The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2025-01-09
Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (25,253 words), shown in readable case and split into speaker turns. Speakers are not yet identified (colors just separate consecutive turns). Auto-captions can contain errors — check the recording for anything that matters.
Session summaryEditor-reviewed
The Portland City Council held a public safety work session on Thursday, January 9, 2025, opening with acknowledgment of a national day of mourning for President Jimmy Carter and an update on a Multnomah County fire strike team deployed to assist with wildfires in the Los Angeles area. Presentations covered the Public Safety Service Area's structure and bureau directors, followed by overviews of the Office of Violence Prevention, Portland Ceasefire, Portland Street Response, Portland Police Bureau staffing and priorities, Portland Fire and Rescue operations and staffing comparisons, the Bureau of Emergency Management's coordination functions, and the Bureau of Emergency Communications' 911 dispatch operations and accreditation progress. Recurring themes included staffing shortages, overtime reliance, structural budget deficits, workforce wellness, and ongoing efforts to classify 911 call types for appropriate response allocation across police, fire, and alternative responders. Some figures, such as officer staffing numbers and shooting/crime reduction percentages, were stated inconsistently across speakers. A question-and-answer session followed, during which councilors raised topics including call allocation, training program changes, regional mutual aid, gun violence prevention, PSR's scope, emergency preparedness for wildfire and infrastructure risks, and workforce collaboration. Some votes may have occurred; outcomes, if any, are recorded in the vote ledger. Councilors requested written follow-up on several data points before adjourning.
AI-drafted from the session's auto-captions, reviewed by an editor — describes the discussion only; recorded votes live in the vote ledger. Captions contain errors.
0 Good morning everybody. My name is mike myers. I'm the deputy city administrator for the olympic safety service area. We're just a slightly delayed the public safety team is in with the mayor giving a quick briefing. They should be out shortly to join us. So stand by and we'll get started as soon as we can. Just a quick reminder for those that are just joining us. My name is mike myers. I'm the deputy city administrator for the public safety service area. Several of the public safety bureau directors and a couple counselors with the mayor for a briefing. They should be out shortly and we can get started just by.
1 Ready to start us. President, how are you doing? Okay.
2 Good morning everybody. Thank you for bearing with us while we run a few minutes late. I am going to open this work session. It is Thursday. It's Thursday, January 9th at 935. I apologize that we are running a few minutes late this morning. We are going to have a briefing and conversation about our public safety community safety system. Broadly, I do want to note before we start that today is a day of mourning for president jimmy carter. There are events happening nationally as we remember president carter's legacy and all that he stood for. I hope we can aim to strive for the civility, values and service that he brought to everything that he did, both in his time as president and after. With that, thank you to our team for being here today, I believe. Do we have stephanie? Are you kicking us off or is dca myers?
3 I think dca myers will kick us off. Okay. Thank you.
4 Thank you, madam president. How is my audio?
5 We can hear you just fine.
6 Great. Madam president, thank you for the introduction. My name is mike myers. I am the deputy city administrator for the public safety service area for the city of Portland. Thank you for the patience. I think most of you know that I am struggling with the medical issue that I'm trying to figure out, so I'll be virtual with you today. I also wanted to make a quick note. Tuesday evening I was contacted by chief gillespie, your fire chief. I think most of you know about the wildland fires north of the la area. Chief gillespie was anticipating a call for assistance from the state of california via the fire marshal. That request did come in yesterday morning. A what? A Multnomah county strike team was put together. What a strike team is. Council is a combination of engine companies from across Multnomah county and a battalion chief to lead that that group, that strike team was put together left the Portland area yesterday. There are three Portland fire engines and led by battalion chief jason kelly from Portland fire headed to la with their arrival time at noon today. We want to wish them all of the safe travel and success there and their safe return, and so I appreciate the support of mayor, madam president and the councilors in your support in the congregation in california. So thank you, chief. Chief gillespie, let's get started. Madam president, mayor, council members, welcome. Today. This is our first work session for public safety. Next slide. Today we will be going through quickly an introduction to the service area. Some of you have had some introduction already. I know you've have a packet already and some of you know the bureau's quite well, but you'll get to meet the bureau directors today. We'll talk a little bit about our top challenges, some recent accomplishments, and that what we're looking for as we go ahead, we will have ample time for questions and answers. At the end. I expect the presentations to last about 20 to 30 minutes this morning. My hope is that if we can hold questions, take notes, hold questions till the end, we will have a couple of hours to answer those questions. The bureau directors are here with several staff members. We have contingent from our finance and budget team here. We have hidden slides that we will pull up if we can help, if it will help explain certain things and questions you might have. So we are well prepared today to attempt to answer most of your questions. So this will allow us to kind of get through the presentation fairly quickly and then have that time available for you as I anticipate you'll have some important questions that you want answered. Next slide, the public safety service area does have a mission, vision and values statements. The mission is that the service area advances the safety through collaborative prevention, response, and recovery. Our vision is a safe Portland for all, and our values mimic those of the city's anti-racism, equity, transparency, communication, collaboration and fiscal responsibility. Next slide. Most of you are very aware of the city's new form of government's organizational chart. I report as the deputy city administrator, one of six I report to the city administrator of michael jordan below me. I have six very talented directors that you will meet today. We have a director over enterprise services director, elizabeth perez. You'll meet her and get an introduction to her work. Bureau of emergency communications director bob cozzie, the Portland bureau of emergency management. Director shad ahmed. Your fire chief, Ryan gillespie. We have a director of community safety and the associated work. That's that's her responsibility. That is director stephanie howard. And, of course, the police chief, bob day, who I share responsibility, supervision with the city administrator and the mayor's office. Next slide. These are your presenters today. They are the names I just talked about. We're going to start off with director stephanie howard. The director of community safety. Stephanie, welcome and thank you for being here today.
7 Thank you. And good morning, mayor. Madam president, councilors, it's great to be here with you today. As mike said, my name is stephanie howard and I am the director of community safety for the public safety service area. I'm here today to provide you an overview of two of the three programs in my portfolio, which are the office of violence prevention and our Portland ceasefire program. Before we begin, I just want to give a little context, because I'll be fairly high level in my presentation, and that's intentional because there is a budget note that came with last year's budget that we are working on now, and it directed us to do a deeper analysis and make recommendations regarding the funding for these programs, the structure and how these programs can work better so that you all can consider that going forward. And so that report is in process. It will be finalized in the coming weeks, and you'll have a very granular level of detail on these programs based on that report. I do want to just begin with a little bit of context. Also for the problem that we're here to talk about. And in my situation, at least, gun violence in Portland has been an incredibly alarming and serious problem in the city, and one that we have been putting a lot of resources and energy into trying to address. As many of you know, between 2019 and 2022, gun violence in Portland rose 230%. I do want to make sure that it's very clear that while we talk about data and trends, what we're really talking about is lives. We're talking about human beings, and we're talking about mothers, fathers, sons, daughters. We're talking about people that matter very much to all of us in this community. And that's how we really work to center our work as we move forward, to try to address these problems. And it's also important to be very clear that this problem has a disproportionate impact on our black and brown portlanders and particularly, you know, young men. So these these are, you know, areas that have great significance to all of us and have great significance to our larger community in the face of these incredible losses, the city of Portland made historic investments in the office of violence prevention to expand their ability to work and intervene. We also created the Portland ceasefire program to create a more focused and specific track to engage with people who are at highest risk of gun violence. Gun violence is an incredibly complex problem. It doesn't arise out of simple circumstances, and the solutions are not simple. They are diverse. They are, you know, complicated. And they require a holistic tools to prevent and intervene when it does happen. And I want to really underscore for all of you that through the collective efforts of the public safety bureaus, you'll hear about today, we've been able to make good progress. We've been able this year or 2024 over 2023, to reduce total shooting incidents by 21%. We've reduced gun homicides by 10% year over year, and those numbers get bigger. When we look at the average of the last three years, we're in the 30s in those percentages. So what what is happening is, is working. We're seeing the trends and our work is far from done. But this this progress is the result of multidisciplinary coordination and collaboration among the office of violence prevention. Portland ceasefire, the Portland police and many other of our public safety partners. So with that backdrop, I'll start with a quick overview of the office of violence prevention. The mission of the of the office of violence prevention is to prevent and reduce violence for community engagement, education and proactive measures, and to achieve these goals. Ovp works on, on, on many different fronts in the community. Education and outreach piece. They begin initiatives that are aimed at educating community about violence prevention strategies. And right now we are working and have been working to really reinvigorate our community piece collaborative meetings, which are monthly meetings that bring together community, bring together stakeholders in the public safety space, work to share knowledge, to listen to community needs, and to make sure that they hear from us what we're doing and what opportunities there are for them to engage. Ovp also administers grants to community organizations that work in the violence prevention space. We're currently planning for programing and grants to address gaps in the spring break time period for youth, as well as summertime violence and preparing to invite applications for those those grants going forward. So that work is already underway. Finally, office of violence prevention also is a member or has a contract with an organization called trauma and violence impacted families, and that program works to provide with in collaboration with county the county to provide social assistance, programing and resources for adults, youth and families who have been impacted by violence. Also under the umbrella of ovp, we have two additional programs. One is called the safe blocks program and the other is rose city self-defense. With regard to safe blocks, the goal there and the mission is to bring bring place based community violence interventions to portland's many neighborhoods and in doing so, to increase the livability, the thriving nature of those areas and to reduce violence. Safe blocks works with community building. I'm sorry, in a community led and place making manner to hold community building events like cleanups, host community gardens, murals, lighting and space activation. And so these are really exciting efforts that we've had some great feedback from the community about and had some great results with. As far as rose city self-defense goes, I. This program offers free self-defense training and education programs to empower communities, particularly girls, women, members of the LGBTQ plus, and other vulnerable communities. It is a small but mighty team of two full time employees, but they are supported by a team of really amazing volunteers. We currently have 30 volunteers who help with these trainings, but I'm happy to report that as of Saturday, we will be training an additional 24, so we'll have a total of 54 volunteers. And this. It's an incredibly popular program in the community. Those classes fill up within minutes sometimes of when they're offered. So it's a great program. That is we really love and are excited about. And I will take this opportunity to offer to all of you to take a class with rose city self-defense. Those folks would love to host you and your any members of your team. So I'll be reaching out to follow up on that for anyone who's interested. Moving now to Portland ceasefire. The mission of Portland ceasefire is to provide immediate and long term intervention strategies for individuals who are at the highest risk of perpetrating or being victimized by gun violence. This is done through the offering of intensive case management, through street level outreach, and through providing customized and tailored services to meet the needs of these people who are most highly impacted. I'm oversimplifying this. So again, you'll have the budget note, and we can certainly talk more about the details of how this works. But essentially the way that this program works is every week. Our program director, sierra ellis, is participating in a shooting review, which is a law enforcement meeting that reviews the prior all of the shootings from the prior seven days in that meeting, the details of those shootings are discussed, and sierra is able to conduct assessments of the people who are tangentially involved in these incidents to determine what their risk factors are and whether they're a candidate for ceasefire services. After that meeting, sierra will then convene coordination meetings that include our community based partners, where she can then work with them to find the right program, the right mentorship, the right outreach folks to make contact with that person. And it's what we call relentlessly pursue their their interests and their safety to try to match them with services after street level outreach. Their folks who are willing to participate are assigned intensive case managers, and those are daily contacts with the person that has lived experience that has credibility in that person's community, and can help with the variety of services that are needed to help change this person's circumstances and change their behavior. Cognitive behavioral therapy is a part of that intensive case management work as well. So that is at an 18 month process. So it is a long term commitment that is really intended to give people the skills they need and the opportunities they need to change their behavior and move forward in a positive manner. One thing that I do want to make sure that you all are aware of is that ceasefire runs and is guided by data in terms of portland's gun violence. What we are seeing is that we have a unique gun violence problem in that we have, you know, the disproportionate impact to communities of color with with regard to gang group and retaliatory gun violence. But we also have a growing number of members of the homeless community who are impacted by gun violence. And it's a little bit unique to Portland. So in working with our data teams, ceasefire has been working with other community based organizations to figure out how can we engage with that community as well. And we're really pleased we'll be partnering with poic, that is launching a peer to peer program that works on specifically trying to identify intensive case managers that can work with people facing homelessness, addiction and are at risk of violence. Finally, and I know I'm going a little long, so I'll be really quick. Ceasefire works with the hospital based intervention program called healing hurt people. Those opportunities when someone is injured and in a hospital, those create great opportunities for us to have impactful conversations and really try to engage them with services. And so we also work with that. That's a best practice nationally that we are really proud to engage with. Finally, as I mentioned, we've got great data teams that help guide the work of ceasefire to help make sure that we're agile and conduct quick analyzes so that we're investing and supporting the right kinds of services that meet the needs of our community. I mentioned that I oversee three programs in my portfolio in Portland. Street response is the third of those, but I want to hand it over to elizabeth perez, who's done a terrific job of supporting that program in this last year and allow her now to take it over and give you that overview. Thank you.
