Public Safety Committee (PSC) Meeting Transcript – 12/1/2025 Title: ATXN-1 (24hr) Channel: 1 - ATXN-1 Recorded On: 12/1/2025 6:00:00AM Original Air Date: 12/1/2025 Transcript Generated by SnapStream ================================== Please note that the following transcript is for reference purposes and does not constitute the official record of actions taken during the meeting. For the official record of actions of the meeting, please refer to the Approved Minutes. [2:02:54 PM] we'll call the public safety committee to order. It is December 1st, 2025 at 2:03 P.M. And this we are meeting at city hall, located at 301 west second street in Austin, Texas. We have a quorum present. Vice chair, Laine, council member, duchen and myself. And we will begin with public communication. I will turn it over to Daniel. Love to to call any speakers that are signed up. >> Yes. If we can have Scott Johnson. >> Good afternoon, council members. My name is Scott Johnson. I'm here to speak on distracted driving. Some background information. I'll try to get through this as quickly as I can. 2006 there's a bicycle safety task force. I advanced two separate ordinance ideas for texting while driving and hands free while driving. In 2009, the city council approved an ordinance against [2:03:54 PM] texting while driving. Unfortunately, with that ordinance, an affirmative defense is that I was calling someone. So those are not effective. In 2012, I started working towards having the city council's board and commission system consider these urban transportation, public safety commission and community technology that has a different name. As you can read along with me, I recruited Bianca Benson, who is still with the city. That was a very good decision to help go out to these boards and commissions, to let them know what's happening now. And in 2014, the city council approved the distracted driving ordinance. The effective date was early 2015. APD was doing an excellent job of. Second Paige please was doing an excellent job of writing citations. The peak was in 2017 with 10,142. As you can see, there's a minimum of $200 fine for it. [2:04:54 PM] There is a diversion program that was put together by the chief prosecutor, Bianca Benson, and her group 2019 the state tried to lower texting hands free down to texting only. We fought it and we won. Along with support from APD and SAPD and other cities have used our ordinance as a model. Looking down further, you can see the ordinance is effectiveness in terms of writing citations 2015 through 2019. Third page please. And now, and I'm certainly not here to criticize APD. I understand the staffing situation. I'm actually the coordinator of neighborhood watch for my neighborhood for 17 years, and we just need a working group to reinvigorate this process. So we raise the awareness for people that have moved here since the late 20 tens, and those people that are already here who don't know about the ordinance, and we need to find creative ways to enforce the ordinance. And [2:05:55 PM] there may be some options beyond just APD having more staff for patrol. There's some other things on there that may be of interest to you. Obviously, the fatality issue is from the last decade and early this decade. You can see those numbers. And from a comprehensive report by Cambridge telematics study, you can see the top ten reasons why people are looking at their phone while they're driving. And some of those are surprising. Some of them are not surprising. There are two videos that were developed, one in the 2015 time frame to warn people about distracted driving and the consequences. And then there was one done more recently by the vision zero program. And those are available. You can see the link there and I can send that to you. Questions. >> Council member. >> Scott, thanks for putting this together. Can you make sure you can send this send your data to us when you have a chance? I'm just curious, what do you think is a the next best step? And the other question I have is just based on your data, [2:06:56 PM] it looks like, you know, by 2019 there's a sharp a sharp drop off. That's even before I think that we channeled our motors unit into a different purpose at APD. So what do you think is going on there? Have we solved a problem? Was there a sense that we needed to write less citations by then? >> Well, the discretion obviously is there with the officers on patrol. One of the benefits of having a hands free ordinance is that even if they're holding the phone and not using it, they can be cited. We try to get it when they were at a stop, but it was pulled out by former mayor Leffingwell and former council member, now the late bill Spellman. And they didn't let us know the working group folks, which is unfortunate. And that and that won't happen again. If we can figure another working group, we're going to try our best to be sure that our intent is translated into policy. To answer your question, I can't say why it dropped off. There's certainly opportunities to write more. Again, I'm not here to criticize the police staff, [2:07:58 PM] I respect them, I work with them because I'm the coordinator for my neighborhood. As I said, I think what what happens is that people try different tactics to not be seen. And that would include bringing the phone down below their the center of their body, holding it down in their lap and then looking at it. And I'm sure that happened a lot. And therefore you can't if you're in a patrol car that's not higher than the other car, then you can't see it. APD did do this, which is creative, where they for a short time use use busses and that was a limited time, limited scope. There was some concern from the community. I don't think that's necessarily what undid it, but I do think people use creative ways. And one of the things that I find ironic is that many vehicles, newer vehicles, you don't need to hold the phone, but it's just a habit. You can talk through the bluetooth, and that's part of this working group that I'm suggesting to this committee and also to the [2:08:59 PM] mobility committee, is that we have that because we need people to know that they have options and to use those options, or they could be cited. There is a diversion program, as you might have seen in there. And that's helpful because we don't want to be punitive. If we can educate our way out of it, we would. But it's really not possible to do that. Recently at the mobility committee in November, they they've cited about 840 or 850 folks this year, which is a marked increase from earlier in the 20 2020. So that's great news. >> Thank you. I'll look for the data. >> You're welcome. >> Thank you, Mr. Scott. >> Colleagues, the first action will be to our first item will be to approve the minutes of the public safety committee meeting for November 3rd, 2025. I will accept a motion to approve the minutes. Motion made by councilmember duchen, seconded by vice chair Laine. [2:10:02 PM] Without objection. The meetings. The minutes are approved. Item number two. And colleagues, I'm very, very, very excited about this. The community will now take up item number two and that is the boys and girls club community violence intervention work presentation. I got to meet with these young leaders a while back, and they have gone on to lobby members of congress, namely council member, congress member, former council member Greg Casar. And now they're here to testify before us. But they have been actively working to improve safety, not only in their neighborhoods, in the meadowbrook apartments, but just in Austin overall. And I just wanted to recognize Mckenzie Zepeda Harris Tovar, Mendoza, hasani Blankenship, Kelsey Taylor, and narsi martin. And with that, I will turn it over to Maricela Casillas, director of character and development of leadership development at the boys and [2:11:02 PM] girls, boys and girls club of Austin. >> Hello, my name is Sidney Trevino and I'm with the boys and girls club. Thank you all for having us here today. Behind me and to the side of me, I have some very prominent club members at meadowbrook. Next to me is Kelsey Taylor and this is a tall man does. Back in March, we were tasked with creating a social justice program aiming at mental health support, and they chose their topic of gun violence. So they worked for several months creating ways to implement gun violence prevention programs. They reached out to you all over here. We reached out to our board members as well, and came [2:12:04 PM] up with a project that ultimately led some of them to go to Washington, DC. So we're very proud of them for that. If my president, Mr. Attal, would like to speak on some of the service projects that him and the other group did. >> Hi. Some of the service projects we did was a community cleanup. Meadowbrook members participated in a cleanup on a Saturday with the city of Austin cleanup group, and we cleaned up a lot of trash together, improving living spaces. We. The second one we did was thrive fest, which was a annual thrive fest to celebrate healthy lifestyles with a focus on mental wellness. This fair provided community with access to resources and community partners that support and promote well-being in the community. [2:13:06 PM] >> And now, Kelsey will go ahead and talk about our our main focus, which was our gun violence program. >> Meadowbrook club, focused on gun violence prevention as their community has been severely impacted by it. Navarro club focused on access to mental health resources and coping strategies for athletes in their campus. Teens and their campuses are often often involved in multiple extracurricular activities and often hold, wait, hold a job to support their families, work life balance and stress. Coping strategies are needed, otherwise it can lead to poor, athletic and poor academic performance and mental health struggles. Home club. Home club members focus on promoting wellness and women's mental and physical health, and women vital order to have stronger and safer communities. [2:14:08 PM] >> So as you can see, we have a bunch of bright young people also behind us. Some of the club members from Navarro. Correct. So we definitely, again, thank you all for inviting us here. This is a great opportunity for them not only to get out of school early, but to see this beautiful building which we have not been to yet. So thank you. >> Perfect colleagues, do we have any questions? >> I just want to thank you for coming. And I also I more have a comment than a question. Okay. So I think that and I have seen that the voices of our young people can be very powerful to elected officials like us. And I just want to encourage you to continue coming, exercising that civic participation muscle and telling us what you see and hear and feel, because that's what we need to know to make things better for the future. So thank you very much. [2:15:08 PM] >> Councilmember. >> I also wanted to thank y'all. I mean, since I believe it was about March when we first met and we got to hang out in meadowbrook, and our friends from life brought us together to be able to talk about CVI. And I'd explain to y'all that that I lost a little brother to gun violence in 2009. This is a very personal issue to me, and I appreciate your advocacy. I was I think it was it was we were talking with and I was telling him there was no way when I was his age that I was ever going to be advocating for anything but to see the energy and, and the inspiring stories that, that, that these young leaders had around wanting to better their community. Was it it it landed with me. And I wanted to make sure that y'all always know you have a place here at city hall. Anytime you want to come back and testify and come and inform us about the work that you're doing around this issue. So appreciate your service. I appreciate y'all traveling to Washington, DC to represent Austin, Texas and let them know [2:16:10 PM] what we're working on and what you're working on. Anytime you want to come back. You're always welcome to come back before this committee. And thank you for being here with us today. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Colleagues. Next, the committee will not now take up item number three, briefing on findings, observations and status of recommendations from comprehensive, comprehensive operational review of the Austin police organizational capacity systems and practices conducted conducted by Barry Dunn. We will welcome chief Davis and Michelle Menzel, and I apologize if I ruined that senior program manager with Barry Dunn. >> Wine settlers. Wow. >> I really ruined that. So I apologize. >> For that. