Public Safety Committee

PUBLIC SAFETY COMMITTEE September 29, 2016 A meeting of the Public Safety Committee was held this date at 4:30 p.m., at City Hall, First Floor Conference Room, 80 Broad Street. Notice of this meeting was sent to all local news media. PRESENT Councilmember Kathleen Wilson, Chair, Councilmember A. Peter Shahid Jr., and Councilmember James Lewis, Jr.STAFF: Chief Karen Brack, Charleston Fire Department, Chief Julazadeh, Charleston Fire Department, Chief Greg Mullen, Police Department, Mark Wilbert, Emergency Management Director, and Marcia Grant, Council Secretary The meeting was opened with a moment of silence by Chairwoman Wilson. Approval of Minutes The minutes of the March 3rd, 2016 meeting were deferred. On the motion of Councilmember Shahid, seconded by Councilmember Lewis, the Committee voted unanimously to approve the June 14th, 2016 minutes. Updates: Fire Department- Chief Karen Brack Chief Brack stated that she wanted to give a brief overview of things that were going on in the department. She asked Chief Julazadeh to come with her that day to do an overview that his division had been working on for a year. She thought they were great programs to brief the Committee on. One was business orientated process improvement that they had been working on. The next one was an initiative to inspect all vent hoods in the peninsula area and restaurants as a fire prevention effort. That was one of the greatest risks that they had at that point, especially for exposures that may be subjected from a fire traveling through the vents. She wanted the Committee to be able to understand all of the things that went on in his division. They had their recruitment hiring process under way at that point. They started back in late August and had 243 applications for the position. They were currently down to 41 people, because they had gone through some of the most difficult weeding out applications. They had done a written test and a physical agility test, but still had an interview process, background process, medical/physical, and a psychology test to do. Their best hope was that by the time they were done they would have 25-32 recruits for the February class the next year. They were looking forward to that. Station 14 had gone through the precon and there had been silt fencing put up in Carolina Bay. They should see some movement on that station. They had a community meeting the previous week on Station 11 to get some community input and had quite a few residents of the Pebble Road area in attendance. They received great feedback from them on what they would like to see and some of their expectations. They had been working with a group called the AED Alliance. That was a group that worked to identify where all of the AED’s were in the City. They had been talking about doing some initiatives for hands- only CPR. They had an event at Tanger Mall a few months previously with all of the local Fire Departments and EMS. They would have another large event slated for October at the fair where all of the local Fire Departments and EMS would be to teach people the hands-free CPR. The general standard was that the sooner you got somebody starting CPR, the greater the chances for survival. Because you would be eliminating the respiratory portion, more people would be willing to do it. Basic CPR worked better than anything else for cardiac arrest. It was an exciting initiative. Councilmember Lewis asked if they had been able to work on another rapid response unit for West Ashley and Chief Brack said that was coming in the 2017 budget. They had that one unit that was running a 12 hour shift and were running about 12 calls per day. When they had the fire on Rutledge Avenue and were down fire crews, they picked up all of the calls on the peninsula. That was what they were intended to do. Most of the guys loved being on it. They felt like they were getting a lot of community interaction. That was the model they would be looking at in the future, rather than big trucks. They could typically get to the calls faster. Councilmember Shahid asked what the cause of the fire was on Rutledge Avenue and Chief Julazadeh said they were still working on it. The area of origin was on the third floor which was a utility room. They may not be able to get to a specific cause. Councilmember Shahid said it was definitely not arson then. Chief Julazadeh said they had no reason to believe that was the cause. The caretaker was there at the time. Chief Julazadeh said that he wanted to speak briefly about two of their programs with one being their permitting process. The Fire Marshal’s office was involved in the safety inspection aspect. That would start at construction. They were very concerned with the fire plan review and making sure that they got as much done on the front end as they could. They continued to try and adjust as much as possible with contractors. Between 2013 and 2015 the base turnaround advertised time was 20 business days on initial submittal and 10 business days with re-submittal. They had not been able to achieve that. If they couldn’t hit that threshold 95% of the time they would have a problem and would need to adjust the process. They had adjusted staff hours, but unfortunately that has come with the cost of routing people to different sections. The last overhaul they performed happened at the beginning of 2016 and that was when they released the current document that outlined the new planning. They were essentially triaging the plans and assigning times based on the intensity of the review, the size of the review, and the type of plan. With those changes, they were able to get their first quarter of 2016 compliance up to 95% on initial review, and 90% on revised review. In the second quarter they had dropped off a bit, as they had noticed an uptick of submittals. They were doing better, but had revised the process as much as they could without sacrificing quality. This was where they were, unless they decided to increase the turnaround time. He wanted to give a quick update while making sure that they looked at the performance