Transcripts For SFGTV Government Access Programming 20240713

In june of 2018, almost a year ago, the budget and legislative analysis analyst provided the board with a performance audit of the San Francisco Police Department so we could better understand, number one, how to put the police are deploying police staff, that is funded by the general fund, and number two , how uniform staff is allocated to administrative versus patrol duties. One major finding and recommendation of that audit was that in light of an increase in property crime in our city, with public demand for more officers on the street, the San Francisco Police Department should put as many administrative positions in as possible. This is best practice is recognized by major Law Enforcement associations including the International Association of chiefs of police and adopted by most major Law Enforcement departments in the country, but San Franciscos ratio of sworn officers to civilian staff remains higher than the National Average over its peers. While there is a need for sworn officers with certain administrative and nonpatrol positions, there are also opportunities that we have not taken advantage of to produce cost and operational efficiencies for the department. That is why i asked the Controllers Office to provide us with the analysis of the civilian efforts made so far. That is the sole focus of today s hearing. We will not close this hearing, but we will continue it and it will be called again for the full Police Staffing analysis that i requested that will be completed by the end of this year. This Police Staffing now is one that i have tossed the department to conduct with experts in the field to provide the board and the public with the report about their staffing needs and the manner by which the San Francisco Police Department determines its Staffing Levels throughout its different divisions. Again, we will be holding a hearing specifically about this topic in early 2020 when the analysis is complete. At that hearing, we will also be asking the presentations from the citys Human Resources department and Police Department regarding a bunch of things including how they are recruiting new officers, Graduation Rates from academy classes, attrition numbers, demographics of the department versus the city, and our departments rate of retention of trained officers. Every year during budget time, this board is asked to support the departmental budgets. We rely on the departments to tell us what they need in order to carry out their assigned responsibilities. This is important when it comes to the nuts and bolts of running the city smoothly. For example, if public works doesnt have enough resources, that impacts the level of quality of the services that we are providing to our residents, businesses, and visitors. At the same time, we have to be vigilant. That we are being efficient with taxpayer dollars and making the very best use of these resources to get the most value possible for our residents, businesses, and visitors. As we seek to increase the number of officers serving the city, the San Francisco Police Department should have a plan in place as a key component of the effort to maximize the number of Duty Officers providing direct Public Safety Super Services and it should give us a basis to determine if we need to adjust the charters mandate of 9,171 fully Duty Officers. I want to add that another piece of analysis i have asked for is, again, its very exploratory at this point, but we know that we have many, Many Police Officers assigned to the airport and whether or not that makes sense to the city when some of these Police Officers, or many of them , or all of them could be deployed in our city streets instead of at the airport. I want to thank you, my colleagues, supervisor stefani for cosponsoring this hearing request and we are really looking forward to the discussion. Supervisor stefani, would you like to make any comments . Okay. Who is presenting . Good morning, supervisors. My name is peggy stevenson, i am the director of the performance unit and the Controllers Office by way of background, we have been engaged and looked at Police Staffing and multiple analyses over the years including prior civilian analyses and just to refresh everybodys memory, there have been a series of studies of civilian over time. We engaged an Expert Consult with the Police Executive Research Research forum back in 2008 that produced the study was published in 2018 and then last year, we worked with the Police Department on a command staff review of civilianization in their department where we validated their work, compared it to the prior recommendations that had been lined up by all the prior expert studies that i just mentioned, and compared it to some industry best practices so that a new set of civilianization proposals could be made for your last years budget process. That was done in response to the request by supervisor yee. A memo went out from our department to all of you that was published on our website well in advance of your budget hearings last may, on may 13th if youre curious about any of the detail, it has appendices which list civilianization recommendations that occurred in each of the prior years and how well the Police Department had done on fulfilling those. That is available to the public on the controllers website. May 13th publication date. By way of summary, i will say that if you look over that period of time, there has been a lot of progress on civilianization. About 60 positions from fiscal year 1213 until 1718 when we were looking at it again. These civilianization