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 meeting for Wednesday, June 24th.

My name is Darrell Watson.

I'm honored to be the chair of the Health and Safety Committee as well as the City Councilmember representing all of the Fine District 9.

To everyone that's biking to work today, be safe with the safety committee, safety first.

Um we have two briefings uh today and one item on consent.

But before we roll into the agenda, why don't we have introductions?

And I'll start with the gentleman to my left.

You'll start and finish.

Good morning.

Paul Cash from South Denver District 6.

Uh thanks for being here, sir.

And I think President Protect.

Good morning, Diana Romero Campbell, Southeast Denver District 4.

And right on time as well.

Good morning, Jamie Torres, West Denver District 3.

All right.

Well, we have a whole bunch here.

We have two briefings uh this morning, so why don't I turn it over to Monitor Castle for your presentation and your annual report?

Thank you very much.

Good morning uh members of council and community.

Um before I begin, I'd like to make a few um quick remarks.

Uh thank you for allowing the OIM this opportunity to review with you our 2025 annual report.

In 2025, the OIM achieved several successes.

The OIM, together with the COB and community, limited the scope of a new program called Education Based Discipline, later changed to development, which eliminates discipline and replaces it with training.

In 2025, through the OIM's hard work, together with the then director of safety, Armando Saldate, a directive was issued that required an internal review of each suspected overdose incident at the jail, allowing the DSD, the Department of Safety, and the OIM to dig into facts surrounding such overdoses, including a review of rounds.

That um directive, unfortunately, was rescinded by Director Gardner on May 27th of this year.

2025 was also a challenging year for the OIM.

Our budget continues to get significantly cut and has been pretty much so for the last three years and will continue to be reduced moving forward in 2027.

We are being asked to do more every day with less.

Since December of 2024, I see a trend developing within all branches of safety, which minimizes or eliminates accountability for officers and deputies who violate departmental rules, eliminates transparency, eliminates oversight, and excludes the community from matters regarding their safety at the hands of law enforcement.

This trend potentially puts community members, persons in custody, officers and deputies at risk, and may open the city up to further liability due to law enforcement misconduct.

After the death of Paul Childs, the killing of Paul Childs, many promises were made to the community.

Those promises were repeated again after the deaths of Jessica Hernandez, Michael Marshall, victims of the George Floyd police police enforcement and the protests and countless others.

For 21 years now, law enforcement and the OIM have worked together to improve safety for community members and officers.

These recent changes from EBD to TASER to the new directive, but specifically the most recent directive by the Department of Safety issued on May 27th threatens to put Denver back in the position it was in in 2003 with the killing of Paul Childs.

And where the police were policing themselves.

OIM will continue its commitment to oversight and will work with the departments to understand their goals, collaborate, and consider changes that do not minimize or eliminate the role of the OIM or its mandate.

If we forget the lessons of the past, we are destined to repeat them.

Together, we must address this recent trend and fight for the oversight community demanded and was promised.

Thank you.

Moving on to our 2025 annual report.

On March 15th of 2025, the OIM issued its annual report.

As a reminder, the key OIM responsibilities include monitor and make recommendations on complaint investigations and disciplinary findings on all cases, monitor officer-involved shooting and in custody death investigations, make recommendations for improving policies, practices, and training, conduct outreach to community and law enforcement, and cultivate community member officer dialogue through mediation.

There are three different sections of the Office of the Independent Monitor.

One is the monitoring section that looks at the cases individually and also recommends reviews discipline and recommended discipline.

There is a policy section of our office, and there is an outreach section.

With regards to the monitoring section, we're going to talk about the number of administrative complaint investigations reviewed.

In 2025, there were 415 DPD complaint investigations and 623 DSD complaint investigations.

With regards to critical incident investigations monitored, there were 11 DPT officer-involved shootings.

So whenever there's a police shooting, we are notified and we will respond to interviews and/or the scene or both.

Actually, we always attend the interviews, and sometimes we we attend go to the scene as well.

There were three deaths during interactions with DPD officers and eight deaths while in DSD custody or during interactions with DSD deputies outside the jails.

One of those deaths we know for sure was of natural causes.

One trend that we identified is sustained community complaints, complaints that were sustained with at least one specification, fell from 18% in 2024 to 11% in 2025.

Specification duty to obey was up to 68%, which has doubled over the last four years.

And that is significant because that particular specification, so imagine it's it's like a charge that is a violation of a rule, is an A through F category.

So it runs the complete gamut of potential discipline.

Where when the matrix was created, each rule violation was assigned a category, A, B, C, D, all the way up to F.