turnaround. Councilmember Shahid asked if they were doing the breakdown on type of building and Chief Julazadeh said yes and that most of their work was outside of single family dwellings. They currently were not involved with single family dwellings but were involved with multi-family dwellings like apartments. The square footage indicator could make things more complex. Councilmember Shahid asked if they were making a distinction and if they were involved. Chief Julazadeh said that they were. Councilmember Shahid asked if they were making a distinction between commercial and other types of buildings. Chief Julazadeh stated that those did change a little bit but often it was more about the occupancy types. The complexity of it was typically driven by the size of the development. Chief Julazadeh stated that the next thing he wanted to talk about was the program that Chief Brack had mentioned. He handed out a few photos. The photos were the interior of a building. The top left photo was a horizontal duct. The material they saw was grease that was not properly cleaned. On the right was a picture of fusible ink that detects a fire in the system and sets off fire protection. It was corroded and possibly not even functioning. Those photos were from Sticky Fingers downtown and this was discovered by the inspector 3 days after they had their system cleaned. That, in addition to other issues at restaurants drove them to look at how they could better regulate cleaning. Hood cleaning vendors were currently unregulated by the State. There was one group of contractors that had no license. The restaurants were getting shorted. The Sticky Finger’s case was extreme, but they had the same vendor for years that just didn’t do the job. They spent over $32,000 to end up replacing duct work. That was a prime example of if they had a fire in that location, it would be detrimental to the entire block because the duct work makes multiple turns. It was supposed to be cleaned down to the bare minimum but that didn’t happen. That was nothing but fuel if they got a fire in the duct system. The change in the 2015 Code gave them more teeth to regulate quickly. It specifically talked about the ability to local jurisdictions to determine who was qualified to do this kind of work and it gave them the ability to dictate what the vendor had to know and understand and to what standard they work. They met with all of the vendors, the Restaurant Association, and folks that had suffered these incidents to push forward with code. They got everyone on board and they understood. July 1st, 2016 was the adoption of the code and they did a soft roll-out with all of the vendors. They had 14/18 that they had identified and had signed up for the program. They were going through a qualification process and they were working with the restaurants to let them know which vendors had been qualified to do this sort of work. Full enforcement was anticipated by January 1st of 2017. They were using some of the things that were currently in place to better regulate the hazard. Councilmember Shahid asked about DHEC and if they weighed in on this and Chief Julazadeh said that their biggest concern was at the actual hood opening and the equipment that was under it. They were looking at how clean the hood was and if that’s done, they usually wouldn’t go any further. Chief Brack stated that this was a hidden danger that they had and Chief Julazadeh and his crew had worked hard on the outreach piece. That had become the most important part of this. They were going into the businesses, and talking to the owners about the danger this was and what the potential was. They were also reaching out to the vendors. This impacted the business on both sides. The feedback had been very good and they understood the issue. They had worked hard to make sure that they understood the danger and what potential damage could occur if they didn’t deal with this. This had been a very successful program due to the outreach. Chief Julazadeh said that their hope was to do fire safety inspections in more locations. They wanted to be able to do that throughout the City, so they had one person who was assigned right now to do the program. It was a slow process, but they would love to do it once a year. Right now, they were looking at 24-30 month process to get through it all. Councilmember Shahid asked if there was a way to put the burden on the restaurant owners to send them reports of those things. Chief Julazadeh said yes and that part of the program was that they worked with GIS to try and reduce some of the paperwork burden. The restaurant’s responsibility by code was to hire a qualified vendor after July 1st, 2016. The qualified vendor’s responsibility was to submit the report to them through the GIS pool that was created. They received notification anytime a report was submitted. The red dots were recorded by the vendor as being non-compliant and those were the ones they went immediately after to take some action to get it corrected. It had been a good system so far and reduced a lot of administrative load. Chairwoman Wilson asked if this was an annual inspection and Chief Julazadeh said that it depended on the type of cooking they do. Some restaurants were required to have a monthly hood inspection, like with oriental restaurants that produced a lot of grease. Sticky Fingers was on a 4-6 month rotation, but it should’ve been more like 3 months. Councilmember Lewis asked how often they inspected restaurants that had upstairs and Chief Julazadeh said that right now they were lucky if they got to them once every 1-3 years. They would like to reduce that cycle. Councilmember Shahid asked what other dangers restaurants dealt with and Chief Julazadeh said that one of the biggest issues was tied to the restaurants and the nightclub facilities. One was if they were being cautious about bringing people in and bringing people out. Emergency planning had been beefed up a lot, especially with the late night entertainment ordinance. They had been more aggressive. As part of this program, as the inspector made his