Good morning. The meeting will come to order. Welcome to the thursday, july 30th special meeting of government audit and Oversight Committee. I am gordon mar and joined by peskin and safai. Thank you to joh john john carrd sfgovtv. Do you have any enouncements . To protect the public during the covid19 Health Emergency with board of Supervisors Committee room are closed pursuant to various local and state and federal directives. Committee members will attend through Video Conference and participate to the same extent as if physically present. Public comment is available for each item. Cable channel 26 and sfgovtv are scrolling the call in number on crosonthe screen. Once connected and prompted enter the meeting id1464783455. Then press pound followed by pound a second time to be connected. You will hear the discussions but you will be muted. Your line will be in his senning mode only. When your item comes up dial star and three to be added to the speaker line. The system prompt will indicate you have raised your hand. You may begin your comments when unmuted. Call from a quiet location, speak clearly and slowly, turndown your television or radio or streaming device. Account for potential time delays between live coverage and streaming. You may submit Public Comment in the following ways email me john carroll, clerk of government audit and Oversight Committee. Please submit the comment by email. I will add to the public file for the legislative matter. You can send mail to our post office at city hall. Finally, items today will appear on the agenda of august 11, 2020 unless otherwise stated. Thank you, mr. Clerk. Can you please call item 1. Hearing on the current hiring and Recruitment Practices for the First Responders and special focus on strategies to diversify the work forces including statistics and demographics how they staff their recruitment teams. Members of the public now would be the time to call. Dial in number is 415 6550001. Enter todays id1463783455. Press pound twice. Then press star followed by 3 to speak. The system prompts will indicate you have raised your hand. Thank you, mr. Chair. Thank you, mr. Clerk. Supervisor safai thank you for calling for this important hearing. The floor is yours. Thank you, chair mar, forgetting this on. I know there is a tremendous number of requests and backlog in your committee. I appreciate you making time for this and highlighting the importance of this issue. I wanted to say today we are here to discuss a really important issue in what we consider extremely important given the climate in our streets, reckoning on a National Level and overall movement for racial and civil rights and equity in our society. Specifically i am referring to reckoning around race and structures of power that have oppressed the most vulnerable in the society for a long time. We need to ask ourselves if we are doing enough, and if we are Opening Doors for others like many did for us. It has been the history of this country. With that said, i want to explain why i called for this hearing along with partnership with supervisor walton to focus on the recruitment, hiring, retention and promotion of the diverse candidates within our First Responders, fire, police and Sheriffs Department. I want to make a special note that many representative bodies, specifically within the Fire Department, approached us and asked us to hear their concerns. It was from those hearings and many of the things i have mentioned and meetings i mean, not hearings, that we decided to bring this to the forefront, particularly what we are seeing in the streets today in the United States. Also, to help give us guidance in addition to First Responders. We asked the office of Racial Equity to participate. They are going to give their opinions analysis after the presentations that are given, and also specific requests from local 798 from the firefighters will be addressing the committee. I am going to get right into it. We will have opportunities as Committee Members to ask questions, but we are going to first have the Fire Department, chief Joanne Nichols and her chief and acting captain al together. Fire department has submitted a Powerpoint Presentation. Thank you for that. They are going to try to present that. Second we will hear from the Police Department and here is police chief bill scott and also with bill scott is commander steve ford. The Fire Department has a Powerpoint Presentation. Then we will hear from the Sheriff Department. They also have put together a Powerpoint Presentation. We havent seen it yet. Maybe they will get it to us shortly. After that we will have response from Human Rights Commission director cheryl davis and more than anything we are going to hear what the departments presented and react and give analysis and recommendation. We will finally hear from local 798 president and director. One last note. We have the department of Human Resources here to answer any questions as it pertains to testing in particular. With that why dont we go ahead and have the first presenter begin, mr. Chair. Then we can go in order from there. Chief nichol. Chief nicholson good morning. I dont think supervisor haney is here, is that correct . Directors davis and simply. Thank you for calling this. I will