[Music] okay everyone i think we'll go ahead and get started i'm going to mute those that aren't muted right now just so don't we don't get an echo um my name is minnie salas i'm the community engagement coordinator for the mesa police department and i want to thank you all so much for joining us today i know you're all getting ready for the new school year that's going to look a little different from all the others so i appreciate all the hard work that you're doing behind the scenes that we don't know about but um i want to go over a few things before we get started uh first of all this meeting is being recorded for anyone that is unable to attend today we are going to be posting it online so after probably next week sometime when it gets posted online i'll send you all a link so you'll have it you'll be able to view it online um i ask that you please keep your mic muted because it does give feedback and we don't want to we want to make sure that all the speakers are heard well throughout the meeting if you have a question please use the chat box i know that there's an option for a virtual hand to be right don't use that because it's too hard for us to keep track of the order that they come in so if you do have a question during the presentation just go ahead and type it there shannon who's my helper today is going to be monitoring those questions and we will have a chance toward the end of the meeting or the second half to go over those um we do have approximately 50 people registered today so i know a lot of more people are going to be coming in during the meeting so please be mindful of your time uh toward the end i ask that you only limit yourself to one question and then if we have more time for more you can go ahead and ask more questions then but if we do not get to some of the questions again i'll be following up with an email so we'll make sure that we get all those answered um i want to introduce some people that we have joining us from the mesa police department right now we have tara hall who's our community partnership administrator and oversees the community engagement division we have commander bill peters who oversees the superstition division and he's also the chair for the education forum we have commander chris rash who oversees the uh like who's waving who oversees the uh uh school resource officers so he's gonna be doing uh the bulk of answering the questions hitting his team uh he's being joined by lieutenant ryan stokes sergeant chuck lines sergeant tracy baca as well i think she's on here too yes she is and then a little later our youth development team is going to go over some opportunities that they have for students too so that you could share it with them when school starts uh that's sergeant rob sheehan and paul torres who's our youth intervention specialist but we also have assistant chief dan butler joining us i know you're not going to be here for the whole time but uh we want to go ahead and let you say a few words to kick this off what's up i just heard a beep on my thing can you hear me minnie yes go ahead oh wonderful holy cow 50 people there's uh there's a lot of people here this is this is a really cool one um generally our forums you know have anywhere from 15 to 30 so 50 is quite the uh the jump it's pretty intimidating actually seeing all your guys's smiling faces um welcome to webex enter your access code or meeting number followed by pound i'll mute that hang on just a second if i can find who it is fun catchy music i almost started doing my elevator dance ndid or the numeric meeting okay i think i got it uh so anyways there's so many people here there's gonna be tons of questions i had a an opportunity to look at the uh uh the the the things that uh commander rash and and uh my team are gonna be talking about i'm not gonna spend a lot of time uh having discussions or or putting a lot of information out just to speak so um thank you guys for coming we we love uh working with you um we're kind of all in in the same service anyway and that's service to our community so um we all have really a uh a similar path and and this and things that we wanted to do out in our our community so i appreciate you guys being here and look forward to the discussion all right thank you assistant chief dan butler again i know you're not going to be staying for the whole thing but hopefully you can stay for a little bit um so prior to this meeting i did ask if you had any questions to submit to us and we did get a lot of questions so i'm going to go ahead and let commander rash and his team answer those and uh i know you have about 20 minutes to do that we'll move on to other things but again if you do have more questions during this presentation feel free to type those in the chat box so commander rash is all yours hey well thank you minnie i appreciate the opportunity to speak to everyone can you hear me just i want to make sure everything's good all right you're not in your head yet so um i want to just start by uh thanking everyone for being here um and i thank you as educators for what you do like policing uh you have a very noble profession and my thanks goes out to each one of you for the service that you provide in teaching our next generation um quickly want to introduce myself my name is chris rash i'm commander over our metro division our metro division encompasses a lot of different areas a lot of specialized units from the aviation unit traffic unit our school resource officer program our homeland security areas including our intelligence and counterterrorism units our emergency management unit our special events the list goes on and on so i have a diverse uh work group and a diverse team that i work with and i'm grateful for uh a number of them being here uh with me to to present what we do not only in the schools but what we do as a police department um we are in unprecedented times uh for all of us that we are operating in with not only the probit 19 pandemic and how that's affected all of us in our work areas and still trying to continue to provide the services that we provide but then on top of that all of the civil unrest that law enforcement around the country has been dealing with following the murder of george floyd that's a been a huge had a huge impact on law enforcement uh everywhere um i'd like to just start by telling you how much our community supports us we have great support from our community and that doesn't happen by accident that happens uh from a lot of diligent efforts in consistently and continually engaging with the community and building trust in all of our interactions that we have with the members of our community and that has happened and occurred over the course of my 26 years we have a long established history of uh having good open communication and building uh trust with members of our community and that uh is demonstrated in the fact that we have not had a lot of the things that you've seen around the country occurring here in mesa while we have had protests and we've had uh some of the the largest numbers of protests as far as gathering of individuals that we've had in the history of mesa those have all been very peaceful and we've not had the same type of impact that a lot of a lot of other communities are dealing with and we believe that that is because of the great work and partnership that the mesa police department has with our community we are a progressive police department i'm going to talk a little bit about some of the training that our