we wanted to get everybody together back in june and i was telling a couple of you that you know back in june uh was was not a good time we obviously had a spike back in june and to get everybody together to go over the use of force review and implementation committee uh it wouldn't have been a good time so thank you to each and every one of you for coming i think tara hall minnie and and her entire staff and and chief rankin for putting this together um there's there's no more important time now to get together as a community and and discuss what we're going to discuss today our country is speaking our mesa community is speaking and your police department and mesa police department is listening you know community it literally means by definition collaboration and on top of that it means partnerships and it means relationships and relationships are built on trust and i think each of us would agree that trust is only gained and built through actions that are taking taken on commitments meaning it can't just be words you can't just stand up and speak about what a police department is going to do or what we're going to do as a community and then check a box if you will you have to take action on those words and today you're going to hear about some of that action that we're going to take and reform there's been a lot of talk about police reform lately and i want to tell you that that word is not a scary word for the mesa police department in fact we embrace police reform we embrace reform on a regular basis because those ideas to help improve our hiring our training and our actions of our officers is what makes us better community partners because we are not separate we're not separate because of the badge that we wear in the uniform that we wear we work together i was telling a group the other day that you know an officer you know years ago you used to say something about customers or citizens aren't customers a customer is somebody that you want to give a five-star yelp review when you leave a restaurant that you just hope that they come back because you're trying to make money off of that person and attract them to your business we're not in a business to make any money we're in a business because we live work and play in this community and so it's very important for us to do that a little history in our agency is we you know the reason why i say that we're not foreign to uh reform or or worried about that word and embrace it is the history of our department shows that we're one of the first agencies in the country well over 25 years ago to bring community action teams or community action officers out to the street and have them part of the police department problem-oriented policing intelligence-led policing working with the community working with non-profits all to come to a common goal with the community is something that the mesa police department was built on years and years ago you look at initiatives that were featured such as axon cameras you hear a lot about different departments now and different reforms wanting to go nationwide to bring axon cameras to police officers the mesa police department has had axon cameras since 2012. we were one of the biggest agencies in the country to outfit our officers with axon cameras over eight years ago and in fact the department of justice used a study that was done in the city of mesa for axon for body worn cameras as a guide for other departments around the country to use so you know we i my point is this as you go on um the comprehensive report many of you in this room worked on the 21st century policing report under the president obama's administration that report that task force was put together of subject matter experts and academic folks from around the country and citizens from around the country to really take a deep dive into law enforcement and the recommendations that they recommend law enforcement agencies and act and that happened in 2014 chief rankin will go over this book right here this is mesa police department in the 21st century a lot of you worked on that those were 59 recommendations in 2014 from that task force report well the mesa police department took on that brought in our citizens to a quite a lesser degree than what we're doing even here today to advise us and help us look at those recommendations and then answer the questions on what we're doing uh for each of those recommendations we also were one of the first in the state to bring de-escalation training now sometimes de-escalation training for us us old guys and yeah i'm calling myself old it started with verbal judo in the academy and i think a lot of the old guys are probably not in their head but what does that mean it's communication it's talking to people it's making a connection it's humanity it's it's it's compassion it's empathy it's respect that you show to each and every person that you contact on the street so we expanded that baseline hours to now the mesa police department who runs our own academy we have more hours of communication and de-escalation training than anybody in the state and does that mean we're done absolutely not so um why are we here i mean yeah if the mesa police department chief coss if it's so good then why are we here today well the point is is we are we have never reached the finish line nor can we ever say that we're at the finish line because we're never going to be perfect we're going to make mistakes and we have made mistakes the key to it is that we're a humble learning organization that is always hungry to be the best in the in the country and get the best practices on behalf of our community and we can never stop working on that and we can never stop being too transparent with our community what we're talking about today is the use of force review and implementation committee quite frankly what happened over two years ago when this started or about two years ago when this started and what result that you're going to see today is where a lot of agencies are going to try to get to in the coming years based on what's going on around the country and the demand and rightfully so of our community to make changes within the police department this was the police executive research forum which is a nationally recognized think tank if you will not associated with any police department not associated with the department of justice who are independent coming in our department and looking at all of our use of force policies and any policies related to the use of force to