Citizen's Police Advisory Council

Charleston Citizen Police Advisory Council May 2, 2019 A meeting of the Charleston Citizen Police Advisory Council was held this date beginning at 5:44 p.m., at the City of Charleston Police Department, 180 Lockwood Blvd, Training Room Notice of this meeting was sent to all local news media. PRESENT Thuane B. Fielding, Chair, Rhett Outen, Vice-Chair, Max Milliken, Ryan Davis, Camden Norris Shields, Joe Lysaught, Barry Wright Also Present: Reverend Kylon Middleton, Steve Ruemelin, Chief Reynolds, Lieutenant Bruder, Lieutenant Murray, Deputy Chief Broughton, Captain Walker, Deputy Chief Taylor, and Bethany Whitaker, Council Secretary Welcome/Call to Order Reverend Middleton called the roll. Approval of Minutes The minutes of the March 7, 2019 meeting were unanimously approved. Old Business  Review of CPAC Purpose and Updates – Steve Ruemelin and Chief Mr. Ruemelin stated that he had a couple of quick updates that had come out of the public comment period from the last meeting. Ms. Parker was there and had mentioned that she had been at a community meeting and a few officers were not familiar with the Citizen’s Police Advisory Council. She wondered how they could get the word out to the officers in the department. Since then, they had been working with the Professional Standards Office and their Policy Officer, and there was now a PowerPoint presentation that went over the guidelines of the Council. Officers had to go on to that and when there was a new document they had to read it and sign on the website that they had reviewed it. So, they had a record of who had read it and who hadn’t. They were getting the word out. He would suggest that if they had a neighborhood or community meeting where they wanted someone to come out and talk about the Citizen’s Police Advisory Council, they would be willing to do that. They wanted as a much citizen participation as possible. That was the purpose, to connect with communities and work on the big picture issues. Anything they could do to get more participation, they were open to. Reverend Middleton stated they needed to make sure people were aware beyond the Command Staff, Lieutenants, and Captains. Mr. Ruemelin said they wanted the officers to at least be aware of the group and be able to tell people how to get in touch with them if needed. However, if they wanted someone to speak in detail about what the Council did and go over guidelines, it may not be the officers that were normally there, but someone who attended the meetings regularly. Mr. Harris was also at the last meeting and asked about how one could become a member or apply. Since the last meeting, he had been working with Mr. Tito in the Mayor’s Office. They had set up the Council under the Boards and Commissions. There was a button that someone could click that said ‘apply’. So, if someone was interested, they could fill out an application and the Mayor and Council would know who wanted to 1 become a member. That was the list he thought they should pick from. They wanted people who were invested and wanted to do it, and not just someone who was asked. Ms. Fielding asked if they could post a listing of each of the member’s districts and the Police Team lead. Mr. Ruemelin said he would explore that with Mr. Tito. Reverend Middleton said that the Police Department was broken up like that in some ways. Ms. Fielding said that it would help with the focus of trying to improve communications and help the community/Police relations. Mr. Shields said it would be nice to have consistency throughout the sites. Mr. Ruemelin said that Ms. Parker had also said that it would nice to have the minutes up on the City website. The agendas were up there. Ms. Whitaker stated that she could probably get this done. The Clerk of Council’s Office didn’t post all of the minutes, but if need be, she could post them. Chief Reynolds stated that there was a gap between the top of the organization and the rest of the organization, so the point was well taken and was not inaccurate. There was a lot they needed to do. So, posting the PowerPoint and having everyone look at that was a step, but it was just a step. They would talk about how they had been having Command discussions about the Advisory Council. There was a lot of helpful feedback and honest discussion, and that filtered back to the Command. It didn’t die there in the meeting. When they talked about the audit, they would talk about the complaint process. It was one thing to say they had a new policy/protocol. He had met with every Sergeant in the department and had a good discussion about the changes that the Advisory Council had been talking about. There was a gap and they needed to work on it. They were pointing in that direction, but there was a lot more to do.  