Im proud to be a part of. Its jointly under the auspices of the cops office and the bureau of justice assistance. This is done tremendous good in training more than 15,000 officers across this country. Finally, hes increased the federal grant money thats gone to groups like ours and others who are focused on officer safety and wellness. Those are just some great examples of the leadership hes provided. I dont think its any coincidence that as a result of all of those efforts, the last two years now, weve seen fewer Law Enforcement fatalities than any year for the last 50. Thats a great credit to leadership and to this group and so many others focused on this issue. A lot more work clearly needs to be done. I look at canada as a great role model for us here in the United States. Ive attended their memorial service, two out of the last three years. Two years ago, they honored all the officers in canada who had been killed in the line of duty. One officer during a 12month period killed in canada. The last three years, theyve always been below ten. So i asked Toronto Police chief, bill blair, a couple years ago, what were some of their secrets of success and he enumerated several. He said they had a guaranteed Arrival Program that decreased traffic crashes by 70 , impressing the officers get to that call for service safely first and foremost, then render assistance. Mandatory seat belt and vest ware policys for officers, which were now seeing more of here in the United States. Sensors in vehicles. Checking the speed and Seat Belt Usage along with in car cameras. The officers know theyre being watched for safety om compliance and it makes a difference. Aggressive Education Campaign showing officers what happens in a crash when you wear a seat belt and when you do not. Its pretty impressive and makes a difference, an officer safety question that meets once a month looking at injuries, accidents and fatalities and figures out what we can do to prevent them in the future. Then an aggressive promotion of their move over and slow down laws, thankfully with anytime sa and us and other group, we are focusing on getting the driving aware of the laws. We need to learn from our neighbors to the north. Consider these troubling statistics. Last year, we know 24 of the officers killed in the line of duty were not wearing body armor. 32 of the officers killed were not wearing seat belts. 55 of the officers who died in auto crashes were killed in single vehicle crashes. And 15 officers were shot and killed in ambush style attacks last year. Thats triple the number from 2013. Other props weve identified, officers failing to wait for back up and entering dangerous situations alone. Many officers crashing their vehicles while rushing to assist a fellow officer. Officers being killed with their own weapon. Weapon retention is still a concern and issue we need to address. Here are recommendations, some of them, that we talked about with the National Officers safety and wellness group. We must have a unified safety message with involvement and buy in from both management and the unions. Youve heard that said before and im sure youll hear it again later today. Hire a Safety Officer like they do in fairfax county, virginia, and create a safety committee. Establish a National Clearinghouse for best practices. We are doing this now in conjunction with the bureau of justice assistance. Lets get the number of injuries and deaths down to zero. That should be our goal we can all rally around. Reduce distractions for officers and their vehicles. Take a data driven approach to safety. If it matters, pressure it. Officers will be more influenced if you give them the data to support the safety policies. Bring families into the safety messaging. Create an environment that rewards officers for safe behavior and most importantly, change the culture. Do not accept injuries and fatalities as just part of the job and thankfully, i think the best news of all is that that culture change has started to occur and with your leadership, this task force, your recommendations and im sure will come out of this, were going to do a lot better, so thank you very much for this opportunity. Thank you so much. Im going to start out the question with brittney, followed by sean smoot. Thank you very much for your testimony. My question is for lieutenant eastman. Can you hear me . Yes, maam, i can. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your testimony and others regarding training for hemorrhage control and other trauma instances. My question is really about the policy surrounding that. So, if the training is available, im wondering how we can help to man date and expect officers use it if the force is we saw a failure to provide to mayor rice in cleveland and for Antonio Martin in missouri where im from. So im wondering once that training is fully provided, how do we create policy around ensuring that is providing even to potentially the victim of officers league use of force . Thats a great question. And i think the answer is when you train people to do this, we havent seen them withhold that therapy in an agency thats had that training. In my own experience, i have been a part of unfortunately several uses of deadly force as a part of the s. W. A. T. Team where even members of the before i could move to get to the victim were deploying some of these skills. Weve seen officers use force force in the field in dallas. And subsequently holster their weapons, move to the suspect, make sure their safe and then begin treating them immediately. So i think the answer is that if you build the capabilities, the officers will do the right thing. But i think its important to build in policy and procedure expectations to give them the Legal Protections they need if that