Recommendation to request a report from City Manager and Police Chief on gun violence in Long Beach within the past year, including what steps are being taken to address the violence and what additional resources are needed to assist with those efforts.
Communication from Councilman Austin, Councilwoman Gonzalez, Councilmember Muranga and Councilmember Richardson recommendation to request a report from the city manager and police chief on gun violence in Long Beach within the past year. Thank you, Councilman Austin. Yes, thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. And I want to thank my colleagues who signed on to this. This item. I want to, first of all, start by applauding the hardworking and dedicated men and women of Long Beach PD for the work that they do to keep our city safe on a day to day basis. They have a tough job and we very much appreciate the work that they do. However, recently, over the past several months, we have experienced an increase in violent crime, particularly gun crimes in some areas of our city, which has been very, very unsettling for many of us as city council members, but many residents as well, families who have been impacted by gun violence neighborhoods. And it does have an impact when when those actions happen. I know gun violence is actually down. If we look at the statistics over the last 20 years. But we are experiencing an uptick. And from my perspective, any gun violence is is too much gun violence. And we can and should do better. And so what I'm asking for from our or I'd like a staff report from the P.D. to to give us some some some insight as to what sort of strategies and what are we doing to to try to reduce gun violence over the next in the coming months as we are approaching our 2016 summer? Also, what can this council do to better support you in terms of reducing gun violence? Mayor Councilmembers, we have with us tonight all three deputy chiefs, Rich, Rocky, Mike Beckmann and David Hendricks. We also have Tracy Coalinga, our neighborhood resource officer. So I'm going to turn it over to our deputy chiefs. But I do want to point out as well that this is probably the last time you'll see Deputy Chief Rich Rocky buying a microphone. He'll be retiring in early June after a 30 year career. And congratulations, Chief Rocky handed off to you. Thank you, Mr. West. Honorable Mayor. Members of City Council. Yes. We, too, share your concern with the increase in in gun violence, as we've seen so far this year. And we are doing many things to try to impact our gun violence that we are seeing throughout the city. I'd like to point out that one. In 2014, we ended the year in a 40 year low in violent crime in our city in 2015. In 2016, we started to see some of that rebound, specifically in the area of violent crime and in our gun violence. Through April of 2016, our city has experienced a 13.1% in violent crime. We have experienced an increase in our shootings of nearly 42% compared to the same time last year. About one third of these shootings are gang related, and we have seen an increase of 46.7% in gang related shootings from this time last year as well. Murders are also have shown an increase this year of 83.3% year to date compared to 2015. Most of these, however, are gang related, and that's where we're focusing a lot of our attention to impact these crimes. One thing I'm going to add into this is our robberies. Although some of our a lot of our robberies may not be involve guns, some of them do involve guns. So I thought it was appropriate to talk a little bit about that when we're talking about gun violence. But we have shown an increase of 24.3% of robberies through April 2016 compared to 2015. And just to clarify, robbery, this crime occurs when someone takes the property from another by force or fear. And most of these robberies that we experience in our city are street related type crimes. And again, many of them don't involve guns, but some of them do. The common things taken in these robberies are cell phones, personal items such as jewelry and money, and these are often crimes of opportunity. In addition, as we talked a little bit about the 40 year low in violent crime in 2014 and then bouncing back the last 17 to 18 months, according to a recent report of Major City Chiefs Association, major cities across the country and even into Canada are experiencing similar increases in their violent crime categories, as we are seeing here in Long Beach. And they're seeing these during the first quarter of 2016 compared to 2015, like we are here as well. Some of those challenges that we continue to see and that have been something that we've been focused on as an organization is several legislations, legislation, challenges that have come our way in the recent years. Other well-intended to reduce prison populations. We have seen that legislation impact us and we're still working with our. Agencies across the country and major city chiefs to determine how this legislation is, in fact, impacting us to get more empirical data. A lot of what we're seeing is anecdotal at this time. So some of our strategies that we have employed and I'll mention a few, I do have many of them and we can include these in the upcoming report. But I want to point out before I get into the strategies and just thank our dedicated police officers in the city. We have a group of officers who work extremely hard to impact crime and keep our community safe. And in doing that, they work with us and employ various strategies to impact crime. And to name a few, like I said. Through crime analysis, we adjust resources throughout the city to impact crime when and where they're most likely to occur. We focus enforcement at the patrol divisions by directed enforcement teams in Impact Motors, public safety realignment teams, patrol officers and canines. Through April of this year, a public safety realignment team has performed 213 compliance checks and made 93 arrests. We've increased our court order arrests to 82 versus 69 through the end of May of 2015, and May isn't done in 2016. So we'll see that number grow. And we have surpassed our court order enforcement, increased proactive enforcement with the use of overtime for violent crime and property crimes are most likely to occur. These efforts, in combination with quick response to priority calls for service, has resulted in an increase of seized guns this year. These are evidence guns taken off the street. And so far we have seized 186 versus 139 from this time last year. So we are continuing to impact our gun crimes by taking guns off the street that are in the hands of those that want to do harm. Local and regional narcotics enforcement to impact a funding source for gang operations. And with that, I can answer any further questions. Catherine. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And thank you to Councilman Austin for for bringing this forward and for asking me to join join in with them. And thanks to our police officers and our violence prevention team. I know I know very well our statistics. You know, I know statistically we are up in gun violence. And I know statistically there is an increase in homicides, particularly in my council district this year. And I know that conversations are taking place at kitchen tables in our community and taking place taking place in my own home. So I do think it's important that we as a city council do have these conversations at the highest levels of our city. It's important for the public to know that this is a priority for us, that we are doing the best, doing the best that we can, constantly innovating and looking at new approaches, not just focusing on suppression, but placing a real focus on violence prevention and investing in this like we've never invested in it before. So, so, so know. I want to again thank Councilman Austin for bringing this forward. But I think we need to continue to have these these regular updates and dialogs until we turn a corner, until, you know, additional resources are put on the table for us to to really make an impact and keep our community safer. Thanks. Thank you. Next is council member. You're actually. Yeah. Councilor, we want to. Thank you, Mayor. And I, too, want to extend my my gratitude to the men and women of the Long Beach Police Department for all the work they do that they put themselves in harm's way every time that they out in the street. So I really appreciate the work that they do. And I also want to thank Cosmo Ralston for including me in this in this in this item here, because it's my district is obviously very impacted by this as well. One of the things that I think that as we pursue this and go forward, I think we also have to look at the besides the effects of legislation that may have an effect on where we're at right now. But also, we also have to look at what are the economic and socio economic aspects of why we have an increase in crime. We always know that as we go into a recession or we go into a hard economic times, that there's an obvious increase in crime. People are become desperate or become more compelled to get what they need in in a very easy way. And it's been said there are crimes of opportunity. So we always have to keep people informed about how to secure their homes, secure their vehicles, secure their properties. And I think that obviously we need much more information on that. And besides that, we also need to keep more information and contact in regards to what to do in in dangerous situations. I don't think there's enough of that education going on. So I think that's another aspect that we need to look at as well. One of the things that I would also like to see in whatever is coming up in the report is the increase that there has been terms, there has been an increase, as we have heard right now, in gang activity. But I'd also like to know if there's new gangs out there that are that are developing and coming up. Is there any new activities that have been presenting themselves at great challenges to our police department as well as other public safety personnel? And also the the the the the guns that that have been confiscated? Perhaps we will get to a better understanding of where those country are coming from. There's no question that a lot of the the gun incidents that are being perpetrated are from stolen guns. Very few are bought for the purpose of of a career of causing a crime. The most they are stolen. So maybe we have to have more education as well on securing the guns that the owners might buy locally and just giving them more information about how to secure and how the proper use and safety of those those weapons so that they don't become easy access for for a potential burglary or or a car theft, whatever, that that would make make a gun accessible to a criminal without bad intentions. So I would also like to to to have that looked at and more and more education. I mean, there's nothing that is more important than anything with with our community and our residents to give them information. So the more information they get, the more knowledge they gain material, making themselves much more safer. I think it's a it's a is an improvement in our in our community. So I would like to see and they don't cost money. I know that nothing comes cheap. Creating more brochures and literature and distributing those is an issue. So we have to look at and how we're going to not only get these these guns off the street, but also how we're going to secure those that are that are owned by private citizens, that are become victims of a theft that later on becomes a weapon for for bad intentions. Thank you. Councilman Price. Thank you. I want to thank my colleagues for bringing this forward. I actually didn't know about the item until I saw it on this week's agenda. But I think it's a very, very good topic to discuss. It's actually something we've discussed at the Public Safety Committee meetings. And Deputy Chief Hendricks has given us reports on all of these topics, public safety. And I'm wondering, as we're talking, whether it might be useful for us to maybe take up the issue that Councilman Turanga just mentioned regarding new gangs and gang outreach activity, outreach and outreach and education activities that are going on citywide. Because I know we have multiple grants and multiple outreach efforts going on. Maybe we can have that presented