never be clean again. since then she's had one of the best programs that exist in the city. i know for a fact having worked for the city and county, if it had been a county agency which crossed so many areas, we'd still be talking about it. my belief, my hope is that in this community we have a grand desire to do better particularly with the homeless situation with people who are mentally ill, with all of this. what would support law enforcement would be if they had more recourse. if there was in every community in the city, a place during the day where someone can walk in and sit down and without filling out a mountain of paperwork and just talk to someone. it would have an enormous benefit. it would be cheap, it could be well managed and incredibly effective. that kind of solution, i feel like on the side of where i come from which is the over here with we have to bill medi-cal and we are becoming more and more convoluted with all of our it systems. an emergency room dr. at san francisco general they have four or five different systems to put information in. how do we find information about a client? how do we track somebody if we don't have a way to follow someone who has a mental illness, who is hiv positive and getting methadone and also on housing list and also trying to get their benefits and all of this? how do we do that? i don't know how the clients manage it. it's a test to the resilience of the people we serve. i would be happy to explore some of these areas where perhaps we can propose to the city, why don't we do some of these things that are fairly simple, fairly straight forward, but would have a huge impact and they don't require a lot of money. i don't know, that's a very long answer to your question. but the truth is that is one of the biggest problems is that if you are new to the system and in crisis and trying to get help, your resources are very limited. if you call suicide prevention and if you are suicidal, they are going to call the police who then most people don't realize are going to come to your home and take you in handcuffs in the back of a police car to the hospital. most people are appalled and horrified by this, many are. that is the system and unfortunately we don't have an alternative to that. >> thank you. the situation just seems to get more and more complicated the more i listen to you. i just wanted to tell a short story talking about people who just want to be heard. i worked for an organization that has an open house once a week for drug users. my job was to go around with an ur sac survey that i did but what i did i asked them questions and then listened to their stories. and everybody wants to be listened to. dpa organized during those years trying to eliminate those silos and trying to integrate more efficiently, has that helped? >> i'm a contractor for cds so i have to be tactful. i can only speak for myself and say that i feel that within dph, there is for the most part i think we are still struggling with this siloed system. the reorganization and some of it, there was a plan to have more of a transitions program where we had one individual managing or helping care management for somebody who had multiple issues and i don't know where it is or why it got stalled. i can only speculate. what i would say is i'm not sure what the answer is, but i do know that's why i love the cit because nobody ran it. it wasn't run by hsa, by the police department, it wasn't run by anybody. we were all in it together. there was no entity like that in the city. that's the beauty of cit. i wish there was more. what we need is a container a framework where people like myself, like jenny, the mental health association, like michael who is gone now, if we can all get together and say before the city makes anymore policy decisions about where this money is going to go, let's look at this and have this input. because sometimes we don't share too well together. we don't work too well together. it's an over stressed system and the problem is that often people are working in their own wheel and lose track. services wide, there is a lot we can do but more we can do to make it easier. >> thank you. tactful honesty. >> thank you. council member at that time -- kostanian has a question. >> thank you, we were facing issues not only from people offering services but the community. they were totally floored that there was no place to go to and nobody to really hear our stories. i think instead of just floundering around, we really have to sit down and ask the community to step forward and be participants and not to controlling. that's the same thing that patients feel, that they are controlled. you can't do that to human beings. >> that's true. i agree. >> so to step away from that, i would love to be a part of that. >> i'm hopeful. i feel the winds of change are blowing where they will take us, anyone knows but i agree. as a nurse, i think that was the problem that essentially what we are dealing is the history of when behavioral health was created years ago nobody had ever done it. all they did was unbundle the state health services. we are still dealing with the effect of that because in the state hospital services nobody talked about vocational rehab. nobody talked about this. all they talked about high level emergency care and the case management. it never got beyond that. >> the other part of that is where the funding becomes the problem too. >> but we are penny wise and pound flush. that's the expression my mom used because we are spending lots of money. we are spending the money anyway and we can do so much better. >> nobody is telling where it's going. >> thank you. any questions of staff? anyone on the bridge line? >> okay. we are going to pro to item no. 10. community perspective on crisis intervention team. jennifer friedenbach. i would like to make a change. is it okay to go to item no. 11 before ms. frieden en bach comes in. >> thank you. i will keep my report pretty similaring today. i think that cochair supanich has covered the ada celebration nicely. i will skip that. i wanted to tell you a little bit about the city hall centennial and the u.s. conference of mayor's. you might have noticed as you walked in the civic center plaza is set up for a big party, this is the celebration of the 100 anniversary of city hall and the conference of mayor's san francisco is hosting and president obama was here at the hotel. as we leave this afternoon, you may see them gathered. they will be here in the building for a big gala this evening. there are many break a ways and