CNA Updates – Lt. Jason Bruder and Chief Reynolds Lieutenant Bruder stated that CNA had asked him a lot of the same questions that the Advisory Council had asked such as where to find the rules and regulations. They were working to make all of that available and take it a step further. People didn’t need to know that they had it to go look for it, that it would just present itself, instead of making people dig for it. There was nothing confidential about CNA’s visit. They were in Charleston for five days and jammed in a lot of work. They interviewed 64 different CPD personnel, primarily from the operations side. They attended four community meetings and the final tally was about 250 citizens. They went to a CJCC meeting and also met with the Charleston Area Justice Ministry. They met with the ACLU. The findings generally focused around community engagement from a command level, as to what they expected of supervisors and what the individual officers were doing, how it impacted the shift scheduled and how they worked, and the communities concerns with that. They focused on the overall complaint process, how they handled it, how they communicated it to people, how they received and documented that. They also talked about how CPD tracked cases, demographic for traffic stops, what CPD was aware of and doing. At this point, the audit was still in a very fact-finding stage. They hadn’t done any analysis, but those were things that CPD had seen as they had been asked questions. CPD said they probably needed to take a closer look at some things that were brought up. CNA had cautioned CPD in moving too fast. CPD may not realize the severity of something, or it may not turn out to be a problem once CNA got into the analysis and combined all the interviews with data. They didn’t want to change too much before the findings were back. CNA had one more site visit that was planned for the following Tuesday and they would be meeting with a local youth group, and a couple of other groups, as well as follow up with some commanders. From there, they would go into the analysis where they would start digging into the data and producing their first draft analysis, which they were expecting early fall. CNA was still focusing on the five areas that the City had asked them to focus on including use of force, traffic stops/field contacts, internal/external complaints, recruiting/hiring, and community engagement. They all had Ms. 2 Rodriguez’s, CNA, contact information and if they felt there was something that didn’t make it, they could reach out to her. Chief Reynolds stated that in the officer interviews there was a lot of good feedback from the officers and communities. It described exactly what was brought up, which was the gap in the department. It wasn’t uncommon and it existed in a lot of organizations, but there was a desire for the truth to be a part of the conversation. There was a lot of good questions in the command meetings they had. The first line supervisor in the organization was probably the most important position as far as the impact on outcomes, performance, and satisfaction. There was a concern that they needed to do better with communication which was not unexpected. This audit would make them better. The feedback had been very balanced, which was what they were hoping for. They didn’t want just once group who was all positive or all negative. There had been a lot of healthy discussion, which was what CNA had been hoping for. They were happy with the number of people and the variety of people. Reverend Middleton stated that he had done research on different levels and he was still concerned with the number of 250 people because it wasn’t a great sampling based on the population of the City itself. That was a concern if it was non-random and it may not be generalizable across demographic groups based on whoever showed up. It could still exclude vulnerable groups. There were only five people who showed up at Ebenezer, so if they looked at the demographics, it may still miss certain groups. He wanted to ask, once CNA wrapped things up and provided the report, what had other communities who had received audits done with those recommendations that helped transform their organizations. Lieutenant Bruder said that the City was in a rather unique situation because Charleston was one of the first to call a group like this in. Usually, they were sent in and ordered by the Department of Justice. So, generally the Department of Justice paid for a group like CNA to go in and determine if there was a problem and help fix the problem, and generally would pay for follow-up for a number of years. There was grant funding available and things like that for follow-ups, but they had started talking in-house about how to sustain it within their five-year strategic plan. Some of that could come from working with the Advisory Council who could help get results. Mr. Shields said he may not have been at the meeting when they were told that CNA was coming, but he hadn’t seen or heard anything about what the scope was for the audit. He would like to know what the scope was, what their goals were, and how much money was spent on it. Chief Reynolds said it was $158,000. Mr. Shields said he would also like to know about other cities, as that would be good for them to know, so they could have an idea about what they wanted to get out of it themselves. The members of the Advisory Council had a duty to look at that, just as the Police Department was, and try to get as much out of it as possible. In order to do that, they needed to know more about what they were doing. Ms. Fielding said this was a real-time example, where some of them knew what CNA’s goal was and others didn’t. It showed that they needed to maximize their use of as many communication opportunities as they had. It could have