lap, he was asking for proof that they had been trained. They had to make sure that the places had a plan to get people out. Councilmember Lewis said that was a good answer and that was his concern, especially with the upstairs restaurants. Chief Brack stated that Chief Julazadeh had come in 2010 and from then on, he and his group had done a remarkable job keeping a handle on the inspection in the City and how they should move forward with issues such as that. She thought it was important to hear from him about the initiatives they were involved in because they were so important to stopping the fires. They were doing a spectacular job. Police Department- Chief Greg Mullen Chief Mullen stated that he appreciated the opportunity to update them on exciting things they were doing in the Police Department. They were notified that week that they had received a combination of grants from the Department of Public Safety, as well as Federal Grants that would allow them to add another advocate to their Family Violence Unit. That was started about two years ago, and they now had a mental health clinician, two adult victim advocates, and a child advocate. Adding an Elder Advocate would round out the team and would be important as they saw the population of the City grow. They also received a grant in partnership with the Mayor’s Office of Aging that would allow them to hire a program coordinator to work with the Elder Program Manager there. They would do outreach and work with the officers more in identifying and preventing elder abuse. They also would allow them to purchase additional forensic equipment that would help them in the collection and processing of DNA, specifically during domestic violence, sexual assaults, and other types of family violence. It was a combination of over $400,000 that they received. This would help them take another step in the process of providing services to the vulnerable after they became victims of crime. They were very excited about that. Hopefully, they would continue to add to that, and what they would really like was to get another investigator that was dedicated to that unit. They also wanted to get an embedded DSS representative as well, because they saw a lot of that with the family issues, and that was a place they saw a gap. That unit was working well and making a lot of progress. The second thing that was going well was the Narcan Program. A few months ago they said they were implementing this. It was a drug that was able to counteract overdose symptoms from opioids. They had approximately 90 officers and supervisors that were trained. They had their second save that week. That program had made a huge difference and they were adding additional officers to that. Hopefully within the next three months they would have another 40 or 50 officers with the Narcan. Eventually, they might have all of the officers trained. It was just a matter of funding. 75 dosage units was around $3700. They were working to make sure they had adequate funding to maintain what they had, and have extra dosage available. Once it was used, it went back to a local pharmacy and they were able to replenish it. That was becoming more important as they saw opioid overdoses and addiction rising. It was becoming more prevalent than cocaine, marijuana, and heroin combined, because it was coming from medicine cabinets. A young person could get it, start using it, and before they knew it they would be addicted and getting heroin off the streets, because they couldn’t get prescription drugs. They were seeing that heroin was mixed with more powerful drugs, which was causing many of the overdoses that they were seeing. It was an epidemic that was happening across the country. They were not anywhere near where the northeast was, but they were starting to see the growth. They were working with the DEA and other partners to make sure that they had enforcement and prevention. There was going to be an initiative on October 22, 2016 that they would be working with the DEA on to get access to drugs that people had in their homes. They were working on strategies pertaining to the Illumination Project. The first was that they wanted to create official liaison officers for a number of different communities within the City. They already had liaison officers with the NAACP and the National Action Network. They had been working with them for years and were now adding liaison officers to the LGBT community, the Islamic community, the Hispanic community, the colleges/universities, and the military. They would have official liaison officers within the department that would be working with those communities that were making sure the department was understanding their needs, and having them more involved with what was happening in the department. They had also started the Youth Council and had met the previous week with the young folks from the Mayor’s Council, which seemed to be a good starting point for them. That went well, and they had gotten great ideas from the Council. They had agreed to become part of the Youth Council. That helped them get started. They also started a review of current practices, and were looking at the foundational pieces of that. There was a lot of technology, in terms of what they had in place. They were also looking at some of the reporting requirements that they had at State level to make sure they were on a clear foundation. They were also looking at the process for the Citizen Advisory Council. They had a number of people who had volunteered for the process, and they were hopefully going to have an opportunity to provide additional names for that in the next 30-45 days. There had been departments that had requested Collaborative Reform. That was a program where the department may have issues or concerns and they would ask for a collaborative reform process to come in and review what they were doing and then give recommendations to the department on what they could improve on. They had gone to those reports that had been prepared and reviewed the reports. They had compared them to what they were currently doing and he