Public Safety Committee

PUBLIC SAFETY COMMITTEE April 27, 2020 An meeting of the Public Safety Committee was held this date beginning at 2:00 p.m., by video conference. Notice of this meeting was sent to all local news media. PRESENT Councilmember Shahid, Chair, Councilmember Seekings, Councilmember Sakran, Councilmember Shealy and Mayor Tecklenburg Staff: Jennifer Cook, Lakesiya Cofield, Lieutenant Bruder, Wendy Stiver, Lieutenant Cretella, Chief Reynolds, Susan Herdina, Chief Curia, Dan Riccio Also Present: Councilwoman Delcioppo The meeting was opened with an invocation provided by Councilmember Brady. Update from Court Administration on the status of pending cases set for jury trials, including DUI Ms. Cofield said that since the pandemic had happened, they only had the probable cause determination hearings. Those were the video pleas for the defendants who were currently in jail. They were still open to the public, but they were only accepting payments, in addition to documents that needed to be filed with the court. There was an option to pay online, however they still had some citizens that came in to make their payments in person. They were continuing to follow through on Chief Justice Batey’s order. There were no jury trials. During the video pleas, the prosecutors and judges did go over dockets that would have been heard on those particular days, but they didn’t currently have any jury trials going on or jurors presently coming to the court. Even with the reduced staff they had, they were still able to do the minimum duties that were required of them. Chairman Shahid asked if they were all being done by video conference and Ms. Cofield said that was correct. The only individuals in the court room were the judge, prosecutor, and the clerk. The defendant was in jail. Chairman Shahid asked about the defense lawyer and Ms. Cofield said they could be present as well, if they had an attorney. Chairman Shahid stated that the Chief Justice had issued some very specific guidelines on how court cases could be handled. The courts were trying to restrict having just a barebones minimum cases being involved, and they were just trying to handle detention cases right now. He asked if they had an update on where they stood with pending cases and jury trials, including DUI’s. Ms. Cofield said that as of April 17th, there were currently 150 DUI pending jury trials and 195 non-DUI jury cases. That totaled 345 cases. Initially, when they met on October 18th, there were approximately 396 defendants with jury trial cases pending, and a total of 542 cases pending. 1 Of those 542, there were 167 DUI jury trial cases pending. At that meeting, it was asked of them to provide a break down of those cases and where they were. So, they followed up about two months later. As of November 15, 2019, there were approximately 398 defendants with pending jury trials cases, and a total of 450 cases, and a total of 183 pending DUI jury trials. Chairman Shahid said that they had essentially scaled back the DUI cases by 33 and Ms. Cofield said that was correct. Chairman Shahid said he would presume that they had picked up cases in the interim as well. Ms. Cofield said they had, and since the pandemic had started, there were a few cases that still needed to be scheduled. Since they started the pre-trials, it seemed to be helping them move some cases along. Chairman Shahid asked Ms. Cofield to elaborate on how those pretrials were working out and how often they met. Ms. Cofield said that the pretrials were held once a month. They had the pretrial week to try to resolve a case without it actually going to jury trial. If it wasn’t resolved, it would be continued to the next month. The way they did the schedule for the year, whatever judge was on for the pretrial week, that same judge would hear those cases for the next month during the jury trial week if the case wasn’t resolved during pretrial. Chairman Shahid asked if they had any numbers on how many cases had been resolved by pretrial conferences. Ms. Cofield said she didn’t, but could get it to them. Chairman Shahid said it seemed to be working on getting some of the cases resolved. Ms. Cofield said there was some improvement that they had seen. They hadn’t heard any complaints, but if they couldn’t be resolved, they were continued to the jury trial the next month. Mayor Tecklenburg said he had a question for Chief Reynolds. He was curious over the last month, or six weeks, if the number of new cases for DUI been reduced. He would expect so. Chief Reynolds stated that he couldn’t tell the number, but he thought it had been reduced significantly with the restaurants closed and number of vehicles that had disappeared during the times when they would normally do the DUI enforcement. They had continued to make arrests, but the numbers were down. Chairman Shahid said they had heard that there may be an increase in criminal domestic violence with people staying home and drinking more frequently, but he didn’t think that had been the case either. Chief Reynolds said they were starting to see a little bit of an uptick. They had been paying attention to that from the beginning. Generally, they had not seen an increase, but believe they might be starting to see a slight increase. It was almost too early to tell. Chairman Shahid asked Ms. Cofield if there was anything else they needed help with. He knew they were in an odd situation. Ms. Cofield said as of now, they had everything they needed. She would pass what he said about the numbers being down to the judges, because they had worked really hard on that. Setting dates for interviews of judicial candidates Chairman Shahid said they should have received a packet of new applications for the judicial candidates. There was a very impressive pool of candidates. They could do this through Zoom, but he wanted to know what the preference was in going forward and resuming the interview process. 