mr president we are now live all right thank you good morning everyone welcome to this study session of the city council we have a quorum of counselors present and we may have some others joining us but i think we'll get started and we we really uh as with study sessions typically there's no uh actions other than the approval of the minutes and and then that's the only voting action so we'll start with that this is the approval of the summary minutes from december 20 of 21. i'll move approval is there a second down second from counselor jones and um any discussion or any corrections i don't think there would be but um i guess we need to call the roll so i think uh ms you know jose if you'd call the vote please counsel yes councillor davis i believe he's excused counselor people yes councillor grout yes councillor jones yes councillor lewis i wasn't a part of that meeting but yes thank you council pena yes counselor sanchez i believe he's excused oh there he is counselor yes thank you councillor benton yes thank you that passes unanimously all right thanks we'll now move on to our discussion uh for this meeting and um this is a discussion regarding the police oversight ordinance and the intention of the meeting that was that we could have a conversation with members of the civilian police oversight board so i'd like to have them introduce themselves and i'll just call them out as i see them here on my screen ms galloway hi good morning everybody chantel galloway i am acting chair um after the mass exodus of a month and a half ago so here i've been on the board for about four years now um and so a little bit of history with it thank you uh mr dr cass oh yes i'm bill cass and i'm uh i've been on the board almost five years and uh i currently am the uh chair of the policy subcommittee and uh that's been my primary focus on the board so mr crawford my name is jesse crawford i'm currently the newest member of the board i've been serving i think it might be coming up on about five months now thanks for stepping up miss french good morning my name is patty french and i currently chair the complaint review committee which since i think october we've been going through the ordinance line by line by line since we heard about the recommended changes and we have been working on our recommendations and the changes and edits we'd like to see so uh um and i'm i'm the second newest person on the board i got on the board i believe in june of last year thank you and then we'll have our acting uh director ms mcdermott hi i'm diane mcdermott i've been with the agency for over 15 years um currently serving in the interim capacity for director and generally my title is lead investigator at the agency thank you and i see uh councillor davis has joined us thank you for that and um yeah i think this is intended to be a fairly free-flowing discussion um i'll just ask many counselors when i speak first um and perhaps uh well as you know the the the bill that we have before us is co-sponsored by myself and councillor bassan and councillor davis so maybe if they would like to comment concept assign thank you mr president i guess depending on what everybody else wants and what your pleasure is i mean going through director mcdermott's email there's quite a few details and questions and i think it's really a great starting point to what we should look at and maybe if we can't make the changes that she's suggesting at least figure out how to communicate to the board why because i think there are some reasonings on there but i mean i've been going through it and i have some markups um but i wouldn't i don't know if there was a different direction but i think that also with council stuff with mr malendras and miss kulidon i think that might be helpful too as a starting point to kind of nitpick it okay counselor davis you have any comments on that uh thank you mr chair mr president i appreciate that i'm excited to hear from the members of the board i know we've all had a chance to hear from individual members and uh there are a number of different pieces so i appreciate the president and the members making time to do this today i think it's important for us to hear directly from them since we can't do that uh and sort of these open meeting uh rules sort of one-on-one and in these rolling quorums so i appreciate that i hope you all have a chance to to hear from them and take that uh forward to our next meeting thanks all right um assess mr melendez if he has any suggestions as far as how we had to proceed in the meeting i'm happy to uh maybe follow along with ms mcdermott's email if that's i don't have that in front of me myself unfortunately at the moment but i'll get it up um but uh any thoughts uh mr melendez um mr president uh yeah so it sounds like you have a potential framework to work through um from ms mcdermott's email i'm not sure if um there was a something that happened in cyberspace or if i was inadvertently left off but i didn't get that email so i'm not not able to help help kind of identify issues there speak through them because i haven't had a chance to review it but um you know the other alternative is um to maybe i could go through some of the high points of what the ordinance is doing um and what the big ticket proposed amendments are with an eye toward what the council is looking to address um and then potentially board members could let us know if we think that those align with what they believe those big tickets to be or not um and any suggestions for what they think might be missing from what the council is looking at in its scope um all this is set to the backdrop of o2178 which is presently in the council approval process you had one meeting with the full council on that ordinance at your last meeting and entertained a few amendments you deferred that ordinance in order to continue the discussion including the discussion that you're about to have here today so that's kind of the backdrop and i see you have a hand up from one of the counselors and so i'll yield so that you can address that and give me direction on how you'd like to proceed sure counselor basan you mr president so given what councilor davis said and what mr melendro's just said as well um just for the sake of i i remember us saying and the board saying at our last meeting they really wanted to talk with us so i completely respect maybe we should just use today to hear from them and then maybe in office we can go ahead and kind of dissect that email i did re-forward it to mr malendra then miss cool it on um for their review but i still follow your lead but i'm happy to not necessarily go that route if that's not the best way sure well you know just as a um again i i didn't see the email either so um i guess maybe we uh unless we could bring that up and and have that be a guide of some sort we could just open it up to hear from the uh board members at this point and i i just want to say quickly that um you know i i want to express my apologies at the last meeting you know that the bill had come up it's time time had arrived at the council and we did go ahead and you know it was on the agenda and we discussed it along with some uh some amendments that that were are out there for consideration you know they're they're i don't think any co-sponsors are tied to those amendments necessarily but we did