conferences taking place over the next few days. city hall, when we think about the centennial, what makes me the proudest when we look at this palace is to think about how accessible it is and how successful we were able to make a qualified structure and that is represented by not only in this room where we sit in where the council has the diose that is raised and accessed by ramps but also extends to things like our board of supervisors where we meet to talk about the legislation that's necessary for our quality of life and the fact that the board chambers are fully accessible and that their meetings are captioned and we can all watch them at our leisure on television and be fully engaged in the process. the celebration is going to be out in the city hall plaza tonight and it's open to the public. there are going to be two bands, one at mccallister and the other one at the grove street corner. later as it gets darker, there is going to be a performer called vand loop and they are going to be trapeziusing down. it's lovely to see them watch and dance suspending from the rope. there will be a light show tonight starting at 9:00. it's nice how city hall gets lit up when the giants win the series it goes orange and black. it's nice that we'll have this led system that they will be able to adjust the light instead of putting a piece of plastic that is orange to the lights to get that effect. so the light show will be demonstrating that and the lights will be creating patterns and such. but one thing that will be really interesting is that there are these project ors that sit on the top and they will be creating the images across city hall so you can put for pride or put text for the 100 centennial of city hall. basically it's just this great new sort of public art space. so i hope you will join us. i will be out there after the meeting. that's my plan tonight. speaking of public art spaces. i wanted to profile our mod ada transition project going on now, that's the renovations of the bayview opera house. the bayview opera house is this cultural treasure out in the southeastern part of the city, in district ten, malia cohen's neighborhood. it's an opera house built in 1888 and has a central role where the community can come together where they have civil disobedience in the 1800s where people can protest out in front and about affordable housing. what our office has done is we have funded a barrier removal project to start the full renovation of that facility. what's going to come out of it is a fully accessible front entrance. no more back doors for people with disabilities which is how we've gotten into this building over time. it's really going to be the universal access perspective that comes comes in the front door, even people with mobility disabilities. that will be the beautiful ramp that will come across the entrance and there will be fully accessible restrooms and along the line of the public engagement and resource there is going to be an amphitheater where people can gather inside and the opera house as well as outside as real public space. we are looking at getting a little bit of press about this that ties in nicely to the connection between civil rights and disability rights as we look forward to the ada 20th anniversary celebration of our own. look to your newspapers. we hope they will take the bait that we are dangling and this is a great story of our collaboration and coalition of our communities. the last thing i would like to say is i want to put a save the date note on your calendar, saturday the 26, will be the festival. for many of you that attended the disability pride celebrations in the past, the ones that have taken place down in san jose. this is a collaborative effort involving the local independent living centers whether it's silicon valley, or marin or berkeley and the california state organizing agency. everybody is coming together to throw a really big parade and party. the plan is to kickoff the celebration on the steps of 50 plaza of the federal building with the 504 demonstration and occupation took place back in 1977. along with that parade and celebration there is also going to be a conference held throughout that weekend. you will be hearing more about it. it will be taking place at hastings college and will be able to provide some material as well to participate. that concludes my directors report and i look forward to seeing everybody again wednesday july 1, 1130, to 1:30 in san francisco for our 8825 celebration. thank you. >> thank you, i wanted to check in. is our presenter here? jennifer frieden bach. thank you. >> thank you very much. i apologize for being late. >> that's okay. thank you for being here today. >> i had a little issue getting through security, but i'm here. i'm jennifer frieden bach and the executive director on coalition on homelessness. it feels non-sequitur now. i'm scooting this back a bit when we were talking about the crisis intervention team. i have been working on this for a long time, over 15 years. we originally started with a bunch of other community organizations after a young man by the name of adrian stalley was shot by the police and he had a little pen knife in his hand and working with his mother and others in the community about moving this situation away from command and control situation. we were talking about folks in psychiatric disabilities but this also applies to folks who are hearing impaired or deaf or folks who don't speak the language of the officers. you can put it in a number of different situations, but we are really focused on people in psychiatric crisis. the idea moving when a person doesn't understand a command. the police are trained to increase their level of force and to go from level to level to force and to flip that script and have them instead use verbal deescalation techniques. while we were working on this and trying to figure out what to do, we realized that in memphis tennessee there was a model that at that point was very freshly developed and very similar to what we were talking about. we got lewd of ideas from them. the initial training which supervisor tom yamano was in crisis intervention and was funded partially. really focused on training and didn't move beyond training to all the other stuff that needed to happen. eventually gaskin was chief and funded it. the new one is called crisis intervention team. the training back in place and a lot of work done to have the training and have a lot more solid skill development among the officers. the training is run by volunteers however. it's not