Feb 01, 2021 City Council on 2021-02-01 11:30 AM (SPECIAL CALLED MEETING)

Welcome to this special call meeting of the City of Denton City Council. It was scheduled for 1130 a.m. I'm sorry we had some technical internet issues initially, but it is now 1143 a.m. and we do have a quorum. So we will convene this work session on Monday, February 1st, 2021, again 1143 a.m. And the first item on our agenda is item one, Work Session Reports, and the first letter under that is item A, ID 202354, Receive Report and Hold Discussion on the Police Department Overview. Good afternoon Mayor and Council, Frank Dixon, Chief of Police. As I previously spoke of, I want to make sure that we kept in touch on a constant basis giving you all updates on what's going on within the police department, and this is going to be one part of that. Let me get the screen up. Thank you and good afternoon. This information session is going to give just a brief overview over our mission, vision, and core value statement that are aligned with the city's overall. We're going to briefly talk about the organizational chart, review some 2020 accomplishments and some data. It's going to be shared on our open data page, and then we're going to talk a little bit about our 2021 goals. And I will be stopping along the way for any questions that anyone may have. So as you can see, the mission of the Denton Police Department is make Denton a safe, sustainable, and livable city for everyone by keeping victims safe and holding offenders accountable. The very last part of that sentence came into play in late 2018 as we were working with the International Association of Chiefs of Police when we were doing some victim-centered training, centered around sexual assault and family violence, and that became a big piece of our mission, keeping victims safe and holding offenders accountable, which may seem elementary, but it is something that we want to make sure that we stated so everyone knew that looking at us. And then our core values of professionalism, respect, integrity, dedication, and excellence is what we put forth every day, our expectations to our police officers serving the community of Denton. Our organizational chart, as it stands right now, has changed pretty significantly since 2018. Most notably, if you look on the upper left, with the creation of a mental health division that we'll talk about here in just a minute, and then the Office of Accreditation and Compliance with Dr. Richard Williams, those report directly to me, those two entities, because of the vast importance above. When we look at 2020 and our accomplishments, even though 2020 was the most trying year in American law enforcement since probably the Civil Rights era, we were able to accomplish a lot of things that we wanted to, but if I had to single out one that was the most important to me, personally, and for us organizationally going into 2021, would be the forming of the mental health division. We also launched a Spider Tech customer service delivery app. I thought it was very important that we leverage technology to get constant ongoing feedback from the community and not wait for the end of the year to send out one customer survey for the entire city. If you have ever gone out to dinner, you get an email, ask you how your night was. You want to do that while you're in the moment, right after you've interacted with the business that you've gone to, and that's no different in law enforcement. We are a customer service-focused organization, and we want to make sure that we're getting real-time data about how we're doing. We get a report at the end of every month, which actually comes in on the 1st. We got one this morning, and it goes through and tells us how many messages were sent out. These are automated messages that go out when someone calls 911. It lets people know when an officer has been dispatched, lets them know after they left the scene when they're writing a report, and then it again alerts them to the detective that the report's assigned to. So you're getting automated updates about your case along the way. It saves a lot of time, it saves a lot of energy, and it really saves the unknown. A lot of complaints that we get in law enforcement is failing to communicate properly with the community. This is one big piece that has really helped bridge that gap. For a point of reference, in the month of December, we had over 8,900 of these messages go out. I looked at the report this morning, for January, we had over 8,200. So you're looking at almost 17,000 of these messages going out in the last two months that we've had it up and running. So that has shown us some really good data. We'll talk about that a little bit in a minute as well. With the help of counsel, we were able to assign one detective to the HSI Child Exploitation Task Force. That's Homeland Security Investigations that does both human trafficking here and abroad, meaning internationally. What that has really done for us is it's gotten us involved in the North Texas corridor where there's a great amount of human trafficking, but has offered us the ability to leverage resources that we wouldn't normally have if we were out investigating these on our own. That's manpower, that's technology, that's equipment, and that's training that will come along with being a part of that Child Exploitation Task Force. So we're really excited about doing that. In the month of September, we led a sex offender compliance check operation that was coordinated with the United States Marshals. We had 146 out of 157 checks that we were going to do. We had 146 of those done. We ended up having 15 warrants written for offenders being out of compliance. We found three violations overall, on-site violations. One was a protective order violation. We recovered one missing person that was from a halfway