Good evening, everybody. Thank you for being here again on the second meeting of the use
of force ad hoc committee. We have a loaded agenda tonight, so we're going to go right
into the first item, which is item A, the consideration approval of the use of force
ad hoc committee meeting minutes. Did everybody have an opportunity to read over the minutes?
Okay. We're going to do it a little different because first I'm going to need a motion and
a second and then when it's time to vote on it, I'll need you to raise your hands if you're
in favor. And then if you're not, then we'll come back and then you'll raise your hand.
So do I have a motion for the minutes for the last meeting? So moved by John Baines.
Okay. A second by Jamie Blanton. Okay. The first was the John Baines and Jamie. Or was
that Pam? Okay. And then all in favor, can you raise your hand and hold it up for a minute?
Okay. And those not in favor, can you raise your hand? Okay. Motion carries. Onto the
next item. Did everybody have an opportunity to go to the use of force simulators? Okay.
I did not. Okay. So I think a few of you guys are rescheduled for another time. Okay. Can
we get two or three people to let us know the ones who did go, what your experience
was like, Gary, I know you went, I saw you. Chair, I thought it was outstanding and I commented
to the city manager that I thought it was brilliant to allow us to go through that process
very early in our journey. It's not a joking matter, but I died once. I was pretty good,
one out of six. But I don't think you would hire me. I think that was the reality. Rhonda,
I saw you leaving. Unmute yourself. Well, I too was very impressed. I died once too,
the same killer, but I shot somebody right between the eyes. So I was pretty proud of
that. It was really interesting. I mean, really what I thought was every, every person ought
to have an opportunity to go through that. It was really challenging. Yeah. Who else
wants to talk about their experience? Madam chair chambers, I thought it was a great experience.
It certainly gives us a different perspective as to what those officers have to deal with
on a day-to-day basis. And I really think every leader in the city of Din, ought to have an
opportunity to go through the simulator. Anybody else? Yeah, I thought in as much as the experience
was what it was. I mean, I was with Gary. I got shot real quick. Willie Hudson, he gave
me a D. I said, I don't know how that's. But I think as much as that experience, it was
also the dialogue. We were the last group, so we got to stick around afterwards. Okay.
Officer Green, Yancey was there with us and just to be able to dialogue back and forth
about different realities that was combined with the experience was really formative and
meaningful and fruitful, I thought. Anybody else want to talk about their experience?
Okay. Well, thank you guys for participating. And then we'll capture it again for the ones
who didn't go. We'll talk about it again about what your experience was, or did you have
anything to say or wanted to contribute to that and let us know how that went. The next
on the agenda item is item C. Receive a report and hold a discussion regarding the presentation
and review of the state civil service law and meet and confer contract provisions related
to the investigation of allegations of police misconduct and review of data from the Denton
Police Department regarding complaints and disciplinary actions. And it is going to be
a little different tonight because after each presentation, then we'll have discussion.
So if you could hold off or take notes so that when we, we can just move this meeting
on just a little bit quicker and then ask our questions at the end. But Mike Kronick
is our deputy city attorney and he's going to do this presentation. And Mike, I would
ask that you would tell a little bit about yourself so that the committee knows your
experience. Sure. I don't remember what I said last time
when our first meeting, but I was a police officer for the Dallas Police Department from
1983 to 1991. I worked patrol in the Northwest part of the city up where Bachman Lake and
Love Field is. Then went to law school in Philadelphia from '91 to '94, came back to
Dallas and was one of the attorneys for the Dallas Police Association, Dallas Firefighters
Association, handled all kinds of employment matters, including I went out on every officer
involved shooting, which usually, unfortunately happens in the middle of the night on the
worst weather. I represented officers in disciplinary appeals and did that from '91 to, no, from
'94 to 2000. 2000, I was hired by the city of Austin Law Department to be the employment
attorney for the Austin Police Department. And for the next 20 years, I was the employment
attorney for the Austin Police Fire and EMS Departments. I was their legal advisor for
their internal affairs division. And some people would probably say, "Well, you're biased against
police because you were an officer and you represented police officers." I kind of think
it's just the opposite because for the past 20 years, my job was to represent the chief
of police in Austin, trying to get the discipline upheld. And I was pretty successful. Part
of what I'm going to talk about is what officer appeal rights are so that you kind of understand
that it is pretty difficult in today's day and age to fire an officer and to keep that
officer fired. And I think after my presentation, you'll have a little better understanding
of how that is. I came to Denton in April. I retired from Austin, came here. I know chief
Dixon. We worked together in Austin for a number of years and that's one of the reasons
I came here. And I am the employment attorney now for the entire city. Since I've been here,
most of my work has been police related. Not that there's a lot of misconduct, but it just
seems like police departments in the cities that I've worked tend to have the most work
of any other city department. So I appreciate your being here tonight and I'll try to go
through this as quick as I can. So what I'll do, let me upload this presentation. The presentation
primarily is going to talk about Texas local government code chapter 143. That's commonly
referred to as the firefighter and police officer civil service act. So if you hear
me talk about a reference chapter 143 or the act, it's the same thing. There's five areas
that I want to cover and as Cheryl said, after each one, we'll have a break where you can
ask some questions. But the first part I want to do is provide an overview of chapter 143.
So you have an understanding of what that is. Then I want to talk about how a meet and
confer agreement can change that. So I'll have to tell you what a meet and confer agreement
is for those of you that don't know and how that can change chapter 143. The third thing
I'll talk about is the provisions of chapter 143 that are related to investigations of
misconduct against police officers, the disciplinary actions that can be imposed, and then an officer's
rights if he or she is disciplined. Then what I'm going to do is talk about how the meet
and confer agreement has changed that. And the last thing we'll talk about and Assistant
Chief Smith is going to cover the last section. And I think you'll find real interesting is
going to talk about data for the police department from 2015 to 2020 related to complaints against
officers and the disciplinary actions that are imposed. I kind of think you'll probably
have more questions about that than you will about the contract and the law, but I may
be wrong. Chapter 143 of the Texas Local Government Code. The very first part of it says this
is the purpose. The purpose of this chapter, and this is word for word, is to secure efficient
fire and police departments composed of capable personnel who are free from political influence.
And those are the key words, and I'll tell you about that in a minute, who are free from
political influence and who have permanent employment tenure as public servants. Chapter
143 only applies to those cities whose voters had an election and approved it. The voters
are dead and approved chapter 143 for both your police and fire departments. And I believe
that was back in the 1940s, so it's been here for quite a long time. You can see this little
note I put here because a lot of people always ask or say, well, police officers should live
within the community in which they work, otherwise they're not vested in it. Well, chapter 150.021
of the Local Government Code specifically prohibits a residency requirement for police officers.
Now, you could, through the meet and confer process that I'll talk about in a minute,
change that. You could put a provision in that agreement that officers have to live
within the city. However, from a practical standpoint, I don't think the police association
or the city would require officers that are currently working here to sell their house,
to take their children out of their school districts. But if there was an incentive or
a reason to, you probably could put a residency requirement for future hires. It's not in
the contract, but I'd just like to point that out to you. So what is chapter 143? What does
it do? It addresses the hiring of police officers, the appointment and removal of the police
chief, wages and benefits, promote the promotional process, disciplinary actions and appeals,
confidentiality of police personnel files, and that's including the investigative files.
And the very last slide that I talked to, I tie this point into potential citizen oversight
of the Denton Police Department. 143 also talks about mental and physical fitness evaluations
for police officers. Now, if you remember on the prior slide, I talked about free from
political influence. The purpose of 143 is to prevent a police chief from hiring family
members and friends and paying them differently than everybody else and only promoting them
and only hiring people of a certain race or certain religion. 143 sets forth process for
hiring and promotions that is supposed to establish a level playing field. So that's
pretty much what chapter 143 is. The meet and confer process, some of you may know what
that is, but there's a provision in chapter 142 that applies to cities like Denton that
are over 50,000 that have adopted chapter 143. For cities like Austin and Houston, San
Antonio that have a population of over 460,000, there's a provision in chapter 143 that applies
to them. But for Denton, it's the 142 provision. And meet and confer is a purely voluntary
bargaining process between the city and a police or fire employee association. There
is no requirement to meet, there's no requirement to bargain over any specific subjects, and
there's no requirement to even reach an agreement. So if the police association contacted the
city manager and said, "We'd like to meet and confer with you over wages and benefits,"
the city manager has the authority to say thank you, but we're not interested in it
at that time. However, if the city manager and the council and the association do want
to meet and confer, then we can bargain over wages, salaries, rates of pay, hours of work,
and other terms and conditions of employment. Other terms and conditions of employment is
pretty broad, but it includes things like leave and benefits, disciplinary actions,
those types of things. And if you, if the city and the association agree to a meet and
confer agreement, that agreement can supersede or preempt a state law, a local ordinance,
or a rule adopted by the city or the city civil service commission concerning subjects
like wages, salaries, rates of pay, hours of work. Simple example would be under state
law chapter 142, police officers in a city with a population of over 10,000 are entitled
to 15 days vacation a year. If the city and the association wanted to, they could agree
to lower that to 10 days, or they could increase it to 20 days. So that's just kind of a subject
that the association and the city can agree to if they want to. And if the city and the
association sit down and negotiate a contract and come to a tentative agreement, the agreement
is then submitted to the membership and it has to be approved by a majority of the association's
membership and a majority of the city council. So if the majority of the association doesn't
approve it, it doesn't even go to the council. I had a situation in Austin in 2017 where
the association approved the contract, but the city council voted it down. So we had
no contract and we negotiated for another year till we got one. If an agreement is reached,
it is a legally binding contract between the city and the association that is enforceable
in state court. And just to give you an example of some other cities that have a meet and
confer agreement, and this is just some, Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, Houston, Abilene,
Temple, McKinney, San Angelo, there's a whole bunch of them. And every agreement is really
different. They have a lot of similar provisions, but each one is negotiated based upon the needs
of the specific municipality. Just to give you an idea, usually I've been involved in
probably about a dozen negotiations with our police, fire, and EMS unions in Austin. And
in my experience, the unions are usually interested in negotiating over wages and benefits and
officer rights during an investigation. The city's interests usually are, they want changes
in 143 to the hiring and promotional process, which increases diversity as well as discipline.
So that's just kind of a highlight of the law that the city and the contract that the
police department and the city are operating under. And I'm happy to answer any questions
that anyone might have about either one of those subjects.
- I have a question, Michael. This is John Baines. When is the next negotiation for meeting
conferred to, or will it occur? - The current contract expires on September
30th of 2022. I'm assuming, and Todd may need to speak to this, probably a few months earlier.
I'm assuming that the association will notify the city or vice versa that they'd like to
discuss negotiating a successor agreement. So probably not going to sit down with them
until probably the spring or summer of 2022. - My last question on it is this, at this
point is, are there any items which are currently under consideration for that forthcoming contract?