discuss each of those and there and they're just out there for consideration but uh tesla feeblecorn sir i was just wondering i i also don't have the email and so i'm just wondering if somebody could forward it to everyone so we can all follow along i think we have two two possible courses one is to follow along with ms mcdermott's email the others just kind of open it up and hear from the board if i heard counselor bassan correctly is that what you were thinking yes sir i think that i mean why not hear from the board on what they think we've done so far and figure out where they want us to proceed and then put all that information together with the email that will sounds like be distributed to everybody thereafter and we can kind of polish it up before the next meeting that sounds good uh counselor jones thank you mr president i also agree with that i think it would be i think we need to listen to the board and see what they have to say and then we can uh go from there with what what we think we want to do and discuss it with them but i really would like to hear because we get to see them quite a bit and get to see their faces but i would really like to uh hear what they have to say specifically okay very good thank you thanks so um well why don't we just uh do that then let's just go ahead you know again this is a study session it's a free-flowing discussion no decisions will be made here we won't be voting on anything or changing anything about the legislation or possible amendments but uh let's uh let's open it up for the board uh acting chair galloway do you want to lead off and get us started sure i can um so i think that my overarching concern after the last city council meeting and receiving the proposed amendments um was that it just seemed like there was a lot of really big changes that were taking place some of them seemed as though they came out of left field and that maybe we were trying to solve problems that may or may not exist or not solve some problems that exist by just circumventing the problem itself particularly with the number of board members i am confused as to why we've not been able to appoint members to this board when we have such a large number of applicants available for consideration for nine people i think the last count that i heard was 178 or 180 applicants to this board surely we can come up with four people out of that large of the application pool um and so my concern with that personally is that we're not looking at the root cause of why we're not finding members for this board um i'm personally concerned with the removal of the citizens police academy as a requirement as far as our training goes i know that we've talked a lot about that and how burdensome it is but the cpa is is really important training i think for anybody who's going to come from the public right we are not legislators we are not members of apg we don't have this background for a very specific reason and that's to lend a little bit more context and not um leave this community with such a myopic view of what's going on and potential issues that arise within the community and and the department and that relationship and so giving us that baseline training of what the police department has i i do personally believe that should be a requirement and in fact uh contrary to i think popular opinion of other board members i think every time a board member is reappointed they should go through that training again i don't think that should be once for a six-year potentially six-year term it's too important um in in my opinion so i think that that needs to be needs to remain as a requirement rather than an optional training or a recommended training um i would go back to the budget process for the cpoa being a percentage of apd's budget rather than as a standalone and come to come to the city as everybody else does i can understand the value in that but i also think that it's important the argument that we made um a few years ago the independence and the the the independence and the integrity of this process cannot be dependent upon who is sitting in your chair when you are not um and subject to political whims it needs to hold its own integrity um and so i would be a strong advocate for re reverting that back to the way that the previous ordinance had the budget lined out there are some things that i think are a little vague for example on the current proposed draft that i have it's on page five the first line talking about a representative sampling of incidences um use of force talking about that things like that just need to be a little bit more specific i think um i have some concerns i'm director mcdermott and i had a conversation yesterday afternoon i have some concerns with the board being removed completely from the case review process and leaving that in the hands of one person at the agency because of what i understand to have been problems with the previous prior to director harness the the person who filled the position at that point kind of stashing cases and not having any accountability and cases not being reviewed because that individual didn't want them to be reviewed and so i think the checks and balances are important however i think that the solution that we have currently is unmanageable and that there's some work to be done so one of the things that just kind of in conversation back and forth director mcdermott and i were discussing is maybe instead of reporting the cases that we we back up and pull focus on trends that's what we should be looking at for policy development purposes um and so rather than looking at individual cases that we are reported um we have reports given to us by the agency on a monthly basis that have to do with how many times a certain sop has been either violated or a sense that it's been violated by the community right because i think that that can be very telling too we have a lot of instances where community members have an interaction with a department that feels uncomfortable it feels uncomfortable to them it feels uncomfortable to us as a board but it's not technically a policy violation well maybe that's something we need to look at that's a trend right if we don't like the feel of and i get in trouble for saying feel but it is that we don't like the feel of something maybe there's some room to tweak and so being able to look at trends and policies and how many times one comes up um is probably a better direction for us to go so that i know that there's been some discussion about compensating board members i personally don't have a dog in that fight i don't care one way or the other it would be nice to have some of this time that i take away from work um recognized and there's uh some value to doing that monetarily i also didn't sign up to get a check from the city so it's not super critical on my list of um issues that have come into this ordinance so um i agree with councillor sanchez's assessment that internal affairs training needs to be a part of our experience it shouldn't be a recommended training it needs to be a part of what we're looking at um there's a little bit of confusion and i don't really know if it's an ordinance thing or if it's a casa thing but as to what our role is when we're looking at youth of force cases that's the one that comes up quite a bit as this is where our focus needs to