Welcome back to the city of Denton use of force ad hoc committee.
Our first item of tonight will August 13 2020 will be the minutes from the last meeting.
And if you've had a chance to look over the minutes from the last meeting, I will need
a motion to approve the minutes Gary make a motion I need a second.
Yancy seconded. All in favor. Raise your hand or say aye. Hold them up for a second.
Any nays. Okay, I'll approve motion carries.
The next item is to review and discuss follow up items from the previous committee meetings
last week you had questions that you posed and I think we're going to have the answers
to those Sarah. Yes, so included in your backup. We did draft
a document that kind of summarize the questions and answers we heard from committee members
last time. So if there's any additional questions or inquiries that we did not capture, please
let us know. We just want to make sure we're getting the information to you during the
meeting or following the meeting. But I think most of the questions were actually
addressed during last week's meeting or we will have presentations and info upcoming
for you. Did anyone have any additional questions
that they wanted at this time for with regards to last week's meeting.
Okay. So we'll go to item C, receive a report and
hold a discussion regarding proposed topic areas related to use of force in the Denton
Police Department, including internal affairs, training, accreditation and compliance policy
and use of force and provide staff direction on findings or recommendations by topic area.
Alright, good evening, Madam Chair and committee members. It's a pleasure to be here with you
again. So based on our last few weeks of discussion,
we wanted to take the opportunity to put together kind of the five key areas that we've kind
of had recurring discussions about and questions about. And we thought if we package these
individually and presented them to you individually, we could have a more robust discussion about
each area. And that being internal affairs, which we talked about last week, training,
accreditation and compliance policy and our general orders and then use of force.
So tonight we're going to go through and if you look in your backup, you should have gotten
I believe it's like a 36 page document that had all these areas spelled out with a pretty
exhaustive summary for each for you to reference. Tonight we're going to do training and what
I'm going to have do is Deputy Chief Frank Padgett, who's over the training division will
present didn't PD training requirements, state requirements, compared to the department's
additional requirements, the number of training hours versus years of service, how you obtain
different levels of certification from your basic intermediate advanced masters. And then
we'll have Dr. Richard Williams, who's our accreditation and compliance specialist, talk
to you about our comprehensive training plan. It's a plan that we moving to, to be more
intentional and more focused about what training we're offering. You know, kind of laying out
career tracks for officers to better serve the public. So with that, I'll turn it over
to Deputy Chief Padgett first, unless there's any questions for me.
All right. I just want to let you guys know to leave your cameras on throughout the duration
of this meeting so that we can have you on camera. Thank you. You're on mute.
Of course I am. One in every meeting, right? Good evening, Madam Chair and committee. I
am Frank Padgett, Deputy Chief of the Support Bureau of the Denton Police Department. That's
a criminal investigations, training, jail, and our fleet. So I want to start tonight.
The sanctity of life is the basis of everything that we do at the Denton Police Department.
And that begins with training. And each officer that comes into our department begins as a
basic police officer. Even our lateral officers go through the basic police academy. And what
we learn in the academy is that as officers, we can only use the authority that's given
to us by the public. That authority has been given to us by the legislature of the state.
It's given to us also by case law. And case law is the law that comes out of courts. You
know, after somebody's been arrested and then they go on appeal and different courts look
at it and they decide, well, they interpret what the legislature meant by the law. So
when I teach in the academy, I teach arrest, search, and seizure, and that goes -- that
covers the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution. In the first four hours
of that class, it's not mandated by the state to teach this, but we spend the first four
hours of class in Denton PD's academy getting the recruits' hearts and minds right. We set
them up so that they're ready to receive the knowledge. We remind them, you are citizens.
You're also the police, but the police are only citizens that have been given the authority
to do certain things. So we kind of put it back on them to put them back in the seat
of the citizen. And how are you going to look as a citizen, how are you going to look when
you get stopped by the police? How are you going to react when an officer wants to search
your vehicle? So we put that back on them. Because as officers, they need the knowledge,
but they also need to have compassion, which leads to discretion. You know, is it -- the
knowledge is what can we do? What does the law say we can do as officers? The discretion
comes in where that is the what should we do. What's the right thing in this situation?
We want to make critical decision makers. We don't want to make robots. We don't want
to make officers that look at every situation the same. You know, not every problem is a
nail. So not every solution needs to be a hammer. We need officers to be able to go
into situations, correctly assess that situation, and then decide what is the correct course
of action. And we do that by teaching problem-solving. We do teach problem-solving different methods,
the SARA method we teach in the academy. So then once you're out of the academy, there's
ongoing training. The state of Texas, T-COL, you can go to -- it's T-COL, T-C-O-L-E dot
Texas dot org, and you can find every syllabus for every training that police officers in
Texas have to go to. Every two years, there's a two-year cycle, and every officer from the
chief on down has to go through 40 hours of training every two years. Some of that is
mandated training. Each legislature that meets every two years will come up with different
training that we have to go through. You'll see some of that. I'll bring up the presentation
here in a minute. But you'll see some of that is state mandated, and that changes every
two years. And every two years, we have to go through an illegal update, which teaches
the officers, okay, this was the law two years ago. It's changed now, and here's the update
so that you know it. Because on September 1st, when that law goes into effect, we need
to know it. So there's T-COL. There's our basic curriculum. There is our -- and each
-- you have the basic proficiency certificate that you get, then you have an intermediate
and an advanced and then a master's certificate as a peace officer. And each one requires
different things. Some of it is training in the classes that you have to take that are
mandated by the state, and then some of it is time in employment as an officer. Because
we understand that some of the training is on the job training. It's experience. It's
putting yourself in those positions and applying the knowledge that you have to different situations.
So we have T-COL. We have -- we went through a PERF review two years ago now. That guides
some of our training. Dr. Williams will talk about our comprehensive training plan here
in just a little bit, and he'll go through all of the things that led into that plan.
And then, you know, the last thing that really drives our training is the 21st century policing
pillars. And that's being trust and legitimacy -- sorry -- policy and oversight, technology
and social media, community policing and crime reduction, training and education, and officer
safety and wellness. And that officer safety and wellness, you know, that's getting officers
well so that they are mentally well themselves to deal with the next call. And they're not
holding things in and bringing that baggage to the next call that they go to. So let me
bring this up. That's not what I wanted.
Okay. So this is our basic and intermediate training. You'll see the courses there. Our
basic academy is 716 hours. Then field training is another 742 hours. And our field training
is when the recruit graduates the academy, comes into field training, rides with a field
training officer, a teacher, for 12 hours a day, and they do 742 hours of that training.
They may do more if they're -- if we find that they're deficient in a certain area or
if they are out for an extended period of time. For some reason, you know, they get
sick or something, they'll have them make that up and do a little bit more training.
And like I said, the two-year cycle is 40 hours every two years. But the basic academy
and field training, that's almost 1500 hours of training that a police officer gets before
they're actually able to go out on their own. The academy takes about four to five months.
But then they're in the field training for almost that long as well. So it's almost 1500
hours before an officer is allowed to go out by themselves. The intermediate certification,
that will be the next level that an officer rises to. Right now, the mandated courses
are child abuse, crime scene, use of force, an intermediate arrest, search, and seizure,
and a Spanish class. Some of those classes, the Denton Academy does 716 hours because
we include two mandated classes in our academy. The state only requires 696 hours. But we
throw those -- de-escalation and other class, we throw in the academy and don't wait until
officers graduate to take those classes. And then -- so the -- over on the right, the hours
and years of service to obtain an intermediate certification, if you have an associate's
degree and gone through the required mandated state training, then you also have to do four
years on the street before you can get that certification. If you have a bachelor's degree
or higher, it's only two years. Because you've had that -- if you have that bachelor's degree,
you've had some education. And the state takes that into account that you've put in the work
to earn that degree. If you don't have any education as far as a degree, then you'll
see the hours go up and the years of service go up. You have to have the hours of training
plus the years of service to be able to obtain that degree.
Legislative mandates, if they're not part of the academy, if we don't take them in the
academy, let's say officers that graduate this year from the academy, well, in two years,
the legislature decides, well, there's another course that we mandate. Well, the officers
that graduated the academy this year didn't get that course. So they're going to have
to go back, do some in-service training, and go ahead and take that course. Right now,
the legislative mandates are body-warm camera. If you're going to wear a body-warm camera,
you have to have a minimum of two hours training. K-9 encounters, it teaches officers how to
deal with dogs, how to read dog's body language. Civilian interaction, that's how do we interact
with civilians on the street, traffic stops, doing the seven-step violator contact, which
is how do we actually come up to your window if we stopped you for speeding and interact
with you appropriately? The other half of that is in the high schools, we do civilian
interaction training with the students. And they're taught, if you're stopped by the police,
how should you react appropriately? So we're getting that from both ends. Cultural diversity
and diversity, de-escalation, and de-escalation is the go-to philosophy of the Dent Police
Department. We will de-escalate every encounter that we can to the extent that we can. Eyewitness
identification, human trafficking, identity theft, interacting with drivers who are deaf
or hard of hearing, we get that training. Racial profiling, and then the department-mandated
training. Since Chief Dixon came in in October of 2018, we have mandated some extra training
that will get us to where we want to be in the future. We've had Autism 101, we teach
us officers how to interact with persons that may be experiencing autism. Autism is on a
spectrum, so you may have people that are completely nonverbal, you may have people
that are very high functioning, and anywhere in between. So we've seen instances where
officers encounter someone with autism, they believe that person is intoxicated based on
their observations, and this will teach us officers how to distinguish that, how to draw
that line, how to take the step back and say, "Oh, this may not be an intoxicated person.