house that was actually with an offender that she had a protective order out against. So that was a tremendous success, and, again, it's all about partnerships and leveraging those resources as you can. In late 2020, we're accepting into the Georgetown Law Act of Bystandership for Law Enforcement, or the ABLE Project. This is a new national standard for law enforcement. We were one of the first four agencies in the state of Texas to be accepted into it. We sent two officers that completed the train-the-trainer sessions. They are not only going to deliver the train to all of the Denton Police Department, but they also will be delivering that train to surrounding organizations, and myself, I've signed on as an ambassador for that program because I believe that much in it. And, again, we just continued through the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. We still continue to train and use educational opportunities. We were able to hold our fair and impartial policing course with community members, with the executive team, lieutenants, and members of our community, which I think was an eye-opener for both the community that attended and for the police officers that attended as well. The mental health division, we were very fortunate that we were able to hire our program manager, Sarah Gower, from a local behavioral health facility. She comes to us with a wealth of experience. Not only does she work with victims of domestic violence at a shelter, she also has done medical social work. She's worked with adolescents and residential treatment, and she has experience in healthcare administration, again, in a local psychiatric facility. So we were really blessed to have been able to get her away and have her come and really work together with our sworn, her sworn counterpart, which is Sergeant Elisa Howell, to get our program up and running. I think we're going to find some great benefits of having a co-responder model, but not just that the relationships that she already has and the relationships they have already built, not just in North Texas, but beyond, is really going to benefit the community and our mental health consumers within our community, which is the most important. And I do have Sarah and Elisa here, if they want to turn on their cameras real quick. So if you see Sarah or Elisa, you'll know who they are. They will be in plain clothes all the time. So get familiar with their faces, and please don't hesitate to call on us or them if you need anything mental health related. We are currently in the process of hiring licensed clinicians that will partner with our four police officers. So there'll be one clinician per officer. Again, they'll be in plain clothes. And they will act as a crisis intervention response team, and they will go out respond to high priority calls, especially those that involve firearm, edge weapon, a threat of jumping from the elevated position. They'll respond out to those calls in assist patrol and not only bring in the call to a successful resolution, but in planning prior to making contact, if there's nothing driving us to get to the scene for a life saving purpose, I really want to make sure that we're leveraging time distance cover barriers and communication, most importantly, to bring these calls to a successful resolution. So we're really blessed to have Sarah join our team. Are there any questions about the mental health division? I know that's been on some people's minds. I want to offer the opportunity to ask them anything. Thank you, Chief. If you could, let's see. So just to make sure I'm tracking with you, you feel like this is a good break for that topic. And then the other topics are kind of will move forward or are on different, it's a different subject matter, if you will. Yes, sir. Excellent. Okay, so if you pull that down, we'll take questions on the presentation with respect to mental health. And then we will hear the rest of the presentation. Thank you. Questions for the Chief regarding specifically mental health. Councilmember Armitage. Two questions, and this could be for the Chief or Sergeant Howe, whoever wants to answer it. One is, what is different now at the level of dispatch? Is there somebody from the team currently or plan to be in dispatch when those calls are taken? And number two, if you could just summarize briefly how this new mental health unit, which works in coordination with MHMR, is different than the crisis intervention team model from MHMR. What is similar and what's different? Hi, I'm Sergeant Elisa Howe. So as far as an officer being in dispatch to handle those incoming crisis calls, we aren't there yet, but it has been considered. Other large departments, including Houston Police Department, have a crisis call diversion program, and that would put a licensed counselor in communications, and they could route those crisis calls to that counselor. And then if the counselor determines that no, in fact, a police response is warranted, then it could be routed back to dispatch to get an officer in route. So we had several meetings about that early on last year, but it's going to take some grant funding, which should come up mid-year this year, and so we will again explore that option. But MHMR was very open to the idea, they liked the idea of putting one of their counselors in communications. As far as where we're at currently, and we're still in development, we are not operational as of yet, but we are working towards that goal as diligently as we can. Our officers have undergone training, we have hired one clinician in addition to Sarah, and we are still looking to hire three more. Once that takes place and we go operational, some of the major differences between how crisis calls are handled currently and how they'll be handled once we're operational is that we will significantly, significantly