at a future public safety meeting, committee meeting, and then we could forward that report to the full council. Is that something that you guys would be able to accommodate? A council member prays. Absolutely. We can accommodate that and come back with that. Okay. So maybe we'll go ahead and add that to our next public safety agenda. And then I'm also wondering and I wonder, I'm just throwing this out there if maybe it would be helpful for us when we do cover some of these topics. And earlier tonight, we had a fireworks item on we'd covered the same topic at Public Safety. Do my colleagues think it might be helpful to have some of those reports forwarded to the full body for discussion? Because we can we can think about maybe doing that from the Public Safety Committee standpoint on issues that really impact the whole city. Gun violence, fireworks. We talked about maybe gang and gang activity and education. Those are three things that I was thinking might be relevant to the full body. We could have the reports forwarded to council. I'd like to hear what my colleagues think about that. Well, I think that that's actually a great, great idea. I also sit on the public safety committee. I agenda is this particular item outside of the committee because I think it merited a a a citywide stage and a council wide discussion. Several of our council districts are impacted. Not each not everybody on the public safety committee is is as impacted. And I wanted to make sure that we were included in our residents, as well as sending a message to our residents, more importantly, that this this this issue of gun violence is extremely important and that the city council , the entire council cares about it. And we wanted to make sure we aired it in front of the council to give it a bigger stage. Obviously, most of the public is not paying attention to our individual committee meetings, but good work is actually happening in those committees. And in fact, much of this information has been presented to us and Public Safety Committee, we're working. Councilmember Price is our chair and is very thoughtful. We are working to with PD and with fire on constantly on on the issues, the big issues facing our city. But this particular item I thought merited a larger discussion. I do have a couple of follow ups and they do want to hear from the public as well. But in light of the challenges outlined, the legislative challenges, the the the challenges that we may have with with staffing, what more can we do as a city to prevent crimes? And I know we have a violence prevention plan. I know we have a lot of great innovative approaches right now that are unique to our city in a lot of ways. But what more can we do? And this this is it's an open ended question, but it's a question that I would just really ask for us to think hard about, because I can tell you that this council member and I know others are committed to doing doing whatever we can to to make our city safer. Councilmember us and we are doing an awful lot in impacting in enforcing violent crime. And we work collaboratively, collaboratively as a city to impact that. So we certainly can look at what what we can do differently or add to. But I think in the report you will see the comprehensive approach that we have. So so, Deputy Chief, I want to congratulate you also on your many years of service in your retirement. We did not see A, B, one or nine or we did not understand and know what the impacts of of legislative actions would be. And there's a lot of there's theories that that maybe some of those actions have resulted in some of the upticks in crime that we're experiencing today. Now that we know or now that there is a theory or hypothesis out there, that that that some of these legislative actions have created a situation now that we have more crime or we need to be more alert. The question is what what else can we do? And if you don't have the answer today, I'd be happy to get an answer at a later later time to give you 30 days to think about it, to come back to this council. But I think what we need to do as a as a what I'm looking for today, and I know our public in many communities are looking for is is innovative new approaches to to dealing with this issue because we have new, new scenarios facing us today. I can answer that, Councilmember. I think that's just something that I know that working on with our government relations with Diana Tang, we can certainly report back on what's happening with those propositions throughout the state of California. Okay. Well, I'm definitely looking forward to hearing those report back from Diana Tang, and I would encourage our PD to continue to stay the course and work continue the great work that they're doing on our behalf. My, my, my, my concern is that we need to look at some alternative approaches, some sort of new strategies that may not have to be laid out here before the council, but some more aggressive approaches to to end gun violence, particularly when you can you can almost put a map out there and understand that, you know, there are hotspots throughout the city that we need to be really, really focusing on. Okay. Councilman Price. Thank you. So one of the things that I hope that we can do, this discussion of an uptick in crime is affecting every single council district. I mean, every single one. I just looked at the TFF that you guys that the police department sent out on crime stats and you know there. Property crimes and theft related crimes have gone up more in some districts, a lot more in some districts than others. And this is a conversation that we're all having across the city. So I would like to elicit input from my colleagues in terms of how we can better use the Public Safety Committee to vet out some of these issues so we don't have to do it tonight. But as as everyone kind of walks away and thinks about these issues because we're all addressing them when we go to community meetings, we're all talking about the various issues that impact our neighborhoods, and we want to make sure that we have accurate information and that we're appropriately setting them as a committee and also as a body. So one of the things that we could