8 Good morning, madam president. Councilors. Mayor, my name is elizabeth perez. I use she her pronouns and I'm the enterprise services director. That happened January 2nd of this year. So I'm still learning and growing in this position. But what that really means is that I oversee budget development, procurement, employee services, strategic planning and transition. And then for the dca's office, specifically, it's communications equity. And then we have two advisory boards and commissions. We have pccep, which is the Portland committee on community-engaged policing and fit cog, which is the focused intervention team, community oversight group. So as stephanie said, I had the privilege of overseeing Portland street response and seeing the transition of Portland street response from the fire bureau into the dca's office, I'd first like to celebrate that on January 7th, we had the four year anniversary of Portland street response. We've also had one employee who has been here the whole time, which is our aftercare supervisor, heather wheatman. So I just want to acknowledge and celebrate the work that has been done so far, like ovp and ceasefire. Psr was directed to produce a budget note to discuss mission scope, staffing and budget, along with the chat program and the fire bureau. And that should be coming this month for you all. So like I said, I've been overseeing this program for the past few months. The team is resilient, caring, wonderful people, and we really had the opportunity to reestablish the mission and vision for Portland street response, with input from the staff, and have worked really hard to fill vacant positions to get the program to full capacity. So for those who don't know, psr is made up of two distinct teams. We have our frontline teams, which respond to crisis calls from 911 and our community partners. The teams go out in pairs of two. We have an emt and a mental health crisis responder. These teams respond to calls where a person may be experiencing mental health crisis, intoxication, or is drug affected. A person who is outside and down and has not been checked. A person who is outside in yelling. A person who needs a referral for services but doesn't have a phone line. And in addition, there are no weapons on scene. The person is not in traffic or obstructing traffic. The person is not violent towards others physically or verbally. The person is not suicidal and the person is not inside a private residence. So that's team one. Team two is our aftercare team that's made up of our peer support specialists and our community health responders. What they do is they follow up in a timely manner to connect individuals to services and prevent future crises. They create individualized care plans from those referrals from the outreach team or the frontline team. So they assist in the following ope application support. Shelter referrals. Housing readiness, preparation, sobriety and harm reduction. And then advocacy with agency partners such as aging and disability services and health clinics. I want to give you some recent successes since July of 2024. So we've filled 11 positions in that time, and we have three recruitments in process. We are working with our partners to identify barriers to medicaid and develop plans to overcome those barriers. And we've also applied for federal grants. We have 50 plus policies either in draft or approval stages. We're really working on our performance development and continuous quality improvement to really establish this program and make sure that our staff know their job, are confident in their job. And then I just really want to thank April roa. She is our psr interim manager, who, through her dedication and her perseverance, has really provided the stability and encouragement needed for this program to thrive. So I've shared a little bit about our operations, which is very important. But as mayor wilson stated in his first address to council, this work is about real individuals who are suffering on our streets. So I'd like to share a couple stories about the impacts to real people. So we've had a familiar face who would pop up from time to time since the pilot. Our aftercare team began working with this client more consistently in July of 2024. The client was being seen multiple times a day by psr first responders, er teams. And despite daily engagement, the client repeatedly refused services for several months. During this period, the client was also placed on hospital holds multiple times, but was released each time only for the cycle to repeat. Recognizing the need for a coordinated approach, our aftercare supervisor successfully connected with tc 911, Multnomah county aging and disability and the good samaritan legacy social work supervisor to coordinate guardianship, allowing her to transition to long term supportive housing through consistent support from our peers and a community health worker. The client has reported that they are now sober, employed and housed. Another more recent story is on christmas day. The psr outreach crew received a request from aftercare staff for assistance with a client who was seeking resources and shelter. Aftercare was able to secure a bed at bybee lake shelter, but they left the scene to gather some supplies for the client. When they returned 20 minutes later, they found the client surrounded by Portland police officers. The client had called the police because she was being harassed by several individuals around her. The team quickly assessed the situation for safety and communicated the involvement with the client. After speaking with police and clarifying the efforts to help secure shelter. Officers disengaged and aftercare provided cab fare and a warm handoff to the shelter. I share these stories because sometimes we see some immediate short term success, and other times it takes months or years of engagement for us to see the life changing success that we seek. We must also engage with our partners, including Multnomah county, our community based organizations and other public safety branches, to achieve these successful outcomes. And lastly, I again, I just want to thank you all. Looking forward to talking to you more and educating you on psr, and really will be handing that over to stephanie howard. So psr is in very capable hands. But thank you for the time and yeah, appreciate you all.
9 Oh it looks like my slide. Good morning. I'm bob day. It's robert when I'm in trouble. But you can just call me bob. It's fine. I want to take a quick minute and introduce my executive team here. Deputy chief chris jovic. Chief jovic is essentially in charge of operations for the bureau on a day to day basis, the organization and will probably be somebody you'll be interacting with regularly. And then we have assistant chief dobson, who's oversees our operations branch, which is essentially uniform. Patrol is largely what our operations branch is. Special thank you to my to my friend and colleague, assistant chief lavelle. He oversees our services branch, which would largely be our in-house work personnel training, business services, things like that. But I just want to take a minute and recognize chuck and how much I appreciate his leadership, his willingness to step in in 2020. His sacrifice and service for the three and a half years as he guided both the police bureau and I think the city and the community through some really challenging times and grateful that he has agreed to stay on and be a good sounding board and a counselor and a friend. So thank you for that, chuck. And then finally absent today, unfortunately, is assistant chief amanda mcmillan. Amanda's not feeling well, so she stayed home today. But amanda is in charge of our investigative branch. And our investigative branch is largely detectives and other units. Our special emergency reaction team and other teams that tactical teams, etc. So that's kind of an overview. My expectation is that you will probably be spending a great deal of time with them, or with the precinct commanders in your districts. Just given the needs and the challenges. But know that my number is always available. I want to be available to each of you. And certainly if you're not getting the answers responses you need or you just want to have coffee or conversation, I'd hope that we will get an opportunity. There's a lot of you and one of me. But I just want you to know that I am available for those for those opportunities. A couple of slides. I was told five minutes. I've never kept anything five minutes. But I'm going to do my best to just give you an overview. I'm assuming there might be 1 or 2 questions when we get to the q&a section, so we can always come back to it. But when I came on board, as many of you are aware, I retired in 2019 from the bureau after 29 years of service. I was the deputy chief when I retired. Very grateful for that experience. Spent a little over four years retired, but still stayed very engaged in the conversation around criminal justice, social justice, racial justice work both locally and nationally, and was caught off guard but flattered that the mayor would ask me to step back in. When chief lavelle made the decision to step down. So I'm honored to have served now since September of 23. And it's been quite a ride, and I'm grateful for it. And I'm looking forward to this transition under mayor wilson's leadership and your guidance and direction. A couple of things here. When I started, immediately established three priorities for us, and that is that we transform the dynamic between the police and the people we serve. Every chief that I worked for and I worked for 12in my first 29 years has gotten up and said, we need to restore trust in the community. We need to build trust in the community. We need to earn trust in the community. We need to gain trust in the community. I believe trust is the bedrock of how law enforcement works in our country, that if we do not have the trust of those that we serve, that it's irrelevant in what we do. We pull a car over and we pull a car over. There should be an expectation by the person being stopped that this stop will be equitable, transparent, fair and reasonable regardless of the outcome. And so I understand and value the importance of trust. But I intentionally chose those language there because I believe that we need to be intentional and actionable in our efforts. I want to talk about transform the dynamic between the police and the people we serve. Really the responsibility upon all of us as a community and going together to understand this relationship. One of the things you will not hear me speak very often about is community and police. I talk very regularly about community. We are in this together. I fully understand my role and the role of the Portland police bureau and the city of Portland, but I think that we are all responsible for one another, and I want us to continue to be looking for ways to transform that dynamic. And we have done so tremendously. And there's numbers and stats and things that I can share with you during the q&a if you're interested. Reducing crime and the fear of crime. This has been part of the Portland police bureau mission statement for as long as I can remember. This is generally our sweet spot. Reducing crime. We're pretty good at that. Some of the numbers indicate that over the last year we still have, you know, a long ways to go. It's we know that we're never going to get to zero. There's probably always going to be a mean or an average, but we still have some work to do. For example, as stephanie mentioned, the great work that we've seen through the office of violence prevention and ceasefire and the ongoing decrease in shootings. But as of the end of 2024, we're still nearly 100% higher than we were in 2019. And where other cities are seeing a dramatic decline, unfortunately, we're still seeing high numbers in our homicide and active violence. Boston had 24 homicides in 2024. We had 68. Seattle is probably the last numbers I saw was in the 50s. So we still have a long ways to go as a city to improve. But we are seeing a reduction in crime. But the real key there is really the fear of crime that's much more damaging to a community as the fear of crime. And I mentioned earlier to some councilors, a phrase I use often in the organization is we cannot not believe our experience. We cannot not believe our experience. If chief gillespie is in pain and I tell him he's not in pain, that's not very helpful. And unfortunately, a lot of our community and our portlanders have experienced or are aware of or know a story of related to being the victim of a crime and that drives community response. I'm proud to say that, you know, stolen vehicles, for example, has reduced almost 60%. January 2023. We had nearly a thousand cars a month stolen after taking a data driven approach, working with OHSU, working with our partners throughout 2024, we were averaging these are rough numbers, but, you know, around 400, 400 a month versus a thousand a month is tremendous. But if you're one of those 400 that had your car stolen last week, that's not very helpful for me to tell you that we're down 60% in stolen car theft. And that's not a criticism. That's just a reality. We cannot not believe our experience. And the fear of crime is really, I think, hinders us in many ways. And I am passionate about reducing not only crime, but really the fear of crime. And I believe that happens through changing the experience, changing the dynamic, which points us back to the first goal. And we have created numerous opportunities in the last year around that community engagement and outreach to create other environments for both our police officers and our community to interact, to get to know each other. I've also tried to be as transparent as possible in my communication with portlanders about what we're doing and why we're doing it, accepting responsibility where we fall short and affirming and praising the good work that the men and women of the organization do every day. And finally, around organizational growth and development. I say routinely to community leaders that I am unapologetically, inwardly focused on the wellness and the well-being of our membership. And I hear sometimes, you know, kind of a puzzled look or pause like, well, you serve us, you serve the community, and you should be focused on us. And I fully understand that expectation. Last year, Portland police officers responded to a little over 200,000 calls for service and had umpteen thousand more additional contacts through self-initiated activity. And if the men and women of the organization, both our professional staff, which are so critical to our success as well as our officers, are not in a good space mentally, emotionally, physically, financially, psychologically, spiritually, then those encounters are what reflect the police bureau. I've learned a long time ago that people really are less concerned about our intentions, and they're more interested in our behaviors. Our behaviors demonstrate our values. We can be as well-intended as we want, but it's our behaviors that demonstrate our values. So I am constantly looking for ways to affirm, encourage, hold accountable, challenge, and rise the organization up to meet the expectations of portlanders. And having been in this profession for a number of years, I would say those expectations are high and I welcome those. And I do believe it, says the Portland police bureau. Apart as an agency both in the state and in the country, in terms of what we're able to deliver in terms of service. Next slide please. There's always going to be conversations around police bureau staffing. There has been for as long as I can recall, these numbers here are fluid. They probably have changed a little bit even as we speak today. And I know that we're going to have more conversation about staffing. I just want to give kind of a high level overview of that as we excuse me, as we pass it along to the next presenter, the when you see the numbers on there that it says total officer rank 535 539 patrol officers 293. We've done numerous studies throughout my career. We really believe to adequately meet the need of police officers in the precincts and do it in a way that's also fiscally responsible. We that number should be much closer to 400. We've strived for that over the years. I can remember times in my earlier tenure where we were certainly much closer to that number, but that just expresses the deficit that we're facing in terms of in terms of patrol officers. And when you see 293 patrol officers. They're obviously not all working today, right? They have to work varied shifts. I'll just give you a quick example. The last 24 hours today, right now, this morning as we speak, the minimum number of officers that we project needed for the city of Portland is 53. Now, those 53 are coming from east central and north precinct. And fortunately today we're actually at that number, which is unusual. We're doing that at the expense of five overtime positions. So we reached the minimum standard by hiring five additional officers on overtime. Yesterday afternoon. Our afternoon shift, which runs from 4 p.m. To 2 a.m, we have a minimum standard of 55 officers goes up a couple because we see an increase in calls for service tends to be a more active time. And we operated at 41 yesterday afternoon, city of Portland, we had 41 police officers. We believe the minimum standard is 55. And that's because we were only able to offer two hire, two on overtime. I'm opposed to constantly ordering our officers to work. I don't believe that tired, overworked officers is good for the organization. I think it's good for the community. So we're dependent upon officers being willing to participate. And the challenge we're facing is that they have been worked so hard and so much that we are putting out what we know to be a lesser number and not to steal any thunder from my friend and colleague, chief gillespie. But you have 171 firefighters, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in the city of Portland. And the reason that that number exists is because the city has recognized over the years the importance of quick and available response, and they have support of the fire bureau in a way that has allowed them and through his leadership and his management to achieve a level of success and sustainability. But we are constantly evaluating where do we put our members to best serve the organization. We have 94 officers in training. That's a great number, but the training process is long. 16 weeks at the basic academy is mandatory. We can't get out of that. We have a 13 week additional academy where we provide Portland specific training. I'm shortening that to ten weeks in an attempt to try and create some efficiencies. And then we also do an additional five weeks of training pre and post academy when they go down to Salem, an officer is on probation for 18 months. So during that 18 month period they are in various training assignments. And then they're also in the field. But they don't actually are not given, you know, authority and sort of well, they're given authority, excuse me, but they're not working on their own independent until late, late into their probationary period. So the difficulty in police hiring and staffing is you have to play the long game. People that we're touching today, people that the two officers we hired a couple of weeks ago, we won't see the benefit of them both in the reduction of overtime and response to calls for service for 16 to 18 months. And that's hard because it's a significant financial commitment to be able to see the result. And I think where we have fallen short as a city is we tend to see peaks in hiring, where we have a hard emphasis and then we back off. In 1990, when I started, six months after I started, tom potter was appointed chief of police. We had dinner recently. He was really the grandfather of community policing as we know it. We were seen as a national model. There were 415,000 people in the city of Portland, and he had 1050 police officers to work with. Today we have about 650,000 roughly. And we've got, as you notice, about five 785 total, the numbers that above that sworn members, above that officer rank, I can go into detail, but that's our detectives, that's our criminalists. It's our supervisory staff sergeants, lieutenants, captains, commanders. And then of course, the executive branch. And then at any given time, we have, you know, a number of officers that are on leave or modified duty. Right now. We have about 25 officers on modified duty. Those are officers that may be injured. They may be pregnant. And so we find opportunities for them to be able to take calls for service over the phone or do follow up and support roles. And then those that are leave of service are those that are off because they're injured and they can't work. Maybe it's administrative leave, whatever it might be. Those numbers are are pretty fluid. So as you see there, we're authorized at 881. And once again, I'm sure we'll have more conversation around staffing as we go. But that's just a real fly by opportunity. And I look forward to the conversation when we're done with the presentation. Thank you chief.