- I'll defer to the city manager on that. - I'm going to defer to Chief Dixon who's
been more recently engaged in those conversations. - So there's a number of things that I'm going
to want to bring to the table this next contract. And most of it has to do with further professionalizing
the organization. We're looking at formal education requirements coming into the department
as they promote up into especially supervisory and managerial ranks and looking at other
ways that we can continue to stay. I want us to be ahead of the rest of the profession,
especially up here in the DFW area. It's so competitive up here when you're looking at
recruiting and retention. I want us to be on the upper cusp of that.
- I will say contracts can always be reopened if both sides want to do so, but I don't know
that I don't think that's really been considered at this point. Depending on what comes out
of this committee, we'll just have to see. But I think for right now, the contracts in
effect and we'll go back to the negotiating table in 2022.
- Thank you very much. - I have a follow-up question. I'm sorry,
go ahead. - Go ahead, Paul.
- You had mentioned that since you've been here, most of your time in your position has
been spent with the police department as opposed to the other departments. And that's been
your experience in other cities as well, you said. Maybe add a little bit of just clarity
to why that is, why you've been given an ordinate amount of time here since you've been here
to the police department and then in your experience that that's typically the case
other places as well. - Sure. Chief Dixon is trying to make changes
to the existing policies and a lot of my time has spent been helping them do that. There's
been a few disciplinary cases I've been involved with and then this committee. And then also
there's been some discussion about maybe trying to have some form of civilian oversight in
Denton. I was one of the primary drafters of the oversight process in Austin. I wrote
the majority of the language in the Austin contract that dealt with oversight. So I've
been doing a lot of work on that, just researching it and preparing that if that comes to fruition,
some of the legal and contractual challenges. And that's just most of my experience in Austin.
The police department is really the most high profile. Most of the litigation involves police
departments. Police departments can take away your freedom and your life. And it just seems
like everything in my experience with the police department is always high profile and
an emergency and needs to be handled right away. So Denton is no different than Austin,
even though Austin is 10 times bigger. - Thank you. That's really helpful.
- Anyone else? - Yes. My follow-up question was in regards
to the contract itself. You said that it won't be eligible for succession or renewal until
2022, but that it can be reviewed under certain circumstances. I was curious if in your experience
you have ever been part of a situation where it was revised in advance of the contract
and why that decision was made in that case, if you have an example.
- We did in Austin, that happened with at least one police contract that I can recall.
And I don't remember exactly what caused it to be open, but we did go back in. We revised
it where we put in, I think it may have been some oversight issues, but we also put in
a provision where we included or created an incentive for officers to move back within
the city, given the city council, the authority to offer some financial incentive to officers
to move within the city limits. But anytime you wanna reopen a contract, it's a bargain.
So if the city, for example, wants to negotiate a change in something, the association is
certainly probably gonna want something in exchange for it. And that's really a management
and council decision whether they want the city to go back to the table or wait till
the new negotiations. - Thank you.
- Did anybody else have any questions? - I have a question.
- Okay. - There's a mention of mental and physical
fitness evaluations. What are the mental health assessments?
- That's a statutory provision where if a question comes up about an officer's mental
or physical fitness, for example, if the chief believes that an officer is suffering from
PTSD and not capable of doing the job, there's a process. It's a three-step process. The
first step is the officer goes to his own physician and we give them the essential functions
of the job and the physician determines whether or not the officer can do those essential
functions. If the chief questions that report, then the Civil Service Commission can appoint
a physician or psychologist to conduct an independent evaluation. And if those two reports
conflict, then the commission can appoint a three-doctor panel whose decision is final.
So it's a lengthy process. It can take several months. Ultimately, it could potentially result
in the officer's termination if they're not fit to do the job. But we always have to take
into consideration the Americans with Disabilities Act and see, for example, if it's a physical
disability, we have to see whether or not we can accommodate that. But there is a specific
process if there is a physical or mental question about an officer's ability to do the job.
Okay. And just as an addendum to that, are recruits screened with any kind of mental
health assessment? I'll defer to the chief, but I believe they
do undergo a physical as well as mental evaluation. Is that correct, chief?
That is correct. They go through both a written and they sit down with an interview prior
to being hired while they're in the process. What is the written mental health assessment?
It's whatever our doctor on contract right now is using. Typically, it's something that's
relative to the NMPI. Okay.
So an updated version. Yeah. Minnesota Multifaceted Personality Inventory.
Okay. I might want to follow up on that a little bit later, but thank you for that.
Does anybody have any more questions before we move on?
Okay. Let's see. I'll make sure that I get to the right one. So the next part I want
to talk about is investigations of police misconduct. And here's a flow chart and then
I'll talk about each one. The first step is we get a citizen complaint
or an internal complaint, which could be from a fellow officer or a supervisor. So we get
a complaint. It then goes to the Internal Affairs Division that investigates it. Internal
Affairs does fact finding. They do not make a recommendation whether a policy violation
occurred or not. If you have any questions about that, the chief can explain that. They
do fact finding. They then give those facts, fact finding to the officer's chain of command
that reviews those findings with Chief Dixon. The chain will make a recommendation to the
chief whether they think a policy violation occurred. Their recommendation is not binding
on the chief. He can accept or reject it. And if the chain does recommend that a violation
be sustained, then the chief will schedule a disciplinary review hearing. And at that
meeting the chief will have the involved officer present and the officer's chain of command.
And I'll go into it a little bit more about what happens there. And then the chief makes
a final decision as to whether to sustain any policy violations and then the appropriate
discipline. So under Chapter 143, let me say this. One of the things that I think you'll
realize at the end of my presentation is, let's say you see a video on TV of an officer
doing something that clearly is inappropriate. And that video is sent to the chief the same
day. People or some people may say, well, that chief should fire that officer right
away. Don't even wait. The video is clear. No question. Go ahead and fire him. The chief
can do that. But I think after this presentation, you'll realize that if he does that, there's
probably about a 99.99% likelihood that officer is going to get his or her job back. And that's
part of what this presentation is to show to you why that might happen. So under Chapter
143, a police officer can only be suspended, demoted, or fired. And you may have heard
the term indefinite suspension. That's the civil service equivalent to firing. So a suspension
is something short of firing. A demotion is being demoted in rank, or an indefinite suspension
is firing. Police officer can only be, one of those things can only happen for one of
these 12 enumerated things. And I'll just let you take a minute and look through the
first six, and then I'll switch over to the next page. And then, so those are the first
six, and they're not in any order of importance or anything like that. And then here's the
other six. Most police officers are suspended for a violation of paragraph number 12, which
is a violation of an applicable fire police department rule or order. The police department
has general orders that set out standards of conduct and a whole bunch of other. I think
the department's policy manual is several hundred pages long. But in order to suspend
fire or demote someone, you have to fit the conduct within one of these 12 categories.
And I can tell you that's very, very easy to do. Usually it'll fall within number 12
easily. Everything starts with a complaint. The complaint can be the person alleging to
be the victim of the misconduct, a person who witnessed it. It can be someone that's
anonymous. It can be another city, a police department employee, or let's say somebody
calls and says, I don't want, or somebody sends a video and we don't know who it came
from. The police department can adopt the complaint and be the complainant. So everything
starts with a complainant. Probably the most, I don't know, some of you may have heard of
something called the 180 day rule. This is probably the most important rule for disciplining
a police officer that's subject to chapter 143. And what that means is any complaint
can be investigated. It doesn't matter when it happened. I had a complaint in Austin that
was more than 10 years old and the person filed the complaint and it was way outside
the 180 days. And what that means is an officer could not be suspended, indefinitely suspended
or demoted if the act for which the officer is being disciplined occurred more than 180
days before the discipline takes effect. So if the chief fires me today, he cannot fire
me for something that happened more than 180 days ago. After that 180 days is up, the most
discipline that can be opposed is a written reprimand. So you can imagine what happens
when somebody comes in on the 178th day and complains about serious misconduct. The chief
basically has two days to do something under chapter 143. Now I'll explain in a minute
how the meeting confer contract has changed that. But that is the general rule. You cannot
suspend, demote or fire someone for something that happened more than 180 days ago. However,
there is an exception if it's criminal conduct. If it's allegedly related to a criminal violation
of federal, state or local law and the officer is still subject to prosecution under the
applicable criminal statute of limitations, that 180 day clock starts on the day the department
discovered the criminal conduct. So for example, if the criminal conduct occurred 200 days
ago, we're outside the 180. But if the chief just found out about it today and the officer
can still be prosecuted for it, then the 180 day clock starts today, the day the chief
found out about it. Now the good thing, and I applaud the meeting confer agreement, that
changed the 180 day rule, but not for the criminal stuff. The criminal 180 from date
of discovery still applies. But for everything else, the chief now has 240 days from the
date of the alleged misconduct to discover. So we went from 180 to 240. And then on top
of that, the chief then has another 180 days from the date of discovery to investigate
and impose discipline. So now potentially the chief has up to 420 days to impose discipline
rather than 180 days. I think that's a great provision. In Austin, we've tried repeatedly
to get the police association there to increase the 180 day rule, and they steadfastly have
rejected that. So I think that's a great extension. And again, as I mentioned, that extension
does not apply to criminal. And I'll explain in a little bit how we deal with that criminal.
And here it is. If an officer is indicted for a felony or charged with a misdemeanor,
a class A or B misdemeanor, if that happens, the chief can suspend the police officer with
or without pay for no more than 30 days after the criminal charge is disposed of. So let's
say we had an officer today who was indicted by a grand jury for family violence, assaulting
his spouse. The chief then could suspend that officer without pay until the criminal charge
is resolved. And I'm sure you know sometimes criminal charges can take years to resolve.
So the chief can suspend that officer without pay. And once the criminal is resolved, then
the chief has 30 days after that to impose disciplinary action. Nobody wants to pay an
officer that is accused of committing a crime to sit at home and be paid. And in my experience,
I can't think of a single instance where a police chief has let an officer sit at home
being paid while they're under criminal indictment. Being arrested is not sufficient to trigger
that provision. The officer has to actually be formally charged with a crime. 143 has
a provision that says even if the officer is found not guilty or the criminal charges
are dismissed, that doesn't mean that the officer can't be disciplined because in a
criminal trial, the officer doesn't have to testify. The standard of proof is higher in
a criminal trial. And criminal trial is determining whether the officer violated the penal code.