ask jose and price to make themselves seen. Chief bellow is going to put up the presentation for us. Good morning. Let me share the presentation with chief nicholson. Chief nicholson i can start speaking while you work on that. I know you practiced and it worked. I will start. I will give you an overview today of the backgrounds of our recruitment and hiring over the last 30 plus years, the process and current process, resources, partnerships, and any future business that we have discussed. In 1988 there was a Court Ordered consent degree. We had 83 of the department was white male at that time t. Zero percent was female. The black firefighters and others got together and sued the department and the city. There was a Consent Decree put in place. As a result of that decree, and i wish you could see this on the screen. We ended up with just under 50 white, 17 asian, 9 black, 16 hispanic, 5 plus percent filipino and 16 women. We were well funded due to the Consent Decree. That is no longer the case. We have very limited administrative staff throughout the department, including in our recruitment. Our current landscape is decent. In 2016 the u. S. Department of labor said we were one of the top five departments in the nation for diversity. This year we were in a study for recruitment success for women. We have a lot of work to do. This is currently how it works. I have quite a few issues with this that i think need to be changed. Right now what happens is folks sign up for the ntn, National Testing network. This was adopted by dhr. It was quite a few years ago. It is much cheaper to do than how we used to test, but in my opinion there is bias in it. People from all over the country are on the list as well. That poses a problem. We know the fire Service Nationwide is not as diverse as we are here. I would rather give a local kid a job than someone from florida. Also, the outcome of this test is definitely disperate. Africanamericans and females do not perform as well as other groups. We definitely have, and i think most of the Employee Groups and union and i are in agreement on this. Then you go to the cpa p test. That is also limiting for folks who are in underserved communities because you have to go somewhere. You have to pay for it and know about it. Maybe you have to train for it. That is also while it is extremely important to have it, we need to create pathways for people to take it. National edgily e. M. T. In ems this is incredible lack of diversity. In our own department. I have been speaking about this since i took office. In station 49 our ems we only have two africanamerican women and 13 africanamerican men out of 200 people. That is unacceptable. We can talk more about that. Next is the hiring officer, which is me, basically. This year what i did was instituted some diverse panels in the department to talk to folks applying to the department and to make recommendations to me. There may be something others see that i dont, you know, culturally and otherwise. We did that this year. Then, of course, there is a hiring freeze now. We go through background exams and selection to the academy and then getting through the academy. This is a slide of the National Testing network, who applied, who signed up to take the ntn over the past year as of may 31st. The numbers drop in terms of who qualifies and who actually shows up to take the test. It is predominantly white, and the numbers drop in terms of who actually takes the test and really drop in terms of who passes the test. Again, africanamericans do not do as well as other groups. Again, i think there is a problem with the test. This is our hiring as of 2018 to present. This includes our firefighters and our ems. You can see that the orange is our ems station 49. Again, we are not doing a good job in terms of recruiting the right a good amount of diverse candidates. I think especially when it comes to public service, First Responders, you need to represent the community that we are serving. Our current practices are and components, a, recruitment coordinator firefighter. Committee on Community Outreach and recruitment and education. They do a lot of the work. Then we have the web and social media. Our recruitment coordinator is responsible for implementing, devicing and developing methods and strategies for recruitment and outreach. They hold the event or set up the table at different cultural events, whether it is the gaypride parade or mlk day or what have you. That is only one person. I believe back when we had the Consent Decree in place there were five people assigned to recruitment. Our Core Committee does provide a recruitment be footprint to education. I will talk about the Mission High School program we are running and it develops different partnerships that help the recruitment coordinator to provide career information. This is a really important pathway, pipeline, if you will, i hope it to be, for kids to come into the San FranciscoFire Department. The Pathways Program exposes kids to these opportunities that they wouldnt necessarily otherwise be exposed to. In Mission High School we have had a chance last year of fire science and this year ems class. What we want to do is when these kids turn 18 they can take the National Registry