2 Councilmember Shealy asked if they had to interview all candidates or if they could narrow them down by looking through the resumes. Chairman Shahid said he would have no problem narrowing them down. He asked Ms. Herdina if they were obligated to interview all of them, since they interviewed all in the first batch of candidates. Ms. Herdina said she didn’t think they were required to interview all of them. They made that decision last time because it was a smaller pool of candidates, but now they had a group that was at least twice as big. She thought they could have a preliminary list that was maybe five candidates and interview more after that. They could do what was most comfortable. Councilmember Seekings said he didn’t have a preference. He thought he knew all the candidates except one. The interview process last time was very helpful. He asked how many candidates there were. Ms. Herdina said she looked right before the meeting, and there were 19 candidates. Councilmember Sakran said that if they could cull it down to about ten candidates, that would be a manageable number. Nineteen would be an undertaking to interview. Chairman Shahid asked if they could schedule a meeting to review the candidates. They would be in executive session. They could decide at that time whether they should interview all, or if they could cut down the number of candidates. Councilmember Seekings said he wasn’t sure where they were officially on a hiring freeze, but it seemed like they weren’t doing a lot of hiring. He asked if that would affect this process. Mayor Tecklenburg said he had already asked about this and they had already begun this interview process, and because of that they were allowed to proceed. In this case, it was also a critical position to fill. He encouraged them to push forward and get whatever interviews done. He looked forward to their recommendation. Councilmember Seekings asked if it was the Mayor’s intention to bring both positions at the same time to Council. Mayor Tecklenburg said that was correct since they waited the extra time to let applicants come in. Chairman Shahid said they could schedule a meeting for Thursday or Friday to try to sift through the applications. Ms. Herdina said that in the information, the job posting was included, so it might be helpful to take a look at the postings because there were some minimum qualifications. Reports from Fire/Police Chief as to ‘state’ of each department Chairman Shahid stated he had asked the Chiefs to give an update on their departments. Chief Curia stated that he came in in July of 2018 and his marching orders coming in were three-fold. They were to address morale issues, look at call volume on the Peninsula and don’t ask for additional resources right off the bat, and to look at the infrastructure of the department. With the Fire Department, with all the good things going on and all the things they need to work on, it came down to people and relationships. That could be having personnel coming in for holiday meals, to softball games. It came down to how they treated and related to people. Just addressing those things had put them on a good path. The state of the department in one word was ‘good’. The CFD was a great department and they had great people. It didn’t take long to address some issues that would need attention such as morale and vacancy. When he started, the department’s vacancy rate was 79 positions in the operations division and a few more in the Fire Marshal’s division. They had facility issues. Overtime was millions of dollars over what they had budgeted and they had a strategic plan that was largely not used. They found out that their 3 ISO assessment was due and not much work had been done. The accreditation that the Fire Department pursued was through the Center for Public Safety Excellence. That was due and they hadn’t made any progress on it. They also had a leadership vacuum when he first started. A little more than a year and a half later, morale had gone up and the vacancy rate had gone down. They were controlling the call volume. They had maintained their ISO accreditation. They were putting plans in place for long-range planning. For morale, it came down to a lot of time spent together and trying to retrain the department in when to relax and that love mattered. If they treated their people well, great things would happen. They adopted a culture of saying ‘failure isn’t final.’ They were making sure that their communication was open, honest, and transparent. They wanted to build a trusting culture. Looking at their operations vacancy rate, when he came through the door in 2018, they had 74 vacancies. Over the last 20 months, they had hired 77 people, and 63 of those had graduated from Fire Academy and were in fire stations. The vacancy rate had dropped from 21% to just over 9% in the operations division. They had retooled their EMS responses which had greatly controlled their call volume. In 2018, they went to every medical call. They went through and identified calls that were strictly life threatening in nature such as cardiac arrests, pregnancy calls, etc. They found out that the City was going to be reassessed and they hadn’t put a lot of effort into the process. They did retain their Class 1 rating and that impacted insurance rates