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Council members, for the opportunity to discuss the ongoing Barry Dunn report and the recommendations and how hard we're working with those [2:17:10 PM] recommendations. And I'm excited for you to have an opportunity to hear where we are as an organization, and specifically to hear from Michelle and the fantastic work she's doing. Thanks, chief. >> Pleasure to pleasure to see all of you. And get an opportunity to give you a little bit of background. Next slide, please talk a little bit about kind of historically what Barry Dunn has been doing, what our relationship has been with APD. On this first slide to start with, we our initial project was in February of 2024, and that involved a handful of different pieces. First was looking at a service model that the police department was engaging on resource intensive service calls. We also looked at a lot of business processes, looking at the ways that the police department operates both in the field and how particular calls for service are managed, and from the point of origin and through the reporting process. We also did a field technology review, and we also [2:18:11 PM] did an essential call for service evaluation review, which is also a portion of the alternative response piece that is kind of a current option or current item within the within the police department and the city. Right now, the current project started in February of this year, and that project really had a handful of components. One was to do a workload analysis for patrol and investigations and a staffing report for that, and also a supplemental unit staffing report. What you probably already know, based on information from chief Davis, is that based on our report, based on internal reviews by the police department, a number of positions within the organization were reallocated to supplement patrol staffing and to help improve that, the work to help reduce individual workloads by officers. I'll come back to that and talk a little more about that. One of the things and I will touch on this later, but we are still [2:19:13 PM] the patrol workload staffing report is still pending because we've had some other things that we have advanced and prioritized in working with the police department. Our current work includes looking at the helping advance the recommendations that have come out of our prior work and more recent work, and helping the organization, helping the chief and her office with implementation assistance and oversight over advancing those recommendations. And I'll talk more about that as well. There are a number of operational assessment sprints that we are doing within this effort, and those really relate to things that come out of a need that arises within the organization. Also, reviewing business processes and workflows and change management services, which will also discuss in a little bit. And by the way, if there's questions along the way, feel free to interrupt me. Otherwise I'll rush through and we can I can ask them at the [2:20:14 PM] end as well. Next slide please. So this is a basic review of kind of what we've done. The prior reports, the original resource intensive service call for service report and the patrol schedule review was done in July. We did a limited workload analysis for the police department in October. I'll come back to that. But effectively, one of our findings in the original review was that the the police department needed a more substantial workload analysis to more definitively determine staffing needs and demands for workloads within the patrol section. We also did a targeted operational review that was delivered in December. That work in December actually prompted some additional conversations with the police department and ultimately us being reengaged. In February of this year, we developed an emergent issues memo in 2020, in may of 2025, and we say emergent issues memo. That means during the course of our project work, we oftentimes [2:21:15 PM] come across items or issues within organizations that really should not wait until other reports might come to fruition or might be finalized. And we do. When we identify those items, we notify the police department sooner than later so that they can start working on implementation of those more critical issues. We did. As I mentioned, we did produce the investigations and supplemental unit staffing report in June, which again was used for redeployment of personnel from various units to help support patrol functions and operations. And we also this is one of those sprint items. We did a job task analysis for the data analytics data analysis division, which we produced in November of this year, to provide additional information about the type of work and volume of work being managed by the data analysis group. If you could stay back, please. Our current work, we're also doing a case audit looking at a variety of different data [2:22:15 PM] points within the records management system and analyzing the data, the nature of the data that's present, how it's organized and how it's being reported. As I mentioned, we're still in the midst of the patrol workload analysis. We expect that report to be completed in December. We also have are in the process of working on organizational change management approach. That will begin in some stead in December. And also we are in we will be looking at the academy and the reviews and recommendations that have occurred previously and some that we have already made. And ultimately we also are working on a new mission vision values process with the police department. We did a couple of weeks ago. We had the opportunity to bring all the command staff together and spent several hours talking about mission vision values for the organization, looking at current, looking at their current version, and asking [2:23:15 PM] questions about whether these are in need of revision to help guide the police department going forward. Next slide. This is an example of the priority recommendations that came out of not only the emergent issues memo, but other project work that we have done. So there are, as you might imagine, a number of recommendations, and I think council has been provided with a number of different reports that we've done. And you've probably seen there's a lot of recommendations in there. One of the important things to do is to prioritize those recommendations that are most critical. And so what you see in front of you in the table are the priority recommendations, as defined by the chief and the executive team. In addition to those recommendations, we're also working as I mentioned, part of our job is to help facilitate the completion of those recommendations, which also includes tracking of those recommendations and how they're [2:24:15 PM] progressing. And we really we look at these recommendations from two perspectives. One is the functional development of the recommendation. That is what information what processes, what policies need to be developed for that to evolve. And then what does implementation look like as we are right now, each of the recommendations that you see are already in the functional development section for q4 of this year, with implementation or the beginning of implementation across these slated for q1 in 2026. One of the things I want to mention is when we think about implementing recommendations, especially in an organization the size of the Austin police department, there are a lot of complexities. Some of those complexities relate to current technologies. And I'll talk about that in a bit. Some relate to business processes and workflows, some of which also relate back to technology. [2:25:16 PM] There are other matters of policy, and then there's training as well. And so when we think about implementing recommendations, there are a lot of tentacles that cross various pieces and parts of the operation. It's not as simple as just saying we're going to change X or Y, because those things have significant downstream implications. So this entire effort and the things that you see up here all have are they all have interdependencies and they're all interwoven. And so even as we are progressing with, as I say, we the police department, that's what I mean. Even as even as we are proceeding with moving these and advancing these recommendations, there's also a recognition that it has to be done in a particular way in order for it to be successful. And in many cases, there are dependencies that require us to do a before we can do B and before we can do C, which can certainly elongate the process. The good news is that we have been spending a [2:26:17 PM] lot of time working with the executive team to advance these, and we are in a good position for those to move forward between the end of this calendar year and the beginning of next year. Next slide please. One of the things that that is on our agenda to do is to work on a change management strategy and plan for the police department. It may or may not surprise you to learn that most changes do not fail because they're a bad idea. More often than not, they fail because of how they're implemented. And this is a graphic at the top. It shows. It shows the likelihood of success when changes are implemented using a specific change management strategy, versus using no change management strategy. Certainly this this is a sliding scale based on the depth and level of the changes that need to occur, in this case with the department and with the prior slide and [2:27:18 PM] recommendations that I showed you. There are a lot of pieces that need to move. None of these in and of themselves are particularly substantive, but as they're all put together, they represent an adjustment to the way folks do their work. And as any of us know, and I'm sure all of you have been involved in this as well, when something changes in our work environment, we tend to go, well, shoot, this feels like work all of a sudden. It used to be pretty automatic. And so we need to we need to use strategies to help alleviate those challenges and any resistance that might occur. What you see in the table below that adkar is an approach used by prosci, which is a nationally recognized change management strategy. I am a certified prosci change management practitioner. And effectively, as we look through this table, you can see that one of the most important pieces is having people be aware of what the changes are about and why, and then moving down the scale, helping folks develop a need for the change, [2:28:19 PM] understanding how to change what they need to change, making sure they have the skills and the ability to do that, and then reinforcing that. Next slide please. What you're going to see here in the next handful of slides are unadjusted recommendations from prior work that we've done. So these bullets that you see at the top, the communication and the communication strategy, both of those are just unadjusted text from prior work that we've done. So again, in the first one, that first recommendation is to develop an ocm plan and strategy to help ensure success of the operational changes. And the second one is a communication strategy, both for the executive team and for the department, to help ensure that folks within the organization are aware of the kinds of changes that are occurring from the beginning, and that they have a clear line of sight on why those changes are important. And again, it goes back to basic change management [2:29:20 PM] strategies. Communication is a critical component of ensuring that the organization can move toward the change in a in a positive way, without substantive resistance. It's also an opportunity for us to address and mitigate resistance on the front end, rather than waiting for it to occur to occur. One of the key steps in this process is revisiting our mission, vision and values and being clear where we want to take the organization. What does the future look like? What is the future state of this organization look like? What's our mission? What's our charge, and how do we then use these recommendations to leverage those pieces and to make clear and as we go forward, making clear to the organization that the changes we're making are in furtherance of those of our mission and vision and values that that we've all adopted. The next section that you see, that little bottom portion is also a portion of the change [2:30:21 PM] management approach. Again, it's a three step process there, which which is about preparing for the change and developing a change management plan, then managing the change and ultimately reinforcing the change. And a lot of these