be but we have absolutely no perception that we affect that process whatsoever um we don't have any concept of if we disagree with uh the force review force review board findings what are recourses how do we address that we don't seem to have any sense of well what happens if another issue is identified within a force within the force review board process that would close that loop of communication with us for something that is so critical to oversight and um kind of a cornerstone of why we're all here talking about this today i'm not sure other than watching the same thing that that the force review board has done what effect we have on that process and so i think that there's some tweaking that needs to be done there um so i think i think just for me that's probably where i would start with that is just backing up with the case review stuff really paying attention to what training should be required um and which ones shouldn't codification of those trainings too for the same reason that i think the budget should be a percentage of apds the the idea that what a board member what dr cass and i experienced four years ago versus what member french and member crawford um are experiencing or going to experience as far as what trainings there are completed it's different it just is we're not coming at this as a board from the same um handbook really you know i i don't really know how else to say that we're not coming at this with the same information and the same tools because the classes that are offered in the police academy are dependent upon whoever is commanding the academy at that time whoever is the commander so um laying out at least these things need to be done so that we take away any kind of um change that would come with a change in administration or leadership within the department so with that i will kick it off to perhaps dr cass since he's got a long-term view of this as well thank you dr cass yes thank you so i have a little bit different approach to this and i would like to talk kind of an overview of what i think are you know the three major issues what board selection and training second was to see our mission as a board and an agency more specifically about how we uh handle themselves and complaints and what we do there so i would say that um we should be selecting community members for the board who are specifically motivated to focus on police oversight and this requires some familiarity with the history of the apd use of force that led to the awesome i think that i think it's important to have that history and that understanding of why the council created this war went through a lengthy process of creating a task force first of all background research and i think esports did a feel a very good job of creating a thing and so framework for the organs in general i think that that you know fundamentally we have a decent yeah there's some changes um so dr casa you're breaking up could you see if you could speak perhaps a little bit louder yeah is that better if i'm closer i've had something so probably thanks oh it's like your connection is degrading i'm sorry it's like your connection's degrading when you speak for some reason oh can you hear me now is it is this okay all right okay well i'll try to focus i'll try to get uh to the microphone so um i think that the other the other aspect of selecting uh members is that they have the time to devote to these tasks of reviewing policy and and reviewing these use of course cases which remember galloway uh alluded to and then also i think it's important to deal with you know uh police and more than just a right along sense and i think it's useful to be able to have the time and i think it's important to have the time to be able to attend uh with uh abd which is policy which i regularly go to and so i think that you know it becomes important too or it's useful to get the information that you get not just with my laws but with interacting directly with this policy major problem regarding the mission i think our mission is we have a mission that's laid out in the mission statement and that is to deal with advancing constitutional policing accountability so i think it's important to remind ourselves what our mission and i think that we looked at by getting the kind of training that the makeover which leads me to the citizen complaint part of the process i see that the cpoa itself has investigated well equipped to deal with these complaints although the investigation is generally a fair the purpose of it is to create a fair great affair that um so what do you do we're going to separate those two functions so that essentially the agency investigates the complaint finds it disappointing and uses the information complaints to deal with so i think so those are the three main points the other issue of reviewing seriously supports cases i think this is you know i've been the person on the board who put this together and i think this is an ongoing process actually the board the role in this review sop is atv's sap report and so i think this is something that's sort of an internal process within the agency and the board we can't hear you at all you're breaking up tremendously perhaps we could move to another board member or something dr cass until you can get that taken care of because you're it's a constant breakup you log out and log back in um bill that might help yeah just a reconnection right how about this that sounds good that's better yes okay all right good um so you i mean i hate to start over i i i think we got some of the just what you were saying but yeah if you want to kind of summarize okay well i think that you know essentially there's there's three areas that i care about in that era that i like i think that the ordinance can address and that is more board selection and training i think we need to select community members who have us who are willing to learn what the mission of the board is and then provide that mission information um and then have the have the the time to be able to deal with you know uh daytime meetings and and essentially the prioritization to you know to fulfill or fulfill their membership obligations then i think we ought to deal with the mission of the of the uh of the agency much more directly i think we need to create a you know we need to have a constant process of re-understanding and and making this a common understanding among board members as to what the actual mission of the board is so that we focus on the things such as policy uh uh citizen citizen claims in a you know you know in the manner that i described earlier but essentially policy uh serious use of force case review and uh and and citizen complaints uh then i think that um regarding the there needs to be clarification on the role of the board versus the role of the agency in in uh dealing with citizen complaints the role of the agency i think is to use to do a fair investigation of the citizen complaint and we uh recently have had uh you know there's discussion and i think it's part of the findings of the subcommittee that dealt with this regarding uh allowing unlimited appeals or anyone to appeal a case i think that you know this goes in the that flies against the uh the uh the integrity of the investigation that was done to begin with with the agency itself and i think it also takes ends up taking