cut down on response time, on getting people who need help to a facility or connecting them with someone in which they can receive services from will reduce that amount of time. Right now we have to contact MHMR and then sometimes contact the mental health deputies from the county, and all of that takes time because everyone wants to do their own assessment. When we're available on the street, our SERT officers will be able to respond to those calls and assist our officers, make that assessment, and then get someone immediately to a facility if that's warranted without those extra layers in there. Okay. Thank you so much for that explanation. I'll just say quickly and just in follow up, I love hearing that there are conversations about possibly having a counselor in dispatch like they do in Houston. I love the Houston model, and anyway, thank you so much for that update. That's very informative. Okay. Thank you. Thanks, with respect to the mental health segment of this presentation. Seeing none, I will give you a few of my thoughts, Chief, and your staff too. You can circle back when it's convenient. Just wanted to kind of give you my thoughts. So on what I've seen, other issues. So when a mental health officer is not available, once that's kind of worked out, I'd love to see what our process is for handling that, one, and then two, I think there's a notice kind of opportunity for the caller to say, "There's not a mental health officer available. How would you like to proceed?" And so that that caller is activated in that kind of decision matrix and can, you know, they understand who they're calling about, that situation better than us, and they can kind of make that call and give us guidance on how we should proceed, but we have provided notice in advance. So I'd be curious to see how that kind of gets formulated, that process, understanding it's still in the works. But then also, when a family member, and this is in the news as well, family member calls another agency and that gets redirected to us, how we manage that or kind of read through those calls that come in, that maybe it's, you know, again, third-party agency that then calls us, how we can kind of filter through those and make sure if we deem it's necessary for a different type of response, we can go from there, but we need to elicit that information on the front end of that call. So curious about how we'd handle that. And then any opportunities for over-the-phone assistance, again, mental health officers are not available, another officer is not optimal, are there things we can do to work through with the family over the phone to give guidance, or if we can make that into the policy. And then I want to understand how if a mental health officer responds, how is that call escalated, right? So mental health officer shows up, hey, we're going to need a uniformed officer here, what's that process for that evaluation and how is that process documented, et cetera. Obviously, I know all those things are in the works, but that's kind of just the things that are top of mind for me around the mental health aspect of things. So certainly, I'll try to walk backwards. I'll try to take them in reverse order if I can remember most of the questions. So it's going to be a co-responder model, the mental health unit is going to respond along with uniformed patrol to help stabilize the call, and keeping in mind that these are going to be active calls for service. Once they determine that the uniformed officer presence is no longer required, they'll go back into service and they go on to the regular calls. The big piece of us wanting to get a clinician into communications is exactly for the reasons that you've talked about, is being able to solicit better information on the front end so our officers responding, whether it's the mental health unit or not, they have a clearer understanding of what they're walking into, hopefully. And that's going to be able to give our dispatchers the breadth to elicit more of that information that they may not get now. Should there not be a mental health officer available, then we're going to have to send people if that's what our caller wants because, I mean, we do it now across the country. But there are resources currently available over the phone that people can call, and that's going to be part of the mental health website. There is 1-800 numbers already available for people 24 hours a day, seven days a week through MHMR and some other resources that they can contact to get some of that over the phone conversation going and potentially get directed to resources without even having to contact the police. Okay, great. Thank you very much for that information. Okay. Any other questions for staff around the mental health aspect of the presentation? Okay, seeing none, I think we're a little lagged, there's a little lag, but seeing none. You can see me there. Okay. Councilmember Meltzer. Yeah, just a fine point, Chief, and the co-responder model, as I recall you describing it in an earlier meeting, the intention is to have the sworn officer not be uniformed. Is that still your thought that the presence of a police uniform can sometimes be provocative in those situations? Would it be more accurate to say who corresponded to the sworn officer versus a uniformed officer? It is a co-responder model, and they're both going to be in plain clothes. The officer, the certain officer and the clinician will be in plain clothes, but there will be times that they're going to respond along with uniformed patrol. So they're going to gather their resources and be able to work the problem more effectively to be able to bring the situation to a successful resolution. Okay, thank you for that clarification. Okay. Any other questions for staff around the mental health component for this presentation? And again, I'll pause