Good morning, everyone.

Like to call this meeting to order.

This is the Alameda County Board of Supervisors Public Protection Committee meeting for Thursday, May 21st.

If we could please start with a roll call.

Supervisor Miley, excuse.

Supervisor Marquez.

Present, thank you.

And if the clerk can please provide the announcement how the community can participate in public comment.

For in-person participation, the meeting site is open to the public.

If you'd like to speak on an item, you can fill out a speaker's card in the front of the room and hand it to me, the clerk.

And for remote participation, follow the teleconferencing guidelines.acgo.org and use the raise your hand function.

Thank you.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for the public protection committee.

Today we will hear two important informational presentations focused on the future of public safety and youth services in Alameda County.

First, we will hear from the Alameda County Public Defender, Brendan Woods, regarding the national public defense workload study and assembly bill 625, California Public Defense Workloads and Staffing Report, which was passed by the legislator back in 2021.

This presentation highlights statewide workload and staffing challenges facing public defense offices and helps us better understand the operational and staffing needs here in Alameda County.

This is a timely discussion given the given the governor's May Revised Budget, which was released last week, and the board's upcoming budget hearing on Thursday, May 28th.

Equal access to legal services like public defense is a critical part of ensuring a fair and functioning justice system.

We will also hear from the Alameda County Chief Probation Officer Brian Ford on informational item two and three regarding the juvenile justice landscape analysis and service needs assessment, as well as juvenile justice coordinating council strategy as it relates to the juvenile justice community prevention act 2020 2026 plan.

These presentations look at the services currently available to youth across Alameda County, identify service gaps, and provides recommendations on how we can better coordinate and strengthen support for young people and families.

I appreciate both departments bringing here being here with us today and look forward to their presentation.

So now I'd like to call up our first presenter for today and introduce our public defender Brendan Woods.

Welcome and good morning.

And the presentation is online, and I should have asked earlier, but want to make sure if anyone's listening remotely, that the audio and visuals are coming in clearly.

We're good.

Okay, great.

Thank you.

Welcome.

Good morning.

The mic.

Good morning.

Thank you for having me.

We have discussed presenting about the National Public Defensive Workload Study for quite some time.

You've actually heard me mention it, and I think the last three budget presentations.

So in order to give you a better and probably more well-informed perspective, Malia Brink will be joining us in presenting today.

Malia Brink is the policy director at the Decent Criminal Justice Reform Center at SMU Deadman School of Law.

I've known Malia for about 10 years now.

We worked together on the American Bar Association Standing Committee for Incident and Legal Defense.

She was actually lead counsel for them for quite some time.

We also helped revise and draft a new ABA 10 principles in engine defense.

Malia is the foremost expert on workload studies throughout the nation.

And I'm happy to have her join us.

I see that she's ready and on the screen.

So I'm going to turn it over to Malia.

She will talk about both the National Public Fenton Workload Study that she was instrumental in drafting and also the ABC25 report.

And then I'll finish up by applying them both to our office.

So thank you.

Thank you.

Welcome, Malia.

Thank you for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me.

And I apologize for appearing remotely.

I had a prior commitment and couldn't actually make it out there.

I love opportunities to come back out to California.

Um, as Brendan said, I'm going to present briefly on the National Public Defense Workload Study and try and focus mostly today on the study done for the California legislature pursuant to AB 625 on public defense workloads in California and support staffing.

So very briefly, um Brendan mentioned that I'm at the Decent Criminal Justice Reform Center.

That is a research and policy think tank at um SMU Dedman School of Law.

Malia, can I ask you to hold for one second?

Of course.

Is it on RN?

I know.

Are you guys hearing it clearly?

Malia, do you mind just uh speaking up a little bit louder, maybe projecting your voice?

Absolutely.

I can do that.

I'm also checking my audio settings.

Okay.

Is that a little better?

It is.

Thank you.

Wonderful.

Okay.

So at the Decent Center, we focus on three things.

The right to counsel, which includes, you know, public defense system design for our purposes here today, ethical workloads and prompt access.

Just to kind of give you a sense of our work.

We also do focus on rural justice and specifically criminal legal deserts.

And finally, we do uh prosecution work as well, primarily focused on uh the use of prosecution prosecution discretion at the earliest phases of criminal cases and charging practices.

Um today I'm gonna talk briefly about the national public defense workload study, which was published in 2023.

It was a joint project of the RAND Corporation, the American Bar Association, the National Center for State Courts, and an expert named Steve Hamlon.

Um, the results of the National Public Defense Workload Study estimate the time needs to provide reasonably effective assistance of counsel across 11 different criminal case types.

So, how much time does a lawyer need to actually provide competent representation in case types ranging from parole and probation violations all the way up to high level felonies uh where life without parole is at stake.

Um importantly, right?

The the way that the National Public Defense Workload Study did this was to look at the average hours needed uh per case by case type.

Um, and so we call that a case weight um or a standard.

Um, but you use a case weight because it is focused on the actual time that an attorney needs.

Um, so not how many cases per year, because then you get into, you know, what is the attorney's um uh kind of, you know, what are their other commitments, all those other pieces, um, what does it mean to have an annual workload?

Um, but rather literally looking at the case and looking at the specific lawyer activities um that must be completed in that case under the ethical rules and the practice standards.

How much time does an attorney need?

And using those time estimates, we can kind of construct um adjustable circumstances.

So, you know, if you have part-time attorneys, you can still estimate roughly the caseload required.

If you have people who are doing supervision tasks as part of their time, you can still estimate um their caseload without it just being kind of a concrete number.

I'm not gonna go too deeply into the methodology of the national study, other than to say um the work of the national study was many, many years in the making.

Um it was a meta study of of 17 separate jurisdiction specific studies, and then convened a national panel and used a Delphi process to come up with these case weights.

Um, and I'm just returning to the case weights because they're quite logical, right?

Uh, lower level cases take less time on average.

Higher level cases take more time on average.

Uh, the one thing I want to say here, um, that I think it's really important for policymakers to understand is that when you talk about average hours per case, uh, most cases probably fall below it.

Like people think of average as a bell curve, but that's not really true in public defense.

Um, most cases take less.

Sorry, I have to interrupt you.

I'm getting notice that the audio is not coming through on the live stream.

Oh, fascinating.

Okay.

Let me know if you could just you're okay.

Let me actually try.

Let me switch to No, it's not you.

That's on our end.

Oh, good.

Okay.

Yeah.

So give me just a second.

It's coming clearly via Zoom, but we also live streamed the meeting on our website.

Understood.

Sorry, give me just a second.

Do we need a resess?

Yep.

Okay.

Okay.

So I just want to make an announcement.

If you can give me one second, Malia.

If the public would like to view this meeting, if they could please log on to the Zoom link and they could hear the audio there.

This recording will be uploaded to our website tomorrow.

But if you want to listen and participate in this meeting, you would have to use the Zoom link, which is on the agenda, which is on our website.

Okay, go ahead, Malia.

Thank you.

Okay.

So just to kind of pick up the average time per case, the average attorney time needed is made up of those activity tasks listed on the right.

It includes everything that you would expect an attorney to do for you in a criminal case, everything from communication and keeping a client informed to reviewing discovery, conducting independent research outside of what is provided by the prosecutors, whenever necessary, consulting experts, all the way through kind of being it prepping for court, being in court, talking to the prosecutor and sentencing.

As you can see, average hours per case uh not shockingly go up with the severity of the charge.

So it takes a longer amount of attorney time to represent someone effectively in a high-level felony case than it does a low-level misdemeanor case.

Um, but all of those tasks in all cases take a certain amount of time.

Um I think right before we got cut off, I was saying that average is not always a bell curve, right?

More often than not, um, cases take a little less time than this, but your upper end outliers, cases that actually go to trial take significantly longer.

Um, and so that is the one thing I will say about a case weight is that while it reflects an average that does account for the most complex cases.

Um, and so these numbers are at their best when you're doing something like estimating total staffing need across an office.

Um, every average is kind of at its best when you're using a large number of cases and applying that average.

And so I just want to walk very quickly through how a public defender like Brendan would um apply the national workload study.

Um, the first thing you do is project your caseload, usually based on your historical caseload, and understand what you expect the caseload for the next year to be.

You're then gonna use that case weight from the national study um to estimate how many hours are needed.

Um, so you need to sort your caseload by the 11 case types, and you get a different kind of hours needed to represent um people uh in your jurisdiction across those 11 case types.

Uh, you do that all 11 times, and you get total hours needed, and you can divide that by just the number of hours your lawyers have to work on cases every year to get the number of attorneys you need to effectively staff your caseload.

Um, if you subtract the number of attorneys you currently have in your system, you understand whether you need um a greater number of attorneys or fewer attorneys uh for the projected caseload.

The goal is of course to always at least have the number of attorneys you need, ideally to have a little bit of flex because your projected caseload is just a projection, may not accurately reflect what is coming at you in the coming year.