a lot of time and away from the you know the real mission of the board which should be to use that citizen complaint information to create policy and and training recommendations so that's kind of a summary of what i tried to say uh and with a bad microphone thanks thank you dr cass um uh mr nixon and you got on just a little bit of late you want to introduce yourself and then we'll we'll just keep going around the horn here yeah my name is eric nixon i'm on the cpoe board i've been there for a couple years now i served on the cpc's before so glad to be here thanks thanks for being here uh mr crawford you want to go next certainly um i'll avoid being too repetitive because i think that uh chair galloway and member dr cass covered a lot of the same thoughts that i have um i did just want to to re-emphasize a couple of things that they've mentioned the first is modifications to the board's role in the case review process i think everyone kind of agrees that the the situation is sort of untenable right now in terms of the the amount of time that that consumes i do think that involvement in case review is an important way for the board to obtain information that leads directly to policy recommendations and so i hate to see a an elimination of that scope um something that i've discussed in the past is is moving towards more of a random audit model or in in some other way uh developing a method for the board to remain involved enough in the case review process to have access to that information for policy purposes and also to hopefully contribute to the high quality of those investigations uh but without having the the situation we have right now where it feels like the board is frequently repeating the agency's work um another thought as well that that something i was not very happy about in this amendment uh or in the proposed amendment are the changes to training there's been pretty serious problems with a lot of the trainings that were not required by the casa but rather by the ordinance being difficult to obtain um i'm not not very happy with eliminating those training courses as requirements though some of them seem really important to the function of the board in particular i think awareness of ia policies and of the training that apd officers receive is really critical to being effective in a policy oversight role um it's frustrating that you know despite those trainings being required they've been so difficult to obtain and sort of addressing that by dropping the requirement seems like it just really ensures that those trainings will never be offered and that will be a real loss i think to the efficacy of the board um and then a couple of other thoughts that are i think more responsive to the floor amendments that we saw as a general principle i do support introducing a stipend for board members i think that'll help to improve the sort of the accessibility of positions on the board to the public i do feel like as is right now the time obligation and some of the sort of morale issues involved i think are probably a bigger impediment to obtaining board members and retaining board members than the pay issue per se um so i don't object to that change i'm just a little hesitant i'm worried that it won't maybe achieve the outcomes that we might hope for and finally there was a floor amendment that substantially changed the composition of the board the reduction from nine members to five members is uh not something that i'm really upset about um i would maybe tend to agree that nine members seems kind of large um for the board the two things that i objected to a lot more were first the move towards using a chair who's appointed by the city council um and is not a voting member of the board i think there's been an unfortunate feeling over the last um sort of six months that i've been involved in this process that there is a degree of disconnection and sometimes acrimony between the board and the city council i'm worried that a situation where the city council appoints a chair to the board who's not elected from the board's membership that feels to me like something that might kind of make that situation worse rather than better uh and moreover my concern was about the composition requirements uh that were in that four amendment um if i don't have it in front of me but if i remember correctly it specifies the board should have uh five members and then i think two to three should be from a law enforcement background two to three from um the cpcs and then one general member um i'm pretty uncomfortable with the idea that a board of five people would can potentially consist of three members with a law enforcement background um you know that would be exactly following the the recommendations in that four amendment and that feels to me like it would definitely have the appearance of pretty significantly compromising the cpoa's independence from law enforcement um i think that's really everything i have to add besides that just thank you so much for this for this opportunity and for working on these amendments thank you member crawford and i just a couple of uh responses uh quickly um one with regard to the audit and reporting to the board this proposal does still include that it does however alleviate them from having to approve findings um and then the other aspect i think um minor correction it wasn't law enforcement it was involved with the criminal justice system so you could be a you know you could be a public defender a retired public defender uh we even used the example of you might have participated as a person would be prosecuted within the system if you wanted to read that broadly but but uh but point well taken and uh you know i i we may have uh certainly gotten too far uh on the reduction of the size of the board so but but anyway these are things that that we need to hear and we appreciate it um let's see uh we'll go with uh member french first and then member nixon um thank you um as i said we've been going over the uh ordinance line by line by line but i'll just highlight some of the things that have stood out to me as a board member number one i think that every citizen should have a right to appeal the agencies decision or findings and they don't currently you have to find an sop violation or has to be something so egregious and i've brought up several examples to the members of this committee where you know an average 18 year old or average citizen would not know all of that information so we've looked back at the original way that they used to do it where any citizen could appeal i think that's a big issue that we need to address as far as the composition of the board we have a lot of work to do i don't think that five people could do it i certainly don't think that putting requirements on board members this is supposed to be a fair representation of the citizens of albuquerque i don't think that the average citizen has had a police background or been a part of the cpc it does take a lot of dedication and work i personally i don't want to be paid i wouldn't take it even if you would allow it because i'm not here for that i'm here to to help apd because how many people are willing to put their lives on the line for you every day and to help the citizens who now feel that sometimes they're being mistreated by public safety officers so my ultimate