Transcripts For SFGTV BOS Replay Public Safety Committee 322

Hello. The meeting will come to order. Welcome to the wednesday march 22 regular meeting of the Public Safety and Neighborhood Services committee at a special at at 3 00 p. M. And i am supervisor ronen and to my left is supervisor sheehy and supervisor fewer and supervisor safai has joined us. The clerk is erica major and i would like to thank sfgtv for staffing this meeting. Madam clerk do you have any announcements . Yes, please silence all cell phones and electronic devices. Completed speaker cards and copies of documents to be parted of the file somebody submitted to the clerk. Items will be on the april 4 board of supervisors agenda unless otherwise stated. Thank you very much. And we called this meeting today or i called it at a special time because were going to have two hearings, one about child care and about one staffing and teacher housing in our Public Schools and wanted to accommodate those that could only come at this time and we have a long agenda and we will go quickly as possible so everyone can get home and feed their kids and get to sleep. Check check will you call item 1. Yes, is a hearing on the Family Violence council 5th comprehensive report on the Family Violence and requesting to the department on the status of women to report. Thank you. And we will start with a representation from supervisor tangs office. Hi. Good evening. I am from supervisor tangs office and i would like to keep my comments short and go through the report of the Family Violence council and weed like to give your thanks to those that putting together this information important on the status of this important issue in our city so i would like to hand the mic over to the department on the status of women director maf ari. Good afternoon chair and supervisor sheehy and supervisor fewer. Thank you for having us today. I want to acknowledge the leadership for requesting this hearing. We were originally presented in october and after waiting three hours the committee decided we should be scheduled to today and were delighted to be here with three new members with the board. Congratulations to each and every one of you. The Family Violence council and compose upon of 24 members. 21 Government Agencies and three Community Based organizations plus many more attend regularly. I want to acknowledge some of the members who are here today. We have captain yuma bailey from the Police Department. Maria mcgee and the District Attorneys Office Julie Leonard from family and Children Services of the Human Services agency. San francisco is unique and we address violence across the life span and including elder abuse and family and child abuse. The mission is respond to the citys response to Family Violence in new and innovative ways. For example the first guest speaker to the council was representative from animal care and control known as the dog catcher so you might ask why the dog catcher has anything to do with Family Violence fam but turns out where there is animal abuse there are signs of child abuse or Domestic Violence or elder abuse and families are more likely to open the door to animal control than others and theyre a mandated reporter and one of the activities is publishing an annual report on Family Violence in San Francisco and the only of its kind in country and we bring work from 20 agencies and staffed by the department on the status of women and has three cochairs. Kate i albright and keaght and sean and couldnt be here today and we have staff filling in. I would like to thank the interns nicolette and the office of womans policy and we put together this report and switch the slides to these slides. So just in terms of a quick overview of our report. Methodology the data was collected from july ion, 2014 to june 30, 2015 from 15 public agencies and 27 Community Based agencies so today we want to give you a high level view of trends and statistics. Also talk about Family Violence deaths in 2015, achievements of the council and recommendations for 2016. We dont have time to go over all 121 pages of the report but it is available on our website so im going to turn it over to Katie Albright to give statistics on child abuse in San Francisco. Thank you so much. And supervisors its an honor to be here. Thank you so much. My name is Katie Albright and the executive director of the San Francisco Child Abuse Prevention Center and our mission is end abuse in 50 years. I will be highlighting specifics around child abuse prevention statistics specifically and my colleagues will be highlighting Domestic Violence findings and jill highlighting elder abuse findings. I wanted to thank dr. Morassy and others for their incredible work and leadership on this report as well as the entire department on the status of women for the dedication to End Community violence in our San Francisco. We are truly connecting the dots between child abuse, Domestic Violence and elder abuse and creating Effective Solutions for families in our community. As you will read in this report i want to pull back on three highlights. One, prevention is key. Two, we really can connect the dots. As was said between child abuse, Domestic Violence and elder abuse both in terms of its cause as well as prevention opportunities in the to find solutions and finally private private truly work and i think you will see that in the report today and as you read the findings lets me start with the child abuse finds specifically and i wanted to highlight again the prevention is key. When you think about the finch finding the top line is a program by the San Francisco Child Abuse Prevention Center and operating 24 7 for more than 40 years really thinking about as initial response to families in crisis and we see more than three times the number of calls as our Child Welfare department, their hot line so you can see that this is truly an effective measure in order to be the First Responders on the line and the calls are from suicide and crisis calls how to do encoder dropped and as you will read in the report on page 62 yearo over the cdcs rates of child abuse relatively constant from 11 to 14 year over year. Turning to the Police Department the find it is show there is a 30 decrease in the number of cases investigated by this department in 2015 conversely in later slides investigations of elder abuse have increased by four fold and we will look at later slides how those connect with each other. Finally turning to the District Attorneys Office the findings show a 33 decrease in cases filed by the district attorney, but in 11 increase in conviction rates. Theres more information in the report and the San Francisco Child Abuse Prevention Center looked at the economics of abuse in our community and i am happy to make that available as well. Creating a link between child abuse and Domestic Violence i wanted just highlight some success numbers that we see in a program called safe starts and focused on family with children 06 exposed to violence and between 201115 we saw an increase of 103 as well as an increase in the work by the district attorneys victims is department of 41 in this last fiscal year. Again it shows the interconnection between Public Private partnerships and the importance of focusing early on prevention. I have the happy opportunity to turn it over to my