10 Thank you chief. Good morning city councilors. My name is Ryan gillespie, fire chief for Portland fire and rescue. I'd also like to take a minute and recognize our executive team behind me here, elizabeth gallagher, our deputy director, division chief. Aj jackson, division chief of medical services and training, fire marshal carrie schimmel. And division chief andy ponce, division chief of emergency operations. We also have some of our deputy chiefs here. And as we get into the question and answer part of the work session this morning, we can go as deep as you want. If you have specific questions about our, our, our organization, Portland fire and rescue is the largest fire and emergency services provider in the state of Oregon. We serve the city of Portland and the regional metropolitan area. We provide an all hazard emergency response through our network of 31 stations operating 24 over seven, 365. We are usually the first on scene for all fire, medical, natural disaster and other emergency incidents. The size of our workforce has not materially changed to meet population growth and increased service demand. As a quick comparison, denver fire in colorado serves a similar geographic area and population as Portland. Our daily staffing is 171. In denver, it's 199 199 firefighters. We have 31 fire stations that serve the city of Portland in denver. That's 39. Despite having an undersized workforce for our service area and demand, we have opted to fill staffing gaps with overtime expenditures rather than close neighborhood fire stations or reduce service levels to residents. This, of course, has a financial impact and a less talked about impact to the health and wellness of our firefighters. My top priorities as fire chief are to resolve the bureau's structural workforce deficit and reduce overtime expenditures, while at the same time maintaining fire and emergency medical services currently available at the neighborhood level. Also of utmost importance to me is a focus on the mental, physical and emotional well-being of all of our first responders. To achieve these goals, we implemented a long term recruitment and training strategy, and we've worked closely with the service area budget folks, the city budget office and former council members to increase the number of authorized firefighters in our bureau. Though it seems counterintuitive, adding firefighters has paid for itself and backfill overtime hours are down 19% to date this fiscal year. In addition to our all hazard response to fire, medical and other emergency incidents, PFA keeps communities protected through a combination of prevention and community health programs under the direction of the fire marshal, our prevention division takes a multidisciplinary approach that combines education, engineering and enforcement to prevent fires before they start the community health assess and treat or chat program is another prevention program that has proven successful and necessary in the continuum of care provided by our. Designed to address the dramatic rise in low acuity medical calls, particularly in our unhoused community, chat is a proactive medical intervention program that provides pre-hospital care, connects patients with the right resources, and provides follow up support and education. The chat program includes an overdose response team that responds in the downtown core and through an innovative partnership with care Oregon and Multnomah county can administer medication for opiate use disorder. Unfortunately, the program does not yet have ongoing funding and has been sustained only through one time allocations of city funds and care. Oregon grants. The bureau has for years been aware of the need to improve our degrading training and logistics facilities, but we have been unsuccessful in gaining the necessary support to refer financing options to voters. However, we are optimistic that the city's long range facilities planning process process will yield a viable solution to our long term facility needs. The next slide, please. So this slide shows a breakdown of our staffing. Of note, the six limited term sworn positions. Those are funded through a federal grant, the safer grant. The 24 non-sworn limited term positions are specific to the chat program. We strive to maintain zero vacancies in the regular sworn position numbers. We do this through consistent recruitment and training programs. We will be hiring a new class of 15 recruits in two weeks, and that's to ensure that we keep up with the recent wave of retirements and the future wave that we know we will see. And finally, before I close, I want to recognize as dca myers did, our 13 firefighters that we sent down to la. They're part of the Multnomah county strike team. We again, 13 firefighters, three engines, a battalion chief. We're committed to these strong partnerships that we have built and maintained locally, regionally and across state lines. They should be arriving as we speak, and we'll we'll have updates to share as as we learn more about the situation there. Thank you all for your time today. I look forward to answering any questions you might have at the end of the presentation. And again, we've got our whole team here, and if we don't get your questions answered today, please reach out and we will do our best to answer those. So I'd like to introduce the director of the bureau of emergency management, shad ahmed.
11 Thank you chief. Good morning, mayor, madam president, vice president and councilors. My name is shad ahmed. I'm the director of the Portland bureau of emergency management. On our command staff. We have with me here today, deputy director jordan wiley. We have our chief resilience officer, richard narwal, and our preparedness and response manager, chris carey, both of whom could not make it here but wanted to introduce them as well. In case you have any questions down the road. I want to start by acknowledging it's a it's a lot easier, I think, to quantify in terms of public perception, what it is that police fire 911 do in terms of public safety. It's a lot harder to quantify emergency management. And so I want to start by describing our superpower. Emergency management is a convener, collaborator, coordinator, communicator and a connector. What we really do is connect agencies across disciplines across jurisdictions and put folks together in the same room so that we can be successful as a city. When we respond to an emergency. And that work really starts well before an emergency occurs. And part of our responsibility is doing the planning for those emergencies so that we're ready to respond when that time comes. A lot of what we do in order to get there is we establish policies for our city agencies to be able to respond within. We have frameworks that we establish. There's national standards such as the national incident management system, and we basically adopt those and regularly train together and work with city agencies. But we also work with external partners. We work with community based organizations, we work with private sector, we work across, as I said, jurisdiction. So county, state, federal and regional entities. So really that's what the work emergency management does. Sometimes when we put people together in a room that we call the emergency operations center or eoc, we learned that different agencies or different organizations have resources that they can support our emergency response with that we may not have otherwise known. And so a lot of that work is discovered during planning, hopefully, but also sometimes during response, we may have a unique problem that presents itself. And at the eoc we can really troubleshoot that and come up with a creative solution. So emergency management is really a problem solving construct for the city when it comes to, you know, emergencies or unique problems or challenges. And one of those things that we do in the eoc is resource management. Oftentimes bureaus or city bureaus or agencies, you know, they respond to an emergency. They oftentimes can handle them within their resources, within the assets they have. But sometimes you come across a situation that's pretty unique. You don't either have a particular resource or you've exhausted resources. So another tool that we have is the ability to at the risk of sounding old, we act like a rolodex or a yellow pages, and we pull together resources for supporting our emergency responses within the city. We also have a strong community preparedness community resilience program that some of you may be familiar with. We have a really large volunteer network, one of the largest in the country, actually, of this kind in our neighborhood, emergency teams or nets, we have about 1200 volunteers there that we train regularly. We recruit and train folks to be able to respond not only to help the city, but help their neighbors and help each other and help themselves in an emergency so that we can truly have resilience in our communities. That program has expanded in scope, and I'm proud of the work that they've done in recent years. We've used them to support areas that the city maybe doesn't have the ability to support in some areas, such as large special events, including the rose festival. That's an ongoing, you know, mission area that they've been able to support. We also have a strong network of community based organizations that we work with and what we call the community organizations active in disaster code, that is a network of community organizations representing various groups in the in the city that come together. We support during emergencies, but we also prepare with them. And I'm also proud of the work done there. Oftentimes during an emergency, again, resources are tight. So we rely on our community partners. We provide them information. They provide resources for the communities. And another big component of what we do within our bureau is we are host to the regional disaster preparedness organization, or dpo. That's a regional group that's actually established by an intergovernmental agreement and mou with five counties in the metro region, as well as special districts and cities in the area. We all work together to collaborate. When there's an emergency, we pull together regional agencies to kind of share information and approaches for how we're solving problems, and we also are a big part of that function is to disperse federal funding to assist our programing throughout the region. Next slide. We believe that there are a lot of challenges and opportunities on the horizon, and I want to just give you highlights of some key focus areas for us. First of all, we believe under the mayor's direction in the new structure of government, there's a tremendous opportunity for us to better integrate emergency management functions across the city. We've already had great conversations with our colleagues here with me today, and especially on national law enforcement appreciation day. Chief, thank you for the work that your uniformed officers do, but great partners at the table. We can't do the work ourselves. We're like I said, we're a convener of folks who are the experts in their particular areas. So we believe that this new structure will allow better integration. We have seen a reduction in staff, unfortunately, over the last two years here, and it's provided a tremendous impact to some of our core functions. I'm really proud of the work that our team is doing. You know, I mentioned our command staff, but really all of our bureau staff are working really hard and are dedicated, mission oriented and just picking up. I've never heard anyone complain or question really just picked up, but there's only so much that we can do as we continue to face potential cuts. We have, as I mentioned, the strong resilience program. That's a huge positive and we're always exploring opportunities to incorporate the volunteers into different areas of our emergency response. And as I mentioned, their mission, we've expanded. They've really stepped up to the plate. And that also provides us a unique insight into our community members so that we can make sure our services as a government agency are aligning with the needs of our community. And finally, as you all are probably familiar with, we have seen an increased frequency of emergencies. We've had climate emergencies, we've had increased potential for civil unrest. We've had cyber issues. We've had just, you know, in emergency management, we refer to what we call blue sky days and gray sky days. And when there are more and more gray sky days, there are less blue sky days. And that means the planning part of our efforts, which is what we do in advance of those gray sky days, really gets impacted. So we've been with our limited staff, just kind of one after another, cycling through emergencies without a lot of time to recover and properly plan. So I just wanted to provide a high level of some of those opportunities and challenges on the horizon. And with that, I want to introduce my colleague, director bob cozzie, for the bureau of emergency communications.
12 Thank you. Director. Good morning. I am bob cozzie, director of the bureau of emergency communications. And thank you for this opportunity to introduce myself and the bureau. I'd like to welcome all of you as well, and congratulate each of you as our new city councilors. Congratulations. I'd also like to introduce deputy director Steve mawdsley in our audience. He oversees overall operations for boec. And really very brief overview. I only have one slide to go over today. Boec provides 911 call answering and public safety dispatching for all of Multnomah county, in addition to the city of Portland, we serve the cities of Gresham, troutdale, fairview, wood village, maywood park and unincorporated. Sorry about that. And unincorporated areas of Multnomah county all the way from sauvie island to corbett and Multnomah falls. Our mission is to work collaboratively with our community and public safety partners to ensure effective and timely 911 call answering and dispatching. The bottom line is this we provide help for our community. We are the first line of first responders, and we currently have 127 dispatchers and call takers, many of whom are still in training. They all provide professional and compassionate care for those members in our community who have to call us on the worst days of their lives. Boec 911 call volume has experienced significant increase since 2018, nearly 35% increase in 911 calls following COVID and portland's infamous 100 days of protest, boec struggled with staffing, losing about a third of our staff, primarily due to burnout. Since then, we've taken great strides to improve our staffing, which has resulted in significant improvements in our ability to answer 911 in a timely manner. We aren't where we want to be yet, but we are on the verge of having all of our positions filled in. Our upcoming February academy. We're also very close to meeting all the requirements for agency accreditation through the international academies of emergency dispatch. There's additional information in your packets that I sent ahead, and feel free to ask any questions. And when we get to the q&a part, thank you very much. And I'll hand it off to d.k. Myers.