paid trainers. it's a 40-hour class. it is a work in progress really. i don't think it's reached all the way it needs to go. we have the founder of the program in memphis came out and did an analysis of the program and felt we needed to increase the number of hours spent in practicing verbal deescalation for the officers. it's a 40-hour training, he recommends at least ten. we are not anywhere near that. the training covers a variety of mental health issues from a variety of different perspectives used, elderly, trauma, homeless, a whole bunch of different, va, this kind of stuff. it's much more around getting this broad understanding of mental health for police and trying to develop empathy and it's not all the way there with regards to skill. the numbers on training are looking pretty good. the original resolution called for every officer in the san francisco police department to get a shorter training. that has not happened at all. the original resolution also called for the dispatch criteria at 911 and that's taken a number of years and this last january it was finally up and running and district had specific codes for officers. the other piece we wanted to see in place was having a supervising cit and when we talk about the way the police are structured, it's very laid out. it self described para military. it's very laid out in terms of general orders and instruction to police and how you respond and what situation and what's the proper protocol and everything is very intensive and general orders. it's also very complicated to change and there are the number of steps to do that. we haven't changed the general order when they are in command and how to deal with psychiatric crisis. so that's not happened yet and it's something we are working on and speaking to the community advisory body and this is one of the things we are going to be taking on. another piece of it that's been successful is boosting up the kind of the specialness of being cit trained and having the officers beingel elevated in different ways. we have been working on that. we had our first award ceremony to try to outline different situations andersen -- certain situations where the police officers had different techniques and successful outcomes by not using force. the other big picture, the idea besides moving away from using force is system wide to stop our reliance on police as a response and as a response to people in psychiatric crisis. in someways in our system it's the only way to respond. for most people their first touch with mental health system in san francisco is through psych emergency services. they brought in in handcuffs and put in restraints. they are in a locked facility. while it's not jail, there is not a lot of fundamental differences from the perception of the mental health consumer. it's very traumatizing. part of what has to happen is this whole systemic shift from reliance on institutional care of the hospitals or if they are not taken to the hospital, they are taken to jail. and into another place. so, that other place doesn't really exist, right? so we have door alley which was opened up which was a huge step in the right direction for san francisco but they are always at capacity. they are not able to, you know, there is, if you look at the 911 calls, there are several thousand a year. i think it's 4,000 psychiatric calls in crisis with the police and doer does not have the capacity to serve that whole population. so, we have a system problem that is forcing the police to the front lines. so that's a piece of the pie as well is having a system in place that can address these issues in a -- humane way. there is going to be a system of care and people can get care when their symptoms are first appearing and not so far down the road. the police don't have control over that, but the broader city does. part of the idea is bringing all of these issues to light so we can buildup a much more humane system. a much more effective system that moved away from institutional care and towards community care and a healthier community all around. so that concludes my comments. if you have any questions, i will be happy to address them. >> any public comment? >> councilman at that -- kostanian? >> i have been hearing on the internet a lot of people use that phrase . let me look at my notes here. para military response and force. did that come from the police department or the public? >> that's how the police department describe themselves as para military organization. it's a structure the police department matches in a very simplistic way, a top down structure. >> is that across the nation or just in some >> it is across the nation. that's not meant to be a criticizing term. >> right. there are a lot of people that do use it in a criticizing form. >> yeah, there is a lot of people with the perspective that police officers shouldn't have guns and there is an association with military. if you are, then it would be seen that way if you have that perspective. absolutely. >> thank you. council member kostanian. cochair supanich? >> i just want to take a moment to thank you for coming. and thank you for going so far in your advocacy. it's taken years to get this far. i don't have a question. i'm just impressed. >> yeah, i think most important message is we have a long way to go. even looking at the police shootings and the fatal police shootings over the past 7 years. the half of the people involved were people with psychiatric disabilities. we have a long way to go and we oftentimes like to sugar coat stuff and think that san francisco is better than everywhere else. we are not that different. i did a similar analysis to the bart police and it was the same thing. actually very paralleled. african americans and people in psychiatric situations. in both of those areas we need a lot of work. >> thank you. >> questions to the staff? through the chair? >> jennifer, thanks for being here. i have a question. we heard a couple speakers talk about during the training, the police officers actually do scenarios and practice and i'm just wondering how much of the training actually has some background information. for example, if you are interacting with someone who has a developmental disability or cognitive disability and you say where is your drivers license, you might just get someone who is not sure what you are talking about. what if you say, where is your id?

Related Keywords

United States , California , Tennessee , Bayview , San Francisco , Americans , Malia Cohen , Jennifer Frieden Bach , Hall Plaza , Denise Sandoval ,