In California, significant work has been done already by the um Office of the State Public Defender to apply the national workload study consistently across the state.

One of the most challenging pieces is mapping all of the criminal charges to the um case types that are in the national study.

Um and OSPD has provided really effective guidance on how to do this in California.

Um, and um this allows, as I said, for consistent application across counties, how are people treating different enhancements?

What I really want to spend my time here today on is the study done in California, uh pursuant to AB 625 on public defense workloads and staffing.

So, what is this situation look like in California in terms of public defense staffing?

And AB 625 required OSPD in consultation with public defense entities and other experts in the state to assess appropriate workload for public defenders and indigenous defense providers in California and submit a report to the legislature.

The Deason Center bid on this project and was selected.

And our process for conducting this study for the legislature, the goal was to kind of look at all of the qualitative data and gather qualitative data from across the state.

What is actually happening?

What do people say is happening in the public defense system?

Also look at uh quantitative data regarding staffing and support staffing, and make recommendations for future state action, what needs to happen based on kind of what we found.

The methodology we used for this is uh was pretty extensive.

This was about a year and a half of a study.

Um it included a comprehensive literature review, but also gathering all kinds of available statewide public defense data, which is extremely limited in California, but includes some very good funding and staffing data.

We conducted site visits to nine of the state's 58 counties.

Um at those site visits, we interviewed public defense providers, judges, prosecutors, uh some county officials, and in the public defense system focused on really broad application trying to talk to not just attorneys but also support staff, um, leaders as well as line attorneys.

For the counties that we were not able to visit, we conducted focus groups with all of those different types of staff members.

We also surveyed all of the chief public defenders and we got bar data and looked at where California lawyers are to understand some of the recruitment and retention challenges in parts of the state.

So let me take a moment and present kind of the high-level findings.

Um this is from the public defense, uh, the chief public defender survey uh this is kind of data on the fundamental question of do you have enough trial attorneys to represent people charged with crimes in adult criminal court?

Um, and so are the current number of attorneys you have sufficient, as you can see from that top line, uh, more than 82% answered that question no.

Um, the strongest box, 71.4% strongly disagreed that they had sufficient attorneys to represent their clients in adult criminal cases.

Um we wanted to know whether that was about vacancies or just lack of positions.

And so we asked the question if you have vacancies and those vacancies were filled, would you have sufficient attorneys?

Um, and the answer was still no uh for more than uh, you know, there were 25% that had no vacancies, but of the 75% that had vacancies, more than 50% said that would still not solve the problem.

Um, and while vacancies did hinder practice, right?

That was not kind of the root cause.

At the end of the day, there just aren't enough attorneys in the system.

That bears out across staffing data.

Um, you know, people talk a lot about um kind of what the right number of of public defender attorneys to DA attorneys is um across the state, uh, based on the statewide staffing data from 31 counties, uh, public defenders have about 73% of the attorneys of compared to prosecution.

One of the things that I would note here is that one-to-one is not actually always the right answer.

Um, a lot of people say, well, public defenders only represent the people who can't afford counsel.

So there's a group of people who can afford counsel, and so shouldn't it be less?

Um one of the things that I like to remind people about is about 30% of cases have multiple defendants.

And where one prosecutor can prosecute both of those defendants, uh, you can't have the same defender.

Um, and so sometimes what is a single case for uh for on the prosecution side is actually two cases that require two lawyers on the defense side.

And so this 73% gap is really, really significant.

Um, this is affecting trial lawyers, it's affecting caseloads.

Um, so we asked all the attorneys that we spoke with to tell us whether they actually knew what their caseload was.

Um, a lot of them could tell us what their open caseload was, meaning how many uh cases did they have open at this exact moment in time.

Um, and those caseload numbers were staggering.

Um, and so this is kind of an example of things we heard across the state, where people had typically um 80, 90, sometimes over a hundred open felony cases.

Um, most of those attorneys who represent felony cases in California, they don't tend to have specialized um murder units.

A lot of, in a lot of the rest of the country, you have like a homicide unit that just takes homicide cases, or you have a major felonies unit where they take homicide and your most serious uh sex offense cases.

But most of the line felony attorneys in California are carrying those really high, at least a couple of those really high-level cases.

Um, so you see that like they not only have 70, 80 clients with 90 to 100 cases, but they have among them uh open homicide cases, open life exposure cases, three strike cases where people are facing life.

Um, and if you just think about what it means to have that many cases to try and kind of investigate, keep your clients informed.

Just keeping 90 people informed of what's happening in their case at any given time is a real challenge.

Forget trying to actually prep and move a case forward to trial.

Uh the situation is equally bad on the misdemeanor side.

You expect misdemeanor attorneys to have uh more cases in a year.

Um, but those cases open and close faster.

So you expect them to still have um, you know, uh fewer open cases at any one time, but misdemeanor attorneys in California are handling 300 plus open cases.

Um, you know, most startling very young lawyers, new to practice were reporting that in the first year um they were getting, you know, a thousand plus cases um assigned to them.

And you know, again, if you have this many cases open at one time, you really can't even keep up with basic communication.

It this is impacting the lawyers.

Um, we asked lawyers whether their caseloads were too high about right or or too low.

Um, most of them told us they were too high.

Um, often we got more robust descriptions of people who feel like they're drowning.

Um, these are very, very dedicated public defense attorneys.

They want to be doing this work, um, but they are getting burned out by the crushing caseloads.

Um, and that's really concerning because it often creates a cycle, right?

People do burn out, they move on, those caseloads then have to be distributed across the rest of the office, increasing the rest of the caseloads, and you can really end up in a very challenging recruitment and retention cycle if if you have, if you don't address your caseload issues.

Uh, and then overwork and overload have real case consequences.

Um, you have clients who are sitting without understanding what's going on in their case, um, or lawyers are not able to investigate their cases sufficiently.

You've reduced litigation, meaning motions that should be filed aren't being filed.

Uh, you may have cases that sit because they're awaiting trial longer, or trials are not happening, you know, increased backlogs and delay.

And this was very prominent in talking to the lawyers across California, right?

I mean, they were very willing to admit what they don't have time to do and its impact on their on their cases.

So they don't have time to talk to their clients, um, let alone strategize with them about what the investigation should entail.

Um, and time and time again, we heard that they are not able to complete um investigations and certainly not able to complete them timely, specifically with regard to video evidence.

And this is really problematic for the system, right?

Um, in the best case scenario, the second you get video, you're reviewing it so that you can get the cases that don't really belong in the system, the cases where the wrong person has been identified, the cases uh where the video evidence does not support the charge that's been presented.

You want those cases out of the system early.

If they linger because nobody's had time to watch the video, then you're draining resources across the entire justice system.

We asked public defenders in California if they'd tried to apply the national public defense workload study, and most actually had.

And their application of the national study bore out what we were hearing from their lawyers about burnout, about caseloads, and about the impact on their cases.

One office reported needing 22% more trial lawyers, but that office was actually in a pretty good situation compared to the rest of the state.

Several offices reported that they would need to double their attorneys to meet the national public defense workload standards.

And across the board, you know, the information that we got was that applying the national study actually displayed they had a sense that they were understaffed and underfunded, but they couldn't quantify it.

And then the applying the study, understanding the study, made them realize exactly how understaffed and underfunded they were, particularly in comparison to the district attorneys.

The end result of the study was that we suggested that the state should actually limit public defense workloads and provide funding to the counties to help ensure workload limits.

You are more aware than I that the state has not been able to move forward yet on that.

But recognizing that it puts the counties in this position of trying to have to address this crisis.

I want to touch now on the non-attorney staffing and its impact on public defense workloads.

Non-attorney staff in public defense includes investigators who conduct a lot of the fact investigation, checking the police work, trying to go to scenes, often interviewing clients and other witnesses.

It includes the social workers who help with trying to get people into diversion programs and get assessments done for people who may have drug use or mental health issues that contribute to criminality.

Paralegals who do the legal research and court prep work alongside lawyers and also the admins who just do filings and basic motions and all sorts of other things.

Across the board, with the exception of admins, the support staffing for attorneys is largely insufficient across the state of California.

What this means is that either this work is not getting done or that attorneys are having to do it, which is inefficient for the system and also contributes to even greater excessive caseloads.

So this, as I said, kind of we talked about how attorneys don't have time to investigate.

Without infective investigators, without investigative staff, there is this is really not happening, right?

So a lot of investigation is intended to be handed off to investigators and not to be done directly by attorneys.

But you're hearing attorneys say they have to pare down their investigator requests because they don't have investigation.

This is also true that as a result, really severe cases or or significant cases where people are facing more jail time or prioritized, and that the low-level cases get almost no investigator support, including people just saying they don't ask for it, or that the investigators just have to say no to particularly misdemeanor attorneys who might be looking for investigation support.

