Community Discussion - Imagining a Just Cville and Marcus Alert Working Groups   9/28/2021

Thank you all for joining us today.

There have been, there were two work groups formed from members of council, myself and Councilor Vice Mayor McGill and Councilor Snook, the Imaginina Jess Seville working group and the Marcus Elote working group.

And today, after many months of trying to figure these systems out and what

changes that we could influence and answers to questions about what we couldn't influence.

We are here today to just do an initial presentation.

We had originally hoped that this would happen back in April.

So that just gives you some insight.

And I think you'll hear from both groups that this is just the beginning and there is a lot of work to do.

And Ms.

Mayor Walker?

Present.

Vice Mayor McGill?

Here.

Councillor Hill?

I'm here.

So you all know I never read, so I'm going to try to stay on task and read my remarks.

So bear with me.

But first, I would like to say thank you to our group members.

For many months since October 2020, we've met for between two hours and 15 minutes to two hours, twice per month.

We started out with a larger group of community members who had been negatively impacted by our criminal justice system.

Many of them did not attend for the entire time, but we benefited greatly from their intellectual contributions, and I've been able to check in with many of them from time to time to get feedback.

And even though they did not attend many of our sessions, our discussions were more meaningful because of the time they shared with us.

and to all of you who endure countless hours and difficult and challenging conversations, thank you.

And it saddens me that we won't be able to continue this work together.

Our group members was...

Sherry Henley, Joy Johnson, Raylaja Waller, Nicholas Fagans, Martez Tolbert, Stacey Washington, Whitmore Merrick, Latasha Smith, Jay James, Harold Foley, Herb Dickinson, Neil Goodlow, Jeff Fogle, Janice Redinger,

Jordy Yeager, Dr. Brackney, Elizabeth Murtaugh, Kaki Demick, Joe Platania, Nina Antony, and Kina Thomas and Max Celia Robinson, our clerk and deputy clerk, provided our staff supports

throughout our meetings.

And I just want to say again, thank you all.

And whether you attended one meeting or every meeting, I value your contributions and look forward to working with you in the future.

The Imagining Justiva Workgroup agreed that there is missing information from the DMC report, but instead of focusing our request on funding more research,

which we do recommend, we started focusing on the group members and the power that they held in their fields.

We then spent a lot of time talking through what immediate changes they could make in their departments.

We focused on issues that they had the power to change without getting buy-in from others or that required legislative changes from the state and federal government.

It was powerful to watch.

Primarily, this resulted in

a focus on the police department, the public defender's office, the prosecutor's office, and request from community members on what grassroots startup and funding were needed in the community.

Chief Brackney received a lot of criticism throughout the entire process.

Thank you, Dr. Brackney for showing up meeting at the meeting and dealing with some of the hostility that you received even within our group.

Really appreciate that you stayed the course.

We also took a deeper dive into the community members' main focus were investments in programs that increase social cohesion and well-being and work to prevent any interactions from ever happening with the criminal justice system.

It was important for community members to have the resources to create grassroots programs

and worked to change the trajectory of community members' lives.

No one wanted to only recommend more research, but we all acknowledge that a more complete understanding of the past will require further research and will help us avoid making some of those same mistakes in the future.

I asked the group members to believe

and stretch themselves in order for us to explore solutions that may seem impossible.

It was important to me when I convened this group that we hear from the community, honor their perspective, their humanity and follow their lead.

The group fully supported and believed in that mission and it became the foundation of all of our discussions, even when community members did not attend the groups.

As I've stated throughout my time on Council, the healing that needs to occur in Black and other vulnerable community with Black and other vulnerable community members require that we shift.

It requires that we invest and support individuals who understand the struggle of those community members best.

If people who consider themselves the experts

shift their mindsets and come to understand what truly being of service mean and provide support as requested lives will begin to change.

We covered a lot of topics.

We went through every point in the criminal justice system and discussed from

engagement from the initial interaction with police officers to what happens when someone returns home from prison, jail or prison.

And we have three key recommendations, four recommendations that I'll discuss at the end of the meeting.

And again,

to all the group members and, you know, I thank you so much.

