance as they understood it at that time and they really did try to provide a lot of warnings and again, set a tone that they hoped would carry over to the later event because they knew that that was even going to be a larger one and they hoped that by establishing some standards early in the morning or earlier in the morning, that would carry over into the afternoon event. And a second, I think very significant difference was that they had worked with, they had reached out to the organizers of both protests and the organizers of the first protest were not interested in engaging with the department in advance of their event, which they're certainly entitled not to do. But in terms of the afternoon, the organizers were more, responsive and more willing to engage and kind of understand where the department was coming from and and again, I think responsive would be a word to that and that the investigation found that that was probably a factor as well in terms of the the way that the the latter um protest event played out if that distinction makes sense, so That, I think, when it comes to the investigations and the findings of no misconduct, we concurred with that and thought the department did a good job with the investigative process. But that last little part of this slide, I think, is a very important piece too. One of the things I told you 20 minutes ago was that we're always encouraging the department to look at these events as, yes, we want to see if there are any accountability issues for our officers, but beyond that, We also want to see, can we learn from this? People were unhappy with us for one reason or another. And sometimes that's just what happens in law enforcement, unfortunately. And sometimes the police did everything exactly the way the department would want them to, and maybe a lot of members of the public would want them to, and it still didn't come out well. this was an opportunity to say, wow, let's unpack this a little bit. This was a large scale operation, a complicated operation, and can we learn from it? And even if there hadn't been complaints, even if there hadn't been the pushback that the department received, The scale of this event and the complexity of it and the number of officers were involved, it would certainly would have been a great forum for the department to take a deep dive and say what went well and what could we adjust or do differently next time. And I think that I think that process absolutely did happen. Within the agency and they did make adjustments to their operational plans and the ways they decided to go about their their business of enforcing. On a on a going forward basis and the the proof has been in the pudding, which I think is is gratifying. that there have been some subsequent protest events of a similar scale here in Modesto as well as in other parts of the country, and we haven't had a recurrence of the problems that were so concerning to a lot of people in the community back in June. So it's, I think, a form of progress that is encouraging. Simi, next slide. Switching over to the force review process, we are, I would say, supportive of the template, the structure that the department has for reviewing force is as well constructed as we would want it to be. There are multiple levels of evaluations by supervisors after every use of force. A relatively simple takedown to the ground with no injury at all, that's still gonna be the subject of an extensive review process where the supervisor, there's gonna be a supervisor in the field who is going to get the initial feedback from the officers, ideally talk to the subject as well and get the subject's perspective on events, take pictures if photographic evidence is necessary, and then later on is gonna review all the body-worn camera, is gonna look at the police reports, unpack the whole thing and see did the officers meet the department's expectations in terms of how they handled this and maybe most importantly was the use of force justified under the circumstances. And again, this is something that we've talked about already a couple times. Certainly in the use of force arena, we also think that that is an area where looking at the collateral issues besides the justification for the force itself is very worthwhile. And here, we have kind of been pushing for that in our first couple of reports, and we really saw the fruits of that. I'm not necessarily sure we should take a lot of credit for it, but there is absolutely a marked improvement in the department's willingness To be more expansive in terms of what they are looking at and following up on when they review one of these things. So it could be, you know, things that are really peripheral to the use of force itself, but have to do with operational effectiveness officer communication officer safety. Good teamwork with with you know partners or whatever the case may be so they're obviously there are a whole range of things that could potentially be. identifiable and worth following up on the department really has done a good job with that de escalation is another thing that we have talked a lot about it is a. concept that has been given a lot more prominence from a public perspective in the last few years. I think police folks would tell you de-escalation has been around for as long as there's been policing. It's not a new concept. But the public certainly has more awareness of it. And I think a heightened expectation that officers will attempt to deescalate, and that can mean a lot of different things, but they will. Just because you can do something legally doesn't necessarily mean you should. In that situation, and are there things that you can do, whether it's communication or just trying to slow things down or standing back and getting cover waiting for a partner before you engage so that you know you're not in a fight with one person. These are all things that that go into effective supervisory review. And we have also pushed for the officers to be more conscious of it in a concrete way by documenting their own efforts in their reports. And even if there aren't any, maybe the thing happened very, very suddenly. Everything was fine. And then as they were trying to put the suspect in the car, that person just got a little bit agitated and tried to run away. And the officers just had to react by grabbing that person and maybe taking him to the ground, depending on the level of resistance. That's not a situation where de-escalation was possible, but the department still expects the officers to walk through the exercise of saying, there's no de-escalation here, but here's why. It was such a spontaneous event, and we thought everything was good. We actually saw examples of situations in the cases that we reviewed where supervisors just kicked back reports to the officers because they did not make an effort to document their efforts at de-escalation. And so they really are taking this seriously, following up with it. And I think that the results are, are are hopefully playing out in the field in terms of officer performance but certainly as far as the review process and the documentation of these things it's been very enhanced in the last year or so and i think it's a very positive thing scotty i lost my clicker thank you and You did not miss a beat. You just jumped right in there. You've shown me something. So a couple areas of concern, or certainly suggestions for the department to refocus on, body-worn camera activation issues continue to be a significant concern. source of potential improvement, I guess is how I would put it. And I think that this many years down the line, officers ought to have it down by now as far as activating their cameras and being on top of things. So we saw issues with late activation on some of the cases that we reviewed in terms of the force review process. And we also saw instances where there was muting After the force was, the incident was over, it's kind of the processing of it and waiting for a sergeant or just kind of the post-event investigative process before, maybe before the subject is taken off to the hospital or to jail or whatever the case may be. There's a lot of situations where officers will mute their body-worn cameras to talk to each other. And some of that we absolutely understand. And I think there are situations where that's very appropriate. But what we sometimes saw is somebody would mute for a very good specific reason. And then seven minutes later, their camera still would be off. When they were maybe back engaging with the sus the subject the suspect and doing you know doing things that we would expect to be recorded so. Just refocusing on that re emphasizing to the officers and I think the department has a department certainly gets it from a managerial perspective, but to keep pushing it down and to keep. Focusing on it, I think, is is there's room for that and hopefully the Agency will do it and then canine bites. particularly sensitive area of the use of force spectrum, just because it's a high liability. Obviously, the dogs, there's a lot of moving parts, literally, and there's a lot of variables in it. And there's been a movement in the state of California legislatively for a few years now to say, we don't want police dogs used in apprehension anymore. And those legislative efforts have not been successful so far, but there is focus on it. So the department has a canine program, and there are a lot of advantages to the canine program. And a lot of agencies would tell you that they rely on the canine program as an enforcement tool for officer safety and for suspect safety, and we certainly recognize that. But if you're going to do it, the pressure is on you to really, really do it well. And in the couple of instances that we looked at, we saw the canines not – performing as effectively as they might. And so that's gonna happen, but then what is the department's after action response to that? How do they address the canine deployments? And again, work with the dogs and work with the handlers and adjust the dials. And in the force review processes that we saw for these cases, the focus was a little bit narrow. And I think part of that is because it's specialized, right? The canine process is not something that every sergeant, every lieutenant is gonna be really well versed in, but if you're gonna put it through the force review process, and you absolutely should, then make sure that you're doing a deep dive and that if there's a canine-related shortcoming, whether it's the handler's performance or the dog's performance, that there's gonna be follow-up and some documented action items associated with that. Next slide, please. So, believe it or not, I'm going to stop talking now. And again, I certainly welcome any of the questions that you folks have.

Thank you, Stephen.

Are there any questions from the board members? Nancy?

Yeah.

from the public, there was more than . It was more racial bias than bias based on political content. At least that seems to be an important issue. That is correct, yes. No. Right.