Across the state of California, the investigator ratio is compared to what the National Association for Public Defense recommends, which is one investigator for every three attorneys, was only met in two offices.

Most offices are significantly deficient when it comes to that ratio.

And even more significant in California is the disparity between district attorney investigators and public defense investigators, right?

Where the gap is enormous.

This is one area where parity might actually not be enough.

The DAs get to rely, in addition to having their own investigators on significant law enforcement resources.

And public defense investigators at a minimum have to retread all of that work.

So this gap is probably one of the most significant staffing gaps that exists in kind of the justice system in California.

This is just an example.

It includes Alameda of what those funding gaps looked like based on state data from 2022.

And you can see the massive disparities between public defense in purple and the prosecutors in orange, just on investigator resources.

And so this was also true across social workers, and I'm going to focus specifically on investigators and social workers here.

No county met the national recommended staffing ratio for social workers.

Several offices had no social workers.

And more than 80% of chief public defenders reported that their access to social workers were inadequate.

What happens as a result is that these offices can't, you know, California has wonderful diversion.

It's it's promoted, but you can't capitalize on it if you can't do the evaluation work necessary to get your client eligible for diversion and the lack of social workers is really impinging on that.

You can see this in the quantitative data too.

Asked about how often they're able to use social workers in different types of criminal cases.

You can see that there's a lot of triage happening, right?

There is some use at the highest level cases, but far less use at the lower level cases, particularly even like low-level felonies.

But there are places where even homicide cases are not getting social worker attention.

Across all support staffing, the gap is massive.

District attorneys have nearly three times the amount of support staff compared to public defense attorneys in the state.

And so this resource gap puts pressure on that 73% gap between public defense attorney staffing and DA staffing because you were public defense attorneys are having to do what amounts to support staff work.

The recommendation was that the state should require adequate adequate support staffing for public defense and again provide funding to help comply with those standards.

I should say that based on our evaluation of California and particularly the massive quantity of both digital data, right, computer-based discovery, and video evidence, that we actually think California should probably recommend one investigator for every two lawyers and not the one and three that the national standards suggested.

They're a little older, and that video evidence is really kind of pushing the need for investigators up.

Absolutely no California public defender office meets this ratio for support staff.

Every single office across the state still needs more support.

And as a result, their attorneys are having to do work that you could be passing off to trained paraprofessionals who don't exist in the system right now.

I also want to point out that even with the recommended ratios and that distinction from the national study, or from the national standards that we recommended in California, the recommended ratio for public defenders would still actually fall significantly short of parity with the DAs.

So the DAs currently have uh over 10 support staff for six attorneys.

We were recommending eight paraprofessionals per every six attorneys.

This is just another way of visualizing that recommendation.

So currently they have less than one support staff per attorney.

The DA's office has significantly more than that.

Our recommendation would be 1.3 per attorney across all types of support staff.

And again, this is a huge gap, but this is an even bigger gap between what the public defense providers have and what the DAs have.

And thank you for giving me time to do kind of the overview of the situation in California.

I'm happy to answer any questions if you if you have any.

Um thank you, Malia, for the excellent presentation and PowerPoint.

It was very clear, appreciate the visuals and all of the data.

So thank you.

Just a couple clarifying questions.

You had mentioned that it's important that we look at um historical data here within our own county.

Um, how far do you recommend we go back?

Is it like a one to three year look back or what's the best practice?

Right.

So I mean, if you're thinking about a projected caseload, um, you know, you can do it just based on last year's, but the better practice is to be able to look at trend lines and adjust that kind of projection.

Um just to understand.

And and you all are in a very good position to understand if you look at those trend lines, what might be affecting them, right?

Is it is it actual crime rates?

Is it a change in personnel on the charging side, like a change in district attorney practices?

Um there may be changes of law that impact them.

And looking historically really helps.

Um honestly, the longer you can look back, the longer the data chain, the better you get a sense of those trend lines, um, with a caveat that obviously COVID affected things.

So a lot of places use, you know, courts use three or five-year rolling averages, but they've tend to drop 2020 and 2021 because of COVID effect.

And depending on where you are, you'd want to look very closely at 2022 as well.

Okay.

And can you point to any counties within California that have been able to move quickly in these recommendations?

So a lot of counties have been able to move quickly towards um increasing support staffing.

Um, you know, I I um I think about um I saw a presentation actually um, and I'm sorry, I'm looking up a county name as I talk to you.

So give me one second.

Um, but a number of counties have been able to add in particular some support staffing to increase the efficiency, right?

Because having attorneys um do um some of that work, having them investigate rather than an investigator is is inefficient and also not what they were really trained to do.

Um, so if you can have your lawyers be lawyers and increase in particular your support staffing to ensure um that you're maximizing the the professional resources that you have, um, that is um really helpful.

Um, Santa Cruz, the new office in Santa Cruz has been really effective at increasing in particular social worker resources.

Um, there have been a number of offices that I think have pushed for investigator resources um as a result of of this study.

Okay, thank you.

And you um this report was published in 2023 and it took a year and a half to conduct all the research.

Oh, yes.

Um yes, it did.

Um, it took us it it probably was if you include the literature review, almost a full year, a full two-year process.

Um, and I'm just trying to look up the date of publication, but I think it might have hit in 2024.

Okay.

And then with respect to um having to review video evidence, can you give us some examples of what type of videos are being reviewed?

Where how is it being captured?

Are we talking about okay?

So let's just take a typical like a DUI case, um, which is a really easy one.

Um in that case, if you have um two officers um in the car, then you probably are dealing with both a dashboard cam that's gonna give you a wide angle and and two officers who are recording the entire kind of key investigation.

Um, and you need to review, right?

You can't just look at one and say, I I saw it, because um every angle gives you something different.

Um, and um, and I'm sorry, the publication date of that report was actually September of 25.

Okay, thank you.

Um, and that is true also, like, you know, it as many officers as show up at a scene now, you often have video.

And then in addition to the officer kind of recorded video, um, you are if you're doing a really good job, you're looking for other angles to see what might have been kind of missed.

Um, so you're looking at who might have ring cameras, you're looking at if there are traffic cameras in the area, right?

If you um just think about like um on a uh think about like um one of the mass, you know, if you have like a group kind of um retail robbery, right?

Or what basically amounts to like many people engaging in shoplifting at the same time um which has been you know something that I know has gotten a lot of press in California.

You are looking for all of the store video you are looking for any officer video of anyone who arrived on site and you may be looking for external video from things like parking lots and and so forth to try and identify people you know verify stories about who took what and what the amounts are which really relates to appropriate charging.

And all of those things take time and those are not the highest level cases.

And and in addition now what used to be often reports of witnesses are often now coming in as video evidence.

So when police interview witnesses you're not getting kind of the one page report and that's good you're actually getting to see the the interview but that takes more time because you have to watch all of that video evidence.

And that's to put aside any kind of digital evidence that you want to look at to try and understand where your client might have been what their relationship to people were.

And all of that is coming in and if you have clients who are detained you may get hours of recorded jail telephone calls right all of that material is relatively new in in this process but all of it is really critical to to doing kind of effective defense work um and understanding the prosecution's case and understanding what the defenses might be.

Thank you for that comprehensive overview um those are all my questions and so now thank you I'm not sure if you're gonna uh be able to continue to join us we're gonna do public comment after we hear from the public defender Brendan Woods yes I'm happy to rejoin I'll I'll happily rejoin the public link and just listen.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for being here we really appreciate your time and your expertise thank you.

I'd like to introduce our um public defender Brendan Wood we have an additional presentation for his information as well.

Great I want to again um extend my thanks to Malia for joining us today.

So what I'm going to do is very briefly explain the process with regards to how we assign case types in the national publicload study.

So when a case comes in of course person's arrested they're charged they are arraigned um we usually contact them either right before arraignment if they're in custody or if they're out of custody they may get arranged and then referred to our office case assignment does vary depending on where you're at in the county it can be different in Oakland as opposed to East County but it is done almost immediately before the case is assigned to an attorney it's done by either our branch supervisor number two or senior calendar attorney.

So and you've seen this in Malia's presentation we have something very similar in which we have charge that lay out the case type that is assigned when the attorney is doing the review.

So for high felony we have it there for low felony for low misdemeanor for low DUI they're all included and we assign them in our case management system.

It's all done manually we're hoping that we can move to a case management assessment does it automatically as opposed to putting into physical labor into assigning each case one thing that needs to be noted with regards to national public defensive workload study it only looks at felonies and misdemeanors and what I mean by that is not looking or taking into account juvenile cases or post-conviction cases or probate cases or um our SVP cases or or um queens late cases it is only looking at our core felonies and misdemeanors.

So there's a whole side of the practice which isn't included in the study.

So this is the slide that I did present in our budget presentation.

Based on the application of the national Public Workload Study to our office, we would need an additional 104 attorneys.