officers go through and i know that was one of the questions that was brought up what are you guys doing with training specifically when it comes to uh implicit and explicit bias training all of our officers are trained through the mesa police academy every police officer in the state of arizona has to be certified and the governing board that certifies police officers in the state of arizona is called the arizona post arizona peace officer and standards and training board and they require uh every police academy to give a minimum amount of hours of training to an individual who wants to become a police officer and they require 585 hours of training the city of mesa we established our police academy uh 27 years ago 26 years ago i was in class number two of the mesa police academy and our police department our city requires 880 hours of basic academy training before our recruits graduate and become police officers here in mesa those uh hours make up everything that it takes to become a police officer but include training in interpersonal communication mental health cultural awareness we have what's called icat training which is integrating communications assessment and tactics it's really a training that's designed to de-escalate situations when an individual is suffering from a mental health crisis or some other type of crisis and they're armed with a weapon other than a firearm after an officer graduates the academy they also attend a field training program that is a very extensive program where they ride with a veteran officer and during that time they also get additional classroom instruction that includes uh instruction in continuing instruction in interpersonal communications uh they learn uh they have a training called the holocaust uh lessons and they learn uh things from the holocaust that they can apply to policing today regarding bias regarding how the police were viewed during cost and how to avoid situations like that or could be perceived and they take and translate those lessons to modern day policing they also receive training in the history of mesa and our diversity also african american history they received training during the building uh program they was additional training in fair and impartial policing as well as mental health training um our entire department uh for the last number of years in 2016 2017 2018 received de-escalation training learning how to de-escalate situations rather than escalate them and the goal being to use the least amount of force in trying to accomplish our mission and uh and oftentimes that involves taking someone into custody and arresting arresting them we try to de-escalate situations when we have uh volatile situations we try to de-escalate those as quickly as we can and we continue to have uh de-escalation training built into our training plans every two years so an officer every two years is getting continued uh training and de-escalation tactics uh in 2018 i mentioned icap training that our new officers go through everyone in the department received icat training in 2018. and in 2019 everyone in our department receives fair and impartial policing training that was directly related to implicit and explicit bias training and how to apply that uh in our daily work i wanted to talk talk about just briefly before i turn it over to my team is the things that we do to engage the community i talked about the uh the trust that's been developed that's been developed because of uh our community engagement and the positive interactions that we have thousands and thousands of times during a week during a month with the public now we engage in the community in many different positive ways and i'll just give you a a personal story i guess uh highlight it and not go into a lot of detail but um this happened to me one morning as i was driving to work i was in a i drive an unmarked car i was getting off the freeway and i noticed a marked unit on the corner of the freeway and the side street i was getting off on and there was a homeless person sitting on the corner and the officer was talking to the homeless person i could tell i couldn't tell what they were saying and i didn't know what the call was that they were on um but i could tell that the officer was talking to him about the location they were at there were no trespassing signs and so forth and so on um i was watching the interaction at the end of the interaction what impressed me was that the officer gave this person a hug and there was a big smile on the person's face even though i knew that the officer was probably telling the person that they couldn't be at that particular location because of the the uh no trespassing uh warnings uh that officer um had empathy and and took things to next level and showed uh human uh you know just human nature about himself and the way he dealt with that person and that person left the area with a smile on their face and that was a positive interaction and that happens thousands of times uh each week in the city of mesa with our offices and there was no no one filming that no one looking at it the only people that knew about that were that homeless person on that officer and uh to me that uh speaks volumes for uh the culture of our organization when you see that kind of thing happen there are quite a number of things that we do uh to engage the community i'll just highlight a couple of them we have ongoing community forums um that uh that meet on a regular basis where our officers are are working with members uh from the community in different uh different uh forums this one being one of them the education forum meeting with educators we have them for the clergy we have them for we have an african-american forum hispanic forum quite a number of different forums that continually collaborate and address concerns that the community members have and it's a great opportunity for us to really understand how to better reach certain segments of our community we continually engage in service projects and our officers do everything from things on their own to organized events you know every year at christmas time there's always dozens of uh families that are adopted by our officers and have gifts taken to them and meals prepared our officers are volunteering in food lines and so forth during the holidays but it's not just during the holidays it happens throughout the year our officers are constantly engaged in service projects within the community and i'll just tell you i'm a mesa native born and raised graduated from mesa high school and quite a number of our officers are in the same shoes as me they're members of the community themselves they're raising their families here and so we are part of the community ourselves one of the questions uh related to how can we um partner or how can we partner with the officers in our beat i think this specifically came from elementary schools we have a very good school resource officer program and i'll have the sergeants and lieutenant over that speak here shortly um they have a great relationship with the high schools and the junior highs where we have kind of a gap is in the elementary schools we don't have officers in all the elementary schools so that question i think is a great question how can we partner better at the elementary school level how can we get officers in there so that the administration knows who the officers are that work that area i think meeting with beat officers calling just having an administrator call up and ask to speak to a beat