Right.

Correct. And that's exactly right. And again, one of the things that I think the department did, although it wasn't in the form of a formal complaint investigation, was that they incorporated some of that feedback into their report. their own response and adjustments. But there wasn't a, they didn't do a structured like, for example, an officer involved shooting where it's a very structured process and it's got these categories. They didn't do anything like that for this case. And to your point, one of the things that I would say is that we obviously saw how sincere and how passionate a lot of people were that came to speak on these issues. And some of them were coming at it from a variety of perspectives. Some really were directly specifically focused on actual aspects of the way that the department had handled the actual protests and the interactions with people. And I guess what I would say to that is we absolutely... hope that people who are unhappy with their law enforcement agency and who have a sincere belief that something has gone wrong and they want to see it addressed use the process because if you specifically, I was here for this, I was standing on this corner and I couldn't believe the way this officer, that is gonna be drilled down on and investigated in a way that's so concrete that it's very, very practical and useful, whereas some of the larger expressions of concerns that people were making are hard to investigate or drill down on.

Thank you. Go ahead, Ken.

Even I went through the report and on the issue of the body worn cameras. But my understanding of your position on this or your observations were that perhaps the department should consider more accountability issues and more maybe disciplinary matters for this continued behavior, I guess is the way I would put it, that you posited in your report. Am I correct in that?

Yes. And so just to expand on that a little bit, I think that the department's perspective in the cases that we happened to see where there was a BWC issue, the department's perspective was that this was not an intentional act. It wasn't a sinister act. And in most of the cases that we looked at, it didn't cost anything in the sense that this was an officer who had other officers. So we know what happened. We just lost that officer's particular camera. but i will say and i have i've talked to the chief about this issue and i certainly you know respect his position but officers are are smart people right they they respond to to stimuli like, like anybody else. And we've been around agencies where, you know, one of the agencies that we work with were, they were very early adopters of the cameras and they gave officers a big runway to get used to them and the muscle memory. And, and so, but by the second or third year, when we were seeing some of the same things, we were like, I think it's time to bump it up a little bit. And so they did. And sure enough, the incidences of officers failing to turn their cameras on went down fairly significantly. So I think that the department's reasons, you know, I'm not going to speak for the chief. I think the department is, it's fair for the department to say, this was not intentional behavior and it and so we just want to you know counsel the officer reinforce it but if you were to bump that up to a slightly higher level even i think it might have an effect on behavior and just make people more conscious yeah i i think um i think you're uh

your perspective on this is probably reasonable that, you know, maybe it's a habitual thing. And, you know, the desire here should be to correct that behavior. And not that, like you said, it had any material effect on the outcome of whatever the incident was. But if that's a continuing behavioral trait for a particular officer, they should be held accountable for that so that they're more sensitive to that in the future.

Well, I think that's right. And I would also say that the whole philosophy of discipline for law enforcement agencies is that it's not supposed to be punitive except when you're discharging somebody from the agency and there are some officers that they need to be separated from the department. In every other instance, the philosophical goal of the process is to correct the behavior. So we're not mad. We're not trying to make you feel terrible about yourself. We're trying to motivate you to correct the behavior.

What else, Nico?

Excuse me. Thank you. If I may add on the body-worn cameras, is there any like – legal issues that may come into play when it comes to like a public records request of body worn camera footage from someone that you know was arrested by the police officer and then they get the footage but it's just all muted and they don't know you know what they can't use it essentially because there's nothing there is that like an issue that you kind of run into often or

No, would be the most direct answer to your question. And the better, I think the better lawyer answer I could give you as a lawyer is it's gonna depend, right? It's always gonna depend on the circumstances and the situation. And I think to your point, I don't think there are any examples I saw where it's that extreme, where these incredibly sensitive interactions that could be difference makers for somebody who was trying to defend himself, that those were all muted out. I think the things I saw were relatively peripheral and, again, not meant to be intentional. But in a larger sense, from a liability perspective, in a critical incident, you know, if the officer's body worn camera isn't on, there might be a perfectly justifiable reason for that. But how is that going to play into public perception of the event and public, you know, I think the expectations are the cameras are there and the officers are going to use them and it's going to provide the public a window into what's happening out there. And when the department falls short of that for any reason, it's something that deserves attention.

Thank you. I just want to go back to the June protests as well. When you did your review, I know there was only two complaints that you could review. Did you also just go kind of based off of what the Modesto Police Department informed you on when it came to the nonprofit organizations or the people running those protests responding and being proactive with police officers before the protests, how you mentioned, for example, the ice out protest did not communicate with MPD, nor did they have to, as you said, but Did you reach out to them to see if MPD reached out to them or was it just based off of what MPD told you kind of happened with Minnesota Progressives?

So the most direct answer I can give you is that I work off the investigations that are provided, the investigative file that's provided. I'm not going to be conducting my own investigation and reaching out to the complainants to say, hey, is this really what you said? I'm really just going to base it on the evidence that is made available by the department. So yes, to that extent, I'm relying on their representations. But I also saw... body worn camera recordings that talked about the interactions that preceded the arrests at the ice out protest and the attempts by the department to talk to the organizers who were willing to meet with the department and talk to them kind of on the fly about some of the issues of concern. So I think that my sense is that the department was sincere in making that representation. But what I also say in the report is that warning piece is huge, right? Putting people on notice of what's in bounds and what's out of bounds when they would very understandably not have reason to know that is, I think, a really important thing. And the department did make some efforts in that direction. But there was one point right before some of the arrests began very early on as the protest was just kind of getting started in any kind of an organized fashion. The department was putting out messages over a car loudspeaker. And meanwhile, the protesters were protesting. So it's like there's obviously not the ideal arena for effective communication there. and it's one of the things that's very sensitive is that there are especially in the protest environment and especially in in the last few years one of the things that makes this stuff particularly sensitive and particularly difficult is that the police are responsible for public safety and kind of maintaining order and making sure that people are following the law at an event where they are oftentimes the subject of the protests. They are the thing that people are mad about for one reason or another. And that wasn't specifically the case here in these, the June 14th protests, but the... it puts law enforcement in a sensitive position that they need to kind of work through and pass. And I think the department made some efforts in that direction, but there's always room for considering other ways to be the good guy, if you will, and to always say we gave people every opportunity and we're sorry it didn't work out.

Thank you. I do have a couple more. Back to the complaints that spiked. I know you had mentioned how it went from 28 to 48. And partially it could have been because of like online complaints. Do you know how many when you looked at the complaints? Does it tell you which complaints were made online versus like in person or anything like that?

The complaint. So the form of the complaint is absolutely part of the complaint file. But I took my statistical numbers from the department in terms of this was the total number. This was the number that came in online, et cetera. And in terms of my own experience of looking at some of the individual cases, I saw several of them that had been initiated by the online portal. Okay.

Okay. I think the only other thing was the force review process. You stated the force review process is strong, but some of the flags that you brought up were the need for uninvolved supervisors to handle initial force reviews. Do you think maybe you can explain that a little bit further?

Sure. So depending on the circumstance, either the supervisor is going to be summoned to the scene after the person is in custody and after the initial encounter is already over. I would say that happens in the majority of cases. But sometimes the use of force happens when a supervisor is already there, either because the event has been going on for a while or because the supervisor happens to be in the field and just responds to a call and is able to assist. So when the supervisor has been involved in arresting this person, then in some ways that person's decision-making is in play as part of what happened, right? In terms of communicating with the officers or failure to communicate with the officers. And so it's in an ideal world, you would have somebody who wasn't directly involved in the incident and therefore potentially involved in the decision-making and responsible for what happened. You'd have somebody else come in and do that. There are practical realities involved. I mean, it's a lot of work. for another supervisor to come over and take over. And if the incident was relatively minor in nature, then the department's going to weigh the cost benefit of that. But again, in an ideal world, you're going to have an uninvolved person.