things, frankly, they go to culture when we when we start making changes, oftentimes people are comfortable with the way things were. They're not always excited about what the way things are going to look like going forward. And sometimes that means that we need to intentionally ready people for those adjustments and then work them through, coach them through, and help address the challenges that they may have with the changes that are occurring. Next slide please. The records management system. For those of you that don't know what this is, every time APD receives a call for service that they respond to, that information is recorded in the computer aided dispatch program, or cad. And a lot of that data is then advanced and [2:31:22 PM] forwarded into the records management system, which is the repository where the police department stores all of its records related to response within the Ms. System. At the APD, we identified a number of process and flow issues that required some adjusting, and we have been working diligently with not only the technology group within APD, but also with the vendor who owns the product that the police department is currently using. We have developed a number of recommendations and adjustments to the record system that are really in a couple of different buckets. The first one is short term, and this involves making some routing adjustments to how how data is entered and moved through the record system. You may or may not be aware that the police department used to use a different platform called the mobile report entry. Mrr is not a meal ready to eat, [2:32:23 PM] although for military folks, in this case it refers to a mobile report entry program. There were challenges with that program in the past, and because of those challenges, APD moved to direct entry into records and that move along with some other kind of, I think, practices that became norms have resulted in some challenges with workflows. So we are advancing those routing adjustments to alleviate and and account for those challenges and to improve data consistency across all of the data that's going into the record system, so that ultimately, when data is extracted and when the chief is standing in front of you and saying, here's this data and here's that data, we can have confidence that the data is representative of what's actually occurring and what's been reported. There's also some quality assurance protocols that we're working on that need to be advanced to make sure that we're [2:33:23 PM] consistently auditing the work that's occurring, helping folks improve how they deliver or how they produce that work. And, you know, if there are errors or things that are missing, then holding them accountable and getting them back on track for doing it correctly long term. There are some other implications for technology which will take longer. Implementing new technologies certainly takes a lot longer. There are one of the things we're looking at is single point capture of data. That is, if we take data in at the street level, how do we capture that data a single time and move that throughout our system electronically, versus having to do dual entry, which is susceptible to accuracy issues? So not only are there technology solutions that can improve efficiency, but they can also help with overall accuracy of the data and within the Ms. Next slide please. Recruiting and retention. This [2:34:23 PM] is an area that a lot of police organizations across the country have have struggled with. You may have seen it in the news there. There is many will suggest that there are fewer and fewer applicants that are applying to police positions. And it's certainly true. One of the things that that we work with organizations is to analyze the recruiting strategies and to ask whether there's a need to adjust recruiting strategies to be to to adapt those strategies to more modern process. Oftentimes, police departments are stuck in the field of dreams recruiting method, which is if you post it, they will come. And they used to work because there was such an abundance of people that were looking for work. It doesn't work as well today. And so what we're we're doing is we're working with the police department to adopt better recruiting strategies, more active recruiting versus passive recruiting strategies, targeting different groups, targeting different points of entry to ultimately improve the [2:35:27 PM] inflow of applicants right to the process. And then another key thing is to reduce the washout rates at the academy or through field training. And so. The the net byproduct of those two pieces is a goal to close the vacancy gap. We know that the police department is roughly 300 positions short in patrol, which is having a ripple effect in a lot of areas, including issuance of hands free citations. Most likely, that's a that's a challenge that the organization has struggled with. I do want to also mention that there is a significant linkage between recruiting academy training and field training, the way that we bring people into the recruiting process and the way that we tend to them through that process, has a direct impact on their level of success on the back end. And so that's also an area that we've that we have built into our [2:36:29 PM] process as we're continuing to go forward. Next slide. The again these are there are a number of standard operating procedure adjustments that we identified. And I'm not going to I think all of you if you should have this presentation, if you don't it's available to you. But I won't read through these. But other than to just highlight them, the initial call for service investigation routing, there are some things that need to be cleaned up there. And we talked about that even in terms of adjustments to record system, there's also process oversight, review and monitoring and accountability. Who's monitoring each incident as it comes into the Ms. To make sure that the right things have been done with that record and that has been closed out properly. There are also some areas to to look at in terms of adjusting some processes, in terms of how we activate cases for investigations, primarily [2:37:29 PM] for in the investigations division. But also there are some there's a nexus back to even things that patrol needs to do from from their perspective as well. Next slide please. Investigations case routing and review. And case management is another area. There are many, many details around this which I will spare you. But the bottom line is that within the record system, there are various protocols and routing setup to advance cases for review, and ultimately a decision regarding whether the case should be advanced to an investigator for an active investigation. The next bullet point there, you see, is something called solvability factors, and you may or may not be aware of that, but solvability factors emanate from studies that have shown certain elements within initial preliminary investigation gives strong indications as to whether there's a likelihood that the case can be solved. So, [2:38:31 PM] for example, if we have someone that broke into our car overnight and they stole a pair of sunglasses off our dashboard, it's very unlikely that's going to be solved. There's no suspect. We don't have fingerprints, sunglasses probably aren't traceable, etc. The alternative to that are incidents where we do have evidence, or we do know who a named suspect is or a suspect vehicle. And so utilizing solvability factors in the case in the analysis process can have a substantial impact on volume that's being advanced to investigations. To put this into context, there are approximately 70,000 criminal incidents per year that are routed to investigations currently that don't get activated for investigation because they lack substance for completion or the likelihood for completion there. There are processes that we can employ using solvability factors that effectively reduce that number substantially, which again [2:39:31 PM] frees up time for investigators to spend more time working those cases that actually have a greater likelihood of being solved. I also want to mention just kind of broadly across the whole standing up standard operating procedure adjustments space, that there are a number of these things that we've talked about kind of broadly here that are already in policy. But being that they're in policy doesn't necessarily mean that they've always been in practice or that there's been consistent use of them across the organization. And so even as even as we look at new operating procedures as a part of some of the changes that are occurring, there's also a need to establish and reestablish some prior processes that have been used and to make sure that folks are adhering to them. And part of that means just helping people understand why we're doing it this way. Why is this important? Next slide please. The other thing is looking at the the training academy in the first bullet, we talked about folks that are assigned to the [2:40:31 PM] academy and making some adjustments there. Police department has already made some of those adjustments. And there are changes occurring at the academy in terms of who's delivering curriculum, which has been a good move. We are also in the process of doing an academy audit. We have already done an initial audit. There will be a there are some additional steps to this, one of which will involve looking at the recommendations from the prior study that was done there. Now, one of the things that we want to do, first of all, as far as we have, we have been advised by APD that those recommendations have been advanced and we have no reason to think otherwise. But we want to do is to be able to go back, look at those, ask ourselves to what degree have they been implemented, to what degree have they been incorporated, and are they being adhered to? And are they having the net effect that we're hoping to see? So we will be going back and looking at each of those recommendations and producing a report that identifies each of [2:41:32 PM] them from that perspective. Additionally, we want to look at curriculum delivery and the fidelity of delivered content. It's one thing to say that we're going to have a curriculum that has these pieces and parts in it. It's another thing to say that we're adhering to the heart and the spirit of that curriculum, as opposed to just delivering it with a wink and a nod. So we want to make sure that we are as we're delivering content, especially for new officers who need to come in, who are the future of the organization. We want to make sure that they're getting the right information and that they have the right spirit and delivery of that content. The last thing I'll mention is a training philosophy challenge, and we see this in a lot of organizations, and it's this notion of screening in versus screening out. Many organizations are very prideful about their organizations, and they should be. They want the best of the best. Sometimes that what that results in is a belief, if you will, or an operational output where we're [2:42:33 PM] constantly looking for things that might folks might be doing wrong, as opposed to looking for ways that they're doing things right and or helping them be more successful throughout their throughout their entire process. We do know that, again, a lot of organizations do this. There's some evidence that APD has at least some of this within its culture, and it's a philosophy that we want to work with the pd to, to help alleviate and clean up. Next slide please. One of the other things that we identified is looking at patrol beats and districts. I think all of you know, because I think you each represent a sector within within the city, the police department had also within the sectors has districts. So there's a further breakdown of response assignments for patrol officers within the various sectors. Some time ago, the police department generally moved away from district response and was doing more sector response. [2:43:33 PM] That is something, by the way, that has recently been changed. The police department has moved back to district level assignment and responses, which again, when we think about the purpose behind sectors and districts, it's about distributing our people across the community, in the places and spaces where they're going to be needed. But also the whole notion of geographic centric policing suggests that when we patrol a specific area with regularity, we get to know the people, we get to know the area, we get to know the types of crime, and it gives us a leg up in terms of understanding when something