In internal affairs investigation, the standard of proof is preponderance of the evidence
and it's whether or not the officer violated department policy. So and the last point I
want to point out is if the chief wants to indefinitely suspend an officer, but doing
so would jeopardize the criminal investigation, the chief can protect his right to suspend
the officer indefinitely by sending a letter to the attorney general, notifying him that
a delay is necessary to protect the criminal case. And I have personal experience with
this and I can tell you why that's important. I know there's been some criticism of the
chief waiting to impose discipline when there may be a pending criminal investigation. I
had a case in Austin where an officer was accused of sexually, he offered two women,
he would let them go if they perform sexual acts for him. They had warrants and he said
I won't take you to jail if you do this for me. The chief of police at the time indefinitely
suspended the officer even though there was a pending criminal investigation. The officer
went ahead and appealed his discipline. He then you and that appeal took place before
the criminal case. The officer then subpoenaed every single person involved in that criminal
case, including the victims and was able to get them to testify under oath about what
happened. The officer then was able to use that testimony in his criminal case. So that
is why the chief will send this letter to the attorney general to postpone taking disciplinary
action because he does not want to jeopardize a criminal case. So that's the provision that
deals with if an officer is charged with a crime. In chapter 143 the legislature was
keen and sensitive to that. That's why they put that in there. I just want to talk about
the investigation and there's just a couple more slides and then we'll take some questions.
As I mentioned, internal affairs does the fact finding. They will obtain all the relevant
information including any body worn cameras. They'll get the reports. They'll interview
the officer. They'll interview witnesses. The chapter 143 does not give an officer the
right to a union or attorney during a internal affairs investigation, including their interview.
Chapter 143 does not require the department to show the officer any of its evidence before
they do the evidence before they do his interview or her interview. There is an exception though
state law allows an officer to review any body worn camera video of the incident prior
to the officer being required to provide a statement about that incident. So that's really
the only thing that the officer gets to review before they are interviewed. And if you remember,
I think last time our first meeting I talked about the Supreme Court's Garrity decision
statements a public employee is compelled to provide as a condition of employment cannot
be used against that employee in a criminal prosecution arising from that incident. That's
an important component of an internal affairs investigation because in a criminal investigation
an officer cannot be compelled to say anything. They cannot be forced to incriminate themselves.
But in an administrative investigation, an officer can be forced to give a statement
to internal affairs. And that's why the Supreme Court said an officer should not have to be
forced to choose between incriminating themselves and their job. The meeting confer agreement
member I told you that it can change certain parts of the law. Well, there is no requirement
chapter 143 as I mentioned that an officer has the right to see any evidence before their
interview. However, as part of the negotiations for the current meeting confer agreement,
the city did agree to allow the officer to have these rights in connection with an administrative
investigation. The office, the subject officer, not witnesses, just the officer that's accused
of doing something wrong has the right to be represented by an association representative
and or an attorney during their interview with internal affairs, as well as during a
disciplinary meeting with the chief. But the representative is there and is an observer.
They can't interfere with the investigation. They can't tell the officer don't answer that
question or tell them how to answer it. And if the representative doesn't obey those guidelines,
the chief has the right to remove that person from the interview. And it'll be continued
without the officer having a representative present. Witness officers do not have the
right to a representative during their interview. It's just the accused officer. In addition
to that, the contract allows the officer who is the subject of the investigation to review
certain evidence prior to their interview. That includes a copy of the actual complaint
at least 48 hours before their interview. And what that means is the officer cannot
be interviewed until at least 48 hours have expired after they get that complaint. So
if the officer is the subject of an investigation, we have to give the officer a copy of that
complaint and then we have to wait 48 hours before we conduct an interview. The officer
can waive that. If they just say, hi, I just want to get this out of the way, they can
waive that. But if they don't, we have to give them 48 hours. And I'll answer any questions
you have in a minute. The officer also has the right prior to their interview to review
any videotape, photograph or other recording of the operative conduct or alleged injuries,
which is the subject of the allegations. So for example, if an officer was arrested for
DWI and there is an in-car video of the officer driving and doing the field sobriety test,
then the officer gets to review that prior to his interview because that is the operative
conduct that's being investigated. If an officer is accused of using excessive force and causing
an injury to someone and we have pictures of those injuries, then the officer is allowed
to view a copy of those pictures because those are photos of the alleged injuries. The officer
also has the right to review those portions of any documents in which the officer is alleged
to have lied or left out important information. So for example, if an officer is alleged to
have provided false information in a search warrant, then we have to show the officer
what part of that warrant that we contend was false. And then if it's the officer also
has the right to review any report, supplement your use of force report or other statement
that the officer wrote regarding the operative conduct. So for example, if an officer wrote
a report about using force, and it's an excessive force complaint, then the officer gets to
review the report that he wrote about that. Let me just cover this and let me just see.
Let's have a couple more slides and then I'll answer some questions. So once an investigation
is done and Internal Affairs has done their fact-finding, then the chain of command makes
a non-binding recommendation to the chief on whether or not a violation occurred. And
here are the different classifications of complaints. Sustained, the investigation established
that the alleged misconduct did occur. Not sustained, the investigation failed to produce
sufficient evidence to clearly prove or disprove the allegation. Exonerated, the investigation
established that the act complained of did occur. Yes, I did use force, but it was justified
legal and proper. Unfounded, investigation established that the act complained of did
not occur. And then a policy violation, the investigation revealed that the act did occur
and may or may not comply with department policy, but it was determined that the allegation
and misconduct could have been prevented had the policy been more clear or complete. So
basically, you know, the policy just wasn't as clear as it should have been. So those
are the different classifications and ultimately the chief has the final decision on what the
final classification is. And then if the chain of command recommends that a policy be sustained,
the chief will schedule a disciplinary meeting with the officer and the chain of command.
Prior to that meeting, the meet and confer agreement gives the officer three hours to
review the investigative file. It does not, that review does not include the summary that
the investigator wrote, but the officer gets to review all the witness statements, all
the reports, all the documents, all the pictures, all the videos. And in a disciplinary meeting
with the chief, the officer has the right to be represented by an association member
or an attorney. At that meeting, the chief will give the officer the opportunity to explain
what happened. The chain of command and the chief get to ask the officer questions about
what happened. And once that questioning part stops, the officer and his representative
will leave the room. The chief will then discuss with the chain of command whether they think
a violation occurred and then they make a disciplinary recommendation. Ultimately, then
the chief decides what he's going to do. The chief will then bring the officer and his
rep back into the room and inform him or her what the decision is. I know that's a lot
of information and I covered a lot there, but I'd like to give you folks the opportunity
to ask any questions about any topic that I covered.
I have a quick question. You mentioned that the 180 days and the 240 days that the city
now has adopted, it all pertains or it all has to do with when the chief finds out. But
what if there was misconduct or anything else, a complaint, anything, but it stalled out
maybe one level or two levels below the chief? Is there any accountability for that? For
the department?
I think I can speak for the chief that if a manager knows about something and didn't
take appropriate action to report it, I think the chief is going to hold that person accountable.
Is that a fair statement chief? That's a very fair statement. I get briefed very regularly
on a daily basis from assistant chief Smith. So he and I work very well together and I
have the utmost confidence that he'll bring every complaint to me as he should.
Now I do want to tell you why making the chief be the person who becomes aware of it is really
important and you folks may, it made the national news. We had a school teacher down in Austin
that was thrown to the ground by a police officer and it was on video and the officer's
chain of command knew about it and they took care of it. The chief of police in Austin
at the time did not know about it. When it finally came to the chief's attention, 180
days had already expired. The chief could not take action because when someone at a
command level knew about it, that knowledge was imputed to the chief and the chief was
outside the 180 and he could not fire that officer even though he wanted to. So making
the day the chief becomes aware of it protects the chief's ability when a lower ranking
member did not take appropriate action at the time. So that is actually a good thing.
180 days customary, is that a customary amount of time? Those amount of days, 180 days, is
that a customary amount of time for an investigation in law enforcement?
I'll comment and then I'll let the chief chime in. I'll tell you what, the chief, he was
actually I know he was in internal affairs for a while as a lieutenant so I'll let him
address that.
So by state statute we have 180 days, actually we have 240 here and that's by state statute
in the meeting confer contract. I'll tell you that the majority the vast majority of
our cases are disposed of well before that time.
But it is problematic when a person comes in after 160, 170 days. The department is
really under a crunch then to get it get it done and people have various reasons for not
coming forward. I'm not but we unfortunately we that that 240 days really is a big plus.
So I commend the department and the city for for getting that extension and then 180 days
on top of that. I think that's great.
I have a question.
Mr. Baines go ahead. Are you sure? Yes sir. Are you sure? Okay thank you. I have a question.
We live in the days of video now and I think this is a state and the situation I hate to
mention the situation but I think it precipitated a lot of things for the good the one officer
in Minnesota that kept his knee on the neck of that young boy yes he was a young man.
The chief there fired that person and as you mentioned a lot of times the officers get
their jobs back and this particular individual had a history of incidents where there should
have been done something done previously and so I'm saying all that to say this that if
these the 143 basically says it's hard to get rid of an officer that has a history.
How are we going to rectify that problem with 143? It's long it's a long answer long question.
Yeah it you know it every case is fact specific. I can't tell you what those 17 complaints
were on that former officer and whether anything was sustained or disciplined but I I'm comfortable
in saying where there's smoke there's fire if I feel pretty confident that if an officer
here had that history that the department would do an in-depth investigation to determine
what the problem is because there's something there so I really can't address that but we
do and I know that the chief will use progressive discipline if an officer has disciplinary
history that is one of the things that the chief will use in determining if you have
a history of sustained complaints and you're not correcting your behavior then progressive
discipline is going to be imposed. Let me say one thing about that Mr. Baines do you
remember offhand what the police association president said after the chief fired those
Minneapolis officers? I do not I'm sorry. He said they were denied due process he didn't
comment about what they did whether it was right or wrong he said they were fired and
they were denied due process and he may be right now they have pending criminal charges
but it is very possible if they go to arbitration an arbitrator may agree that these officers
were fired before they even had an opportunity to provide their side of the story so that's
my point that a police union or association while maybe not necessarily condoning the
officers actions will still say that they believe the officers are entitled to due process
so I guess time will tell what will happen with those cases. Did I answer your question?
I think you did it's a it's we're in a very difficult environment right now we're trying
to come up with policy and an approach that you know it's going to be difficult to take
care of everything one size will not fit all but I think we're making the effort to do
the right thing. And one thing that you will see when Chief Smith gets to the disciplinary
part of this the Chief Dixon has a I believe a different philosophy on discipline than
his predecessor so I think the message will get out there that officers realize that there's
a new sheriff in town so to speak and that white what might have been tolerated in a
prior administration is not the way it's going to be handled with this administration.