include how we investigate officer-involved shootings how we investigate excessive use of force complaints just about everything they gave us 66 recommendations in a book that was probably about that big i kid you not so what did we do it was the brainchild of chief rankin who we'll talk in just a minute um to hey let's not get in a room in a board room with a bunch of other police executives look at these 66 recommendations and then just simply kind of pick and choose which policies we change what language we change how we do things instead he had the thought look in 2014 when we did uh the 21st century policing project we involved our community how about doubling down on that and involving our community over a long period of time to have a significant impact in where our department goes based on these 66 recommendations from an independent body that we proactively brought to the mesa police department and that's that was where this was was born then he decided hey i think it's even better to bring a project manager jeff weiner in to oversee that project so it's not just a lieutenant a sergeant it's an officer or somebody that's running that project this is somebody that we're going to hire we're going to contract but they're going to keep us on track and make sure we get these done because i have to tell you bureaucracy is slow and i think everybody in here knows that whether you work in the private sector or you work in the public sector so what jeff did for us is keep us on track to make sure that we didn't just look at these recommendations that we took action so then we brought in several citizens from the city of mesa and surrounding areas academics our union heads our union officers and our subject matter experts pretty much everyone that's in the room right now standing by some of these posters and we brought them together to work with us on our policies and then all those recommendations including every recommendation from the community came up to the chief's office and the assistant chiefs for final review and implementation and so that's what brings us here today involving our citizens the academic community to get recommendations that's the type of transparency that you'll expect from the mesa police department and that you'll see from the mesa police department not just from this project but from our critical incident review board that reviews all use of force shootings use of force incidents that that people complain that we've used excessive use of force our citizens will be looking at that in detail and what they say matters and their opinion are going to come straight up to me for my review we're going to involve citizens in our training in our training committee in our training academy and what we do and and setting out our training calendar in concert with our community we've uh increased our our forums even today and i was talking to uh pastor kirby about like how are we going to keep we got to keep the forums going we need we need our citizens to participate in our forums so we need to get creative on what we do during the pandemic tomorrow night we start a new forum a youth forum so these are mcc students and and high school students graduating going to college that are going to work with us that have a ton of ideas we just did a faith and family or a faith and blue competition where we had what 60 essays 65 essays written by college or high school students throughout the mesa area and we just chose winners the other day and i will tell you those high school students taught me a thing or two and they taught my staff a thing or two and there's things that they said in those essays that we're going to implement within our department so i think the important thing for our mesa citizens for our community as a whole because it's not just mesa mesa is only separated by by traffic lights and street names to chandler tempe phoenix everywhere this is all one community is that you have a department that's going to be dedicated okay we're humble we realize that we have work to do but the promise from us is you're going to get that work done and i think what you'll see from chief rankin's presentation is a kind of a little bit of a deep dive in what we did and how we did it and this is just the start so thank you everybody for attending and i'll turn this over to chief rankin thank you [Applause] well good evening it's certainly a pleasure to be here i normally say it's uh great to look at the crowd and see all those smiling faces not necessarily true today i'm just going to reiterate some things that chief cost hit upon the bulk of the next five ten minutes is really going to lay out a foundation of what this team did he was kind in his words and saying that this was my brainchild and i appreciate those kind words but the reality is is i looked elsewhere for inspiration and honestly that inspiration was president obama's 21st century task force a task force on 21st century policing when you look at the dynamics of that task force you know this the task force was comprised of subject matter experts it was comprised of police practitioners it was comprised of community activists community members and activists so when you look at our committee members and you look at how we comprise that it mirrors what you saw in president obama's 21st century policing it worked then in 2014 and we truly believed that it would work here in 2020 although we began this in 2018 i'll walk you through how we got to where we're at today and it was no small lift it took everyone on the committee to for this to be successful so again we looked at president obama's 21st century policing task force as our inspiration when they looked at what policing needed not only today but well into the future they broke it down into six different pillars as you look at those pillars they deal with trust policy technology community policing officer training and officer wellness those are the key principles and based off of those key principles the task force provided 59 recommendations chief cost picked up the book our response we looked at each and every one of those action items and we compared how are we doing against what is now best practice how are we doing now as it relates to industry standard in policing and based on those observations and recommendations we got to work fast forward to 2018 the chief mentioned that we've had our own set of issues and we truly are a learning organization and at times it's best to bring others in to get a new vantage point