been posted on the website. She was happy with the number of people who attended, because the session she had attended was at Burke High School and there were eighty people there. That was a large number. She was hopeful that the other meetings had as much attendance. She asked if the information could be posted on the website to let people know the audit was underway. She referred to websites that had pop-ups that contained information that was important. People would see that and want to know about it. She asked if the recommendations from CNA were too preliminary to share. Lieutenant Bruder said it had been shared, but he wasn’t sure if it had been posted. It wasn’t confidential. CNA was sending it to the Mayor’s office and then the Mayor’s office was sending it out to their contacts. Ms. Fielding said it might help to go the distance in credibility. A lot of people at the session questioned the integrity and credibility of the session. They wanted to know if people were police officers at the meeting. They could post it as an update on the website. 3 Reverend Middleton referred to CNA coming to interview youth that following Tuesday and asked Mr. Milliken if he was aware of that. Mr. Milliken said he hadn’t known about the meeting that following Tuesday. Mr. Wright said he was wondering about the total number. There were about 80 at St. James as well, which didn’t add up to a total representation. One of the things that came out of the meeting he was at was the lack of people knowing this was happening. In order for this to be an adequate analysis, they needed more people. 250 wasn’t a lot. There was a lot of youth things going on right around when they were there the last time, and that would have been a good time to get a large percentage of youth. But, if the youth didn’t know about it, and it was happening on Tuesday, something needed to be done. Mr. Shields said this was a good reason for them to know the scope and what CNA’s duty was as far as going out in the community and making sure people were showing up. Chief Reynolds stated that those were all good questions and he didn’t want to stifle the discussion. In reference to the number of people, it was posted in The Chronicle and in The Post & Courier. There was a press release that went out through every media organization that they were aware of multiple times. It was posted on every social media outlet. It went through all of the community groups, and through Nextdoor. CAJM was intimately involved in this since the beginning. Reverend Middleton had helped some. So, they had a ‘fuse’ on the contract. It was finite. $158,000 was one of lowest bids. There were some in the $400,000-$500,000 range for the same thing. When they started talking about consent decree in a DOJ agreement, they were talking about millions of dollars for a large city. The scope was finite. It was to look at racial disparities, to look at the organization, to look at public trust, transparency. It would look at data. There was an open procurement process. The final review of the vendors interviewed was public. He recused himself, because he knew most of the people in the groups that submitted. Chief Broughton, Lieutenant Bruder, Captain Middleton, and Sergeant Smith were on the board among a lot of Councilmembers, and some others. At some point, this may not be that time, they had to get their arms around this, which was where the scope became important, and ask what they wanted to accomplish. To him, in simple terms, they wanted to make sure they were doing the right things for the right reasons, and that they were policing their communities with the proper procedures. There were many things they could do to be more transparent. When they looked at the numbers, they could tell CNA they needed to come back three more times, and the City would have to pay for that. CNA said from the beginning that they would do ‘X’ number of visits. That was what they did. So, he didn’t think they would get additional visits without a cost. Ms. Fielding asked if it was just the one more visit left with the youth. Chief Reynolds said that was correct. They would then do a lot of data analysis, do things by phone, and work with the PD on the data that it had. Ms. Fielding asked if they had thought about partnering with the school district and have CNA do some sort of brainstorming session during an assembly program at a school. They could hit all the high schools. Chief Reynolds said that he said in the beginning, before they every awarded the contract, that the most important part would be the community engagement and that it be transparent, and people felt like they had input. If he was hearing that people felt like they didn’t have input, they would have to address that somehow. He didn’t know how based on the fact that he didn’t know what more they could have done to better announce it or better talk to people with the finite money they had and the timeframe. Reverend Middleton said that he was thinking as a trained researcher, that 250 people wouldn’t cut it. Chief Reynolds said that he didn’t think that CNA was looking at scientific data with regards to objective and subjective interviews of people. He didn’t think there was anything scientific about the officers they interviewed, other than making sure that everyone