This may be something completely different, so I need to approach this in a different
way." That was really good training. Human relations, how to interact with each other
in the workplace, how to treat each other with dignity and respect. Fair and impartial
policing, that covers the explicit and implicit bias. Animal abuse investigations, the duty
to intercede, that's on the front of our plate right now, is you have to have the duty to
intercede. It's required by the department, but it's required by us individually that
to be good officers, we have to be able to intercede. I mean, that's what we're doing
out there when we're called to a call, we're interceding. We have to be able to see that
within ourselves and stop another officer from going over the line. Going back to what
I teach in the academy, you have to be able to respectfully, at least respectfully interact
with your, or interject with your supervisors and say, "Sards, I'm not doing that. That's
against the law. I don't think we have enough to put this guy in jail. We can't do that,
and respectfully, I'm not doing it." We have to be able to do that. The duty to intercede
really covers the not so overt. It's easy. In a TV show, what would you do? It's easier
to interact or interject when something is overt, but what is your duty when things aren't
so overt? That goes into that. First line of supervisor training on violence
against ... Oh, this is IACP training that we did, International Association Chiefs of
Police. We were a recipient of a grant, and we had about 18 months of very intensive family
violence, domestic violence training. That was first line supervisor training on violence
against women, identifying and responding to stalking, determining the dominant aggressor.
Who is the dominant aggressor? You go to a domestic ... I think Cheryl was saying earlier
that she stepped into dispatch earlier, and they told her that there was 12 to 15 calls
a day of domestic violence. How do you determine the dominant aggressor when both people have
bumps and bruises? When maybe the one party seems to be more aggressive when officers
are on scene, but when you dig through it, really, who started the interaction? That
training helps officers ... We don't want to go to a domestic and arrest everybody.
We have to be able to investigate and determine which one was really the dominant aggressor
and which one was simply fighting back. Improving our response to non-fatal strangulation
assaults. We have a lot of domestics that are strangulation assaults, and strangulation
isn't always easily identifiable. Maybe the marks don't show up immediately, so that's
hard to see sometimes, so we had training on that. How do we improve? How do we ... We
brought the fire department in so that they would see the effects of strangulation assaults,
because they may get called to a scene or they may remove somebody from a scene before
we get there, so we brought them in so that they would have a better understanding. Integrating
victimless rights. Preparing for and learning how to survive vicarious trauma. Again, that
goes back to officer wellness. Officers are exposed to vicarious trauma. The calls that
officers go on, the things they see, that gets bottled up and that overflows. How do
we get the officers to be able to filter that better so that when they go from a really
bad scene to the next scene and then they deal with somebody who's just not being nice
to the officer, how do they respond effectively? NIMS and ICS training. That is the incident
command training. If we have a tornado here in town, how do we train? How do we work with
the fire department, the airport, solid waste? How do we interact with the rest of the city
so we can get the city back running? The escalation I talked about. Taser, OC spray, baton, Narcan.
Narcan, that's something new for us. We received training on that very recently and have been
able to save several lives that people were overdosed on heroin and officers were able
to respond, deliver the Narcan and those people recovered, whereas they might have died had
the officer not been there. We had one officer, I think he responded and saved two or three
lives within a week. Standardized field sobriety test. That's the standardized test for driving
while intoxicated that we do. Well, we have trained the trainer and we have certain certifications
that you have to go through on a regular basis. Emergency vehicle operations. How do we operate
our vehicles? In emergencies and non-emergencies. Defensive tactics and then active shooter.
We went down to one of the schools and did some active shooter training. We get actors
that -- so it's part of that critical decision making. We bring actors in so that the officers
have to respond and they have to decide who is a threat and who is not. You know, so we
do that training. Going forward, Dr. Williams will talk about the comprehensive training
plan that we have for the department and that includes from the academy to a special assignment.
You know, what does a sexual assault investigator need for training? What does a narcotics officer
need for training? What does a training officer? What does the people that are going to teach
our officers? What do they need for training? And then what is the training that the department
needs as a whole? Dr. Williams will talk about that. Questions? Nancy?
>> Chief, I know I understand it, but a lot of people on the committee probably don't
understand. Can you go back to the first slide where we were talking about intermediate in
the hours that's mandated for training and all that dealing with intermediate training
and the academy? Not that one. The other one talking about the hours.
>> So I just want the committee to know that the hours that's on the right-hand side over
where it says intermediate hours, those are in addition to the required courses and those
are actually training hours, not hours that's where people actually just come to work. Some
people might think that the 2400 hours is working hours, but those are actually continuing
education that officers actually have to go through in order to actually receive that
certification, not work hours. So that's continuing education. And the education has to be approved
by TECO, which is the licensing agency for the state, so you can't just go take a class
on the water, basket weaving or something, and think those hours count towards the education
hours. >> Right. And those hours, too, those hours
are what time did you spend in a class, whether that's you're sitting in a classroom listening
to a lecture or you're going through scenario training. Scenario training is taking the
knowledge that you have and applying it in situations or whether you were driving a vehicle
for eight hours on a track. That's actual class time.
>> Thank you. I just wanted to make sure they understood that was training hours, not working
hours. >> Yes, sir. Thank you for that.
>> Chief, my name is John Veins. Can you hear me okay?
>> Yes, sir. >> I have a question, please. Actually I have
two questions. The first is can you talk about let's say updates, having training updates?
And then secondly, can you talk about when your supervisor recognizes that a subordinate
is in need of additional training, talk about the process that's in place here in Denton.
Those two specifics, please. >> Okay. When you say updates, do you mean
updates to the training that like say you take a arrest, search, and seizure class in
the academy and then you take an intermediate arrest, search, and seizure once you're out
of the academy, that update or are you saying the actual -- how often is the curriculum
updated? >> Well, let's say for example I've been an
officer for 15 years and I had some training in my first two years. You know, it's just
like anything else, you need a refresher course from time to time. So could you talk about
is there a refresher course that we take the officers through just to make sure they're
staying abreast of any changes that may have occurred. And then secondly, if a supervisor
notices that one of the subordinates is in need of perhaps sensitivity training or something
in their annual review, they realize that it would be good that they go back and take
something old or take something new to kind of help them in their development.
>> Yes, sir. The legislature comes out with new laws every two years so we get a legal
update every two years and every officer is mandated to take that update training. Yes.
And then to your point about supervisors, if a supervisor recognizes any deficiency,
they can send someone to training any time they want.
>> Do you know if that occurs regularly or is that kind of an exception to the rule?
>> I would say I don't know how regularly. I know that officers will -- I get training
requests all the time. They have to fill out a form and they say I want to -- because training
costs money so it has to get approved up through the chain. So I get requests all the time.
You know, how do I -- I want to know what the current practice is for murder investigations.
I supervise detectives so I'll use that as an example. I want to know what the current
practices are. I want to know what the current law is if I want to search a cell phone. I
want to know what the current law is if I want to get, you know, certain records or
submit a subpoena or a warrant or that sort of thing. So whether that's -- whether that's
the officers asking themselves and they just want to be better or if that supervisor is
doing it, it's probably a mixture of both. I know that if a supervisor does recognize
that deficiency or we have any disciplinary action, we'll have a training component with
it. And that disciplinary action may not be, you know, hard discipline. You know, it may
just be this wasn't a big deal, but I think you still need training in this area to get
you better. >> One last thing, chief, and thank you for
your indulgence. I -- the incident in Minneapolis kind of is paramount in our consciousness.
And so we have an office -- we had an officer there who apparently had received several
reprimands and several -- how would you say -- notifications of inappropriate behavior.
So I don't know if there they had a mechanism in place where once you recognize this person's
having difficulty, let's put them through training and let's make sure that we do everything
we can to make sure we make them the best that they can be on the streets. And that's
my last question for right now. Thank you. >> Yes. I don't know what they had in place.
I know in Denton we actively look at officer issues. And, you know, they'll do things on
the street that, you know, it's not illegal, it's not a violation of policy. It's just
somebody will go, you know, so-and-so did this, you know. I think we need some arrest
search and seizure training or something else or some human interaction training.
>> I think that officer had 18 disciplinary actions and his 19 years of service with that.
I'll go to Pam and then we'll go to Jamie for questions.
>> Thank you. Deputy Chief, can you tell me what kind of mental health training that you
offer for your officers currently? I know the chief is working on training for the future,
but can you tell me currently what's available, please?
>> There's we have autism training that the department offered that's not mandated. We
do have some mandated courses as far as mental health. And then there's also a mental health
peace officer. It's kind of a step above the basic class that officers get in the academy
or in the extended training if they didn't get it in the academy.
>> Do all officers receive it? >> Not all officers get the peace officer
training. They don't all get that. Not to that level, anyway.
>> Is there any other? >> Back to-I'm sorry.
>> I'm sorry. Is there any other training? >> There-I'll just point to the autism. The
mental health peace officer certification and then the dealing with people with mental
health class that they get. >> Okay. Thank you, sir.
>> Yeah. And can I go back just real quick to Mr. Bain's question? We do have an early
intervention system. You know, if an officer has so many uses of force within a certain
amount of time, that pops up red flags to supervisors to say, hey, you know, this person's
had so many uses of force. We need to look at this. The supervisors can look at it and
say, okay, yeah, you had so many in this amount of time, but they were all reasonable.
Or we can look and say, you know, you've had maybe not-maybe they weren't all the same
thing. Maybe it was a use of force. Maybe it was a discouraging complaint and something
else. And we kind of put those pieces together as an early warning system to say something's
going on within its officer. You know, it may-we may need to look beyond and, you know,
maybe something that weren't officer's personal life. Maybe they've gone on some really bad
calls, had, you know, several-been on the-had infants die, you know, maybe three infants
die in a very short amount of time. You know, so that officer may be dealing with something
that we need to look at and maybe bring in peer support to help that officer work through
those issues. Okay. And if we have participants with discipline, if you keep getting in trouble,
your discipline's going to go up, you know. And again, that doesn't have to be for the
same thing. It could be a pattern of, you know, we look at it as a pattern. Is it a
pattern of bad decisions? Whether it's use of force or discourtesy or whatever it is,
is this a pattern of bad decisions this officer is making? And we need to get to the root
of why is this officer making these decisions? Is it training? Is it our policy? Is it something
personal with the officer?