goal is to look at trends and to make recommendations on policies and procedures as far as the investigations citizen complaints are concerned i made a recommendation the other day that we do it like other committees that i've set on boards that i've set on you have a consent agenda and if a board member sees something that they would like to pull on that and from a certain investigation they would be able to pull it and to have random audits i understand that you're saying that the agency does fair investigations but there always has to be checks and balances i don't care who it is there has to be checks and balances so having a history of working for apd for 30 years i will let you know that the citizen police academy was a learning experience i didn't feel like i needed it i didn't really want to go but i will say i enjoyed it i even went to classes that were not required i agree that is something that every board member should have to take it is tuesday and thursday for three hours for about nine ten twelve weeks but it is something that if you're going to make decisions that if findings are correct from ia or for from whoever from the director you need some knowledge of the training and what officers are exposed to every day you can't make that decision from one-sided one point of view so as i said we're having a meeting this evening where we're going to be going over the all the changes that the board that this mo the committee has gone over line by line in the audi in the ordinance so i will have more information once that information is vetted by all board members and we all agree on what changes we would like to see so i will just leave it at that because there's too many changes that we would like to recommend thank you uh member french and just quickly uh not not in the form of rebuttal or anything i just get some information just to to make clarity um uh uh you know there is still a provision that anyone may appeal uh the board's decision um and that's still in in the language and then the proposal does include audit and reporting to the board continues to have that it only alleviates uh well we talked about the findings uh but the board does have discretion and hearing appeal so maybe that's uh what you're getting at but we're happy to to hear what you come up with this evening um board member nixon how about yourself uh talking on you sorry about that can you hear me okay now yes good okay um so i've heard all the other members um it seems like we're kind of across across the board uh agreeing on some things and kind of disagreeing on not so much disagreeing but coming at it of a different view which is what i think the board is supposed to do as it reaches a consensus but overall um i can say that my experience being on the board has been somewhat lackluster and it's not because of the members of the board or anything like that um as much as the role of the board and the role of the cpoa and being able to affect change at apd has been kind of lackluster and and somewhat disappointing in my opinion um when i think about what i'm doing on the board and why i'm serving on this board to be honest with you i'm here for the people of albuquerque and for the community and the intention is not so much to to help apd or harm apd but to to be an unbiased uh ear and eye to what's going on and and what needs to happen as far as the community is concerned i've gone through the um citizens police academy i've looked at ordinances um ad nauseam weighed in on some things um put some things in and and i don't see the effect um to be honest with you i think that this whole process has helped to perpetuate uh i guess an environment of of policing that is just not conducive to where albuquerque should be according to the great citizens that are in it um the changes that are trying to be made or the changes that the board should be able to influence at some point that influence in my opinion is just not there um so there's a lot of different things that i'm i'm you know kind of tussle with to to to be on the calls month after month and do this work but i see that the ordinances um and the policy changes and recommendations um definitely do come out but what i what i think is one of the most disappointing things is knowing and understanding the entire process you know as a board member i get a nice little package called a use of force case in a powerpoint presentation with redacted film so on and so forth and i get to see some of the things that have happened and then um based on that i'm to make some sort of assumption or or just come to my conclusions um i don't think that there's a transparency and i and of course you know that makes sense because you've got three entities that are um for lack of a better term and kind of a tango if you will and so those three entities pretty much influence what we can and cannot do and that would be the apd itself the department of justice and of course the uh city council um and so i again i think that this is somewhat flushing it out uh i i i'm listening i'm i'm participating i'm trying to understand what's going on from day to day and from month to month but that that's that's kind of what i see and i think that people are working hard to try to solidify um the process so that we can make policing better in this community i really don't see where we can continue to have some of the imr reports that come across the desk where it seems to me just my opinion that apd is just fighting it they're they're refusing between them in the union they don't you know they don't want it here they don't want to make these adjustments um that may need to be made so that it's indicative to the community that there are actually processes and changes that are being made um because i think there is work being done behind the scenes but again i think that when you have a priority of redaction um hiding um avoidance um accountability especially which is probably the big one then you're going to have these kind of issues so um as far as limiting the board down to five people i don't agree with that 100 i think the representation across the board should be as diverse as the albuquerque community and putting limitations on people as far as who wants to serve on the board i don't think taxpayers pay their taxes and adhere to the laws of this land and do things like that so that they can be excluded based on the fact of whether or not they've served in law enforcement or not or if they have a high school diploma or not etc etc um you know i think that do we really need to get back to the grassroots of what it is we were trying to do when james boyd was killed um and and seeing some of the things that are going on and what the idea of having a cpoa was uh supposed to do as far as serving the community and um allowing the process to do exactly that but also identify where those bottlenecks are and then remove those bottlenecks or adjust or make changes to them so again if you tell me you know it's sort of like shut up and dribble if you tell me uh you know what this is what the cpo is supposed to do we make the recommendations people may or may not adhere to them or agree with them so on and so forth is just what we're supposed to do then we're always going to be ineffective but if we uh can understand how our recommendations and how our time