was pleased to say that the vast majority of recommendations that had been provided, they were already compliant with in the Police Department. They had groups of officers in the department that were looking at how to additionally improve and implement more of the recommendations. They were looking at what other departments were learning through their reviews and using that to help them improve. It was important for them to utilize information that other departments had recognized. They had gotten requests from local media about vacancy levels and he wanted to make sure the Public Safety Committee was up to speed on that before it came out elsewhere. They had 18 vacancies and were in a hiring process for November 7th and were hoping to hire 12 people then. They would then have another recruitment process start at the Academy in January. They were hoping to fill all of the vacancies by the beginning of the year. He understood that what they were seeing right then was officers leaving Law Enforcement completely. They were seeing that across the board. They were seeing the officers leaving completely or going to Federal Agencies. There was no way that any State or local agency that could compete with the Federal Agency as far as pay, schedule, and stress. They were getting many applications and qualified people, but it was a matter of getting them through the process and assigned to an Academy. He was in Virginia Beach for 20 years and they were only fully staffed for seven days during that period. He was not under false belief that they would become completely staffed at any one time, but they were working hard on that. They were going to create a Community Council to make sure they were addressing diversity and increase that in the Police Department. That was hard to overcome, especially in the black community, because there was not a positive encouragement for officers to come from those communities. They wanted to change that and have influence about that type of diversity. He and Chairwoman Wilson had talked about the article that was recently in the Post and Courier about field contacts. He wanted the Committee to have a better understanding on that topic. This was not a program, where they tell officers to go out and fill out forms to create a massive database. It was a large database and it was a module in their records management system. It had been around for decades in terms of policing. It gave a police officer the opportunity that when they have contact with an individual, they can document that contact. That was important because so many times people want to criticize or make allegations about an officer and what they did during an account. The contact card allowed the officer to document what occurred during that contact, so that if someone came in and made an allegation they could go back and look at it. Many of the contacts involved things such as areas that may be involved with drugs, or if an officer went to a house for an alarm going off and there was a car that didn’t belong there, it would go on the contact card. The cards gave them a place to start with investigations. They helped with leads, where a person may be moving throughout the city, or what the associations were between individuals. Many of these things were just observations and not necessarily direct interactions. The module was used for many different things for investigative purposes. It was used for supporting officers as well as what they were doing overall in the department as far as preventing crime and identifying those who were engaged in crimes. There had not been a retention period for contact cards, and departments across the country had started to look at that. They had started to look at how technologically they could look at information that may not need to be maintained. They were looking at the types of events that they could look at differently. They had talked to their vendor that managed the record management system and there wasn’t a capability in the system at that time to purge cards, because it had never been asked for. Because the information went into different modules, if they deleted one card, it would then delete all references to that person. Chairwoman Wilson asked if there was a strange car in her driveway if there would a contact for her particular address and a contact for that car. Chief Mullen said yes. Chairwoman Wilson said that they could delete her address, but the other card would still be there. Chief Mullen said yes and said that for example if they wanted to remove a contact from a certain location, it would then remove that person’s contact from all other crimes as well. They were talking to the vendor, and they wanted to make sure that they could do that in a way that wouldn’t jeopardize other information in the modules and they needed to see what it would cost to add that capability. Any time someone dealt with a piece of technology and making additions, it would cost. They were also asking other departments if they had thought about it, because if they had enough departments who were using the system to talk to the vendor, it would be more advantageous for them to make the change. They would bring in other people to talk about it and in the coming months would hopefully have information. He didn’t want anyone to think that they were a mini NSA. They didn’t have the capability to track people around to see where they go. It was no benefit for them to do that. It was good for investigations. He understood what they were saying, but it was not their purpose to track individuals. He wanted the Committee to know that they were reviewing what they had, and talking to the vendor to hopefully make the process better. Chairwoman Wilson said that it seemed to her that most of the contacts were of the neutral-unpleasant variety. Officers wouldn’t take record of a pleasant contact. Chief Mullen said a contact card would be created if the officer had a reason to believe that one could come back and question what they did, or if there was a crime. They asked the officers to be in areas where crimes were being