Thank you so much Deputy Chief for this explanation. I have two questions and then one comment,
and so I hope you'll give me some grace as I walk through all those. My comment is that
I am incredibly grateful that the department has taken proactive steps to support and understand
the needs of those with autism. It is important for me though to just say that I don't really
classify autism in the same type of behavioral and mental health category as I feel like
Pam's questions were addressing. So autism is a developmental disability that impacts
the way that people communicate and interface with the world. It's not really a mental health
problem. And so I do think that there are some additional steps that we in the City
of Denton can take to address mental health calls that our officers are going out on,
but it's really important to me that we make some distinction there. And so I hope you'll
forgive me and give me an opportunity to just kind of make that comment as an educational
moment.
Absolutely. Thank you for that.
In terms of my questions, and they go to what Mr. Baines was speaking to a little bit, sort
of a follow up from that. And it is, are there particular types of calls that our officers
may go on that then mandate additional training? So for example, if we have officers that attend,
I mean, they're dealing with catastrophe and trauma every day, right? But if we were to
have a mass shooting or a mass murder or something like that, are there particular types of incidents
or calls that in and of themselves necessitate specific types of training, refresher options
or whatnot for our officers?
Good question. I don't think there's a specific type of call that would mandate training,
but if we had something like that, a mass shooting, a mass murder, a tragic bus accident
with a lot of kids that were injured, our peer support team that we've started, we would
engage them so that they could counsel the officers and either decide, you know, maybe
certain officers need additional counseling or maybe they do need training, that sort
of thing. But it's about the officer wellness in that case is how do we get the officer
well so that when they go back out on the street, they can interact appropriately?
And then sort of a follow up to the question and the sort of refreshing moment that Officer
Green offered us about the table and chart of the hours of training required. I want
you to explain it to me like I'm in second grade a little bit, okay? So let's say I have
a bachelor's degree and I have been on other police forces before coming to the City of
Denton. Let's just say for the sake of this conversation, I was on a police force in a
neighboring community for 10 years before joining the Denton police force. Based on
that chart, would I be required to do the 700 and some odd hours of basic training and
whatever the 400 or 600, whatever it was for my level of experience? Or does it reset when
I move to a different municipality? Sorry. Like I said, just treat me like I'm in second
grade. I'm sorry. I completely understand the question. If the 716 hours that we do,
that is for that state mandated basic training for police officers. If that officer was a
police officer in another Texas city, they would have gotten that training already. Okay.
So they come to Denton and we make them go through some abbreviated training. You know,
how do we do things in Denton? We have a lateral, we call it a lateral academy. It's about six
weeks and we send them through that training and we send all of our new, all of the Denton
recruits that graduate the 716 hour academy also go through another six weeks of Denton
specific training. Okay. And then, so that officer that's in, that was an officer somewhere
else for 10 years, they come to us, they go through that six weeks and then they do field
training also. Again, that's abbreviated because they already, you know, know the basics of
what they're doing. You know, they don't have to learn how to do a traffic stop anymore,
but we need to make sure that they're going to do it the way we expect them to do it.
They're going to treat people the way we expect them to treat people. So they do ride with
a field training officer as a partner, but it's not as long as a basic recruit. That's
just learning how to do things. And then the hours that you talk about, does that reset?
No, that's state mandated training and they would have already had those hours in the
10 years they were with that other department. Does that make sense?
Just extrapolating out, one of the things that I feel like our committee has learned
over the past several weeks is sort of the culture that Chief Dixon expects in Denton
and how it does already differ from other municipalities, not just in Texas, but for
example, like in Minneapolis, which I think, you know, sort of necessitated or began some
of this conversation. So are you telling me that that abbreviated training for lateral
training is where they're going to get the, this is how the culture and experience and
the people of Denton are different than where you were before, including attitudes of citizens
and things like that are just, this is how we do a traffic stop as opposed to how they
do it in Lubbock or whatnot.
Absolutely. They're going to start learning Denton police culture.
And then related to disability, I saw that you do some training on autism, you do some
training about working with folks that are hearing and visually impaired for all of the
other spectrum of disability. 57 million people in the United States with lots of different
kinds of disabilities. Are our officers receiving any training related to any of the other ways
you could divide that population in some of these other trainings that they receive?
I would have to look at the state website and really look at that training and see how
it's broken down. So I can get you that answer.
I do think that we are uniquely positioned in Denton with two universities that serve
significant populations of disabled students and residents that then maintain their life
and employment here after graduation. And so it might be something to investigate. Thank
you for your time.
Thank you.
I'm going to go to Yancey and then Willie and then Pam. Go ahead, Yancey.
Madam Chair, I'll hold my comment until everybody speak. That way I might be able to address
everything in once because I got some answers for Janie and Pam regarding the mental health
aspect of the training.
Okay. Okay. Willie, you got to be off mute, Willie. Hit the button. We can't hear you.
Come on, Willie. You had it a minute ago. Can't hear you. Can't hear you. I promise
we can't hear you. Let me see if we can do it here.
No, I got it. Okay.
There we go.
Okay. As I sit here and I'm looking at what we are charged to do, what the city council
has asked us to do, develop a report of clear findings, conclusions, and achievable recommendations
that promote the use of best practices in the use of force policies and trainings for
the Denton Police Department. That's what they've asked us to do. So in my mind, I'm
starting to figure out what should that report include? What are we supposed to recommend
as a group? So I'm trying to put mine together so when we finally get to this decision part,
then I can say, this is what I think is the best practice for the police department to
use.
Now, we've been presented with this information about the training. So I've got a question
about that. That's an awful lot of hours. And as it was explained, this is not doing
working hours. These officers are asked to go through all of this training. I don't think
there's... Well, I was going to say I don't see how they can do it, but that's not my
call. I'm working on my recommendation in the training area. So the question I have
about the training is, is there a prioritizing way or do you prioritize which training is
first? When are the officers able to go out and actually do their jobs, the ones you've
hired, and be able to do the job and fulfill all these requirements of the training? Who
determines which course they take first? And then make sure I get all this down like I
want you to answer it. Is there a priority as to when you take whichever course or when
you get the training? Who determines what that is and when you officer get to go out
and do the job after you've completed the courses? Or is that a factor? Do you have
to complete all the courses before you actually can go out and do the work? And the reason
that this is important to me is I'm going to recommend something about that training.
Some of those requirements that the chiefs have initiated and what the state mandates
that I think are excellent and they should be done quickly and that should get more priority
and that's going to be my recommendation. So I need to know the answers to those questions.
Thank you. Yes, you want to go now? I can. So what let's you because you're the last
one with the statement and then we'll go back to Deputy Chief Pageant. Okay. The first one
I guess it was a year towards Pam and Jamie is dealing with the mental health aspect and
the other disabilities and everything. So the officers get 40 hours of crisis intervention
training in the basic academy. So that's just one aspect of it. So they get a broad spectrum
of crisis intervention and how to deal with people in crisis, both mental health and with
disability. I think Jamie asked a question on as far as specialized training or in stuff
like that. One of the specialized units that we have here at the department would be traffic.
So if you have a fatal accident or a serious bodily injury accident, the regular patrol
officer is not going to work those crashes. The traffic unit will because they do have
the specialized training to go out there and map the scene and try to put the pieces back
together in order to figure out how the crash occurred or why the crash occurred. And for
you Mr. Hussbiff as far as prioritizing training, basically most officers once they get done
with the basic academy, they want to prioritize their training on getting the intermediate
license. So they'll go through all those intermediate classes first and then start working on advanced
classes and other specialized training that they're trying to because some people might
want to be a detective, some people might want to go to traffic and those are different
specialized training. But most of the time when an officer get done with the basic academy,
him or her and their supervisor sit down with their sit down together to map out when these
classes occur because not all these classes occur here in Denton. They occur in the Metro
Plex or some are even far off. They'll sit down and look at the schedule and see if they're
able to take off work if the class is held on a work day or if they're able to get their
time you know elsewhere on attending those classes. So I don't know if that cleared up
some of the questions that you guys had. But may one for me is who determines which class
they take? Can I answer that? Yes. The priority of classes is it's a close race between state
mandates and chief mandates. The state mandates are law and then chief mandates are running
right there with them. So that's going to be the priority of training and then anything
past that you know it's the officers can train for you know to get their intermediate or
advanced certificate. They might want to train because they want to become a detective or
they might want to become a traffic investigator. All of that is selective and that is based
on the needs of the department, the funds available for training and then you know we want officers
to self-actualize and to do what they want to do. If they want to be a traffic investigator
then we want them to become one because if you're doing something you want to do you're
going to do it better. But we may not have space for a traffic investigator and don't
foresee having one for a while. So we may not allow an officer to go to reconstruction
school because that does take time out of the regular job. It does cost quite a bit
of money. So we have to prioritize those things through department needs past the state mandates
and what chief takes the mandates. Did that answer your question Willie? Yes thank you.
Camion? Can't hear you. Can you hear me now? Yeah. Okay. I had a couple questions. One
of them was does the do the officers at the DPD receive any formalized training around
working with LGBTQ folks? Is it is it coached an implicit bias? Like I'm just wondering
if there's any specific timing around that? Biases, correlations, those types of courses cover that to some degree.
I wouldn't say that there's a separate and above course that would address only that
community. Is there I'm just I'm just assuming that maybe you and Yancey a few other officers
on this call might have gone through some of these trainings. Do you remember being
trained on any instances of like maybe a traffic stop or responding to a call with folks that
identify as being transgendered? Yancey's shaking their head yes. Yancey can you answer that?
This part of the implicit bias training but also during the academy we do what's called
practical so basically you learn the book work and then we go out and do hands-on activities
and like a scenario based type training and we do have actors that act like that on so
for the recruits before they graduate the academy they do have some experience or exposure
I should say to that type of culture or whatever but it is touched on in the implicit bias
courses. Okay I appreciate hearing that. I just think it could be something important
that should be added just not just around transgender folks the entire spectrum of LGBT
folks but in the incident that someone gives you their name and they present differently
than their driver's license like that's very common and so I think officers should be trained
around the fact that that's like something that happens with that community. The other
question I had is that I'm very glad to see that every officer is getting some training
around domestic violence. Having been a survivor of relationship violence myself I'm glad to
know that. I was wondering if there's training specific to what I would call relationship
violence or violence that's not necessarily just with heterosexual couples if that makes
sense like how to recognize that if you're called out to an incident where there are
same gender couple and recognizing it as domestic domestic violence possibly it could get overlooked
so I was just wondering if that is a part of that training or if additional training
might be needed for that. I will say and we've gone through a lot of training in the last
two years so forgive me if I forget that we may have some training out there but part of
that IACP grant that we received we did have some training specific to LGBTQ+ and we had
a sheriff's deputy for Cleveland County Ohio or Clark County Ohio I'm sorry she's part
of the community and a police officer and and she provided that training it was excellent
and there was some other additional training put on by IACP for that and what what training
is out there that you know of that we could implement? I don't know that I do know of
a training that you could implement but I know that those individuals exist in our community
and that there may be things out there that aren't necessarily police specific but you
know could you know it could be for anybody interacting with that you know with the community
so it doesn't have to be specifically for police officers to be good training for us.
