the director of the mental health board. >> thank you, commissioners, for looking at this issue this evening, and for chief godown for a new openness in looking at the police department. my name is helena brook and i'm director of the mental health board. with a group of people from mental health, we could collaborated and created the training that existed -- we co-collaborated and created the training that existed for the past 10 years. i applaud the continuation of training ever all the officers. the training that has been a collaborative effort between the police department and mental health has trained nearly 1,000 officers appropriately to help people with mental illness and help them get help. these don't make the front-page news. i want to emphasize that through the training from meeting the officers in the san francisco police department, we have a tremendous department that do care about the citizens of san francisco. during the past 10 years the department also funded research about the type of training and the type of calls that people get and the number of calls from people with mental illness. results show they found the training useful and led to a change in their attitude. many officers sate -- said it was the best training they have had in the police force. it helped officers identify a person and communicate with them more effectively. officers also said the training provided them with more information on the mental health services that were available. although they were frustrated with the fact we had limited 24-hour services and that psyche emergency was often on red alert. the overwhelming majority of respondents said the training had given them useful tools to help them work with a suspected mentally ill person. the virt wall simulate -- how to talk and listen to people with mental illness, visiting our clinics, and listening to consumers sharing about their illnesses. the san francisco police department and the research has individual officers have from one to 20 interacks per shift for people with mental illness with an average of four contacts and spending about an hour to three hours a day on these contacts. plo over 10,000 mental health related calls per year with approximately eight per day resulting in a 5150 and going to psyche emergency services. southern mission tender loin take twice as many people to psyche emergency than the rest of the city. i encourage you to work with the officers on the street to see what training they would find useful going forward. i encourage you to talk to the board of supervisors and the mayor to fund a 24-seven mobile crisis treatment team so mental health can take more of the calls to people in crisis and to request that san francisco stop cutting mental health out-patient services so that more and more people don't risk going into a crisis. we cannot ask the police to handle more and more people going into crisis unless they have more help and more training. thank you. commissioner chan: we have jennifer johnson who is with the public defender's office behavioral health court. >> commissioner, chief godown, i want to thank you for having me with you tonight. i'm the deputy public defender assigned to behavioral health court. i'm also one of the people who was responsible for creating that program. i represent on average about 100 to 125 people at a time who have a serious mental illness and are in the criminal justice system. most of my clients, 80% or more are charged with a felony. 75% of my clibets clients have -- 75% of my clients have a diagnosis of skits freenia. -- skits frenchia. behavioral health court, this problem has been left in the hands of a system that was not designed to deal with it. in behavioral health court i have to say proudly we have done a pretty good job. we have great outcome data that show that we are reducing recidivism dramatically. we are reducing rearrests after crimes of violence by about 54%. we're reducing jail days on average from 36 to 40 days for clients as compared to a control group, and we are saving the city and county $2.7 million a year just in both criminal justice and mental health dollars. that means they are both going down. it is wildly successful. however, it is a little too far down the line. once they get into behavioral health court, they have gone too far. we need a solution that comes before people ever have hand cuffs placed on them. when i read this resolution today, i was thrilled. i couldn't believe it. i think that this is such an important gap that needs to be filled. along with representing my clients in behavioral health court i spend a significant amount of my time working on national public policy at the intersection of criminal health and mental justice. i provided commissioner chan with a document i've been working on which i hope eventually can be provided all of you. one of the glaring owe mations -- one of the glaring omissions is on police response to mental illness and that includes crisis intervention training. what goes hand-in-hand is diverting people out of criminal justice before they get into it, decriminalizing people that have a mental illness. i think we're pretty clear some of the things we're doing in the system are not working. giving people citations, they end up crumpled in a pocket somewhere and they don't do any good. there are a lot of things we could be doing. in addition to training police, we need to provide police officers with alternatives so they don't have to take someone either to jail or the hospital. we need accessible alternatives that are police friendly where police can receive services voluntarily in lieu of going to jail. so the way i view this policy, as i said, i am exstatic. -- ecstatic. i whole heartedly support what this commission is hopefully going to do. i also want to make sure that this policy fits into a broader public policy at the intersection of mental health and criminal justice. there are a lot of other things we need to do. this is an incredible start. i would like to come back to you in a couple years and tell you that my case load is down to 10. that would be a great day. i really applaud your work. thank you. commissioner chan: thank you, ms. johnson. our last speaker, but i think we will move quickly into public comment, there are many people in the audience with expert he's to share. our last speaker is mary kate conor from outreach services. s thank you for joining us. >> thank you very much, commissioners, for considering this, and for moving so quickly on this issue. i understand taking a look at the memphis training was on the agenda, but looking at the most recent tragic shootings that happened at end of december involving people who have serious psychiatric illnesses. i was