Thank you. That's it for my questions.

Is there anybody else on that board?

Frank? regarding the review times that you're seeing from our police department and comparing them to the review times you see in other police departments are the reviews getting resolved with the same efficiency is there a is there a turnover or a manpower shortage that might be delaying, or are they faster than other departments, specifically like the two that you couldn't review this year because they weren't completed by December 31st? I mean, do you see a responsiveness issue or concern that we should be discussing as a community?

So I guess if I could get some clarification. So the two cases that I referred to as happening in 2025 and rolling over into 2026 were the officer-involved shooting cases, the critical incident cases. And were those what you were referring to or just in general the whole?

Well, I guess there's a lot that you've been reviewing, right? And that they reviewed themselves internally, their own internal investigations. Right. So, sure, let's go back to the first shooting, I think it was March. If this was any other jurisdiction, what's the typical turnaround for a review of a critical incident like that? And also, just the internal reviews that they're doing. I mean, I just want a comparison to other departments and what you see. Are they...

Okay, understood. So I guess with regard to the critical incidents, the officer-involved shootings in particular, it is actually very... common for these investigations to take at least a year to be resolved a lot of that has to do with the elaborate investigation and sometimes there's you know the the forensic evidence takes a while to be compiled and then the the district attorney's office is going to deliberate over that for a period of time and then and then issue a decision of some kind And then the department is going to take over from there and do its administrative thing. They usually stand down on their own administrative review of officer accountability issues until after the DA is done. So I will tell you that in our experience in Southern California, a year would be actually an unusually brisk turnaround for one of these things. And we've seen them go on for two years or more, depending on the circumstances. With regard to the regular, the less significant events and kind of the basic complaint cases, for example, those cases tend to be processed more quickly than in the past. I'm not gonna say Modesto is way faster than other agencies. They certainly don't have any issues with running up against the statute of limitations where they're going to lose the opportunity to discipline the officer because it's taking too long. It's not one of those situations. It's going to vary according to the case and maybe most importantly based on whether the officer needs to be interviewed or not. There are a lot of complaints that can be resolved just by watching the body-worn camera and comparing that to the allegations that are being made. And in those instances, it's pretty routine for the department to turn it around in a few weeks. If the officer is going to be interviewed, then that's a much more, you know, you got to schedule that interview, you got to transcribe the interview, and there's a lot more deliberation that might be required before it's over. So that could end up taking, you know, six, eight months routinely. But again, timeliness was not an issue that we noted as being a problem in the department's process.

Anyone else?

Yes, I have a question. Thank you, Steve. My question has to do with how does your firm, going back to the criteria and the process of how you select which uh issues that you're going to work on i know you said you do random things one thing that i don't understand is that a couple years ago there was a data in the modesto b that showed a pattern a lot of extensive research about how african americans was four times was four percent of the population yet stopped more than 17 percent of the time or at least use the force And that data was also supported by the RIPA, the Racial Identity Profiling Advisory Group, where police departments have to report different stops. And then there was also another article in the San Francisco Chronicle And you also received a letter from the NAACP asking you to look into this. So I'm not really understanding why that situation was not worthy enough for the auditor to at least look into it. Can you explain why not?

Thank you for the question. I would start by saying it's absolutely as worthy as any issue in police community relations, and it is a problem. You mentioned a few articles that came out of Modesto in San Francisco. I think I told you when we were on the way in, I was in Olympia, Washington yesterday, and they are absolutely dealing with that same issue in Olympia, Washington. They're dealing with it in Palo Alto where we work, virtually every jurisdiction that is drilling down on these numbers has concerns about some of these statistical disparities, and it is enormously concerning. I would say two things. One is I think that this this board really did make a concerted effort to follow up on that and to kind of drill down on it. And you had a couple of different presentations where the department tried to provide some context into here are some of the factors and the things that make the statistical analysis complicated, including the use of census numbers versus, again, I'll go back to Olympia because I was just there, that's a capital city in in Washington and so the the I think that the black population in Olympia is maybe three or four percent but their arrests and uses of force are are significantly more than that but part of it is there are a lot of people that come through Olympia for for government business and there's a college there in other words they're not residents but they're they're in the city and coming through the city, and so that strict population-based comparison has limitations, I guess I would say. So I know, and I followed with great interest when the department pursued those issues in a couple different presentations. I know that there was a presentation about the RIPA numbers as well. But I would just go back to the reason why I didn't do a full-scale analysis is, one, That is an enormously complex task that is not in our wheelhouse, you know, as far as statistical analysis and just taking on the massive kind of project that would be necessary to do a fair comprehensive statistical analysis of something like that. So it's outside. It's basically outside of our scope. And even if it weren't, we might demur in the sense that we are probably not the best folks to do that. Having said that, what we can do is look at it at the granular level. Right. We look at the individual cases that we come into contact with and we ask ourselves. It was certainly, especially when somebody raises an allegation of biased policing, that's gonna be front and center in our analysis of the case. But otherwise, are we seeing indicia of the department treating different races, different ethnic groups, different protected classes differently in terms of how they're engaging with them and are they showing evidence of bias in their treatment of these people? And at that granular level, And there are limitations to that. We're not seeing everything, and we're not seeing the contacts that don't result in a complaint and that don't result in a use of force. There are limitations to what we can glean from what we're seeing. But in terms of what we're seeing, the department is not engaging in discriminatory policing.

How can you say that if you don't really look into it?

Well, again, they're not... They're not engaging it in the context of the specific incidents that we have been called upon to review. Your point is absolutely well taken, and I would fall very short of saying, hey, I can confidently say there are no issues of biased policing or discriminatory policing in Modesto or any of the other agencies or jurisdictions where we work. that is a reality that's constantly deserving of attention i can just tell you that through the very narrow window that we are able to look at narrow but not insignificant we don't see it as a problem

Okay, I have another question, too. Based on your experience with some of the other departments you work with that have hybrid, and they get complaint forms, because here we don't see complaints or really even know about the complaints. Anytime someone makes a complaint to the police department, then it goes to the city manager. I believe that's how it works here. Is that true? It goes straight to the city manager. It doesn't come before us at all. Is that true?

We don't see the complaints.

Or the names or anything.

Or understand what the complaints are.

If there's a complaint regarding the police department, that complaint is referred to the police department. If there's a complaint that goes through the police review board, then that's referred to the city manager.

How would a complaint come through the police board? We don't have any type of complaint forms or anything like that.

Typically what happens is if some if someone comes to you says, I'd like to make a complaint, then you're making the referral than that referral is made to the city manager's office. And then we work with the police department.

Okay, so everything is still kind of handled in house.

Yeah, if there's a member of the public that wants to make a complaint, they go through the police department's complaint process. Maybe I'm not answering your question. Maybe I don't understand your question.

I'm just wondering where we come in in this, if we don't ever get a chance to see.

We don't. Yeah, so if there's a member of the public that comes up and they make public comment, they're making a complaint during their public comment period, I would take that as that's a complaint that's being made to the police review board they're speaking to you um and if there's someone that comes up to you and wants to make a complaint we're just about done with the materials we've been talking about that you'd be able to hand them a card have your you know you make your referral there's the process that you could refer them to the to the city manager's office and then we work with the police department okay that's the process

Okay. Speaking of cards, we know we've been aboard for 22 years now. We don't even have a business card.

They're coming. I know. I keep saying that member bird, but I literally we just made the purchase order. Um, it's with the vendor. They're creating them right now. So hopefully by this time next month's meeting since we scheduled one in june, you'll have them in hand.

