Recommendation to request that the Special Order issued on January 16, 2020 become a permanent policy change for the Long Beach Police Department.
Did you want to turn over to the police department? I would if the cheeses available to comment specifically on what the special orders are. And then I will comment as to why the Budget Oversight Committee have brought this item forward. I mean, I'm sorry, the public safety committee. I'm missing my committee. Mr.. Mr.. Potter, can I the Chief prepared there to give some comments? Yes, he is. Chief Lunar. Chief and you might be muted. For people cheap lunar. Can you hear me? Hello? Yes, we can hear you. All right. Thank you, mayor and council members. Special orders affect our entire department. They're issued when we have an immediate or an urgent need to make an adjustment to policy or procedure. Special orders remain in place for revisions to current or the development of policies or take place. Our special orders are reviewed and signed by the Chief. Of Police. And eventually are archived in our Long Beach PD policy manual. While special orders are in place, a number of things continue to take place related to the special order. This includes revisions and adjustments to the order and or policy language, consultation and review as necessary by the City Attorney and human resources, as well as meeting confers with the impacted labor unions. And this includes employee feedback as well. Again, the special orders allow PD to make immediate adjustments during the formalized policy creation process. All employees must follow special orders as if they are policy. They're required to comply with rules and provisions in our department manual. So this came from a special order related to use of force, I believe this item from the Public Safety Committee and that is under development process to be archived in Long Beach PD Manual. This concludes my report and I can answer any. Questions you may have. I'll go back to Councilmember Price. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, and thank you for that presentation on behalf of the Department. As was stated earlier this year, the Long Beach Police Department took significant steps to address issues around uses of force, the duty to intervene, de-escalation, and a number of other policies to improve their policing approach. These have been implemented throughout through a special order and are not currently included in the Police Department Operational Manual. However, these policies are currently in effect as a result of the special order. In this light, the Public Safety Committee recommends that the city manager work with our police department to implement these policies as permanent policy changes and add these to the Policy and Operations Manual. These are significant changes that will have a positive impact for every resident in the city as we develop and continue to refine our policing approach and methodology. I urge the Council to support this motion. Thank you. Councilman Orson. Thank you, Mayor, and thank you. Staff for the report. I certainly support this, but I would ask a follow up question. To Deputy Chief or Assistant Chief English to please outline what the special orders actually do. You know, these are specifically related to use of force and the legal. Authority to. Use force. I think these are very important, but also discussed to authorized training, negligent discharge of duty to intervene, de-escalation. These are all very, very important. I think topics that that are that are fundamental in our discourse and the fact that these special orders were put in place on January 16th of 2020 this year, I think is is noteworthy. And so could you please just outline the changes and what prompted the changes in the use of force policy? Special special orders related to use of force. That's that's fluid and ongoing. And what we do is we evaluate best practices, community input, legislative changes and things that are need an immediate course correction. A special order allows us to do that. For example, with you mention the use of force policy. In January of 2019, we issued. A special order that impacted our use of force policy because we needed to make sure that we. Had language. And definitions in our policy that were clear to our employees and to the community, and also describe the levels of force that were allowed by officers that can be anywhere from a control to a lethal force. In January of 2020, we issued our special order that based on and I talked a little bit about this at the Public Safety Committee meeting based on input from PERC, the Police Executive Research Foundation. And we added a reverence for human life at the heart of all of our use of force. This is where we added the definitions and the mandates for de-escalation. Duty to intervene, medical attention, and some of the other issues related to lethal force. Earlier this year, we issued a special order suspending the use of a credit restraint. We have an immediate need to address that issue. So we issued the special order and also a special order with some definitions and some clarification for no knock warrants . And so the special orders exist for us to address things that require. That immediate. Course correction for the police department. I hope that answers your question. I think it does. Thank you. And I appreciate that. Our police department is actually moving and. Has been moving to address these important. Policies within the department. I hope we can continue. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Vice Mayor Andrews. I know. No comment. Councilor Pearce. It's about that can get off me. I just wanted to say I appreciate the movement. I look forward to future conversations and glad to see that we're making some progress. Thank you. Councilor Richardson. Thanks, Mr. Mayor. I want to echo that. I wasn't sure what this was a couple of weeks ago when we discussed it. I'm glad to see the back up materials here. I do remember this now when this when this came out. I want to make sure that the public understands what it means. These steps do make sense. I wasn't aware that we didn't have some of these on the books, but I think having this as a permanent policy, things like no knock warrants and you know, these are issues where the public really wants those things. So thanks to the Public Safety Committee for bringing this to the council. And I think we need to make sure that our policies, particularly sensitive policies, are displayed on the city website so people can know where the city of Long Beach stands on on some of these issues. So a good start. Thanks. Thank you. Is there any public comment? I'm sorry. Councilmember Price. Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. And I appreciate the comments from my council colleague. You know, one of the interesting things, as we've gone through this process and try to start the conversation and we're doing it on a citywide level, a council level and a committee levels are multiple committees. I'm sure we're trying to think about reforms and best practices that we can adopt. One, I will say, having started the process and going through the process, our police department has been really, really receptive to looking into and researching every issue. I know that I've brought to them and I know the same with my committee colleagues who brought items, everything we've brought forth. There's never been a no way that won't work. It's always been, well, that could work. Let us look into it. But more often than not, and I was really surprised, I have to admit, more often than not, the ideas that we have researched and are quickly bringing to the table at every public safety committee meeting, our police department has already research and implemented in some form. I'm not saying there's not a lot more work to do. There is, but I'm just saying that I was very much myself unaware of all of the different things that they are doing already. As part of this national conversation, at least beginning the implementation of several of the different reform methods and research information that we're getting now getting a hold of as members of the public. So I just wanted to acknowledge that with our police department. Things like bystander ship policies, for example, which I know is one that we're we're talking about currently in public safety. They've done a lot of great work. And in my response to a suggestion that they work with Georgetown University on a program they have there that freedom municipalities like are they were more than willing to reach out and start that conversation to enhance what they're currently doing. But I just want to acknowledge that there are a lot of things that I myself was unaware of. And I agree with Councilman Richardson. I think the policies are on the Web, but they're a little bit challenging to find. So if we can figure out how to showcase them a little bit better and make it more user friendly for people to access. You know, people don't know what they don't know. And so there's a lot of assumptions made. And if people are making assumptions about what we're not doing and we are doing it, then perhaps we're not doing a very good job of telling people what we're doing. So with that, I just want to thank the police department for the presentation. Thank you. Let's go do public comment. And I'm. I'm sorry. 1/2. Katherine Pierce, if you're another comment. I'm sorry about that. It's fine. I wanted to. It was good to hear Councilmember Pryce recognize. I think the fact that our PD does make changes, but either the council is not notified or the public is not notified. And I know that we're going to have many more conversations about not only PD use of force, but just the protocols in general . And the biggest thing that we can do for our constituents, for the residents in our city, is be transparent and open and be able to have information that's accessible to everybody. And so I wanted to just go on the record one more time of saying that I wholeheartedly support that notion. So thank you. Thank you. Let's do public comment. There are no public comments for this item. Okay. Okay. And let's go ahead and take a vote, please. District one, i. District two. I. District three. High District for. High. District five. I. District six. My District seven. I strict a strict nine. Motion carries. Okay. Thank you. We have two items that are I know we can into contracts. And so I want to turn it over to the city manager to do EMS nine and 11. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So we have a presentation by Dana Anderson on the item number 11. We're really excited to be in front of you tonight with some significant contracts in front of you for our employees. These are responsible contracts. They also have some significant savings and givebacks from our employees who recognize the seriousness of the financial issues that we have been facing. And they help us meet the $11 million goal set in the budget. And we will be bringing, hopefully, other contracts to you very soon on September 8th.