Adding 104 attorneys would be about 39.5 million.

And even at that amount, the DA's budget would still be slightly larger than our budget.

This was for my budget presentation.

And I think I've fine-tuned this a little bit.

And what I mean by that is I have looked at our probation violation.

So doing a strict analysis would get us at 104.

In our current case management system, I'm not able to, this might be too much detail, but I'm not able to isolate our what we call standalone probation violations.

So we have a probation violation with a charge case.

I think the amount of work needed for those cases isn't the same.

So what I've done is I've completely pulled out the probation violations from our total, which I think that gives us a little bit more of a hopefully manageable and bite-sized amount.

And by doing that, we would need an additional 75 attorneys.

So if we look at the AB 625 report, as Malia has stated, we need two attorneys, should have one investigator, three attorneys, one social worker, four attorneys, one paralegal, four attorneys, administrative staff, meaning legal secretary or clerks.

Currently in our office, we have 129 lawyers, 22 social workers slash advocates, and I include our partners for justice advocates in that total.

We have 19 investigators and 31 support staff.

So if we were to extrapolate out based on the AB 625 report, we're short 45 investigators, 21 social workers, 32 paralegals, and one admin staff.

I tried to um approach this from a way in which we were fiscally responsible and thinking about how we could get there.

Um I think this request, maybe not this year, but next year's afters for the next three years would get us closer, meaning six attorneys, three investigators, two social workers, one legal secretary, would be about 3.7 million.

Um, as you might recall, in our budget requests this year, um, we really focused on the increase in cases.

So I think this is a separate request from that.

Um this year, as you might recall, our increase in cases over the last two years were about 1,400 misdemeanors and 1,400 felonies, an increase of 2,800 filings from 2023 calendar year to 2025 calendar year.

So my arguments at budget was really a strict maintenance of effort.

And I do believe that we've had some very, very productive conversations with the CEO's office, and we're able to hopefully um address some of that issue right now.

But from Supervisor Bass's comments, we were trying to think about a long-term solution to get us closer to how we can come into compliance with the National Public Mention Workload Study and AB 625.

And this is a proposal here.

Um before I sit down, I do want to comment on a few things.

Um currently, I think the board's aware.

I do have a homicide case myself, and I think it's actually a great idea for those in leadership to carry a case.

Because then you can see what your staff is going through.

Um, you can see the work um that's needed to do a case.

And so to one of your questions, I just checked.

In my homicide, I have 145 body one camera videos from one police agency.

I mean 145 videos to review from one agency that doesn't include the other investigative agency, doesn't include the um cameras from the streets, it doesn't include the ring cameras.

I mean, it that's just from one agency.

And so the amount of work um needed to provide someone with an adequate defense is tremendous.

And as I'm doing this work myself, I'm going through the process, I'm like, why am I doing this request or why am I reviewing this transcript as opposed to having a paralegal do it or a secretary do it or someone else?

Because there is no one else.

Um finally in the month of April, we're going to workload and how difficult the job is.

I had five attorneys retire.

I'm sorry, not retire, five attorneys resigned in April.

Um, one immigration lawyer, and then four um in the criminal defense.

All of them decided workload and going to do something else that was not as stressful.

Um, in the month of May, I had another one resigned for him hoping to keep back.

We we're in discussion that they can keep, I think I can keep them, and also um the investigator assigned to my homicide.

So um I just wanted to add those two points to give context with regards to how difficult the work is right now.

And I am truly appreciative of you, supervisor and supervisor bass regards to the interest you've shown in supporting our office, and I'm hopeful that we can really develop a long-term plan to increase that.

I think I'm also aware of budget and how things are gonna be difficult this year, the next year, and the year after, but um, this is a constitutional right.

We are mandated to provide the service.

We have to.

So I'm hoping that we can come with a plan to do it well.

So I'm happy to answer any questions.

Yeah, I I really appreciate um all the work you're doing and just highlighting the challenges in your office.

Um, do we have data?

I know you called out specifically April and May, but do we have retention rate data in the last year or two?

Um if you just want to share anything anecdotally, but just I hear the pressure and obviously uh it's not helpful uh that we want to recruit and retain and people are resigning because of the high intensity of the load.

And I just want to have an understanding of what is being done in the office in terms of just having some type of balance, like are people not even taking time off, or people working obviously 40 plus hours, just kind of get paint the picture for us in terms of what is uh a typical week look like.

Uh it does vary depending on your assignment, but um I I am almost trying not to laugh, but there is no balance.

Um, it's very difficult to have a balance.

And I really think over the last two years, um, caseloads have really skyrocketed.

It's gone through a group, and it's almost in some ways when your caseload is so high, it almost paralyzes you and prevents you from doing the work well.

It's like so you're in a situation of where do I start?

And it's just triage, triage, triage.

Um, yeah, I don't have retention data, and I can get that though.

On the top of my head, I think the last two months have been for my view as being the public defender for the last 14 years, um, the worst with regards to retention.

I've seen maybe a peak during COVID, like 2021, also bad because it was definitely just a different world.

But um this is the worst that I've seen it.

And um, what's your vacancy rate at this time?

We have almost a zero vacancy rate for attorneys.

We fill pretty quickly, it varies for supports there.

Um, we have a lot of positions that are filled either with TAP or um, so it doesn't show exactly, but with attorneys, it's pretty much zero.

I think we are in a fortunate position compared to a lot of places.

Uh we're in the Bay Area, we have a very good office, and we're able to recruit pretty quickly and hire quality attorneys pretty quickly.

So we can fill vacancies very rapidly.

Um that's not the same for other offices.

Some places where they're in the attorney desert, they have a very, very difficult time filling vacancies.

Do we have annuitants come back and work for us?

I have had before, yes.

Okay, okay, a little bit harder to get them to come back right now.

Yeah.

Um, I was gonna ask you something else.

Okay, so where are we at with with the legislation?

So it's passed, but no funding attached.

What are the next steps in terms of advocating for additional funding from the state?

Yeah, so AB 625 passed, doesn't have any funding attached to it.

We are in the process of trying to get some funding this year.

Um, it's a very small amount that we're asking to support post bars and um law clerks.

I honestly think that there will not be any sort of movement from the state unless there's more pressure put on the state from the counties.

Um California is one of the few counties that puts the burden of funding engine defense strictly on the counties, solely the counties.

I honestly think it'll take something more like litigation to get the state to do something.

Um so yes, and then can you remind us?

I know um you presented to this committee in December of 24.

And when the Act Committee started, we were able to identify funding for the immigration defense.

I believe it was 1.3 million.

Can you just kind of highlight what that was able to do for the office and the benefits of that investment?

Sure.

Um, that's been tremendous.

I think our office is always kind of on the cutting edge when it comes to immigration and doing that work.

Uh, we now have base net funding three additional, um, well, we're not we just lost one, but three additional immigration lawyers, one assigned to assist with our post-conviction work in Queenslate, another one assigned to um juvenile for special immigrant juvenile status, and another one that's been assigned to assist with all of our PDA consults in a way where a PA console will come up and there'll be a specific immigration/slash removal defense question attached to that issue.

So that's how we've been responding to that.

Also, um, I covered this in my budget presentation a little bit.

The immigration um, I guess I'll call it playing field for lack of a better word, has drastically changed from where it was two years ago.

Um, you might think a law is this way one way it has changed the next day.

Um, our clients are no longer being held close by, they're being transported all over the nation.

Um, we have very very little success in immigration court.

We're doing a lot of federal litigation now and having some success there, but it is um it is night and day compared to the way it was, and the attorneys who were in our immigration unit are dealing with constant trauma because they are seeing our community members being attacked daily, and they are seeing people separated from their loved ones daily.

So it is a very very difficult job right now.

Um the one immigration attorney that resigned.

Do we have an eligibility list?

Will it be relatively?

Raja will be recruiting that position, but she has been slammed right now.

Um the immigration list is different than our associate public defender list where we have a longer runway of people who are waiting to get in the office.

So we'll probably have to do a new request.

Okay, those are my um questions for now.

Thank you.

We will take go ahead.

Okay, I want to add one thing too, because Malia commented on past data for the public control workload study.

So I do have a full fiscal year of entering data with regards to case types and asked public into workload study.

I have about six months prior to that, but this was the full first time we had a full fiscal year of data, so we could really probably analyze the work or the attorneys that'd be needed for the workload study.

So thank you.

Thank you.

Um we're gonna open public comment on informational item number one.

If you'd like to speak and you're on Zoom, please raise your hand if you're in person.

Please fill out a speaker card.

Um, Tisa, how many speakers do we have?

Okay, two minutes, please.

Richard Spiegelman.

Hi, I'm Richard Spiegelman.

I chair the interfaith coalition for justice in our jails, uh, and I've been an Alameda County resident for 50 something years.

Uh I really appreciate this presentation, and I really appreciate the work of the public defender's office.