Yeah I agree with that and then I think my last question I guess some of us are still
kind of wondering around like how often officers are getting these trainings it sounds like
there's a lot of training hours that people have to go through but from what I could tell
from the diagram that you had up there's a there's a good amount of diversity trainings
at the beginning during the academy and then some additional that aren't required by the
state are those slots of trainings required to be done more than once ever or do they
get implicit bias training every two years once a year every six months every five years
you know like are those trainings repeated or is it only repeated if the state mandates
an update and do they get the whole training in or just the updated portion. I know that's
a lot of questions but I was confused about that. No the the state mandated updates it's
whatever you know the state is mandating for that two-year cycle so it may include updates
to those previous you know diversity trainings it may be something completely different you
know so that's where the training that the chief directs comes in in getting us updated
trainings for those specific topics. Bo is next. I'm looking here at this use of force
and taser reports that Mr. Cronin gave us from 2015 to 2020 and you know thinking about
the interplay between discipline training based on each case and it looks like where
there's follow-up training recommended in some of these various cases there's it's
there's a number of them there's taser training one of them was emotional survival for law
enforcement training another one was de-escalation I think there was a couple of de-escalation
training some are still pending and so I'm just wondering number one if if there's a
use of force situation that is deemed inappropriate in the complaint and sustain and it leads
to training are these just sort of going back to the same trainings they already had on
de-escalation or is it you've had that training and it didn't settle in and so specifically
we're gonna have another kind of training or a more focused de-escalation training or
taser training and then number two just I think for the committee and for we'd love
to hear from you just sort of man in terms of use of force situations where are the gaps
in training that you perceive that need to be revisited does that make sense what I'm
asking yes and the gaps Dr. Williams will talk about a gap analysis that he did and
how he came up with our comprehensive training plan but as far as discipline and the training
attached to discipline that's case it's case by case because it may be that you know the
officer used the tool completely wrong so he needs the training on how to use that tool
the taser so to speak or for an example how to use that taser correctly or the training
may be the officer escalated the situation and that led to the use of the taser so that
officer she needs to go back through de-escalation training so a say a policy violation or use
of force that we deem needs training while it may involve the taser it may not involve
the same aspect of what went wrong in that case it could be they used the equipment wrong
or they escalated the situation or you know something like that so the training connected
to the discipline of use of force complaints that's been sustained is case by case individualized
for the person based on the incident is that what you're saying yes it's not the general
training that you go through in the academy or even in the you know further follow-up
trainings no it'll be individualized for that person what what did we deem in that instance
what was deficient and we need to fix the deficiency so if the use of the taser you
know the equipment the equipment was used correctly as far as physically you know according
to the way you're supposed to use the equipment then we're not going to send we I mean we
may but we may not send that person back through the taser training how to use the equipment
we'll send them through training that teaches them when and why to use the equipment so
like on this first one that says citizen led officers on a 20-minute high-speed vehicle
pursuit before tire deflation and crash officer deployed taser but at the time citizen was
only passively resisting that's not a taser how to work it issue that's a that's a how
and why do you deploy issue okay but that still fits under taser as opposed to de-escalation
or something else in terms of the training needed I mean it said that they could be both
but yeah it would fall under the taser training as into you know how and why are we supposed
to use that tool okay you know if the officer didn't you know and by de-escalation training
you know maybe that officer went kind of escalated the situation themselves their actions escalated
the the need for the taser that's when you would go through the de-escalation training
but the you know but yeah in that case it's how and when to use the equipment what's appropriate
okay one more question it's really helpful to know that it's it's a specific sort of
personalized training the one that was emotional survival for law enforcement and maybe we'll
talk about it later but where the officer responded in a way unbecoming of an officer
it says here can you give us a sense because I think those are the sort of cases that are
concerning in use of force cases where yeah it's unbecoming an officer it's wrong clearly
what would that training entail if it was personalized for an officer that acted in
a completely inappropriate way such that it was you know a suspension but then emotional
survival for law enforcement is that am I supposed to hear that as what you were saying
earlier about man there's just high stress levels going on in the officer and they need
to get themselves right that's exactly what that's about okay because I think that's the
I think somebody brought it up earlier maybe it was Mr. Baines about and if that stuff
sort of builds you know how do we know the training's effective for something like that
so that it doesn't just happen again I think that's I know it's somewhat subjective but
I'm just trying to draw out what is happening in these trainings that are personalized based
on objective incidents you know right now that's in that instance you know it was something
that we saw with the officer that they they need to they need to they need training on
how to relieve stress from themselves okay Willie can you turn your phone on mute yes
I will thank you hang on Gary did you have your hand up okay Donna and then John
I just wanted to know do you have a scale to measure the effectiveness of these trainings
because again as cameo on address there are several trainings so is there any way for
us to see how effective these trainings really are I'm sure there's studies out there that
you know we'll show different results on trainings internally you know we'll base it on does this
person have the same problem again does this officer have you know recurring problems that's
the basis of the effectiveness does that person respond to the you know we do the training
and we ask the instructors how did that person respond to the training well they didn't respond
very well they kind of blew it off might be the response and then and then our response
has to be something different or you know he really that officer came around and responded
well and I think they're good to go now thank you okay John Chief Padgett I want to thank
you again for taking the time to to patiently answer all of our questions I have a couple
of examples I'm going to lay out and then I'll ask my question I have some friends and
clients who are who are firemen and they tell me about suffering from PTSD because they've
seen things like accidents where people are picked up in pieces or they have to use the
jaws of life to get people out of vehicles and accidents so that's and then you've got
police officers were friends who had to deal with a very difficult criminal element drug
dealers murder investigations and things like that and you know most of us citizens can't
imagine the trauma that these officers are having to deal with and so I would think after
a while if you're dealing with some very severe elements you become cynical and a little bit
insensitive so when you have officers that are in these kind of situations that have
been in these situations what do you what kind of training do you offer to make sure
that they they remain whole wholesome and not nonsensical I don't know if that's too
complex a question to ask but I think you get the drift of what I'm asking you know
the biggest thing that we offer offer is our peer support you know and the the counseling
and being able to talk through those things that are creating stress you know those things
get bottled up you go to call after call after call and you know the people that you give
CPR to don't survive and and the baby is is is hurt and you see those things over and
over again in the ANSI you know going to the crashes and fatality crashes over and over
again that builds up and if you don't have a pressure release valve somewhere then it
may spill over you know unfortunately for a lot of officers it spills over at home and
ends up in divorce and that sort of thing but our biggest not really training but our
biggest outlet for that is peer support where we can get to those officers and you know
if we have a fatality crash we're going to offer peer support to those crash investigators
so that they can talk through it because if you can talk through things then they don't
build up as much and and for example you know when you're dealing with the criminal element
of the more unsavory the element I think you become rather cynical at least this is my
assumption I don't live in that world but I can only imagine you can become a little
callous and a little insensitive so how do you address that you can and I think you know
I addressed I addressed that when I teach the academy I addressed that by reminding
officers you are citizens so and your spouses are citizens your kids are citizens your mom
how would you feel if your spouse got pulled over and was treated in this certain way how
would you feel if your mom was pulled over and treated in this certain way you know and
remind them that that when you put the badge on you're not somebody different you're still
part of the community you're still a citizen so treat people the way you want to be treated
you know we have to remember yeah we deal with you know the worst of the worst but can
can we treat the worst of the worst still like a person yes we can and yes we should
you know and that's what we have to that's what we have to do is it doesn't matter what
crime has been committed we still need to treat that person with dignity and respect
and that starts in training and it should go up through you know every supervisor should
be watching their people for that every field training officer you know the field training
officer is the first supervisor we have in the police department and they should be watching
their trainings and watching each other and making sure that we treat everybody with dignity
and respect thank you very much cameo yeah i have a follow-up question to mr bain's question
i'm a social worker so from i don't want to say day one but pretty early on in our educational
careers they're talking to us about self-care because the nature of our work is dealing
with other people's trauma often helping them through part usually the worst times of their
lives when they actually need support and it sounds like those are similar things with
the profession that you have so i'm just wondering if it sounds a little hippie dippy but if
officers are taught anything about like ways and mechanisms in which to take care of themselves
to help deal with the trauma that they're engaging in every day and that's question
number one question number two is around the peer support group and counseling i hear that
that's offered i'm very glad that that's offered to officers i'm wondering if it's optional
or if it's mandatory sometimes for folks to receive that after a certain level of incident
just wondering how those folks are being supported through those kinds of traumas i'll i'll let
chief dixon answer that question so i know that you all have heard of peer support team
a couple of different times and and maybe this will give you a better point of reference
for it we just restarted that team about a year ago just a little bit over a year ago
probably 13 months now and what they do is if we have we had a fatality crash on the
interstate where someone was trapped in their car and our officers had to watch them burn
to death so we make it mandatory after calls like that for them to go to a critical incident
debrief because that one called there's something about that call it may not have been the actual
act of what they saw it may may have been a site it may have been a scent it may have
been something that could be the tipping point for them because they have just left a call
where a six-year-old had been subjected to violence or sexual assault or domestic and
now they're going to that horrific crash so yes we make those mandatory debriefings we
call in and in fact in that case and at least one other that i can think of we called in
extra support from sam houston state university for them to bring uh peer support counselors
up and we had upwards of 40 people going through these critical incident debriefs in their
mandatory and then we opened up for them to have optional follow-up counseling or sessions
that they needed after that because what i don't want is for us to lose someone because
we didn't take care of them so we're taking it very seriously and when you hear peer support
it's kind of a a canned term that's thrown around but i can tell you since we started
in the 13 months that we've had it here they've been called to other jurisdictions in north
texas up into the panhandle to help other agencies that really haven't come to the point
of embracing exactly what you're talking about camion how do we get past that stigma of if
you speak out that something's affecting you that you're weak and i think by and large
our profession has come a long way we still have a ways to go in in fighting that stigma
but i think we're a lot better off now than we were before is there peer support for folks
that haven't gone through a critical incident so like for instance i'm hearing okay good
i'm just i'm hearing like domestic violence child abuse uh who knows what all in the same