was represented. Reverend Middleton said they were collecting data. Data could be quantitative or qualitative. Even in qualitative research, such as 4 interviews, they were fielding participants through questions, experiences, and gaining information for something, even if it seemed informal. They were collecting data and categorizing so that they could present an analysis. Even with the Illumination Project in the early days, they didn’t have anybody attend. So, they had to figure out other ways to engage their own community. They were only supposed to do twelve listening sessions, and ended up doing 34. There may have been some more work that needed to be done. He didn’t think it was a lack of advertising. If they were paying this company a certain amount of dollars, that should be part of their strategy, to get people to attend, rather than depending on another organization to bring people. Mr. Shields said he would like to read the contract. He felt like they needed to go to the people, and at this point, they were asking people to come to them. He thought that reaching out to the school district was a good idea. He wanted to see what CNA’s obligations were as far as getting people or going to find people to participate. They may need to do something to supplement their effort, whether it be through the Police Department or the Advisory Council, but they couldn’t really do that until they knew a little more about what was expected from CNA. Mr. Milliken said that his concern, as a youth, wasn’t necessarily the size of the sample, but how it was taken. He asked for an elaboration on that. After that, they could worry about the size of the sample. He was under the impression that it wasn’t random and that people went to a meeting location to have it done. He asked who determined who got to those meetings. There were certain conditions in statistics for math to be evaluated and one was if the sample was random. In his opinion, this sample wasn’t random if there was bias within who was going to the meetings. Chief Reynolds said he didn’t quite understand. They were mentioning numbers and samples. There would be a data analysis that would be scientific with the Police Department’s data. These were community meetings to hear from people regarding their experiences with police. CNA did their best, and he wasn’t saying it was enough, but he was confused about the questions. The community meetings weren’t quantitative or science-related. It was not intended to be and that wasn’t the purpose. Mr. Milliken said that the smaller the sample size was, the larger the margin of error will be as far as matching a pre-existing average. He was concerned a little bit about the 250, because that was a large margin of error, but he was very concerned about whether it was random. Reverend Middleton said it wasn’t random. CAJM had brought a lot of the people. Mr. Milliken said that someone brought up knowing the full scope and the money spent. He thought an audit was worth any amount of money that the City had to allocate towards. Chief Reynolds said that they had started talking about the scope and someone mentioned they didn’t know about this until recently. Individuals said they had an interest in looking at a contract. Those were all good questions. He would suggest having a special meeting, just on the CNA audit, and everyone could be provided advanced documents and answers to their questions, and they could also get the audit company on the phone to answer all their questions. The last thing he wanted to do was wait until the report came out and then talk about how much of a failure it was. This was a huge opportunity for the Police Department and he was confident it would end in a big positive for the department and the City. For the Advisory Council to have such big questions, it concerned him. He didn’t think they would resolve it that night, but they needed to have a satisfactory conversation. Ms. Fielding asked what the potential agenda was for the June 20th meeting. Reverend Middleton said he didn’t know. They usually sent it out before the meeting. Ms. Fielding said they might need to put it on the agenda for the next meeting, because they couldn’t keep intelligently discussing the audit with so much data missing. She wanted to propose that they could use the June 20th meeting for the audit. Mr. Shields said he wasn’t sure when they were wrapping up. Ms. Fielding asked if the Tuesday session was already set or if there was any flexibility in moving it to ensure that they got advertisement out for youth 5 to be in attendance. Lieutenant Bruder said it was his understanding that they were flying in and drivingin and it was set. Ms. Fielding asked how it was advertised for youth because Mr. Milliken was on the Mayor’s Youth Council and didn’t know about it. Lieutenant Bruder said that he put CNA in contact with the Mayor’s Office for Youth. He didn’t know what group they were meeting with. Ms. Fielding said the concern was they didn’t know if there would be youth there. Mr. Shields said that in CNA’s minds, they’ve already spent the money. So, they needed to sort it out. Chief Reynolds said he didn’t think they should wait until the June 20th meeting. They could dig in the next week to try to get maximum participation from youth. He thanked everyone