13 Thank you, director cozzie and team. Thank you for the thoughtful and professional presentations today. We're a little over time, so I'm going to speed through the last slides here and get to the q&a session, because I think we're anticipating that you've heard a lot of challenges today from staffing and overtime, and how those are directly related. I think chief gillespie talked about structural deficit, the cal target, the current allocation level that a bureau is designated to run their operation often falls short. And year to year, we use limited term employees and one time funding to carry them forward, oftentimes in an overexpenditure ordinance. But that delta is that structural deficit chief gillespie talks about. And then you heard a couple of conversations about some of the capital improvement issues that we have, some deferred maintenance and failing infrastructure, our of our mechanical shop, the training center, the 911 center, and some of the conditions of the precincts and certainly be able to hear more about those in a in future committee presentations, if that, if you desire some recent accomplishments. Of course. We're very proud of the presentations today that highlighted some of those accomplishments. Chief de crime reduction plan, which I think you received a packet late last evening regarding that highlights a lot of steps that he's taken and some key performance measures, reductions that are very impressive. One of the things that chief gillespie didn't talk about a lot today, that I think deserves a tremendous amount of credit. Over the last 4 or 5 years, fire has struggled to keep overtime under control and chief gillespie's leadership over the last several months, we're seeing a 19% decrease in overtime there. That's a credit to his membership, to his senior staff and to the chief. That is a equates to about a $2.5 million savings. And really a credit to chief gillespie's leadership there. Bob cozzie underplays his role here, not highlighting a key fact that he's had a very hard time across the country in keeping call answering times down and bob cozzie over the last couple of years has done a tremendous job in reducing call answering times to where they are today, and his attempts to get them down to 20s 90% of the time. But the biggest, and I think one of the most impressive things about bob is if, in fact, if accreditation does come and we believe it will, there are very few accredited bodies around the world. The program that bob uses is used in about 4000 locations worldwide. Only about 216 of those locations are accredited. I believe bob will be able to do this, and we will be one of about 5% worldwide to be accredited. Just very impressed with bob's leadership and glad to have him here. And then you heard from stephanie howard and elizabeth perez on community safety and some of the significant progress made there. Next slide. Obviously, there's work ahead, I think, to the point of Portland fire and rescue, Portland police emergency communications. Every one of them talked about their interest in continuing to build staff back, to be able to support their primary missions and their goals. You heard from shad ahmed, the director of emergency management, about the absolute constant need. Now, it seems there was we're always in emergency. Crisis in my time was shot. I think we've almost always had a unified command team and an executive policy council up and running for one reason or another. I do not anticipate that will change just watching what's currently occurring and what's happened over the last several weeks across the country. I anticipate that to continue. One thing that we didn't talk about today team is that we do have a strategic plan that's under development for the service area. The bureau's have or are under development of a current strategic plan that they've had for years, or they have put it together and not published it, or they one has just ended. We want to make those all consistent, consolidate those, bring those together under one service area strategic plan. I think this also would be a great topic for an agenda item for a future public safety committee. If you desire to have one, and we could bring that to discussion there and get your input. Some next steps I introduced to you, sean gentry, his email there at the bottom. Sean is the executive assistant for the public safety area. We have a lot of opportunities. I think most every bureau director asked that they're excited to engage with you. We're excited about the new form of government. We're excited to meet all of you, and we want to give you opportunities to learn about us. And where you'll really learn about us is with our staff. We have tremendous memberships in all of these different bureaus, some wonderful people that do amazing things and they know best the work that they do. And we're excited to get to the point where we can introduce those individuals to you. So please, if you are interested, I want to help kind of coordinate that. We can do that through sean gentry and get your your request out and get some things scheduled, if that's your desire. Thank you so much for giving us the opportunity today to be before you. We look forward to some regular opportunities to discuss public safety, and I'm eager to get the things going. And thank you so much. I will pass it back to you. Madam president, thank you for the opportunity to be here before you today.
14 Thank you. Thank you to all of you for your presentations. I know there were a lot of different subjects to cover there, and just my thanks, chief gillespie, for sending that strike team down. I know we have relied on strike teams coming up from california to help us with various conflagrations in the past in the Portland metro area, and I know we have sent teams down to california before, and that trade is really important. So thank you for making sure that could happen this time around. Colleagues, I am here we go. I thought there were some folks who wanted to ask questions. And I'll just note that we have a little under 90 minutes. So that's about 7 to 8 minutes a piece. If you have a list of 20 questions before you maybe hold back, ask your top questions. Let's make sure everyone gets a chance to get their top questions answered. And I am sure that we can get further questions answered in writing if we need as well. Councilor Smith, would you like to kick us off?
15 Thank you, madam president. Thank you all for your presentations. I wanted to clarify something. Chief gillespie, what's the difference between the chap program and psr?
16 Great question. And that has been asked numerous times, and I know there's been some confusion there because of the alternative response nature of that. And I would love for the psr folks to speak to that as well. Psr is an unarmed response to folks that are experiencing mental or behavioral crisis. For the most part, the calls that they are taking once went to police before that alternative response was available. The chap program is the medical side. So the low acuity medical calls. So these are calls that don't necessarily need highly trained four person fire engine with a paramedic and an immediate transport to the hospital. These are folks with a lower level of medical care but still have nowhere else to go. So they utilize the 911 system. We're able to dispatch the chat team. Not only do they respond, but they we also have a follow up so they can help those individuals where oftentimes it's an access issue, right? They just don't have a way to access the health care system. So in a nutshell, psr mental behavioral health crisis calls, chat, medical calls okay.
17 Physical medical.
18 Yeah. But there's a lot of crossover right. Especially when we get into mental and behavioral health drug affected folks. The chat program also operates the overdose response team and the epinephrine pilot. It's not a clean one or the other. And so those teams actually work very closely together, especially on the follow up side, to ensure that the individual again, it's very difficult to put them in one box or the other. So we work together as a system to make sure they have access to what they need.
19 And since you're you're talking about systems, would it make sense for those two programs to be sited together and under one umbrella?
20 That's a much bigger discussion. And I think one that this council should have. Absolutely. I think that the funding mechanisms for the programs for chat especially, it's on very shaky ground because of the one time funding. The possibility for medicaid money to come in. On the psr side. We don't have a mechanism to do that through the city right now. The county does. I think it needs to not only be a city of Portland, you know, should psr and chat be combined, but other stakeholders need to be involved with this. And the county especially, I think, because of their responsibility for mental and behavioral health and the work that they do there. So I would say that is an excellent question. That does not have an answer yet, but that should be should be dug into deeper.
21 But you're mainly dealing with folks who are homeless, who are on the streets. That's correct.
22 The for the well. So just as a as an example in the in the fire department, our fire calls that we go on. About 40% of our fire reports are homeless related. Okay. Almost 40% of our fire injuries and fire deaths that occur are homeless related. The chat program has the ability to. It's not limited to the homeless population. They have the ability to respond into private residences. It's more it's. As director perez stated, she she listed the criteria for psr, and it's very specific for what they can be dispatched to chat. It's more specific to the medical needs, less so about the location of the patient.
23 Okay. Thank you so much. And chief de, thank you so much for your presentation. Could you just quickly because I only have a few minutes, explain to me the relationship between the number of officers that you have on the street. You said you had 785, but you're authorized 881. Is that correct?
24 Yeah. Rough numbers. Yes.
25 So. And I heard you loud and clear and I kind of feel the same way about we want to make sure that our officers are, that they're not overworked and that they're not doing the overtime. So can you tell us the relationship between the money that you have authorized to the money that is actually being used in overtime? Because if we were able to hire those folks and get them trained up quicker than the two years, that would be great. But there's no you. There's no way to do that. So you're using those funds to pay for the overtime, but they would be reduced depending on how many people you're able to hire. I just wanted to make sure that I'm getting this correctly.
26 Yeah, it's it is. And it's complicated. One of the things I want to mention that I didn't and I apologize to our professional staff, you know, we have a robust civilian component to the police bureau, about 300 or so. And there are significant vacancies there which we've been trying to fill. And it really is a holistic approach to public safety. And I really appreciate and respect our civilian. We refer to them as our professional staff and need them. So it's a we're constantly managing the needs of both of those programs. And on the sworn side, you're right. You know, you look at the numbers and you can see we have 80 some odd vacancies. And oftentimes an argument is made. Well, you're not going to be able to fill those or you're not filling those. So why do you need those. And the reality is that that does create some buffer for us with the vacancy, salary savings we do use towards overtime. The reality is to that, and you've kind of touched on it. It's a sort of a chicken and an egg thing where you have to pay the overtime to fill the spots. Now, at the same time, you have to invest in the hiring so you don't have to pay the overtime down the road. And that's where the painful part comes from, is you have to do both. You can't just do one. We can continue to spend millions and millions of dollars of overtime into the police bureau, but I don't believe that's a very fiscally responsible way to do business. But when you have numbers that are as low as we are, then we have to continue to invest in that while at the same time investing in hiring. And we intend to grow in 2025. I'm confident we're going to be able to fill some of those vacancies. But then that pulls away from that money that we were relying on. So it's it is on top of, on top of and it's frustrating.
27 Thank you. And do you see any mass retirements coming up in the next two years?
28 I don't anticipate a significant amount of retirements. We've seen an increased amount of retention, which I'm really proud of. There are some caveats in our retirement system, and in may of 26 is a beneficiary time for people to retire. We had three of those months in the last year. We averaged about 30 retirements, but we also reinstituted our rehire retire program, where officer detective sergeant can retire, come back on a one year plan and continue to work. We're seeing take advantage of that. I'm hoping that our 2025 retention rates will stay, or separations will stay at four or less, and that's separation. People get fired. People don't make probation, people retire. And the previous years we're running seven or so a month and I'm trying to get that under four. So if we see just through the course of business about 50 retirements or separations this year, but we're able to hire 100, which is our goal then, then we would be entering into 26, you know, more around the 850 number and just continue to build on that to make ground. And I think that's achievable.
29 Thank you.
30 Councilor Novick.
31 First of all, I want to congratulate director cozzie on rebuilding the boec workforce. Having been the boec commissioner, I have some understanding of how difficult that is and the idea that you lost a third of your people and been able to rebuild that quickly is just remarkable. I have kind of a big philosophical question for chief day and director howard, which is we've learned over the past 50 years that crime trends are national and international, and nobody really has any good idea of what drives those trends. We have this huge increase in crime in the late 60s to the early 90s. Then crime collapsed between about 1994 and 2014. And that's kind of a problem for my fellow liberals who think that crime is tied to poverty because we didn't have a dramatic expansion of anti-poverty programs. Right wingers like to think it's because we locked everybody up and threw away the key. But the problem was crime collapsed in canada and europe, too, and they did not lock everybody up, throw away the key. And then we had this national increase in crime during the pandemic and a national decrease during the past couple of years. So my question is, in the context of a world where crime trends are driven by mysterious international forces, that we don't understand, what rational basis is there to evaluate the effectiveness of any given local police force or community violence prevention force?
32 Councilor I miss these conversations, but previous previous experiences and we could spend a half a day on this and hopefully we will because I always appreciate your perspective. And I'll I'll definitely allow stephanie to chime in. But keeping it at the philosophical level, I don't disagree with your observation, and it is a it is a moving target, and it's difficult to sit here and say, you know, what's the number? Do you need 100? Do you need a thousand cops? Do you need 1500 cops? What's, you know, how do you measure success? And in my experience, I base that upon the community that we serve. I mean, that's why I got into this profession is for public service. This reason many of you went through the grueling 9 or 10 months or year that you spent last year. And the reality is that we have a high demand for service. And so I think that we need to always be evaluating how we best meeting that demand, what's the best resource to go to that and the system that we've designed, really, not just in this country but around the world, although it varies, is a reliance upon a public safety professional. And the line that I've used throughout my career is that we often use the police to suppress problems we don't want to fix. And I think that, you know, when we encounter people, it's often because they have fallen through multiple failed systems, and now they're at a place where they're interacting with law enforcement in probably the least beneficial way for them, for our members and for the community. So, you know, the statistics numbers, we can throw them all out. And I'm certainly going to tout them and be proud of them. But it is a it is a deeper, more meaningful conversation I'd love to have about how we show up and how we measure success in that area.