colleague bev upton to focus on Domestic Violence. Thank you katie. So i want to walk you through some of the Domestic Violence statistics. I want to talk about the San Francisco Domestic Violence consortium and the community. San francisco is really rich in a diverse array of Services Operating 24 hours a day shelter, crisis line and then Community Based non Residential Services which serve the needs of specific communities, the Spanish Speaking communities and the asian speaking community and the lgbt community. We have a safety net built over 40 years in San Francisco to protect the most vulnerable of Domestic Violence and its an honor to represent them at the Family Violence council. When you talk about what katie talked about for Domestic Violence agencies and number of people served youre seeing about 24,000. That is roughly three times that were seeing at from the calls at 911. That again really echoes the fact that people want to speak with somebody who speaks their language, who understands their cultural issues and who may not be part of a criminal justice team. Now of course San Francisco wants to be ready when people need that kind of solution. Theyre here. We work with them every day but just as we saw in katie numbers for child abuse the largest number of calls and the every day solution to many peoples Domestic Violence and the exposure of children is reach out to the community so you can see shy of 25,000 folks are served in the Community Every day every year. 21,000 are reaching out on our 24 hour crisis lines. San francisco the department on the status of women funds women inc. To operate San Franciscos 24 hour crisis line ferlt the shelters and other agencies answer their crisis lines during the day but 24 hours a day every day of the year you can get many languages that are very well versed and trained in Domestic Violence issues and can help kied people 24 hours a day. As we talked about 911 receives about 9,000. Again we see those as the more serious calls. We have begun trainings with 911 new dispatchers on the language of Domestic Violence, what some of the challenges for reaching out for help might be and connect people faster in their language and their own cultures to solutions around Domestic Violence. The special victims unit they have a happy load on Domestic Violence cases. Heavy load from cases and its down a bit but up when you look at the numbers and the bulk of the cases theyre working on. When we look at the District Attorneys Office our numbers differ than child abuse but again i think we have a longer history and so we looked at 542 500 cases being filed. Thats a 63 increase over the year and the convictions and probation were 111. Also a small increase. I will take this opportunity to say that most of us in the community and our partners in criminal justice do not always see incarceration as the solution to Domestic Violence, so when we dont see huge numbers going into incarceration were not deterred by that. In fact it gives us hope that more is being handled in an alternative manner and in the community, so we see these as positive numbers. Speaking of more positive numbers were seeing convictions and probation up as well and then i think one of the more hopeful numbers were seeing in this chart 142 folks convicted and ending up receiving treatment at our rsvp. One other number i would like to add is how many other people are receiving intervention classes out in the community. San francisco has ten more Domestic Violence intervention classes where people are not incarcerated but go through probation to get to the classes so theres lots of folks to change the Belief Systems and their behavior out in the community. Certainly if it requires a Law Enforcement response we want to be there for that and partner with them but we do not see that as negative numbers. On the next slide there you go. Thank you. We can tell a pretty good story with a cautionary tale; right . When we started this work or in 1991 in the 90s we were losing seven or eight women a year to Domestic Violence. Now are these numbers always perfect . No. Women and other people lots of folks die as a result of Domestic Violence that are never captured so do please keep that in mind. Also it has an implicit outcome in suicide, so these numbers are just what our medical examiner over the years as determined to be Domestic Violence homicides. Okay. With that baseline you can see where we were in the 90s, seven, eight women a year and i can tell you if this chart started earlier would be more and in the 80 it was ten or 12 and over the last ten years we have substantially reduced the number of women dying from Domestic Violence in San Francisco. In fact when we really had an all hands on deck response in San Francisco when the community was were still robust but when we were starting our partnerships, getting more funding, establish svu, getting probation to the table, work with the da and pds office we had 44 months without a homicide for Domestic Violence that we know it and that is unprecedented for cities and San Francisco. You can see the cautionary tale as we move up were seeing increases and three is consistent for the years and were waiting for a couple of determinations from the medical Examiners Office in 2016 but you can see the trend and we need to be vigilant and we know about this. Any questions . Any questions . Thank you so much. Good afternoon. My name is jill neilson and a Deputy Director with the department of aging and Adult Services which is part of the Human Services agency. Our department operates multiple programs that promote the self sufficiency, safety and health and independence, not just of elder adults about adults with disabilities. We are one of the programs that is operated by our program with Adult Protective Services and a primary Safety Net Program to serve older adults and adults with disabilities that are experiencing abuse. One of the things that we know for sure that elder abuse is on the rise here in San Francisco and thats not just here in San Francisco, but thats also across the state and across the country. In fact the adult protect Service Program over the past five years has seen increase of 22 in the reports of abuse we receive by the hot line. Studies across the country have shown that 10 of older adults suffer abuse and we know the rates are higher when you look at vulnerable populations like individuals that have dementia. What you will see from this slide is reports to Adult Protective Services that were confirmed cases by others increased by 33 in fiscal year 2015. We also can see that requests for civil restraining orders which is another way to track elder abuse and went up almost 200 . San franciscos special victims unit is responsible for investigating reports of elder abuse, and we did see that in fiscal year 2015 there was a decline in the number of cases that the special victims united investigated pertaining particularly to physical abuse. However, in the area of Financial Abuse we saw that there was a significant increase over 200 in the number of cases that the special victims unit investigated and we owe that to the addition of three investigators that were specialized in the area of Financial Abuse. And its a highly specialized area and the cases are time consumes and require great deal of training. The