to get a new perspective on the work that needs to be done within the organization not that we don't think we have competent capable people to provide recommendations but again to bring out outside groups to provide some recommendations we felt was to our advantage in the advantage to the community the chief mentioned perf is a um a policy group that looks at police policies throughout the nation you have the park a police assessment resource center again another policy group that was brought in to look at our policies as it relates to use of force and discipline and then ultimately you see john mcmahon and associates and rick romley former county attorney who was brought in to look at some specific cases those four bodies of work provided 66 recommendations for the committee to look at again we did not want to simply look at it solely from a police perspective again similar to what the 21st century task force policing model had done for us we reached out to the community and i look in the crowd and there's a lot of members sitting here today that we met every two weeks for nine months and i've been on plenty of committees and this is what i know about committees they start strong and they end not as strong as they started not this committee not this committee every single time a hundred percent of our folks were there for nine months every two weeks looking at these 66 recommendations i'm proud of them and i hope that they're proud of the work that they accomplished during this period we came up with five uh pillars policy training supervision discipline and administration and as you look around the room you're going to see each of those pillars represented discipline admin policy and in the others around the room now you'll also see uniformed officers standing by each one of those pillars so this is not me giving a 45 minute lecture because no one wants to hear that and it's much more interesting to talk to the officers who are standing by each one of those pillars and they could discuss the process and the thought process behind how they came up with the recommendations because what we wanted to do is we didn't simply want to look at those recommendations provided by these four groups and and say yay or nay what we wanted to do is we wanted to create a system that was repeatable so that in the future if other recommendations were presented that we would be able to give it the same look so you look at the chart that's before you so we looked at an evidence-based research basis our officers smes our committee members looked at what the industry standards are what the best practices are and brought that into the discussion we looked at community involvement not only in terms of the committee members that sat there but looking at the best practices has this worked in another jurisdiction has it worked in another community if so what allowed it to work what were some of the pitfalls all of those things were considered before we went to the chief of police and the executive staff letting them know what the recommendation was going to be this is not intended for you to read what it's intended to do is really allow you to see the level of complexity involved in reviewing each and every one of these recommendations so jeff weiner who was mentioned by chief cost earlier also crystal richardson i don't see her right there she is waving so uh jeff if you could wave to the crowd i know you're standing in the back and then uh crystal that crystal is the managing partner for ce wilson and then uh jeff is our project manager this would not have been possible without their help the reality is this was a big lift you know although we're a police department we often operate like a fire department meaning that we have to put out the fires of the day if we don't put out the fires of the day then bigger issues arise so when you're talking about a project that could last for two years you want some continuity you want someone driving that train to its final and logical conclusion so both crystal and jeff helped us down that path which lead us to where we're at today they built the repository each and every one of those 66 recommendations were plugged into that repository all the analysis the best practices in the industry standards are listed there on the right to the bottom left you have all of the uh the research that went into it then the final guidance and then the implementation why is that important well after this project is done we'll be able to duplicate this process we're one of the larger police departments in the nation uh 34th largest city there's 18 000 police departments and oftentimes medium-sized and smaller sized police agencies look for a model and we've always wanted to be a model of excellence for others within the law enforcement community this is the committee there's a lot of folks on it and i'll tell you again our experts from policy professional standards patrol training legal and risk management special operations labor so our unions homicide then you see the wide array of community members that we worked with every two weeks and not to miss three professors from arizona state university who are there each and every week their assistance and their knowledge in this field certainly helped guide us throughout the entire process so professor michael scott is here today so stop by visit him chat with him and he'll give you an insight into this process 14 days 14 days cycle i talked about every two weeks four policies every 30 days the executive staff looked at 30 policies and those policies were either accepted rejected or sent back to the committee for either uh changes of changes needed to be made if if it was accepted then it would move on to the implementation stage this is uh you look at this chart you have the the burn down rate in orange and then you have the uh completion reviews in blue the gray line and the yellow line show a couple blips you know those as uh that blip being the coven 19. but you know what we didn't let this pandemic stop us so everyone went to uh the last meetings virtually although that was a challenge everyone in this room managed to overcome that challenge and we finished what we started so again thank you to the committee i'm not going to talk in depth about these pillars because that's what the smes are going to do pillar one is policy and you'll see that there's several different recommendations listed in there those recommendations are listed with within the appropriate section so when you