Thank you thank you very much. My question is along similar lines it's in regards to
records of officers that may be transferring or desiring employment in the Denton Police
Department who may have experience elsewhere in North Texas or across the country. I'm
curious what sort of documentation can be shared or is shared if I'm a police officer
in a neighboring North Texas community or from some other state and I transfer here
or have a desire to work for Chief Dixon what kind of record or history are you provided
with as to how many of these types of complaints and the outcomes of their complaints understanding
that there are differences and nuances across the country some of the conversation that
we had in our first meeting was about general employment retention and things like that
and so I'm curious how do we learn as our community if the people that we are potentially
hiring come with some history of complaint. Let me see the Chief Dixon or maybe Chief
Smith can answer that a little bit better than I can. Sure so we have our recruiting
officers that will do complete backgrounds no one can just summarily transfer here they
have to go through the entire hiring process like everyone else. Now if they're a prior
service officer recruiting will go over to that department they'll look at their file
whatever they're allowed to look at by law they'll go in there and look at their internal
affairs history if there is one and if there's one from out of state where we can't get that
information we'll send them up to wherever that department is to do it in person because
it is important to me that when we're hiring people that they're reflective of the type
of human beings we want working for all of you so we're not going to skimp and cut corners
when we're hiring folks. When you look at us having a test the civil service exam we'll
typically have between 70 and 80 people show up we'll end up with a list of 40 or 45 and
from that 45 we typically may be higher six to ten so we're not just hiring everybody
that comes looking for a job. I can tell you that unfortunately not every police department
is as diligent as Denton is in checking officers prior backgrounds so officers are they call
them gypsy cops I think sometimes able to go from one department to another.
I've got another question we last time and some of you can help me out with this in chief
maybe you can speak to it we talked about and I can't remember if it was specifically
with use of force situations that that eventually comes to you and you make the determination
and one of the points of conversation that we had was around the potential of those outside
of the department being a part of that committee that decides whether that goes to the next
step you remember this conversation from the first meeting.
I do so we have a use of force committee that meets but in lieu of that the entire chain
of command reviews every use of force all the way up to assistant chief Smith as you'll
see when he does his presentation in a minute the vast majority of our internal affairs
complaints are internally driven meaning that we catch a lot of things even more things
than we would get from the public you'll also see that when the public calls and makes a
complaint we typically find more violations that come out of just that one complaint that
we see when we're looking over the the entire call itself okay so I guess my question was
what we were talking about in the last meeting was more specifically focused on use of force
situations I was just wondering how that squares with the flow chart that you showed Mr. Kronig
like that's the same thing so if someone sees a use of force that doesn't look right to
them they will send that up to chief Smith he'll bring it to me he and I will look at
it ourselves if there's a violation there we'll open up an internal affairs investigation
on it and then I'll run through that same exact process as it was laid out okay so what
we were talking about last time was even it was more toward the front end of the flow
chart where the arrow was it was like right deciding if it needs to even move forward
and be investigated and some of the people in the committee here were saying perhaps
on use of force situations it'd be good to have community members but that was at the
beginning of the flow chart okay thanks I think when I remember having that conversation
but and I remember I think someone said we could we could look more into that having
civilian representation on that committee because my question at that point was why
isn't there why isn't there someone that's a civilian I think someone said it's it's
I mean it would take a lot for a civilian to be trained to know all the ins and outs
of all of that which I completely agree but I think that's something that's it can be
a recommendation the further we go and the more we know that can be brought up that there
should be some kind of we completely trust in the chief and the chief of police and the
assistant chief and everything but there still has to be some some accountability to the
public I mean I don't see why there wouldn't be Mr. coding if you can talk to us are there
other use of force committees in other cities that have civilian representation I don't
know or is that like I'm part of no I don't know if there's use of force committees as
such I know example for Austin we have an office of police oversight I know the police
department has a force review board I don't believe there are any civilians on that board
they're all police officers I just not familiar with enough cities to know if they actually
have civilians involved in the review of use of force on on the front end I think I'll
have to find out I was reading an article they had the civilians around there were even
like criminal defense attorneys it wouldn't just be like someone that has no experience
I'll have to find that see if I can send it but is that a possibility even anywhere in
the process that civilians can be part of that process chief Dixon or Michael yeah
I think there's a way I need to look at the issues it's going to really depend on what's
this person's role typically I think you all know there's a body worn camera statute but
there are there are some very specific rules that apply to when those videos can be released
and who can see them typically any in camera videos like from you know mounted inside a
police car those are going to be public we may there may be some exceptions to releasing
it right away if there's pending criminal and stuff like that but for the most part
videos I think members of the public at some point in time might be able to see them but
it's really kind of just depend on the circumstances but there's probably I don't want to say absolutely
yes but if if there's if the committee recommends that and there's a way to legally do it I
certainly don't think the city manager or the chief would have an objection to that
so are those videos public information in car videos are but again the the department
or the district attorney could not want to release them if they think it's going to affect
a pending criminal case that's in car videos and again the body one camera has a specific
statute with those videos can only be released under certain circumstances and certain criteria
that kind of the general rule is all information in the hands of the city is public that's
the general rule except and then there's some exceptions so we would need to know specifically
what is public information and what is not if we were going to go that route if you tell
me when when this panel comes to making recommendations I think you just need to be as specific as
you can what you want to see and why and then we can we can all look at it and determine
whether we think we we can do it my philosophy is not to say no it's to try to find a way
see what works can do it yeah if we can do it we'll find right okay thank you and look
like anybody else says mr. Kovac one question yes sir pulls in other cities where a neighboring
city or another law enforcement body would serve on that panel where they have the professional
expertise but they're outside of that sitting that police department I'll defer to the chief
I I mean police departments ask each other all the time to review things and to help
out I don't know if chief Dixon's aware of if he's ever done that you know chief I have
not called them in for any administrative purposes but for all criminal purposes we
are not going to ever investigate ourselves I am totally against that so whether it's
a neighboring organization state organization we're going to bring someone else in to do
those but but I think the chief certainly has the right to ask another let's say if
you wanted to ask the chief of McKinney to take a look at a video and get his take on
it I think that would be appropriate because it's helping the chief to make an informed
decision so I don't think that would be inappropriate I have a question what is the process of seeking
out a third party look like and how is that determined to investigate a third party for
a criminal yeah like if you are I think the example was having McKinney look at something
or if there's an investigation that's needed that's internal in you would secure a third
party agency what what does that process look like how how how is it determined like you
already have like a list of agencies or just want to know what that what that so for criminal
investigations we have the Texas Rangers that do it now for us here if that were to change
I would want to look at an agency that's at least our size or larger that someone that
has the investigative capability to be able to do it and is it required that you use the
Texas Rangers or is that just how how were they how is it determined that they would
be the agency well that was actually in place before I got here but there are state agencies
agency that's used across the city across the state to do those criminal investigations
I mean they do public corruption investigations they're charged with that in the state of
Texas they're charged with doing criminal investigations anyway so it's a natural fit
okay I mean we could use the Dayton County Sheriff's Office I don't know if the next
biggest city around here would be Louisville or somewhere like that but I haven't really
had to do that I will say from an administrative standpoint the Internal Affairs Division of
the Denton Police Department does not have to be the only body or is not the only body
that can investigate administratively both the contract and the law define an investigator
is an employee or agent of the city so if if there was the city manager has the authority
and the chief to request someone from outside the city conduct an administrative investigation
and that may be where there's may just depend on the facts may involve if I'll pick on assistant
chief Smith if for example he was accused of doing something wrong I don't think Chief
Dixon is going to have his Internal Affairs Division he might but investigate an assistant
chief he may want to ask the city manager or the city manager may decide on his own
to hire someone outside the city to do that investigation because it involves a high ranking
member of the police department but we all know chief Smith would never do anything to
warrant that so okay unless somebody has anything else I'll move on to the next part of my presentation
let me and chief Smith will be up in about about two minutes so so let's say that the
Internal Affairs does an investigation there's policy violations sustained here's the different
types of discipline under chapter 143 that can be imposed a written reprimand now there
are things lower than that like oral counseling and you know training but training really
isn't discipline in a sense but this is really the formal types of discipline a written reprimand
which can't be appealed a temporary suspension of 1 to 15 days which the officer can appeal
an agreed suspension of 16 to 90 days and what that means is the officer and the chief
agree that the officer is going to be suspended anywhere from 16 to 90 days and since they're
agreeing to that that can't be appealed and then indefinite suspension as I said is equivalent
to termination that can be appealed the chief also has at his disposal of demotion and that
can be disciplinary in nature or can be performance related there's two types of demotions one
is a voluntary where the officer can agree that the officer can agree to be demoted and
if an agreed demotion or a voluntary demotion you can't appeal it the other one is an involuntary
demotion and that can be appealed so let's say if a police officer violated policy the
chief can chief has a lot of options the chief can suspend the person and demote him he can
do both or he can do one or just the other but if the chief just says you're a sergeant
and you violated policy I'm not going to suspend you but I don't think you should be a sergeant
anymore and the sergeant refuses to take a voluntary demotion then the chief recommends
to the civil service commission an involuntary demotion and then we have to have a hearing
and the commission or a hearing examiner and I'll explain that in the next slide has to
approve it and until the commission or a hearing examiner approves that demotion the sergeant
keeps his rank and keeps his pay however the chief can reassign that sergeant's duties
during that interim period a lot of people wonder what can discipline be used for a discipline
can be considered by the chief for promotional purposes so when someone takes a promotional
exam and is up for promotion the chief has a right to consider that disciplinary history
in deciding whether to promote that person if the chief decides not to promote that person
and bypasses him or her for promotion that bypass decision can be appealed to the civil
service commission or a hearing examiner so here's the different types of discipline
and here's the appeal process there's just two more this slide and one more so if an
officer is suspended from 1 to 15 days involuntarily demoted or by path indefinite suspension or
bypass for a promotion the person can appeal to either the civil service commission which
is a three-member commission here in the city or to a hearing examiner a lot of times referred
to by arbitrators that is purely the officer's choice the officer can decide whether they
want to appeal to the commission or a hearing examiner and here's the difference the commission
it is composed of three citizen volunteers like yourselves a hearing to the commission
must be held within 30 days after the appeal is filed unless the officer and the commission
agreed to postpone it the commission can subpoena documents and witnesses if an officer chooses
a commission they may choose it because it doesn't cost them anything the commission
appeal is free however if the officer wants a lawyer they have to pay for that themselves
a decision by the commission requires a majority vote so if thought three commissioners are
present at least two of them have to vote if only two of them are present which is a
quorum then it has to be a two-to-nothing vote the city has the burden in a disciplinary
case the officer doesn't have to prove that he or she didn't do it the department has
to prove that they did the authority of the commission in a disciplinary appeal they can
overturn the discipline in its entirety they can modify it they can only let decrease it
they cannot increase it or they can deny the appeal altogether and uphold the discipline
commission has a hearing the decision is rendered immediately they don't write an opinion they
just say what their decision is in public and then they sign in orders saying what their
decision is the commission can award back pay and other loss benefits like vacation
that the officer would have accumulated and then if an officer chooses their commission