33 And I'll just add, I think the space where we'd all like to be is prevention. And what that looks like is preparedness on in many different ways. It looks like investment in community, it looks like investment in many, many of the things that help contribute to a functional and thriving society. There are national trends that we may follow and we may not. And it's very rare that we find a national data point that is purely apples to apples comparison across geographies. One thing I will say is, I think to pick up on what the chief said is we do want to that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be looking at our data. And so as an example of how I think we are trying to view data in the gun violence space nationally, nationally gun violence is trending down. However, I think it's really encouraging and telling that here where in the last year and a half or so especially, we've been investing in focusing on young black men at highest risk of gun violence in our community. That's the population that has seen the most stark decrease. And that tells me that that's a good investment, that that is, you know, something that's worth happening. It's not the only cure for that. Again, it's a collaborative effort across many different disciplines. But I think those are data points that are more telling than than large national trends.
34 Would it be somewhat fair to say that a gauge of success is how the community feels in terms of fear of crime and their interactions with the public safety system, how the community feels, rather than the statistics about whether crime itself is up or down.
35 Yeah, I, I love this. I mean, I I'm, I'm tracking right with you, but I think it also is not only how they feel, but I think it's all the also how they behave and how they engage. And you know, in multiple conversations that I've had across the city over the last year, you know, we see behavior related to safety. When people feel safe, they participate in public parks and they go to festivals and they go to the symphony because they're not concerned about walking into the south park blocks after dark. And they attend the blazer game, and they use mass transit because there's a sense of safety and security and so forth. So, yeah, I mean that I think that is the measure. When you have a thriving community, you're going to be able to say that, you know, we are managing those safety concerns. You know, in a few months in the waterfront, we're going to see the cherry blossoms. It's just an amazing time of year. And I love it when we get those spring days and the waterfront is full and people go down and participate in that because there's a sense of safety, a confidence. What I tell, what I, what I really believe is the law is designed to provide predictability. And we can certainly have a conversation about the appropriate enforcement of the laws throughout our nation's history and even here in Portland. But the law provides a level of predictability. And when I drove to work today, I didn't randomly choose which side of the road to drive on. I chose to drive on one side with the belief and the hope that others would drive on the other side, and that would allow all of us to get to where we need to get to. And so that's where I see the rule of law as a role in our society, is to allow that predictability. So if I'm going to go to the store, if I'm going to go to the park, if I'm going to go to an event that there's a sense of safety and security, which we all interpret differently, I know that safety is not the same for all of us at the same time, but I do believe it's a core component of a successful society.
36 Councilor Dunphy, thank you, madam president.
37 Chief de, you mentioned in your presentation that you are attempting to reduce the city specific training for from 13 weeks down to ten weeks for new officers. What is lost in those three weeks?
38 Yeah. So as I mentioned, we have an advanced academy, which is not totally uncommon. Several local agencies have smaller, but ours is come and gone. It's grown from from eight weeks or less. When I started up to 14, 15 weeks, probably the largest chunk of time that's going away from that 13 week is a one week bicycle certification course that we give all recruits that we're now going to implement and bring them up to certification throughout their probationary period. I don't have all the numbers in front of you. I was with the training advisory council last night. I can get it to you, but I can tell you that the areas that I was not inclined to cut was around community engagement, around equity, around, you know, oftentimes what we refer to as the soft skills, the areas there was a slight reduction, I believe, in firearms and a couple other areas. And I'll have to get to the specifics on that. Some of them we also recognize as training we can do online. Now, you know, every every car has a mobile digital terminal in it. So we can push stuff out. So the train division recognized, you know, hey, we can we can try and get more stuff online. And the motivation is twofold. One, there is an efficiency effort here. I believe that, you know, there may be some cost savings. I really don't know because there's costs when they're in the academy, there's costs on the street. We'll evaluate that. But also it gives us just a few more weeks to get them quicker into a spot where they're going to be able to work on their own. I say that with, you know, as a as a former captain of training, on two occasions, I was a sergeant in training and I was a trainer in training. I spent a lot of time. I'm passionate about training and I understand the importance of it. So I've done this in careful collaboration with the training division staff and believing that we're not minimizing standards or lowering expectations. Yeah.
39 Thank you. And I know that this still puts us, I think, above the national average for amount of weeks and training for an officer. But I know that there's a healthy tension between the need to have highly trained, highly accountable officers and to have them. Now, how do you philosophically weigh those? Yeah.
40 Boy, we got some good. We're getting some good questions here and I'm on the record, so I have to I'm I'm a believer in and an advocate for training. Absolutely right. And I am so proud of the training that we have delivered over the years. We have grown in our training. And I don't like to talk old school. But when I got hired in April of 1990, I got hired on a Thursday. I went to the academy on Monday. It's mandatory. Everybody goes to the same one in Oregon that is different than other states. It was eight weeks long, eight weeks. You came back and then you maybe went to an advanced academy down the road. And that was usually about eight weeks and you were done. Today we hire people. We give them two weeks pre academy training before they go. And that's because we were noticing deficiencies in their performance when they're there at the academy, maybe around firearms or other areas they go to a 16 week academy. So the state has doubled the minimum requirement. And then when they come back, they have a three week academy of reentry training to, you know, make sure that they're up to speed on, you know, some of the basic core understandings of what they're going to be doing in the police bureau. And then we add the 13 to the current 13. It's going to ten weeks. So we put an extra 18 weeks of training into our new hires. And as I said to the train advisory council last night, we need to recognize that that is optional. That is optional. It is not a state requirement. Washington county does about nine weeks, and they split it up at some point where they go with corrections and they go with deputies on the road. So they diversify. It is common to have additional training, but that 18 weeks is far more than what we see on others. And so I'm pushing against that. But it's a it's a difficult not organizationally, but it's a it's tenuous because of that. What you identified, you know, we want to get people trained. We don't want to cut corners, but we also want to get them out on the street.
41 Thank you. This question is another question. Just sort of to you is again, but also to the director of boec. My observation has been that we have a long history in this community of sending police officers to do something that an officer isn't the most appropriate person to do, but there's simply nobody else to do. One that I've complained about a lot is noise complaints. How within the bureau is there an effort to systematically identify the types of calls that officers are being sent on, where maybe somebody else would be more appropriate to be sent?
42 Yeah. In fact, we started that project last year, and it's one that's been talked about forever. But I actually sat with some of the staff that have worked on the past and they said, you know, we've had eight chiefs talk about this, and nobody's actually looked at it. I said, well, I'm not going to be the ninth trying to understand, first of all, just basic. How do we categorize calls for service? And director cozzie and I are on the same page on this, and I just certainly value his expertise and professionalism and understanding that, you know, we sometimes have these categories that we've established and we haven't revisited. So we're revisiting the 100 or so classifications that we put calls into. What kind of buckets, how we prioritize them. Because what's happened over time, as those calls come in and they get prioritized one way, and then they hit the box, as we say, or they hit the they hit the street. And a sergeant looks and says, well, I only have five people to do the work of ten. So we're going to lower these priorities. And we do that and we give them the authority. And I want them to have that discretion. But now we have this inconsistency about data and measuring. And then we're constantly evaluating, you know, what's the right resource steps we've taken I think we're aware of, you know, alternative response models. We now have our public safety support specialists. You know, we did have a telephone reporting unit that we don't have that anymore. I think that's beneficial. We are trying to improve our online reporting system in 2025 to make it more user friendly. But by and far, you know, some studies that I've seen show 60% of the calls for service don't require an armed response. But the reality is, the risk is such that, you know, as we saw outlined in the psr qualifications, you know, that risk is not something that people want to take on. And I understand that. I don't want our members to take on that. So we're in this tension point of trying to figure out, you know, what is appropriate and what isn't. And I think we are really leading that conversation in many ways. But what's what's abundantly clear, given the level of violence and issues we're seeing in the city, is that, you know, we don't have enough first responders to be able to supplement, even with alternative response models. I don't see an example of psr or ps three. I see them as an augmenting of, but not a replacement of. Until we can get our staffing at an area where we can say, okay, we're comfortable assuming this risk and liability and properly dispersing the right resources.
43 The only thing I'd add is, as chief de mentioned, we do have a workgroup comprised of boec staff as well as pb. Recognizing that there could be a better way of conducting business. And that's really what we're looking at, unpacking those specific call types. I'd also like to mention, you know, we provide at boec provides service for the whole county. So the decisions that are made in that body also impact the city of Gresham as well as Multnomah county. And they provide police services in the rest of the county.
44 Thank you that that study of the call allocation and looking who is the proper responder and who should it be dispatched to? That's really across the public safety spectrum. We have a big role in that, too. We recognize that a number of the calls that we've historically responded on, especially in the media, on the medical side, there is a more appropriate responder for that. So this has ever since I've been hired, we've looked at calls to say, hey, should we be going that going on that or should we not? Is there a more appropriate responder for the community? And that's I think, with the public safety group that we have now, that that work has really kicked into high gear, recognizing the toll that the call volume is taking on the system. Great.
45 My last question is for chief gillespie. Specifically, you mentioned that service levels have not really adjusted to the increased population that we have, and we're pretty significantly behind in terms of stations and officers or firefighters on duty at any given point. I'd heard through my campaign that the situation is even more dire in east Portland, that we are dramatically lacking the number of stations that are needed to appropriately respond. What would be your top priority right now if you had additional capacity or additional resources to build additional stations, and what would that look like?
46 Well, my top priority right now is maintaining what we have, quite frankly. And that's been a challenge with the budget situation that the city has been in over, over a number of years, and especially recently that it has been a I really have not had an opportunity to focus on any add ons or where we would put an additional station, because quite honestly, we're just trying to not close any stations. We have 171 people on duty a day, 31 fire stations, station, 23 in southeast. That was one that we were able to staff up using federal federal grant money. And then also utilizing one of our the money for our rescues. But the structural deficit that we have that myers referred to that still exists for this year. If we were to receive our cal for next year, we're still looking at a shortage because of the one time funding funding that's been allocated. So to answer your question, I have not spent a lot of time or effort looking into where our next fire station would be. I think eastport, I know east Portland is in dire need of additional services. We did have a study done a few years ago called the city gate study, which looked at our deployment and our response and that that did identify that the eastern side of Portland is we're overworked out there, and our response times are not appropriate for that part of the city. You could also argue that in south Portland, down by by OHSU, we do not have a fire station down there. The closest one is the fire station that serves city hall here. Station four. So that part of the city was developed without a fire station going in there. And for us to be effective, it's all about response times, proximity, access. And that's why our network of stations is spread around the city. So I would I would love to have that conversation about where do we put the next one. But again, the priority now is just to stabilize and maintain what we have so we can we can build off of a good foundation.
47 Thank you all.
48 Councilor Kanal.
49 Thank you. Thank you, madam president. I am one of the people with 20 questions, but I will confine them and give colleagues a chance. First, let me say thank you to dci myers. In general, the integrity and humility with which you approach your work is a big part of the reason I'm confident in the work of the service area, and I had a front row seat to your leadership as an employee of the community safety division, and I'm excited to see how it progresses forward. Community safety is my top priority. I think when we talk about that, we're often talking about the broader aspect of this work. I will actually start with the questions on how you're using it, though, which is to director howard around this work, and then I'll pass it around and let some other folks go. One quick note first, though, there is a performance unit that did write a report on if Portland is following the national trend on gun violence last year, that I think might be a worthwhile thing to recirculate for us, not just for councilor Novick, but I imagine we'd all be interested in in that. And it showed a lot of progress specifically to ceasefire and to ovp safe blocks. And ceasefire obviously includes police, the entire system, really, in terms of the work that they've done to exceed the trend line and advance further, director howard, thank you for being here. My first question is around the leadership at ovp. This is a program, an office that is well trusted in parts of the community, largely because of the relationship building and the needs of specific sectors of the community, which you highlighted. Right now, that position is vacant. Could you let us know what the plan is and timeline for filling that role with someone who's got the qualifications to do that work in a community focused way?
50 Absolutely. Thank you for the question. Councilor. Yes, the beginning, at the end of last year, the team at ovp and elizabeth perez again was doing a lot of community outreach, really trying to engage with community and hear from them what it is that they want to see in leadership, in in scope, in direction for the office of violence prevention. And the team has done a great job of trying to compile all of that and really create a plan moving forward. Our goal is to begin that recruitment in the first quarter and really prioritize bringing in a, you know, conducting a recruitment that will invite, you know, strong candidates that see a future in the office of violence and violence prevention. We're really excited, and I am eager in my new role to try to create sustainability, to try to create stability around these programs and really demonstrate the trust and the investment that I know this, this council and prior councils really have in the work and what's possible at the office of violence prevention. So we're looking to begin that recruitment in the first quarter. My hope is to get that moving hopefully within the next couple of weeks or not. I'm sorry, next couple of months. We're as I mentioned, we're working right now to try to get some quick planning ahead so that we can make sure we're getting grants out in time for spring break and planning ahead for summer. But this is absolutely a priority, and I'll be working really closely with the team and with the community to move that forward as quickly as possible in the first quarter.