looks amiss or out of sight. So one of the things that we had recommended was to revisit the current be structure we are that is in the process, by the way, and what we did for that brydan did was we used geo plotting. So we mapped all of the activity across the community. We also use a weighted system for for [2:44:34 PM] that to help understand where the most effort occurs. And at this point presently, the we're working with the executive team to continue to review the placement of sector and district lines and asking whether we should make or whether the police department should make adjustments to those. And ultimately, ultimately, aside from the concept of geocentric policing, we also want to be aware of response times. And when we have people that are that are assigned to particular areas and that's their home area, as long as they can stay there, there's a greater likelihood that our response times to challenges or problems in those areas are going to reduce. And I will say, although I don't have I don't have data in front of me, but we have already seen as the police department has recently gone back to a more division focused deployment. We have seen improvements in response times. And by the way, one of the pieces and there will be more data coming out on [2:45:36 PM] this when we finish this report. But one of the pieces we looked at was your current response times across for the last two years, and they're actually in pretty good line with what national standards are for response times, at least for the highest priority calls. There's some work that could be done on those calls that are not, perhaps the kind of the in progress or real life threatening calls. But nonetheless, we have seen already adjustments, improvements in response times with the inclusion of more district centered patrol deployments. Next slide please. Again, as I mentioned, we did an alternative call for service review for those that that I believe you may have seen this report, but if you haven't or if you haven't read it, this involved analyzing all of the different call for service types that the police department goes to. There was also a community survey on this where we asked for community input to help understand how the how the community would feel about alternative response methods. And that data was [2:46:38 PM] ultimately produced in a report. This is another recommendation that's currently in queue, and that includes looking at other response options, things like online and telephonic reporting, which we know that you have, that at a certain level. There are some challenges in the effectiveness of the current use of that system. Wright resource response approach. Do we need to send a plumber to plug the sink, or is there someone else that could do that? Right? So how do we make sure that we're sending the right resource for the right need? Another question is outsourcing, which I know has been a topic of conversation. And at present right now what is occurring is there is a plan being developed that will outline some different opportunities that the police department has been exploring relative to alternative response. Next slide please. You'll all feel better. This is my last one. What's next. We're going to do [2:47:40 PM] a few things. One is we're going to continue to work on the recommendation monitoring and facilitating and helping advance recommendations, supporting the executive team with the advancing of those things. The patrol workload analysis is another piece that I mentioned. Originally. We originally we did what I would call a light version or a light workload analysis, and we are in the midst of finalizing that now. But I can tell you, just based on all of the data that that the it will come as no shock to you that based on workloads, the police department likely should be closer to 1100 in patrol as opposed to the allocation of, I think 966 or something like that, but they're actually operating at about 688. So as you can see, as you look at those numbers, there are reasons why there are some challenges with various call for service response pieces. And even even as I listened to the gentleman talk about. [2:48:43 PM] Talking about citations, one of the things that we look at closely when we do these types of analysis is how much discretionary time is do officers have? That is how much time is left over after they go to all their calls, after they put all their evidence away, after they do all their follow ups and reports. And what I can tell you is based on the current number of patrol officers in the field, as opposed to even what they should be staffed at. But based on the current number in the field, that discretionary time is nominal, which explains a lot of why there's some challenges with some of the more proactive policing strategies that we'd like to see. So that's what I got. That's a lot, and I'm happy to take questions if any of you have them. >> Thank you so very much, colleagues. Before we take questions, I wanted to recognize the councilman. Ryan alter is has joined us remotely. Question. Councilmember duchen. >> Thank you. Chair. Thank you so much for the work you're doing and the comprehensive [2:49:43 PM] update had a couple of questions. One is and since we're sort of running the gamut here on topics, just to start off with where you left off, one thing I'm curious about that wasn't really emphasized in the report is to the extent that technology is part of the review process for how to maybe achieve some of the goals that you're looking at. And I'm thinking about specifically what you what you just discussed, which is how to create additional, how to stretch an officer's time Wright in a shift. And I know that even as part of, I think the package that axon was looking for, there were some particular technologies in there for things like reporting, right, that might cut down on the amount of reporting that an officer might have to spend on a shift because of it might be automated or use different technology to try and make sure [2:50:45 PM] that they had an extra hour or two, even per shift. So I'm just curious, can you speak at all to the extent that technology and those different solutions are part of how you're approaching, trying to address really all of the different topics and systems that you've covered? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, technology is the great equalizer, right? It really does improve the efficiencies of what we're doing if it's working right and if it's working correctly and if it's structured and set up correctly. And what we often find and this is this is the case here in Austin, is that a lot of the technologies, even the current technologies, are not being leveraged in the ways that they could be. Secondarily. And you mentioned axon, there are some other technology processes that would be kind of the second wave of the Ms. Piece that I was talking about. This has to do with technology in the field being able to capture and leverage and route information much more seamlessly. Those types of things, they multiply. I'll give you an example. Your [2:51:49 PM] your based on two years of data, your department spent spent an average of 48,000 hours handling motor vehicle crashes. Let that sink in for a second 48,000 hours per year on average. The last the last two fiscal years that we looked at, that's a really big number. And if we think about the amount of time that it takes to do something as simple as an information exchange or to create a crash report for a reportable crash, if we can take five, ten, 15 minutes, we can reduce each one of those instances incrementally. There can be a substantive impact on the backside of that. So to your question, there are absolutely technology pieces. We're working very closely with chief askew on this. And and again with the vendor that manages the Ms. Platform. Understand that you also have two different vendors. You have a vendor that has your cad system and your mobile system, and you have a different vendor [2:52:51 PM] that manages your Ms. And that creates that creates interface and integration challenges, which ultimately can impede your ability to do some of the things that you want to do with data, because they require very sophisticated processes to move that data around. But those are pieces that we're looking at. We're going to continue to explore. And I don't think it's a shock to say that at some future point, I think some of those things are going to come back to full council for consideration. >> Okay. I appreciate the work you're doing in that space too. And the update, the other question I had was about the recruitment and retention. And you mentioned that efforts that are being made to try and reduce the washout rates at the academy. I had two questions in this, two pieces that I'm curious because I understand from visiting with chief Luckritz that ems does things a little bit differently, and one is on the recruitment side. I know that they spend a fair [2:53:52 PM] amount of energy and dollars trying to recruit from out of state, or even out of country. In fact, when we pulled the travel budgets, I think ems had a budget twice as large as police's budget, despite being a much smaller organization. So I'm curious to the extent that that is a potential opportunity that could be looked at. And then on the retention, I know that they also and again, I don't know if this is a I'm looking for your guidance, whether this is an apt parallel, but I know that they also will if somebody doesn't. Doesn't successfully pass through the training program, that they will find a way to essentially find a clerical job until they can retake the assessment test and pass the next time. Is that something that presents an opportunity also for trying to move more, trying to [2:54:53 PM] successfully guide people, higher numbers of cadets through the program? >> Yeah, yeah, sir. >> Reference the I think the police department we have about, I believe four positions that we use. So if someone were to say get pregnant, get injured while in the academy, we are able to put them in different positions. We have some a couple, nine, 11 positions that they're able to go until they're able to come back through the process. As far as academics, where they're failing the academics or they're failing portions of the physical ability, physical agility, we do not. But if they injure themselves in the course of of the academy or again, become pregnant, we do have positions where they can be until they can go through the academy again. >> And let me just come back to the out-of-state question. Traditionally, ideally, what we want are people that are part of our community. That's who we want to police our community because they're invested. And a [2:55:54 PM] lot of organizations do out-of-state recruiting. Some organizations have good success with it. Oftentimes we find in talking to organizations that when they bring people in from out of state, they might stick around for a little while, get some experience, and many times they go back. That doesn't mean it's not. That doesn't mean it can't be a part of a broader strategy. And I'm aware that APD is working on those types of of external recruitment strategies. And certainly we encourage that. That is. But we have to think about the effort that goes into recruiting and what the return is and how much effort we want to put into each one of those, into each one of those lanes. And so there are some other areas that are more local and a little bit easier approach that we can do within the community and within the organization. >> Okay. I'll follow up on some of the other details, but I really appreciate your responses and the work you've done here. Yeah. >> Vice chair. [2:56:54 PM] >> Thank you so much. I really appreciate the thoroughness. And also step by step approach on how this is all laid out. I have some questions about. Slide 12. As we're looking at response times and some of the related topics, I went back to look at one of the earlier reports, the targeted operational review and summary report. And one of the recommendations in there was getting to the point that we're generating a cad record for all incoming cfs requests. Can you tell me a little bit more about where we're at on that? >> Sure. And just so we're clear. So a cad records, a dispatch record, comes in at the communication center. It gets sent to the mobile, an officer picks that up, they go, and they take care of the call. They're doing some information entry for that record that resides within cad. There's also just so everyone's clear, [2:57:54 PM] there's data from cad that gets pushed from