route only the officer can appeal the commission's decision to court and you may ask why and
the answer is the commission as a city entity it would be this if the city suing itself
and that that the city can't do that so that's one option in a commission appeal but I can
tell you based on 26 years of trying disciplinary appeals the officers always choose the hearing
examiner route because they win about 50 percent of those appeals and here's the hearing examiner
must be a member of the american arbitration association or the federal mediation and conciliation
service hearing examiners do this for a living whereas the commission of volunteers who were
just volunteering their time a hearing examiner must have experience that hears these appeals
must have experienced hearing public safety and disciplinary appeals hearing examiner
has the same powers and duties as the commission the way we choose a hearing examiner as we
try to agree on someone if we can't then we ask the arbitration association for a list
of seven if we can't agree to somebody on the list then we take turns striking a list
and the person's name that's left is the person who hears the case the hearing can take months
to schedule whereas as I mentioned the commission hearing has to be held in 30 days hearing
examiners are expensive the good ones charge anywhere from a thousand to fifteen hundred
dollars a day plus expenses the party split that cost so typically if an officer is represented
by a police association the association will pick it up commission appeal is free hearing
examiner costs a lot of money hearing examiners provide detailed written opinions they can
be 20 or 30 pages long usually takes 30 days to get a decision after the hearing so you
can imagine if it takes three or four months to get a hearing and the hearing takes a week
and then another month it can be five or six months before the officer gets a decision
a hearing examiner's award is final and binding on the city and the officer and it can only
be appealed to district court under very limited circumstances and those are the hearing examiner
lacked jurisdiction which means they had no authority to hear the case they exceeded their
jurisdiction meaning they did something that they weren't allowed to or the judgment was
procured by fraud or collusion or some unlawful means the officer bribed the hearing examiner
and something like that the good thing about hearing examiner appeal both the city and
the officer can challenge the decision in court so based on my experience as I said
officers always choose this route when I represented officers in Austin and Dallas I always recommended
they go this route because they stand a better chance of winning so that's uh that's the
appeal process and I'll entertain any questions uh the next next section is then going to
be uh chief smith on the data on complaints so happy to answer any questions that you
folks might have about the appeal process uh Michael how often do we have appeals here
and then to my understanding uh since chief dixon has been here I think we've had one
is that correct which which the city one and prior to that uh any ideas the appeal hearings
themselves I do not know offhand that actually went to a hearing I don't know and chief smith
thinks there may have been one there's been one chief smith tells me okay well uh before
chief dixon came was there any any other appeals that you can think of under chief howell in
the past few years yeah we can't think of any offhand uh the contract the meet and confer
contract does have a provision that says if an officer is suspended up to five days they're
allowed to substitute a crude leave in lieu of days off and several officers recently
have chosen that which and if they make that choice then they waive their right to appeal
I'll try to hold my questions to a minimum so thank you okay no is there another question
I'm happy to answer it if you have one well I'm just trying to think you know it's like
if in previous administrations there were no disciplinary measures then you would have
no reason to appeal and so if you have a more disciplinary environment right now then there's
going to be more instances of appeal so one of the one of the slides will show you uh
disciplinary actions between 2015 under chief howell up to just a couple of days ago under
chief dixon so that might help you uh understand a little bit of the disciplinary suspensions
there have been 19 in the past five years um seven under chief howell and 12 under chief
dixon so we'll go in chief smith we'll go into that a little bit thank you very much
mr kroneck what else does the civil service commission do is that specifically connected
just to the police department or is that other aspects of the city as well just police and
fire uh they handle things dealing with uh entrance examinations promotional examinations
fitness for duty uh discipline uh that's primarily it
in in officer green was correct me if i'm wrong you had mentioned uh after the simulator
that there's another commission that's made up of citizens that's connected to the police
department as well i guess i'm just kind of wondering how many different groups there's
an oversight committee or something is maybe what you'd said there's this commission no
i was referring to the civil service commission is basically who here is our disciplinary
uh appeals which is what michael was just talking about okay so you're the same group
you're talking about this and this is the the one group that has citizens that's primarily
connected to the police department yes not only us just the fire department as well police
and fire are both civil service here in the city uh bo i'm sorry i was going to ask because
uh sheryl aren't you in some kind of committee that helps or works with the police department
i'm on the advisory committee for the police academy for the police academy so so bo i'm
on i serve on the civil service commission as does uh commissioner prada we're we're
the two we're two of the three commissioners for civil service honored thanks for clarifying
that honor is all mine and i can tell you based i can tell you based on my experience
with with both them and uh lily and they take their role very seriously any other questions
on the appeal part if not i'll uh shift over to chief smith on the data which i think you'll
find very interesting okay let me get to that
all you need to do is just use the arrows to move the slides
okay good evening everybody my name is bobby smith i'm the assistant chief of police uh
it's honored to address you tonight i've been with the pd for 25 years almost 26 years now
and i've been in this role for a couple of years this month so as part of my job i one
of my main functions is to provide guidance and oversight over the internal affairs division
and that's currently staffed with two investigators a report directly to me and of course i report
directly to the chief of police and uh i communicate with our internal affairs division on a daily
basis i know about every complaint that comes through and and uh like i said i provide a
lot of guidance and oversight on making sure that uh procedural justice and due process
is handled across the board so what you're looking at here if you can go to the upper
left of this slide i think you might have seen this number before the 525 that's a roughly
a half a million contacts uh contacts in the last uh five and a half years those contacts
generated a grand total of 539 uh complaints of misconduct so as you look across out of
that 539 uh 324 of those had a disposition of sustained meaning that the uh the misconduct
to that was alleged did occur from that 300 and that's a 60 percent of the the grand total
out of those 324 i'm sorry out of the 539 that is 215 you know were from uh were considered
external from civilians uh and citizens i mean and that was a 40 percent of the total
now just by some sort of coincidence 324 was the number of internal complaints and i'll
talk a little bit more about that i want to get to the middle of the of the screen but
that uh that 324 is what happens internally most of those are initiated by a supervisor
if there's an allegation of misconduct or they witness something some of those are employees
having some issues with another employee but the vast majority those are supervisor related
and so if you move to the far right of the screen the e stands for external so 53 percent
i'm sorry 53 of the complaints and that's going to be out of the 215 were sustained
for 25 sustainment rate and then internally 271 out of the 324 were sustained that's an
84 percent so again a lot of supervisor oversight in that area the um yeah i'll talk a little
bit about that 84 a lot of that has to do with supervisors observing the misconduct
and a lot of this is very minor natured so we're talking about things you know that you'll
see in the middle of the screen here performance related operation of police equipment police
vehicles so a lot of that stuff is just something that the supervisor or the manager can observe
and so it's prima facie when it comes to the the incident that it did happen and so it
that's that's just one of the big reasons you have higher level uh percentage of sustained
complaints internally so if you look at when i look down at our top five allegations and
these are the allegations of misconduct the the highest number is performance related
and what that means is is that the the officer or the employee was involved in some sort
of conduct that is deemed unsatisfactory and so it gets looked at in other words it
could be something like just doing the wrong thing the wrong action maybe letting someone
that should have been held accountable for something maybe not doing the right thing
there and then if you see below that the operation of police equipment and police vehicles so
police officers are in cars all the time they back into light poles they do things you know
that because they're in cars all the time and most of that is very minor natured they
might leave a ticket writer printer on top of a car and drive off in the printer is a
million pieces attendance this is very common folks oversleeping maybe you know not showing
up on time maybe missing a court date things of that nature now discourtesy is a little
bit more has a little bit more external generated it's a little bit more external generated
when it comes to complaints we have do have a few internally and then when rounding out
the top five is service complaint now service complaint is actually a little bit of a misnomer
it's it was it's probably been misused as a as a categorization of complaint and but
it shows up in the allegations and most of those would if you go back and read if you
look at those most of those going to be performance related issues when it comes to service complaints
if you look at the bottom of the screen there out of all of these these complaints we had
a total of fourteen use of force complaints since January one of two thousand fifteen
that doesn't include anything that that's happened that doesn't include everything that's
happened this year we're a little bit behind on some of the just reconciliation efforts
when it comes to our our internal affairs software but the fourteen years of force complaints
we had three of those were sustained with one suspension and I threw in taser because
taser is directly related to use of force but sometimes those allegations fall under
the actual taser policy so there was four of those and all four of those were sustained
with one suspension we also had four bias or racial profiling complaints and zero were
sustained those were all exonerated on this screen here if you just go to the top right
for me for just a minute you'll see the five thirty nine that's the total complaints I
went ahead and broke this down year by year so starting with that top level data for complaints
you can see it's broken year by year and you can see that it progressively goes up particularly
in two thousand eighteen and two thousand nineteen and there's there's some reasons
for that number one in two thousand eighteen we adopted a reporting system called blue
team that ties into our our storage system which is IA pro and Chief Dixon's with Chief
Dixon's leadership on this we took a very concerted effort to make sure that we were
documenting performance related issues or any sort of misconduct or and we were before
two thousand eighteen a lot of this stuff was decentralized it was housed in the desk
of supervisors and there was a lot of just discretion that was off that was used by sergeants
and lieutenants but we as a concerted effort we centralized it more and we started we made
a commitment towards documenting these issues and so you can see 2020 is really light when
it comes to the numbers but again we we're going to we're going to have to get in there
and make sure that our numbers are caught up so as you go down you can see you can see
this I won't go through every one of these but you can see the categories the sustained
comes up with the 324 you can see your external complaints as they as they go up a little
bit through the the years to 215 and the external sustained and if you go down to on the bottom
left there where it says internal you'll see the complaints and they were for three years
in a row by just sheer coincidence it was 58 is the number that came up all three years
between 16 17 and 18 and there was a huge jump in 19 to 96 so we broke this down by
race when we looked at it and when it comes to our total complaints that were external
that was 215 46 of those complaints were final filed by black citizens 17 by hispanic citizens
115 by white citizens and you can see four in the asian or other classification and then
we had 33 records where the race was not listed or it was actually listed as unknown
here is the disciplinary suspensions by year this is something that mike alluded to just
a few minutes ago and you can it's a busy chart but if you start at the upper left and
you see that there's a total of 19 that are listed there and then if you go down you see
a one day and you go across the board that's a one day suspension without pay and then
you can see it goes down with the level of suspensions that have been handed out a popular
number of days for suspension is the five day suspension as you can see chief dixon
has handed three of those out in his tenure and then we had one 16 day suspension that
happened earlier this year we've had two indefinite suspensions one of those was appealed we talked
a little bit mike talked a little bit about the appellate process but it did go through
the appeal process and the city of denton won that appeal process and the it's my belief
that that that that happened because of the the system that chief dixon has put in place
with our with our disciplinary review and so this is a breakdown of the other types
of disciplinary corrective action if you go to the upper left with me you'll see the top
three that say verbal counseling documented counseling and written reprimand that's a
hierarchy right there those three verbal counseling is the equivalent to coaching this is for
very minor issues somebody like i said maybe somebody walked in five ten minutes late for
work one day and it's their first time a lot of those will result just verbal counseling
then you get to documented counseling and that's a little bit that's a little bit more
serious it's it's uh you really kind of spell out what happened you you really try to work
with a person to try to fix it and uh but it's we just need to document it a little
bit more and then you get to written reprimand which is one step below with suspension and
the written reprimand has pretty serious language on it about what will happen if you don't
correct the behavior then you have performance improvement plans uh we we actually call these