day and then you have tomorrow so i'm just wondering if there's like optional support
that they can tap into even if that level is a lot absolutely we have several volunteers
stood out the department i have a sergeant and a detective that headed up and they get
contacted on things that are even outside of work they're just an open avenue for employees
to go to sworn or civilian to help them if they can direct them to other resources if
they can talk them through it themselves if they can connect them to other you know other
things then that's exactly what i want them doing and i intentionally stay out of that
information loop because that is a huge detractor when you have people that are reaching out
for help if they think the chief is going to find out that uh you know yancey's having
a problem over a call that he took if yancey's afraid that i'm going to step in and take
him off the street he's not going to talk so i they have very clear direction for me
i don't want to know who you're talking to unless there's a public safety reason that
i need to know if we have to intervene to protect yancey from himself or protect other
people from him then i'll step in he for alumnus in wine my name is situations so if i am on
that list that mr he was referring to earlier where we were disciplining me for some action
or inappropriate activity are are these peer support resources mandated at that time as
well potentially you're making me go to a training about why i used my t-shirt and i'm
required can you guys hear me i'm sorry my internet went a little crazy yeah also also
requiring me to seek out this peer support group is it you is it a two to a dual situation
that's happening so actually on top of the training i don't even send people to peer
support if i think you're having problems like that i'm going to mandate that you go
see a physician before we bring you back to work and then in terms of additional resources
for your support group or for these other types of really important self-care and counseling
resources is that something that you would wish or desire for additional support about
and can you tell me a little bit about that if so well they're constantly networking just
in the 13 months they've been in existence they've grown a great network in north texas
and beyond of resources where they can direct people to in fact we were just talking to
two weeks ago about two other resources they're bringing online so there's nothing that we
need to help them do that it's just really getting out of their way and giving them the
ability to go out and do it they do a wonderful job at it thank you chief dixon and i guess
we'll go to the next presentation you have yes dr richard williams who's our accreditation
and compliance specialist he would like to take a five-minute break before he comes up
before he speaks i want to touch on one very important point that we hadn't talked about
yet if if we put all of our officers 195 officers through one 40-hour course so that's the mental
health peace officer course that takes 40 hours if i make it mandatory for the entire
department to go through that that's the equivalent of three and a half years of a police officer
being off the street and that's one 40-hour course that's just to put it in perspective
how much goes into getting officers training and prioritizing it because it's not as simple
as saying i want you all to go take this 40-hour course we are taking a significant amount
of resources off the street which we then have to replace and backfill but we also have
to plan out how long is it going to take us to be able to do that so i just want to set
kind of set the stage for when you're talking about this comprehensive training plan why
it's so important that for me that we start moving in that direction okay thank you chief
and we're we're going to take a five-minute break hopefully we'll find willy and see if
he can turn on willie you are signed on the two devices and we need you on the screen
so madam chair we're gonna we're gonna sign off for just a few minutes and you can stay
on okay all right thanks all right what did you uh need me to do uh we need to see your
face sir that's not a pleasant thought well it is what it is okay
okay we are back from our five-minute break from uh we are back on the use of force ad-hoc
committee meeting and we are going to go into the presentation from dr williams and i will
turn it over to you well good evening everybody and i and i'm happy to be here with you again
uh i really appreciate what you guys are doing this is a very important conversation that
we're having uh just a just a little order of what i'm gonna what i intend to accomplish
is i'm going to talk about the training plan and the training needs assessment how we put
together the training plan then i'll talk about accreditation and accreditation process
and during those two presentations i'll try to fill in some gaps i wrote some notes for
some of the questions that you asked previously and i'll try to fill in some gaps if that
if that's okay if you have a question you'll feel free to stop me and ask your question
and and i will answer all right any questions before i get started
all right very good so the the training plan so to so one of the one of the first charges
that the chief gave me when i got here was to work with the training division to put
together a comprehensive training plan and so we put together the first comprehensive
training plan for the den police department and so before we put together that training
plan we did a gap analysis and a training needs assessment and we employed a mixed methodology
to do that collecting both quantitative data and qualitative data uh and so how we went
about doing that is we conducted at least 15 focus groups with every work group within
the police department and then we conducted at least one focus group with community members
and we got community members to come in and give their their input regarding what they
thought didn't pd's training needs are and then we looked at what were the statutory
requirements for training what training was required by by t code or crediting body for
uh police officer licensing what training was required by uh the den police department
the chief through our policies as many of our training is is required through our policies
what training is required through tpca out the the accredited the accreditation uh body
that we're participating in and then we looked at we asked officers about what training they
desire not only the training we look at not only training they need and they're required
to have but what training would they like to have to help improve their skill set as
police officers so we put that so that was the the qualitative uh data collection and
then we sent out every person within the police department both non and sworn a survey a survey
of what what they thought about our training current training whether or not they thought
that their training needs were being met what training did they think would help improve
their job performance uh and and to make suggestions regarding additional training that they would
like to have and so we color we pulled all of that data and we put it into a comprehensive
training plan that covered every area of the of the department and let me back up not only
did we do a focus group with the community but we did also a focus group with the criminal
justice system as well the da's office participated the judge participated uh and so we had several
people the city attorney participated so we had various people that participated in uh
this focus group so that we could get so we can collect some good rich diverse data about
where we thought our training was and where we thought we needed to go with our training
and so that yielded our annual training plan which is a very robust training plan that
that affects recruit training it affects supervisor training it affects officer training it requires
in-service training it affects non-sworn training sworn training uh and so to to to wrap it
in in in a nice little ball the chief has said on numerous times that training is becoming
a way of life for the den police department and that's evident in the our first ever training
plan any questions about the training plan
all right so we're going to have a question please sure sure mr bang's uh dr williams
uh uh having not not to be disparaging or to speak ill of anyone of the past i simply
want to know uh why there was never a training plan here before and and why do we see i can
envision the need for it but talk talk to us about the genesis of this how do we come
to this conclusion that a training plan is necessary and how is that different from what
we've done previously so i can't really speak to the past but i can't speak to the present
one of the things chief dixon requested is that we that we look at putting together
training and we identify what our training needs were and that's why we did the gap analysis
and the training needs assessment and that's why we met with every work group within the
department and the outside entities and the community members so that they could help
us identify where our training gaps were and where our where they thought our training
needs were and so that's that formed the genesis of the training uh remember i guess a couple
weeks ago chief dixon mentioned the perf report and the perf report made several recommendations
regarding needs of the department and a lot of that required training uh then we had again
we had the the t code requirements where the state requirements state laws change every
year so we had to identify what's current what are the current state requirements what
are the current statutory requirements for training and so all of those things helped
inform this training plan now why there did a training plan did not exist prior to that
that's not a question that that i can answer uh but i do know the the genesis of the training
plan that we put together well and kind of as a follow-up um how does denton differ from
other departments is this something new that that is kind of a that departments are now
doing that they haven't done previously or is this just we're just kind of catching up
to where some of the other departments are presently so i think it's a little bit of
both so just during our first meeting i gave a little bit of my background during my back
you know in my career i spent 25 years as a police officer and i experienced uh voluntary
accreditation processes and i experienced uh compelled accreditation process i call it
through a federal consent decree and one of the things that they require was that we put
together a comprehensive training plan now prior to that i will admit that we had never
put together a comprehensive training plan uh for my previous agency in new orleans
prior to being required to do it or compelled to do it by the federal consent decree so
to answer your question a little bit uh i'm not sure if it was a practice in other agencies
but i know in my experience it was not a practice in my agency and when i got to denton it had
not been a practice in denton but i can't i can't i can't speak to uh the law enforcement
profession in general thank you any other questions
about the training plan
all right so i'll move into accreditation and accredited and that's a good segue into
accreditation so mr baines i can't speak to uh whether or not other agencies had training
plans but as it relates to accreditation uh we actually what is accreditation accreditation
when you get a third a third party that comes in and vouches and verifies and vouches that
your agency is uh is compliant with certain best certain industry best practices in in
our industry that's law enforcement and agencies across the country in the 80s and 90s uh decided
that they wanted to improve the standards for law enforcement in the 80s and 90s that
you know some of the things that were going on in the 80s and 90s that prompted that prompted
those agencies to want to uh employ standards for their agencies so you had agencies that
were seeking accreditation through what is called the uh commission on accreditation
for law enforcement and that was put together by the the international association of chiefs
of police the national associate the national sheriff's association and also the national
black organization of law enforcement executives but here in texas texas did something a little
different texas decided that they wanted to prescribe training specific to texas they
wanted to identify the the needs the training needs for texas so the police chiefs here
in texas got together at as a as a part of the texas police chiefs association and they
identified 12 critical areas for law enforcement that's in that information that you received
they identified those 12 critical areas for law enforcement that impact police liability
but that could result in police liability and one of those and as it relates to use
of force one of those major areas is use of force
so those critical areas include the use of force emergency vehicle operations and pursuits
search seizure and arrest those fourth amendment rights care custody and restraint of prisoners
domestic violence and agency employee misconduct off-duty conduct not just what they did at
work but what they're doing away from work that reflects on the police department selection
and hiring those personnel issues selection and hiring and sexual harassment complaint
and internal affairs management which you heard a lot about the past few weeks from
chief smith narcotics swat and high-risk warrant warrant management engaging in mentally ill
and the developmentally disabled which you talked about earlier today property and evidence
management so they decided hey these are areas that expose police to great liability we think
that we need to set some standards specific to texas police departments here in texas
so they came up with those areas and under those areas they identified 168 best practices
that they felt that police departments should comply with in order to become accredited
in texas we have to comply with those things to verify and validate our activities and
one of the things that that that does is that makes sure they ensure that the police department
is looking at these things that the police are looking at these things that they consider
these things as we develop policies as we develop practices as we develop our training