for commercial occupancies in the City. One of the things he found difficult was looking for long-range plans for the Fire Department. Currently, they were engaged in a process to see what they would need for 10-15 years. It would be a living document, but the intent was to communicate to BFRC anything that would have a financial impact. There was a state mandate that indicated that for every firefighter they had receiving training, they had to have one state certified instructor with them. That ratio drove the overtime costs up. Their current strategic plan went through the end of the next year, but they had found that there was just too much information in the plan. There were seven or eight goals, each with five subgoals. So, they were engaging in a new planning process aimed at streamlining that plan. For their department, they had settled on two main goals, which were to increase their community involvement from 10% of the population to 25% of the population by the end of next year. The second was to increase their infrastructure from 43% to 71% by the end of 2024. As a driver of that, every week they had meetings to report out on those specific items. On the community engagement strides, they were making strides, but still had work to do with the infrastructure. Their pay plan was largely unpopular. They had started to look at the plan. They were working with HR and BFRC to retool it and come up with something that was a little more palatable. Chief Curia continued and said that in the past twenty months, they had promoted three deputy chiefs and four assistant chiefs. He had one more assistant clerk to do. Internally, one of the greatest needs they had at the time was leadership development. He could crank out managers all day long, but the real trick was developing leaders, so that when he left, they would have no doubt that the next fire chief would be someone from the fire department. For diversity, the demographics of the fire department didn’t reflect the community they served. One of his goals was to have the fire department reflect the community more accurately. For facilities, the CFD would eventually lose it’s place on Milford Street. Currently, they had been having discussions about what they would do and where they would go, but they didn’t have a solution right now. 4 That was important. When they lost it, it would be important to have a plan in place to have a seamless transition. They were still trying to secure land in Cainhoy for Fire Station 22, and also land on Johns Island for Station 23. They had probable land in each location identified, so they were working to get that done. Each firehouse was projected to have one engine and one ladder. That drove the 30 personnel that were stationed there, which was $2 million in salary per facility. That was important to know as they planned out the future. One of the charges that he had been given was to look at the facilities that the department had and develop some type of plan to move them into a place that was better. Internally, they had scored their facilities and they had determined that 43% of the facilities met livable standards and they were trying to get that to 71%. One example was Station 10 off Savannah Highway. There was deterioration in the bathrooms. Fire Station 15 on Coming Street was another example. The apparatus floor had a big metal plate which covered a hole in the floor. There was a lot of debris under the firehouse that was knocked down after the earthquake in the 1800’s, so the repair would probably be more complex than they thought. There were also cracks/holes in the bricks of the station. Fire Station 16 on Ashley Hall Plantation Drive was another example. It would be getting a small facelift, but that would only enable them to stay in the structure for a few more years. With the current stormwater regulations, they couldn’t rebuild on the same property. Fire Station 20 was in Cainhoy and was a facility that they rented. Chairman Shahid said he had been to that station and it was deplorable. Chief Curia continued and said that there were plenty of good things occurring. They had been putting out fires really well. There was a lot that went into how they did their jobs. Things worked really well before he got there, but it was just his job to improve on that. Their marine division was doing well. Station 11 was coming along. He had come out of an environment where he had a pretty good relationship with the Police Chief, but he had landed in an environment where he had a fantastic relationship with the Police Chief. That wasn’t by accident, and the dividends paid when the fire and police chiefs got along and were in sync was hard to measure, but it could be felt. Their path forward was to keep their service delivery world-class, but they would focus on the important goals and make sure they had good procedures in place. They would focus on their family of firefighters, and also honor the sacrifices that had been made in the past and would be made in the future. Chairman Shahid stated that he wanted to touch on a few things. One was the relationship between Chief Curia and Chief Reynolds. They all recognized and appreciated that. He thanked them for that. He stated that he had taken a tour of a lot of the facilities outlined and he would offer other Councilmembers that opportunity. They would get a much better feel as to the state of the facilities and what needed to be done. He knew they would be addressing that in Ad-Hoc budget and eventually at Council. Councilmember Shealy thanked Chief Curia. He said that there were some former firefighters in