officer the beat officers in their downtime can surely come by and visit with you and begin to develop those relationships with trust that's something i'll be talking with uh in our commander meetings with our patrol commanders is how can we get more engaged with the elementary schools especially right now with covet 19 and the challenges that we have with online schooling i think there's room for improvement in how we can uh connect that's one of the things we're going to be meeting this week with the school resource officer leadership team to discuss with online schooling how are we going to be able to complete our mission in that environment and make connections with uh those students especially those that are at risk so with that i want to turn the remainder of the time over to lieutenant ryan stokes and sergeants tracy baca and sergeant chuck lines uh to kind of talk about some of the additional questions that we received that are pertinent to their area's working school resource officer program ryan thank you is my microphone working awesome as uh leading up to this meeting i was thinking back way back when i was in elementary school and never thought back in elementary school that i'd be sitting where i'm at now and i can probably say based on some of my choices in elementary school my teachers probably never thought that i would be sitting in this uh in this chair also but i'm a lieutenant over our counterintelligence unit as well as our sros and our fusion center that i'll talk about here here here in a minute or so i know we're short on time um one of the questions came up as what does it what does a typical day look like for an officer what kind of special equipment do we use commander talked about the 880 hours as well as the four to five months of fto training where the officers are sitting side by side with an officer training when you get on your own it is a very unique feeling a unique situation when you're driving around going well i have all this responsibility that that's been put on me i'm expected to know all the laws all the ins and outs of policies um but i like to break it down think think of what an officer goes through every day and the equipment that we use as a as a toolbox when we show up to the job when we show up to any specific call we want to make sure that we have those tools available for that type of call we don't know it could be a traffic stop we don't know how that call is going to transpire we could show up on a domestic call a shoplifting call and we want to make sure that we have all the tools necessary um some of the basic things without without getting into much detail and doing a demo um what's one of the most important lifelines that i think of is our radio when you think of your radio that's going to be able to communicate with all the other officers give dispatch information so if they need to send additional resources and the fire department that's your lifeline to be able to communicate with everyone else that's out there on the street um some of the safety things that we use traffic vests obviously flashlights we all wear for for patrol officers they wear the body armor they carry pepper spray handcuffs baton taser firearm keys something that when i was in patrol that we really didn't talk about a few years back was ppe obviously that has changed in the last four to five months with the covid uh pandemic all the officers as you see them rolling around and marked patrol cars detectives they're all now wearing ppe they're all wearing their masks depending on the type of call that they go on they could put on gloves all the way down to the full gown and the mask ppe similar to a school administrator or a teacher or principal you have different things that you're going to do on a daily basis well patrol officers have that same responsibility every day they're going to come in they're going to make sure that their vehicle is ready to go they're going to attend some kind of briefing that either go that goes over the night before or the shift before highlights go over crime trends any community meetings any special requests to stop by a school zone i know when when school starts we get a lot of requests for the traffic unit as well as officers just to show up and have a presence in and around the school areas when kids are walking to to and from school one of the other units that i oversee is our east valley fusion center so our east valley fusion center is set up where we have eight full-time police agencies all housed here at the mesa police department which include apache junction gilbert tempe chandler scottsdale salt river mesa and we have part-time agencies the atf the fbi the tsa where we're all housed here in one building one room this gives us the opportunity one of the questions was uh about working with with salt river we have a salt river detective that is housed here in in in our fusion center where anything salt river related we have on-site a person that we can directly go to for questions for any situation that might arise within the uh the indian community on the reservation um it's more like a think of it as a giant network sharing room where rather than calling or sending emails we actually have physical people sitting in here and they're able to share the information a lot quicker i'm going to turn it over to uh chuck and tracy just to give a quick overview of our sro program how many sros we have and what the sro program looks like thank you lieutenant stokes can everybody hear me okay yeah okay my name is chuck lyons i'm a sergeant in the school resource officer unit along with sergeant tracy baca who is also here with us i believe we currently have 16 officers that uh work in the mesa gilbert and queen creek unified school districts we have one queen creek school eastmark east park high school two are actually three uh gilbert schools that we work in uh desert ridge high school does ridge junior high and highland junior and then all of the junior high and high schools in mesa so we have 16 full-time school resource officers that that cover cover those schools one of the questions that uh was was asked was what can school leaders do to establish relationships with the best cops in our community with the beat cops in our community um that was probably synonymous right there um just showing support uh is huge but inviting especially for the elementary schools that don't have a school resource officer on campus it's important to uh recognize them in the school so that the the children can see that there is a police officer in the area put a face to the to the uniform and the way you can go about doing that is just contacting the district that your school happens to be in the the city is is broken down into four districts contact the district that your school is in uh and invite a patrol officer to attend uh either an assembly or or a presentation in some way shape or form in your school just get that uh that that face recognition there with the with the with the children attending the elementary schools um it's also important to develop that relationship with the uh the beat officers in the junior highs and high schools because there will be occasions where a school resource officer has to call in sick is unexpectedly absent and any emergency calls will then go to the beat officers so much the same way just invite making present providing that invitation to uh to the districts uh inviting a patrol officer to be present at the school um just walk around