Thank you. And the tent and the other things that we need to get out and engage with the public.

We have those on order as well. It took us a while. I apologize.

All right. Anyone else? Chief?

Can I just make a point there? I think one thing to remind the board and one of the things that was talked about early on is the Sometimes people are afraid, and I think maybe, Wendy, you mentioned this before, people are afraid to come to the police department or afraid to make a complaint coming down to the police department. And that's one of the reasons why we have the availability online. And I would encourage this board Um, who are again members of the community that have connections. That's hopefully where people would feel comfortable talking to you. Not that you guys, you're it's not with your purview to investigate the complaints, but you, you definitely want to be empowered to have the avenues to refer them to the online portal to refer them to the city manager's office. who then refers it to our internal affairs process so we can have that warm handoff to investigate those complaints fully. So that's where I see extreme value with the board. Again, not in investigating, there's no investigating role that you guys have, but the referral process where people may feel more comfortable talking to you than coming into the police department lobby or calling us directly.

Is there a feedback loop, though, when you get the complaints of whether it was founded, unfounded, or...

Yes, with the complainant, yes. Okay.

All right. Anyone else on the board? Questions for Stephen? Anyone in the public have questions? Come forth, please. And please state your name.

Good evening here, buddy. Tom home. Former resident of Modesto for over a decade. Current county residents still, um, I just want to, um, before I. You know, mention maybe some of the concerns and stuff. I do want to mention same thing I said last year for the report. This is a really good thing. This is the transparency that I think. You know, we all that were involved in the in the early on process talked about and having these reports. So I just want to say, you know, that that I don't want to overlook the fact that this just having the report and having these meetings is a positive thing. And I'm happy that it's still happening. You know, we get to look in the report and, you know, page seven, it talks about there was incidents where officers violated policy. And on the same page, it says MPD went above and beyond in some of the instances and investigate it. And it's like, it's a chance for kind of everybody to see like, oh, well, then these people could have been right about, you know, witnessing an officer violating policy. Well, the officer was right when they said they tried to go above and beyond. And it's, you know, I think it's doing its job in that point in that everybody gets to see that it's complicated. Things happen over here, things happen over there. And it's transparent, and we get to talk about it as a a community. Um, just a couple of, you know, things that I read that were concerned, you know, the thing about threatening to break down the door after, especially after somebody said that they didn't want to talk to police. It's I know it's kind of like borderline the issue. Maybe they weren't read their Miranda rights and then said I want a lawyer and then we're like continue to be bugged but anything that approaches that kind of situation from a civil liberties standpoint is concerning just leave it at that the other concerning issue that was you know talked about so I won't talk about a whole bunch but the kind of Are you arguing with somebody that's make a complaint instead of kind of just gaining the information. One that I felt especially of saying, you know, accusing somebody that says the officer saw my race and saying they couldn't have. And then it actually was found out that maybe that person was right. The officer said that they knew the race. So I know it said in the report that maybe there was no ill intent, but it is, I think they even used the word detrimental to those community relationships when things like that happen. So just pointing that out. And the recommendation number three about looking for patterns in these bias-based complaints instead of just each individual thing. I think that's important. I know that the ACLU of Northern California actually has a project about looking at the pretextual stops issue, even though the Supreme Court has said that it's constitutional to do pretextual stops of working with local police departments and review boards and saying, what can we still do as far as policy to try to stop those things from happening and try to let community members not feel like that's happening to them. And I just want to say really quick, because I only got to read the first 20 pages today of it. I know that last time it was, there's an agenda item about OIR, but they didn't want me to speak about the report anymore because that's not what was on the agenda. Can we put it on the agenda one more time so that I can make additional comments after I read the full report? That's all I ask. Thank you. Thank you.

Is there anyone else for public comment?

wait if i can just quickly respond to you tom um if you do have any further comments or concerns feel free to email us call us and then we can also bring those up in our other meetings that we do have and then we can try to move forward with those and try to get you some more answers of course thank you nico is there any other

public comment regarding the report. Bring it back to the board. Any follow up?

Nancy, like to say I really appreciated it. It was very, very thorough, very granular. And I learned a lot. It was good. Thank you.

I concur. I second that emotion. All right, we're gonna close public comments. We're going to, with no further questions, we'll move on to Captain Adams on Stanislaus County Behavioral Health Services presentation.