do is maybe we can start doing, you know. Regular reports. In terms of specific type of information that we're bringing to public safety. Deputy Chief Hendrix always gives a very comprehensive report on whatever the agenda item is, and I usually reach out to my fellow committee members and ask them what items they'd like to put on the agenda. One of the things that we could do, and I'm happy to do it in our office if my colleagues are interested in this, is we can put together kind of a summary of the items that we discussed at the public safety meeting and what correspondence went along with those agenda items. And we can distribute those. And then if a council member wants to have a further discussion, because I think that's a really great point, we may there are a lot of these topics we should be talking about. As a group. We can agenda as those that come out of public safety and maybe ask for additional reporting that wasn't included at public safety, because sometimes public safety is the first place where we're hearing about an issue and questions come up that necessitate further follow up. So if everybody wants to kind of think about that, we don't have to make any decisions about it tonight. But I'd. Love to be able to use. The Public Safety Committee as a venue to further vet the information that we as a council body hear so that we're all on the same page and able to report to our constituents consistently and and with full advocacy on their behalf. I will say and I remember having a conversation offline with one of my colleagues about Prop 47 before that passed, that I knew for a fact it was going to have the impact that it's had, and it's been devastating. The number of drug addicted individuals we have out there are contributing to our current stats. And that is a situation that I think absent some statewide resources and intervention is not going to go away regardless of how many resources we put into the problem. The reality is there's no longer any incentive for people to make meaningful, sustained long term changes. And as a result of that, we're going to continue to see that problem go up and that problem is going to increase with theft related crimes. And the theft related crimes are going to lead to violence and the violence related crimes are going to lead to gun use and weapons use. That's just the pattern. So anything that my colleagues think as a result of these discussions that we can do to better utilize the public safety committee as we move forward on these citywide discussions, I'd love to hear from you at some point so that we can, you know, be the most efficient and make sure everyone gets access to the reports that we may have. So thank you. Thank you, Councilmember Ringo. Well, I'm just going to go ahead and throw it out there. There's the big elephant in the room is guns. And their accessibility and their misuse. And until we really, really get some real good gun control laws in, we're going to always have this problem. So what can you do as a public safety committee or what can we do as a council if we're going to have to address that? It's not the time tonight or maybe in the near future. It's certainly a federal issue as well as they're looking at implementing some kind of ID. Then application processing for applications for guns. But those are the legal ones. And what we have here but when we're looking at gun violence and we're looking at how they are acquired by gangs and to prepare to perpetrate robberies and assaults and everything else, I mean, we're not going to be able to really get a handle on this. But then, you know, and we do it at the risk of of being a target of the NRA and other pro gun activists out there. So we really won't be able to resolve maybe the gun issue. But certainly, as I indicated earlier, education and information is the immediate thing that we can do. And that's something that I think the public safety committee can do. It increased its accessibility to the public in terms of what to do in those types of situations or how to secure, again, their their their guns and making them less available for for theft and illegal use. So it's a difficult issue. It's one that's not going to be resolved immediately, obviously, but it's certainly one that eventually it's going to come to us. I recall many years ago, the city council was addressing the very same topic, gun violence. And there was a proposal put on the council. I don't know who was around at that time back this goes way back 1980s and 1987, somewhere around there. There was a proposal to eliminate what they called at that time, Saturday night specials. Anybody caught with that would be or committing a crime would have added penalties for for carrying those. And they were basically outlawed in the city in terms of gun sales. I think stores were required to eliminate the sales of those types of handguns. So maybe that could be another way of addressing this type of of activity as well as I think there was also an effort, not a recall when that was, but to also look at the elimination of gun sales of an AK 47 or other automatic automatic weapons. How many AK 40 seconds are used in these crimes? I have no clue. I'm probably, I'm guessing, probably very small because there aren't that many out there anymore. But those those types of things that we could look at, maybe the types of guns that are being used in the in in gun violence would be. Useful, perhaps, in terms of the types of guns. I'm not a gun aficionado, so I have no clue as to what type of gun is popular with with purpose. But maybe that's something that we could look at in the future. MCHUGH Councilman Alston? Yeah. I don't want to beat this to death, and that's probably not the best word to use, considering. But it's a real word because there are a lot of people in a lot of families facing just that death in their their families. Death on our streets as a result of guns. I brought this idea forward in all sincerity, to try to get ahead of summer 2016. Generally, we see a rise in crime during the summer, and I do not want this council or anybody in the city to to become desensitized to gun violence is not normal. It should not be acceptable for