committed, and if they saw activity that could be related to crime, or someone they knew was involved in criminal activity, they make a contact card. People make allegations against anything. They had an officer who picked up a young lady who was walking down the road, and he did a contact card because if she came back and made an allegation he wanted to have documentation. Chairwoman Wilson asked if body and dashboard cams helped to negate some of that. Chief Mullen said that they could, but with the body cam, if it wasn’t an event that turned into a criminal act, it was deleted after 14 days. Chairwoman Wilson said this was just another form of that. Chief Mullen said yes and that this process had been used for decades. It was much easier years ago, because people filled out paper and it went in a box. Because of technology, you can put it in a system. Some departments may have the ability to automate that, but their officers had to go in and look at each one. It was a pointer system; because they wanted to make sure they had leads to start on for investigations. That was one of the ways they did that. There was discussion on how the department had contacts, but no one was charged or arrested. If they arrested or charged someone, they did an office report, so it was an entirely different form of documentation if someone was charged or arrested. Councilmember Lewis asked if this was related to the Illumination Project and Chief Mullen said yes. Councilmember Lewis said there was young man who had been killed and there needed to be people in those neighborhoods. He had noticed that at City Hall there were security guards there and that the lights were off in the hallway. He asked if they were keeping security guards in the building. Chief Mullen said that they could look at doing a hybrid. They want to make sure there was a consistent presence and the officers that were assigned were out of the building more than in the building. They need to make sure there was a constant presence in the building. Other governments were using the security forces to provide a constant presence and augmenting that during specific time periods with officers. They would continue to have officers for Council Meetings but during normal business hours they may have more security officers. As they went around and did the security assessments, they could not put police officers at all of the buildings, because they had to have the officers on the street. They had a new contract that was going to be put out that would have specific requirements for people who would work in city facilities. He didn’t think they would ever be in a position where they didn’t have officers at Council meetings, but they would use more security forces. That was a practice that was happening around the country. The numbers of security officers were outpacing the number of police officers. There would be a combination. Councilmember Shahid said that his main concern was how the procession of the contact cards would come into play with the Illumination Project. The push was to have contact with citizens, but the backlash was that it could dilute what they were trying to accomplish on the other side. The procession was something they would have to deal with. The response to the public needed to be clear as to what they were doing. Chief Mullen had said a few things that he was not aware of. In dealing with the vendor, cataloging the contacts would address the issues such as retention. He thought that if there was a way to pigeon-hole the contact cards better from the system they were using now, that would help out tremendously. It was also the education factor with the public, because information that they had was important. The citizen’s perspective, they were seeing the police department as ‘big brother’ which was what they didn’t need to see. They needed to communicate this better and talk to the vendor to get rid of these things. It seemed that there had to be a way to take the information and fielding it in a better way. Chief Mullen said that the dilemma they had was that one day people were saying they didn’t want the police in the community, and then a month later they were asking why they weren’t there. The officers didn’t know what to do because they were being criticized for being pro-active and then they get criticized for not being pro-active when they back off. There was an easy way to reduce the number which was to not document the encounters, but that wasn’t what they wanted to do either. There were certainly things that they could take out and manage, but at the same time, he didn’t want to tell an officer to not document a contact. They were getting questions because of the level of documentation. As a result of that, they were criticized for having too much documentation. It was a dilemma and one they needed to constantly look at. They were going to continue to do that to protect their officers and the public. He felt confident that they would come up with a way to continue the Illumination Project to ensure public safety, while also guaranteeing individual rights. Chairwoman Wilson said that they would see changes in technology now that this was public. She would need to leave soon. Emergency Management- Mark Wilbert, Director Mark Wilbert said that they had an ongoing team that was going throughout the City. It was a good team effort and it was great to partner with all of the different departments. They had started with awareness training. There were two sessions and they were in the process of doing security assessments. They were still in that process and would have the first recreation building the following day. They were working on developing emergency action plans, which should have been done years prior. The City had a number of tropical storms come their way, and the City had done a great job. Public information had jumped out and Mayor Tecklenburg had been very engaged with how well the City was prepared. He would leave the rest for the next time. Having no further business, the meeting adjourned at 5:50 p.m. Bethany Whitaker Council Secretary