I wanted to just put it in the context of the ICJ concerns.

Our two primary foci are first make sure the people who are in custody in Alameda County are safe.

Uh we reduce the number of deaths in this county, that's great.

Um, but the other half, and and although it's not about mortality, it's probably more important, is to limit the number of people going into the jail so that those safety concerns don't come up for the people who don't go to jail.

So that's where the public defender comes in.

And if the public defender's office doesn't have the staff that it needs to just, for example, get people into diversion programs, do the proper research, be able to bring it to the judge in that diversion court, then that's for each case.

That's one more person is going to be spending more time in jail waiting for whatever's gonna happen next.

So that's our little take, or at least my little take on these studies, which I think are very, very helpful and look forward to action.

Thank you.

No additional speakers for design.

Thank you for your comment, and I do appreciate uh Malia sharing her expertise with us and um our public defender Brendan Woods for your fierce advocacy.

And I've um said numerous times publicly how much I want to support and increase funding for your office.

So I publicly saying it again, and I'll continue to advocate for that.

Um, you know, we did it for the immigration defense, and now we need to expand the services based off the information you shared today in the study.

Uh, we are definitely um behind here in this county.

We've got to make this a priority and invest in people so that they can receive the defense that they need, as well as was mentioned, we want to do everything possible to keep people out of Santa Rita jail.

So this is in alignment with our reimagined adult justice initiative as well as our care first jails last, which we will be receiving an update on for everyone's knowledge in July.

There'll be a joint public protection and health committee meeting on that topic in July.

So thank you for joining us, and we'll continue to um work on these efforts.

Thank you.

Okay, so now we're going to move to our second informational item.

This is with respect to juvenile justice landscape analysis and service needs assessment.

I'd like to welcome Chief Ford from Alameda County Probation Department, and he will be um introducing the other presenters.

Thank you.

All right, good morning, uh Chair Marquez.

Before we begin the presentation, I want to provide just a little bit of context of um what it is you're about to hear today.

You will hear two connected presentations all together that tell a broader story about Alameda County's ongoing investment in young people and our continued efforts to reduce youth involvement in a justice system through collaboration, prevention, and data-driven strategies.

First, you'll hear from Carol Burton, who I want to take a moment to extend my uh gratitude and depreciation for being here.

She has uh completed her contractual agreement or requirement some time ago, and yet she still continues to show up and support, and that just speaks to her her character and commitment to the work.

So, thank Carol and her team for being here today.

But they conducted a comprehensive uh landscape analysis, mapping programs, services, resources, and supports available to youth and families throughout Alameda County.

This work has provided us with a clear understanding of the breadth of the services that currently exist across systems, it identifies uh areas of strength and helps us better understand opportunities for alignment, coordination, and future investment.

And then the second presentation will be done by my assistant chief Dante Sarcone, who will provide an overview of our annual JJCPA plan.

This plan is developed through the Juvenile Justice Coordinating Council, or our JJCC, which represents a broad cross-section of justice partners, county agencies, community-based organizations, education partners, community representatives, and representation from uh your office, Supervisor Marquez.

The JJCC continues to serve as an important collaborative body that helps guide countywide strategy and investment related to youth justice and development.

The primary message uh we hope that you will take away today is twofold.

One, that this board has made significant investments over many years in prevention, intervention, and youth development services throughout the county, and while there's always more work to do, these investments matter, and they are making a meaningful impact and reducing the number of young people uh entering the justice system.

And the second thing we want you to take away is that our collaboration through the JJCC continues to strengthen.

We are increasingly using data partnerships and shared strategy to drive countywide decision making, not only for youth who are already involved in the justice system, but also to identify opportunities further upstream to support youth and families before justice system involvement occurs.

So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Carol Burton and her team from Jeweled Consulting.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Welcome, Carol.

Thank you, Chief.

Good morning, Supervisor Marquez.

I'm Carol Burton, I'm the CEO of JUL Consulting.

I'm joined here today by Summer Jackson, who is online, and Dr.

Katie Kramer, who is here in the audience.

They both went been with have been with this company for over a decade, nearly a decade, and we're proud to share the results of our project.

I want to start by sharing a little bit about the company, not to boast, nor to be proudful, but even though I'm extremely proud of our accomplishments and our contributions to this county, it's really to underscore the power and the strength of this project and the findings and recommendations that we'll share with you today.

So Jewel Consulting has extensive experience working in counties and community organizations to improve outcomes for justice impact, impacted and vulnerable populations.

From 2013 to 2014, JC was a co-convener and facilitator of many of many work groups to gather extensive community input and engagement to inform and support Alameda County probation department and produce its first adult reentry strategic plan in 2014.

In 2014, we led the process to design a capacity development model for organizations interested in partnering with the Alameda County probation department to serve adults and the juvenile population.

Following this co-design process, JC was awarded a contract to deliver capacity building support to those organizations, which were about 46 organizations across the county.

And the goal was to increase the organization's capacity to successfully gain and implement re-entry service contracts with the probation department.

Similarly, JC led a rapid analysis process for Alameda County Behavioral Health that included engagement with over 150 county community stakeholders to identify current jail diversion strategies and gaps in services.

That led to a set of recommendations, some foundational principles, but ultimately it resulted in what you now call your care first jails last.

In 2017-2019, your board, this board appointed me to serve as the interim director of behavioral health.

During my tenure there, there were many accomplishments, including the establishment of safe landing at Santa Rita Jail, currently operated by Roots Community Center.

That model was conceived in collaboration with myself as the interim director, but also Alameda County Probation Department via the data that they collected through their community partnerships.

We're leading the way in Bay Air and in the Bay Area as an expert in strategic landscape mapping and rapid analysis.

So today, next slide, I will share with you the project purpose, the service analysis and mapping, some gaps and strengths, and also recommendations, and then we'll entertain any questions that you may have.

Next slide.

So the full project scope includes a service analysis, which is looking at the service types that youth serve, the locations by region, and also some funding sources.

Then we started the process to look at the utilization analysis, specifically the level of service utilization, whether there was underutilization, and the reasons organization may have not been at capacity.

We also looked at waiting lists.

Then we looked at what we call our gap analysis, the location of services versus where the youth resided, the locations of services versus the location of all county youth, and then identify the gaps by system leaders, parents, and the children.

The strengths identification process included identifying strengths that were identified by system leaders, but they are also strengths identified by service providers.

A bonus is that we have a service inventory with over 500 youth serving organizations that were discovered through this process.

So the methodology, next slide, included stakeholder engagement and data collection.

It included interviews from system leaders, also community-based focus groups with both youth, adults, and also service providers, particularly in South County.

There was a provider survey where 100 and 20, 112 organizations completed surveys, that which resulted in 937 services that were included in the analysis.

And then, of course, lastly, we conducted a youth services service inventory where there are 506 organizations who are identified through government contracts list, professional networks, and also internet research.

So now I invite my colleague Dr.

Katie Kramer to take us through looking at some of the data that we found, and I'll come back and talk about recommendations.

Thank you.

Welcome.

Good morning, Chair.

As Carol mentioned, I will be highlighting some of the analysis work we did in that first bucket in particular.

We did a kind of a service analysis.

So what you see here is results from the 112 different unique agencies, in which they did identify 937 distinct services available for young people throughout the county.

And this is the distribution of types of services available.

And as you can see, the most often cited type of service available was academic support, case management, and life skills.

We also asked and identified that 93% of the eight of these services provide follow-up support once their primary services are completed.

Next slide.

We did that through three regions: North County, Central County, and South County.

One item of note is that Oakland, East Oakland was mapped into central county and the rest of Oakland into North County.

Was Hayward part of Central County?

Correct.

Okay.

So East Oakland, Salandro.

Correct.

What about the city of Alameda?

Or would that land?

City of Alameda was in North County.

Okay.

Thank you.

And South County would be the Tri-Cities and the Tri-Valley.

Correct.

Okay, thank you.

So here again you see the distribution.

Next slide.

One thing that is important to note is that many of the providers noted that they serve youth countywide.

And one lesson learned, and that we would do a deeper dive if we had more time and resources is to really understand where services are physically located versus where providers say that they provide, I'm sorry, services.

So we did not distinguish that in our survey, and I think that's important in the interpretation that many folks may be located physically in North or Central County, but say they serve anyone that walks in their door regardless of where they live in the county, and that we did not distinguish.

That said, what we did find uh of those uh 937 services is that almost half indeed identified that they would serve youth countywide, and that's the 478 programs.

So when you look at the distribution of services throughout the county, we took into consideration in North County, those 208 programs that said they specifically serve youth in North County plus North Central, or really that kind of East Oakland part of the survey, because many people said they serve Oakland as a city.

That's the 218 plus the 478 countywide services gives you uh 696 services available to young people in North County, or 86% of services indicated in our survey.

And then doing the same math, you can see that distribution for central and south county.