epips it stands for employee performance improvement plan and we've uh we've gotten a little bit
more it's been a little bit more robust in the last two years and we're using that to
try to correct officers performance and then we also have a number of training dispositions
where we're getting making sure folks are are getting the training they need when they
have some issues and uh we also had 21 cases where the action taken was not listed so we're
going to have to go back through those and double check everything through an audit we've
been auditing it in any way but we need to go back and double check all of that i don't
know what's supposed to be there but okay with that i'll open it up for any questions
i have a question um on on the um like verbal counseling or the documented counseling um
would would it be fair to say that maybe uh some of these disciplinarian acts are for
newer officers or more seasoned or is there a right a high ratio of maybe newer officers
that would be getting these kind of warnings and counselings or is it just across the board
it is across the board but yeah when you're talking about young maybe newer officers you
know depending on how minor the because some things are really minor especially internally
driven issues okay you know and so yes the whole idea here is to bring people to the
point where they perform at a high rate at very high standards and so it's like anything
else in life you got to coach people and you got to give an opportunity you got to give
them an opportunity to to improve their performance so you can't come down too hard on these minor
nature things because you end up you may end up tearing the employee down their goal is
to get a really high operating employee okay thank you anybody else yeah i have a question
or a comment um i'd be really interested just in the 14 use of force complaints um since
this is the purpose of this committee if um be further elaborated on i know that yes i
said it's since 2015 but i'd like to see a breakdown by year uh i'd like to see who uh
who brought that up for attention was it an internal or an external um who's the one that
brought that up and who investigated who decided that only one of the one of those um complaint
should be held upheld and then what was the consequence you're talking about so the use
of force right 14 the and if you wanted to add the taser one in there i mean that makes
18 but but specifically the 14 use of work for uh force complaints right no i actually
went through every one of those 14 and i looked at them and um you know there was three that
were sustained and all three of those were captured through internal review in other
words the supervisor doing his or her job saw something ran it up the chain of command
and made sure that it was investigated properly now if you look at the other 11 some of those
uh for instance there was a couple of those instances where the officer placed his or
her hand on a on a person just to stop their movement and they were trying to walk away
and they were being lawfully detained and the person filed a complaint for use of force
so you have some of that um you know i i i can't sit here and go through every one of
them i but i can tell you that i did go through every one of them and i did not see any in
my and and this is me looking at it i didn't see deficiencies with the investigation it
would just be helpful for us to read the language uh for us to look at each one of them ourselves
i don't know what the process is if we would be able to read what whatever you were reading
uh i think that would just be helpful there's certain information that we have to protect
under under chapter 143 that's a decision i that's i would have to defer to uh mike
and chief dixon on that as far as releasing that information but in general uh you know
some of the information i can pass along here uh in the taser you know the taser issues
there was a total of four um complaints those were all no no i'm sorry those were not all
captured internally but i think the majority were and in each one of those incidents uh
there was discipline associated with it one was a suspension and that was under chief
dixon's tenure
is mr konig there so he can let us know what we're going to be able to see with those 14
i'm gonna have to think about that because those if they didn't result in a i'll go into
this in a minute if they didn't result in a suspension of at least one day they're confidential
by law um uh let me look at that issue and and i will promise you that if i if i think
you can see them then i'll certainly will make them available to you i'm just not sure
um because this is a volunteer committee and and you'll see that this this goes into the
whole issue of oversight and what what citizens uh especially who aren't even employees of
the the city what they can see so let me let me look at the issue discuss it with chief
dixon chief smith a little bit more and we'll we'll make available to you what i what i
believe we legally can i just i i just think that i mean i that's the whole purpose of
this committee right is to review use of force and i'd like to see what we're reviewing if
it's even necessary i want to know who made the decision that it was a you know that it
was a simple yeah i tried to grab arm and he resisted arrest or was it more than that
uh let us let us talk to michael let us talk to michael and see if we if at a minimum we
can put those in a uh in a table format at least to provide some general data um and
we'll try to figure out a way to at least share um the generalities of the case if possible
if michael thinks we can go a little further we will but uh at a minimum i'll talk to him
about trying to put it in a format we can at least discuss jesse we don't need to know
the person's name i'm sorry cheryl yeah right remove the person's name i think additionally
you shared with us the race of the complainants that were external but not any information
about the officers that were involved um and so generally just i understand that you can't
potentially release individual records for those 14 in their totality but potentially
if we could get some aggregated information that would help us to understand um the circumstances
and the background of those situations i think that would be helpful we'll see what we could
put together and bring it back to you jesse i saw your hand up sure some of the same ground
that's already been covered with other folks that i think for the committee's purposes
anonymous information you know with names redacted whatever makes it easier to get the
information to the committee because i think we can all recognize the danger in let's say
out of those 14 there's even one that's not substantiated that's driven by something beyond
actual events and and the damage that can be done to uh to an officer's reputation even
if it's just uh putting it out there with this committee so um i think i think anonymous
or or somehow scrubbed results or a table or something like taunt said would be very
helpful and i just wanted to add to that i noticed that of those 14ish complaints there
were around seven that were sustained but only two suspensions so i'm wondering if we
can figure out what the action was for the ones that were sustained but there wasn't
a suspension um i'd be interested to see what happened there as well right with the 14 actual
uses of force allegations there was three sustained there and in that case those cases
there was one uh that was a five-day suspension there was another was a documented counseling
and the other one was a written reprimand those are the three disciplinary actions that
were taken in those but one thing to keep in mind about use of force items you know
there's different levels of use as a force that and so uh in in some cases you know if
it's egregious or in some cases if it's you know grabbing somebody that may be a little
too hard so there's different there's various levels of that and and actually most of these
uh i do believe i believe that out of the three uh uses of force i think only one of
those was decided by chief dixon i believe
and just to clarify i guess i was also adding in the ones around the tasing um and and i
just wanted to mention that right you're right so if you add the tases into the that's four
plus the 14 that's 18 and so yes and there would be a total of seven sustained you're
right i think that would be really interesting to see too like you mentioned what the levels
of use of force so i mean if most complaints were grabbing an arm you know were there any
that were more so uh you know just if there could be some kind of difference and often
put on the table too well yeah i'd be glad to provide that if you know if that's something
that we're allowed to do i provide you with the the basic information about it and well
i think your your basic framework too because you've got either intuitively or formally
when you're looking at it after 25 years and understanding this is not that and i think
in general we would be able to maybe all the same information you do to say that but i
think just knowing your categories if you've got four categories from egregious to yeah
uh accidental to everything in between you know how many of those categories there are
that you're intuitively as you're looking at it right that would be helpful just to
to for us to i think know there's four general categories i'm thinking through and these
three go to the chief and this one doesn't you know right but i also want to say something
real quick and i i didn't mention this earlier but i think it's very critical to understand
the process by which when it comes to a complaint of use of force it's it's called it's a serious
nature complaint and previous to chief dixon the investigator on on a case provided the
disposition and uh and when chief dixon came in that was changed to the system that flow
chart where you saw the arrow so there's a much more deliberative process and not taking
away anything from his predecessor but the process is much more deliberative and he's
and the key thing about all of it is that the investigating uh officer whether it's
the i in this case would be always an internal affairs officer doesn't make the the recommendation
for the disposition that is something that is done in the chain of command with chief
dixon making the final decision so um i think that's a key that's a very key point to the
process right now yeah bobby i think we can sit down tomorrow with michael and and just
kind of see how far we can go um if we could put this information in a spreadsheet that
doesn't in any way uh violate any 143 or any of the rules that we've agreed to and just
so we can talk through some scenarios with we're happy to do it and i think we can kick
off our next meeting with a summary of that data and to the extent that we're allowed
to under the law so you've got our commitment to working on that
chief at a more general level i know i think gary henderson asked this question last meeting
about culture and where you see the department at i know these they're doing it very respectfully
but both the assistant chief here and and mr groenig have said you know when you showed
up there's been a new chief there's a new sheriff in town people have felt that from
your perspective in regards to culture what have you seen systemically in regards to discipline
that you've tried to come in and um in address knowing that you know even if it's shown up
to a meeting five ten minutes late these are the kind of things in a culture that lead
to more disastrous consequences if not addressed how have you viewed that overall and just
kind of love to just hear your perspective that they've both spoken to in various ways
so i really wanted us to focus on how can we make our organization better and a lot
of that comes to supervisors starting to have monthly meetings with their subordinates lie
tenants starting to have monthly meetings with their sergeants deputy chiefs having
monthly meetings with their lieutenants and the executive team we meet at least once a
week sometimes we meet more than that so that's where you see a lot of those coaching documented
counseling is going in right there because they're seeing little things and i want us
to catch those little things and address them before they manifest themselves into a tragedy
because by then it's too late that's when you're looking at what is it a mistake of
the mind or a mistake of the heart when people are committing policy violations so we're
looking at these more holistically now we're really taking and i'm putting a lot of the
onus on the chain of command we all go into a room together i start with the lowest ranking
person in there for them to give me what they think what's their recommendation they want
they think something should be sustained if it is why when it comes down to days off what
do you think is something that you would recommend and why because if our leadership from the
top down doesn't understand the why behind the decisions we're playing against ourselves
and we're not improving employees and with that every time we have a policy violation
definitely when we give a suspension out there's got to be training associated with that got
to be tied to it or else again we're playing against ourselves we have an onus as an organization
and myself as the chief executive officer to make sure that we're not setting our employees
up to fail and if we're not giving them the training they need the training they deserve
and the attention they deserve we're negligent in the manner of not setting them up for success
and i want to make sure that i don't let this time pass you've got some amazing men and
women wearing this uniform here in the city of denton working for you every day two of
them are on your screen right now in yancey and travis they come to work not for the money
they don't come to work to get accolades they come to work to serve you and they do a magnificent
job of it so i don't want that to get washed out as long as we're pleased by human beings
we're going to have discipline associated with that we have to make sure that we're
doing it the right way which is why we use indefinite suspensions very judiciously very
cautiously because i don't want on the back end someone to get their job back through
the city and now they're back and they're emboldened even more because they've gotten
their job back so i think where we're at now we're about halfway to where i want us to
be but we're going to get there
michelle i have a question yes ma'am um i'm really interested in the racial dynamics in
our city because we have really large inequities and i'm sure almost everybody is aware and
i was looking at the slide the complaints by race and noted that it says if i can read
this 21 percent of the total complaints were made by black members of our town and i'm
curious if you what kind of thinking you might have done about this and also are black members
of the community more likely to complain about black officers or white officers have you
have you delved into the dynamics
that's something that we we have the data on that when we when we're talking about complaints
made by citizens the race of the citizen we also have the races of the officers so we
have that information and what do you make of it and can't we see it yeah i think that's
something that we you know as long as i mean i'm sure we're going to talk about this more
but that may be something we can lay it all out i'll defer to city manager and chief dixon
on that yeah we'll start the next meeting with both of the data tables from what we
were previously discussing as far as those use of force cases and these but the short
of it is there's no pattern of our african-american community complaining on one race of an officer
or another okay thank you i think um and i don't even know if it's possible is there
one specific area of the city that you receive more complaints than the other or is it just