those pictures that he thought he recognized and he thought it was great the way they had brought in some of the retired firefighters. It helped with the community relationship. He wanted to ask if the new recruits were helping with the overtime and meeting the expectations. Chief Curia said that they were meeting their expectations and were helping with overtime. The big issue related to overtime was that on any given day, all the training a firefighter needed to maintain their certifications required them to hire other firefighters on overtime to provide that training. It would a longer fix for that, but they would figure it out. 5 Councilmember Shealy congratulated them on the ISO and Accreditation. That was extremely important. It was more than just saving a little money. Charleston was what they called a ‘high- hazard’ area and a lot of insurance companies didn’t want to write there because of hurricanes and other hazards. Having the accreditation and ISO rating encouraged insurance companies to try to be competitive. Station 16 was in his district, but also served other districts. It needed attention and there was property available near there. Councilmember Seekings thanked Chief Curia and he would see how they could help on the facility side of things. Councilmember Sakran thanked Chief Curia and said he was pleased to see about the culture shift and high level strategies. Mayor Tecklenburg thanked Chief Curia for his leadership and professionalism. He also brought the human touch that brings people together and he and Chief Reynolds were the epitome of people who liked to leave things better than they found it. They could see that in the progress over the last year and a half. Chief Reynolds stated that his presentation would probably be similar in terms of collaboration and working together. In their region, they all worked closely together. He was grateful for Chief Curia and his leadership. In the past year, Chief Curia’s command had initiated a discussion on something called a Rescue Task Force which was a concept where if they had a significant event, they could get together and get into that event quickly with the expertise of both organizations. It was innovative and he thought it would yield tangible, positive results. The audit was obviously a priority for the City and the department. They now had a Director of Research and Procedural Justice and Compliance. Wendy Stiver had hit the ground running and was doing a lot to look at evidence based practice and look at the audit and strategies. They created a realignment of the Office of Community Oriented Policing and had put that under the Operations Bureau, along with the traffic unit. They had implemented some of the things from the audit already. Some examples were things with training and body cameras. They had learned a lot from the Nathaniel Rhodes case. A lot had been discussed internally, with the family, and with the community, and those things had been incorporated. They had incorporated a robust citizen complaint process. They were encouraging people to use that, and the numbers had gone up significantly, which they took as a positive step. They were putting a lot of focus on use of force and other things that were part of the reporting process and the data analytics. A big area of their organization development and succession planning had been focused on accountability from top down and bottom up. They had breathed new life into areas like Internal Affairs. They also codified and tracked compliments that came in. They also had a compliance officer in the heart of the Internal Affairs process and actually doing audits of a variety of things throughout the department. One of the most important things they could focus on was leadership development and they had received a grant with the Rotary recently and were going to begin that process. They had picked a program that would fit well. They may also be able to incorporate the Fire Department into some of that. Lieutenant Bruder had graduated from the FBI National Academy. They were focusing on leadership development for all levels in their organization. For the strategic planning process, it had been ongoing. They were due for a new strategic plan and had engaged the College of Charleston who had provided grad student who were engaged with Kylon Middleton, himself, Lieutenant Bruder and others. They had facilitated multiple meetings with their entire command to get input on what a strategic plan should incorporate. 6 There were three specific pieces to that which was being finalized. One was incorporating the Illumination Project. The second was the audit itself and the third was the strategic plan. It would be one singular document and that would be a driving force for their Director of Procedural Justice. For those who had not heard about Wendy Stiver, she retired from a full career of 20 plus years in Dayton, Ohio. She was the Chief of Staff and very instrumental in leading in their business district. She did a lot of outreach and community policing initiatives. She had a significant resume and had a lot of expertise in working with NIJ and with the research community and developing evidence-based approaches for policing. There was a lot she would bring to the table as they implemented the plan. The most important thing was that they had a great organization because they had great people. It was exciting to see them in action. Their hierarchy chart had changed a little from when he had gotten there. A few things were highlighted like the Community Orientated Policing Division. They were focusing a lot of time and