give a tour invite them to lunch something like that would be uh would go a long ways in getting that recognition out there for the beat uh tracy did you have anything else you want to add sure i'm tracy baca and i am one of the sergeants over the srsro unit and just to let you guys know last week all of our sros paired together um with whatever high schools and junior highs are together like rhodes dobson we had um westwood carson and they each walked each other's schools again um because we do have some new sros walk to the inside getting to know the cafeteria the auditorium and all that and they also went by the elementary schools i don't know if some of you principals probably met some of them and if people weren't there we told them to walk around introduce themselves to elementary schools around them also um so again like chuck said if you guys are having assemblies or potlucks anything like that you can send an email um to the district and we get those out to the beat officers that's a good way to get to know them um student engagement um i know that our sros some of them are a lot busier than others like during lunch and stuff our high schools tend to be a little bit busier with cases um but i do know that some of our sros during lunch have opened gym at some of their schools and have started supervising that area because they want to open the gym and let some of the girls practice cheerleading and stuff so the engagement with the the students is really really good um during our breaks we like our commander mentioned we do the toy driving and all the sros pick kids that are in their school that are the needy kids and we home deliver those toys to the house and i think that makes a big impact and we also reach out to the group homes children in mesa so there's some elementary kids junior high in high school and over the breaks we always they're more of our high-risk kids for runaways and stuff like that um so we think it's really important for them to see us um not in uniform all the time so just so you guys know over the breaks we reach out to numerous group homes and we have picnics with them we go fishing with them and it's been really really great so a lot of these kids in return instead of running away or if they're having problems with somebody in the group home or a kid at school a lot of them have gotten really close with the officers and will go to them and for help or if they're feeling suicidal or if they're feeling frustrated so i think that has been a really great thing that we have been doing also that that uh we have a very positive relationship with the student body with the faculty the administrators in in all of the schools that that that we're working in um so the uh that's the one of the big um objectives for the school resource officers to build those positive relationships with the uh with the student body we've had cases where because of these the positive um relationship that one particular school resource officer um created in his school there was a student that felt comfortable going to him and uh expressing that she had suicidal thoughts and suicidal tendencies and and he was able to get her the help that she needed so that's one of the things that we strive to do is to build those positive relationships and uh both with the faculty the administrators and the student body i i know we're running way late many yeah thank you so much for that um i'm learning a lot myself about what the sros do so this is great um i did want to say thank you by the way to bill schultz who said in the chat box officers are always welcome for lunch i'll buy so thank you for that um before we do move on though to the youth development department and some of the opportunities that they have are there any questions so far that any of you have right now that you'd like to ask and i'll go ahead and let you unmute yourself i'll give you a little bit of time if you do have a question otherwise we'll move on okay so i don't see anything right now so i'm gonna let uh sergeant sheehan go over some of the um programs that we do in the youth development department and i'm gonna go ahead and share my screen so you can actually see some of the fun things that they do as well [Music] there we go okay sergeant she had if you can unmute yourself it's all yours all right well everybody thank you for um being here with us this evening i'm like minnie said i'm sergeant robert she and i'm over our youth development unit our youth development unit consists of two officers and one civilian youth intervention specialist and she's on here nicole torres she's here with us um she's going to go over a couple of our set in stone programs that we've been running for uh quite a few years like the one you can see on our on our screen now the quino kino junior high school after school program that's been in existence since 2007. uh nicole talk a little bit about that and then i'll talk about some of the other things we've done with elementary schools and other things we've done in the youth so i'm going to turn over to nicole hi so nice to see you all here um i just want to talk about our mesa program i also see principal delbeck and with us today we want to say thank you to her for having us there at kino junior high and allowing us to do the after school program um it is a out of school time award excellence winner last year we essentially are at keno we do nine weeks in the fall and nine weeks in the spring we have anywhere from 18 to 30 students with us we do an hour of physical exercise and activity and then an hour of life skills character building with the kids there at kino so we also do tutoring and and it's it's a really fun program we really enjoy the time we get to spend with the teens there one of our other programs um how many kind of there you go um we do police activities league uh one of those programs we do that falls in that category is called we run mesa um it's a run club that we do with help from a community partner at eagles community center and we have kids from lomacita and also kids who can sign up through eagles community center that do a weekly run program there at the eagles community center we do a program called teen court and we do that in partnership with maricopa county juvenile probation department and also mesa accounts on college access center so i see lisa on the call as well thank you for partnering with us for the program it's essentially uh cases heard of teen defendants by teens so a jury of their peers the kids are attorneys bailiffs jurors they get to hear a case a real life case and give consequences so we do recruit for these programs as well so we'll have some information at the end of the presentation that would allow um all of you to get back in touch with us so that you can have kids join our programs and then um our rad kids safety education um that's for kids ages six to twelve uh we usually do that three to four times a year um it's all about staying safe how you walk to school what what you do if you encounter people who are trying to do things that aren't so great so um we teach simple defense skills and um we practice with the kids as we go along so they really get to see how to use those skills so those are some of our our programs uh that we do and i'll hand it back over to sergeant sheehan to kind of complete some of the other programs that we do okay yes like nicole said so a lot of those programs involve youth who are in uh middle school aged rad kids is a little bit younger we've