part of a working group in 1996 that was brought together by the o.c.c., by members of alternative criminal justice alternate sentencing, very much like the kinds of things that you are seeing and talking about now. we started doing this work in 1996 and put together a program called -- at that point it was called many pirc. the psychiatric illness response club. where the person encountered was killed by the police as opposed to aided by the police. the first thing we needed to understand is there has been such a fractionalize zation between health and law enforcement. the need to take a look at the issues as behavioral issues on both sides. we spent a lot of time talking about what might work. we looked at a lot of techniques, and some of them were pretty wild. they involved spiderman guns that put a sticky web around people, we looked at tasers. and we ruled them out, because there is a high zens of -- incidence much -- of police responding to people who do not respond to police control and then police using tasers. we came up with an identical program that memphis has, identical in 1996. we came up with it because none of the kind of tactical devices wr we're talking about were going to change anything. what seemed to be able to change things was looking at who goes into what kind of profession and why. why is it that i, a person who has 30 years of experience working with seriously mentally ill people outside of a clinical setting, not in a law facility, not in a hospital, not even in an office. i'm talking about working with people who are homeless who have no treatment at all whatsoever and aren't even necessarily looking for treatment. so what makes the difference. why would i go into that line of work and an officer go into the line of work that they go into. it generally has to do with, as the officer on the film that you -all saw in memphis, it has to do with being touched in some way in their own lives about why people go into doing the work with mental health that they go into doing. that is not surprising that given that one in four or one in five people in this country will have an episode of mental illness in their lifetime and 1-17 people are believed to have a serious mental illness such as scizophrenia or bipolar. so chief cochran was talking about the heart being the essence of this program, that is also what we found. that people are moved to do the right thing if there is an understanding at a much deeper level and if they are given institutional support and essentially permission. if this training program that generally falls outside of police purchase view is to be -- per view is to be adopted, the entire institution of the police department from the brass on down has to accept this is a part of daily life for police officers at this point in time. i don't think police officers should be social workers. i'm not suggesting that's what we do. what i am suggesting is that police officers have the best way to work with people who are in crisis, rather than using techniques that don't work that often end up being lethal. there are other ways to do this. and as an advocate as well as a service provider, it is up to all of us, to me, to you-all, to also hold accountable the department of public health and specifically public health. we can talk about the lack of resources, but budget season is coming up. every year something gelts cut from the health department. the police department has threatened cuts. this year rather than fighting and sort of targeting each other's departments, because police and department of health both have large budgets, let's work together and see if there is some way that we can not punish each other's departments because of the cultural differences. that's what it comes down to. we need to shift the culture so that people who provide services where i serve and that police officers. and it is possible to do it. i have a lot of tales to tell about working with police on the ground and how frustrating for them -- it is for them. i call the police, and i rarely call the police, and i have had officers say, i'm not going to take him to the office. they will just let him out in an hour. i will take him to jail for you, if that's what you want. no, that's not what i want. no, we're not going to do it. i can't tell you how many times i've heard that. i'm being honest with you all. officers on the ground are frustrated. those of us that work in mental health are frusstrailted. i know you all are. if we're to change this, we must work together. the resolution you-all have is so simple, it is brilliant. please look at it and adopt it. there are changes in there that would be simple to implement. i urge you to take a look at this now and make sure that we move forward together on this before there is anymore completely senseless loss of life. thank you very much. >> thank you for your comments. [applause] commissioner chan: that concludes the formal presentation, so i toss it back to the police chief. >> before we head in there, we did ask the police officers association for their opinion regarding this. i wonder if someone would like to speak on behalf of the p.o.a. this evening. >> good evening. my name is kevin martin. i'm the director of the police officers association. i appreciate the opportunity to talk to your body tonight. this is a very important topic we're discussing. it affects everybody. it is a community-wide concern. certainly i believe that the san francisco police officers are probably some of the finest trained officers in the country when it comes to dealing individual citizens that are in mental health crisis. we are the first responders. we probably deal with just as many individuals with mental health crises as anybody else in the field. we believe our training is second to none. it is a growing crisis. and a lot of times, the officers are frustrated, as the whole system becomes bogged down with what can we do. certainly, we want to put our best foot forward and provide not only the community the safety that they want, but the victims that are in crisis, to get some type of refuge so that they know that there is avenues of help out there. and to consistently follow-up with these cases so that we don't have a tremendous recidivism rate. police officers are often thrust in a position where they are forlsed to -- forced to act on an accident that has already occurred. we are trained to react to an action that has taken place. we have already had a lot of training for mental health crisis. we have had the mobile crisis units that we're working hand-in-hand, maybe two or three years ago. i walk a footbeat in downtown san francisco. i've been a police officer for 26 years. my experiences are great and many. i'm also a