and so these things help inform and when we do that it help inform the decisions that
the police chiefs make regarding their management decisions and how to and how and why does
it do that well as a part of accreditation we're required to look at things critically
and provide annual reports and in these annual reports it's just not a collection of information
it's just not collecting data but it's what are we doing with that data what type of analysis
are we doing with that data and how is that data impacting our police operations so one
of the things someone asked earlier i think i'm not i don't remember who asked the question
but somebody asked hey when we do the training how do we know that the training is becoming
is is effective right i think someone asked that question right how is it effective and
how are we measuring the success of that training well based upon what we're required to do
now now keep in mind this is our first annual training plan this is our first comprehensive
annual training plan so we're we're just implementing this plan and so these are what we're looking
to this is how we're looking to measure whether or not the training plan is being effective
so we're looking at patterns in those annual reports that are and they kind of intertwine
the accreditation process and training so as a part of the accreditation process we're
looking at those patterns the patterns that you mentioned the use of force the annual
use of force report annual discipline report annual internal affairs investigations report
annual vehicle pursuit report and when we look at these reports we're looking at patterns
you know what what are we learning from these patterns the types of the the types of patterns
the frequency the officers that are involved in those type of incidents so we're looking
at all of those things to help inform training and so when we look at the numbers at the
end of the year so that analysis helps inform the training and it will continue to help
inform the training and then based upon that we can measure whether or not we've been successful
how are we going to measure success all those numbers decreasing so with the complaints
what type of what type of intervention are we and training are we employing to affect
internal affairs complaints or what type of intervention are we employing to affect vehicle
pursuits or what type of intervention are we employing to affect response to resistance
or use of force type complaints and so we'll be able to measure whether or not that training
is being effective by looking at those numbers and seeing where we're improving all those
numbers decreasing somebody had a question i'm sorry
so as a part of accreditation i mentioned that the accreditation requires us requires
the department look at things that will help the chiefs make informed management decisions
related to personnel related to process related to equipment somebody asked a question about
refresher training and when we identify training deficiency i think someone asked that question
and i'd like to fill in that gap a little bit so whenever so we started a new program
last year and that program is called we call it epip for short but that stands for employee
employee performance improvement planning and we put together that program and there are
certain activities that will prescribe a person to an epip or to an employee performance improvement
plan and we know that that performance improvement plans are not unique to denton i mean agencies
across the country use performance improvement plans uh so we initiated this employee performance
improvement plan so that to give supervisors a tool a tool to use when they identify deficiencies
uh that officer may be having performance deficiencies and that officer is required
to participate in that in that in that program the supervisor puts together that that plan
with that particular officer and it may require training it may require some type of course
it may require some other type of activity to show that their performance that they've
successfully completed that that performance improvement plan and that the deficiency has
been improved or the deficiency is no longer a deficiency if i might say i think someone
asked about other specialty type training so there is some specialty type training right
we have the active shooter training we have the response to disasters training we have
the required nims training which chief padgett talked about the national incident management
training that's a national training required by the federal government of all police departments
that all of our police department members participate in including the chief
we have scenario based training that's that's coming up we have the similar the simulator
training that some of you all participated in which we got good feedback from
and we have some new training that we're bringing uh just recently we participated in a conference
on active bystandership uh i don't know if anybody's familiar with bystandership or with
uh active bystandership but that's a new program that's uh that that's being started nationwide
and what that involves is and and before i say what it's involved is similar to and
chief padgett mentioned it uh it's similar to that show uh what would you do right it's
it's it's an attempt to put another another tool on an officer's tool belt to use uh we
teach officers how to shoot we teach officers how to run we teach them the law we teach
them how to conduct investigations but this active bystandership involves teaching officers
making them aware of how to respond when they see some type of misconduct where they see
some type of assessor force or whether or not they see some uh see their their peers
losing their temper and getting ready to do something that they should intervene in to
stop or to help and so this active bystandership training uh is something that is getting started
across the nation they're getting ready to do uh train the trainers across the nation
and we've requested three spots so that we can train we can get some of our officers
trained to deliver that training to the rest of our department somebody mentioned the explicit
and implicit bias training that's training that the chief initiated initiated the process
of bringing that training to denton last year in fact last summer it just took a while to get
and that training is a three-step process where there's command command community training
where the command staff and community members train together regarding implicit and explicit
bias and then there's the train the trainer just recently in june we had 26 officers that were
trained in fair and impartial policing explicit and implicit bias who are preparing to deliver
that training throughout the department and so someone asked i think someone asked hey is this
training is going to is that going to be something that's going to be routine yes it will be i don't
think that we've determined what the frequency is going to be yet but it's not going to be a
one-time training it's something that's going to be routine uh and we're going to do refreshers
but what that frequency is going to be has not quite been determined i don't think
and that initial command community training was scheduled in march but it was postponed
because of covet 19 but that training is actually the command community portion of that training
is getting ready to take place september 10th and 11th of this year and there may be
someone on this in your group that's scheduled to attend that training
any questions about accreditation so far yes ma'am ronda yes i'm not sure it's about
accreditation or if i'm going back to your earlier talk but um are officers ever given
an opportunity to assess themselves and see how that would differ from their supervisors assessment
are you speaking of their annual evaluation or you know as an example
so i can't speak to whether or not all of the officers have done it but i i will say that uh
it is a process that's beginning to be employed by the den police department and where you can
evaluate yourself and your and your supervisor also do your evaluation and you see where where
where you meet right and you can see what's the difference between your perception of your
performance and the perception of your supervisor okay so that is at the beginning that that
doesn't necessarily continue throughout someone's career it may be something that we continue but
right now we're beginning so many different projects this year between last year and this
year and it may be something that we continue just think about it i think i think it would be very
beneficial okay thank you anybody else have any questions bow did i see your hand up
uh jamie i have one question you
hey hold on jamie your internet is going in and out so we can't can you try it again
okay there you go maybe now yes um there's a hundred and sixty eight i think different
accreditation steps or processes that were identified i wrote that number down i don't
know if i have what that is correctly um but my question is the reports and the patterns that
you're identifying are they made publicly available in any way i know that some of them have been made
available to this committee i know that there are probably legal implications for maybe not sharing
all of them but i am curious if the work that you're doing the analysis strategic work that
you're doing is in any way publicly available and if you mentioned it i missed it so sorry
so right now we're going through the process so it's not publicly available right now
but um uh you know but i'm sure at some point it will but i will say this and i think the chief is
okay with this that if anybody has any questions about our accreditation process and our participation
in accreditation feel free to call me or make an appointment to come by and i can i have no problem
with walking you through exactly what we're doing it's not a secret that we're going through this
accreditation process uh and it's a part of our practice of of internal and external procedural
justice right uh we share this information with all of our personnel and we we shared it we we've
shared this information with you through this report that we pray we that we prepared tonight
so i don't think that uh it would be a problem for you if you wanted access to see what we're
doing because i mean this is your police department so i don't think i don't think that the accreditation
process is something that's secret and just for my own understanding can you tell me approximately
how many police departments in our region even or in the state of texas have gone through this
accreditation process and our or maybe police departments of our size that are accredited
because it is a pretty extensive endeavor so i can't tell you uh by agency size but i can't tell you
there's about 155 agencies that have completed accreditation and there's like 30 i think about
38 that are going through the process right now including us and then there's i think almost i
think 15 that are preparing to go through the process and just because i don't understand the
full scope can you give me 100 is about what percentage of all departments well i can tell
you there's about 1200 law enforcement agencies in texas so john did you have a question
uh no i didn't sure i wanted to just comment on the on the uh on the peer process uh and
this was uh something that we picked up years ago when i was working for a major corporation
and i've incorporated it in my own business when we have annual reviews and it's quite
interesting to see how people see themselves they basically go through and and they do a
self-assessment and then the supervisor does an assessment and then we sat down and we talk about
uh the you know are we really having the same perception are we seeing things differently
and it's quite interesting you know rather than the finger wagging where you you you no no no
yes yes yes it's a little more interactive and a little more well received when you do that and i
think that that's a i'm glad to hear that that process is is uh being undertaken by the dentin
police department thank you okay you can continue dr williams so just a just a little thing about
the the accreditation a little more about the accreditation process and what it entails so what
the process entails a team of chiefs and former chiefs that get together and and they form your
accreditation team and they come in and they do but once you complete the application process
which we've already done and you're accepted and you enter into a contract with tpca the texas
police chiefs association which we entered into our contract in march and we we uh we began the
process uh in march the official officially began the process in march the team comes in and they do
an initial on-site assessment of your operation looking looking at they're trying to identify a
baseline and to see if there's some glaring issues that might hamper your ability to become
accredited so we had that process once they once they completed that on-site process then you're
assigned a tpca coordinator that you work with hand in hand that you submit proofs of compliance
those 160 and and it said 166 jamie but it was actually 168 and that actually just past weekend
was that we were notified that it increased to 170 best practices that we have to comply with
and i'm proud to say that the two best practices that they that they added included the duty to
intercede and included the banning of choke holes and neck restraints which chief dixon had already
implemented so it was easy for us to comply with those right away so uh thank you to chief dixon
for his forethought on that uh so they come in they assign us this coordinator that we work with
and we're required to submit in our first year we're required to submit proofs of compliance
for those 170 best practice in an electronic format and also they're going to come in and
visually inspect when they do the final on-site assessment so right now i'm working with the
coordinator and i'm submitting proofs of compliance and you can look at that report there's a report
a spreadsheet that i put in the information that you have today i think that shows the status of
the uh the best practices whether or not they've been submitted approved whether or not we have a
current general order that's working or whether and if it's clear then we haven't done much with
it at all i don't know do you have that do you have that that sheet is that yes is that no
sarah did you um include that sheet in their packet should be in the reports okay