for a bit just because there is a lag there. Okay. Seeing none, Chief. So I believe Councilmember Armitage may have asked this question. What's our current process? Our current process takes about three to four hours. If you look at the flow chart, it's very convoluted, and the flow chart actually accurately depicts the kind of control chaos that goes on. Right now an officer goes out, contacts someone in crisis, they conduct their investigation. If the person is voluntarily willing to go to a behavioral health hospital, the officers can transport them willingly. That's relatively easy to do. Now when they're involuntary is where we come into the time right now. Officers have to call the MHMR intake, then EMCOT, the Mobile Crisis Outreach Team will make a decision whether or not to come out and investigate. MHMR will decide to assess an individual. They do their assessment. Right now we have the ability, thankfully, to them being a great partner with us. We do it over iPad now, which takes a little bit less time, but you're still talking about 45 minutes to an hour. And MHMR will contact the Denton County Sheriff's Office, Mental Health Deputy. They'll come out. They'll also do their own assessment, which again takes another 45 minutes to an hour. And then they'll transport, the deputy will transport the individual if they concur. If they don't concur anywhere along the way of those chain of events, then the call stops in essence. What we're going to be able to do with the CERC team is we can do them ourselves, which as you can tell right here, it really streamlines things. If they're voluntary, again, we just take them straight there. The hospital contacts MHMR. We also contact them in a roundabout way, and I'll show you that just in a second. Involuntarily, our officers can do the, the CERC team will go out, do their assessment and then they can take them and transport them directly. One thing we're going to be working on and bringing to you all in the next couple of months is going to be a memorandum of understanding with MHMR to allow us to use the transfer all program, which lets our CERC officers know in the field, which hospitals have beds available for mental health patients. And that's not just in Denton. It's not just in Denton County. It's in North Texas. So it really will open up our, our ability to get people connected to services quickly. But more importantly, it also notifies that hospital and notifies MHMR at the same time that we're doing that. So it cuts down on that communication lag. So when you're transporting them to say a facility in Carrollton, they'll know that our officers are en route before they even go, which is really going to be great. Intertech I talked about a little bit earlier. We launched it initially in late November of 2020 and again, it's to provide updates and feedback regarding not just the police department, but we took the opportunity to loop in animal services and public safety communications and it gives feedback on the performance of dispatchers, animal control officers and police officers. And again, in December over 8,900 of those went out. We had a survey completion rate of about 17% this month, that's down to 16%. But as you can see, an overwhelming majority found that the electronic correspondence was helpful to them. And then 76% of those that responded, so 76% of the 17 feel safe living here in our city. How did we respond over the last summer of civil unrest, the political unrest, just so many things going on? Again, we didn't sit back and wait for everything to calm down. We seized the opportunities that we had and we utilized technology. So we were able to hold a couple of different candid conversations with two different segments of the community, one with our Spanish speaking community, and then one with predominantly African American community. We were able to hold two different town halls virtually on those. And not only did it have members of the executive team from the police department, but we have police officers, line officers that worked in neighborhoods being able to be on both of those calls, which I think really opened up the eyes of the community and the police officers to be able to talk about things that are bothering our community and then things that our police officers are worried about because I think when you're talking about community policing, you can't forget both sides of that dynamic. They're both very important. And then our staff presented and participated in the ad hoc use of force committee that met over the summer. And we, again, didn't sit back and wait. We transitioned existing positions to form the mental health division. We did not ask for new positions. We didn't wait for the new budget year and try to get those in. We use existing positions and we were very fortunate in the sense that we had those available to use and we were able to do that. It saved us a lot of time. We're looking forward to the chief of police advisory board coming on board. As you know, you all formed an ordinance in October of 2020 to create the board. We're looking forward to hopefully having the first meeting in March or April, and very important the initial meetings will focus on training and education. I can foresee and I've had a question by one or two people over the last couple of weeks. How often do we think the board's going to meet? Well, per ordinance, it's required to meet once a quarter. I can see the first year that meeting a little bit more because there's going to be a lot of things that the committee is going to have to get up to speed on. That's really going to be our focus on training and educating on the front end so we can really have some sustainable conversations about anything that the board wants to really. Our 2020 data, if you look at our calls for service in our last five years, we