done those uh we love to host one out at the school i see that in the the comments that you'd love to have there uh we'll have our co our contact information we can go out there um some of the other programs uh this one the youth leadership academy it goes in line with our our school resource officers uh we send out the application to the school resource officers who identify kids in the high schools they are for sophomores junior seniors um who show leadership potential they come out in the summer time for two weeks and like you see we have them scaling down a seven story fire tower that really shows them that they can overcome a lot of their fears we teach first aid and a lot of different leadership principles we also you can see that we do community service project a lot of our community service projects throughout the year are focused towards veterans um like in this picture here last summer we had to cancel this summer obviously due to covet but last summer uh we we donated or we helped refurbish a house that was donated to a navy veteran where her brother was dying of cancer and so she moved out here from california couldn't really afford a place so this residence was donated to her and we did all the rehab work along with one of our community partners here you can see the sros working side by side with kids from their schools so that's really an awesome uh part of it where you know it it's not just within the school where these officers are showing how much they care they're they're out out there working side by side with them during the summer so that's a really cool program uh we have about 50 kids in it um so any of you want to promote that throughout your schools we're always welcoming kids throughout there that is available to kids um throughout all of our mesa high schools and since obviously you all know that the school boundaries doesn't follow the city boundaries we'll we had kids in our last one that went from gilbert queen creek and san tan valley they also ended up in in the program too so we don't um you know discriminate on city lines if if we have kids in tempe or or chandler or gilbert and they want to partake in our program we're more than happy to have them and it's really cool to see them come together even on their own the kids created an alumni association so to this day i mean years later it keeps building they still get together once a month at one of their houses and kind of reminisce and and just be friendship so you have kids from dobson and then you have kids from skyline interacting and becoming friends through the through our program so that's really cool next slide uh this one is more for the elementary school last year we did a play 60 event with arizona cardinals we're more than happy to come out to your school with arizona cardinals we'll do uh athletic sports with the football we also do a basketball camp at the boys and girls club where we have our mesa police basketball team come out shoot some hoops with the kids and it's just a lot of fun so we're always out there trying to interact with kids show them hey we're just normal people who like to have fun stay fit stay healthy so um that one was at keller elementary school and kind of going off on a side note real cool thing with this one was it was just before christmas and after the event was over we um we were talking and one little girl came up to us and she said hey what are you guys doing for christmas and so we kind of had a little conversation and asked if you know santa claus was coming to her house and she said no my family doesn't have any money for that and it turns out that her family was a refugee family from iraq and um the dad had just lost his job so he couldn't uh really provide that that christmas so we worked with a lot of our community partners and we were able to give them and eight other families this this christmas uh a very wonderful christmas we delivered all the presents there and everything like that so um that's real cool story that we had from from just kind of spurred off of that event just having a conversation with a little girl so um these things kind of trigger into that you can go in the next slide mini uh another another um event that we have is we have our police cadet post this is for kids who are from the age of 14. so as long as they've graduated eighth grade only till their 21st birthday they'll graduate on their 21st birthday this is kind of a para police type of a group so this is so they learn leadership skills they learn a lot of police codes streets things like that they learn about the day in the life of a police officer and um and these kids are awesome so they go to school full time all day long most of them you know they're all high school students most of them have a job plus they they give i've averaged about 6 000 hours a year to the city of mesa they'll work our easter egg events they'll work all the city events they'll direct traffic um they've done security at the police canine trials to make sure that the police cars don't stop running with the dogs in them and then you know get heated up and the dogs die so they do a lot of things for the police department they do a lot of things for the city of mesa tons of community service project huge resume builder for these kids and a lot of them they go off into the military we actually just have one kid actually he's um where's the whole group of them with the flag he's the one standing up in uniform off to the left he just graduated the police academy and he's now a police officer recruit um in field training with us so um you know tons of experiences for them actually with one girl she got a scholarship through the army and now she's flying in apache helita apache attack helicopters for the army so great experience great resume builders for these high school kids to get involved again that's from 14 to 21 years old for those kids go on the next slide uh some of the things that we've done at the elementary schools is we did uh a book reading with kids so we had an officer read a book in spanish over at longfellow elementary and also at jefferson elementary we've done the walk bike roll to school event we've also had officers on top of the the beat officers i see a lot in comments about how they love the beat officers to drop in and stuff like that our youth development officers have come in and given school safety talks you can see we still have mcgruff the crime dog sticking around that was a fun one because we asked who knows mcgruff and none of the kids raised their hands but all the teachers and parents did so um we're trying to bring mcgruff back because we think that's a really cool idea mcgruff also makes a lot of appearances during game night we go to different neighborhood parties and uh introduce mcgruff the crime dog to a lot of kids hand out stickers and just really interact and have a good time uh next slide um we've also gone and done a lot of school career days uh at several schools we've gone to salk desert ridge shepherd junior high through their steam events we had the helicopter land uh motor officers showed up we've done the career day over at mesa high school also and talked with the kids and the nice thing too with that is we see kids coming up from the mesa program who go out to westwood dobson mesa high we get to we see those kids now doing a a great job in uh in a standard curricular school of of high school so it's really cool interaction with those kids go ahead with the next slide um since covet