is that right dr williams yes it was in it should have been in the reports on this on the slide i
guess and maybe i'm not operating the slide right now so i have a phd but my phd is not in technology
so i haven't you know so i haven't been operating that slide because i feel like i'm talking to you
guys like we're in a in a meeting and i'm not doing a presentation per se but maybe if i click
on this yeah because we don't have a slide dr williams oh well maybe maybe i need to click
on this and see if it's if it's on here right okay all right uh is it in the slide uh can somebody
can somebody give me a hand here
hang on yeah
okay yes yes so sorry i didn't go through all the visual aid if you want me to start all over from
the beginning i can right uh no sir thank you there's a lot of information i talked about
that i could have been showing you a visual aid but uh i'm glad your attention was on me
uh so here is a is a spreadsheet that shows the status of where we are in the in submitting our
proofs of compliance and there's a little legend here at the where there was a legend somewhere
maybe it's at the top now there's a legend here that that that tells you how many have been
submitted how many and approved how many proofs and and documents submission forms were submitted
includes those two new standards how many are currently being worked on now how many are
currently the general order is currently in draft how many require some training and then other
how many had not been addressed as of yet and so when you look you can see that those that are
those that are blue they've been submitted and proved and approved by tpca those that are in
brown have been submitted and awaiting approval they're under review those that are yellow we're
actively working on and some of those were actually cleared this week this slide hasn't
been updated but uh a number of them have been submitted this week uh there are a couple that
require some additional proof of training and then white there were a couple that had not been
addressed yet 726 and 110 and i know you don't know what they are they don't have the descriptions
there but there were two new ones that were added 225 was added this week and also 611 was added
this week if anybody wants deeper information about this i mean feel free to contact me i have
i'll be more than happy to talk to you and share that information with you
any other questions about accreditation so once we satisfy each one of these proofs of compliance
then they come in and they do a final assessment and when what they're looking at during those
on-site assessments they're looking at our hard copy files remember i have to submit electronic
files and also we have to keep hard copy files so that they come in and review those files and then
they come in and talk to our personnel because we can tell them what we're doing but they come
in and talk to our personnel and say hey are they really doing what they say they're doing
right are you aware of the budget are you aware of the departmental changes are you aware of those
policies right uh so they come in and they and they physically observe our physical plan as well
do we have backup generators do we have a communications department uh do we have
inventories do we uh they come and review our property and evidence room so those are things
they come in and review our response to resistance records our training records so they come in and
review those things on site to make sure we're doing what we say what we're doing not just what
we're reporting that we're doing but they come in to physically look and and verify that we're
doing what we say we're doing and once that happens the assessors and again the assessor
consists of a team of chiefs and former chiefs that come in and do these evaluations and once
that happens then they submit a report to the uh tpca accreditation committee and then they decide
whether or not our agency becomes accredited and then that accreditation if they agree that
we should be accredited then are recognized it's called the the texas police chiefs association
recognition agency recognition program which is an accreditation program basically
and so it once they decide that we can they feel that we should be recognized then the chief and
members of the department are presented with recognition at the annual texas police chiefs
association conference and then officers get a nice pin that they can be proud of to show that
hey we are and we are an accredited police department and and based on my experience officers
are very very proud of becoming accredited and also the community that they serve become is very
it's very proud that their agency is accredited has become accredited and as jamie mentioned
it seems like a lot of work and that's because it is it's a lot of work to become accredited
especially your first time becoming accredited uh to my knowledge this is the first time that
the department has ever sought accreditation and this will be the first time that of course the
department has ever become accredited and so it's a lot of work and it's a heavy lift in the beginning
yes it is any questions about accreditation about the accreditation process
yes dr wiamons how long does the process take and when do you anticipate the
process to be complete that's an excellent question so the process tpca gives you
tpca ah thank you very much i told you i didn't i wasn't an expert in technology
good to see you all again so good question mr bangs uh so the process tpca gives you 24 months
to complete the accreditation process and what was the second part of your what was the second
part of your question so when do you anticipate us completing that process we're hopeful that we
we're working very hard right now and we we have accomplished a lot and we're hoping to uh be a
become accredited at the april conference in 2021 so we we so we plan so we are ahead of schedule
now there's some things that have kind of some bumps in the road with covet 19 and then some some
other uh construction related planning that could impact that but right now we're on track to
complete this this process in april of 2021 even though they give us until april i guess of march
of 2022 okay i think uh willy had a question sure go ahead mr mr husbit
you gotta turn it on willy i can't hear you
there you go okay thank you who determines which accreditation
plan do we choose or is there only one plan that you can choose to become accredited and if if
there are more than one if there's more than one plan that that you can subscribe to why did you
choose the one that you did or the the city choose the one that they did choose to have this
accreditation process put in place and what are the what are the pros and cons of being in this
particular program or process of accreditation so that's a very good question excellent question
mr husbit uh so there is more than one accreditation there's the kalea accreditation
which i mentioned earlier that's the it's a national accreditation to commit the uh
uh the commission on accreditation for law enforcement agencies which is a national
and one of the largest accrediting bodies and then the texas police chiefs association here in texas
is one that the texas police chief association offers one of the major differences and and it's
somewhat comparable but one of the major differences is costs so the the kalea accreditation
is is very expensive uh and the texas police chiefs association there's some costs associated
that with that but it it's it's it's it's easier on our fine it's just it's almost just as difficult
but it's it's easier on our our finances uh to participate in this process
uh and that that's the major the the major difference
anybody else have a question
okay dr williams you can proceed so that's our accreditation process in uh in summary
if you again if you need more specific information i can give you more specific information uh feel
free to contact me by email or come back come and see me at the at the office i'm always available
and i can walk you through this process in more detail if you like we can walk you through the
training plan if you like we'd be more than happy to do that but at the end of the day this
accreditation process and this training plan is is going to help us continue to be the police
department that uh you want it to be the police department that our city manager wants us to be
the police department that our city government wants us to be
that kind of concludes my presentation uh thank you all so much for your attention today
bo you had a question wow i missed that no he just raised the same dr williams yes sir
i'm just you mentioned earlier the the research that you guys have done the mixed method approach
of qualitative quantitative sure one of the things i'd asked the deputy chief earlier was just about
the gaps that you guys have discovered particularly in regards to the training regarding use of force
okay you know uh you may not have it right in front of you but maybe if that's something that
is documented somewhere that we could get just what you found through those through that research
you know i know that you've showed us everything that you're working toward in the accreditation
but i was just wondering if you knew anything off the top of the mind you know in terms of
what gaps were surfaced in that particular area so i don't have that information available right
now but i can have that information for you prior to at our next meeting thank you but the information
is available yes it is available we do have i just don't have a copy of the report to speak
specifically to it right now thank you anyone have any more questions
okay thank you dr williams you're very very welcome i look forward to seeing everybody
next week thank you so much are we meeting next week yes yes i look forward to seeing
everybody next week thank you so much
so before we um wrap up this meeting um did anybody i think sarah had a survey that
she sent to everybody to start putting input did anybody do their survey
want because yeah we don't well sarah how many surveys do you have
uh i checked a couple days ago i think there was only two received so far
this is the survey that lists your top three things is that what you're talking about
correct yes and you sent that in the email because i don't what if i have more than three things
um that was a tool that we had proposed using to kind of group together what some of the
recommendations recommendations might be from the committee we can still use that tool to get
individual feedback from you all but i think with what chief dixon had proposed tonight is kind of
that we've gotten those five topic areas in regards to use of force so um at the next
meeting chair i'm not sure how you'd like to handle it if you if you want to take training
for example as one topic area and say are there any specific recommendations in regards to
training for use of force right um and then go forward with each of the five areas and kind of
put it together that way i'm happy to to develop anything the committee wishes to have in order to
help you form your recommendations um so staff willing to help i have a couple things i guess
i um thought next week was a community input call it is but we will have something before we start
taking calls like we did the last time okay and um also i've i've been doing some research on the
community police oversight board and i know we had mentioned that maybe like there should be a task
force of people to work on that but i don't know if that got organized but i wanted to say i've been
doing some research on it and the from dallas there's a community oversight board and also
there's an advisory council that's made up of community members so i just wanted to say like
maybe some folks could get together and i don't know sarah if you could put a call out whoever
wants to work on this we can have a call or something um to work on that otherwise i can
maybe email you the research that i have compiled in a document uh as a suggestion around that
oversight board because it's something that our committee said they wanted to recommend
that's what i'm saying i don't know if the the survey is going to be able to fit everything that
i have been compiling okay if it helps you um our attorney mike kroneck has put together a few
options for the committee to think about that meet the state statutes and our meet and confer
currently and just for you to kick around so there's there's actually two or three four different
ways that something like that could be structured and we do intend on having one full meeting to
present some of those options to you so we're happy to kind of save you a little bit of the
research he's already got a position paper that he's working on right now and we wanted to just
give you lots of options to kick through at one night i appreciate that and i also tweaked the
information from the research that i got for the city of denton to make it more how i think our
community is so i'd still like to present what i have found out if that's possible and share
that with the chair or the committee or whoever might want to work on that um but yeah i just
wanted to add that in that like we had talked about that and right i wanted to bring that up
all right um i have a couple more questions so yancey um don who and jamie so go ahead yancey
i just uh want to request information from uh mike uh the city attorney can you possibly provide the
committee with uh what is the purpose and the charter and everything dealing when it comes along
with the civil service commission because i think that a lot of people on the committee don't
understand that we already have somewhat of an oversight board which is in terms of the civil
service commission so maybe if you can provide information to them regarding what is the charter
and the status and the purpose of the civil service commission they might answer some of
their questions and let them know that some of these things are already in place so i think
that'll be some good information that the committee probably would like to review thank you sure
i'm assuming you don't you don't i'm sorry go ahead mike i'm assuming you mean when i do my
presentation uh at that time or i don't think you're asking for me to specify that right
right now right no okay no not right now i'm just saying that even if it's beforehand maybe you can
get it to sarah and sarah can put it out in like an email form or something because i and this is