And again, as I'm sure you'll hear from promotion from probation, that's an important distinction when we think about how services are distributed across the county and and really taking a deeper dive of making sure it reflects countywide services along with where services are located.

We then indeed created maps for each of those uh distinct service types by oh goodness, I'm sorry, by the actual service providers.

Here's an example of the academic support services in Alameda County.

So as you can see in the green were the academic support services specifically for North County, purple for central, orange for south, and then in the gray were the providers that said they provided academic support services across the county.

And again, we produce these maps for each of the 16 distinct service areas identified in the earlier slides.

Next slide.

And then again, as Carol noted, we uh looked at uh identifying gaps in services.

We did that in a few ways.

One in our survey directly with those 112 service providers, we asked them what do you identify from your perspective of the gaps in services in the county.

And as you can see, housing and homeless services followed by mental health services were the gaps uh most identified by the providers, followed up with supporting high needs or justice involved youth and education and academic support.

Next slide.

And interestingly, we asked the same question when we went to the community as Jeweled Consulting is very dedicated to lifting community voice and all of the work we do.

So a core component is that indeed we we went to the community and talked with parents, youth, and some additional service providers, and then map their input against the service systems leaders and the service providers.

So here you see when you compare across the board the areas of need of housing and mental health and education that we saw on the service provider survey continue to be magnified by the systems leaders, parents, and youth.

The other thing that was lifted up in our other data collection was navigation barriers.

So this quote there are services, but but no one tells you how to get them or if you're even eligible.

So again, as a you probably heard there's a lot of resources across Alameda County.

I think there's work to be done to let community know those services and how to access them.

Next slide.

And I'm going to turn it back over to Carol now, who's going to lift up some overall gap strengths and recommendations.

So our gaps fall into four buckets.

Um, of course, North County's service uh concentration reflects a high need and alignment with uh place-based funding, um, also case management and behavioral health and employment services match the TAP community needs.

Um, and then also further assessment of housing needs really uh should possibly happen to look at availability, location, and other contributing factors.

And lastly, ways to strengthen the community outreach and education and navigation support around services that currently exist and some access points.

Next slide.

So we'd like to leave you with some recommendations.

And the full report is in the packet, of course, and they're aligned with the um the findings.

Strengthen the geographic equity and place-based service areas, of course, improving access and navigation and coordination across the system, expanding uh housing and behavioral health and stabilization supports, and looking at ways to enhance service utilization monitoring and capacity alignment.

Of course, we can always improve data quality and reporting and shared measurements, and then lastly, advance what we're calling a system level alignment and community, a continuous improvement.

Keep going.

I think we talked about this before.

Yes.

Okay.

Thank you so much.

I really appreciate the in-depth analysis and concur with the recommendations.

And can you give me a sense of I know it was highlighted how important it is to have community engagement?

So how are those outreach efforts led?

Um go ahead.

So we partnered one, we want to be geographically centered.

So the groups happened in Berkeley, Oakland, and at the Reach Center, and in addition to the provider group in South County, and we look to uh work with some organizations to community organizations to partner with us to do those.

So each of the agencies like the Reach Center helped us collaborate and recruit Berkeley was the Martin Luther King Youth Center.

Um Oakland was Youth Uprising.

So we worked with some of the community providers to help uh outreach in addition to jewel consulting based on their vast, our vast journey together has a very large uh network that we promoted.

So that's basically how we we promoted and we also uh talked to through the okay program that uh the Deputy Dante mentioned at um Castleman High School.

We also talked with those kids.

And um you had mentioned if uh we had a chance to do this differently that you would have made that distinction of where a provider is physically located, but also calling out whether or not they serve beyond their physical location.

Um was there anything else that you thought of that could have been more comprehensive in this analysis?

Right.

I mean, there's there first of all, there's a lot more data in the report.

I was I can talk a lot, so I was really concerned, but I encourage you to look at there's much more information in the report.

Um I do think, you know, place uh based services and really understanding that place and and breaking it down.

We did it by regions because it paralleled another project that probation was doing, but I think zip code is probably an address is an important piece.

We also would love to do deeper dives around funding, funding sources.

Um there was one more that went in and out.

Um, but it was funding.

Yeah, summer.

I'll I'll come back, but there were kind of three main buckets.

I like that you called out um zip codes because yes, through this analysis, was there any type of uh call out with respect to how services can be different, whether you live in a city proper versus unincorporated.

Did that come up at all?

It didn't come up as much.

I mean, I think, you know, the REACH Center was a great space for for young people to talk about.

I do think what we heard from young people in general was um either the service, they say the services are available, but we don't really know where to find them, or when they show up, it's full.

So really that that access and navigation piece.

Um I think we heard that across the board, honestly.

So I'm not sure if we had a distinction, but again, we we didn't do it as well really would have been geographic differences, but we we didn't hear big differences in the voices across the region.

And did we hear from the young people how they would prefer to receive information or how they're obtaining everything social media?

Okay.

Great.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And I think we now have a second part of the presentation.

So welcome.

And I believe we have a separate slide deck for your presentation.

And let me make sure I locate that.

Hello, Supervisor Marquez.

My name is Dante Sir Come.

I'm an assistant chief with the probation department, and I'm here to talk about the Juvenile Justice Community Prevention Act Plan of 2026.

So first a little context for the plan.

The plan was part of work done through the JJCC, which is the juvenile justice coordinating council.

This is a uh group of individuals that she Ford previously alluded to, and uh for the last several years, the JJCC statutorily are responsible for approving a plan that goes to the state that outlines our juvenile justice strategy and how we're going to spend JJCPA dollars.

Typically, our strategy had been for the last several years to support broadly preventative work.

However, it had come up at meetings that we wanted to reevaluate that strategy and do a deeper dive into what we were doing, what we were funding, and was it effective?

And hence the JJCPA work group was developed, and it had a cross-section of persons from a variety of agencies, including the Alameda County Office of Education, your office supervisor Marquez, the district attorney's office, public defender's office, two CBOs, including La Familia and the Mentoring Center, and of course, probation.

So what did the JJCPA work group do?

What was their body of work?

There were four main things that we focused on.

It was a review of the JJ CPA programming and performance.

What were the service trends?

What available services were being provided.

We also needed to identify gaps for our target population and service area.

Additionally, we draft and uh refined recommendations to strengthen strengthen services and contracting, and finally, we prepared and coordinated an update revised version of the plan, presented it to the JJCC, which was ultimately adopted and submitted to the state.

What were the key work group findings initially?

This work group met for just about just a little under a year.

And initially there were nine core priorities that were identified, but they were consolidated into two main priorities.

The first being continuity and longevity of care to ensure that youth have the right support at the right time for better long-term outcomes.

And priority two was sustainability for CBOs to strengthen community-based organizations to ensure stable quality services for youth.

From those priorities, five recommendations were derived.

As that was identified as populations that were overrepresented in the juvenile justice system.

Expand high demand services, improve coordination and referrals, embed trauma-informed care into service programming, and strengthen CBO sustainability.

So, how does all of this relate to the previous presentation of the landscape analysis?

Well, the study provides a foundation for the JJCPA plan and it closely aligns with the direction the work group had already been moving in.

It doesn't replace the JJCPA plan, but it did inform.

It informed and that it brings it brought current data and community insight to guide decision making.

It validated and that it confirmed priorities and gaps identified by the JJCPA, and it sharpens in that it helps refine strategies and investments for the greatest impact moving forward.

With both the JJ, sorry, with both the landscape analysis and the JJCPA recommendations, we know that we have a strong system of services, and it provides a foundation.

We also know that there are key gaps that we've identified, high demand services and services that our community providers think are lacking.

We also know that there's uh geographically in uh equalities that are creating an overrepresentation of certain groups, and we know that there are system challenges, namely uh CBOs, how they communicate with one another, and how they can work together to create a comprehensive juvenile system of care.

We've also confirmed in the landscape analysis, um, uh verified that that the JJCPA's priorities are on target and on task.

They are relevant to the findings.

Prevention and positive youth development approach is the way to go in terms of preventative, preventing youth from getting into the system to begin with.

Community voice is essential to driving this plan, and data and live experience points to the same needs that we've identified at the JJCPA work group.

Target and uh additionally, what do we do next?

Target investments, expand high demand services, improve coordination, and strengthen system design.

So we use the uh juvenile roadmap to directly align our plan, and that included improving access and navigation, expand high demand services, using data, strengthen cross-agency coordination, and align funding.

It was a little bit redundant from the previous slide, so I'll move on to how are we going to use this information for real practical results?

Well, in the immediate action, we're going to use this information, both the landscape analysis and the recommendations from the JJ CPA work group to align funding and contracts with recommendations to prioritize areas that were identified by both of those bodies of information.

We're also going to look at our uh RFPs and our statements of work to ensure that they're aligned and we're getting the data that we need from our providers in order to make the necessary analysis to know that we are affecting the recommendations of the work group.