happens, but i think youre going to be impressed with the dedication of the Law Enforcement officers trained to do this. Look at the Boston Marathon bombing. Those officers had no official hemorrhage control program in boston. Several had taken it upon themselves and when they were faced with one of the Biggest Challenges of their career, they acted and treated everyone no matter what. Not to use a pun, but if you build it, they will come and these officers would use this stuff appropriately. Thank you very much. Sean smoot followed by tracie mears. Thank you very much. I have two questions, one question for your dr. Eastman. First of all, thank you for interrupting your vacation to participate in testifying for the task force. Youre welcome. My wife is watching that. Thank you. Thank you, mrs. Eastman. Doctor, if you know, what would be the cost on a per officer basis to equip them with a downed officer kit as you described in your testimony and the training to use that kit . Yes, so, cost, it depends on scale. If you go large scale, youre going to talk about less than 50. Way less. 50 dollars an officer. I think it would be up to the manufacturers of that equipment and those companies to deal with us on a scale pricing, but if were talking about a nationwide programming, i think that price would fall significantly. Were looking at nearly a million Law Enforcement officers in the United States. In terms of the training, we dont exactly know how long to train people for. Its my belief we can do this in a couple of hours. In the Dallas Police department, we have a multimodality Training Program where we start the officers with some online video viewing. They do some short, hands on training and we incorporate the downed officer kit use into many other scenarios over the course over the training cycle. So the officers get not only didactic training. But they get hands on and they incorporate it in other things. So its significantly less than 50 dollars an officer. Thank you very much. If i could switch to chief castor for a moment and thank all of you for your testimony. Chief, you talked about the safe haven house that you set up and your Citizens Police academy program. You also talked about your front porch role call. Which you mentioned in your written testimony as well. So i have a twopart question for you. I dont usually do this. Im probably getting the evil eye from some other Task Force Members. But with regard to the safe haven house and the police academy, are those things that you budget for out of your operational budget for your department or does the city support those by giving you additional appropriations to do them . And could you elaborate how the protocols work. Thats number one and two, could you elaborate more about how your front porch role calls work . Yes, actually, the safe haven we have for the kid ss the second one weve opened up. Weve had one in another high crime area for about 12 years and we just opened up a recent one and one of my assistant chiefs went to leadership tampa through the program and they took an old parks and Recreation Building and rehabbed that as a class project. I assigned Police Officers to both of those safe havens and the officers ive assigned have a background in education and so, theyre very well received and accepted in the neighborhoods. As far as the operational budgeting for it, hopefully, my mayors not watching, but the city takes care of the operational costs for that safe haven. As far as the front porch role calls, those have been a great way to connect with the community. Citizens can call in and request those role calls and its been very, very successful and the squad just shows up at someones front yard and usually feed them, which seems to attract Police Officers very well and they get to meet the Police Officer that literally is patrolling their neighborhood and they create those relationships and those bonds. Is that role call similar to what they would do in the station . Thats exactly what they would do in the station. A lot of it, you and i are so old, we had the role call board they would read off. Now, they get that through the mdts. They get whos wanted and what to look for in the community. The Community Gets to feel a part of the Police Department. Tracie mears followed by sue rahr. Good morning, everyone. This is really interesting and really eliminating. My question is for you, mr. Floyd. I was going through your, the data you listed in your written testimony carefully and as i understand it, there was some very welcome news that fatalities are down, except that it sounds like in recent years, the greatest contributor is accidents, maybe vehicular accidents . But i wanted to focus on the number of of injuries. In your written testimony, you said something about the fbi saying theres 100,000 injuries, officers injured in the line of duty. Im wondering about the relationship between that hundred thousand number and the ve hick lar accident point you vehicular accident point that you brought up. And it seems to me that we could not only save a lot of officer deaths, but injuries. If we could simply convince people to wear their seat belts, so im wondering what the, in your view, is the hurdle . Is it just culture . Is it Something Else . Is there, theres no union representative. Is it Union Resistance . If you have insight on that, it would be helpful. Do we need to put a 9yearold in the backseat because i know when im driving my car, my son says to me, mommy, put on your seat belt. What can we do here . A couple of things. The number of more than 100,000 injuries is come frg the bureau of labor statistics. One of the problems that will be emphasized later, we need better data on injuries. Im working with a group called the Police Foundation, one