All right. Good evening, board members. Captain Chris Adams with the Police Department, currently overseeing the Operations Division. Really appreciate the opportunity to come in and talk about what I think is a great collaboration between the Modesto Police Department and Behavioral Health of Stanislaus County. So actually, there's a couple members of the staff in the room. Chandra Campbell and Kerry McGee are sitting in the audience, and I appreciate them being here and here to support our collaboration as we talk about the different things that we are doing together that I think are really benefiting both departments and the community, most importantly. So I'm going to jump into the four areas that I'm going to talk about this evening, specifically training, both within the department, within BHRS, also the laws associated with mental health, and just give a little bit of context there about the landscape that we're in currently. The MSERT program, which is, I think, a topic that the board is very interested in hearing about. And then something that's pretty new in the last six months or so, a monthly meeting and evaluation process that we have in place with us and some of our agency partners. So just real quick, talking about training our staff, officers and beyond that, our professional staff as well when it comes to mental health calls. Definitely a topic that I think is constantly on the forefront of policing in general and ultimately the police department takes this very seriously and we take our training very seriously behind responding to mental health calls for service. So just a little bit of context for what training officers are getting in the academy. There is basic post or police officer standards and training they receive in the academy approximately 15 hours. But what's different now than even from when I went to the academy 20 years ago is mental health calls for service are woven into a lot of different what are called learning domains within the academy process. than just having just one block on mental health calls for service. We really take use of force, de-escalation, handling disputes, cultural diversity, victimology, crisis intervention. All of those are different learning domains in and of themselves in the academy, but we take mental health calls for service and weave those into those as in scenarios. So while it may say on paper, as in most trainings, we get 15 hours in the academy, It's well beyond that because we're building them into additional topics of training. Field training officers, specifically those who are training our officers in the cars when they're brand new coming out of the academy, they also get an additional eight hours of post-training plus four hours embedded into their FTO certification course. I think one of the biggest things that's probably most important to highlight about Modesto Police Department that may set us apart from other agencies is we're constantly evaluating and building in different topics into our training. We have five annual training days a year that officers are required to go through. And while POST requires a certain number of hours in every single different discipline, whether it's driving or use of force or cultural diversity, they set a minimum standard. And we definitely meet those, but we pride ourselves in our five annual training days that we build and go above and beyond. Instead of doing what would be considered block training every two years and doing those core concepts, every single training day is different in building in different avenues of learning and training into our core concepts as well. So while we may be doing emergency vehicle operations, while we do that, we respond to a mental health call for service. And so that would require maybe code three driving, lights and sirens. So we're integrating the driving portion, but also when they get there, they actually have to act and work on a call for service We could drive all day and do emergency vehicle operations. But ultimately, if we actually put it in a real world scenario, which we do a lot of in our training is practical application. What do you do when you get there? And now your adrenaline's up because you've been driving fast to get there because it's an emergency situation. So we're really building in a lot of this training into our annual training days that we do throughout the year. And also every single day, every staff member that's assigned to us is sitting in a briefing and has an opportunity to learn something. And we incorporate that into our training there as well. There we go, thank you. But one thing that I think when I talk about our partnership with BHRS is kind of the flagship of the training when it comes to mental health and working with what training is probably gonna be most important is our 40 hour crisis intervention training. So this has been around for a long time. I went through the class actually in 2010. And we're constantly cycling our officers through there. Actually, 75% of our sworn staff currently that works has been through this 40-hour crisis intervention training. While not a mandated post-course that we have to do, it is a post-certified course that we in this county choose to do, and because we find huge value in it. This is a partnership directly between Modesto Police Department and BHRS in the creation of the course content that's behind this. BHRS is actually the lead agency that puts it on. and we're the hosting agency that pays for it. This course is hosted twice a year at the Modesto Police Department or at the Academy, the Stanislaus County Sheriff's Office Academy for space, and it's open to other agencies in the area. The Sheriff's Office sends members to it. We've had outside agencies within the county and also outside the county that attended, but we're sending officers through this and some of our professional staff every single time that we host this, which is now twice a year. So as you see up here, and I'm not going to read everything to you here because you have it in your presentation, but this 40 hours is jam-packed with information that helps our officers really understand what it's like to respond to a mental health call for service. All of the things that are associated with that, going back to crisis resolution and de-escalation, that's huge, the de-escalation and slowing things down. understanding mental health and substance abuse, time and distance communication, which is a big piece of de-escalation, a coordinated response. And what that looks like is not just police officers responding, but what resources do we need there to help de-escalate this? And that's our great partnership with BHRS when I talk about the MSER program in a moment. Suicide prevention and an adverse outcome. So making sure we're understanding, identifying risk as we are either going on calls for service or just interacting with the community in general. And then scenario-based training. This is huge. This class is put on specifically by BHRS. They're bringing in professionals. They're bringing in psychologists, people that have lived experience, which is the last point up there. But we're actually putting our officers in very uncomfortable situations, oftentimes in front of their peers, which makes it even more uncomfortable when you are going through a scenario that in front of your peers and everyone's watching, but to make sure that the concepts that they talk about in this 40 hour course are put to work and our officers feel very confident and competent in their abilities to interact with people that are either struggling with mental health or with substance abuse and those types of things. So this course has definitely evolved over time and I think it's just gotten better and better BHRS has done an excellent job and we're the beneficiaries of that to receive this great training. It's something that we're making sure early on in our officers careers, we're getting them into this course. It's one of our core courses that we like to send them to. And as I mentioned before, 75% of our sworn staff has been through it and we continue to put it in. We actually have one coming up next month. We also put our chat workers through the same course, which chat, obviously working often with those struggling with mental health or substance abuse disorder. And we have found that to be very helpful for our chat workers. So real quick, before I talk about the MSERC program, I just want to give you a little context of where the legal landscape has gone when it comes to, and some of the stuff you may be reading or hearing about response to mental health calls. 5150, I just wanted to put up there, which is kind of the law that we're able to utilize when someone is a danger to themselves, others are gravely disabled, that we could put a temporary hold on someone to get them out of an environment where maybe they could hurt someone or someone else. But SP230 was a law that came into place in 2019 that really started shaping, I think, the conversation around one, use of force, but two, de-escalation techniques. And it's really the guiding principle really accompanied with AB392, which came in 2020 around use of force. but making sure that agencies were going down the path of de-escalation and utilizing all de-escalation techniques, as OIR mentioned tonight, something we specifically call on police reports, to make sure that's happening in any situation, whether we believe it's going to lead to force or not. We want to make sure that we're doing that. It focused around mental health crisis response, communication skills, and required documentation, which is where we got that concept of making sure in each police report, if force was used in any situation, whether it's involving mental health or not, that we're documenting that. But ultimately, that guiding principle and the concept of de-escalation, while we in our careers have done that informally, putting a term to it and make sure that we're documenting that information and officers or staff are constantly thinking about that. What things can I be doing to slow this down if I can? What other tools, what other people what are the things that I have at my disposal to have the best possible outcome for everybody in this situation. But one thing I want to note up here, this is a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision from 2024, Scott V. Smith. I won't go into the details of the case, but it was out of Nevada. But specifically this had to do with a subject who was suffering from a mental health crisis and ultimately was taken into custody and died in the custody of an agency out in Nevada. And ultimately, the conversation around this really started focusing on a crime versus mental health calls for service. And sometimes we go and we have both. Sometimes we only have a mental health call for service. And a lot of times when we go, we don't have all the information to know before we get there. So the court's decision here really focused around what I think you guys are familiar with when it comes to qualified immunity, that officers in the event, in this case, did not have qualified immunity based off of what ended up being a result of the case. What that did across those states that are in the Ninth Circuit is starting to take a hard look at mental health calls for service and are the police the best resource to be sending to that? And agencies were looking at it from the perspective of not wanting to put their staff or the cities don't want to put their people in a position where they're only going to a mental health call for service. And if they potentially use force that someone could be hurt, What kind of liability are they facing? So a lot of agencies around this time, and you probably saw it in the media, some agencies started taking a no response model, meaning if it's just a mental health call for service, we are not going to go to that. And so internally, both as a city and as the police department, We looked at that and of course we're taking talking to our attorneys about it, but ultimately we have to make a decision of what's best for Modesto and Modesto Police Department's response to that was we were not going to be a non-response agency. I think as an agency we've been Someone that really looks at both sides of things. And while we need to be, we need to be smart about this, but there's an expectation of when someone calls 911 because their family member is suffering from a mental health crisis, that somebody shows up and does something for them. So that started engaging our conversations really deep internally about what we would go to, calls that we would go to, and what resources we're going to send to that. So here, as I mentioned, we did not develop a non-response model, while some agencies in the state did, but we set up very specific guidelines in making sure we have a higher level of understanding of this call and taking a deep dive into what we actually have before we act. Obviously, emergency situations where someone's life is in danger, we're gonna respond to that and we're going to be there and evaluate that and make decisions. But supervisors on calls for service where just a mental health, someone that says I want to hurt myself, and they're by themselves in a residence, supervisors are going to respond to that call and evaluate if police is needed. One thing we don't want to do is we don't want to go in and hurt someone that wants to hurt themselves, right? So we have to evaluate, are there other family members there? Are there crimes that have been committed? What other resources do we have to bring to that call to help bring it to a safe resolution? that doesn't mean that there's not instances where we don't walk away because there is if we have someone that maybe is in a residence on their own and the only thing that's happening is they're threatening to hurt themselves and they're inside we know there's no other family members there there's no kids there there's been no threat to neighbors or people in the community there's a there's a possibility that we do not go in and make contact with that person in that moment because we don't want to be in a position to force ourselves now Are there times that we would or need to? There could be, but we want supervisors to be part of that conversation gathering all the information. That doesn't mean we walk away when we just hear about it. If we have resources to talk to that person or if we can have a mental health clinician, as we'll talk about with MCERT, that is gonna be something that we're gonna try to do first and absolutely try to get this person help. But again, we don't wanna hurt someone in the event that maybe that's what they're looking for, that maybe their intention is for us to do that. and ultimately evaluating if there's a better time to come back and help this person when they're not in a moment of crisis and they're not going to hurt somebody else. A big thing with now and as I talk about MSER in a moment, we have mental health clinicians out in the field riding with our officers that work for BHRS and bringing them to those types of calls is the best resource we can have because we can get history on that person. We have now another line of communication, someone that has training above and beyond even what our officers have, getting them there. Crisis negotiation team members, those that work specifically on trying to negotiate with people in high-stress situations, getting those people to those calls as well. And of course, de-escalation, communication, time and distance. We really, really slow these calls down. We are not in a hurry unless someone's life is in immediate danger. But ultimately, we do everything we possibly can to take our time when it comes to mental health calls for service to make sure that we get it right in the end. And they're based off safety, immediacy of risk, and totality of the circumstances. And that's why we want to supervise if they're a higher level of experience and someone that is going to look at it from the totality of circumstances. So I'm gonna transition here to talk about MCERT and then talk about our meeting collaborations. But MCERT is a great program that was revitalized back in 2022. We had MCERT up until 2017, which is the mobile crisis emergency response team. But they were, funding went away in 2017 and the chief was able to get them back in 2022. What this means is we actually have mental health clinicians that work for BHRS and we contract directly with them and they come to the police department and they write out with their officers on a daily basis. Right now we have two clinicians assigned to patrol. They work daytime hours typically. And they're paired up with an officer. We have four officers identified that they ride with. We try to keep that relationship consistent because if they're moving from person to person to person, that they start to learn each other and know what the ultimate goal is when it comes to having an MSIRT rider with you. So we identify four people that they're riding with and While they are assigned a normal patrol beat and handling day-to-day calls for service, their goal is to go to mental health calls for service. So specifically, they're listening to the radio, paying attention for when calls come up on the radio to say, hey, this could involve someone that maybe is in mental health crisis or has a mental health component, and the officers are going to that call specifically. So if you see up here on the data, 72 is the number of calls for service that MSERTs handled in the last year. And when I say MSERT, that's MSERT riding with a police officer. So they're going to that call together. When you pair that in context with the average number of mental health calls per month that we actually receive, we only get 37 a month. I say only. That's specifically calls that have been closed out as someone that was dealing with some type of mental health issue or closed out as a mental health call. There's other opportunities out there that maybe the calls are closed out as something different. Maybe there was an arrest. Maybe it was a homeless person looking to get off the street that may have pieces of mental health or substance abuse disorder. But when we talk about the actual average number of calls we get per month, it's approximately 37 calls. And as I mentioned, we have two clinicians assigned to us now. At our peak, we had three, and we have two right now kind of in the wings to get trained and come back in. So we have more coming. BHRS, their staffing is starting to pick back up, which is great for us. And we're going to have more in the field, which is great for us. The last thing I want to talk about on there, they're able to also do follow up with clients in the field if they have some downtime and maybe have a call that we handled a couple days earlier when maybe we did walk away. We can go do follow up with that clinician at that time and bring the clinician to that call to make sure that we have someone that helps kind of deescalate that or more expertise. And lastly, we've integrated them to our threat assessment team. Our threat assessment team is comprised of sworn staff, Modesto City Schools, different hospital organizations, and that if we're receiving any information about people that potentially could be or planning different things that could threaten the community, having a mental health professional on there because we do occasionally get emails or threats to city officials or to people in general and may be experiencing some mental health concerns, we can have that clinician there to help us and help kind of navigate what that looks like in our response plan. Lastly, the thing I would like to talk about, and this is something more recent in the last six months and really kind of stemmed out of some agencies looking at kind of a non-response model. I won't speak for how the county handles mental health calls for service, but there is a model where mental health clinicians are going to calls on their own outside of having police with them in other places in the county. But ultimately, we collaborate with other agencies in Stanislaus County along with BHRS and have a monthly meeting where we talk about a few different things. One, we'll talk about specific cases that maybe we have handled in the city or have been handled in the county. And if there's things that we could be doing better, if there was an instance where maybe we did walk away or we had a conversation with a clinician and we were trying to decide what the best scenario was to move forward on getting somebody help. If there's lessons learned or things that we think we could have done better on both sides, we'll talk about it there. We want to make sure that we're all on the same page when it comes to people that maybe need additional follow-up or different attention for help or getting into some type of counseling or substance abuse disorder counseling. Talk about those individuals in that meeting. The big thing is talking about training. Just recently, we had documents shared with us in some of the training that BHRS clinicians are getting. That's good information for us to have. and it kind of improves our coordinated response with them. But most importantly, it's about the relationships. Oftentimes when working with other entities, whether it's in the city or the county, we're finding that if I have a face to a name of someone that I have a question about of, hey, why did MCERT handle this call this way? Or the same question for us, I can go to so-and-so or I can go to this person and making sure we're having those connections constantly and talking about them. But ultimately, I've been very pleased since I've come over to this division in January with the success of the MSERT program and looking back on kind of the history of it, and more specifically, that 40-hour CIT course as we get more people through that. It's been hugely beneficial. I've seen a lot of instances of opportunities where students You could easily justify and move into using force on somebody because of the situation, but our officers are doing a great job of deescalating, taking the time and having conversations with people to make sure that everyone's safe in that outcome. So with that, I'm happy to answer any questions about any of this.