stayed just over 100,000. For 2020, we responded to 101,000 calls for service in our city, and out of that, you had 24,000 of those being officer initiated, 74,000 being dispatched, and then the net delta of that will be online and from the non-emergency member as well. Then our top calls for service, this is always surprising when people look at these. Total calls for service, traffic stops were number one, speak with officer can be anything from someone wanting to meet with an officer to talk about getting things from their residence because they're breaking up with their significant other, it could be someone lost, it can be a lot of different things. Then the impoundment of vehicles was third for total calls, and those are driven from the community. Community concerns, they call in, they either go through CIS or they come through our parking enforcement, and they end up becoming impounded vehicles. Burglar alarms, number four, a high number of our burglar alarms, both residential and businesses are not registered alarms. So we are really looking at a way that we can craft kind of a formula to get people more apt to coming in and registering their alarm with us. Why is that important? If you're out of town in your house, you have a storm and a window breaks, sets off your alarm. It would be beneficial if we had key holder information on file that we could call and let you know that so you could plan on getting someone out to fix it temporarily, a family member coming over and taking custody of the residence or what have you. And then domestic violence or domestic disturbance rounds out our top five for 2020. Our top 10 crimes of 2020, burglar vehicles, one anomaly that we saw this year more so than others previously was we had at least one very well organized group come into our city on a couple of different occasions and commit a lot of burglar vehicles in one night. So they would specifically target one neighborhood, come in, commit a lot of burglaries. They would sometimes drive in a stolen vehicle, either dump that stolen vehicle or drive it back out. They would also steal another vehicle from the neighborhood they were in and then take that along with them. One of those rings, we traced back to Fort Worth and a group that was targeting a number of different jurisdictions between Fort Worth and here. They ended up getting into a pursuit with the stolen vehicle from our city. The driver was subsequently captured after a chase and a crash. They recovered a firearm in that vehicle that was actually linked to a homicide out of Fort Worth. So you know, for the community watching, when you think of someone breaking into your car or snooping around your house, that's why it's very important if you see something out of place to call 911, especially at night, not to go out and try to confront people. On another occasion, they were confronted by a homeowner not in our city, but in a different city and the suspects did brandish a firearm at that homeowner as well. So it may seem like a minor crime, but as you can see, there are some nexuses to some very serious. And then I think for us, number six, looking at driving while intoxicated. Some people may think that because of the COVID pandemic that people weren't going out to bars, they weren't going out to sporting events, so there was probably a drop in driving while intoxicated. We did not see a tremendous drop in DWIs in our city, which is unfortunate. There's still people getting behind the wheel driving under the influence. Our part one crime data, if you look at a snapshot from 2015 to 2020, we had 3,400 total part one crimes in 2015, and that went up to 3,900 this last year. And as you can see, our murders, we ended up having six. Our sexual assaults are up, but I really believe we started a very concerted effort to push out better information, better reporting mechanisms, and really encourage people to step forward towards the end of 2018 into 2019, and that is a potential driver for those numbers going up in 2019 and 2020. Robbery actually went down this year significantly. We only had 56 robberies in our city in 2020 compared to 79 the year before. But the one thing that we did have this past year, aggravated assaults, went very high towards the end of the year, and we'll look at a chart on gun violence in our city here in just a few slides. So again, total violent crime went up by about 32 calls this year in 2020, and then our property crime, specifically burglary of businesses went up as well. Family violence offenses, as you can see through this chart, when the pandemic hit in March, family violence took a really steep dip in April, but as you can see in May, it spiked and it really hasn't slowed down until towards the end of November or into December, but we had three family violence-related murders this year, so half of our murders were specifically family violence-related. 35 of our sexual assaults were family violence-related, 82 aggravated assaults, family violence-related. So I can't impart on our police department, our police officers, and our community to work together to help us when we're tracking family violence offenses. We're doing a good job of getting focused this next year, working with Dinn County Friends of the Family and the District Attorney's Office. We're going to really be looking at ways we can proactively target those prolific offenders that are repeat family violence offenders. As you all know, family violence starts with verbal abuse, intimidation, physical abuse, and it escalates, and by the time it escalates to the point of one of the three murders that we had in our city, it becomes very difficult for our community and for our police department to accept. So we're going to try to get in front of that in 2021 by more proactively targeting those offenders when they get released on