And it has just been, even though it was late at night, 6 to 8.30, most nights, I really appreciate the time we spent together and the conversations we had.

And I hope that our efforts, we will see some changes in the future.

So thank you.

Next up, we have mass incarceration and

World Class City.

And so we have, let's see, waiting for, hold on just a second.

Hold on, one of the panelists is having some trouble getting along.

Mayor Walker, while you're looking at that, we had a few people join who I didn't have first and last names for.

So if you look at the panelists list by clicking on the participant button, you can rename yourself by hovering over your name and clicking the more button.

That way everyone can see your names.

But if you're driving, as I see one of our panelists doing, that may be a challenge.

So you can also send us a chat message.

All right.

Oh, something just happened.

Wanda and Rajon, are you ready?

Yes, I'm here.

I'm just trying to put my name on there.

Technology is so much fun.

I'm here.

Okay.

And I saw Rajan, but he's... Yeah.

Okay, so what we'll do while we wait, we can move on to the next session.

And right after that, we'll come back to this part of the presentation.

So next we'll have Neil Goodloe discuss the research that he's been doing in the community for quite a while and that helped influence a lot of our discussions within the Imagining Just Evo group.

Thank you, Mayor.

I am trying to close this.

There we go.

My name is Neil Goodloe.

I am the criminal justice planner for the Jefferson Area Community Criminal Justice Board.

In that capacity, I also serve the Albemarle Charlottesville evidence based decision making policy team, which is a group of

high-level criminal justice leaders in Charlottesville and Elmore County who get together once a month and discuss criminal justice policy and practice and how we might be able to collaborate to produce better outcomes for the citizens of Charlottesville and Elmore County.

Tonight I come to you to present the findings of a 10 year trend analysis of crime, arrest, and incarceration by race.

Every piece of data you see tonight is Charlottesville specific.

There is nothing from any other jurisdiction in here.

So all of the numbers that you are seeing and all the percentages that you are seeing will pertain to Charlottesville crime rates, Charlottesville arrest rates, and Charlottesville incarceration figures.

But first, a little bit of background.

At the beginning of 2020, the consulting firm MGT

presented to city council the results of a study that was done to determine using a matching strategy of similarly situated inmates, one black and one white, in every other respect as similar as the research team could make that match to determine once

other factors were controlled for, whether there was disparity found at any points in the criminal justice decision process.

And in fact, that study revealed that in six of the seven areas studied, there were disparities found, and they include severity of principal charge, number of companion charges, bond and hold decisions, the length of an inmate stay, findings of guilt, and sentence length.

including the suspended sentence.

They did not find disparity in active time to serve given by the courts.

What makes this study different is the MGT study was a point in time study from using 2014 to 2017 data.

This data covers a much longer time frame from 2011 to 2020.

and it seeks to do two things.

One is to see what disproportionality may exist between black and white arrestees and inmates and to see if those ratios have changed over the last 10 years.

I make no attempt to do regression analysis, as was done in the case of the MGT study.

It is frankly beyond my professional abilities, and I'm not going to attempt to do anything that I cannot do accurately.

What you will see tonight are true numbers, which represent disproportionality.

So all of these are tallies.

The 10 key findings in this study, and I will then go into some data that supports each one of these, reported crime is down significantly in Charlottesville over the last decade, down across a broad variety of different charge types, and it is down especially when compared to other Virginia cities of comparable size.

The number of Charlottesville arrests also decreased by similar percentages among black and white people over the decade.

By the way, the reported crime statistics are not available for by race.

So I do not have a comparison of reported crime by race, but I do have comparisons by arrest and incarceration.

One of the findings that's been emerging over the last couple of years now is that younger people, both black and white, are getting

in trouble far less often than they used to.

And their numbers of both arrests and incarceration have fallen sharply over the decade.

On the entire opposite end of the age spectrum, however, the number of individuals age 50 and plus at the Admiral Charlottesville Regional Jail is rising, and in fact is the only age group to experience an increase in bed day expenditures.

This appears to be particularly true for Black arrestees age 55 or older.

As a result of fewer arrests, there have also been fewer intakes of inmates into ACRJ who are there on Charlottesville responsible charges.