that record into our Ms. But it's basically the notes that come from the dispatcher. It doesn't become kind of its own incident within the Ms. One of the things that that we're trying to do is to encourage the organization to move toward Ms. Being the the repository of truth. This is where all the data exists. The challenge with data within cad is it's often freeform text can't be searched. Well, there can be challenges with even foia requests and different things. So ideally we want ultimately to have that information appearing within in full essentially within the Ms. That is part of phase two that I was talking about earlier. That is a much bigger fish, and it's going to require some integration across the technology platforms between the cad and mobile and the record system. And so again, we are having those conversations. [2:58:56 PM] I know chief askew and I met with the vendor, spent a couple of days meeting with the vendor to talk about these things. That is absolutely an issue that that we're continuing to explore. >> Okay. That clarification was very helpful. On a related note, the disposition codes, and particularly getting to the point that there's a disposition code for closed without a pd response, is that something that can be handled earlier than the larger complex phase two items that you just described? I can, I can, yeah. So there was another recommendation and discussion about revising other disposition codes as needed to enable more granular analysis of response times. And one of the reasons why that type of analysis of response time wasn't possible was because we weren't. At that point in the report I read, it was that we weren't generating a cad record for each of the cfs, but I understand that piece of it. But another piece was that [2:59:57 PM] there is a single disposition code being used for multiple situations, and the one that seemed to be lacking was closed without a pd response. >> Yeah, certainly. That is a that's a open field that most likely could be implemented easily at the dispatch center. That's the short answer. >> Okay. So I know during this, chief Davis knows how often I talk about response times. And I'm really learning a lot as we go. I really appreciate this. So during this presentation, you mentioned that response times are relatively in line with typical or at least as it relates to high priority response times. I am concerned that when we're doing overall response time evaluation, that if we are not actually able to track all the priority levels when we get to our overall, [3:00:58 PM] it's skewed, particularly considering particularly when we don't have a disposition code for closed without APD response. I just there are a lot of calls that are currently coming in that are lower priority, therefore deprioritized, and we're not able to track the duration on those. But as I've looked across various reports, it's it's rare. It can be quite long. And so I'm concerned that we are operating from baselines, that and drawing conclusions that maybe aren't going to prove to be so accurate by the time we get through that second phase. And I'm also concerned that we, we, we figure out realistically where we're actually at and having the data about that. So we know where we have a pretty big data gap or not. So that is why I'm asking about this. Do you think. That my concern is well founded? >> Let me jump in and say this, [3:01:58 PM] that the report that we're working on for patrol workload analysis is going to provide you response times for all priority levels by sector? You'll be able to tell by any of the sectors you want to look at what the response times are for priority zero, which is the most critical priority one and then two and three for is in there, but it's not really used. And and to your question, the response times for priority two and three, which are again those non-critical kinds of incidents are rather lengthy and they are a little bit longer than we see in other organizations. And again, this goes back to a question of capacity and ability to respond. What is the organization's ability to get to these in a timely manner? Because we're busy dealing with these zeros and ones all the time. So there will be an extensive discussion on that within the report. And just so you know, we do look at [3:02:59 PM] those. We are able to isolate those incidents where there's no arrival time. So we can tell whether a unit actually arrived. So when we're calculating response times we're looking at those incidents where somebody actually got there. There's also another piece of that puzzle. And that is that oftentimes we look at response times from the point that the officer was dispatched until they arrived. But the true length of the response is from the point where the call was placed until they arrived. And we call that a, we call that a gap. And that gap depending upon depending upon the severity of the incident, gets wider. There's also a procedural piece within the police department that priority zeros and ones are dispatched and assigned. Twos and threes are picked up by staff as they have time to address those things. And so there are some process pieces in here for us to look at, even as we move into the next phase. [3:04:00 PM] >> Yes. Thank you. Okay. I, I think that's it for me. >> Thank you, thank you, thank you very much. Thanks. >> Actually. >> I have a question. Whenever in the moment is right. >> The moment is right now. And I'm glad you changed your voice up a little bit. >> Perfect, perfect. Apologies. I wish I could be there, but I wanted to understand a couple things. First, as it relates to some of the alternative response. Do I know in the report it mentions some specific areas? Are there specific types of calls that we've identified or specific types of alternative response that we are zeroing in on, or [3:05:01 PM] are we still kind of in the investigation or open thought phase of what might be possible? >> Chief Davis here, sir, the conversation around alternate responses is absolutely occurring. And so to Michelle's point where all of these recommendations will start, they fall on one another. And council member Laine, to your point of those responses, it does that. And so when we're looking at alternative responses, we are absolutely. We've identified a pilot location, a pilot sector that we're going to be in. Chief Jones is working very hard on developing those, and we believe are going to be back in front of this committee in April with. At that point, hopefully we will be starting that pilot and we'll have some data for you. So we understand that. Alternate responses. And again, we're 340 officers short. We have to be smart and we have to think outside the box on how we can get customer service, better customer service to the citizens of Austin and at the [3:06:01 PM] same time keep our officers safe. That is the goal. And so alternate responses, that conversation. I just had a meeting before I came in here with DC and fortune about where we are with with alternate responses. So it is absolutely conversations that are happening and it is moving forward. >> And as as we talk about patrol and, you know, you mentioned the number of officers were still trying to hire. One thing that I keep trying to understand is what exactly are we planning for when we plan for patrol schedules or the like? Is it the number of people that we have and that we think we might have in the short term, or is it on that ideal number? >> I mean, patrol schedules currently are based on the number of people you have. I mean, we can't deploy personnel that that aren't there. So there are, quite frankly, gaps [3:07:02 PM] in the number of personnel that should be on shifts to manage volume. But it's based on the current personnel. And again, with hopes that ultimately those the gap, the vacancy gap will be closed. And we can supplement folks back into the into the rotation. >> But is it when y'all are assigned or thinking of how many people let's say that you decide that, you know, eight people need to be on patrol in a sector, and you recognize that you have 6 or 7. And so you say that eighth person is always going to be an overtime shift. Like, is that a practice that we use, or do we say we only have 6 or 7 people? And so while we'd like eight, we're only sending 6 or 7 out. >> Well, I think it depends on what the sector is. We certainly have sectors that are busier, that are more dangerous, that experience more violence. And so as we're looking at one that goes toward how many people are assigned to that sector, we take those things [3:08:02 PM] into consideration. So as we're looking at backfilling or using overtime to address that is absolutely a consideration on, you know, keeping officers safe, whether they respond to these calls and service to the community. So we do use overtime in regard when we're looking at those those more violent locations, for sure. >> Got it. That makes sense. And this is not specific to just your department. But back in August, we had a resolution that asked for reporting on overtime for all three public safety departments. For to this committee, just so we can better understand the utilization of overtime and what is driving overtime, whether it's situation you just talked about where we just, you know, we have to backfill with overtime or where, you know, we have a bunch of whether it's police officers, firefighters, paramedics who are either sick or on administrative leave or vacation or whatever, just so [3:09:04 PM] we can better understand what exactly is driving our overtime costs. And I don't know, the chair knows when that information is coming or dcm is in the room. I can't see up there. I just see him popping the screen there. >> Yes sir. We will be starting that in the next public safety committee meeting. We will be presenting those that data. Great. >> I really appreciate that very much. All right. Well I look forward to continuing. Oh, I guess I have one more question. You said for the timeline for all of these. It's q4 of this year, q1 next year. What is that assumed? I'm assuming that's like start what are we thinking timeline to having the recommendations or completing this stage of the work? >> That's a great question. I can't quote you specific. A lot of that's going to depend on how these things roll out. For example, we know there's phase [3:10:04 PM] one rollout of Ms. Changes, which we want people to get used to and accustomed to before we before we add kind of a second phase of rollout. So certainly I think that the bulk of these recommendations by Q2, q3 next year should be implemented generally. Now, as I said, there's a there's a broader phase two on the technology side, particularly related to Ms. And data and so forth, which may extend beyond that just depending upon various aspects of what technology you want to use and how that gets deployed. But but certainly the expectation is that these each of these recommendations will be well in queue and underway in q1, and we expect that they'll continue to evolve, and most of them should effectively be completed in Q2 and three. At least the initial part of them. >> Very good. Well, I appreciate it and appreciate the work you're doing and the work you and your team are [3:11:06 PM] doing, chief, and we'll see you again. >> Thank you sir. >> Thank you colleagues, we'll now take up item. Yes, absolutely. >> Okay. I'd like to try to formulate this a little differently and just see if it changes anything if that's okay, because I was able to find the specifics that I was thinking about. This relates to those the response time data for the non-critical incidents. And so I understand that we haven't moved towards getting more towards the Ms. System being like that single point of entry for the data yet. And in a prior report, it was explaining that most of the documentation for calls for service occurs through the cad system. And much of this information only occurs within cad unless it is manually moved over to the Ms. System. It only exists within that cad record. Offers estimates. Officers estimate that about 25% of calls for service require additional [3:12:06 PM] reporting with rems. The rest are only reported in cad. And so when I read that, it makes me think that there may be a large a potentially large number of calls for service that currently aren't getting to the point of having a record generated that they're really being tracked as we're then reporting on our response, our response time data. >> Let me let me clarify a couple of points. Thank you. Every cad incident that gets dispatched ultimately ends up in Ms. But they show up in Ms. In two