bail. And we won't go into what we'll be doing, but we're going to be making a concerted effort to get those people taken off the street when we can. Our gun-related calls for 2020, as you can see, they're really high. Now, keep in mind when you're looking at these numbers, when people call in and say there's a person with a gun at a park, the call hasn't changed, the numbers aren't changed when we get there and our officers find out that it was a BB gun that was being used and not a real firearm or replica firearm, but nonetheless, there's a significant driver with gun-related calls for service in our city this past year. We implemented a responsibly aggressive direct patrol in the areas of our city using data that we collected. Where are our calls for service with gun violence in our city? Well, we deployed officers in those areas and in the span of two months, we've taken over 15 guns off of people, off of offenders and arrested them for carrying said guns. So we're going to continue to do that. Let me pull this down, Council Member. There it goes. Well, Chief, you only have about, what, five or six more, not even five or six, right? Five slots, is that right? Am I looking at it right? Yes. Yeah. So let's go ahead and finish and then we'll come back to questions if you'd be so kind. Sure. Thank you. So, again, our persons shot this past year. We had 10 more people shot in our city than we did in 2019 and went up from 15 to 25. Internal Affairs Complaints, if there's a second thing that I'm proud of in 2020, it's going to be that our Internal Affairs Complaints went down. There was a significant shift in expectations and culture that started in 2018 and you'll see in a minute what I mean by that. And when I look at the numbers for me as the Chief of Police, it's letting me know that people are adjusting accordingly to what the new expectations are and they're doing their jobs and they're doing them better. But in 2020, we had a total 88 complaints, 45 of those internal, so more than half of our complaints were on ourselves, which again, I think it speaks to our supervisors understanding what my expectations are of them to be very critical of ourselves to look internally on how we can improve. And out of those 45, 31 of those were sustained internally. And out of those, the 39 total that were sustained resulted in eight suspensions. Two people were put on a performance improvement plan. Nine of them had verbal counselings, 12 written reprimands, seven documented counselings. But one big piece of all of the corrective action taken is I have mandated that a part of that, if there is a training component, if it is not just behavioral, if there's a training component, to look at the individual officer and what they've shown to be deficient in and get them training on that to make them better coming out of whatever it was that drove them in to getting the complaint. So again, as you can see in 2018, we had 108 complaints and in 2019, it skyrocketed to 164. And a lot again is internal. If you look in 2019, we had 96 internal complaints. And we ended up sustaining over half of those. This year, we sustained just under half at about 44%. Use of force was part of that ad hoc committee that we did this summer. So we had eight use of force complaints, and that is both response resistance and taser complaints. Three of those are from citizens. Five of those again from internal, just from internal review. One was exonerated from a citizen complaint outcome. One was exonerated for the use of force, but we did sustain a different violation for unsatisfactory work performance, which resulted in a suspension. And we have one citizen complaint that's still under investigation. Internally, we had one that was not sustained. One that was not sustained for the use of force, but again, we found unsatisfactory work performance, and they were issued a reprimand and education based discipline. We have one that was sustained for a reporting violation in the response resistance, meaning they did not fill out two boxes that they were supposed to fill out to capture the data, and they received an education based discipline on that. And then we had one that was not sustained due to a civilian employee resigning while under investigation. And then we had one that was exonerated. And then our 2021 goals, we're going to continue to increase our community engagement opportunities. We recently re-embedded a police officer over at the MLK Center, which I think is going to be fantastic for southeast end, that part of it. Not only does he get the kids in the community over at MLK, but he also gets to interact with the kids over at Rivera. And he was actually instrumental in going over there and helping them during one of their evacuations. They had a fire over Rivera about a month and a half ago, and our officer was able to run across the street and help with that. As I spoke about the Family Violence Strategic Plan, we're going to implement that this year, 2021. We're hoping to complete the Texas Police Chiefs Best Practice Recognition Program by the end of this year. And we're going to continue with their critical training, including the ABLE Project, Fair and Partial Policing, Defensive Tactics, and Deescalation. And my primary goal by the end of this year is to hopefully implement a community police mediation program. And what that's going to look like is if a motorist, if you get stopped on a traffic stop and you feel like our officer was rude to you, we're going to offer you the ability to sit down in a room and mediate that with our police officers. So the community member, the officer, and a third-party mediator will sit down and allow both sides a chance to talk to people, talk to each other as human beings. And I think that's a big component that's missing right now. It's communicating with one