Okay, council, we're ready to start our Mesa City Council study session for June 1st, 2026.

All of our council members are present.

Thank you.

As usual, item one is to review the two agendas we have for tonight's council meeting.

And that would be our regular council uh meeting, and then we have the special council meeting where we discuss the budget.

So with that, if you would go through our first council budget agenda.

We'll have a swearing in of the appointment of Jacob Brown as our city magistrate by our chief magistrate, Mr.

Umblie.

And then the items on the agenda.

Any questions for staff?

For tonight's agenda.

Uh huh.

Yeah, I didn't.

You do have a question.

Um I just have a question for Chief Butler.

I I had a constituent ask about um the uh importance and value of sick our our relationship with ASU.

So if you could just kind of talk us through what we've done, been doing in the past and why it's necessary going forward.

Thank you.

Uh sure.

Mayor, vice mayor, uh, council member go forth, so good to see you this evening.

Um happy to talk about this uh this relationship.

So um as many of the many here in this room know, and many people in the community know we are a really effective crime fighting police department.

We have a really, really safe community.

Um we have wonderful men and women who go out there every single day, and they work super hard to make sure that we have a safe community.

Um technology is another key component of that as well.

So a lot of the technologies that we utilize help us be way more effective and way more efficient in our crime fighting model.

And then just as important is the ability to analyze our data and ensure that we have the appropriate resources in the appropriate areas and times where they need to be.

So historically, what we've done as a police department is we were reactive in our policing model, meaning that every 30 days crimes were would occur, we would look at where those are crime crimes occurred, and then we would send officers out to those areas in about a 30-day reactive response to it and try to be in the area where we thought crimes were gonna continue to occur.

Uh we got to a point in about 2022 where we realized, hey, we can get better at our policing model by trying to predict and analyze where we think crimes are going to occur before they actually occur.

So we started researching nationwide.

Well, what could we do to improve on our crime analysis strategy?

And what we found is Arizona State University, who is just right down the street, has a really good problem-oriented policing component, and they have master's levels uh academia, master's level training for crime analysts.

So we looked into building a relationship with them, and we started doing that.

Um and that relationship started in 2022 where we collaborated with ASU and had highly trained individuals come and intern and paid intern positions for the Mesa Police Department.

And then in turn, we got a lot of the training that those individuals receive through their studies and getting their master's degree at Arizona State University, and it helped us with our full-time employees elevate their ability to predict where crimes are likely to occur, analyzing the data, create maps that our users can easily understand, and then as it went on, we saw the value in that and we started getting better and better and better.

Well, early on, we funded it, uh the police department funded it.

Um and after a year, after another year, we figured out that there was an opportunity to utilize grants to fund this program, and that's what we've been doing since 2024 is funding this through grants.

This relationship allows us to be effective, it allows officers to be in the areas where we know suspects are likely to be and crimes are likely to occur, and to prevent crimes prior to them occurring and make our community safer.

So did they did they bring the methodology to the city to the police department?

Or was that a collaboration and and creating it?

It's uh mayor, vice mayor, council member go forth.

It's a little bit of a little bit of both, right?

We we had the foundation of that, but what we needed that to do is grow and build upon that foundation, and that's what they brought to the equation is we were doing a lot of what we needed to be doing, but they helped us get better and improve in the process to make us more effective.

And you said there's two, it's it's two at a time.

There there is two at a time.

They are they are um paid interns through this grant, and they work about 30 to 31 uh hours per week for us.

Okay.

And and the grant covers the majority of the cost.

It does.

So if you look at what the the language in the grant, it talks about 224,000 per year, um up to 224.

Now the grant covers 184,000 of that.

So there could be a situation that uh we would have to look at the general fund in order to compensate for that, but we haven't had to do that yet.

And in fact, this this year, going into next fiscal year, we will be rolling forward about $30,000 of last year's grant, applying it towards the the grant that we're seeking right now.

So we have not used general funds for this program yet.

The grant is covering it.

Since we started the the grant, we have not.

Okay.

Uh we originally started this utilizing public safety sales tax funds.

Okay.

Okay.