51 Thank you. My next question is very, very similar to that, but related to Portland street response. And it is actually just the same question, what is the progress plan timeline for the leadership at psr?
52 Yeah, we're we're really, really fortunate, as elizabeth mentioned, to have April roa here as our interim program manager at psr and April. Right now, I think the goal that we have after listening to staff, after working really closely with them about what the future of Portland street response looks like, we're focused right now on just kind of creating some foundational policies, creating a strong foundation. Again, sustainability. And, and, you know, support for the program so that we can move forward with that recruitment. We don't have a timeline on that just yet. I think right now, April is just doing a terrific job in working to solidify all of those efforts in the program. But we'll be working with the team there and can report out as soon as the plans have been made for that. As of right now, we're just working on a maintain level right now and relying on April as a leader for the program.
53 Thanks. And I didn't mention this up top, but I'm really grateful you started the presentation with that work, because it often doesn't get appreciated as much as it should. And also safe blocks and rose city self-defense for the cameras. I got the bracelet on for csd today and appreciate their work. I also wanted to ask, you know, there's been a couple references to the call allocation workgroup in the previous studies, but if you can maybe speak a little bit more directly to the progress on in expanding the types of calls which psr specifically would be able to respond to, because there's been a lot of different estimates thrown around about how many calls that would be. But obviously we can't answer that without knowing the categorization.
54 Absolutely. Yeah. That coming into this new role is a priority for me because I know we've heard from the community loud and clear. They want to see psr able to respond to additional calls. I know that psr has great support in the Portland police bureau, and the process for deciding that scope is related to our labor negotiations. So under the collective bargaining agreement with the ppa, with our police bureau, there's a process for bringing the leadership from pb, psr and others together to discuss that scope and to come to some agreements on what that can look like and what those processes can, can be. April and I just spoke about that this week, and we're working to get something on the schedule to start those conversations again and really reinvigorate that discussion, because I think we all, you know, see the need and see the potential and want to, you know, come together to be force multipliers across the public safety service area. Psr is a first responder. And they you know, we want to make sure that we are sending the right using our resources in the right way. That benefits not just the city, but benefits the community. So very a very top of mind. Again, a quarter one to reinvigorate those conversations.
55 Great. And I guess, relatedly, does that also include the conversation around scheduling?
56 Yes, that does include that. That's a priority. I know, trying to really, again, maximize the resources we have to provide services to the community, also to work with the mayor and his team on how we can, you know, meet his goals and to help support his plan to end unsheltered homelessness.
57 Thank you. I'll stop here. Yeah.
58 Thank you. Councilor canal councilor Clark.
59 Thank you, madam chair. And thanks to all of you for being here today. I have learned a lot, my head sort of throbbing. I know I have a lot more to learn, and I look forward to talking with all of you, maybe individually. I just want to riff off of councilor Novick from the 50 zero zero zero foot level to the 5000 foot level on behalf of my neighbors, my district, my friends, all the constituents in district four, I want to thank you for responding to our needs. We have had car break ins, stolen cars, car parts, apartment break ins, and when the police and the fire department show up, there's this great sense of gratitude. And I just want to share that with you. In fact, there's sort of an awe because people didn't expect it all the time for you to show up. And it really restores that faith in our government, faith and our civil society. And back to your issue, the trust in our society, because I think that for too long we've been really enabling scofflaws, and we have to turn that around. So that's a personal account of the 50 of the 500 zero foot level. I did want to appreciate mike myers suggestion that maybe the service area needs a strategic plan. I'm really interested in that. And what a what the vision would be for an overall functioning system. We've heard about all the parts today, but and how they all work together. But what would the what would the bigger vision be? So just a couple of specific questions and you could nod yes or no for miss howard. The safe blocks that you talked about, that's something new to me. Is that related to pmo? Is that is that they do work together?
60 It's distinct from pmo, but safe blocks is a program that I think was the formerly the crime prevention program. I think it was within the Portland police bureau for a time. So it's been around for some time, but it is now under the auspices of the office of violence prevention.
61 Okay. So when my neighbors asked for a crime prevention review of the area we live in, where did where did that actually go? Where does that reside?
62 That would most likely be a safe block. Safe block okay. But again they work closely with pmo. And so the problem solver meetings I think we've got safe blocks folks who attend those and collaborate with pmo to do those site walks and septet assessments.
63 Thank you. And to mr. Bob cozzie does the accreditation rest on our response time?
64 There's a 20 components actually that tie in with the accreditation. And I don't have them all off the top of my head. We actually have a quality assurance manager, Ryan desjardin, who can answer specific questions about that. But I do also want to mention that the past three months we actually met call answering standards through that accreditation body for emergency medical dispatch calls, and we're really close in emergency fire dispatch at this point.
65 Terrific. That's great news. And for mr. Ahmed, this may be a little more involved. But regarding disaster preparedness, I'm just curious, what do we have a plan or how are we approaching the critical energy hub in the linnton neighborhood?
66 Yes. So we a lot of what we do is planning. That's a big part of the prior to an emergency component. Unfortunately, I will say in the last couple of years we've had to because of the issues and challenges I've highlighted, put some of that on pause. So we do have some plans. They do need to be updated, and we'd like to revisit some of those as soon as we can.
67 And do you involve the linnton neighborhood in that, in those development of those plans?
68 Yeah. Through our community resilience team, we actually have, I know, frequent contacts from various neighborhoods, and I know that they've been in contact with that team as well.
69 Okay, great. I've got lots of other questions, but I'll pass at this point. Thank you. Thank you all.
70 Thank you for your restraint. Councilor Morillo.
71 Hi everyone. Thank you so much for taking time to present and good to see some of you again as well. I just had one question. It's a little bit long, so I'm going to read it off. But I know that in 2022 we had a mission critical partner report that showed that the top three call types for police tended to be about suspicious persons or vehicles and unwanted person or a welfare check, and that accounted to about 80,000 calls. Those calls might be suitable for reallocation and more appropriate responders, and could free up police call time so that you can respond to violent crime, which I think is really a focus. And it's no, it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that all of our bureaus are facing really difficult budget questions right now, and all of our employees are facing those questions as well. And as a council, we're going to have to discuss that, too. So accurately assessing the workload of each bureau to make sure that we're appropriately funding each bureau is really important. So does the project to analyze our call types. And the best responders for those call types still have the support of all of you. And I'm specifically want to hear from dca, myers director cozzie and chief de. Thank you.
72 Well, thank you, councilor. I will just start before passing it over to director cozzie. The answer is a yes. Call. Allocation work is a has been a high priority for us for several years now, since when I was the community safety director several years ago. And that concept started to kind of bear fruit. We have a long way to go, I think. Bob, I'll turn it over to you. I think we do have a call allocation committee that continues to work around this. I will say one thing. Councilors and, madam president, we've heard a lot about call volume and the dependency that it puts on our our first responders. And I've always said, if you do not manage the call volume, the call volume will manage you. And we have we must get out in front and analyzing all the call volume and start separating out what really needs a primary response from our law enforcement and our fire officials, versus what can be possibly managed by an alternative response. And that's why we've moved down this path in the public safety service area. Chief carter director cozzie, I think we have been working on this for quite some time. I know you have a team with Portland fire and Portland police. I think it's called the call allocation committee. Can you talk about that and then maybe include your partners on on what the committee does?
73 Absolutely. First of all, yes, it is a very high priority. And in one that in my one on one meetings with deputy director maudsley, we discuss every week to see what the progress is with that group over the holidays. The committee didn't meet, however, they are reconvening. Gosh, I think it might even be today, but I know it's very, very soon to begin unpacking a lot of the specific call types. And you know, when we look at call types, the initial round was looking at some of the more obvious call types, where it's obvious that police need to respond on those calls. Now they're diving deeper into other call types and actually tearing that apart to determine maybe it's better for a ps3, perhaps it's better even for online reporting in some cases. So that's where the committee is going. And really trying to take that higher level approach and diving deeper.
74 Is there a timeline for this committee or when the council should receive more information on the call type?
75 I don't have a timeline right now, but we'll work on that. Okay.
76 Thank you so much, councilor.
77 I will say from a timeline standpoint, I don't think this will ever be done completely. I think this is a this is something we should do through the lifetime of having service delivery. You will be we should be reviewing call types regularly and never stop. So I think it's you know, it's work that can be done right now. I think, you know, there's a couple staff members that are with council now, elisa freeman, andre miller, who were with the community safety division for a few years who have started this work, they've championed this work. The work will start. We'll continue to get progress. But I think we do this forever. We should be analyzing call volume as a regular part of our business model, and we should be reporting that in some form or fashion, where the council can have confidence that there's progress and that we are managing the call volume appropriately, I don't think we'll be done. I'll put it that way. Maybe that's the better way to state it. But I appreciate you bringing it up because I do think this is if we're going to talk about appropriate staffing, the wellness of our of our first responders, we need to talk about how we're managing the workload. And this is the primary way we can manage workload.
78 Absolutely. Thank you. And chief de yeah.
79 So I tell people sometimes a little bit sarcastically, I'm the only ceo in the city that's trying to get rid of work. But and so all of these efforts around alternative response models I'm very supportive of call allocation etc. I know that, you know, there are some conversations that we need to continue to include labor, but as a membership, as overall there's a lot of things that we respond to that either we don't believe we need to or they don't fit. The best response being police officers. Police officers take this profession because we're naturally problem solvers. And it saddens me that every day we send a number of officers to problems that are unsolvable, and they're not equipped to be able to manage and handle, and yet we expect them to do so. And they do it in an incredible way. But I do think that that having this conversation is important. I just want to emphasize, though, that, you know, we are relying upon a system that we can agree or disagree in terms of its effectiveness or appropriateness that we have built for, you know, literally decades. And to make changes in that system requires a really difficult commitment, because we can't replace one until we have something else to replace it with. And I think measure 110 is a great example of that. The concept around measure 110, the belief and the understanding about what measure one 10th may have provided for our community for years later, hundreds of deaths later, we realize we weren't ready. And I think when we have this conversation around law enforcement, it's the same thing. This is why I'm encouraging each of you to engage with the bureau as much as possible, because what's happening on a day to day basis on the streets through the 911 center in terms of just practical, what's playing out? The other day, as I was driving to a meeting, listening to the call of a mother who had called in because her 15 year old daughter had threatened her with a knife, has a history of anxiety, and is hiding in her room, and they don't know what to do. Nobody wants to go to that call. That's a tragedy on so many levels. Is it appropriate to send a police officer? Is it appropriate to send a mental health response? Is it we send both. What do we do? And that's just one call out of thousands. So I think this is this is a very timely, important critical conversation. You have my support to be looking for alternatives. But at the same time, in real world and real world, portlanders are calling out of a desperate need for help, and we have a responsibility to provide that. And your police department is the primary responder for that.
80 Councilor I'd like to answer just from the fire department perspective as well. And we are absolutely committed to that work. And as dci meyer said, and I think I mentioned before, this work has been going on for years, and we're committed to continuing that to ensure we send appropriate responders to the to the community and the calls for service. I just I do want to separate and I'd love to have further discussion about this, but there's been a thought that if we can come up with a appropriate responder for low acuity medical calls, for example, we can reduce the size of the fire department because that a large number of calls would go over there. I will I would just want to say that that is a fallacy. What we do the way we why we are set up the way we are is to manage risk. So we have to look at the risk within the city and deploy a fire department to mitigate that risk. Just because we are able to ship low acuity medical calls to a more appropriate responder, that doesn't change the risk of a catastrophic wildfire in forest park or powell butte. That doesn't change the risk of a mass casualty incident at one of our public events. That's what we're set up to do. We've taken on additional work through calls that, again, rightfully so, should probably be going somewhere else. But that risk that, that underlying risk doesn't go away. So I just want to caution and again, I'd love to have further conversation about that and how we how we look at the size of our services, how we're set up, how we provide that. But it's really it's that risk management at the at the core level of it all.
81 Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Thank you all so much. Appreciate you.
82 Councilor Zimmerman. Thank you.
83 I just want to kind of start, chief with noting the lifestyle of an employee who lives the go bag life, right. And you've got a strike force that is heading down south. That is that is an important function, part of our mutual aid, having been somebody who has led a task force in wildland firefighting, myself, not nearly at the intensity your folks are moving into. I just want to give a nod to those employees. But on that, both for with respect to mutual aid, right. We are starting this meeting noting that. And it's an important part of how our work gets done on our worst days or on our stressed days. And I'm curious, chief day, in terms of our mutual aid with agencies outside of Multnomah county, I'm very interested in what our timeline looks to a return and increased and better relationships with Washington and Clackamas county. And in particular, I think the thing we see every single day are we used to see every single day was police agencies from other TriMet jurisdictions being on our transit system. I was at dcm in another community, and my officers worked in Portland as part of transit. We've left that. I'm curious on when we can see that return or if it's in your vision.