another as human beings. So hopefully we can get that launched by the end of this year, if not, it'll be in 2022. It's kind of dependent on COVID and the trainers being able to fly down and do it in person. That is definitely a training we can't do remotely. So with that, I will open up to any other questions the council may have. Thank you. And while you're pulling that down, I'll say thank you for your contributions to the Denton Black Film Festival's panel, that was very insightful. So I appreciate your willingness to engage, even when your schedule's full, you continue to squeeze stuff in. So I'm grateful for that. So questions for the chief council member Armatuer was in queue, and then council member Meltzer. Hi, yes, so thank you for talking about the increase in domestic violence and the overlap between the murder numbers and domestic violence numbers. I was wondering if there's also overlap between the rise in the reported gun violence numbers and the domestic violence numbers as well. We haven't seen specifically a rise, correlated rise with domestic violence and firearms. What we have seen, because most courts have been shut down or greatly reduced in those cases going to trial, what we have seen is offenders not being as scared of carrying weapons on them and obviously using them because of the perception of them not going to court. So they're more afraid of being caught by a foe without a gun than being caught by the police with a gun at this point. That's interesting. And I had another question, but should I wait till we've gone around? I'm fine waiting. Yeah, no, by all means, go ahead and ask all your questions. That way we can rotate. Okay, great. I have one more question. I'm looking at my notes that I wrote to make sure I get the numbers right. This is about and you don't have to pull it up, but the slide about complaints, the internal and external complaints. You had a breakdown by race and ethnicity of the complaints and the total added up to 43, which was the number of external complaints. Is there a documentation, and I don't expect you to have the number just in your head, but documentation of gender as well and also of the internal complaints. Is there documentation of race, ethnicity, and gender identity in the internal complaints? Great question. For the external, there are. For the internal, I'm not positive, but I'll tell you no. For the internal? That would be interesting to see. I'm thinking of the Perf report and what you have been working on, what the department has been working on about equity and inclusion internally in the department. It would be interesting to see that information. We are taking notes as we're talking, so that actually will be something we'll go back and look at. So thank you. Okay. Thank you. Dr. Meltzer. Yeah, thank you. First, I'd like to comment that the mediation idea is really interesting, and I hope that comes together and is successful. I'd like to start with first a kind of a philosophical question. On the mission statement, it talks about protecting victims, or rather, keeping victims safe, and I would suggest that, you know, a better mission is, or that part of the mission is keeping residents safe, in other words, not having so many victims. Do you agree in principle with it, do you get where I'm going, and do you agree in principle with that? Well, I do. This was after consultation with the IACP, and what we're talking about, our police department have a victim-centered approach to the people that are calling us for help. We want them to know they're front and center. I mean, it's part of the, that you're talking about is we're keeping our city safe, livable, and sustainable for everyone. That captures the point that you're making. Okay, I take that. We just want to make sure we didn't leave our victims out. Yeah, no, no, that's great clarification. The reason I started there is, you know, the data that you shared with us today, which incidentally, you know, in the past we never got, was never shown quite so clearly, so this is super helpful, but it appears that in all but, I guess, burglary, that incidents of crime seems to be rising faster than population. Is that a fair statement? I don't know if that would be a fair statement. It didn't rise sharply this past year. Yeah, and we've got, you know, unusual, unusual environment, but where I'm going with this is if, maybe it's just a one-year event, but, you know, the slopes over, the multi-year slopes are rising, are they faster than population or not is maybe like an X level of analysis, but if it is, if crime rates are increasing and if you share the goal of not having as many crimes occur, I would just ask, you know, what are the categories of crime you think we can most affect in that way, you know, to keep them from occurring, what are the techniques that, the policing techniques, you know, that will tend to diminish the number of crimes that are committed and, you know, are they in our plan? That's the essence of what I'm going, I hope that's a broader, yeah. No, good questions indeed. Well, I think overall, what we're talking about is us working collectively as a community, we can impact all the crimes across the board if we work together as one community. I think Council Member Arbiter herself talked about this on several different occasions is we've got to get past just putting people in jail. That's not the answer. It can't always be the answer, right? That's why a big portion of the mental health unit is jail diversion. The Dingen County Jail shouldn't be the biggest consumer of mental health services in the county, right? So when we're looking at how we can do that, we're leveraging data, we're leveraging technology and we're leveraging resources better to hopefully to be able to be better positioned to respond to these so we can really get to the