Calvo down.

Okay.

This meeting will come to order.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Monday, October 23rd, 2023 meeting of the Rules Committee of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

I am Supervisor Matt Dorsey, Chair of this committee, and I am joined today by Vice Chair Shimon Walton and Committee Member Asha Safai.

Together, we'd like to express our gratitude to our committee clerk today, Mr.

Victor Young.

Thanks also to the team at SFGov TV for facilitating and broadcasting today's meeting, and in particular today, our producer, Mr.

Jason Goldhammer.

Mr.

Clerk, do you have any announcements?

Uh, yes.

I'd like to remind the audience to make sure to silence all cell phones and electronic devices.

Uh documents uh provided to me today will be included as part of the file and should be submitted to myself.

Items acted upon today are expected to appear at the Board of Supervisors' agenda on October 31st, 2023, unless otherwise stated.

That completes my initial announcements.

Thank you, Mr.

Clerk.

Uh, would you call, please call item number one?

Item number one is a charter amendment to amend the charter of the city and county of San Francisco to establish minimum staffing levels for sworn officers of the police department requiring for a period of five years that the mayor and the board of supervisors appropriate funds to meet staffing levels, establishing a police full staffing fund for a period of five years for the purpose of facilitating minimum police staffing and allowing for a temporary freeze on appropriations to the police full staffing fund in the budget and economic emergency and an election to be held on March 5th, 2024.

Thank you, Mr.

Clerk.

Uh colleagues, item number one is the police full staffing charter amendment that we first began working on last March.

Uh some of you may recall that I announced this publicly last April.

That was the day after San Francisco's flagship Whole Foods Supermarket and Civic Center in my district shuttered following only a single year in operation.

Their stated reason for the closure was safety concerns both for their employees and their customers.

That cite safety concerns for reasons that they have closed.

We know too that safety has been a pervasive concern in fewer conventions and diminishing tourism in ways that hamstring San Francisco's post-COVID economic recovery and our long-term economic employment outlook.

Many of these businesses, though certainly not all of them, struggle in the district I represent.

After a nearly a year and a half serving on this board of supervisors, I can say that probably 90% of the complaints I hear from my constituents boil down to a difficult truth, that we don't have enough police officers to address the concerns they have every right to be voicing objections about.

I have never believed more strongly than I believe today that San Francisco can no longer afford not to have a fully staffed police department.

And this charter amendment endeavors to give voters the opportunity to accomplish that.

While San Francisco has experienced police staffing shortfalls in past decades, never in our modern history has our police understaffing crisis been as serious as it is today.

Now, as we will discuss in this hearing, we have a newly updated recommended police staffing level that is somewhat lower due to a drop in calls for service last year.

The new recommended staffing level is 2,074 full duty officers.

That developed a workload-based data-driven, independently recommended methodology that was guided by outside experts.

It also reflects a much needed improvement over the prior staffing minimum once enshrined in our charter, which was there since uh 1994 up to 2020, which for 25 years froze the minimum staffing level at 1,971 full duty police officers.

Unfortunately, San Francisco today is nowhere near our recommended staffing level.

For that matter, we're nowhere near the old minimum staffing before it was repealed in November 2020 as proper.

Our actual number of full duty sworn officers, as currently defined, is just 1475 police officers.

That means we are about 600 full duty officers short of where we should be.

Nearly 30% of the police department we are supposed to have isn't there.

And most worrisome to me, more than 350 current police officers are eligible for retirement right now.

If we don't act boldly, and with a mandate from voters, I believe we face the prospect of a police force that could soon be at half strength.

This proposed charter amendment endeavors to prevent that.

And here's how it will work.

First, it will re-establish a minimum police staffing level of 2074 full duty officers in five years.

And unlike the 1994 Charter Amendment, which for a quarter century enshrined a sh a static number, it will enable periodic adjustments to minimum staffing levels in years to come.

Second, it will give us um get us to full staffing in a way that is incremental and doable over time, with graduated targets over five years.

The amendments I will read into the record today lower those targets by 100 officers, making this approach more affordable and more workable.

Starting in July of 2024, if enacted, the minimum staffing level would go from 1,700 full duty police officers in year one to 1800 in year two, then to 1900 in year three, then to 2000 in year four, and finally to a fully staffed SFPD at 2074 full duty police officers in year five.

Um Chair Dorsey, would you like to pause to let the people settle?

My apologies.

If someone would like to translate that, it would be appreciated.

Thanks, everybody.

So are we opening up overflow?

They're setting it up, it's gonna take them a few minutes.

Okay.

So there will so there will be um overflow seating.

So I'm gonna ask that everybody remember this is an open session.