for being at the community meetings. CNA was happy with the total of 250. At one of the community meetings, there was a writer for the City paper who sent out on social media that the police were at the community meetings. That confused them, because they had gone to great lengths to ensure that didn’t happen. He called and found out that the van was being driven around to pick people up and drop them off. Someone saw the van dropping them off, and thought the police were there. They had specifically tried to distance themselves. They weren’t trying to control what was happening. CNA wasn’t from here and they wouldn’t be able to get a good group of people like people who were raised here and had been here for so long. He would call CNA after the meeting to see what other opportunities they had. They could get CNA back. Reverend Middleton asked what message the community was giving by not participating. Ms. Fielding said that was simple. They didn’t trust and the community felt like this was another exercise that was being done to make things look right. It was a trust issue. Lieutenant Bruder said they should notice what most of the bullet points from CNA were about. They were about lack of community engagement or the Police Department’s effectiveness at having community engagement. Mr. Shields asked who was working on this from the Mayor’s Office. Chief Reynolds said it was Rick Jerue. Mr. Shields said that office, at some point, had the same responsibility that the Advisory Council had. Additionally, he was still wondering why the business community hadn’t been approached. They had the same concerns that citizens had. Chief Reynolds said that to the credit of the Mayor’s Office, they had supported the audit, but they weren’t micro-managing. Whatever they needed from the Mayor’s Office, they would get it. He asked if there was apathy or an intentional distrust and that was a good point and a healthy question to ask. They needed to be asking that, as it was the core of the whole audit. He didn’t know the answers to those questions. They needed to do their best though, and if they weren’t doing their best, they needed to correct their course and make sure that, at the end, they could say they did their best. Reverend Middleton said that he thought the community was on a ‘see-saw of skepticism’, and four times may not be enough. If someone was just watching to see how invested they were to get that person to participate and there was only one week to meet, they may not understand that. Chief Reynolds said he was confident that they could get CNA to do an additional visit. Ms. Outen said she thought people were busy. She thought that it was interesting that someone at her meeting talked about the policies and asked where they were. She had said they were on the website. They just kept talking about the same things over and over with different people and it was frustrating. She didn’t know how they could have gotten it out more. Ms. Fielding asked what the percentage was, when surveys were mailed out, of getting responses back. Ms. Whitaker said that if she were to guess, she would think it would be low. Mr. Lysaught said that from a marketing standpoint, for every 50,000 letters that were sent out, they could expect the return of 2%. The Police Department had a responsibility, as they had taken an oath and made a commitment. They were doing their jobs, and now they wanted to make it better. That could be achieved. 250 was not a bad number. 6 Chief Reynolds said that he would set the meeting up and they would get information to the Advisory Council. He thought that CNA would be better equipped to answer their questions. His macro goal remained that when they finished the process, that they would be better as an organization. There were a lot of things that had changed already including policies and training. They would continue to build that into what he thought would be a five-year plan. At the end of the day, he was less concerned about what they were concerned about, but more about the communities trust, transparency, and engagement increased. If they didn’t accomplish that, they had failed and lost a big opportunity. He was hearing that there were still a lot of questions and a lack of confidence in where they were if the visits were close to completed. They needed to fix that and he didn’t think it would be hard to adequately answer their questions. Asking those questions was one of the biggest roles of the Advisory Council. He didn’t want a bunch of ‘bobble-heads’. He found their questions to be of great value and he was okay with critical thinking, criticism, and thought-provoking discussion. If everyone agreed, they probably didn’t need to be there. Ms. Fielding asked about the 13th-17th. Mr. Shields said he wouldn’t be able to make that date, but he could read through everything and send an email. Mr. Shields asked about the 9th. Multiple people said they could meet that date. Ms. Whitaker said they would have to have an agenda posted. Mr. Shields said it could be a special meeting. Chief Reynolds said he apologized, as they should have established everything way sooner. There was unanimous approval of the audit from Council and the Mayor. He said that because that was rare. Everyone wanted the Police Department to get better. Mr. Ruemelin said that the guidelines said that meetings would be schedule a month in advance, so they would have to make a motion to call a special meeting. Lieutenant Bruder said that he could set up a conference bridge, so that people could phone in. He would email everyone the information. On the motion of Mr. Shields, seconded by Mr. Lysaught, the Citizen’s Police Advisory Council voted unanimously to have a special meeting at May 9th, 2019 to discuss the CNA audit.  