just me from the inside uh looking out i know a lot of anti-workers and i know the committee doesn't
and they probably don't understand what the civil service commission is and don't even know that we
even have the civil that it even exists and in fact we have members on this committee that's
part of the civil service commission that hadn't spoke up about the civil service commission so i
think that uh maybe the putting information i mean i'm all about sharing information and letting
people know what we already have in place maybe they won't try to reinvent the wheel i guess is
what i'm trying to say because it's already there sure i'll be happy to do that and mr baines who's
pointed out is actually on the commission at some point maybe could uh give his point of view of
what what they do and those types of things thank you okay my question is to sarah um is it possible
that we can email you that sometime um before our next meeting because i honestly did not see
that's really i'm sorry i'm like i'm willing to commit so i really do apologize for that delay
no problem yes i'd be happy to do so okay thank you jeremy
it is possible that i am just too much of a type a an organized person for this type of committee
endeavor but i'm really struggling with how many weeks we have remaining in our charge and how
little conversation we as a committee have been able to have to this point we've been
intaking a lot of information but we have not really had the opportunity to discuss how we
individually have processed the information to be able to move forward to making recommendations and
i was the one last week that suggested or wanted to know if it was possible to do work groups or
something like that and i i'm just really struggling with what our timeline is as a
committee moving forward and hearing that there are additional presentations that we will continue
to be receiving so can somebody walk me through when when are we going to hash that out and who's
gonna help us to make sure that we meet the charge that this the mayor and the city council have given
to us yeah we have laid out a timeline basically that we would try to have some kind of a draft
report to for all of you to discuss recommending at the council either towards the end of september
sometime early october i mean i think the initial goal of september 15th probably isn't realistic
for some of the reasons you're articulating and kind of after listening to you tonight
you know i think we'll start off the next meeting by kind of introducing kind of the vision to deal
with some of the policy issues that we're hearing come out of the committee i mean it's been pretty
obvious to us what what you're interested in but i think we also need to build in more time now for
you to to have those debates in those particular areas so we'll we'll provide that framework to
kick off the next meeting get your input on that if you want to break down into a couple different
subcommittees and take that on as long as we meet the open meetings act we can then staff and we can
we can certainly accommodate you with that but this is not a this is not something where it
september 15th is a is a must be you know we must meet that date i mean if we need to take two or
three more meetings in order to make everybody comfortable and review the report going to the
council we're going to do that so if that's what you want to do we're here with you donna
um i also have a concern towards that too because my initial um thought was that this would um kind
of end on september 15th and with the many commitments that i do have i'm afraid that
i won't be able to provide as much input as as i would like to um with these other meetings that
you're suggesting um so is there like another channel that we can put our input through um in
the case that we cannot make these meetings and will it um affect us in any way um i kind of just
want to know there's like a penalty towards that there's no penalty oh go ahead yeah there's no
penalty at all um and if you can't make a meeting and want to make it want to make sure that your
opinion is heard if you would just let you know send something into sarah she's working closely
with chief dixon and sheryl as our chair to kind of organize the information and uh that's going
to be the best way to do it but there there is no penalty for missing a meeting if you can't make
it you can't make it but if we want it we want your information we want to know what you're
thinking so i think sarah's the person that kind of to help disseminate that for everyone and we'll
let the committee know what your thoughts were and you can go back and watch the meeting that you
missed so that you won't uh you'll you'll be up to date up to speed when whenever you can participate
willie i i know you're dying to say something because i can see it in your face so go ahead
uh turn it on willie i can't hear you push the button willie
there you go don't get old because it's not no fun two things i was sitting here thinking
about the mandate or what this the city council has asked us to do to develop a report clear findings
city manager i've been in two meetings where we've had to do something like this one was when we were
choosing you as a a candidate and i please don't hold me to me saying you weren't a good candidate
for the job uh just kidding just kidding but we've been on two of those and you've got certain people
that's very good at bringing groups to a consensus i hope that when we get to that point where we are
talking about what the report should have and what we plan to do you incorporate some of those
because they were able to just like sarah's done with the five points got us on point that this is
all we're asking for and just as fri what i've what have kept me on point is just remembering
i'm not a person to try to tell everybody what to do i'm not that i don't have that power the
committee doesn't have that power we're making a recommendation so if we have someone there who can
kind of steers in in the right direction in that the majority of us agree with should be in that
report i'm real comfortable with with starting that process after we get this additional
information the one thing i fear is if we split up that group will have people in there who sees
things a certain way then when we come back together we still got the same problem we've
got to figure out then what do we do what do we keep so i think it's better if we just stay together
and then talk about what it is we'd like to see in the report and with me just remembering
i'm not a rule maker i don't know much about what the police do still don't have to listen to all
of these reports so if i hear other people and what they're saying i think we can come up with
a a report that might be helpful to the city council members i think i think if we will we'll
provide kind of that we'll do a little bit better job next time of showing you the five areas that
we've kind of broken it down into and why if you want to add to it or change it that's great but
we felt like we needed to provide at least a starting point for you to uh to kind of agree
some skids then we'll back away i think for the next meeting also something would be helpful is you
you've been inundated with a lot of information tonight about training we had a lot of questions
at the last meeting about what kind of training do the officers go through do we have enough budget
for it that sort of thing and i think our staff did a really great job tonight explaining exactly
how robust the training is and and all the things that dr williams is working on but
if if you could all kind of think about you know what do you think is missing i've taken some notes
that you know that i i heard from you tonight but if you could just kind of think about what
what would you like to see what in your mind is missing i think that's an important part of the
recommendation because how we'd envisioned this was just sort of breaking it down into
training ideas we know the committee is a big the oversight committee or that concept is
is is out there and we're kind of looking at it as sort of bullet point recommendations to the
council at the end of the day it doesn't need to be a you know 50 page report to them i mean it's
it could be a a few pages of just saying hey you know there's these topical areas we really went
into um you've been you've really grabbed the reporting aspect as well so we've we've integrated
that chief's already starting to work on more robust outward facing reporting so as you're
talking it may not be so obvious but we're making changes listening to you and i think just sort of
wrapping it up and kind of showing you what we're doing as a result of the input we're getting kind
of rolls into the report so we'll do a little bit better job next week maybe putting that into a
visual format for you and then we're gonna willy you and then after willy it'll be john and then
pam and then we're gonna wrap it up for the evening all right one of the things that the chief brought
to my attention tonight when he said how much time it would take for these individual these police
officers to complete one course and how much it will cost so we need to as a group we need to
kind of consider that before we start saying you need to do this and you need to do that and that
i have no idea so that was very helpful what he shared thank you willy john
uh thank you madam chair i'm one of the civil service commissioners i've had the pleasure of
serving on the civil service commission for three years i was just asked to serve another three
years and my experience there has been it's been a very unique experience listening to
the police officers and the fire uh the fireman and um the when you talk about citizen input i
don't really see the uh much opportunity there unless you're a dedicated uh person who would
like to come and sit in those meetings which can be very technical and very um very confined
we have a very uh very very strict agenda and we have uh some governing laws and the um some
contracts that we have to abide by and so uh as far as that vehicle providing an audience are
sufficient uh community input i basically don't see it as that recently to me
as things arise and and people in the community would like to have some input to me that's where
i see that that uh citizen oversight or citizen of i don't know what how to describe it it gives
people a chance to talk and have input and be heard and so that's just my impression as to
civil service commission and its function versus having a different
committee that's geared specifically to citizen input thank you john you're welcome
jamie and this is the last question and then we're gonna wrap it up so we can
we've gone over kind of our time go ahead jamie i was just going to say that i think
to willie's point i don't disagree willie i think we could do it all as a group i think what i'm
asking of our city support is some space for us as a committee to do so i feel like we just need
some time to sit together and share what we have learned and what we feel like is coming out of
these conversations and start to identify some commonalities and i certainly appreciate you guys
trying to do that for us but i i do feel like there's value in just some open conversation
around those four or five points where we can sort of go around robin as a crew well i think
and i think what they wanted to do and i think the goal was to get all the information out there so
that when we did sit down and have those conversations that we had all the information
out there i think what might have frightened everyone was the initial timeline of september
15th now that we know that we have more time it doesn't feel like we're so pressed together
to come up and you know what i'm saying so i think um next week we'll have some time prior to
the calls from the public to go over some more stuff and then we'll start delving into that but
i think that because we have more time we'll be able to sit and have those conversations
and hash bullet point by bullet point to come up with the solution that we have
okay pam this is the last question go ahead thank you shirle um this is for yancy and it'll be very
quick is there a refresher training for the mental health just i have two questions
yeah so for the mental health you talk about mental health peace ups or just mental health in
general the crisis intervention training that you were is there any kind of refresher after that 40
hours uh i know that's initial in the academy and then i i want to say you get like 24 don't call me
on the hours but it's more training when you get your intermediate and advanced license but the
thing about the specialized training you know you have to have an officer that want to take that
training once they get that license in because like a mental health peace officer i'm a mental
health peace officer but and i have to take continuing education hours on top of the other
required hours and then now you're bogging the officer down that's something i have to want to
take yes and then officer down with hours of training and that therefore you're taking
officers off of the street so sometimes you got to relate with training versus the needs of the
community and the department and then in the autism training was that based on an event that
happened with an officer something that happened in the community or is that something you all just
that was that the autism training was something i am on the academy advisory board okay and that
was something that came out of a concern from a citizen who had an adult child who was on the
spectrum he was you know functioning could drive and what have you but he had twitches and that
was a concern and so we brought that and so that's how that was that training okay thank you so much
you're welcome okay so we're going to wrap up tonight and it is what time is it it is 8 35
and we will be back next week we will have a brief presentation and then we will take calls
from the public like we did prior to this couple weeks ago it will be the same format
and sarah did you have anything you wanted to add we'll be sending out a press release tomorrow
to inform the community of the second public input session and i'll distribute that to all of you as
well okay will there be emails as well this time or online entry correct the online form is still
open it has been since the first public input session and that'll remain open until thursday evening
okay well thank you guys for participating and we'll see you next week