being spent to go through ordinances and make recommendations so on and so forth where we can get outcomes to that where i can see okay where this is what we put in this is what came uh came out of that then i think it would be a much better and much easier for a citizen like myself uh to serve on on this board so all right thank you member nixon um i just wanted to uh ask uh let's see uh please use your hand raise of happy to recognize counselors in order on this but i was i think mr malendras may have some some comments with with regard to the drafting of the ordinance revisions sure mr president and counselors and members of the cpoa board so myself and i know our council staff has been taking notes on all the the good comments so um certainly appreciate those and um i think i'll only echo a couple of things that you mentioned counselor benton which the intent and the ordinance was to continue to um have a process wherein the board would be able to uh review the various complaints that are being investigated however right now the ordinance places responsibility upon them for actually approving you know the individual findings within an investigation even if that investigation doesn't result in a disciplinary recommendation to the police department so that that would be the component of the ordinance that is uh being removed and again that's not a requirement of the city's settlement agreement with the department of justice and it may have been leading to some of the overload that the board has has quite frankly experienced with respect to what it's being asked to do and so i think i heard ms french say that they were going to be doing more of a deep dive on the ordinance and and maybe giving some more direct feedback on that so that'll definitely be helpful if there are places within the ordinance where it appears that that is happening um certainly that's not the intent as i understand it so those could be addressed um also with respect to the appeal process um that was referenced section 9419 um does still say that any person who has filed a civilian complaint and who is dissatisfied with the findings or recommendations may request a hearing by the board it does establish three criteria that the board should evaluate in granting that hearing to include whether or not a policy was mispla applied whether the outcome of the investigation appeared arbitrary or confused or or constituted an abuse of discretion um or that the findings and recommendations were not consistent with the record evidence uh and so certainly within the policy discretion of the council to adjust those criteria if if the board were to recommend as much and that made policy sense um also you know with respect to member nixon's uh comments with respect to uh um being able to implement you know meaningful uh having some meaning associated directly with the acts that the board is taking um i think one of the overarching principles at least as i've been directed by the sponsors um is to put these changes in the ordinance for example by alleviating the responsibility to approve every single finding on every single complaint to allow the board to focus more on the big your policy recommendations that might be developed and be able to pass those along into the the police oversight system in a way that that sets up a proactive and more and hopefully more meaningful um implementation of those that the board had direct responsibility in developing the ordinance has also always given the board the opportunity in the event that they feel they are not being heard on a paul in a policy perspective by the department or or otherwise to submit policy recommendations that they're developing directly to the city council and so that's an outlet as well i don't think the board has exercised previously um but maybe the board should should think about and figure out whether or not that is a um a useful pathway for them to use at some point or or not because that that could be on the table as well for part of this amendment process um that's the only comments that i have i'd be happy to uh attempt to answer any questions about the ordinance if those exist um otherwise i'm just available and as well as miss coolidon um and i believe mr silban is with us now i know we had a little bit of a conflict getting started but we're all here to help fill in any blanks if you need them thank you chris um counselors any other comments from counselors i see uh councillor davis who's his hand up uh thank you mr president um it sounds like we're coming to a close sort of so i want to just say thank you to the members of the board who were able to come join us today we had to come come up with a way that we could hear from everybody uh in a setting um that that wasn't having one-on-one or side conversation so we could incorporate everything and i do appreciate everyone who did that today i hear i heard a few things that i think you know i hear some agreement about the need to really structure the mandated training and ensure that apd is able to provide that training and some accountability it sounds silly but clearly we're not doing a good job at the city of ensuring that the people responsible for overseeing the cops are getting the training they need to evaluate uh police actions uh right or wrong and i appreciate that we need to do that um i i hear some almost universal agreement from members of the board about tying the board's budget back to apd's budget i agree with that i lost that vote the first time around um but i also want to ask and hope that the board can give us some more opportunity to do that i think one of the reasons that change happened early on was because in its oversight role the board was not in my opinion um doing a good job of uh holding the the agency accountable to its own budget positions that were say funded for statisticians and additional investigators weren't filled the agency's budget was often not utilized effectively and the board didn't seem to take a role in that so i think the council thought it was appropriate to bring that back i think there are some internal things that we should work on together as we do this so that uh member french's idea by using consent agenda for example i know patty you and i've talked about that before and i think that's an excellent one it's one we use at the council to move through things but i think that's something the board can then do internally or at least write up recommend and sort of ask for a stamp of approval if they think there's some outside approval needed but i think the board is doing some good work with the members we have here uh sort of with this paired down board before we appoint some new members to do some of those internal accountability things to take a leadership role and to redefine its mission and i want to see us do that before we appoint a new director um because can't ask somebody to take on a job they don't know what it is so mr president thank you for doing this um i i there are some things i hear some agreement on today uh and some other things i think we're really going to have to shuffle through so i hope we can have a new round of these amendments from the sponsors for public review before our next meeting and thank you for this all right thanks councillor davis uh councillor basan and then acting chair galloway has her