hit a lot of our youth programs have dropped off obviously we can't do a lot of interaction things so what we did was we ended up identifying a lot of our families that were in need who couldn't go out whether because you know family member has cancer they don't have a car things like that we've arranged with we partnered with midwest food bank we picked up a lot of food boxes our officers went out there they were delivering food boxes to the families we also partnered with holmes elementary and lehigh elementary where we gave out books to kids during their lunch handouts um just to keep those kids interacted and continued having them continue reading throughout the summer for the last month we've been partnering with the boys and girls club we'll go out there once a week and you can see in the pictures where we're doing an activity with the kid just last tuesday nicole and officer martinez they went and decorated gingerbread or uh graham cracker uh things with the kids where they got to eat it and that was pretty fun um and then we also just hosted our virtual uh teen town hall where we had kids from the boys and girls club and child crisis on there along with kids in the in the community who had questions about kovid they had questions about like commander rash talked about the the social unrest in the country they had questions about you know police use of force and things like that so we hosted a teen town hall for kids who were 14-18 just to kind of keep the the topic relevant for them um so uh that was that was a great outcome with the kids and and good information to them too so uh you go to the next slide and then we just create a an instagram page so if you like the page we're posting a lot of information on on all these things on the team court on the leadership academy showing uh pictures we've all we're also part of uh east mesa alliance where we're teaching um basically healthy habits during this pandemic a lot of kids are getting cooped up they're getting sad you know having thoughts of self-harm and stuff like that so we just started a campaign of healthy lives healthy vibes with the east uh with the mesa prevention alliance and basically we're getting kids involved to uh shoot videos of them working out watching tv you know walking the dogs simple things on how they're keeping sane and keeping their minds healthy um and active and um we're kind of like the ice bucket challenge we're trying to get that out there with these kids and so it's just just starting to take off and we posted one of our cadets she was out there working out she did a great job and sharing that with other other youth so we're just trying to get that word out there that you don't have to turn to drugs you can work out you can stay healthy and you can do the um you know just stay vigilant with your self-care so um that's all i got i know we're running out of time so any other questions or anything like that like i said you can email me it's robert sheehan maysayz.gov and i'll put my email out there you can reach out to us they said we're more than happy to come out to elementary schools junior highs high schools i know the patrol officers they're super busy and they do drop in when they can our unit is strictly 100 youth engagement so we don't carry caseloads or anything like that it's just that's the blessing i have to go out and have fun and play sports with kids and and and teach them on how to be safe in their community all right thank you sergeant sheehan um i see a lot of comments in the chat box and some elementary schools wanting to know how we can get those programs in their school so nicole torres did share her information on there and i know commander rash also shared his information too and we're always open to feedback and you know ways that we can uh support you and what you're doing as well but do we have any questions we have about another 15 minutes so if you do have any questions you don't have to type it in the chat box you can go ahead and unmute yourself and go ahead and ask and sergeant sheehan just shared his information as well so anybody have any questions or any comments feedback you'd like to give us i'll speak up if you guys can hear me um my name is brady bond i am the athletic director and uh assistant principal over safety and security for westwood high school i just wanted to you know comment thank you for having this i think this is a a great first step in in the things we want to see in education and the great thing that we're building we're building these relationships and opening these lines of communications with each other i think our kids will benefit greatly with you know increased participation with our school resource officers being willing to you know have those tough conversations with our students and developing those relationships in a positive way at westwood we've created something called the warrior council which is aiming at you know giving our students a voice talking about the things that are going on in the world with you know the racial injustices and the different things that are going on and giving them a platform to talk about these type of things so i think this is a like i said a great first step from both the school side and from a from a police department side and i i personally want to thank each and every one of you for your service and and hope that we can continue these conversations in these positive ways and find ways to continue to improve and i know i want to work even closer with my school resource officer and our district security to you know be more visible and develop these relationships because in the grand scheme of things it's all about developing relationships i want our our school resource officer to be seen as a positive you know person in our community and not just someone that they see when they're getting into trouble and i think that's that's the direction that i hope that we're all heading and i think you know listening to all you guys i know that's that's where everybody wants to be but again i appreciate you guys i appreciate you letting me get on my soapbox for a couple minutes and again appreciate minnie for for putting this stuff together and opening these lines of communication i think you're new i wanted to say thank you for that brady because i know you sent a lot of questions to us just a couple days ago and it's great to get that participation from the community so that we know that we're you know all on the same page and what it is that we can do a quick question i think it might be the way that i entered and maybe for other people would you be able to email um out all the contact info because on my end i can't see a chat but um thank you for putting this all together and thank you to all the officers for your service yes i will definitely do that i'll follow up with an email um if you can't see the information in the chat i'll make sure that i add it all in there too does anybody else have any questions or comments and bill schultz i want to remind everybody he said he would buy lunch for the officers right i know we have a lot of people on here so really i mean we could end it early but i want to make sure that everyone has a chance to to say anything they want to say or ask anything that they want to ask while they have a chance hey minnie hi i'm tara in closing yeah i mean i feel like you guys heard a lot from us and i think this platform really does allow for us to to be able to reach a broader group and then also hear from you so we