Welcome to the october 12th, 2023, regular meeting of the Public Safety and Neighborhood Services committee. I am catherine stefani, chair of the committee and to my right is vice chair engardio and to my left is supervisor lee dorsey. The clerk is mr. John carroll. And id also like to thank Kalina Mendoza at sf. Gov tv for staffing this meeting. Mr. Clerk, do you have any announcements . Yes thank you, madam chair. The board of supervisors and its committees are convening hybrid meetings that allow inperson attendance and Public Comment while still providing Remote Access and Public Comment via telephone. The board recognizes that equitable Public Access is essential and we will be taking Public Comment as follows. First, Public Comment will be taken on each item on todays agenda. Those attending in person will be allowed to speak first, and then we will hear from those who are waiting on the telephone line. The Public Comment callin number for todays meeting is 415 a6550001. When prompted, enter the meeting id for todays meeting. The meeting id. Is 26635936535. After youve entered the meeting, id press the pound symbol twice. Youll be connected to the meeting. Youll hear the meeting discussions, but your telephone line will be muted and in listening mode. When your item of interest comes up in public. Comment is called those joining us in person should line up to speak along the curtain wall that ill point out each time. And those on the telephone should dial star three to be added to the speaker line. If youre on your telephone, please remember to turn down the volume on your television and your computer, your listening devices , your radio, wherever you may be using to access todays proceedings. Alternatively you may submit Public Comment in writing. You may send your written Public Comment via email to myself. The Public SafetyNeighborhood Services committee clerk. My email address is j o n c. A r. R. O. L. L at sf gevorg. Or you may send your written comments via us post to our office in city hall. That is one doctor Carlton B Goodlett place, San Francisco, california 94102. The Clerks Office is room 244 and if you submit Public Comments in writing, i will forward your comment to the supervisors and it will be included as part of the official file on which you are commenting. There are no action items on todays agenda. Madam chair, that concludes my announcements. Thank you, mr. Clerk. Will you please call the first item . Agenda . Item number one is a hearing on the findings and recommendation made in the Human Trafficking in San Francisco 2021 report. Thank you and colleagues, i was very much looking forward to having this hearing today, but unfortunately the staff have at at the department on status of women have asked us to continue this. They have had a covid outbreak. So we are not able to have the hearing today. As such, i do intend to continue this item to the call of the chair. If you dont have any questions, we can go straight to Public Comment on the continuance. Very good. We will take Public Comment now on agenda item number one, do we have anyone joining us here in the chamber who has Public Comment on agenda one, seeing none. Lets turn our attention to those who are connected remotely. If you wish to speak on agenda item number one, please dial star three. And madam chair, i see that we have no callers in the queue. Thank you. Public comment is now closed. Id like to make a motion to continue this item to the call of the chair on a motion offered by chair stephanie that this hearing be continued to the call of the chair. Vice chair engardio engardio. I member Dorsey Dorsey i chair stephanie. Stephanie i. Madam chair, there is no opposition. Thank you so much. And will you please call the next item for just a moment . This agenda item number two is a hearing to receive information on how San FranciscoLaw Enforcement data dashboards can provide more robust, user friendly and anonymized online information on crime and Law Enforcement response through the various stages those being incident arrest intake by the District Attorneys office, initiation of prosecution, sentencing and disposition. Thank you. This item is sponsored by vice chair engardio and i will turn it over to him. Thank you, chair. Stephanie and id like to thank the Department Representatives who arranged their busy schedule for us to be here every thing we want to fix in San Francisco starts with safe streets, but we cant fight crime with a spaghetti bowl of data. Solutions depend on good data, transparent and accessible crime data. Residents can trust. Thats why i called this hearing to see how we can share crime data compared to other cities today, we will consider how our District Attorney and Police Department can better inform the public at a future hearing. We will look at the courts and the Sheriffs Department at the history of data access in our city is dismal. I moved to San Francisco in 1998 to take a job as a journalist. At the first dotcom boom was happening. The first wave of tech had come to San Francisco from silicon valley, and my very first assignment 25 years ago was to write about a conundrum. How could San Francisco, the tech capital of the world, have such lousy technology in City Government . Very little was online. Everything was still on paper. If you wanted information about something happening in the court, you had to page through giant ledgers in the Clerks Office. In 1998, the area around south park and soma was the center of the tech universe. It was called the multimedia gulch, and when my report about the difficulty of accessing city hall data was published, the headline was multimedia zilch. Today, a similar article could be written. The headline wouldnt say zilch because theres been progress, but the headline might say much frustration with ongoing limitations about the time i arrived in San Francisco city hall decided to create an integrated database called the justice tracking information system, known as justice. It was for data sharing between Public Safety agencies back then, every agency had a different Computer System that couldnt talk to each other, and justice was going to manage the data sharing needs of the police. Sheriff District Attorney, public defender, Probation Department and the courts. But 25 years and tens of millions of dollars later, the system is still not complete. This matters because a lack of data communication can have serious consequences. The delayed Justice System made headlines in 2003 after a woman was murdered by her exboyfriend, Domestic Violence activists said the murder might have been prevented with better data sharing. How the exboyfriend had served jail time for attacking the woman in the past just after getting out of jail, he assaulted her again twice. S but the jail history was not on record when the woman tried to get him arrested again. When he came back a third time, the woman was killed. More recently, former sheriff Vicki Hennessey noted a Police Operation in 2019 that arrested 63 suspected drug dealers over six days. Yet 80 of the dealers were free within a week. Some were already on probation, arrested and released multiple times without a fully operational justice database. Sheriff hennessey said it was difficult to know when defendants were rearrested. And while waiting for a court appearance, she had to rely on time consuming manual methods prone to error. So there are