a well-rounded all over on um number of complaints i don't have that information right now ma'am
that's something that um we'd have to look at to see if that's available to us okay we'd
have to look at locations and addresses you know when i looked at this when i spent the
last couple of weeks looking over information that is i did use uh just the person's name
and their and their uh their race and gender and the same with the officer so that but
as far as location where it occurred and address i don't have that data yet i haven't looked
at that is that something we we could get at a certain point i'd have to see if that's
available uh i think it is i mean this the system that we have has a lot of different
searchable data fields okay chief smith i have a question go ahead john thank you uh
chief smith i have a question uh when i'm looking at this complaints by race these are
people from the community complaining against the police department right for the most part
there is one little copy out there that i have to explain okay prior to 2019 uh we didn't
have the ability to categorize where we weren't using the ability to categorize internal versus
external in the actual number and this is kind of confusing but there's an ops number
or an investigative number so these two 15 were represented by the citizens that we recorded
in the complaint there is a possibility that some of the citizens uh did not file the complaint
themselves that that we filed it on behalf of the citizen there is some possibility of
that but generally speaking it is a complaint out by the system and my second question which
is related so if these citizens are complaining about the police generally what are they complaining
about well when you saw that top five stuff there probably discourtesy is the one in that
in that those categories uh but i will say this we can break it down by citizen complaints
to determine what their highest level of allegations are but if i i can tell you just from anecdotally
from my experience a lot of it is performance related they weren't happy with the performance
of the officer or the decision making of the officer or that the officer was just courteous
and in his demeanor or her demeanor thank you very much camion who else had a question
you have a question camion yeah i did so i was trying to get off mute so i have a couple
questions um the first is around this complaint by race uh breakdown i was wondering how does
our um breakdown compare to the percentages um of our dentin population by race and also
like how it might compare to other cities or cities of similar size and population of
ours i'd just be interested to see if we could at all i don't know if you all have the ability
to get data from other cities but i'm just wondering how it could compare to see um where
dentin's at in comparison to other areas um and you mentioned that there were more ways
to break down data around this and you mentioned that you use um a breakdown around gender
and race and all of that i'm wondering if there are any indicators in the um software
here at with our city that indicate folks is gender if it's not male or female like
if they um identify as a trans individual or a non-binary individual i'd be interested
to see if any of these complaints came from our lgbt community if that is an intersection
that is captured well ma'am i don't think that's actually captured right now when we
go back and look at the data i mean this and we've had this system since 2013 uh and uh
i do not believe there's a cat a category in there now that doesn't mean it's not available
through some sort of research but generally speaking i don't think that's a data entry
point in this system that we currently have my question was just going to be about language
okay that was um when i was looking at that i think the spanish community it was really
low it's like eight percent which is good or it could be that it's not complaining that
they can't complain in the appropriate language so i'd just be interested in that as a data
entry point as well did you get that chief smith i'm sorry what was the actual question
i i thought you was you just wanted some information did you have a question about it though yeah
no the question is the question is that whenever the hispanic the ones that you're getting
from hispanic population if any of them um have if any of the complaints have come in
in spanish and how are those routed my concern is maybe someone wants to complain but they
can't speak or you don't have anyone available so i'll just be interested right right i totally
understand that and of course we would we would always we always make arrangements whenever
we can but i do understand there might be a barrier to want to file the complaint in
the first place i totally understand that but um we do have spanish speaking officers
at our department and we would always facilitate that somehow we would never turn anybody away
because of any sort of uh language barrier yes ronda i have a comment on canyon's question
uh it didn't actually get answered about uh the percentage of the races in denton properly
um i don't have the data right in front of me but i have looked at it before uh hispanics
are about 25 of the population and i think african american or black whatever term you
use is about nine i thought it was 11 okay somewhere yeah between nine and 11 yeah certainly
a lot fewer african americans and and in terms of the percentage of the population as to
those making complaints yes katina if you take that go ahead katina and then john um
so i would like to see the nature of the complaints may be ranked by severity are we able to look
at that like do you have categorizations where are some of those complaints to where you
know like rating i'm i'm just using hypothetically like a ranking from one to ten or a type of
or a type of complaint um like excessive for sexual you know just do you have them categorized
in that way or is it is it are you able to uh pull that data from your system yes ma'am
okay yeah that's uh you're talking about allegations you can you can you can sort anything in the
system by an allegation you can you can pull i can figure out exactly how many of each
allegation we looked at five and a half years is what we use for this uh this presentation
this is what what i was told to look up but you know this particular system dates back
to 2013 but yes we can we can look at it the way you described now and and we can break
it down by race we can break it down by gender uh the allegations you can break it down by
officer you can do it you know there's there's a lot of there's a lot of functionality there
thank you john uh thank you sheryl i was going to say that um when you look at the numbers
and the african-american community represents around 11 i would think the hispanic community
is around 30 and then when you look at only eight percent here i don't know that that
those numbers kind of tell you something you know i don't know what they're telling you
but they're telling you something that you you have and the white population is around
50 i think 45 to 50 and so but those numbers seem to to to line out but somehow we're missing
information from the hispanic community i don't know maybe the service is adequate or or like
like living was saying we've got a breakdown in the ability to communicate there and i
i do want to say i know chief dixon and um some of his other officers are trying to kind
of bridge that gap right between the hispanic community maybe the trust maybe the lack of
trust to report crimes and things like that i know that there is work that that is being
done and i think that that's something that's very relevant uh you're right i mean i think
whether city of denton or denny county we're more than 25 just alone in k-12 at the dentin
isd it's 31 so i know way more i'm just not why uh you know and like you said maybe the
service is adequate but i i don't mean to be a negative nelly but i think it's probably
better well i can tell you yesterday speaking to that lily and i had two um ladies call
me and we had a discussion for about an hour and they were both immigrants to our country
and they spoke exactly to what you just spoke to is how we have been coming uh closer together
in the last year and they would have never called the police department for what they
did yesterday and that was to help them and in the course of an eviction that they were
going through and asking us for assistance even though they knew that they weren't here
legally they still didn't they had enough trust in us that they reached out to us so
i think we are making some some ground here that's good and i know that hopefully uh i
know karama kind of put a stop to it but hopefully those meetings will continue katina so could
it possibly be um because i see the unknown and not listed i know um sometimes there's
nuance to hispanic and latinx uh communities and how they identify could that potentially
be an issue that there's more um that there are more um hispanic or latinx um complaints
but that they that there's no proper classification for their ethnicity or you know how they identify
culturally if i may if i may i don't know and i'll just i'll defer to assistant police
chief but i know that for me uh it'll say hispanic non-white or or sometimes i'm hispanic
but i'm included in white it depends you know who's dealing with me um so i don't know how
that's done but that can very possibly be what's going on and i've noticed that where
it'll say hispanic and white um and so i'm wondering if that if the white um if some
of the hispanic numbers are are lumped in with white or unknown not listed i definitely
believe it's possibly about the unknown or not listed we're going to have to like i said
we're going to have to go through those and figure out what the problem is with those
33 records and see so the numbers could change dami i was curious if chief you believe that
you have the resources that you need to communicate with our community about how they may go about
filing a complaint both in english and spanish and in any other forms or um if you have the
communications resources that you feel like the department would need to help educate
citizens about how they can move forward if they feel like they have a complaint to file
we do we have an amazing well we have a great relationship inner that in the city
being able to use resources both with our public information office and with corporate
communications here at the city additionally we work very well with twu unt nctc and get an
out joint messaging so we have introduced a number of ways for people to reach out to us both online
and in person they can go online and send in a complaint anonymously through email they can call
and leave messages they can come up to a police department we can send people out to meet we've
opened up as many channels as we can but we're going to continue to try to get better communication
now because we have other communities in our city that aren't latinx hispanic they come from
the middle east eastern asia places like that so that's really we're trying to make them a broader
focus one thing i wanted to add real quick and uh on our website we do have uh we do have a
spanish-speaking option on our website when it comes to making complaints with the department
i don't know that it's been utilized i don't think it has but it's there it's an option
for our spanish-speaking community
would you possibly be able to share with me what other intersections you
you all capture regarding the the complaints aside from race and gender
well obviously there's the standard stuff with uh with your date and times we also can capture it
by supervisor but it all depends on if the data was filled out correctly one of the things i did
find is that some of the records are not complete so you have to you have to fix those i think in
some instances and we're dedicated to doing that from here on out but there are a number of data
points and i don't have them all right here in front of me but it could be something as a shift
it could be a supervisor that's assigned to the individual there's information about the officer
i think there's actually information there's some ways to capture some information about the
officer's background things like that but i'd have to take a little deeper dive in it to determine
how how much quality data we have there did you have anything else specifically yeah i mean i
guess i'm just wondering if you all can provide to us the data points that are captured around the
person who's making the complaint and the data points that are captured around the officer in
which they're complaining about um because it seems like i don't know i'm just wondering
what is bringing up for me is that there are i think people have looked it up some barriers it
could be for people to feel like they can make complaints and i think that this committee is like
likely interested in trying to reduce those barriers because it would just help um with
transparency with the police department and citizen trust so just wondering like what information you
all might be able to share around that because it could help us in determining if there are
barriers to folks making complaints or who better understand who might be making complaints and who
they might be making complaints about without like names or anything just like the things you can
actually document about right cameron i'd like to ask you a question were you specifically asking if
um we can do a better job of identifying the lgbtq community i'm thinking that but not just that like
our aging population people with um disabilities like all types of things that's that's kind of
what i'm leaning at is like there could be trends that we're completely missing um because of if we
might only be and i get that maybe there's limited time but if it's a form that folks are filling out
that they can make a complaint if there are sections that allow them to put things about
themselves they might right um so that's my thinking around that i'm just wondering what
information is captured i can tell you anecdotally that i saw a pretty strong representation of
mental illness in some of these complaints as i went through a lot of these and i know that
that's a it's a big thing for our community is to to provide the right uh you know collaborative
approach to mental illness and i did see that when just in this again this is just this is not a
data-based summation it's just simply anecdotally i saw a pretty strong representation of mental
illness in some of the complaints something um i'd like to uh chime in something i wanted i'd like to
know how many um how many officers like like what's the protocol for identifying yourself
like as an officer and how many people that have put in complaints without knowing the officer's
name or like without knowing who the without knowing the officer's badge number whatever it is
that's a great question and you know over the last couple of years i've been involved in every one of
these complaints that come through and and occasionally we'll get a complaint where the
the complainant doesn't know the officer's name or maybe in fact it's actually more common to not
know the officer's name but they can provide us with the details that we're going to need and
we seem to have a very strong record of determining who those people who those officers are so if
somebody complains of misconduct and they don't know the officer's name as long as they can provide
us with some basic details we'll we'll be able to determine the officer's identity the protocol
though for an officer to identify themselves is they're you know they're typically they need to
identify they need to say who they are they need to say their officer so and so but if the person
demands more information they they like a name and a badge number they're required to give their badge