e. M. T. We want to prep those students in high school to take and pass that. Through this program they also get credits at city college, which is a wonderful thing. We really want to be able to develop this into a pipeline. Again, the current pipeline Mission High School we want to expand that. We want to establish a Fire Prevention and Education Program for 6 through 12th grade students. We want to utilize the mission high fire and ems students to help build the content and facilitate that training. That is also in the works. This is my big passion, and when i first came in i called up director cheryl davis to ask to meet with her about several things i wanted to do within the department. This is one of them. Ems corps. It is Incredible Program set up by the gentleman standing in the photo in the middle in the east bay. It works with young men at risk in the inner city. It brings them in and gives them a stipend and life coaching, trauma counseling, Wraparound Services, math, literacy and gives them an e. M. T. Class. Over 85 of the young men served over 200 so far, over 85 passed the National Registry e. M. T. Class. That is higher than the National Average. We have two of the graduates in our department today. One may be watching today. Antoine davis with the black firefighters. These are the future leaders. They have overcome adversity with the proper support. They are standing out in all sorts of weighs in the department now. We also want to do female cohorts. They initially tried male and female because it did not work because of the distraction. With the trauma counseling they needed to separate men and women out. We need funding for this. I have spoken with supervisor walton and director davis and a lot of folks about this. It needs funding. Covid happened and cheryl davis was extremely busy doing a bang up job. We all have been diverted. We have the nonprofit in place and folks in place. We could start it in district 10. It needs funding. I would like to make this a permanent pipeline to the department as well. These are department initiatives i have already spoken about, and what i havent spoken about is opportunities for all. We started with that last year, and we were going to expand it quite a bit from last year. Obviously, covid hit and we couldnt have young adults with us on the fire engines and ambulances and working sidebyside with us. We currently have three kids from opportunity for all at station 49 right now. These are some of the other initiatives. Recruitment videos and we also established an Intern Program at headquarters through city college and their science program. This is just sort of the show and tell what the Core Committee does. The middle photo is united fire servicemen that set this up Fire Service Women set this up for young kids to go through a little Fire Training area. It was superfun. Left is Mission High School program and some field trips. On the bottom left is our outreach folks from the bureau Fire Prevention. They help us with education and outreach. Our work with both hrc and ore began a as soon as the director came on board, soon after i had the opportunity to meet her at headquarters and talked about several of the things we wanted to do. We also appointed a Racial Equity officer in the department who is here with us today in case you have any questions to ask of him. He is working built gently with the office of Racial Equity to do all sorts of thinks including reassessing our recruitment and hiring practices and creating a Racial Equity action plan. We have affinity or Employee Groups. We are working with the bsa. We are meeting with Employee Groups to talk about these issues as well as outreach and recruitment. Next is city college of San Francisco. There is a fire and ems courses aat the college level. There is a real lack of diversity in the classes. What are we doing wrong . One fix could be the Unified School District pathways. Fierfire reserves are not paid. They volunteer. It is not always a particularly Diverse Group because these folks come and train with us one night a week or every couple weeks. They train with us and dont get paid for it. They have to get there and they may be working. Then opportunities for all. I want to talk about the future vision. I want to develop pipelines. That is what is sorely needed here. We have lost ground from when we had our Consent Decree in place over 30 years ago. We lost the majority of africanamerican chiefs in this department, we have very few left. We have lost a step in our recruitment and hiring and advancement. What we are doing, obviously, having this conversation and talking about it. We are developing internal professional development for leadership and management. We dont have a proper Succession Plan in place. It is okay if you are single you can take this class on your off days. If you are a single parent or you have some stuff to take care of and you cant take this on off time. Offer the classes in house to be able to bring everybody along with one another. We want to develop the comprehensive recruitment hiring and advancement strategy. Working with Racial Equity committee to develop strategies. Our hiring process i want tatiania little bit. I dont want to be the only person having input. I think t