go to the policy section along the wall you'll see each and every one of these represented there and the same holds true for training supervision discipline and administration some are more controversial than others some are mere tweaks you know we don't shy away from reform as the chief mentioned we dealt with the issue of the use of the crowded restraint technique we dealt with the strikes of the face neck and head your smes will tell you exactly what the thought process was in the recommendations implementation 32 have been implemented at this point all 66 will be implemented by the end of the year this is not merely rubber stamping this is checking the policy checking the lesson plans making sure the training isn't in line and then jeff goes back with those smes and conducts an audit to ensure that implementation is complete so very key to this process at the end of the day was it what good does it do to look at recommendations that aren't implemented recommendations that aren't implemented are just words on the piece of paper that don't matter to this this matters to us and i know it matters to you because that's why you're here last slide go to our home page go to our home page all of these recommendations are online for you if you click on that green tile it says use the force review project there are 66 power points in there that give you every step of the way in terms of what those recommendations were what they are what the process the thought process was gives you all that information the multi-colored tile bottom left all our policies are there for you you could click on any policy you want to look at the use of force policy and see that it was implemented like we said it's implemented it's online go online and see that the change that we say has been implemented truly has been implemented so i'm excited about this and i appreciate you being here i'm done speaking at this point we're going to open it up to what we call the open house please feel free don't be shy if i could get the smes by their uh by each of their pillars they're here give them a hard time if you have to they're here on overtime some of them so i want them to earn their money all right so enjoy they're here for you they'll uh they'll answer your questions thank you very much okay this is pillar one policy uh lieutenant martin related to policies and with the use of force how does mesa police department develop policies regarding this divorce it's a very lengthy process we have subject matter experts inside our department on use of force we consult with those experts we also researched use of force practices across the nation and we look for what they call best practices what's being used across the nation look at cities are comparable size of our population our demographics and also our own department there's a review process of all our force policies that goes through a legal review by our own staff members and then is finally approved by our executive members including the chief of police and i also may add too that all their use of force policies are reviewed on a yearly basis just to make sure they are still staying within best practices across the nation can you tell me what policy change has the greatest benefit to the community well i had to say to all of them uh but one thing i think the community most interested in um we added to our policy the duty to intervene and remember this stuff we began working in 2019 um reviewing all the use of forest policies and we began to realize that our policy was missing the duty to intervene however that wasn't lacking in our training every single police officer for the city of mesa went through police training and had to show proficiency in recognizing when it was time to intervene during a case and it was a scenario of use of force but we found out our policy was missing just saying just to do that so that's one of the things that we added and i think the public be kind of interested in the wake of the george floyd incident this is pillar two training did mesa police department discontinue the use of chokeholds well that's a good question the mesa police department currently does not use choke holds and we haven't used chill colds choke hold is something that's applied around the neck that restricts breathing we don't do that we never practice it we don't plan on doing it on the other hand we do implement something that's called the carotid control technique which is used to reduce blood flow which capacitates people in their ability to fight us uh we still do that and yes we have made some changes to that we have restricted that and as a matter of fact we just raised the level so it's uh still authorized uh when deadly fourth is authorized so that's our current policy and that's one of the changes we made is we just raise it to a higher level of force but it's still a useful technique to deal with seriously violent offenders that we come in contact with and which change in the use of force policy will help build better trust with the community i think one of the most important things that we did um is to improve and revise some of our training mechanisms one of the best things we did recently is we created an advanced training squad um this advanced training squad uh will develop and uh bring training to our office on the street um so they're better trained and are better able to perform uh their jobs what's the department policy regarding shooting at a moving vehicle our department has always had a policy on shooting at moving vehicles however to clarify that policy and to account for recent trends and updates to get more of a clear direction to officers and supervisors we changed the policy to say the following shooting at or from a moving vehicle is prohibited the only exceptions are an apparent act of terrorism when the vehicle is used as a weapon of mass destruction or is being used as a dangerous instrument someone inside or someone inside the vehicle is using or threatening deadly physical force we feel that this clarifies the policy a little bit better makes it clear for the officers to understand and supervisors to be able to implement this policy and be effective in their supervision okay so what are supervisors doing to reduce the incidents of force by officers well this is a good example of this policy that we implemented to in order to try to achieve that and what we have is that supervisors now are mandated to be aware of the use of forced reporting findings and track use of force involving