really do want to continue these conversations but but us be able you did send us a lot of questions but we we want to hear from you in this setting so even if it comes to uncomfortable conversations or you know i thought it was great brady's talking about a counsel for students maybe we can look at having those students come uh and and talk to us and so that they're really out there they're the ones feeling it and hearing and having concerns or or positive you know we don't know but we'd love to have those conversations and continue on the dialogue so thank you all for for your time today uh thank you to assistant chief butler i see he's still still on here thank you for for being a part of this and and uh your leadership drives what it is that my division does and a lot of what our support does here with mesa pd so thank you uh commander rash commander i know commander peters is in there he supports our our uh our school education forum and a lot of our community forums so thank you and then the sro unit and my youth development team also within this first year we minnie is fairly new to our agency so she has a radio background uh a media background and has really been able to step up uh our outreach in terms of of these virtual settings um and just really just being able to connect our community and so we're happy to have her uh and please look forward to more conversations and at least in this way during coven but again just seeing all that stuff that rob was talking about with our youth development team it really made me go i can't wait for us to get back out there you know like i missed that and i'm sure that you guys all miss that too at your schools with the kids and the energy we can connect this way virtually in a room but it's just not the same as is connecting in person so really looking forward to hopefully getting back to uh some form of normalcy and being able to maybe even meet in person down the road so uh with that keith butler did you want to close it with anything quickly since we have a few more minutes minnie can i this is amy glennatore at longfellow and i just had some books in the chat that i just wanted to address somebody asked how can we um what do our elementary schools need and being the principal at longfellow you know i think i i feel that when we have officers come to our campus there's a really good relationship that is built just from that and several principals had said that coming to just be there so our students see officers in a different way than maybe sometimes they do i've had officers play basketball with students being out there in the mornings just to say good morning to them things like that and i think that's really huge but i think that you know there's somebody else asked about serving students and hearing from students and i would say that at the elementary level those conversations can start then right like we can start talking to our elementary students about their concerns or things that they might be feeling and that would be huge because that's that early intervention to start building relationships at that younger age and so i would welcome that on my campus um to build some type of um student council um you know some of those conversations and surveys so i just want to put that out there those are great great points thank you for sharing that i saw that someone said uh i agree with martina maybe a student survey as well we can give to our intermediate students in elementary to hear what they have to say um i wasn't sure what martinez said but i just wanted to remind everybody that you know that the town halls for example that the youth development team uh held recently they're going to be doing more of those so that's a great way to hear from them also and we'll send you all that information too when when we when they uh put one together so with that uh i guess tara i'll go ahead and let you close it out i said what i i said some good words and and moved it forward i think dan butler's got his unmuted so i'm gonna turn it over to him sure yeah i'll just jump on as it's wrapping up uh one of the things that i wanted to uh just bring up as this group continues to grow and get a little bit more comfortable nothing really is off the table here in a lot of other our other forums we really get some tough pointed questions and if you don't ask those questions you never get our perspective or our response and you heard from a lot of us today we can talk i mean we do a great job of going on and on and on uh so much so that a couple of us fell asleep thankful thankfully they turned their cameras off as it was going but please ask those questions as we go along i know you guys have questions that aren't just related to you know education our schools our teachers our principals our students and the police department but some larger broader societal type questions and we're happy to answer those we're happy to tell you what we're doing uh we're as transparent as we absolutely can be if it's something that we can't talk about able to say yeah you know i really can't because of an ongoing investigation pending litigation i mean those are the things that really kind of hamper us from being open and honest um well just open i guess because we we will be honest um at the time so please as this this goes forward let's let's have those conversations um that's actually why i stuck around just to make sure that uh everybody knew from the top level of our organization that we we want those type of types of conversations so you know hit us hit us with them um sometimes you may not like the answer sometimes you'll really like the answer but we don't grow we don't get better and less we start having those conversation conversations uh so transitioning from that uh one thing i just want to bring up is that we do our community engagement academies i think the email that i read last last was our next scheduled one is october is that right tara i think it's september september is the next one yes so um i know brady pond with what he's doing with the students but everybody else in here it's a one day event on a saturday we spread them out all throughout the city of mesa and it is an incredible opportunity for you um and and it's not unfortunate it's not for a lot of our student age but for you as educators to get a um really in-depth comprehensive look as much as you can in a day at what it is to be police officers but also you guys get this a lot because you work with our school resource officers and a lot of our our police officers to begin with uh but what it's like to be the person underneath the police officer you know people will go in we'll have our officers go in and tell their life story and uh you know it just kind of as strange as it may sound most times people identify with what they're wearing not the individual who's on the inside and once they start hearing hey that person's just like me or they came from a background just like me it really starts to break down some of those barriers that exist and again you guys it's it's i think we're already really close but i encourage you all to attend that um you know we we do cap the size of those things just so we can have enough of a interaction and it can be intimate for us but uh we do them four times a year as soon as this over things over and then finally um as this meeting started i was the the weirdo that left his mute button off and i was watching the news behind but it got to the point where the governor was talking about opening