Thank you very much.

I got a quick question.

Okay, so... The mental health clinicians are working. You only have two and they're working during the daytime. I already know nighttime. is sometimes the worst time for mental health. What happens to those individuals who are in need of help? How are they being serviced?

Absolutely. Good question. So obviously our goal is to always expand this program. Often the M-Cert riders that come out, it's based off of their schedule. We find that when we look at our call data, that we find a lot of the calls for service when it comes to mental health actually occur. We get more during the daytime than we do at night. Not to say that we don't get them at night. Fortunately for us, the mental health clinicians through BHRS has someone on all the time. So if we truly needed them, we could call them and have them come. The response time could vary. Not having them in the car, obviously we have the immediacy of it. But they're working in the county all the time, and we could call them. But you could be looking at ours. That's why we internally don't want to just rely just on clinicians and get our officers more training, get them through that CIT course so they have the tools to be successful in those. But we do have opportunities where we can call additional resources if we need.

Okay. Who was it? I had a question. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Trish. Go ahead, Trish.

Thank you, Captain Adams. One of my questions is you're talking about the supervisors come out to do the evaluation. Are they the officers that the clinicians are writing with or those patrol officers?

Yeah, sorry if I didn't make that clear. So no, they're the clinicians are writing with police officers, line level police officers. When I mentioned in general, when we're talking about mental health calls, supervisors are responding to oversee that there and they will be the final decision maker, whether we were the we respond or whether we're going to act. The officers are starting with that, though. They're the ones that are out there communicating, and then they're reporting back to the supervisor. So ultimately, we're putting the onus on the supervisor for whether we're going to have a non-response in that specific incident. But for the totality of circumstances, they're monitoring that. But ultimately, our officers are still doing the work and communicating with the individual or individuals on the ground and then reporting that information to a supervisor. They're still first on scene, basically. Exactly.

A lot of your references are to those in crisis as the individual, but I know during the day, because I work downtown, a lot of calls are about the actions of someone who's altered or having a mental or chemical response to things and either freaking someone out, intimidating them, causing that, the same circumstances would apply, right? The call then could involve that officer with that clinician.

Absolutely. And you know, what is common when someone calls the police for service, we may only get tidbits of that information and we may hear that as a crime call. Maybe somebody is looking into vehicles or hitting something with vehicles or something like that. And while you hear that with the information you have, that sounds like a crime call, over time you recognize that there could be a myriad of things involved in that, whether it's substance abuse or mental health. So we want to equip all our officers with all the things and when they get in there to make that evaluation. And then if it transfers into a mental health evaluation and we have an MSHRT writer, we would have them come over and help assist or take over that call.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you, Captain Adams. This sounds like a really good training. Do you guys have like a mental health registry where families can call in if you know you have a problematic child or family member that's subject to go off every now and then, that they can provide you information ahead of time of who they are, what their diagnosis is, what kind of meds they're on, and things like that so that you have a little bit more information about the person?