two types of data streams that need to flow well, data that Government Agency is share with each other and data that is shared with the public. Judge justice is an example of data shared within the government and it deserves its own hearing. Todays hearing focuses focus is on public facing data, again focusing on the District Attorneys office and the Police Department. But public facing data is important because journalists, researchers, Public Safety advocates, social justice advocates, crime victims and concerned residents all have the right to know what is going on with our criminal Justice System. As a former journalist, i know that Good Journalism is very effective at shining a light on the strengths and weaknesses of government. But the brightness of a journalists flashlight, it depends on access to data. There are laws that require the disclosure of existing documents to journalists, but those laws do not require departments to regularly disclose and update data. Analyzing important metrics that tell the public how city hall is doing. Its also important that we let ordinary residents have access to this data so they dont need a journalist to do it for them. Ordinary residents should be able to go online and with a few user friendly clicks, find out for themselves how well the government is functioning. When it comes to an important issue like crime, it is vital that we make as much of the data public as possible. Is crime up or down . Which crimes are police making arrests . What does the Police Report say . Is the District Attorney charging crimes . What is the end result of all those cases is a story in the media is only as accurate as the data the journalist has access to. Voters read news stories. Elected officials listen to Voter Sentiment when deciding policies. But Voter Sentiment is only as accurate as what people think they know transparent and accessible data is the only way for the public to truly know a situation and a truly informed public can ask. Elected officials to enact the most effective policies. I requested that the budget and legislative analyst at city hall review the District Attorneys public facing data dashboard and compare it to dashboards operated by other da offices in california and throughout the country. I wanted to see which jurisdictions have the most robust Information Available to the public in a user friendly format, because if it was possible elsewhere, we should be able to do it here. We will hear from the budget and legislative Analyst Office today. They will tell us the results of their report. Public data dashboards began under former District Attorney george gascon. They were a good start but stagnated during the tenure of District Attorney chesa boudin. My hope is that District AttorneyBrooke Jenkins can take it to the next level for restoration with the das data dashboard peaked in 2021, it counted the number of charges filed, but it never reported the final result of the charges. Were they dropped, reduced, taken to trial for a win or a loss to years ago. Local journalist annie gauss of the San Francisco standard asked for the disposition memos that reveal the final outcomes of criminal cases. Da boudins office denied the request, saying they were no relevant Public Records to her query, and if they did exist, those documents were privileged. Goss vented her frustration on social media. She said, quote, i cant emphasize enough what a load of expletive this response is. At a certain point, you got to wonder why theyre so adamant about keeping this info from the public, she said. Boudins office was, quote, ignoring the fact that they have a duty to disclose what is disclosable, which includes procedural and case details that are otherwise in the Public Record. So we have a different District Attorney today, and i hope the office of Brooke Jenkins will put more crime data in the open, at least as much as her counterpart in chicagos cook county. The public datasets in chicago contain an anonymized information about every felony case processed by the prosecutor going back 14 years. They are divided into four stages of interaction intake, initiation, sentencing and disposition. Any journalist, researcher, crime victim or member of the community in chicago can easily analyze what the prosecutor is doing. The online experience is super easy. You dont need any technical expertise. San francisco deserves this kind of data dashboard for every agency involved in criminal justice from the Police Department to the courts, Justice Reform is necessary for it to happen. Residents must feel safe. Residents must feel confident that Public Officials are doing their job to keep everyone safe. And that requires transparent and accessible crime data. Residents can trust. So this is the lineup for todays hearing. The first presentation will be from the president of the Northern California chapter of the society of professional journalists, Joe Fitzgerald. Rodriguez is a longtime local journalist who will speak on behalf of his chapter members. We will hear from the journalists first to get a sense of what type of data they need, whats lacking, and how we can provide better access. And while while todays hearing focuses on the District Attorney and Police Department, we can also hear what the journalists need from the courts to help inform our follow up hearing about the courts. Next, well hear from fred broussard, director of policy analysis at city halls budget and legislative analysts office. He wrote the report that reviewed our District Attorneys data dashboard and compared it to others in the state and around the country. With that overview, we will then hear from edward mccaffrey, chief of policy for the District Attorneys office, and nora gregory, the data director. Theyll explain the current capabilities of their data dashboard and the work theyre doing to expand it. Finally, well hear from catherine maguire, the director of the Police Departments Strategic Management bureau. She will explain how their public facing data dashboard works. Myself and the supervisor on this committee will be able to ask questions after each presentation, and then Public Comment will happen after all the presentations are completed. And so mr. Fitzgerald , you have the floor. Thank you. Good morning, supervisors. A little strange to be on this side of this room, of this chamber, usually right over there. But i did get permission today from my employers who so graciously said that matters of journalistic import matters of free speech and access and open government are of chief importance to journalists and that i should be able to advocate on that, for which im happy to do today. So the society of professional journalists, we represent journalists up and down Northern California, our board and our freedom of Information Committee, which is a committee within our chapter, has investigative journalists, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and broadcast journalists, all sorts of folks, but many of whom report here in San Francisco and use that data that supervisor engardio mentioned. Geez, nearly every day. But as part of this, not only do i ask our own Board Members and our freedom of Information Committee who are specialists in open records, but i also canvas newsrooms in San Francisco, so i ask them what is the data that you would like to see . What are the roadblocks that you come across . You may not be