different ways. 25% of those show up as a report. This was a burglary report or this was an assault report or a domestic violence report or a stolen vehicle. The remaining 75% just come in as a cad note. So they don't they don't create their own quote unquote report within the system, but they are present in the system so they [3:13:07 PM] can be located within the system if you know how to find them. They're just not part of the standard view that you would look at. So the the difference is when we talk about when we talk about developing a, a record for Ms. For each cad record, it's evolving to the point where instead of that just being a note, it actually has its own presence as an incident within the system, which allows for ease of retrieval and statistical with statistical analysis across all of those calls for service within cad, you have approximately 1.4 million lines of data for each year of calls. All of your calls are in there, and it's a lot of data. And I know that because I looked at it. So just so you know, all of that data is analyzed and will be reported within the workload report. But some of the pieces [3:14:07 PM] that what we're trying to get to is this repository of truth within Ms. That's a bit of a shift in protocol for how you're currently recording information. >> Thank you. That was also helpful. >> Appreciate it. >> Thank you colleagues. Now we're going to take up item number four which is a briefing on citywide crime trends. Place network investigations PMI and problem oriented policing strategies in partnership with Texas state university. Welcome back chief Davis and Tamara Harold. And thank you for being here. >> Absolutely. Thank you chair. I'm really excited for you to hear from doctor Harold today. She's going to be talking about our crime, our crime statistics, which I think are you will be happy about, I hope. And also we'll discuss my chosen crime strategy to reduce violent crime here in in Austin place network investigation. So I'm very excited for you to hear from doctor Harold. Good. Thanks, chief. And thanks to all the committee members for [3:15:09 PM] your time this afternoon. Thank you, Kevin and Michelle, for making sure I was taken care of today. And thank you, Robert Trevino from dcm's office, who made sure I could get my slides in the right format for you all and make sure that they got to you on time. So I am a crime scientist or environmental criminologist. I'm currently an associate professor at the university of Nevada, Las Vegas, but I just spent three years with the national institute of justice working on their evidence to action initiative. We have learned so much about what works to prevent crime over the last few decades, but rarely does that science and evidence reach the front lines. And so I've been so fortunate to work with particular leaders throughout the country to help bring that evidence and and make this part of policy and practice in various agencies. And that's what I'm doing here with APD is helping them to develop crime strategy processes and initiatives. And as part of the chief's move toward more transparency, something that she'd like to [3:16:10 PM] start doing, I think with our public safety committee is offering you statistics on a regular basis. And so this was part of your package. And I'll just mention doctor Wenzel said. We're working so hard to improve the accuracy of our data. And in the spirit of that, knowing that we're still working toward improving our our data collection and practices and processes, these are our crime statistics to date. This is a picture of what is being shared in the chief's new weekly crime reduction meetings that she's holding with her commanders. And for you all to know that you are welcome to join any of these meetings at any time, just to see how they're looking at the crime picture and what they're doing about these. So I'm not here necessarily to talk about these individual trends, but just to share this with you and say, this is sort of what's happening internally at APD. The interesting thing about looking at aggregate crime statistics is it tells you a little bit, but it doesn't tell you everything. We should really look at crime data through different lenses, [3:17:11 PM] different frames. And one of I will tell you as a crime scientist, one of my frames that I use on a regular basis is thinking about how crime concentrates in any urban jurisdiction. Ad I can tell you across the country, if you look at the way in which crime concentrates across both places and people, you'll always find this j-curve there's always a the vast majority of of addresses in Austin never go end up in our Ms. Systems. Right. Most most places do not are not affected by crime, but there's some that's affected by a few incidents and then some that are repeatedly affected at a very high rate, a concentrated rate in our community leaders that we heard from, from the boys and girls club earlier, talking about a specific location that's being plagued by gun violence. Right. And so we can look at and you can see sort of this hotspot map. Doctor Fritz and his data team internally at APD produced all this information for you. You can see crime is not equally distributed across Austin. And that's very [3:18:13 PM] important to recognize when we're thinking about how do we approach crime, how do we prevent harm moving forward. And so it's really helpful to acknowledge that crime is what we call sticky. It's highly concentrated across people and places and particularly violent crime. And council member Velasquez, I am so sorry for the loss of your brother. I've spent a great deal of my career thinking about how to prevent gun violence and gun violence incidents. And what we find, statistically speaking, is when we look at shooting violence in any urban jurisdiction, it is so highly concentrated that almost about half more than 40% of all incidents cluster in these highly predictable, what we call micro locations of gun violence. And again, thinking about our community partners earlier, they're clearly focused in on one of those micro locations and thinking strategically about how can we disrupt the dynamics that are leading to the persistent high [3:19:14 PM] levels of violence in these locations? Interestingly, also in the course of my research from an officer safety and wellness perspective, it's very difficult to think about the impact that this has on officers as we continually send them in to these same places, all of our first responders, to deal with these same persistent, micro, violent locations over time without trying to unravel or solve some of these underlying conditions. It can really lead to all sorts of we have high, high risk arrests or high levels of officer injuries in these locations. And so both from a community safety perspective and from an officer safety and wellness perspective, I'm really passionate about thinking about how we can address these places and do something differently that produces sustained levels of reductions in gun violence. And that's where place network investigations comes in. Now, I just told dcm fortune, I'm [3:20:14 PM] going to hit the wave tops for you because I understand our time restrictions. I will say this if you'd ever like a more in-depth presentation about place network investigations, and really some of the some of the evidence that we found across the country related to how effective this is. I'd love to come back and speak to you once again, but just as an introduction today, I will say this what place network investigations is built on is this concept. There is a network of places that are used when you look at any of these gun violence hotspots or any violent location, there's typically a network of places that are very, very important. One is the crime site. So when we look at a hotspot map like the one I just presented for Austin, you'll find those concentrated levels of gun violence at very specific locations, intersections along street segments. Those are our crime sites. But there's three other types of places that are really important for the facilitation of violence and the persistence of violence in these locations. One is what's [3:21:15 PM] called a convergence setting. And that very simply is just think about public locations where people congregate for various reasons that might be associated with some of the illegal activity or some of the violence that's taking place in that location, often in alleyways. So spending time down on sixth street and I'm relatively new to Austin, very excited to be here. It's a wonderful city. You know, some of the alleyways that border sixth street, you'll find people sort of hanging out, milling about, and this is an important part of what's going on in terms of the illicit activities that's happening there. So you have these public places called convergence settings. We also have privately controlled locations that are referred to as comfort spaces. So imagine that if I'm engaged in some sort of illegal activity where I'm moving illicit goods, it could be weapons, it could be narcotics, it could be humans. In the case of human trafficking, these comfort spaces, these privately controlled locations become very important to that crime place network as well. And then finally, we have something [3:22:16 PM] called corrupting spots. And these are simply locations that are generally businesses and legitimate businesses, but that are engaged in activities that help to drive crime in these locations. So I think about after the economic downturn in Las Vegas in 2007, 2008, the police department came to me with a crime map of all the copper theft that had been occurring all across the city. And they said, what, doc? What could we possibly do about this? And it would be impossible to protect all the copper that were in the light posts or in air conditioned units inside of car catalytic converters, but we could trace the driver for that back to two metal recycling plants that were willing to take copper, no matter where it was delivered, where it came from, they didn't ask questions. And so it tended to drive crime across the city. Same thing for these corrupting spots. They might launder money. They might be buying and selling stolen goods. They might be doing a variety of things that help to sustain these, these, this criminal activity in and around these [3:23:17 PM] locations. So really, what we know is that all four of these locations are really important for crime and the persistence of crime in a location. So the first time that I ever saw this in action, I studied at the university of Cincinnati. I'm from southern California. Cincinnati was a culture shock to me. I don't know, I know the chief is from there and she hates this. But, you know, Marc twain said at the end of the world is coming, go to Cincinnati. It's about 20 years behind everything. It will buy you time. I don't know that that's true in all aspects. And I'll say in terms of their crime prevention initiatives, it's certainly not true because this is where we started to understand the importance of crime place networks. And so this was this was the number one calls for service location in the entire city, most violent location in the city of Cincinnati. A new commander takes over this particular district with this building, this 3522 location inside of that district and does everything science says to do to prevent crime. So first and [3:24:19 PM] foremost focuses on strategic deployment of police resources in order to sort of stabilize the violence in the location. Uses a focused deterrence or community violence interruption strategy to really focus on the the very few individuals who are really trigger pullers in that community willing to shoot and harm other people and sort of dismantle that that criminal network at the individual level, and then looking at the place, engaged in problem solving efforts and said, what can we do to improve this building? And was able, through nuisance abatement, to bring that place manager to the table and invest hundreds of thousands of dollars, right. All the all the necessary upgrades you would need at this particular location, lighting, getting better locks you think of, you name it, right? All the things we know some of these high crime locations need. And this commander looked fantastic when they went before the chief and was able to say, look, we had this massive crime reduction. This is wonderful. But about 90 days later, crime had come back and exceeded previous levels. [3:25:20 PM] And this is not a new story. This is something that we see over and over and over again. We dump a tremendous amount of police and