We personally don't have access to that detailed information. However, when we have a clinician in the car, they do, which just enhances our response to that because they can go into databases that have private medical information that we can't access through our databases. So we have that opportunity through BHRS. If we had something that maybe wasn't immediate, we could make a call to a BHRS clinician and get a little bit more information. But we personally as a police department don't. Ultimately, obviously, BHRS is a good resource for that. If a family is struggling with something and needs help, they can reach out directly to them. But in the moment, unless we had that clinician, we wouldn't have that detailed of information. We do, though, however, have access to if we've had prior calls and that resident or with that person, our CAD system will automatically populate that information. So dispatchers can relay to the officers in the field, hey, we've been to that house three times in the last two months. The last time we went there, that person was placed on a mental health hold. So at least we have some of that detailed information to help in decision making.

So do you know if families know that they can do that ahead of time just in case something happens, that they won't have to worry so much about the person getting shot or whatever, but that you already know who this person is and what their issue is?

Yes, and ultimately, those are a lot of the conversations we're having, even before we make contact with someone that's maybe in a mental health crisis, is conversations with the family to learn the history and tell us what has changed. Has medication changed? Have they stopped taking medication? All of that is great information for us to diagnose, and we take that information in and can report it into our own reporting system to have that in the future.

Yeah, and if there's a family member that has influence over that person, that maybe can talk them down or talk them out of things, whereas an officer or even a behavioral health person, they may see them as agitating. But if a grandparent or uncle or cousin or somebody that they have a good relationship with, if you have their contact information, that could be that one person could talk to them

Absolutely. And that's something that's covered specifically in that 40-hour CIT course, is thinking about all of those avenues and not just what police officers may think in checkboxes and handling a call for service. So, yeah, absolutely. Nancy?

Hi, Captain Adams. Can you give us an idea of your other partner agencies that you referred to regarding the monthly collaborative meeting?

Absolutely. So the Santa Claus County Sheriff's Office, Ceres Police Department, Turlock Police Department, all of the county agencies are invited to that monthly collaboration meeting to talk in general about mental health.

Okay.

So the only... mental health agency involved, or the source would be BHRS?

Correct. Thank you. Correct.

What about NAMI? Who? NAMI. Oh, NAMI.

NAMI. Not this particular collaboration meeting. This meeting is hosted by BHRS with the local law enforcement agencies to collaborate, but they're not in that specific meeting now.

Captain Adams.

Yes.

In your material here, you listed the average number of calls per month for mental health issues around 37. My math is correct. It's around 450 calls a year. Do you have any idea what percentage of those are handled by your officers and what percentage might be handled by the chat members?

That's a good question. I don't have that breakdown in front of me, which is something I can absolutely get to you. What I will say, though, is, as I mentioned before, while that is the average of what we look at monthly, I can guarantee, especially with our chat workers, that they're working and talking with persons experiencing substance abuse or mental health that's not going to be captured necessarily in the closure of a call the way that we classify it this way. So it's probably beyond that. I can get a breakdown for you on what that looks like in the end. Ultimately, when it comes to mental health calls, if it looks like it's going to maybe where someone's going to be placed on a hold or there's going to be follow-up done, typically it's going to involve a police officer at some point because chat doesn't have the ability or authority to place a mental health hold on someone that's experiencing that that meets criteria 5150. So most of them is going to have a police officer involved at some point or at least a mental health clinician.

but that initially could involve the CHAT personnel. And they obviously recognize that this is above their pay grade for lack of a better term. And so they're gonna request an officer to respond. follow up question as far and maybe this is more for the folks from behavioral health services. What other agencies do they interact with, for example, you know, my background was in the fire service, and they respond to probably 70% of their calls are for medical aid. And I don't know what the percentage is. But there's more than a few of those calls that turn out to be mental health issues. And so my I guess my concern is this shouldn't be isolated to law enforcement agencies. I think any first responders would benefit from this type of training. And my question, as I said, probably more succinctly directed to the behavioral health folks, is do they work with other agencies? For example, fire departments, AMR, the ambulance service providers in the area. Yeah.

Chandra, Kerry, did either of you want to have something to say? Thank you.

Yes, thank you for the question. I'm Carrie McGee, and I'm the Chief Operations Officer for the Behavioral Health Department. So as far as our collaboration, we have collaboration with several other partner agencies. We have the specific monthly meeting with the law enforcement, but we also have a monthly larger collaborative that's open to a lot of other community partners, including first responders, our local hospital emergency departments, community first responders. It's the integrated Crisis Response Alliance Network meeting. and so that one has a lot of additional partners and including community-based organizations and so that's an opportunity for us to collaborate with others we have been in communication with the fire department and are having conversations with them about what they're seeing in the field as well so that we can better partner and learn how to respond to the calls that they're seeing all right thanks awesome another question

I have a question. My information's dated. It was back like in 2015. We had a young lady that I was assisting her mother, and she was very critical of the 5150 because an officer, and I'm not sure if it was an officer now or a sheriff's deputy, Back in the day, but we just come up roll up on the person who's having a very traumatic moment in their own mind. And they'd say, do you know what day it is? Do you know where you are? It was like three simple questions. Do you know who the president is? And then they would leave and not actually address the crisis that was happening with that person. Has that changed? Do you engage someone or maybe detain them and take them to doctor's hospital now? What's the process there when you say, no, you're going to danger to yourself?

Right. So the process really is having critical thinkers, having conversations, and making a determination if someone meets what would be considered the threshold that they're a danger to themselves, a danger to others, or gravely disabled. And there's very specific things that we have to have to meet that criteria. So there are questions that end up getting asked. To your example, while some of that may be relevant, I think, for maybe a medical emergency in that, maybe there's something beyond that that happened in that specific scenario. uh that could be different but our officers are are trained our staff is trained to to be critical thinkers and asking important questions but asking very blunt questions do you feel like hurting yourself if you do what what means would you use to hurt yourself because we have to have very pointed questions because someone in a mental health crisis that maybe does want to hurt themselves often are going to tell you that information Now, before we even have contact with them, we'll likely talk to family members. What are statements that they said before we got there? What medications maybe have changed? That's all going into an evaluation to say, hey, if I leave this situation now, that I'm here talking to them and have them in a safe place, are they going to hurt themselves when they leave? Are they going to hurt someone else? Are they so disabled that they cannot care for themselves and there's no one to care for them that we need to take them and get to a place to be safe? So to go back to your question, there's a lot of questions to get answered. And to say that there's a checklist of ones that we specifically ask, in that instance, no, it's a long list of things of trying to get the history and get an understanding so the officers can make a determination Is this person truly going to hurt themselves, or are they going to hurt someone else? If I leave this situation, are they so gravely disabled they can't care for themselves?

Okay, like this one was simply a young lady dressed in a negligee in the middle of winter, and she wasn't going to hurt herself, but if she stayed out overnight, she was going to have exposure. I mean, she was going to hurt herself. Yeah.

Yeah, and ultimately, you know, we talk to a lot of people that maybe are in vulnerable situations, but there's a different threshold to get to what is considered danger to yourself or danger to others. And so in that specific instance, obviously, I can't speak to the exact details, but ultimately our officers are really looking for the perspective of when it comes to mental health. Not necessarily life circumstance, and there's a lot of different ways that we can get someone help or get them out of a situation that may be dangerous to them, become a victim of crime, or just weather dependent to get them out of the elements. But ultimately, to get to a point where someone is having a mental health crisis or in a position that they may hurt themselves or hurt someone else, we have very specific questions we're going to ask in that situation.

Wendy asked a question about a registry, and I don't know what happens with this. I know a woman who was attempting to get legislation up in Sacramento. Her child is severely autistic, and she knows that the response the child might have to sirens and to an officer would provoke him to be very resistant and maybe violent. And so is there a registry problem? that maintain either by BHRS that is aware of the child's handicap? Or does the police department know that this child has this? I mean, is there a registry? I mean, would you identify them on a sidewalk?