came from a variety of studies listed above and changes that were occurring in the organization at the time. Most notably the sfpds civilian the civilian eyes to research and analysis functions, technology functions, permits, property management, facilities management, contracting, and fleet management, the bulk of all of those things were done over that period. I will just say, at the same time, and leading into the last budget process, theres still a lot of functions as supervisor yee noted you noted that can be civilian eyes no further study is necessary to move forward on these so just put another way, the department specifically in fiscal year 18 19, the sfpd received 25 new positions for civilianization. At the time of your budget hearings in may, many of those were complete and others were underway. The sfpd can update you on progress on those positions, same concept for fiscal year 19 20. I mentioned the analysis that they had done working through their command staff. They identified an additional 50 positions that could be civilianized. My office reviewed and validated their analysis. Some of the functions that were identified there included records management, media, police commission, legal bureau, professional standards and community engagement. You will recall this discussion from your budget hearings, and then during your budget process last spring, they received approval for 25 of those 50 positions. Again, these are broadly agreed, approved, and budgeted. The challenge is a realistic staffing plan in hiring and the sfpd can update you on their progress. Lastly, they have an Expert Consultant currently at work doing staffing analysis to inform staffing and organizational design broadly speaking. Civilianization is part of that, including civilianization and bureaus where we know it needs review including investigations, special operations and administration. We will work with them as the findings come out from their consultants, to validation, and be prepared to validate and comment on any civilianization proposals that come forward for your next budget process. Finally, just as a point of interest, my office has been engaged with staffing studies and workload studies with the Police Department for many years , during most of the years i have been director of this unit. At the moment, last year we finished our Culture Service analysis that took cab data, did a lot of cleaning and review taking out outliers, working with the sfpd to understand what you can observe and data about the time they spend on calls for Service Versus administrative time, versus officer on duty time and understand how those things are varying by time of day, day of week, and geographically, and build a series of dashboards so that the Police Department, captains, and command staff can look at those things on an ongoing basis. We did a lot of years of studies it was a oneoff, a snapshot of data and analysis. Then we have to do the whole thing over again a couple of years later. This is continuously updated and is available for use by the captains and helping them with their deployment decisions. That is a piece of work that was done last year, and then in the current year, we are in the next phase of that with them when we are looking at response times and how response times are affected by the decisions they make on deployment and understanding that broadly, and again, building interactive dashboards that they can use to try and improve their performance on response times. That is underway. And the next few months, we will hopefully be wrapping that up and we will look forward to sharing the results with a broader audience. The calls for service analysis, in case you wanted to look back, our presentation on it was published on the controllers website on may 8th, 2018. I will stop there. Im happy to answer any questions you would have for me and i know the sfpd is here to update you on progress. Just a quick question in regards to our there i forget the total number that we looked at from three years ago, was a 200 or so . Have you done an analysis at all on those or do you still need to do further deep analysis of some of those positions . We reviewed everything that had been done in prior studies and the appendices are in our memo. We reported progress on the sfpd s filling of all of those. In the aggregate, i would say that the 60 positions that have been filled between fiscal year 1213 and the start of our last analysis, and then i would have to check back, which i can do maybe while the sfpd is updating you to see how many remain unfilled. I would have to look it up in the appendix. Just in regards to the process of the analysis, im just curious, where there certain civilian jobs or certain positions of the 200 or so in certain departments that were easier to analyse and whether or not it was consistent in terms of the departments sub departments sub departments that would have organizational charts did they all have organizational charts or can we get them to get a better sense of why those decisions were made in the first place . Yes. They all have organizational charts. Many of the functions were quite straightforward. I think it is typical of Police Departments with detention between using uniformed officers and civilians, and for a lot of years in my observation, the Police Department had uniformed career Law Enforcement people trying to manage technology projects, managing basic Administrative Functions like records and property. They have mostly successfully transitioned out of that, and their analytical staff is the same. I have experienced much better dynamic