officers under their command those findings then will be determined whether additional training is needed and ensure policies are being followed in the field and furthermore actionable data will be provided by our training unit to the different department divisions enabling supervisors to facilitate training directives specific to their division and squad also super supervisor supervisors are expected to monitor the behavior of officers to ensure training is implemented correctly corrective measures should be applied immediately and supervisors should be held accountable for non-action we believe that the overall theory behind this policy is that accountability is an expectation in our department supervisors must demonstrate the ability to establish and maintain a high performance team and work environment by holding themselves accountable first okay what impact does concurrent investigations have on the community that's a great question so concurrent investigations really deals with uh reviewing any critical incident from a number of different uh areas to include uh our training component our policy component as well as the normal investigation that would occur talk to me about because i want to explain this to people what are what is a concurrent investigation so a concurrent investigation is really taking the facts as we know them at that time and investigating them from from three different areas first would be your critical component or your criminal component the second would be a training component and the third would be a policy component and each of these different areas work together or work separately to develop a final product that is really comprehensive now how do you think like how can the community feel safe coming forward to file a complaint so we actually offer several different ways to make a complaint one of which is in person any supervisor in our department will accept a complaint we also take complaints online we investigate anonymous complaints we investigate complaints over the phone so we have a number of different mechanisms i would say paper format or a newer electronic format or just in person okay so all uses of force are reported what does the department do with the data like you said all use of force reports are all reported and they're actually looking they are actually examined at multiple levels within the department so basically an officer uses force on an on a suspect in a crime so that's reported the author will write a supplemental report or or an original report and then a sergeant will respond to the scene conduct an investigation on the use of force he will conduct a he will complete a use of force report which is completed by him then it's reviewed by his lieutenant the lieutenant review it if the lieutenant doesn't see any issues with the the actual use of force he will approve it with no changes and he will submit it to his his or her commander and then the commander will review it and then submit it to pd training police department training now if the lieutenant does see some issues he'll report the issues to the commander and the commander will also report to pd training about the the issues and concerns and then that that actual lieutenant will have about 15 days to complete an investigation on how he can make corrective actions in this use of force it could be as simple as a a tackle debriefing for the squad it could be uh like a training for the officer it could be it could actually it could lead to a corrective action plan for the officer or ultimately if there was some use of force that wasn't authorized at all by policy violation it would go to professional standards or internal affairs for a full blown out and investigation now a good thing about so each each use of force instant is actually a learning experience for everybody so take everything out the the reporting aspect of it pd training looks at all these use of force reports every every use reports use the force report that a police sergeant completes it's ultimately forward to pd training pd training meets with the executive side meeting all the police chiefs once a month and goes over every use of force application that occurred that month and then with that pd training makes recommendations to the chiefs of police whether we need to do officer training supervisor training or basically department-wide training to make correct corrective actions on these use force applications and then once all that is done it is stored into a major database that we call ia pro and then with that professional standards can actually track each time an officer uses use of force so if you get one officer that is using use of or using force like excessively we can track that and we can deal with that individual officer to see what the issue is um what's the mesa police department doing to make community members at ease with filing a complaint you know first of all we we accept and investigate all allegations of misconduct involving any police member and there's how we're making it easier for them there's multiple ways that you can follow a complaint against a police officer one actually is in person you can come to the police station and request to speak to a supervisor a supervisor come down and take the complaint and then investigate it thoroughly to see if there's actually any out or any if the allegations were actually true and then if there was we'll deal with that officer on a personal basis you can file in person you can do it through the us mail you can actually write a letter to the police department and then we'll investigate that way you can also go online you go to our police department website and then you can there's a link just to file a complaint and it goes directly to professional standards they'll triage it whether if it's a serious allegation they'll take care of it not they'll forward it to that officer's supervisor to investigate so you have in person you can call by the telephone you can speak to a supervisor or you can call internal affairs directly so we're trying to make it as easy and as open for anybody to come in to file a complaint and then once the complaint is fully investigated that complainant is notified with about the findings and then once it's all completed they can actually get a copy of the complaint through a public record request and then ultimately you don't have to give your name you can report anonymously we investigate all complaints whether it's a person actually coming into an or it's anonymous