city resources into a particular location, only to have it to return. And because I don't have a lot of time with you here today, I'm going to touch this fast, but I'm going to show you this is the crime site, the most violent proprietary location in the avondale neighborhood, right? Oh, I can't show you the the network behind it, which is unfortunate. It's not there for some reason. Next to that particular crime site, though, we have these two convergent settings. Right. So these are public locations where people who were engaged in the criminal behavior were tending to, to, to spend time. One was a great lookout location for what was an open air drug market just south of that building. Another one was this convenience store was receiving money from the city of Cincinnati to provide fresh food for the local neighborhood. It was a bit of a food desert in that location, and the joke [3:26:21 PM] from all the residents was only fresh food at that location was actually painted on those windows that you see there, because they weren't doing that with this money, and they were helping to facilitate a lot of the activity that was going on in that area. In addition, what the investigators found was going door to door in that apartment complex. Most people living in that apartment complex were solid, hardworking people who were simply sheltering in place and trying to survive in a very, very violent location. There was 1 or 2 if you went, if you looked at each individual unit apartments that were tied to what was going on in terms of the violence, one was a woman who was dating a member of the the the offender network that was engaged in some of this violence. So of course, this was a this a high crime apartment unit. Another one was actually a victim of the individuals who wanted to use her apartment as sort of a balcony and a lookout for some of their activity going on there. So for the most part, there's 1 or 2 comfort spaces inside of the building. But in [3:27:21 PM] the surrounding area, there was a series of these single family residences that the investigators found could be traced back to one individual who was receiving money from the city to rehab these houses to provide affordable housing for this community, and instead was a mid-level drug dealer who was facilitating that trade and was using these as comfort spaces in and around that neighborhood, which proved highly problematic. And just south of that building, you had this strip mall, right? These strip malls are very common in Las Vegas. I know I see them in Austin. We have these tiny strip malls. Most of these businesses were operating just trying to survive. Stay open. 1 or 2 of these businesses, investigators undercover operations found, were laundering money, buying and selling stolen goods and helping to facilitate that network in and around there. So if you can imagine this network of places in and around that crime site, this is what typically happens. And this is [3:28:22 PM] the big breakthrough. This is the thing that most, most people don't recognize in terms of the dynamics of crime. If we only focus on that crime site and we throw all of our resources at it, we leave the rest of that network intact. People who are engaged in crime and violence will do one of two things. They will withdraw into the rest of that network and wait until we redeploy our resources elsewhere, and then retake over that building, just as we saw in avondale. Or if there's a nearby location they can displace to while still accessing the rest of that network, we get crime displacement. So when you hear communities say, I'm so worried that crime is going to move from this location into our location, and that does happen from time to time, it's because we're leaving the rest of this infrastructure intact. And that's the idea behind place network investigations. So when you look at a hot spot on a map, these are just visible symptoms of these things. You've got an active criminal network engaged in various activity. These are almost always in underserved [3:29:24 PM] communities. In fact, they are always in underserved communities. And I don't think I've ever been in one of these hot spots that hasn't actually been a food desert in the past. A lot of this violence is opportunistic. You have people milling about in unmanaged spaces who are carrying weapons, who then engage in gun violence, and there's this unmanaged network of places. And so what place network investigations does is help us focus on how can we disrupt these various networks in order to again change the trajectory of that location long term, not just for a few months at a time. So we did test this ahead of the curve. So Marc twain isn't right about everything, but ahead of the curve in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the chief part of this, we did two pilot locations. We established two pilot locations. Cincinnati is made up of 52 very different neighborhoods, kind of like Austin, very different neighborhoods and a large jurisdiction. We picked two that were different, but but both had one of these micro locations, sent investigators out and said, could you find [3:30:24 PM] these network locations? And sure enough, they've come back and they say, yes, we are finding these convergent settings, these comfort spaces, these corrupting spots. But here's the thing that's most important is that police only have so many tools in their tool belt. So what other resources do we need to bring to the table to actually disrupt this network? Right. Actually, you know, remove this, this underlying criminal infrastructure. And when you look across what's happening in all of these different locations, there's so many different dynamics. A comfort space could simply be a place with lots of overgrown weeds where where you've got individuals hiding guns and ammunition. So when they're stopped by authorities, they don't have anything on them, but they have something close nearby. You see, in the upper right hand corner. This was a notorious place for drive by violence. And when you talk to community members, they told the investigators, these cars are not ours. We are not [3:31:25 PM] parking there. People are coming into our neighborhood parking their cars there because one, they use them as comfort spaces, right? They're leaving the drugs and guns in the car. And secondly, they're using these sort of as shields or barricades for the for the gun violence, as are passing through. Now again, police with only so many tools in their tool belt look at this and think, well, how can we disrupt these offender networks? But if you can think of this from a city level perspective and a city driven perspective, all of a sudden we can think about lots of ways to start picking apart that crime infrastructure or that crime network, and the way in which place network investigations operate is first, police work in tandem with the community to identify these networks because in addition to investigative processes that can uncover these places, the other individuals that know exactly how places are being used and in what manner are those who live and work in these locations. So working with the community, they identify these locations and the dynamic at those locations. Second stage is an all city [3:32:27 PM] team reviews this intelligence and prioritizes their various resources to help block opportunities for use of these various locations by individuals engaged in this type of behavior. And then long term, what we're looking at is long term environmental management changes in order to eliminate these crime opportunities. And what that takes is a coordinated response. And so all the way from the city manager, mayor level, all the way through all of our city departments and incorporating individuals like we heard from earlier with the boys and girls club, the community voice about what does the community want and need in these locations. We can start to leverage the various resources that the city has to block these opportunities. And just as one example, because I know we have limited time, but when traffic and engineering looked at that location with the drive by shootings that I showed you the picture of, they said we could easily, easily change the dynamics of this location. We can change the parking [3:33:28 PM] footprint, we can put in traffic calming devices, we can do a variety of things. And as soon as traffic and engineering intervened, zero drive by shootings in the months and years that followed. So there's a many, many different things that we can do once we understand the dynamics of crime at these locations. And so whether it's working with the da's office to really focus on those repeat offenders, that's always an important part of this. We also do things with other city departments to think strategically about. How do we best utilize our resources to shut down these opportunities and and unstick these really persistent, violent locations? That can be a variety of things that happen. One of the most important, I would say, is an economic development arm of this because, again, these are often underserved communities, under-resourced communities. So we start thinking about just like negative locations attract negative behavior, how do we start to replace those with really positive locations for a community? And so as my my [3:34:29 PM] friend, our friend Ethel Cogan used to tell us, it's not a it's not enough to take a negative space and turn it neutral. So for example, take enforcement action and shut down a location. The long term question is how do we reactivate that in a way to serve community needs? Have the have the residents and businesses take back over that space so that you don't have the criminal element move back in and just simply reestablish themselves in those same locations? So it takes a lot of coordination, it takes a lot of effort. And we often do in every one of these micro locations that we've we've established across the country, we think about what could be the signature project, what does the community want to see happen, and then start addressing those previously criminogenic spaces with some of these signature projects to really change the dynamics in these communities? And I love this public safety model because it does a variety of things, but one, we're all operating with very scarce resources. We just heard about staffing at APD. Everybody is [3:35:29 PM] operating with budgetary constraints, a lot of constrained resources, but it maximizes our scarce resources. We can be highly focused. We can focus on that j-curve focus on the places that are disproportionately impacted by violence. It's all about accountability and partnership and partnership with the community. Very importantly, it is the only strategy I have ever seen that produces anything beyond a year's worth of violence reduction, really. I mean, some of our most evidence based violence reduction initiatives that maybe six months, maybe nine months, if you repeat them over and over again, this really helps to stabilize neighborhoods, and it really changes the dynamics between police and the community they serve. When police are acting as ambassadors for resources to bring into these communities and really help to stabilize these communities, it's it's it's a wonderful thing on the back end to see just how the relationship between the police and the community change long term when we adopt these types of strategies. So in, in, in these, these initial pilot [3:36:32 PM] locations, it's I'm going to talk about here because we have such limited time. But just to give you a picture, a very clear picture of what happens when we do this and do this with fidelity and do it right. So two years prior to the implementation of the strategy, in that initial pilot location, you can see the number of people that were impacted and were involved in gun related violence. And then after a 93% reduction in the two years that followed, in terms of violent victimizations, although we weren't focused on that necessarily, it spilled over. We had this diffusion of benefits effect to other violent victimizations, reducing that by 35%. And I think most importantly and dramatically, and when we talk about scarce resources and using our justice system resources widely, they were able to do this while achieving a 42% reduction in the number of arrests that took place in these communities over time. And so, just in terms of thinking through long term trajectory, how do we do this [3:37:34 PM] without traditional criminal justice resources and with other partners at the table? This provides the structure and the process through which to do that