where they now have professional analytical staff doing statistics, stat, staffing analyses, so there are a lot of functions like that that i think we would all agree were pretty straightforward. I think now part of what you will hear from the Police Department in the Current Study is there having to go more to a task level, so there may be departments were even though the bulk of the work is done by non foreign people, technology, for example, they believe that you still should have a uniformed person as the director of that. It could be for a variety of reasons, not necessarily because they have technology expertise, but because the relationship with other command staff is better managed by someone with a Law Enforcement career. I can see both sides of the conversation like that. The task Level Analysis i think will yield more opportunities for civilians where once you really jewel down into some of those jobs you will be able to identify tasks that should be performed by a civilian and those which really require Law Enforcement backgrounds. In your own report, thats why i asked that question. I dont know the exact words, but it didnt seem to be consistent in terms of the different departments and the Police Department. Is there an organizational chart i guess im not sure what you are asking. We can and have had complete organizational charts from the Police Department. That has never been an issue, but the task Level Analysis is timeconsuming and so maybe if you were thinking about positions in your chart, youre looking at something where there is a uniformed person working there, the function is understood to be something that has many nonuniformed tasks to it. The drill down, there is they are timeconsuming. We didnt do that for fiscal year 1920 budget process. There just wasnt time. I think we will see some of those results from the work that is undergoing with their current consultant. Okay. Thank you for your update. I guess, who will come up . Is it miss mcguire . It is you again. Morning, supervisors. I am available to answer any questions you have or provide an update on the staffing analysis and commander ford is here also to speak on our hiring progress with respect to civilians. Give us a highlevel update in terms of the numbers because right now there were a lot of numbers thrown out and we started at a certain number and then from two years ago, how many of those positions have been civilianized, and what is the subset that is considered seriously to be civilianization but havent gotten there yet . Okay. We did have, actually pulled up a report from the Controllers Office from earlier this year and about 54 positions that had been identified previously as civilianization positions, all of them have been filled save for two which were no longer applicable, meaning the position no longer existed in the format it was at the time, and then the 25 positions from that we got budgeted, and 25 positions in 19 20, so commander ford can speak to the status of those. Welcome, commander. Good morning. Good to see you all. All right. Pertaining to fiscal year 1819, 25 positions budgeted for 1819. Of those, 13 have been filled to date. Another six or being created through the official classification process with a minimum qualifications are currently being built out. We also have six more under the fiscal year 20182019 where the examination rituals for the final six positions are being established and being constructed in that process. It is forthcoming very shortly. The 13 that have been filled are pretty much done and completed. The additional six pertaining to the background investigators and the remaining six pertaining to six technicians. It brings us to a total of 25 for fiscal year 1819. Moving forward to fiscal year 19 20, we also had 25 civilian positions budgeted for that fiscal year timeline. Three have been filled to date. Currently 11 more currently being screened to determine if those are viable for the advancement to the interview process and we have another three positions in the background investigations process. Three more additional will come to fruition as those examination materials are currently under construction. Finally, we have two additional positions recently posted via job announcements. We have two more that the examination process is for and it will commence on october 29 th of this year and then the final position is a civilian position and it is pending eligible list authorization. So that pretty much covers the 25 positions budgeted for 2018 2019 and the 25 more for fiscal year 1920. Im just curious, as you are doing these positions, what is the game plan in terms of what do you do with these officers . The goal is to obviously fill these positions was civilians that are currently being held by sworn members and have those members back on the street in some capacity and serving to serve as an outward facing entity with the public. The ideal situation would be to have those officers transition back into patrol and complement our patrol staff. Right. I guess i am asking is there do you have a plan . Or is this pretty spontaneous what happens . I dont think it is ponce spontaneous, sir. There is a concrete plan in place as we transition these officers out of these civilian positions. They are being strategically placed into the control force and that is being done through command staff and our staffing deployment unit, and our Strategic Management unit which is led by director mcguire, and all Staff Services division. So i dont want to drag this piece on, but i would love, unless other people want to hear , i would love to mayb