Nathaniel Rhodes Updates – Chief Reynolds Chief Reynolds said they had a very thorough discussion on this last time. He didn’t have anything new to add other than the Attorney General had just issued a letter of declination. That meant they had looked at it. SLED did an investigation into the incident and completed it and forwarded it to the Attorney General. The letter had just been issued in the last day or so, that they would not prosecute or charge criminally the officer for what happened in the event. The next steps would be getting the SLED report and it would be incorporated into their own administrative investigation, which was near complete. At that point, they could publically make a statement about the findings in the investigation and the outcome of the case. There continued to be a civil side of the case, which he couldn’t talk about in detail. Mr. Shields said they didn’t need to wait for the meeting and asked if they could get emailed with updates. They were clearly concerned about this issue at the last meeting and it identified an issue that was part of something they were there to do. If something didn’t happen, that was different. Chief Reynolds said that if they ever had an event of that magnitude, they were discussing how they could notify the Advisory Council. They were talking about how to improve communications in a variety of ways and the Advisory Council needed to be among those. New Business Chief Reynolds said that day they had a press conference with Solicitor Scarlett Wilson. The area Police Chiefs and Sheriffs were there, himself included. The Police Chief in charge of SLED was there. The Solicitor over the last two years had been working on a draft and she announced that day that there was an officer involved critical incident protocol that had been developed and would be released publically. 7 They were discussing, when a critical incident occurred, who the primary investigator would be. The community around the country had demanded that there be some objectivity in those types of investigations. So, the solicitor set up that she would be the one to rule on those and get the case and decided if there would be criminal charges. No matter what happened, people would be unhappy. The solicitor had said they needed to get it right. She had sent out a draft and it probably wasn’t much different than how they were already doing their investigations. Essentially, she had helped coordinate the writing of a protocol in who would handle a crime scene, who would do interviews, who would handle public information release, who would talk to families, etc. Now, there would be a brochure that would go out to the family and it would be an ongoing process. Essentially, if something happened the next day, and they were available, and could get somewhere quickly, SLED would handle those major events. If they were not available, and maybe at another major event, then they were beginning to determine who would do the crime scene so they could be expeditious about it and so they didn’t lose evidence. They were working through all that, but the point was that there would be a quality investigation and that there be consistency in how evidence was handled. This was a big, positive step in the right direction. They would see more about that. Mr. Shields said thank you and that they were big fans of the police department, so they didn’t want to get blindside because that was where they would start to fumble. This was all working towards building trust. Commissioner Updates in Districts and Concerns Ms. Fielding said that in the Team 1 area, they had a Know Your Rights session at Morris Street Baptist Church where Lieutenant Corey Taylor and Sergeant Chris Stinson were present and representing the Police Department. She thanked them for their representation. Captain Foster was there from North Charleston. Attorney Ed Brown was the moderator and Judge McFarlane was the judge that sat on the panel. Dot Scott, NAACP, was on the panel. It was a good discussion. They had about 65 people present. It ran over and they were looking at having another session. They were also looking at doing a similar session at the Charleston County Missionary Baptist Association as a result of what happened. She did notice that there were no brochures that the Police could hand out to tell people their rights. It would be nice to have a little pamphlet regarding knowing your rights and who the teams leads were. There was a question asked about training, looking at cultural diversity training for the officers, and they wanted to know how many hours of training the officers received. The response was given that it was forty hours per year, but that may have just been one type of training. If it was only forty hours, she was sure that was something being looked at, while they were doing restructuring, to