84 Yeah, a priority of mine when I returned is these agency relationships. You know, unfortunately for a lot of years and I was certainly a part of this, you know, Portland sort of worked independent. We're the biggest fish in the pond, didn't really see the need. And I think to our detriment, it lost some of those contacts. Certainly policing is different. Policing is different. Each of your districts. It's going to be different in each of our counties and different communities and expectations. That's why we have 18,000 police departments in the united states, because everybody has a little bit different idea about what they think their city or community or county needs. But I have made that a priority, and I'm pleased to say that we've reestablished some tremendous relationships, both in Washington county and in Clackamas county. We're actively working with Washington county in conversation about reestablishing a written agreement. I saw sheriff massey just recently, and we've agreed to meet here in the coming weeks. We're trying to push that forward a little bit complicated when you get outside of Portland, because it's not just Washington county, but there's 7 or 8, nine agencies out there. So we have to get a lot of chiefs in the room to be able to have that conversation. And I've had those both with hillsboro and Beaverton, tigard, you know, great, great relationships. And as I said, we do have a handshake agreement with several of them that they will support us in critical times. But we haven't formalized that. Clackamas county as well as the same I haven't had as many conversations with the sheriff, tried to connect and have missed each other, but certainly conversation. Lake oswego, west linn, milwaukie has supported us. We've had some needed some help on, you know, emergency responses. So that is growing. I'm trying to formalize it. Our relationship with the state police, I don't know if it's ever been stronger. I spoke with superintendent cotty yesterday. I applaud the governor for her willingness to support and offer, you know, the use of troopers over the last year and continue to be really engaged with them. They're probably our our closest partner. The one thing I will mention, I know you talked about outside of Multnomah county, but in Multnomah county, I'm proud of the fact that we did formalize an mou with Gresham, with Multnomah county and with the port last year. We had not had one for a long time. We now have a formalized mou in regards to going forward. I see public safety as a regional approach and what's changed a little bit is in the public safety sector is oftentimes like, well, we're not Portland. That's not us. You know, da da da da da. That type of attitude, that's not the case anymore. We recognize as public safety partners that, you know, crime doesn't stop at the tunnel. You know, the issues don't stop at the, you know, 162nd and Burnside, they're going to continue. And so the increased amount of conversation and resource building is there around TriMet, specifically, 60% of the TriMet calls in the city of Portland. We take already 60%, and yet we don't have a presence in TriMet. And TriMet will actually pay us to take those calls. They I've met with them, sam, their director, several times. They would love to see us reengage. I would love to see us reengage. But it goes back to the earlier comment about, you know, chicken or an egg. Rob peter to pay paul whatever you want to use. If I pull five officers and a sergeant and say, hey, you're going to work the train from downtown to 162nd, or you're going to focus on x around TriMet. Even though we're picking up those calls, we've also now depleted in the precincts. But I am in conversations with TriMet around that. I think it's important. And I think if we took that step councilor, it would increase the amount of presence and demonstrate to other agencies, hey, we're in this together, but there is a little bit of a tension point between, you know, those that are working for TriMet and the areas they service. And it's frankly not largely in the city of Portland. We're still carrying that load.
85 Thanks, chief. I have that goal as well. I know it's long term, and I'm not asking you to reassign today, but I hope that we maintain it as part of our goal for both police and fire. I think what I could really use to be helpful would be a correlation report between the use of overtime to staffing positions and the changes that we see in our in our cost for that. We talked a lot about that, and I and I'll state it, that will be helpful because I think I have a goal is a reduction of overtime as a standard operating procedure. And back to being or whatever makes sense in each agency more of a momentary need or a lottery system instead of a you just know you're going to do a certain number of overtime every, every week. So that would be my goal. And I and I would love to see how that fits into yours. You know, director, I'm sorry, I'm still learning some names here cause I just want to share, you know, chief de mentioned that we cannot not believe our experiences. And we've all heard, I think, over the last couple of years, some pretty terrifying and disappointing 911 outcomes I want to share with you. Last month, I had a good outcome. I had an intense situation where I called 911 and needed to be transferred to another county's 911 system, and it happened so rapidly, I can't even recall if there was a delay. Right. And so I just want to commend the team, the improvements over the last few years, and I hope you'll pass that on to your staff. I know that they've been in the media a lot and that can be hard, but I appreciated their work and my own experience.
86 Thank you.
87 Director mod. Somewhere maybe gone. Okay, that's fine. Y'all can convey it. I think that electeds can be a great asset in the day of an emergency, and I think we can be great distractions. So my encouragement to the dca and the rest of the team is please schedule the ics trainings for elected officials as soon as possible because you have 13 distractors or 13 assets up here, not to mention all of our staff. And so I've been through it a number of times. I used to put my own mayors through it. I hope you will put all of us through it. And to my colleagues, I hope you'll all go to it. I am, I am, the reason I'm being delayed here is I'm selecting which questions. For miss howard in terms of the violence prevention work that you'd mentioned and some of our unique issues, but also some trends that track nationally. I am curious when the last time we engaged in a gun buyback program, right, things that used to get a lot of attention, I don't hear a lot about anymore. And the reason I ask you that is that I'm a firm believer in the reduction of access increases the time from for decision making and increased time and decision making increases better decision outcomes. And so do we have a current gun buyback program or gun access reduction priority?
88 We do not have a standing program for that, but the safe blocks program, and I think in collaboration with pb, have had gun buyback events. I don't remember when the last one from safe blocks was, but they work with other community, community based organizations to do those. I know that we have had at least 1 or 2 in the last six months, and I think that's that's something we absolutely will look at in the future as something we can add to that effort.
89 And we and councilor, we've been in conversation just recently as a chief leavelle or craig, I can't remember, but we just had recent conversations about that with program managers around that. So it's back on the back on the list and conversations happening.
90 Please consider me an advocate for it. If you can put me to work, I will help where I can. And I appreciated the comments earlier about some of the crime prevention. We have some folks in this room right now who I think used to be crime prevention specialist for the city before we had a commissioner Really defund that program and move away from it. And I would just note how impactful this work is, getting us all back to being able to help neighborhoods figure out how to reduce crime, how to have that, that interaction. And so safe blocks and the whatever each iteration we're in, it's important and I the work that you all are doing and that your teams are doing outside of the uniform divisions is incredibly important to the success of this entire service area. And so I hope that we will resist those kind of clawbacks in the future or reductions in the future, because we're in a clawback moment now. And then. Chief, one thing that I two things you and I have discussed previously, and I'd be curious as, as we go through this first year of this new government, the alignment of precincts to districts. And if that ever does make sense, I'd be very supportive if you think it makes sense. But I have no predetermined. So let's keep that one on the on the burner and see where it goes. And then secondly, I hope that we can start to hear a little bit about the recruits that we see coming into service. I, I think that we have some preconceived notions about who goes into different lines of public service. And having come from an organization where recruiting and retention is important, knowing the demographics of folks who are choosing to raise their right hand and take an oath is something that will help us then be better at targeting folks to come join our ranks. I've told you previously, chief, that I if you can put me to work to help know that Portland is open for employment and we are open for people to be a sworn officer, that I want to help with that. But it also helps to know who's joining the ranks of Portland police bureau today. And then I think it's relatedly, I couldn't sit here and not talk about, you know, having spent a career in a volunteer system of service that I think it is time that we get serious about bringing back the reserve program. I understand why it left. I appreciate that sheriff reese took it on, but I think it's time to come back to Portland. And it's not just about more uniformed officers. It is about our ability to say yes to every event that wants to come to Portland and have a road closure so that they can have a race, a parade, a festival. It is about a sense of public safety coming back to the community where you can volunteer, right? You can rise to the ranks as a volunteer. That I think is incredibly important to the fabric of the community. And so wherever I can be helpful to move us back into a place where reserve program is part of our fabric, and you can tell me all the hurdles that you think exist with that. And let's knock down the hurdles versus saying, no, I'm there. And so thank you. I'll stop there. Madam president, unless we just have an abundance of time later, I don't suspect that will happen.
91 But noted councilor Ryan, you have some questions? Yeah.
92 I'm going to set my timer. And you all have to hold me to it. Good morning. It's a beautiful day, and I'm a little bit of a somber mood because my favorite president in my lifetime funeral is today. A good friend's house burned down yesterday. And, you know, that's life. And what I want to pivot to is what I'm experiencing when I listen to all of you. It's morale, reputation, morale, all these things that are deeper than data. I can tell you that I'm experiencing a different level of morale boost over the last year, and it's evident when all of you are in person, and I appreciate that. It's also really complicated. Someone started, I think it was you, stephanie, with complex problems. Take a while. Do the second part. Take complex local solutions? I think we're usually good about the complexity of the problem, and then society wants a quick fix. That's a longer conversation. Everything we've talked about is that's why my alarm will go off soon. My point is, collaboration is key. We experienced that I think two days ago when we had the scc team here. And I think we're hearing that again today and we're portlanders, so we can never get distracted by something. One of our values, which is inclusion. And I think that you've proven that you've taken a lot of steps in that regard. That said, mike myers, I think you started off with saying one of the goals, the values is collaboration. Where would you say the number one strength is in collaboration right now, and where would you say is our number one priority for improvement?
93 So thank you, councilor Ryan. And I think you answered the question for me. Really, I'm not there today. But I can tell you over the last six months in working with the talented individuals that have presented with you today, that there has been a there's a difference, there's a change in the energy around public safety. And I'm hopeful and sounding just kind of listening to what you said. I'm hopeful that the council is seeing that energy and that passion amongst this group today. I would tell you a year ago if we would have brought that group, this group together without this common service area approach, I don't think that energy would be felt by you. That's my personal opinion. I can leave it to the to the bureau directors and the directors there to comment on how they feel. But I feel a difference. I've noticed a difference. I've seen a difference not just in the energy around our conversation, but it shows up in the performance indicators and the results that we're seeing. Things have changed. I feel it when I walk around town. I feel it within the energy of the conversation and we're seeing it in results. A positive change in results. All of that, I believe, is the result of really good professional dialog, collaboration, support. And I you know, I watch it when we sit in unified command meetings. We are just approaching things differently where the number one area for improvement, I don't know that there's a number one, I think there's a there's multiple areas for improvement. There always will be. What I hear from each one of these directors, I meet with each one of them independently and alone, and I meet with them all together. I hear passion about their work area. Every one of them has a something very important to give back to the community, whether it is Portland street response or getting gun violence down, or the chief's challenge on staffing, or the making sure that we keep the fire to the room of origin and cardiac arrest survivability numbers are good in the city. Every one of those are a challenge we have. We were showing good results. We can show better results. So I believe the collaboration will yield just a consistent increase in our ability to deliver the goods and services of public safety that you all are requesting. And I'm seeing that today, and I'm hoping that you are as well. And I would open it to my colleagues on their comments on how they feel. The last six months has gone on based on on around collaboration and working together. I just see a difference.
94 Okay, we'll get that offline. I only have a few minutes left, so moving right along. I want to first of all acknowledge you, chief day. When I go to the swearing in ceremonies, you say something so important to your new recruits. And I think actually to yourself, that is, you have really challenging jobs and you respond to things that are very uncomfortable and you have to make really quick decisions to protect portlanders. And so you remind everyone to go appreciate Portland when you're off duty. Go walk along the park when the blossoms are out, and etc. So I really want to say that's really important that you help set that tone. Staffing levels is obviously the big question. And police for the police bureau, and you mentioned both the morning shift or the day shift. I might not do these right. The afternoon shift. Then there's the night shift. I didn't see the numbers on the night shift. And we also had a report recently from your team about the staffing up with overtime during the week of the elections. And I can't tell you how many times I heard from people. They dialed one, one, one. And they got responses that week that had nothing to do with what you probably were preprogramed for. It was just basic service. So how many officers will we have tonight on the night shift, for example?
95 Yes. So I appreciate that. Thank you. Councilor. And the numbers vary. And I just gave you that snapshot just for, you know, real time moment in time. But I can definitely get you those. Overall, I can tell you that consistently for the last year, every shift has been a minimum of two below minimum. So once again, and this is just the minimum standard. So consistently on average we do not meet the minimum requirement of staffing that we believe is necessary to meet the needs of portlanders. And you're right. When we had and it was recently, we had the resources we had during election week is because we ordered everybody to work. They didn't have a choice. And so but in that same vein, I was committed to not just having people sit around, but to really demonstrate what we can do when we have adequate resources. And we saw double digit percentage decrease in response times, being able to get to places, you know, quicker, more efficiently, we saw an increased amount of use of deflection to the point to where I think we took 41 people over the course of a couple of days, and we've been averaging just a few. So we're able to engage more with our behavioral health, public service and county partners around that. So the reality is it's a math problem that if you have the people in the butts and the seats, they're going to be able to get to the calls quicker and more efficiently.