and do it very thoughtfully, do it very well. And in doing it and do this in partnership with the community. So this was the first site, and I remember we were so excited because there was a 90 like about a 93% reduction in shootings post nij implementation. I always say it's not a panacea for crime, right? There's you want to do this strategy in tandem with other strategies and other other resource deployments, of course. But we were very excited. The second location, the second pilot site, had a 77% reduction, and I think anybody would take a 77% reduction in shooting violence as a major win. Right? You say, but I'm a nerd. And I said, but why? Why 93% reduction here in only 77% reduction in the other in the investigators in their follow up analysis told us we missed one of the locations in the network. And since removing [3:38:35 PM] that location, there has not been one shooting in that particular community. So you're really talking about transformational change, long term sustainable gun violence reduction. And so here in Austin, 900 east Braker Laine, one of these persistent violent micro locations. So between January and September of this year, you can see generated 137 calls for service. We're operating 66 investigative cases, 18 gun seizures, 28 arrests, two shootings at that location. Chief Davis brought in. We had training resources. We trained investigators. We trained individuals who are working in and around these areas to look and figure out what was going on in terms of the dynamics there. I want to give commander J.J. Schmidt a what an incredible work he has done to start identifying the place network in and around this area. He partnered with local, state, federal partners [3:39:35 PM] to look at what was going on in this location. And I think we're uncovering everything from narcotics trade to even human trafficking, some really terrible things. After the implementation of the the peony, the initial strategy, where they went in and they sort of started removing that network they had in the month following the operation, you can see a dramatic change in in the numbers of calls for service, the cases, the gun seizures, the arrests. More recently, they said they're now up to three calls for service, but two of those were officer initiated. The other interesting thing to note is they now have made several additional arrests because individuals are trying to reestablish themselves in that same location, just as we see in other places. And this is where the coordination out of the city manager's office and with dcm fortunes assistance, is to bring all these other city resources to the table to help stabilize this location. So we don't just go back to the levels of violence that we've [3:40:36 PM] seen in the past. And so this is all part of the chief's, I think, larger, grander initiative to really turn APD into an elite problem solving agency. And I can't tell you how excited I am about this. And in fact, I am so excited that I have I'm leaving UNLV at the end of this semester, and I've taken a position at Texas state university, and I am moving the international center for problem oriented policing to Texas state university, where we hope to partner with APD to really make this one of our flagship agencies, where we are operating on all cylinders, training officers and problem solving how to prevent harm, just really taking all of the resources that are out there that are just absolutely incredible. And I'd love to talk to you more about the resources available through that center when we have more time. But it's going to be, I hope, absolutely fantastic. And we're hoping to host our first conference here in Austin internationally, bring people in from all over the world who are doing this type of work to show them the type of work that we're initiating here in Austin as well. And so that's me. And [3:41:38 PM] that is the fastest I have ever, ever discussed and I in my life. But I hope it was a great overview and I'm excited for your questions if we have any time for that. >> Thank you, doctor Harold. And it was amazing. And I'll reserve my question because I want to set up a follow up meeting on this with you. And have you also come back, colleagues, we if I'll take questions now, but we do have one more presentation after this, so I'll ask if we can limit it to 1 or 2 questions each. >> Council member duchen. >> First, just thank you again. I like council, like our chair, councilmember Velazquez. I look forward to a presentation, a more in-depth presentation where you're not quite as rushed to get through everything. I've got some questions about. I mean, certainly using your example in Cincinnati was really interesting because it seems like in some part it was an oversight of the city in a couple of different departments that allowed that situation to continue. And so there's some questions I have regarding how to address that piece of it, [3:42:39 PM] which might be out of APD's control, but maybe there's a way to to explore that. And then I'm also curious how you're prioritizing where to spend your energy, how you're identifying the places that you've, you know, worked in these cases, and then you touched on it. And also to the extent that crime gets dispersed or displaced as a result of these activities. And I think about even operation Ramberg, which was a few years ago, and nearby the breaker location, and how when I looked at the crime data afterwards, it seems like to your point, generally speaking, it came back. Yes. Even though the program itself was successful for, you know, it seemed like the better part of a year. So all to say, I'll look forward to peppering you with those questions after we can get a more in-depth presentation. >> Yes, sir. Thank you, thank. >> You, vice chair. >> I just want to thank you for the overview. I really love how it starts with the community and also the long term positive, like the staying power of the changes. And thank goodness we have acm fortune making sure [3:43:39 PM] we're going to be very coordinated across all the departments. No pressure okay. Thank you. >> Thank you ma'am. >> Thank you very much. >> I appreciate you. >> Thank you all colleagues. >> Now we'll take up item number five. It's a briefing on staff review of lessons learned from the community communications during the critical incident that occurred in zilker park on September 5th. Excuse me. September 10th, 2025. And we have Jim Reddick, director of Austin emergency management. >> Council members. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, chair. >> Members of council and members of the committee. I know that pd had received most of the attention on this issue, and that's obviously based on the scenario, but I can tell you that it's a much larger issue, one that's organizational wide and community wide. And I'll thank DC and fortune now for his efforts and leadership to bring us all together in that unity of effort and unity of messaging that we want to achieve, because messaging and alerts and notifications is one [3:44:41 PM] of our highest priority issues, and one that we're committed to getting right, getting the right information to the right people at the right time. And so with that, I think it's important to say that early on in incidents, there's a lot of change as the incident involves. So those notifications will change, but we'll do everything we can leveraging technology and and the incident command system to get the messages out as they need to be. So since the incident took place, I know that Austin police department has had numerous community meetings taking information, concerns and addressing various questions throughout the community. In early October, we had a conversation among emergency management leadership, among police leadership, and that of Austin ISD. That includes their leadership, their law enforcement professionals, and public information officers. And so, you know, we talked about what needed to be done moving [3:45:41 PM] forward. And there's quite a bit so I can tell you that there are standardized templates being developed as we speak, and they're based on the guidance from the industry standard. Doctor Jeanette Sutton, who does this for a living, who FEMA hires to to set templates for, for the entire emergency management community. And they're all focused on identifying from who the message is being sent, what action we're asking folks to take, and otherwise making sure that the message conveys confidence and clarity in terms of exactly what's being done. We're also learning through that. The meetings that we've had with Austin ISD that cops speak one language, schools speak a different language, as also fire speaks a different language. So making sure that we're consistent in the terms that we use, using terms that won't necessarily cause panic among the parent community, but making sure that we're accurate [3:46:42 PM] in terms of what we're putting out and everyone in that unified command, in terms of the liaisons in the school districts, also are aware of those same terms. And we really blast those out. Again, the same messaging throughout all the different audiences. We're looking at training by the appropriate staff. We mentioned before that we now have the emergency alert system. We have the wireless emergency alert system, we have ipaws. So we have the tools for for lesser incidents and more life saving incidents. And we want to make sure that all of the professional communicators all have access to that which requires the training. So doing training and not just in our own silos of excellence, but cross training, so we can have real conversations of large scale incidents for which there's going to be multiple agencies working as one. We're looking at planning just in general and then exercises as well. So we're going to plan, train and exercise together, [3:47:42 PM] but not just with pd and fire and emergency management and aid. We have a workshop we're scheduling in January where we've reached out to all of the K through 12, public and private, as well as the higher education institutions. So we will establish a coalition of the willing to make sure that we're at least using the same templates, the same language, and everything else that would be articulated in our overall alert notification functional annex. And then finally, I just want to say that again, our focus is on timely, accurate, actionable and accessible alerts to the community. And so I'll just say that we've also recently met with our vendor everbridge. Again, our focus is on getting messaging out in the 14 different languages in Austin. And we we have some exciting things that that seem to be coming down the pike that everbridge has promised us. And so we look forward to keeping in touch with them and keeping you posted throughout. And with [3:48:43 PM] that, I may have broken the record today in terms of being brief, so I will turn it back to you for questions. >> Thank you director. Questions, colleagues. We broke that record too. >> Awesome. >> Well, thank you so much for being here with us today, director. Actually, do we still have councilman alter on? Okay. >> Perfect. >> Thank you for your leadership and continued support. >> Thank you colleagues. >> Now we're going to take up item number five. Excuse me. Item number six which is a discussion and possible action on public safety committee meeting scheduled for the year 2026. You have the dates in front of you. Let me know if there are any questions and I'll accept the motion for the calendar. >> I have a question or request chair, which is that I will be gone. June 1st. June 1st. So if there's a way to reschedule that to the end of June or perhaps in July, may or July, [3:49:46 PM] that would be helpful. If not, I also understand. >> So we can look at that and amend that and bring it back. Do we have to vote on this today? >> That would be ideal, and we can come back and amend it in January. >> So we can we can vote on it today, adopt it, and then amended in January for the date reflecting council member duchen. >> Correct. >> Perfect. Are you comfortable with that? Okay, I'll accept a motion. Motion by by council member duchin, seconded by vice chair Laine. And without objection, the 2026 meeting schedule is approved. Colleagues, that brings us to item number seven. And that's to identify items to discuss in future meetings. If anybody has any any ideas that they would like to daylight, let us know and or email us. Alrighty members, there's no further business to come before the public safety committee of the Austin city council. Without objection, this meeting is adjourned at 350. Thank you