Santa Rosa Public Safety Subcommittee Meeting - October 24, 2023
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Santa Rosa Public Safety Subcommittee Regular Meeting - October 24, 2023
The Public Safety Subcommittee met on October 24, 2023, at 9:00 AM in the Council Chamber at 100 Santa Rosa Avenue. The meeting covered updates on the Independent Police Auditor's recommendations, SAFER grant implementation, Measure H funding, and the Vegetation Management Program, followed by department reports from the Police and Fire Departments. No public comments were made on any agenda items.
Discussion Items
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Independent Police Auditor’s Recommendation (Item 5.1): Police Chief John Cregan presented responses to eight recommendations from the 2022 Independent Police Auditor (OIR) annual report. The recommendations addressed complaint investigation processes, use-of-force review, de-escalation documentation, training on racial equity and implicit bias, and external facilitators. Chief Cregan detailed improvements including body-worn cameras, in-car cameras, enhanced supervisory reviews, and new training programs. OIR representatives Michael Chanako and Steve Conley expressed satisfaction with the department's responsiveness and noted that Santa Rosa's approach is among the best they have encountered. Councilmember Alvarez asked about the complaint process, verification of officer statements, and metrics for measuring trust. The subcommittee discussed the integration of OIR in critical incident investigations and future audits.
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SAFER Grant Implementation (Item 5.2): Fire Chief Scott Westrope reported on the SAFER grant (FEMA) to fund 12 additional firefighter/paramedics to staff two advanced life support (ALS) squads. The program will operate from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. during peak hours and staff engine companies at night. The implementation team is developing a plan due November 1, 2023. Hiring is underway with 16 candidates in interviews. Apparatus acquisition is ongoing, with interim vehicles available. The grant period runs from March 13, 2024 to March 12, 2027.
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Measure H Update (Item 5.3): The Fire Department, Police Department, and Violence Prevention Partnership (VPP) presented how Measure H (formerly Measure O) funds are used. Fire Chief Westrope highlighted that Measure H funds personnel, station construction, and specialized equipment, including an entire engine company. Police Chief Cregan stated that Measure H provides $4.2 million annually, funding 16 positions including patrol officers, traffic officers, downtown enforcement team, and civilian support staff. VPP Deputy Director Jeff Tibbetts and Program Manager Danielle Gardunio described the VPP's programs, including the GPS program (serving 515 youth since 2015), Choice Grant program (11th cycle, funding 8 agencies), crisis response after the Montgomery High School incident and shootings, and community wellness pop-ups. Councilmember Alvarez asked about accountability and transparency in grant funding. The subcommittee discussed the Citizens Oversight Committee and VPP policy and operational teams.
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Vegetation Management Program Update (Item 5.4): Division Chief Paul Owenthal presented an update on the Vegetation Management Program, funded by $5.25 million from the city and grants. The program implements the Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP) with 9 objectives and 46 actionable items. Efforts include fuel treatment projects, prescribed burns, shaded fuel breaks, and a hazardous vegetation and fuels management ordinance to be presented to City Council in December 2023. The ordinance will require removal of invasive vegetation (Scotch broom, French broom, bay) and certain mulches within 30 feet of structures, and expand defensible space inspections to the entire wildland-urban interface (9,000 properties). Councilmember Alvarez expressed interest in including eucalyptus as a priority pending funding, and in the use of naturally based herbicides.
Department Reports
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Police Department Update: Chief Cregan reported on three major initiatives: (1) Sideshow enforcement – through a countywide protocol, impounding 115 vehicles, and a city ordinance, sideshows have been reduced from weekly to one in 2023; (2) Expansion of the Downtown Enforcement Team to 8 officers, providing 7-day coverage and focusing on downtown safety and outreach to the unsheltered; (3) Recruitment – sworn vacancies have dropped from 21 to 2, with 4 lateral officers in the background process, and the department is on track to be fully staffed for the first time in over a decade. Future agenda items requested include a gang crimes unit update and a police substation study session for January 2024.