Right, right. So going back to the original question, we don't participate in any type of registry program, where we would say that, you know, this specific instance, autism, for example, like you use that we would say, hey, this person has a house with autism, and we look at a list of everyone that may live in the city that has that we do have that information, as I mentioned, through our CAD system, where we've had contact with them before we can put those notes in there. So we are aware of that in the future. I believe there are some organizations out there that have registry program for different types of disabilities. I know through DMV there's something where you can have different indicators on your vehicle that talk about things like that so we could be aware of it if we made a traffic stop. But ultimately, one thing, just going back to your example, equipping our officers, our agency, and I think we've talked about it here, autism certified. We went through a certification process to make sure that our officers are equipped with the tools to recognize someone that may be experiencing autism and making sure that we're not bringing things to that situation that maybe could amplify it, whether through sirens or voice or even the uniform, those types of things to make sure our officers are equipped to handle that. BHRS may have more to talk about when it comes to registry programs, but the police department specifically does not do registration for items like that.

And then the last one I was thinking of is just dementia or Alzheimer's. Do you respond to those as well?

Occasionally, yeah. And those would start to lead themselves into maybe gravely disabled. You know, if we do come across instances where someone may be wandering the streets, appear confused, lost, whatever that may be. Oftentimes it's more of a missing persons call where someone maybe had wandered away and they have Alzheimer's or dementia and couldn't find their way home. Had a great example of Sky One finding someone like that that was in someone's backyard that we probably wouldn't have found otherwise. But yeah, we do, and when we get those, same thing, we try to get information, identify who maybe they are, talk to neighbors in the area where we found them if we can find out where they live, use some of our databases, sometimes even sending out a photo of that to other people working to say if they recognize this person or maybe have seen them before. But then again, you could get to a point where someone that couldn't care for themselves, bravely disabled, that 5115 may apply in that circumstance.

Thank you.

Hello. Thank you for the presentation. Um, it seems like we all kind of had similar questions with the whole database thing. So I want to ask that one. Um, but one that I did have was the CIT training, um, our dispatchers included in that training. I feel like that's very important. That's kind of where the calls start and the communication from dispatchers to police officers and how to respond really will start there. Um, so my question is, do dispatchers have that training?

Good question that I think BHRS might be able to answer if you guys are incorporating dispatchers into training. I know typically it's our law enforcement partners. I haven't personally seen them in there, but we could get the information for you and find out. But I haven't seen them in the classes, at least at the graduations I've gone to, but definitely a point. It's important for us, and I know part of their training, and I think you guys are going to see a training on collaboration with SRM1 in the future. But ultimately, I agree with you that there's a lot of things that could be happening on the front end. We're constantly talking with our dispatchers, getting all the info that we need before we even get to that call and asking important questions.

Okay. So right now, basically not sure if dispatchers are sitting in on that training. Okay. Thank you so much.

Any other questions?

One more for me. Do you have a percentage of how many of those calls are related to homeless people?

when it comes to those experiencing mental health. I don't have that data in front of me, but I can absolutely get it for you.

And where did all the homeless people go? It seems like throughout the city we're not seeing as many people.

Yeah, no, we definitely, between our chat team and our officers working out in the field, have absolutely made that a focus to make sure that we're getting people to the places where they have connections to resources. It's been an effort across, actually, just citywide in general, not just the police department, because we know, and absolutely, that's been a top priority, I think, of ours for a while and really making some big strides there. It's good.

It's working.

Yeah.

Bravo. Anybody else? Any comments from the public? Captain Adams?

I'll be very quick. I'll just say again, great. More progress on, you know, the reforms and progress that we wanted to see made. Great presentation. Thank you for your work. I know I've mentioned in the past before, and I have the privilege of talking about lofty future goals, but I like the idea of programs like this existing outside of the police department sometimes. I think you're all doing a great job of exploring how it's working now. Just would like to keep that in mind. I also don't know how much effect it could have like when programs are part of the police's budget versus part of the city's budget. I'd like to see programs like this be sustainable for the long term. So, you know, definitely would hear about why, you know, doing it one way or another makes it more long-term viable. And I'll leave it short and sweet. Thanks.

Thank you. Thank you.

Is there anyone else?

Can I follow up on that?

Because you mentioned that you'd lost funding in 2017. It came back in 22. The police chief secured those funds. Are these funds going to expire at some point or this grant? Are there as the city pursuing additional grant money for future programming?

So this is currently funded through, it's called CCP funding, Community Corrections Partnership. And so we are committed to making sure that we continue to seek out that funding. I don't have a date of an end when that funding comes in, but they've been very generous. Chad actually was receiving funding from REM initially until they moved over into our regular budget. So we don't see an end in sight with that. And it's definitely something we're committed to and CCP is committed to us as well.

Awesome. Anything else? We're going to close public comments. Now we're on to staff comments. Thanks, Scotty. You've kind of updated us. Do you have anything else?

Nope. All right.

Oh.

All right. Simi brought me back to reality here. I'm sorry. So the vacancy. So the CPRB has a vacancy. Wanted to let you know that staff is working on a timeline. There are a couple of additional steps that are involved, as you all are very aware, when appointing a member to the CPRB. So we are outlining those. I know that Simi has been in contact Internally today we actually met earlier this week to come up with a schedule so we'll be, we'll be providing that here very shortly. You know if when it as soon as it opens obviously all of you will be come aware, and if it's, you know, and it should be in the very near future we don't have the schedule yet, but we were just meeting on that. can i ask a quick question on that because i was asked this question are these seats because i don't remember are these seats by district in our community they're just open they're not by district and it's it essentially follows a very similar process to we that we have with a lot of our boards commissions and committees for this city it's you know it's just um pretty it's pretty open the measure h for example that is more specific and some others but

Okay, and then I have a quick question. The person that would be filling the seat, the vacancy, are they just filling it for the remainder of the term of the passport member that used to hold it, or are they getting a full four-year? The remainder. Just the remainder. Okay, thank you.

So that completes our report. Thank you, Steve. Thank you, Scotty.

Thank you. All right, board comments. Board comments and reports. Any board members have any announcements?

Okay, I'll just speak real quickly. So I did attend yesterday's, I had some time to attend yesterday's military equipment show. A lot of information there. I walked around, looked at all the categorized equipment that the police department has. I personally did not see an issue with any equipment that they held and how they used it. You know, I was also explained a little bit more about why there was, you know, new equipment ordered, they kind of showed me the reasons why. And I just, you know, I wanted to kind of put that out there that I did attend that. And if there's anyone that has any questions about it, you can feel free to reach out to me. And I'd be more than happy to discuss anything that I saw there. Thank you, Nico. Anyone else?

Yeah, I'd just like to say that I was at the last protest with another community organization, and I did get a chance to observe the interaction between the community and the police, and I thought it was really, really good. I thought it was good the way the officers were dressed. They were on bikes. They were looking less threatening. I saw them communicating with one guy had a something that was illegal, I guess a pole, but the way the officer approached him and talked. So it was just really calm and relaxed, and I think a part of that was the police changing their approach in interacting with the community, which I do have to give the police department credit for, is that when a problem is identified, I do see them trying to correct it. Awesome.

Anyone else? Anything else? All right. Community Police Review Board Annual Report Subcommittee. Frank, you going to speak for us?

I am. Well, we enjoyed Starbucks the other night.

We did get together, but we were anxiously looking forward to what Steve Connolly had to say tonight. And we'll get back together and push forward with our proposal and hope to have it for you guys to review. And then we'd love to hear back from you guys as well. Awesome.

Future agenda items. I think we've established that for ad hoc review for our June meeting.

Is that it?

No. Sorry, Tom. No, it's not open. Nope. Email us. All right, with that being said, This meeting is adjourned.