hand up thank you mr president i wasn't sure if we wanted to hear from director mcdermott herself and her opinions or if we're just going to rely on the email that was sent and then um also i wanted to ask out of everybody that offered these i made lots of notes to move forward with how i want to proceed with changes but our the training how we eliminated some of the training requirements we did that thinking that it might be a little less cumbersome right and now we're learning okay well did we overdue should we put them all back the way it was or is it really just the internal affairs that's being recommended so i'm curious what the board would say about that um and what they would prefer to see as far as what is what is valuable is it in all or none or just some and so that's one question director mcdermott and then the last thing is if after tonight's meeting if you're willing to send kind of an update so that we can look at kind of what you all discussed and compare it to director mcdermott's email with our changes i would be happy to sit with council staff and the co-sponsors and and ideally i would like to come up with a floor sub before you know just rather than a whole bunch of amendments um i think that that would be really great if we could make that happen asap i agree with that counselor uh ms galloway and then we'll we'll uh give mcdermott uh an opportunity to give her thoughts here thank you so much and counselor basson to your direct question about which trainings for me it's the police academy and internal affairs absolutely are critical components to training um touching on something that mr melendra said um and it's something that we have brought up in the past i know that the department of justice has brought it brought it up and the monitoring team but there really needs to be some codification and clarity to the selection process for for new members we we received a presentation from mr sylvan um last month that kind of gave like a 10 000 foot view but we need to get into the weeds on that because that for for the four years the entirety of the four years that i have been here has been the biggest problem that we have faced as appointing members to this board and again with the number of applicants that's constantly being shared i don't know why that problem exists and so there needs to be some time um spent with that i know there's differences of opinion between board members and agency and what not as to whether or not the board and or agency should be a part of that process i personally have the opinion that we should i think that there's insights that we have both from the agency side and from the board perspective that you cannot know if you're not in it um i don't know that it necessarily means that we're part of the selection process but right now we're we're living in this world where everything happens to us and not with us and it happens to us by people who are not a part of the process um and that that would be really helpful if we just did this had the conversations shared the insights and the perspectives but it needs to go down as far as i think with the council staff as well in the process for selecting new members so i think that's important as well mr president if i can just kind of maybe tie a loop there so thanks for addressing that i actually don't think i mentioned that in my comments but i honestly meant to and so i appreciate you uh reading my mind or bringing it up um but there there is room here for a larger discussion and but i wanted to just let you and and counselors know in the event that we haven't had the opportunity to circle up on it yet just this last friday we had a pretty intense session with the department of justice and monitoring team on the selection process and we have some information and some material that we can share with the board on how that process looks you know the the number that was put out i think he said 170 some applications and and why can't we choose from those well um it is it is accurate that there are a number of folks that have applied but at the same time there are criteria that are imposed by the ordinance and the casa and so that number isn't exactly accurate in saying just pick one of these 178 because the evaluation process requires that folks be evaluated based on a number of factors including their diversity across the city that their geographic diversity of their ability to engage independently to not necessarily be invested in one side of issues or the other so there's there's a lot of complexity that goes into that appointment process and historically the board uh at least it was been it's been our perspective that the board has been or had the opportunity to be involved and i understand more recently that that may not have been played out in the way that i think that it had been intended but before folks are appointed to this board they are sent to go visit with the cpoa i think that that may have been occurring only at the staff level but certainly the idea was that they would have the opportunity to meet with board members as well they're also asked to go sit in on a meeting of the board um before being appointed and so there are these opportunities for that to happen and certainly um they can be more well developed and so i think the next step would be i'll get with mr sylvan and we'll make sure that we are discussing all of the presentation material that we prepared in our meeting last week in order to share that with the agency because the discussion does include and should include the agency's ability to inform and assist in that process especially in the area of recruitment and retention thank you mr melandrus and i'm going to turn over to ms mcdermott just really quickly a little bit of background right going back to the james boyd era and that entire turnover of uh the creation of an entirely new agency i think you know my recollection was that there was a lot of pressure for the council the counselors themselves to be have a very long arms length away from any selection process and that's how this ended up kind of being the way it's been run where it's more of a staff the council staff process is further complicated by the fact that council is not really a party to the settlement that's typically done with the chief executives of cities when they doj makes one of these settlements but uh those just a couple of clarifications their background but and i'm not saying it's working we do need to more transparency in the selection process and a more clear selection process without question ms mcdermott uh thank you councillors i just uh will quick quickly mention a couple of things that i've heard regarding the budget issue um it's a more complicated i think than than councillor davis had mentioned in terms of the filling of positions and things like that but generally what we're concerned with is the opportunity the council now has been very uh supportive and good about making sure that the budget is adequate to uh fulfill the mission oh likewise the um positions uh you know there's been funding for the positions and things like that so that's been great the issue is we would want to have at least some minimum standard um available to the agency so that there isn't in the future say the political change of uh what's important to the councils down the road