i am curious if the training for officers as it relates to folks with visual impairment
specifically includes badge number automatically because any member of the community could walk
up on somebody with a visual impairment and declare themselves a police officer so i'm
just curious if that's part of the training i know that may not be a question you guys can answer
tonight but it is something that's being brought to my mind as we're having that conversation
well i can tell you mem that i don't remember anybody ever saying that i i don't remember
being part of the training and and maybe it's because it hasn't really come up as much you know
with with officers and so maybe you know how things are if something is not happening frequently
sometimes it's it's just not something that's that's probably thought about but it's a good
point you also have hearing impaired individuals and so there's ways to make sure that they get
the information they need to correct me if i'm wrong is this the complaint form yes that is
that's on the website and that's getting that's going to be updated shortly by the way we've got
some new ideas that is that's the website right there pointing out okay um have you so you said
it's going to be updated pretty soon have you guys put those updates on there um will there be a box
for people to fill out their race will it be a box for people to like like be more specific about
how they identify because a lot of because if these are the complaint forms this doesn't it doesn't
like the color of the person or the sexual orientation whatever it may be of the person
may get left out in these boxes it's definitely not my field of expertise when it comes to that
i don't know if some folks may not want to fill it out but what you're saying is that
it should be made available to fill yeah yeah okay yeah oh i agree with that and so that's
okay donna donna so uh yes donna diamond on behalf of uh twu um some of the students are um
concerned that cultural competency and sensitivity um is not really being really being um implemented
in your trainings um what can you say about that well i'm going to defer to chief dixon on that
uh i think that's more of a question for him who wants to do that so we understand that there's
always going to be training gaps in police departments so one very concerted effort that
we've undertaken in the last 12 months is one putting together a comprehensive training plan
we're being more intentional more directional on what training we're bringing here we just had
fair and impartial policing come here and train the trainer we had 20 people from within our
organization we also opened it up to outside agencies to participate in that that is one of
the best um implicit bias trainings for law enforcement there are in the country
we're bringing them back to teach the executive team as well as community members so we're going
to have about 30 of us in that class we're being very intentional on bringing more different types
different styles of that because we understand you can't just have one training and then drop that
and not let it go it's got to be ongoing it's got to be very directional it's got to be very
intentional so in the next couple of years and i'm not i'm not going to speak for yance here
or travis on this call but they'll tell you that their training has really picked up the pace
in the last 18 months and i will say that cultural diversity is a mandated class by tico
that uh you must go through in order to even pass the basic police academy
so cultural diversity as well as other cultural classes and to the tune of the way we interact
with the public with other types of disabilities are now mandated classes by tico
does anybody have any more questions because we're going to just about ended and sarah from the
uh this from the um city manager's office is going to um get on and kind of get us where
we need to be for the next meeting and the information that we've requested
yeah i i have a question okay actually the communication that just occurred answered
my first question so i do appreciate that and that was the um implicit bias trainings
and how often those occur but looking at the sustained complaints corrective action document
it says that there were um six incidents where training was provided can we get information on
what type of training was provided for those corrective action pieces yes we'll attach those
to that same graph this is mike again i have two more slides and that's it okay i think these are
important it'll explain something uh oops
you folks had asked can you see the complaints and there chapter 143 specifically deals with
personnel files there are two there are two files maintained by the police department on each police
officer one is called the a file and that's because it's section 143.089a that is the public
file maintained by the civil service commission and it contains accommodations uh performance
evaluations those parts of a internal affairs investigation if the officer was suspended for
at least one day so not only does the chief file a disciplinary memo with the civil service commission
for the suspension but the underlying internal affairs investigation also becomes part of the
public file that's the a file the g file is the confidential file that's maintained by the police
department and i underlined i'll read it a police department may maintain a personnel file
on a police officer employed by the department for the department's use but the department may
not release any information contained in the department file to any agency or person requesting
information related to a police officer that's the problem that underlined language means that
any if there's an internal affairs investigation and the officer was not suspended for at least
one day demoted bypassed for promotion or indefinitely suspended that internal affairs
investigation is confidential by law we cannot release it to anyone outside the police department
there is some exceptions to the city council the city manager and the city attorney and i won't go
into the defined points of the law that provision right there can be only changed by the legislature
or through a meet and confer agreement and as my last point points out this restriction
is a significant restriction on the ability for citizen oversight of a police department that's
subject to chapter 143 in the austin meet and confer agreement there is a specific provision
that allows this confidential information to be reviewed by the police monitor there as well as
the citizens review committee so when you ask to see the files that did not result in discipline
i need to consider whether or not i believe there's an exception to this rule or the statute
that would allow you to see it so that's what i'm going to have to kind of think about but that is
the law and currently the meet and confer agreement does not provide a provision that would allow
anyone outside of the police department the city manager the city attorney the city council to see
those confidential files so that's all i have but i thought it was important to point that out and
the last thing i just want to say is i'm hopeful that let me stop this i hopeful that this this
presentation that i did makes you realize that it's not as simple as just fire the officer today
there's a lot of due process and contractual and statutory provisions that the police department
and the law department has to file when it follow when it comes to the investigation of alleged
police misconduct so unless someone has any questions about those last two slides i am done
thank you mike okay thank you sarah okay so i'll take the last item i'm going to ask rachel she can
bring up the slide so just wanted to review what is proposed for the next committee meeting and get
the committee's direction so when we did review the draft schedule with the committee at the first
meeting we had two public input sessions so the first public input session is planned for next
week thursday july 23rd and i'm just going to add in after hearing some of the committee's questions
tonight regarding the data we'll probably spend the first part of the meeting actually reviewing
your questions giving you providing you some of that data that you've asked for tonight
and then the second part of the meeting for next week would be this public input session
so we've proposed it as follow but we'll take the committee's direction so it would be an opportunity
for citizens to call in and speak to the committee to share their experiences their stories their
thoughts or their input regarding use of force in the police department citizens would have a
proposed maximum time of four minutes per speaker we propose that to be consistent with our city
council meetings and public input the committee members may ask clarification questions to the
citizens and then the meeting would be proposed to continue until all so the citizens have spoken
or no longer than 8 30 p.m we do have a second public input session plan so for some reason not
all speakers could speak at that meeting they could be scheduled for the one in august in addition to
providing the opportunity to speak by phone directly to the committee we are also proposing
to develop an online form for citizens to submit their input electronically what we would do is
then compile all of those responses and send the written comments to the committee we do kind of a
first round to provide you what we receive within the next week but we would go ahead and leave that
form open probably through the end of august so that citizens through the next month can submit
that input to you for your consideration as you're coming up with recommendations and findings
to report to city council if we move forward with this staff will go ahead and release a press
release tomorrow we can push it out through our social media channels through various community
groups to try to get as much public input as possible for this committee to consider and then
the second public input session would be planned for thursday august 20th and then we just also
outlined i'm just looking ahead a little bit further so the committee knows what may be coming
at future meetings it's kind of an agenda for thursday july 30th which includes more discussion
in regards to some of the use of force policies that we have not provided an overview yet so we'll
go ahead and take um committee discussion is everybody okay with the four minute time for the
phone calls okay yeah you're just so i'm clear we would not have really any other business or
discussion as a committee that night we would be simply to hear public comment correct no
we go ahead sarah so it is up to the committee i'm just hearing the discussion tonight thought
it might be valuable just to be timely to some of your questions for additional data maybe take the
first 30 minutes no longer to to take you through some of that data but that certainly could be up
to the committee's direction or we could take public input first and then follow up can i ask
a question sure how how i've watched some of the recent city council meetings and i recognize that
when people have comments to make it can go for a long time so i'm wondering i see that it says six
to eight thirty does that mean we're not taking any more comments at eight thirty comments until
they're done until they're done and if there's more the cutoff will be at eight thirty okay and
then there'll be another session where if they didn't get through this time they'll continue over
into the next public session session yeah i just want to offer offer up an option because i don't
know how many people might register or call in that we could possibly hear those updates on the
30th when we're having more info about use of force from the police department and allow
for more time for public comment but that's just my suggestion but i want that's an option well
that that could be fine but i think that since you ask it and we're um right in the thick i
think we should stay consistent with the meetings and the information that you asked for that we
bring it back so there's not a big time lapse in between that and we could probably knock that out
the first 30 minutes and then um we would have more time for the for the phone calls and the
questions and comments yeah another thing i wondered is whenever you guys say call in are
they going to be calling a certain phone number are they going to be calling it through like the zoom
it would be uh calling by phone to speak to the committee and that's how we have established it
for the city council and for the other boards and commissions and there's just some technical
and security reasons why it's very difficult to do um allow individuals to call in by zoom with
video content yeah what's the number uh we will have that for you tomorrow morning i don't have
it off hand but we'll give you a press release um that we could then share out to the the community
cool yeah that's what i was worried about i'm thinking like we gotta want to
tell as many people as possible so thank you lillian i was just gonna ask if you could send a
spanish version of that press release i would be helpful okay city council if there's someone
that's speaking in spanish if you would allow double times for that message to be translated
sure that's a great question i actually um just messaged um about an hour ago our director of
public affairs to line up an interpreter um for next thursday evening um and yes we can do it in
spanish as well for the press release um it are they're going to be uh what's the registration
process i know like for the county meetings sometimes it just seems like they are straining
a net you know with trying to weed people out to keep them from basically calling in or coming in
so i just want to know what the registration process looks like and how easy it would be just
for an everyday citizen to be able to call or you know get on the agenda for the meeting
sure that's a great question um and we've learned a lot through um having our city council public
comment and that process and making sure um it's easy for for citizens to call in so they could
call in beginning 30 minutes before the meeting would begin we have call takers that would be
available they would record their name and contact information and tell them they would be given a
call back and they queue them up so they don't have to wait around on the line for maybe potentially
an hour to two hours they would be given a call back cued up and then put through to speak with
the committee and then we are able to ask them questions is that correct that i read that correct
yes we would propose um to be again consistent with city council that you could ask some
clarification questions um so if something wasn't clear um in terms of the the experience that the
resident was sharing um that you could ask them those questions excellent thank you
anything else sarah uh nope unless there's any other comments from the committee i just
want to make sure we have clear direction if we want to take um the first 30 minutes to review
some of the data and questions we heard tonight or if you would like to delay that until the the 30th
meeting i think that we should take the my i think we should take the first 30 minutes
to review the data that we've asked for and then go right into um the calls from the citizens okay
okay does that require a motion or we're just going to just uh by uh show of hands okay first
30 minutes aye okay thank you thank you is that is that it sarah that is that is it okay so this
will conclude the meeting for tonight um we will be back here again next thursday and the first
30 minutes we'll go through the data that we requested and and any questions that we have and
then we'll go into public comments so i want to thank you all for participating again
tonight and we'll see you next thursday