root cause of their crimes and not just kind of a blanket, we're going out and stopping everybody walking the street. It's going to take some creative design. We have a lot of really smart, intelligent young police officers that work for us and we take things that they bring to us and we try them and it's not just putting police officers on dots anymore where we see crime spikes, it's working smarter to go out there. So I'm really encouraged by the level of commitment that our lieutenants as shift commanders are really letting their police officers have some autonomy to go out and try different approaches. So what is it going to take? It's going to take a lot of creativity, some courageous leadership on the part of everyone and then us just working together. I would be interested in knowing if there's research, I know this is controversial on this council, but if there's evidence-based research to suggest that police presence does deter crimes from happening versus responding to crimes and I understand that there are many creative ways that we're now going to be responding differently, but I'm kind of going after having them not occur, you know, if that can be done in a reasonable way. And so it might not be something that can answer on the spot, but I'd be interested in knowing whether the data suggests police presence or anything else diminishes the number of crimes that are committed versus responding to crimes. It does and we are implementing those. We're implementing evidence-based strategies along with our data-driven approach. I won't speak specifically on what we're doing as a proactive measure, but there are studies out there that show doing certain things proactively, i.e. visibility in areas, do you deter crime, which then displaces it, which then starts diminishing it. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions for the chief over there, Mayor Pro Tem Davis? Just kind of a quick comment on the family violence piece because I know that's been in the media recently. That's top of mind for a lot of folks and very concerning and by many seen as a side effect of the pandemic and people spending more time together, all that sort of thing. And along the lines of what he just said about not saying publicly exactly what they're doing, I want folks out there to know that people who are familiar with family violence and the steps that we take to combat family violence, there are risk factors that can be addressed very early on in the process and chief's folks and friends of the family that he's working with, they're all very well trained, very well versed in those things and we have a lot of excellent study data on what to do. Thank you. Any other questions for chief? Councilmember Johnson? I wanted to say to the chief that I think the idea of the mediation and the community is a great idea and I think now we'll be able to address perceptions on both sides. So I think that's really good and I also think that the training that the officers are going to be getting on mental health will increase their knowledge and perhaps if there's not a person available to go, it'll be able that they'll be able to spot different things. So I think that's a really positive move. So thank you. Yes, ma'am. Thank you. Okay. Any other questions for chief? Seeing none, I do want to say Chief Dixon, again, thank you very much and I want to give you an opportunity to kind of draw a distinction between the, I've heard you touch on it, but I don't know that I can articulate it, so I'll give you an opportunity. The difference in the mental health program, your crafting and others that are out there, I know I've heard you say it's unique, do you want to spotlight some of the uniqueness of it or just want to make sure we have a clear record for those watching this meeting? So I look at a number of different programs that I thought were good programs, one being in San Antonio, one being in Houston, one being an MCOT model, which we already have, three MHMR. I looked a little bit at the CAHOOTS model up in Eugene, Oregon, and it was just kind of a blend of all of those. But the biggest thing that sets us apart from some of the others is that our police officers will be in plain clothes. Not every model has them in plain clothes. Some do, some don't. I thought that was going to be one that tilted the scales for us to really make it more effective because we know that when a police officer shows up in uniform on the best of days, then not only does it draw attention directly to the uniform, but if you're in crisis, can you imagine having someone lock up, badge, gun exposed, it just looks so authoritative. So we want to really take the most comprehensive approach that we could, and that was one of the things that I thought was important. Great. Thank you very much for that. All right, so one more time, any movement, any other questions? Seeing none. Okay. Thank you very much, Chief Dixon. Thank you. Appreciate it. Yes. That takes us to our next item, which is our only other item for today, which is going to be a closed session item. So we will clear the room except for the city council and members. And then Tiffany from HR will be on standby if we need to call her in, but otherwise this will be just a discussion between the members of city council. So we'll take a 10 minute break after I call it closed to clear the room, make sure we have everyone that we can give people time to set up the room for just us. And so with that, I will convene the closed session at 1240 PM. We will consider the following items. Consultation with attorneys under the Texas governmental code section 551.071, deliberations regarding personnel matters under the Texas government code section 551.074. So we will take a 10 minute break and then come back for that item. It is now 1241, we will be back at 1251. Thank you.