There's an implementation focus.

We want to expand high demand services, improve coordination among the referral systems, ensure that those referrals are a seamless process and that youth and their families can navigate the system without difficulty.

We also again want to emphasize one of the biggest takeaways is targeting investments geographically where they make sense where our highest need youth come from, which is Oakland and Hayward.

In addition, we're not just going to, it's not just going to be a plan that sits on the shelf.

There will be ongoing oversight and monitoring.

The JJCPA work group will continue to meet, typically monthly, and based on progress that we're making in achieving those recommendations, we'll adjust as necessary and report progress to the JJCC.

In summary, there were findings that we found that uh in the landscape analysis that aligned with the JJCPA workgroup.

Uh, we've identified immediate steps that we can take.

Uh, and we are collaborating and working with all of our stakeholders and partners to effect those changes and institute those recommendations.

Thank you.

Thank you, Assistant Chief of Probation.

Dante.

This is incredible work, and just a couple clarifying questions.

Um, I agree with the priorities, the targeted investment, but I know typically each contract with a CBO provider, it varies where it's at in the system.

So do we have a sense of well, first question is our contracts, are they typically one to three years?

Does it depend on the vendor?

And do we kind of have an analysis of where we're at with contracts so that way we can ensure the next time we go to RFP that we are identifying the unmined needs?

Traditionally, we have contracted uh two main uh contracts, the youth service center contracts, all of which are resource connection network, formerly the DPN delinquency prevention network.

Um we have funded those, we've also funded community contracts.

They are also now members of the RCN.

Typically, those contracts would be would be for three years with two one year extensions for a total of five years.

However, we uh foresaw that the work from the JJ CC uh PA work group would potentially modify or change that.

So rather than getting into another three-year contract, we did two-year contracts and we just did a one-year extension while we are evaluating whether we can work within the parameters of the language and those existing contracts, or if we need to put it out for RFP to better align with the recommendations of the work group.

And then we know there's a call out just for stronger data and analysis.

So, what are we doing differently in our RFP and our scope to make sure that we're tracking metrics?

Yeah, that's being currently analyzed and evaluated by our uh chief of research.

We have a research team and we're trying to uh have better measurements.

The um measurements in our existing contracts were very broad.

Uh they were not specific and outcome-based.

They were more based on referral numbers.

How many referrals did you receive and were those referrals successfully processed?

But they didn't really talk about the tail end.

What was the value add by receiving that service?

What was the end improvement for the person, family, youth receiving those services?

We are creating data points that we will collect in future contracts that will measure that and give us some indication of what these services are providing is actually affecting.

And specific to um calling out the two geographic areas that we want to target, just knowing um the population in our care at JJC, which is historically been Oakland and Hayward.

Um, so what are we going to prioritize?

What does the next year look like in terms of additional funding and programming specifically for those two communities?

Correct.

Uh again, traditionally and in the past historical context, we would fund all regions equally.

We are actually uh allowing for more programming in Oakland and Hayward.

Uh that's already in existence right now.

When we look at future RFPs, that's going to be built in.

And so that's for general broad preventative services.

But what we've also found is that we need to get really hyper focused on this population.

Um, and so there's work that we've been doing as an example, the youth violence reduction coordination uh initiative, or also known as the YVRC, which is a um a body that meets and focuses on the highest need, highest risk youth.

Currently, it's only in Oakland, and it's a collaboration with the Alameda County Office of Education and the National Institute of Criminal Justice Reform, and just within the last couple of weeks, Oakland's Department of Violence Prevention also signed on as well as part of this collaborative group.

And the idea is it's based on a San Francisco model where we meet to discuss these youth, and we don't leave, we don't adjourn until we have an action plan for who is responsible for the next step, what services is needed, and what intervention is required.

Um, we upon the signing of that contract, we went from zero youth to 22 overnight.

So uh it is uh it it's very early in its inception, uh, but the need is certainly there.

The plan was always to expand that to a broader county context too, which would naturally include Hayward when available.

It is staffing staffing intensive because um uh staffing such high need kids uh just takes a lot of resources.

So we're continuing to build that out.

Alameda County Office of Education has been a good partner in that, but those are uh two main things the concentration and and um uh continuing of having more general preventative services in those two key regions and also focusing resources very intently on an individualized level for youth in that region.

Um so you mentioned Oakland is 22 young people.

Do we have a sense of what that number might be in Hayward?

I don't have that that initially because we've only focused on uh Oakland, and that was because the partnership started in Oakland.

Okay, um, so I I hear that it's staffing intents.

Uh what additional resources, what can be done to help expedite that same approach also to take place in Hayward.

We're already in the process internally of um creating the infrastructure to support that.

We are reallocated, we are in the process of reallocating to deputy probation officer positions from uh general caseloads into a specific and more intensive caseload that focuses on that population that could potentially help with the capacity, although we might need to reallocate additional services depending on on how quickly those caseloads fill up.

The key issue is um in the reason why Oakland worked was because there were folks that were very much involved with Oakland youth that were willing to be part of the staffing.

So the next step, in addition to having resources at probation, is we would need folks at Hayward, whether from the school district, um from uh services through.

Yes, like because it it is really intensive.

The staff person is basically meeting to discuss these youth at least twice a week, and then there's follow-up work that has to happen.

So um, and in all fairness, I'm not saying that's not possible that there aren't people in Hayward.

We just haven't reached that point where we've said, Hayward, who can you who can you provide us?

But that would be required.

I'm happy to be a part of those conversations being um farmer council member in Hayward and knowing the work that it's unique, but the might get this wrong, but the youth and family bureau services, which is a component of the police department.

I think it's been there for like 40 years as a very unique model, but definitely would help uh facilitate and be a part of that conversation and help kind of brainstorm and see what other partners we can bring in because it's definitely something in the last couple years when I've read the reports and the data and the progress that's being done in Oakland and knowing that Hayward is second highest in terms of population and at risk, uh definitely want us to be more proactive and put more of a concentrated effort and also flagging summer times around the corner and things tend to happen in the summer.

So the more we could do to get ahead of that was would be ideal.

Um, but really impressed with this work and and thank you for um the the updates and the approach to get you're on track.

So I really appreciate it.

And we're going to go to public comment, and if you guys could stick around just in case there's clarifying questions, thank you.

Since you meant, sorry, since you mentioned summer, we are doing a summer summit like we've done in the past years, and that's available for all you throughout the county.

It's a place for them to develop skills.

There'll be a uh employment fair, and they get to be involved with um uh programming so that they have something to do during the summer.

Just as a site.

You could please.

Your your team is really good at ascending all the board of supervisors, flyers, information that we could post, not only in social media but in our newsletter.

Please see us as a resource to help disseminate that information.

Very good, thank you.

Thank you.

Um, how many speakers do we have?

And if you'd like to comment on this item, raise your hand or fill out a speaker card, and we'll do two minutes.

Mina, for public comment.

Okay, so I apologize.

So this is a public comment on item number two and three.

Actually, we didn't take public comment for two, so I apologize.

So right now we're doing public comment for the last two presentations, which is item number two and three.

Uh item number four public comment is general public comment, not an items on the agenda.

We will get to that.

My apologies, supervisor.

We have no speakers for items two and three.

Okay, thank you so much.

So again, I want to thank our presenters for the information.

Also, want to acknowledge uh Brenda Gomez on my team who's been instrumental in building out this work.

Thank you for representing the office and for working in a strong partnership with not only probation but the other system partners, really impressed with the work and appreciate the analysis.

This is very helpful for us to keep into consideration as we're looking at funding and policy decisions.

So thank you all.

Um, we will now go to public comment item number four.

This is for items under the purview of this committee, but not on the agenda.

And I believe we do have speakers under this item.

Mina for public comment.

Okay.

Uh my name is Mina Cucci.

I am a resident of Nate Miley's district and Oakland for 10 years.

I'm here to follow up on the flock safety contract renewal.

Based on the current contract, it will expire at the end of June, and the uh and requires a 30-day notice to cancel the contract.

Otherwise, it'll, I believe it'll auto-renew or it'll continue.

Many residents have shown up across many meetings asking the board to seriously consider the cancellation of the flock contract.

If the board of supervisors is operating in good faith, then an item to renew the flock contract or not would be an agenda item up for vote to the entire board prior to the 30-day notice required.

As I'm aware, there is not an agenda item to meet this 30-day notice.

I'm here to urge this committee uh to get this item on a meeting prior to the 30 days, which would need to be before the end of this month.

I also urge the committee, as I have many times before, and the entire board to vote no on the renewal of the flock contract.

Additionally, in the last meeting when FLOC was discussed, the board asked the Alameda County Sheriff to provide additional information.

Um, as the board still had unanswered questions.

So just throwing the question out there, has the sheriff um provided that information.