and things like that decide to under fund or cut the funding of the oversight process and so that's the main reason to at least request some sort of a minimum standard certainly uh the agency and has to be accountable for how the monies are spent uh justify how monies are spent things like that nobody is disagreeing with that or arguing with that but we just want to put a some sort of an assurance for the future that we won't be suffering under funding um and then just to speak a little bit to mr malendra's point so those staff meetings or the um pre-membership meetings i understood occurred a long time ago in the past but they had not been occurring recently i know in my role anyway there have been no um meetings or anything uh both chair galloway and i have been presented with names just recently as potential individuals but uh there hasn't been this involvement uh by us in any kind of recent history so i just wanted to like bring those couple of things up i wanted to give the the board members the opportunity since they're bound by oma this is the the way for them to be able to engage more easily i you know i have a little bit easier time obviously not being bound by that dr cass yes thank you uh so i i just want to comment on a couple items one is the member selection process and i think uh we i think the idea that the agency be or the board be involved in that process and should be formalized as to what the expectations are i think it's really important to inform effective members in advance what this uh what this job is and i think it it needs more than just directing them to a website or three websites that describe what what the ordinance is what the casa is things like that i think it needs a kind of a much more personal sort of touch to get that information across and i think that should be coupled with having the training be made more available that's really the second thing when i went through the the citizens police academy apd tailored that for members and some other and actually the doj and attended the member cpa members attended but it was given over two weekends of two days each weekend eight hours a day and so we got the concentrated version and it was uh for the subject function of the board i think it was well done and well put together the advantage was that it was also interactive and that we got we had actually did some pushback at this training on on the trainers which i don't think they were used to i know they weren't used to that at the time because that wasn't how the uh academy was presented but i think that interaction is a good interaction i think if there's a requirement for the cpa i think it should be in a modified way and i know that that's occurred in this most recent go around and that they selected sessions that are important but i think it to make it more specific for the board or cpc members as opposed to just the normal police academy i think that would be that makes it a lot more valuable because it can be you can get much more interaction so i think all of this goes to my point that we need the specific training dealing with oversight and and standing how apd operates in order to do that oversight and so i think that all that all works together because i think it ultimately we're engaged in a collaborative process this is where you know um it's it actually it's uh this comes from dr ginger and that is relentless uh or applied and i think that that's the point here is that we're trying to we're trying to do a culture change and i think we're part of that so it and it doesn't just start by or it doesn't it isn't all about reviewing a serious use of force case and saying okay here's where things went wrong and here's what we disagree with but it's changing those policies and the training that we learn from reviewing this serious use of force case and that takes time to go through uh trickle down through the process and so that's uh you know i think that's one of the frustrations of being on the board is you can't really see that you're what the impact is that you're having it's not immediate it's not direct it's gradual so i think it's important to recognize that that's going to be one of the things that you know you have to deal with if you're going to be on the board that's all i have thanks thank you dr cass member crawford and we are over our time already so we are going to need to wrap this up in a few minutes i actually have to get to another meeting myself yeah thank you just a few quick thoughts uh first on the member selection process i think the process by which i was selected suffered a great deal from having been very rushed i know very few council members spoke to me but i think there was also like really one business day to do so so that's not surprising um this i think 60 day timeline in the proposed amendments made me a little nervous from that perspective just because i don't want to see that become uh i don't want to see it stay as rushed as it has been in my experience when it comes to the audit function i think some of the discomfort that i expressed and i think i've heard from others there just comes from the specific way it's worded in the ordinance right now the audit function has been a little odd you know we don't pay a lot of attention to looking at 10 of cases because we look at all cases that would be different obviously after these amendments i i don't really like it being one annual event though that seems cumbersome and i think at kind of a high level i would like the board to have more uh control over how that process occurs and finally i think the citizens voice academy has been one of the big points of contention on training um i do think i have not had the opportunity to do it yet i do think that material will be important but i also think that the fixed scheduling on that in the 12-week duration means that just because of the scheduling it ends up being a pretty substantial impediment to board members and part of that is because there is certainly a strong feeling right now that there are a lot of eyes on the specific training deadlines um my heart sunk recently when i looked at a calendar and realized that i will exceed my initial six months without completing the required training and that's simply because of the date that the cpa is starting compared to when i was appointed um so i think the cpa would be something that maybe made us less nervous if uh perhaps the deadlines on the cpa specifically were a little more relaxed considering that it's long and offered and frequently thank you thank you for that well unless anyone else has a a final point that we'd like to make i want to thank uh the board members for attending and um you give us plenty to think about and we actually do as as counselor busan uh mentioned or very interested in seeing any formal recommendations that you come up with tonight you know i'll speak for the co-sponsors i think we're all we're all just trying to make sense of this ourselves we don't have an agenda we appreciate your service we want to have a complete board and streamline but also make more transparent the appointment process so that's all on us to collectively yourselves and ourselves to uh to try to get this right and uh and that's i think that's everyone's intention so thanks for your time and uh i'm sure we'll see you soon thank you all