of our board member organizations. Theyre doing a study on near misses. What we are doing here is collecting a lot more data on injuries and near misses because those numbers are going to be greater than fatalities. We can tell you everything you want to know about fatalities, especially with this deeper dive were doing right now with the cops grant, but i will tell you its a cultural issue seemingly. Im not a practitioner. I defer to my distinguished panelists here. Clearly in canada as i emphasized, they have a program they emphasized from day one in the academy and every day there after, that is guaranteed arrival. When you get that call for servicicious servicicious, whether its to back up another officer, respond to another emergency, dont put yourself in the peril that so many officers here do. Its a wonderful thing that our officers are willing to put their lives at risk for others, but its foolish when you drive so fast that you wreck your vehicle before you get to back up that officer or help somebody in need. When we talk about a culture change, were starting to embed that message into the minds of officers at an early stage in their careers and were professing that over and over again during their careers. Weve seen it in a lot of agencies now that have mandatory seatbelt policies. The unions have bought into it. They are working with management to impress that message upon the officers and as a result, i think were going to see these numbers of injuries and deaths go down dramatically because because without question, traffic related deaths and injuries are the most preventable of all. In recent years, i have had two Law Enforcement officers who died in the line of duty in vehicle crashes. What i find, i have a fleet of about 1800 vehicles and we drive a combined 25 million miles on an annual basis. When we look at our traffic crash data, what i see sometimes is a disproportionate number related to distracted driver. My deputies are on cell phones and they have the mobile data terminals in their cars, and so, we have embarked, on an Educational Campaign about how not to do that. Weve taken advantage of Blue Tooth Technology in our vehicles now so that we are not predisposed to looking away from the roadway. We are going to biannual training now. All of my deputies are required to have the Vehicle Driver training, every two years. And our ultimate goal is to reduce the number of traffic crashes. We have a mandatory body armor policy within our policy as well. Could i just chime in . I cant give you nonverbal cues to tell you i can answer. You can wave your hands or something. I was going to hold up a sign, but i think the point that craig made about a Culture Shift is important. Let me add to that discussion. Mr. Mears, you describe in your question these as vehicle accidents. As trauma surgeons, we dont ever use the word accident. An accident is an act by god. You throw your hands in the air, you have no idea how to prevent this. I can tell you these are Law Enforcement vehicle crashes and Law Enforcement officers injured in crashes. And crashes are preventable. And if you, again, to just go back to the point of building a database, we dont really know if its speed, if its seatbelt, vehicle design, our equipment we wear. But again, building a database that captures some of these pieces of information and allows us to study it scientifically will help you design programs to prevent crashes. Thats the whole idea behind seatbelts and air bags is because people studied vehicle crashes to make vehicles more safe. We need to study Law Enforcement and learn how to make that job more safe as well. Chief, do you want to weigh in on this, too . Do you have a policy . And whats been your experience with the culture in your department . Yes, i always talk about the seatbelt rule. I think that is something that you have to and i use that as an analogy for everything else. You have to constantly remind people because its a habit they get into and we have policy mandated wear and we havent had any accidents where officers have lost their lives. I cant tell you that all of my officers wear them, but we have a policy for that. And another that alex hit on very lightly that i believe is an Outstanding Program stars as far as the officer safety in general is the Near Miss Program that the Police Foundation have put together and we mirrored that after the firefighters Near Miss Program. I think thats going to pay great dividends if officers put information in it. If we dont get data into it, its not going to be a benefit, but i see that as saving lives going forward. Thank you. We now to turn sue rahr, followed by jose lopez. Dr. Eastman, i want to do a little deeper dive from what sean asked you on the downed officer kits because i think thats one of the smartest things we can do. Im trying to put that together and im wondering if it has to be a doctor, a firefighter that teaches that . Or can that be credibly taught by someone after train the trainer . It can be taught by a train to trainer. Just got to get credible instructors. But i can tell you, ive got 3700 officers in dallas and i dont teach every class. Ive built a cadre of instructors to train these guys and i talk to them regularly and we tweak the program and update it, but this has to be delivered in a train to traper model because weve got a Million People to train, and so if you dont, were never going to get this done. One more question. I was really appreciate ive about your comment about the peer review and looking for Liability Protection for doing those reviews. I know in my experience, people are very, very reluctant because theres always a pending lawsuit. Are you aware of anywhere in the country where those protections have been implemented suc