Lastly, I asked that there is a presentation by an organization of tech professionals such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation or the ACL ACLU to name a couple.

Those uh organizations are familiar with this technology, issues with the contract, and violations of civil liberties and can speak to the harms and concerns around this tech.

Um, and they have yet to share with the board in a public meeting.

Um, Flock and the County Sheriff Office have made multiple presentations that unfortunately did share false information and claims that have yet to be contested.

Um, recently the EFF did speak at El Cerrito and uh City Council and the council decided to completely cut the contract after uh during that meeting, which was just a few weeks ago.

Thank you.

Hi, my name is Chiara Versu.

And you could adjust the mic if you if you want to bring it down a little bit.

Yeah, thank you.

Hi, Supervisor Marquez.

My name is Kiara Bursou, and I'm an Oakland resident of seven years.

I'm here to urge you and the other supervisors to vote against the imminent extension of the flock contract and to bring the issue before the board ahead of the 30-day notice mark required to formally terminate terminate the contract with its expiration approaching at the end of June.

This means bringing the issue back up before the end of this month.

The alternative is to default entirely undemocratically to continuing a partnership.

The constituents have resoundingly urged you to terminate.

Flock is the last kind of safety measure that our residents need right now, not the continued funding of an ICE and DEA cooperative, private techno-capitalist, plainly insecure and historically breachable surveillance infrastructure.

At the exact moment, our federal government is working to categorically endanger the lives of our most vulnerable community members.

In real terms, maintaining the present the presence of Flock Technologies in Alameda County means risking national abuses of data that disproportionately imperil immigrant families, create exposure for abortion care seekers being targeted by out of state prosecutors, an exacerbate risk to protesters, union members, and community organizers.

These are dangers we cannot protect ourselves from in this partnership.

Flock is a waste of community resources and does not make us safer.

Please do not sideline and passively continue to resource without even the opportunity for critical input from your constituents, a surveillance apparatus that structurally endangers our most vulnerable community members and has historically facilitated nationwide infringements on the civil liberties and freedoms of black and brown and immigrant residents.

The stakes are too high, and the families and residents that you represent need your fierce commitment to their well-being and safety.

Do your due diligence and please bring the issue back up with the board before the end of the month.

Thank you.

Caller, you're on the line, you have two minutes more on public comment.

Z.

Hello, can I be heard?

Yes.

Thank you.

Yes, I would like to speak out against Flock in a similar vein to the previous two public comments.

I would urge this board to please vote no on the Flock contract renewal and to please uh bring it up on the agenda this month so that we have a fair shot at actually discussing and thinking about this issue.

Um, this issue strikes very close to me.

My family grew up in the Soviet Union and uh personally has experienced what it means when the state is always watching, always listening, always there to manufacture a crime based off of data that you have no control over, no ability to audit.

It is incredibly dangerous.

And I would just add, you know, as as one example, if Flock were installed outside of Anne Frank's house, she never would have had a chance to write her diaries, they would have found her much much faster.

And we really need to think about what that means in our society right now with the rise of authoritarianism nationally and the fact that it is not possible to protect this data at the local level, despite whatever assurances local authorities may be trying to push at meetings like this.

And so I really really urge you to take this issue very seriously.

There is an extreme amount of historical precedent for what happens when fascists get a hold of tech like this, and we need to we need the only way really to protect this data is to not collect it in the first place.

That's all.

Thank you.

Madeline, you have two minutes.

Madeline, unmute your microphone.

Oh, there we go.

Can you hear me now?

Yes, okay.

Thank you so much.

Hello, all.

Hi, um, Chair Marquez.

I am speaking to ask you, as chair of the public protection committee, to bring forth a request with President Halbort to agendize this item, the flock safety contract renewal.

As people have already discussed, the auto renewal is up on June 30th, and the clause requires a cancellation to occur 30 days prior.

So I request that this be agendized and that you ask President Halbert to agendize this for the next board supervisors meeting.

As we've already debated and discussed the many flaws of flock safety publicly on the 21st, and most supervisors agreed that while they did not want to continue with this vendor, they felt the need to pay the bill.

We do not want to be stuck in the future in yet another catch-22 where we have to retroactively pay a bill to a vendor with whom we do not actually want to be doing business.

There's also fiduciary concerns.

I understand that the money that is being paid is from the sheriff's office.

However, for the county, there are monetary considerations as well, because there is a class action lawsuit in the works against SWAC safety.

There have been lawsuits brought against OPD for SB 34 violations, against San Jose for Fourth Amendment violations, and there are more.

So not only does the contract cost a large sum from the sheriff's office, but it puts the county at risk and at exposure for legal costs that we cannot afford.

So I ask again that we agendize this item to handle this contract and cancel it and vote no before the time is up, and we're yet again stuck in a catch 22 of retroactively paying the bill.

And side note, they were so kind as to let us be unpaid for all that time.

Why?

Because we're the product.

Like women don't pay covers at bars and clubs, but men's do because they're the product and we're the product here.

Thank you.

Roddy, you're we're on public comment.

You have two minutes.

Hi, can you hear me?

Yes, awesome.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for the time today.

I am here to echo what uh everyone has just spoken about.

Please agendize uh the flock contract and please cancel that.

There are so many reasons.

There is so much data out there.

If you do your due diligence, it's it's in the writing between all of us.

There has to be a better solution to public safety.

All of us that are speaking against this really care about public safety.

We believe in our police department, and we urge you to not take what these companies assure you and tell you with regards to data sharing at face level.

Um, they are a product and they're trying to sell us uh that product.

So they will say whatever is required.

Uh the people are speaking of, we we are pleading you to stop exposing our vulnerable through this technology that has shown not to be reliable.

Um please just do your due diligence, do not take what these companies are saying at face value.

Um, it's it's not fair.

It's that's not how critical thinking happens, and that's not a sign of good litter leadership.

Thank you.

Jesse, you have two minutes.

Hi, can you hear me?

Yes, great, thank you so much.

I appreciate it.

I want to echo what everyone else has said already.

And also want to address the elephant in the room that uh in the presentation we endured a month ago from the sheriff's department, they straight up lied.

Um, they said that there were no concerns from the public that were encountered in their outreach events.

And uh, you know, in the following public comment, many public commenters stated that they went to those outreach events and they had many concerns that were went unaddressed by the sheriff's department.

Um, so I'd like to ask you if any other department were to misrepresent their public outreach in a form like this, what would you do?

Would you passively accept what they're what they're asking you to do, or would you contest it and say that this is not ready and that it has to go back?

Um, I've reached out to several supervisors' office and was told that uh it's up to the sheriff's department to agendize this for FY27.

Um, and you know, what will that mean?

Uh, this sheriff's department has shown that they clearly do not care to uh like, you know, look at this in a neutral manner, uh, to address this proactively, to take constituents' concerns seriously.

I fear that without action, and we are demanding you to put this on the agenda now so you can proactively assess flock for fiscal year 27.

Without that action, we know that ICE wants to open that facility in Dublin.

We know that they are gonna completely ignore the symbolic resolutions that this board has created.

You have an opportunity now to stand up for these vulnerable communities and do the right thing.

We know that if you don't do this, ICE is going to use Flock, they're gonna access this network and they will use it to target people and do more proactive, more um targeted abductions of our neighbors.

Uh, this horror is on your hands if you don't agendize Flock and cancel the contract for FY27.

So we urge you to do this now.

Please do the right thing, please protect your communities.

Thank you.

No additional speakers for public comment.

Thank you.

Um, I just wanted to acknowledge the public commenters and the general public comment item.

Um, your comments have been taken, uh have been heard and will be taken into consideration.

We are not allowed to comment on items not on the agenda, but I do appreciate you uh being here and voicing your concerns.

Um, just want to thank everyone today for their engagement, specifically our presenters and everyone who participated in these efforts.

Both presentations reinforce something very important, whether we are talking about public defense or juvenile justice services systems only work when they are properly staffed, coordinated, and responsive to the people they serve.

I appreciate hearing not only about the challenges but also the data, community feedback, and recommendations that are helping shape the path forward.

Today's discussions highlighted the importance of equity, access to services, early intervention, and ensuring departments have the capacity to meet growing needs.

I also want to acknowledge the collaboration between county departments, community-based organizations, youth, families, and justice partners that contributed to this work.

These are informational items today, but they're important discussions that will continue as we look at future planning, investments, and accountability across our systems.

Uh, just wanted to flag that our next public protection meeting will be uh on July 23rd.

It is a joint meeting with our health committee as well as this committee to go over the topic of care first, jails last.

There will not be a PPC meeting in June.

Um, for updates, please follow our Instagram page at supervisor underscore Elisa Marquez.

And again, just want to thank Brenda Gomez, my public safety advisor who was instrumental in coordinating this meeting and many other efforts.

So thank you to Miss Brenda Gomez and thank you to our clerk and everyone else that has been here today.

Have a great day.

This meeting is a