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.

My name is Darrell Watson.

I'm honored to serve as the chair of the Health and Safety Committee and also as the City Councilmember representing all of the fine district nine.

Today is June 10th.

We have one briefing from Denver Police and one item on consent.

Before we roll into the presentation, why don't we have introductions by council members?

And I'll start with our council members that are virtual.

I believe we have Councilmember Flynn and Sawyer.

We'll turn it to you.

Good morning, everyone, Councilman Kevin Flynn, Southwest Denver's District 2.

Good morning, Amanda Sawyer, District 5.

Thank you both for here.

And then we'll start on our right with Councilman.

Good morning, everyone.

Sadana Gonzalez Coquetes.

I'm one of your council members at large.

Good morning, Paul Cashman, South Denver District 6.

Thank you everyone for being here.

We'll turn over to Denver Police.

Chief Thomas, who I'll have you introduce yourself and all of our colleagues from Denver Police and turn the floor over to you.

Uh well, thank you.

Uh Councilman Watson, um, Democrats Chief Ron Thomas.

Um, happy to once again present on education-based uh development, and so I'll start with the agenda if you want to go to that slide.

And so uh we'll be presenting on the what, why, and how of education-based development.

Uh, we'll also talk about eligibility, example scenarios, survey results, and our community engagement, along with program changes based on feedback and guardrails that we've established.

Now, a lot has been offered.

Next slide, please.

Um, no, no, sorry, one back.

Sorry.

Um, a lot has been offered about what education development is and isn't.

Uh, and so for the record from our perspective, education-based development is an alternative to traditional discipline for lower level violations.

It's focused on behavior changes through training and coaching, it addresses root causes of mistakes, it uses targeted training and counseling, and it's designed to improve long-term performance.

And more importantly, uh, what education development is not is it is not a replacement for discipline.

It is not a change to the discipline matrix, and is not a bypass of internal affairs or the Office of the Independent Monitor Review.

Uh, so the core idea ultimately of education-based development is to create a faster and more meaningful uh accountability without reducing oversight.

I want to emphasize that point without uh reducing oversight, which we understand is very important.

So, why is education-based development needed?

First, there are a number of challenges with our current system, and we've discussed this before.

There's a large number of low lower-level cases.

Minor cases often require months to resolve, longer timelines impact the ability to correct mistakes efficiently, and education development would uh would create more current development uh and training uh timelines, and so all of those challenges I think um have negative impacts on officer morale and productivity.

Um, more broadly, there's a growing movement which recognizes that in the current system officer development has become far less important than punitive outcomes for minor mistakes, and those penalties don't address the why.

Also, programmatically procedural and restorative justice has become widely accepted, uh, widely separated practice in favor of uh retributive justice.

And so, just to put a finer point on the current challenges, as you can see, the bulk of our cases, which are those that um where an oral or written reprimand is um the most likely outcome if the charge would be to be sustained.

It's taking six to eight months to resolve those cases.

All right.

Good morning, everyone.

To introduce myself, my name is Wendy Shea, I am special counsel of the department of safety.

But I'm here today because in late July, I also assume the role of being the acting deputy director over oversight of Denver Police Discipline and Denver Fire Discipline as we look to replace the role that had been vacated.

In that role, I worked very closely with our executive director, executive director Al Gardner, to hear the ideas as well as the concerns about education-based development as well as the draft policy.

And I worked alongside him after we listened to those concerns and ideas to make what we believe are meaningful changes to the draft policy that addressed several key areas that we believe needed to be implemented to fully take this vision to where we wanted it to go.

So I think pretty much everyone's familiar with our disciplinary matrix, but just to provide a little context here.

For violation, there's conduct categories that then determine the penalties that will be assessed.

There's five actual conduct categories for the Denver police that range from A to F.

They all have a specific definition.

One thing that Director Gardner wanted to make very clear and did in the revisions to the policy is that currently what's going to happen with this policy is that there's only certain types of rules and regulation violations that are eligible, and it's only for conduct categories A and B.

Conduct category A is conduct that has a minimal negative impact on the operations or professional image of the department.

Conduct category B is conduct that has more than a minimal negative impact on the operations or professional image of the department, or that negatively impacts relationships with other officers, agencies, or the public.

There is also specific appendix that's attached that sets forth this only the specific rules and regulations that are eligible.