effort on recruiting and traffic, and saving lives. Traffic was the number one complaint in all the communities and was the top factor in loss of life. He would say it was the number one quality of life issue. They were building their traffic unit back up and were looking at how they deployed and how they measured bias. They wanted to make sure they had the proper data analytics. Ms. Stiver had already met with their technology people and others who were a big part of the data analytics to make sure they could have a meaningful conversation about it. They had created one pipe for internal affairs, training, and policy. They met every week and talked about issues. They were asking how they could improve on their education and how they could learn and help the organization to get better. For staffing and recruitment, for a variety of reasons, they had retooled all their recruitment. They were using the news, social media, and college visits. They were having the people within the organization go back to their colleges and institutions and they were working with all the local entities like The Citadel. They were using a lot of strategies. They would probably have a class of 30 in June and another in September. Their hiring was looking very good. They were working to get back to full staffing. A lot had gone into that. His feeling was that the best recruiters were those in the Police Department. Property crimes seemed to be going down with everyone at home. Crime in the City was relatively low and they had a very safe City. However, they did need to pay close attention to the numbers. They had really done a lot with community engagement. There was a lot of concern in the criminal justice community that domestic violence crimes would be underreported during this time. There were a lot of people confined together and they may be afraid to report. It was not just about numbers, but about getting justice. That’s why having the new judges and prosecutors was so important. Aggravated assaults were up, as was theft of items from vehicles, specifically guns. Those were all things they talked about at their community meetings. There were some concerns about individuals being released. He could talk about many examples of people being let out, when they should have been in jail. That was something they should pay attention to when it came to violent crime, gun crime, and repeat offenders. They were having fewer calls for service. Interestingly, even with the lower call volume, they were seeing changes in certain things like shootings and assaults. They couldn’t make a lot of conclusions based off a week to week analysis because the numbers were so small, but they were paying attention to it. As population increases, you would think that there would be a greater increase in collisions. However, it appeared as though the collisions were not correlating 7 with the population increase. They continued to focus on education, enforcement, and engineering. There was a lot of impact they could have on reducing the amount of collisions and saving lives. They had some really positive things to report including the new Forensics building. The Forensics building was amazing. The contractor was on schedule and doing a wonderful job. DNA testing and ballistics testing would be a new capability in that lab. They had a lot of grants they were seeking for that. It took a lot to be ready to have the staff and expertise to have the forensics lab. They had been renovating their training room and now there was a great facility there to host events. It would be of great value. He referenced the Fleet Maintenance shop where they were on a month to month lease and the radio division was in a similar position. He had a good relationship with the port director, as well as the outgoing command of the coast guard. As the port grew, there was an expectation that they might have to handle an active shooter on the water, so they were focusing on training for that and how to be prepared. They were talking about how to create capacity for some sort of training complex. It would make sense for a lot of reasons in terms of cost savings and efficiency. They were exploring that with Ms. Wharton. He stated that Council had helped them with getting cameras in the vehicles, equipment for their troops, mobile data computers, and tasers. Councilmember Shealy congratulated Lieutenant Bruder and Lieutenant Thomas. He thanked Chief Reynolds for bringing in Wendy Stiver. That was an excellent hire. He asked about the Citizen’s Police Advisory group and if they were still meeting. Chief Reynolds said they were. One of the things Wendy Stiver had been tasked with was to work with the Mayor’s office. It had been a struggle because the whole purpose of the group was to be independent of the Police Department. So, they were working on getting membership back to a full membership. At the last meeting, they didn’t even have a large enough group to even have a quorum. That would be a big part of the audit process. Councilmember Seekings thanked Chief Reynolds and said they supported him. Councilmember Sakran thanked Chief Reynolds and said every time he had an issue, they were responsive. Mayor Tecklenburg thanked Chief Reynolds as well. They had a great department and he was making it better. He asked if they could get the update on the STR’s to the next meeting. Update on STR/Livability enforcement Deferred. Update on City’s response to COVID-19(follow-up on Mayor Tecklenburg’s Three Step Plan) Deferred. Having no further business, the Committee adjourned at 3:30 p.m. Bethany Whitaker Council Secretary 8