help better educate officers and help with trust in the community. Chief Reynolds said that on the back of discussion about continued outreach and education, he had just talked to Lieutenant Taylor. He as in Columbia for training. They talked about the event and how positive it was. He was big on community outreach, and he used that as an example of how basic the communication gaps were. One of the things that had come up was people asking if they needed to stop for the Police. Of course, the answer was yes. Lieutenant Taylor had said it was a great event, but they needed to do a lot more. People wanted them to do those types of events. He asked Lieutenant Murray if they had a brochure and she said she would have to check. They did have something like that at some point. They were having a Policing 101 for youth on June 24th. They could work on getting a brochure. Chief Reynolds said that if they didn’t already have one, he knew of a department that did. Lieutenant Murray said that they would probably do several more of the sessions like they were having on June 24th. They also had the Citizen’s Academy, and graduation was May 22nd. If they hadn’t gone to Citizen’s Academy, the next one would be starting October 3rd. Camp Hope started June 10th, and would end July 18th. They were excited about that. When they talked about communication, she hoped 8 everyone was following her on Nextdoor, and other social media outlets. Jessica Watkins was leaving to go to Blackbaud. Her last day would be the 10th. Chief Reynolds said that as much as that hurt, it was a big compliment to lose employees to the FBI, ATF, NCIS, and other large organizations. It was a positive reflection on their agency. Mr. Lysaught referred to Team 4 in Shadowmoss. They probably weren’t aware of the good compliments they were getting. He had been in that area for a long time, and everyone was saying what a good job the Police Department was doing at the neighborhood events. He said there was a lot on the Police Department and more people needed to realize that. More people needed to experience the basic training and learn the First Amendment. He thought the CNA stuff was good, but it may take five years to incorporate all of that. They needed to break major categories, like communication, and break it into groups. He thought CPD wasn’t managing resources trying to meet the demands of what everyone wanted. He didn’t want to see CPD lose people, because he knew how much training they went through. Charleston Police Department- Information/Updates  Special Departmental Projects Updates – Deputy Chief Broughton Deputy Chief Broughton said that talking about renovations and updates weren’t important so they could move on. Mr. Shields said he would like to hear about it. Deputy Chief Broughton said that the room they were in was going to getting updated and renovated. It would be more pleasing and professional and have an auditorium type style. They hoped to get it out on bid in the next two months. Chief Reynolds stated that Deputy Chief Broughton oversaw many projects. She was the incident commander for the bridge run and was also the incident commander for the upcoming USGA Women’s Open championship. Mr. Shields said they should think about the big events that happened in Charleston, as they would be great opportunities to get the word out. The Chief Speaks – Information/Updates Chief Reynolds stated that sometime in the very near future they would make changes in the Command. They were giving everyone an opportunity to give choices about where they wanted to go. Some people had been in places for a long time. He would make one Captain promotion, two Lieutenants, and a Sergeant. The Advisory Council needed to know that. Their teams could be impacted by that, so they would get that out when it happened. He didn’t make changes lightly, but it was necessary. They had put a lot of focus on recruiting and hiring and the good news was that the retention had increased. They were working on a variety of things on the training side, with the State, and there was more to be done there. At one point, they were about 40 under complement, and now they were around 18 or 19, with a lot of people in the pipe. A lot of people wanted to come to Charleston, which was a good thing. The City was only increasing and they needed to be focused and effective in using what they had. They couldn’t make everyone happy all the time, but the CNA audit was a good opportunity to increase the bond with the community. If they didn’t do that, they were missing a great opportunity. Lieutenant Bruder would get the contract, the notes from CNA up to this point, with an invite to a location and time for the meeting which was May 9th. They wanted a representative from the Mayor’s Office, and CNA representatives. Ms. Fielding said they could talk at the next meeting about expanding the time to 7:30 for future meetings, so that they respected people’s schedules. Mr. Shields said they could also talk about communicating to all members and find out where they were and if they didn’t have time to come to the meetings anymore. Chief Reynolds said a reminder to other members would be good. 9 Having no further business, the Citizen’s Police Advisory Council adjourned at 7:34 p.m. Bethany Whitaker Council Secretary 10