hostage crisis negotiator with the police department. many times the people that we deal with, we dealt with before. so i applaud everybody's efforts here. i think that the selection process for the officers that are going to be engaged in this needs to be looked at very strongly. we want officers that have experience that have been in the department for a substantial amount of time. i think it takes maybe eight inform 10 years -- eight to 10 years to define what it means to be an effective police officer. i think when we consider what's at stake here -- and we're all stakeholders. from the outside, community, people worried about their safety, to people that are definitely affected by a mental health crisis, we are all stakeholders here. we want to put our best foot forward so we can be advocates on this issue throughout the entire spectrum. thank you very much. vice president marshall: i would like to ask a couple questions. this resolution is a wonderful program. that's why you are here. i am both practical and a realist by nature. so i have to ask some things that sort of brought us to the table. the mental health issues in the city of san francisco are great. but what has really brought us to where we are now is -- are several i would say high-profile shootings involving those with mental illness. i can't remember the name of the woman in the position. there was everything from angst to outrage because of that. what i want to know is, it really comes down to, what adults are going to do. with this model, how would those things have ruled out differently? now, i work with young people who are put in dangerous situations every day. i have to do a couple things for them. i have to be able to tell them how to cut down the chance they will be in those situations in the first place, and when they end up in those situations, i have to tell them what to do. if not, i'm not doing them any good, because i want to keep them alive and free. so the officers are confronted with these incidents. so i would like to know from you, how would those things be handled differently? how would they be handled in the future? >> the circumstances in every community are very challenging, and how law enforcement proceeds to follow with their training, and as i difficult situation. but for somebody to come before you and present any program that says if you do this you will never have another tragic event within your community would be very wreckless in making those kinds of comments. the crisis intervention team is an approach that addresses the broader issue of the community. it also allows the officers that have many years of experience in their own law enforcement training to work with mental illness issues from a level of the training that they receive as a c.i.t. officer. every officer is faced with circumstances that are challenging. it is going to fall back on his or her training and on perception of what is it before them. the c.i.t. officer as a process allows an officer with excellent judgment and maturity as what was suggested by the association member of experience to be critical but that officer is going to have to make that decision. c.i.t. is an extra level of competence, extra level of knowledge, an extra level of passion and concerns to address the difficult challenges that he or she may be facing with any event. and i think within the context of what you are asking, i don't think that i can sit here before you or stand before you today and give you absolutes. i can tell you from my many years of experience that when i would read reports that would be turned in by our officers faced with challenging situations, i would see that the c.i.t. influence made a difference. but it is an individual decision sometimes based on the interpretations of whatever those scenarios are. but i think that the c.i.t. is a program that allows the officers competence by the fact that the c.i.t. officer arriving on the scene is the lead officer. so you may have other officers that are present, and the c.i.t. officer is going to be the director, if you would, of the crisis event. and i think the clarity of a crisis really hinges a lot on that level of performance. these things i'm making before you can easily be somewhat minimized by an expression "but the officer had to act immediately," "the officer had no choice otherwise." those are hard questions for me to counter. vice president marshall: i know. i realize that. if you are telling me that something that might have happened is someone differently might have intervened, those are the things i want to know. i don't want to give people false hope. i don't want it to be like, we got this here and things will be different, i want to know what would happen in those real-life situations that occurred. it is a little tough, because you don't know all the realities. i've been here longer than anyone. people say, they should have done this differently. well, what should the officers have done? i hope that makes sense to people. really, that's why we're here. we can't do anything about the money, but the situations that come up that officers face, i want to know, as a result of this, what is going to happen that would be done differently in those kinds of situations. give me one. if you can give me more nuts and bolts, that would be great. that would help me. again, i can pass something, but it is not going to change what happens in those moments, to me it is hallow. >> i think the emphasis of the training within itself, the leadership, those officers do rise to remarkable 0 cages that i -- remarkable occasions, that i have seen. unbelievable. other communities have reported the same. otherwise, every situation is unique, and the word "depends" comes into play with regard to the chenks challenges that are faced with the officers, the officer's interpretation of delicate situations. the fact that the officers have a better understanding oftentimes. i'm not reflecting my comments toward san francisco, but across the country, many times law enforcement officers are afraid of people who have mental illness. many times they see a person that may have a mental illness. prejudice and stigma toward mental illness would suggest that that person is out to kill somebody and is threatening them in a way that i could harm someone else. i am not saying this about the san francisco police officers. i have met many, and those officers are excellent as a comparing and statchtri enforcement person. but i am telling you there is a lot of stigma and prejudice not because they are law enforcement officers. but is there stigma and prejudice within the community? the law enforcement is just a reflection of the community.

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