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Fire Department Update: Chief Westrope provided updates on staffing (2 vacancies in operations), fire station construction (Station 5 rebuild, Station 8 in Roseland), Emergency Operations Center (seismic retrofit starting November 2023), fleet (9 fire engines on order, 2 type 6 engines arriving soon, 2 pickups from the Foundation), and the Recruitment and Diversity Task Force, which hosted the second annual Women in Public Safety Day with 400 attendees. A countywide fire service sales tax measure (half-cent) will be on the March 5, 2024 ballot, expected to bring $9 million annually to Santa Rosa for new stations and staffing. The subcommittee discussed future updates on the ground ambulance contract and implementation of the tax measure if passed.
Key Outcomes
- The subcommittee received and discussed all reports. No formal votes were taken.
- The police department will continue working with OIR on future audits and recommendations.
- The SAFER grant implementation is on track for March 2024 deployment.
- The Measure H update was accepted; the subcommittee requested a long-term funding discussion for VPP at the January 2024 meeting.
- The vegetation management ordinance will be brought to the full City Council in December 2023.
- The subcommittee set future agenda items for January 23, 2024: police gang crimes unit update, police substation study session, ground ambulance contract update, and possible countywide fire sales tax measure implementation update after the March 2024 ballot.
Meeting Transcript
Good morning. Like to ask the interpreter currently on the Spanish channel to commence translation of the meeting. For those just joining the meeting, live translation in Spanish is available, and members of the public or staff wishing to listen in Spanish can join the Spanish channel by clicking on the interpretation icon in Zoom toolbar. It looks like a globe. Once you join the Spanish channel, we recommend you shut off the main audio. So you can only hear the Spanish translation. Interpreter, please restate this in Spanish. So we're hearing the translation in person here, so if we can adjust that, that would be greatly appreciated. All right, Madam Secretary, can you call roll, please? Chair O'Krepke. Here Councilmember Alvarez. President. Absent. Let the record show that all subcommittee members are present, with the exception of Councilmember Fleming. Thank you very much. Excuse me. We'll move on to public comment on non-agenda matters. So if you'd like to address something uh to the committee that is not agendized, this is your opportunity. Go ahead and move to one of the lecterns, either east or west. And you'll have a few minutes to do so. Okay, seeing nobody moving towards the microphones, we'll move on. Uh to new business 5.1 independent police auditors recommendation. Uh Chief Greggan, take it away. Good morning. I'm John Krieg. I'm our chief of police here in Santa Rosa, and I have with me Captain Dan Morensic, who runs our division, which includes our professional standards uh team, and we have our two uh independent police auditors. I'll let them introduce themselves. Good morning, Michael Chanako, um, part of the um Independent Police Auditor team. Good morning. My name is Steve Conley, and I work with Mike in the Independent Police Auditor's Office. All right, and we're gonna go through this presentation, and so this comes in response in June of uh 2023. We had our independent police auditor uh come down here and do a presentation to our city council of the 2022 uh annual report. And there were eight distinct recommendations that came out of the report, and we uh presented that to our city council, our auditor team did. And then some of the feedback was okay. So, what is the police department's response to these eight recommendations? So that's what we're gonna go through today. Is in 2022 the independent police auditor team reviewed 67 different complaints. Uh 14 of those were internally generated by the police department, the rest came from our community members who had some type of frustration with an incident that had occurred with one of our staff members. We went through each one of those. Our independent police auditor also reviewed some of our policies and our procedures within the police department, and those were all incorporated in those eight recommendations. So we're gonna go through recommendation by recommendation. If we can go to the next slide here. But we wanted to make sure that everyone was clear that each one of these is memoralized in a structured formal process that we investigate each one of our complaints. If we go to number two, it kind of spills off of this as well. So SRPD should review its approach to disciplinary consequences for low-level policy violations and consider leaning more in the direction of a formal process. And this is one again in specifically talking with these personnel inquiries, which are more what we consider like a low-level offense. Now, one thing that's really changed uh for us as a police administrators and for us to be able to more accurately review these incidents is the advent of the body worn camera. And now every single one of our uh police officers in uniform wears a body worn camera, and the same with our detectives when they're going out serving search warrants or any type of enforcement action is required to wear a body worn camera and required to activate that body worn camera when uh contacting the public. Another thing that we've taken a big step forward is as of just last month, all 63 of our marked patrol vehicles now have camera systems in them. So we have from the front camera, there's two different camera focuses that is a 270 foot degree range, or sorry, uh 270 degree range that goes out, so it's incorporating most of what you see on a traffic stop, a bicycle stop, our pedestrian stop, and then we also have another camera inside the patrol vehicle.
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