for people to be dying in the streets as a result of gun violence. And I think we can and should do more as a city council. I did ask a question and I got two different types of answers. What can we do or can we do more? And the answers and what I like to think about is, is improving technology. Improving community policing and new approaches to community policing. Gang intervention strategies. And I know we have all of that there, but I think we have to do more because the numbers don't support a measure of success. And so I think we need to continue to do more, continue to work hard. This is no way a blemish on our our hard working men and women of our police department. It's no way of a blemish on this city and its leaders, but we have to do more. And the gun violence I went to a vigil just a couple of weeks ago, and it was it was heart wrenching that a 16 year old kid was was murdered in a park within walking distance of his home to to be with his family and to understand the anguish and the the pain that that that family was suffering as a result of that crime. And this is happening all too often throughout our city. We need to pay attention to this and we need to step up. And so we may not answer the questions this evening. We may not have all the answers this evening. But, you know, I would just ask my colleagues and yes, we're going to work through our public safety committee and city staff to identify more solutions. And I'm committed to doing that. Thank you. I'm just gonna make a quick, quick comment as well. I just want to make sure that we to add as well that I appreciate the conversation and think there's no bigger issue right now in the city than ensuring that we are adequately addressing this issue of crime that's beginning to increase across the city. And we know that it's not a challenge that we have alone is a challenge that we share with almost every major city, particularly in the state of California. And on the issue of guns. The chief has often said that we are now seizing more guns today than we have in recent memory. So we seized more guns were seizing more this year than we did last year. We seized more guns last year than we did the year before. And we're just seeing more and more illegal guns on the street. And so that is a incredibly serious concern, I think, of everyone that certainly is of the police departments, and that is something that we need to address. In addition, I think that we have to also having a realistic and honest conversation about the resources that our police department has. I think they are doing everything they can with what they got. And I just want to thank them for for their hard work. They're out there. They're out there every single day working very hard. And and we know that it's it's it's incredibly tough. And so we appreciate them. And I want to thank everyone that's had the discussion tonight. There's a lot more to do. The just as important is and the chief will say this, as important as policing is violence prevention and making sure that ah that there's parks for kids to play in, making sure the programs are strong, making sure that services are in place for those in need that need them as well. And so I think that that approach has to be a unified approach and it's crime fighting, but it's also violence prevention and ensuring that people have access to to economic opportunity and to and to safety in their neighborhoods. So I will say to Mr. City Manager, it's I think it's partly related. The sooner that we can implement our citywide LED light program, I know we've started that. I think the better we've having visited some of our test neighborhoods that are that are seeing that it's it is a dramatic difference of how bright we change neighborhoods and we had that light. So the sooner the better. And in fact, we should speed up that process if possible. Let me turn this over to the public. Anyone any public comment on this item? Please come forward. Karen Refight again. We will never get ahead of this problem as long as we continue to be reactive instead of proactive. Before I retired, I worked for the Boys and Girls Clubs for six years. I've done over 30 years in youth work, many of it in gang infested territories. I actually employed gang members, ex-gang members in one of my previous jobs. Five years ago, I wrote the Calgary grants pro bono for the city. Those grants were proactive grants and they were incredibly successful. Pat West and Community Development made a decision to shift in a different direction. There are differences and gang members. Adult gangs are different than youth involved in gangs. We need to identify those differences and create programs that divert our youth away from being wanting to be involved in gangs. Some of the kids have no choice with their in a third, now fourth or fifth generation family that's gang involved. You have to do something really drastic to break that gang cycle. As long as we deny that that Long Beach has a major drug problem. And Councilwoman Price, your comments just right on. Long Beach is one of the main entry points for drugs in the United States, and we need to have more resources. And I think one of the escalations in the gang violence is because we no longer have the gang unit. The gang unit was actually, I think, very critical in reducing the impact of gangs on our city. So I hope that the committee can discuss some of these options. I really hope that you would look at the Calgary program that was that could have been a model program. And many cities copied that grant and used it to get a grip, a Calgary crowd to their own. So I think we've missed an opportunity here and this is part of what the outcome is for missing the opportunity . Thanks. Thank you. See no other public comment? I'll take it back to the council. This as they believe you receive and file by Councilman Austin. Please go out and cast your vote. And then staff. He'll be returning hopefully at some point here too with the much more report things. Motion carries. Thank you. Next item. Report from Financial Management Recommendation to approve the fiscal year 2016. Second Departmental and Fund of Budget Appropriation Adjustments Citywide.