Welcome back to this weekly meeting of the Health and Safety Committee with Denver City Council.

Coverage of the Health and Safety Committee starts now.

Good morning, and welcome to the Health and Safety Committee.

My name is Darrell Watson.

I'm honored to serve as the chair of this committee and also as the representative representing Define District 9 on Denver City Council.

We have one briefing today from our uh from Director Colette Vett uh from the chief uh municipal public uh defender's office.

And before we go into the briefing, uh why don't we have introductions around the table?

And actually, let me check first.

Is there, do we have council members online?

So, Councilmember Sawyer, are you online?

We'll start.

We'll start with you.

Hey, everyone.

Excuse me.

Hey everyone.

Thanks, Chair Watson, Amanda Sawyer, Denver City Council District 5.

To see you.

Um, why don't we start on my right and we just go around the table for council member introductions?

Uh Kevin Flynn, Southwest Members District 2.

Hi, everyone.

Serena Gonzalez Cutietes, one of your council members at large.

Uh, good morning, Paul Cash from South Denver District 6.

Sarah Purdy, the other council member at large.

Jamie Torres, West Denver District 3.

Well, with that, I'll turn it over, Colette, to you and your team to introduce yourself and introduce your team, and thank you all so much for being here.

Great, thank you so much.

Um thank you, Councilman Watson.

It's a it's a pleasure to be here and tell you all a little bit more about our office and the work that we do.

Um, to my left is Ari Kritchover, who's our deputy public defender, Colin March, who is our lead new youth attorney.

Rachel Mercer, who is our appellate and legislative aide, an update attorney, senior attorney, and Ty Cope, who's our supervisor for our client support team.

You'll hear about all of these things during the course of our uh presentation today.

So I think we're ready to go.

I don't know how to connect this.

It's in front of me.

It'll come up in a minute.

Okay.

Is it coming up?

Oh, yeah, there we go.

Thank you.

And I'm I'm really you have to be seeing people from our office that are going to be floating in, and I'm just really so proud of the work that everyone is doing here, and hopefully you'll hear more about why we are so proud of the work that we're doing with the office of the municipal public defender.

And and Colette, I'll say, since you have such a great um group of folks from the office, would you mind um introducing them, even though they're sitting in the audience?

So I would be delighted to introduce them.

Um Jacob, who is our um bilingual case manager that's with the client support team, Lulu, who is with our uh legal secretary and aide with our youth department.

We have Tyler, who is an attorney in courtroom 4B.

We have Rainbow, who is another peer navigator, peer specialist with our office, Hannah, who's our behavior health navigator with our client support team, Eleanor, who is an attorney in courtroom 4C, Eric Goltz, who's in for attorney and 4B, and we've got Candace, who is another veteran, and with our client support team as a peer specialist.

All right.

Well, thanks for stacking the room.

One of the things that we really are proud of is that we are a holistic public defender's office that works to work collaboratively together.

Um, we are unique into in the terms that we we have phenomenal lawyers that you'll hear about, but with our lawyers and our client support team and are every single day working with our clients.

We seek to get them connected to services, to have them represented by some of the finest lawyers, to hear their stories, to tell our clients stories, and to restore respect and dignity for our clients.

And so that's really one of our proudest missions that we do at OMP Day.

In order to qualify for OMP Day, our clients live below the federal poverty line.

Many of them are dealing with uh substance misuse, behavioral health issues, um, mental health issues, uh brain injury.

It was when I first came here to real when I was working with the Brain Injury Alliance, understanding that upwards of 80 to 90 percent of our clients have traumatic brain injury.

And so we have clients that are really one of the most vulnerable citizens or residents of Denver, I should say.

The majority of our clients are on house or experiencing housing instability, and many have uh limited access to health care, especially for our black, Hispanic, and people of color.

Um, that has become really more significantly underscored in the recent months with so many of the our of our dear partners being fired and leaving, and many of the organizations closing up.

It has had a very intense, significant impact on our clients.

People experiencing homelessness are 11 times more likely to be arrested than housed individuals.

And in Denver, nearly 40% of our municipal court cases involve people that are experiencing homelessness for low-level offenses, trespass, open container, camping violations, disturbing the peace.