96 I'm looking yeah, there it goes. I just hit the time. I'll just end with this. I'm doing a ride along tonight. I'm going to the 11 p.m. Roll call, and so I'll be able to get a sense of what those numbers are like in north tonight, and I look forward to that. I also appreciate hearing about the strategic plan, and I hope that you engage the labor partners while you're working on that strategic plan. Thank you so much.
97 Thank you so much, counselor.
98 Can I answer your collaboration question or just add a little piece to that? I don't want to take take away time from you.
99 Seven minutes. Yeah. To myself.
100 I'll be I'll be quick. I'll be quick. And I won't repeat everything that dci meyer said, because the internal collaboration with our team is, is incredible right now. And the, the lengths that we've that we've gone and where we are now, there's a lot of positives there. One challenge that we have faced on the fire side is with emergency medical services, which is managed by Multnomah county. So over the last couple of years, we've experienced instances where no ambulances were available. Unfortunately, despite pushing and asking and getting to the point of begging, it took a long time for that. That change to happen where now we are seeing an improvement there. We're not at that level zero status anymore. So that's one piece. And I know this goes well beyond the fire department on city county collaboration and working together, but I just wanted to put that out there that that's been a real challenge for us, for us with how the system is set up in the ems world and working through that with what our responsibilities are, what the county's responsibilities are. And on a lot of fronts, we work very well together. But there's also some big challenges there.
101 With all the improvements we've seen with theft and with gun violence, can we have the national average right next to that so we can see how we stack up? Thanks.
102 And I just received a text. We have 36 that are scheduled that we hope to have. We only have 31 right now for this evening. And that's including people on overtime. So the likelihood tonight that will be 5 or 6 short on night shift.
103 And then another company piece I'd like is to see when the crime takes place. So when I listen to small businesses and neighbors and, you know, there was a lockdown not far from my neighborhood last night, it seems like a lot of it happens, like my mom always said after midnight. So if you could give us that data, that would be helpful too.
104 Yes, thanks.
105 We have, I think, three folks left who haven't gotten to ask questions. And I'd like a minute at the end. So I may ask you all to stay about five minutes late. We were about five minutes getting started. Councilor Green, go right ahead.
106 Thank you, madam president. And I'll be brief. I just have one question. So, and it's on emergency management. So director ahmed but also chief gillespie, you may you may add some flavor to this if you if you feel it's appropriate. My question is in regards to forest park, kind of the forest heights area and also that sort of like nexus with the critical energy infrastructure hub. One of the things I hear a lot from the people who live in that part of the district is the worry that we do not have an emergency management preparedness posture for that type of risk. I appreciate on the slide that you you mentioned that, you know, there's both the challenges, reductions in staff and also kind of this increased risk of frequency of emergencies because of climate change. I think we're all seeing that lesson very clearly from los angeles right now. So I'm wondering, you know, and I want to recognize the good work that the community resilience program does, but we don't want to just lean only on neighbors. We also want to have our own infrastructure and our own staffing. So I'm curious if you have in your mind, one, are we prepared to deal with a major wildfire in forest park and maybe sort of a leap across highway 30 to the ci, or vice versa? And if not, what does it take to get there? Thanks.
107 That's a great question. And I don't I know you said it would be quick, but I don't know if the answer is as quick. So definitely we could do some further conversation. But I'll just start by saying, you know, there's definitely a lot of will and kind of following councilor Ryan's question about collaboration. That's how we get to that level of preparedness, right? To your point as well, councilor, we can't do it alone. Community can't do it alone. Government can't do it alone. And to that extent, there has been work with even the Multnomah county, for example, on kind of what a plan would look like. You know, again, it takes effort, it takes resources to even do that planning effort. And I know, as I said, some of our plans aren't as up to date as we'd like them to be. But so, you know, having that strong community resilience, having a proper plan in place is really the foundation of an answer to what you're asking for. You know, how confident am I in our preparedness? Yeah, we know there are gaps. We've had identified gaps in the past that we know that we want to work to improve. For example, a key part of ensuring survivability is alert and warning, and an alert and warning program is, you know, kind of it's not resourced right now with us. You know, you look at other cities that have a staff managing that program. We've struggled to get there. And so we've used kind of in bits and pieces. We've had contract resources support some of that. But really that's something that you want to have in-house. So we can talk a little bit more about kind of some of those specific pieces and what that means. You know, I would not say that we are where we want to be. And a lot of what we're doing and what you've heard today from all of us is risk management. And we're putting resources where we're, you know, seeing the greater needs and sometimes those kinds of other issues where maybe something hasn't happened yet falls a little bit lower in that priority. That doesn't mean it's not important to us. It doesn't mean we want to do something. Just right now, with limited resources, we have to focus where we are. And I don't want to speak to for the fire chief, but maybe you can speak to that.
108 I'll add a little bit there. Yeah, absolutely. That's a concern of ours amongst many others that keep me up at night. And we look at it from a couple of different perspectives from the prevention side, of course, and then the response side and preparing and working through both of those. So on the prevention side, our our fire prevention division has worked with the communities up there with the firewise program, making sure that folks understand the importance of clearing brush away from their house and access and egress routes. And we would love to expand that out as much as we can. Again, it's resource limited. So on the prevention side, ultimately that is the goal. Let's stop it before it even starts. We've had fires in forest park. We had a number of them last year. That's where the response piece comes in, and making sure that our folks are adequately trained. A lot of that is self-initiated training by the companies that work in that area, that we can respond appropriately and get that fire out before the wind kicks up, before it starts blowing up the hill and we experience something like la. We can't control nature. We can't control that the environment, we can't control the changes that are happening, but we can be as prepared as possible for that. And then with the see, I have same thing. We understand the huge risk that's associated with that, whether it's a cascadia earthquake or a some other, something else that ignites that down there. So we work with the industries down there to ensure that we're prepared. We have a specialty unit that actually responds to flammable liquid fires, and we conduct tabletop exercises as well. And that's a lot of that is in coordination with emergency management and other bureaus as well. The fire, the fire wise, for example, we work closely with parks for that, for the land clearing and the access.
109 I thank you. And just a quick follow up, if I may. How frequent are your tabletop exercises and are they as frequent as you'd like them to be?
110 I'm going to say annually for the, the cei. I mean, we do them. They're not as frequent as I would like them to be, one that we haven't done for a while, that we really need to do is a communication tabletop exercise. We did that a number of years ago and that was essentially simulated the cascadia earthquake. What happens if our primary radio system goes down, and what happens if the secondary radio system goes down? And we had a across the board boec was a huge partner in that to exercise the communication, because again, if we don't if we don't have that, the communication amongst ourselves and out to the community, we're going to be in a we're going to be in a real jam. So that's one that is definitely on my list. We can never be prepared enough so that it's a it's a difficult question to answer because there's always more we can do. Our job is to manage that, to prioritize it, to prepare and plan and train and exercise as much as we can within the confines of the limited resources that we have.
111 And I can just add on to that, you know, so when we design a tabletop exercise, we're looking first at what is the goal, what is it that we're testing. And we talk about those in terms of capabilities. So even if it's not let's say you know, a specific geographic region or a specific hazard, we test those capabilities. And as the chief alluded to, like communication might be a particular capability we want to test. It doesn't have to be a specific wildfire exercise for it to be tested. So we do tabletop exercises on a lot of areas all throughout the year. As a city, oftentimes, you know, they've been done in the past bureau by bureau, and we're working to kind of create an overarching city wide training and exercise program again, with the resources we have. And sometimes we're challenged by.
112 All right. Thank you both.
113 Councilor Avalos, I believe you only got a brief question in before. So.
114 Yes, this maybe is a big question, but I just feel like I need to ask it. What is your general philosophy on Portland street response becoming a co-equal and independent branch of the first responder system? And are you currently working towards that goal?
115 I'm happy to take that. I think that we absolutely view in the service area. We view Portland street response as a first responder. I think the response and what that looks like is exactly what we're working to address with the labor group. When we talk about scope and we talk about, you know, how we can best leverage the strengths that Portland response. Portland street response has and integrate them. But I think we absolutely see them as an integral part of our our entire first response system.
116 And in what ways, if any, does Portland street response and chat collaborate?
117 You know, I might actually just bring an expert up here, phone a friend and have April come. She can talk about some specifics of how that what that looks like.
118 And I think I'll ask stephanie sullivan to come up from the from the fire side specific to the chat program.
119 Good morning, April roa with interim program manager for Portland street response. To answer that question. We were previously, six months ago, working side by side with the transition out of fire, how our teams collaborate out in the field hasn't changed. How our follow up teams work together and collaborate with each other hasn't changed. We're I think we're both both programs are very committed to our clients out in the field, and that is our top focus and whatever it takes for us to meet the needs to our community. Our staff are doing so. They're constantly calling for co-response if it's outside of our scope, if for Portland street response, if we need more low acuity medical, we're going to call for chat to come out. If it's higher acuity, we're going to call for fire. If it's a police response, we're going to call for them and vice versa. So yeah, yeah.
120 Stephanie sullivan, acting deputy chief, community health chat I think one of the really most important things that we collaborate so well together is in the follow up. So we talk about this case coordination. And sometimes people try to isolate, you know, Portland street response can it can just be Portland street response or just chat. Are they over. Everything overlaps together. And we can't isolate these any more than we could isolate just police and fire because we overlap in so many different ways. And I think the really beautiful thing is in our follow up teams, in these case coordination, we're able to talk about our clients and our patients in a way that we can help move them forward towards independence and towards health, both behaviorally, mentally, substance use wise and also physically with their medications in the way that they interact with the health care sphere. So I think we still continue to do an amazing job at that. Our responders all work really well together. Our leadership teams work really well together as well.
121 So yeah, and just to add a little more, because we have worked so closely together, we really understand each other's strengths and really draw on those respectively in real time aftercare and in first response.
122 Thank you. Councilor Kanal and Novick vice president Koyama Lane has not had an opportunity to ask questions. Do you mind deferring to her? Okay. Go ahead. Councilor.
123 First, I want to say thank you to so many of you in the room who have been at this for hours. It's not lost on me that many of you were in a meeting before this with president pirtle-guiney and I. So thank you so much for your time and your engagement and continuing the conversation around the scope of Portland street response's work and the possibility of the extension of the scope of that work, specifically, the ability to shuttle individuals, community members. That's something that I would love to continue talking about. What I noticed when councilor Kanal brought that topic up was that the response quickly went to shelters. And so something I've already been hearing from my constituents who care about Portland street response, is that they have some concerns that psr will be used to shuttle community members against their wishes, to shelter. So I'm wondering, mr. Mayor, director howard, if you can speak a bit to this concern that's been brought up to me, I'm happy to speak to that.
124 I think I would do my best to allay those concerns for your constituents. Portland street response is not law enforcement. They don't have the authority of law enforcement, and they don't even have the authority to, for the most part, to place someone on an involuntary hold for mental health reasons. So I don't foresee that that psr is, is either being asked to or equipped to, to do any kind of involuntary transport of individuals in any circumstances. So I hope that that that can help you with that.
125 And I concur, and that would only be under a voluntary circumstance.
126 Thank you so much.
127 I know we have other folks who have questions, but we are at time. So I'm going to ask that you all be open to hearing from us in writing, so that we can make sure we get the rest of our questions answered. I also heard some asks for follow up, both information on cuts to police training and what is being cut, and whether that's actually a cut or just being pushed out into the probationary period. Information on a number of reports that you all referenced, that it would be great to make sure we have easy access to, and also information on who our new recruits are and who these folks are, who are joining public service through your various bureaus. I also heard a lot of my colleagues talk about coordination and handoffs, and what the right response at the right time is. And I just would like to flag for all of you that that's a conversation a number of us have been having and that I think we would like to, as we get our work up and running, continue to have with all of you. It's a conversation that clearly you are having as well. It wasn't lost on me, though, that I heard about police and fire being part of those conversations about who the right response is at the right time. And I didn't hear about our our alternative response methods being a part of that conversation. And that's something that I'd like to be able to follow up on at some point. I'd like to thank you all for being here. If you have any final closing information you'd like to share with us, please let us know. Otherwise, we can close out just about on time.
128 Mike, do you have anything to add?
129 I don't just thank you, madam president and councilors and mayor for the opportunity to speak today, and we're looking forward to further conversation with you.
130 Great. And thank you, mr. Mayor, for being here to hear this conversation and better understand the questions that we all have for your bureaus. And with that, I will close our work session and look forward to working with you all more.