schools and i didn't get it here so if anybody has any information on what he decided with the schools i would love to hear that because it'll save me some reading later on caico i'm from keno and uh i just i i want to give a shout out to nicole and to officer martinez because and and and sergeant because we have a really great relationship with them and um as far as working with music program and it does it makes a difference with our kids on campus one of the things that i know from an equity standpoint and from a cultural standpoint that mesa is really working towards is the social emotional aspect for our kids coming back obviously all of us including you know like the people who are in the room have experienced some type of trauma related to the pandemic or whatnot but on top of it a school like mine that has a high population of black students and brown students who have experienced this kind of just this like repeated racial trauma if you will um how i hear a lot about how the police officers are working to kind of humanize themselves but i guess and it sounded like there was training involved but how is is there training that that um that you guys are working on as far as how to talk like what what's going to be different with the officers who are engaging with our kids and would it help that as we are you know like i don't know what the expectation is for sros or for other officers to be included or a part of the social emotional uh training that i as an administrator do for my teachers on campus so i'm just curious to know that it sounds like there's a lot of humanizing the police officer which is really very important but i'm wondering about how our officers being trained to approach and engage with kids because you know they'll come to you for stickers but like the other issue that we have is is that it's always the kids that are coming for stickers that are the ones that need to be engaged with it's the ones who are hanging back and who are qualified and their trauma and manifest in that kind of quiet way so i was curious to know how that's being addressed by the music police department yeah there's so much to that i mean that's that i mean you're talking about just multiple multiple layers of uh of impacts that you know that go into the life of one of those those children and so um you heard chris rash talk about it it starts in our academy right so we have the longest academy in the state uh we do more training than everybody else and in fact i'm actually um in in plans of extending in another couple of weeks and adding more curriculum but in 2018 we took our communica our basic fundamental communication class that's required by the state so every officer in the state is required to experience uh four hours of training in communication which i know you guys draws are dropping because ours was as well uh but we in mesa took that thing to uh 40 hours of training in communications um that incorporates different aspects of our community so we know what the demographic breakdown of our community is both social and economic um and we take that into consideration so we've increased you know spanish outreach educational outreach i know tracy baca is on here um one of the classes that she taught for years and years and tracy forgive me i don't know if you are still teaching this was a class really it's a class on privilege and there's a there's an awesome interaction that she does that highlights that class to a lot of our officers and and shows that just because everybody's a police officer recruit doesn't mean that everybody had the same background and upbringing um from there so that's the foundation aspect of it from there um you heard chris rask talk about getting that exposure and you guys know this i mean you're in education the more educated we are as people the the different the the way our or our world view changes um so there was an article that came out in the early late 90s early 2000s in policing and and it basically said um and i'll use uh robert sheehan uh because him and i actually just talked about this just the other day but it basically said um of police officers who receive complaints um 75 or so percent of them that only had a high school education or a ged are the ones that get complaints for all the various reasons but the officers with higher education receive uh significantly less so that's another thing that we do is we encourage education for our officers in mesa we are one of the few agencies who still pay tuition reimbursement for our officers so we give every officer that chooses to go get an undergrad or graduate degree eight thousand dollars a year to go to that on top of that being education is the focus we just partnered with maricopa county community college district and developed a fundamental leadership and education uh certification that any officer that wants to become a supervisor in our in our police department they have to not only have the educational requirements um formal education requirements attend all the training that we do every single year and i have the numbers here every one of our so our police department we have 1300 employees here we train every person in here 98 000 hours not eat individually but as a whole 98 000 hours of continuing education every single year so it's significant the amount of just and that's every year and i have i have my numbers right here going back the last four years so almost 100 000 hours of continuing training that our officers go through uh every single year well above and beyond the mandated eight hours that the state requires so we're uh my at last chat at last check uh we were like six times higher than the state required minimum for training in mesa so back to that certification program it's a program that we developed in collaboration with maricopa county community college district that in two years um when in two years it will be mandatory that you have that uh certification completed before you can even hit the minimum requirements to test for our first line supervisor position in our department so on top of that we budget from a police department perspective a hundred thousand dollars a year specifically to individuals throughout our organization to send them to advanced training courses uh myself i i spent three weeks in boston at uh harvard last year going through a a coursework on um progressive policing is really what it was and staying at the tip of the quote unquote spear and being an agency that is you know sticking with what societal expectations are so we do a lot so much in order to to keep our officers educated um in order to you know in order to be good partners with our community thank you for that question kaiko and thank you for um the the answer there assistant chief butler um i want to be mindful of every everyone's time i know we had somebody that already had to log off so um i just want to thank you all again for coming i want to thank you all for everything that you're doing behind the scenes like i said earlier that we don't know about because i know this is going to be a very challenging school year uh but just know that we're here to support you all have my contact information um and i will be following up again with an email next week and i will add all the contact information for the people that um were on this uh meeting to you know uh that talked about the youth development and talked about sros so again thank you all so much for coming and just keep an eye out for that have a good night