These intakes have fallen slightly more so among white inmates than among black inmates.

and black inmates were increasingly taken into the jail on more charges per intake than white inmates.

In 2011, there was virtually no difference between the two and there was fairly substantial difference by 2020.

Black inmates were also significantly less likely to be either released on bond or under pretrial supervision than were white inmates throughout the decade from one end to the other.

Average length of stay fell among black inmates, while rising modestly about 3% among white inmates, but still on average in 2020 black inmates were serving jail sentences that were a little more than 24 days longer than white inmates.

Percentage of black inmates on Charlottesville charges increased with each length of stay, and that's an important consideration, I'll spend a little time there.

bed day expenditures dropped significantly among both black and white inmates from 2011 to 2020.

But through all of these statistics, there is a disproportionality that endures from 2011 to 2020.

The good news being that Charlottesville's footprint at the jail is smaller.

Charlottesville's number of arrests are smaller.

The number of individuals being taken into the jail

is smaller.

The amount of time that they're staying is smaller.

But the size of the two populations in the jail as a percentage of the total in 2020 is equivalent to that in 2011.

So smaller footprint, but similar disproportionality to 10 years ago.

So first, a word about racial demographics.

There have been some issues in comparing census data between 2010 and 2020.

Some of those were built into the 2020 census, which asks questions in a different way and allows individuals to identify as multiracial or multiethnic.

In addition, demographers

added some intentional noise to the 2020 census data to protect individual household identities.

And I have no way of knowing how much, if any, that noise influenced the census data by race in the city.

And finally, 2020 was conducted during a pandemic.

which caused a number of difficulties for the Census Bureau and in particular in college towns where many of the students were not present to be counted.

So we do not know what impact this undercount in the census may, what impact it may have on the overall percentages of black and white residents of the city.

But what we do know is that, generally speaking, somewhere around one in five individuals in Charlottesville identifies as black.

Fewer in 2020 than in 2010, and the Census Bureau is reporting an actual loss of black population in the city of 888 individuals.

during the 10 years.

But again, the Weldon Cooper Institute cautions against making direct comparisons from 2010 to 2020.

So we can't compare this to reported crime data.

And reported crime data is assembled

through the Uniform Crime Reporting process.

It's a process that's used nationwide.

It's used by every law enforcement agency in Virginia, and it identifies a crime known to law enforcement.

It does not require the individual to be arrested, so it is generally considered a

One of the better methods of looking at the true nature of crime in a community, although I will acknowledge that there are crimes that are not reported, and I don't have any data on that, so I cannot say what percentage of all crime is reported crime.

So when we look at crime rates per thousand residents, we find that Charlottesville's crimes against persons dropped 40%, crimes against property down 41%, crimes against society, which are dominated by drugs and weapons charges, were down even stronger at 52%.

And when we compare these rates,

Crimes against person down 40% compared to a 14% decrease in comparable cities Crimes against property down slightly more than comparable cities and crimes against society actually running counter to a trend in comparable cities down 52% compared to an increase of 20% in comparable cities.

Arrest rates followed a fairly similar theme.

Down strongly crimes against person, down strongly crimes against property, and down strongly crimes against society.

And we can see that the decreases

between black arrestees and white arrestees in Charlottesville were very similar, although you will notice that the blue line represents black arrestees, the orange line represents white arrestees.

There's significantly higher numbers of

Black arrestees in Charlottesville throughout the decade.

And this does not factor in the fact that Black Charlottesvillians make up less than one in five of the city's residents.

Same thing holds true for property crimes.

There was one year when numerically whites outnumbered blacks and arrests for property crimes, but generally they were down a consistent rate and down an identical rate for crimes against society.

When we look at the age data for both black arrestees and white arrestees, the numbers plummet.

over the decade.

There were 234 arrests of black arrestees in Charlottesville reported to Virginia State Police in 2001.

And granted, it was COVID year, but in 2020, that number had dropped to 38, but it had also been very low the two preceding years.

And the same holds true for young white arrestees.

on the entire opposite end of the spectrum, though, the age spectrum, were significant increases for Black arrestees age 55.

There were also increases among White arrestees, but they were not nearly as significant.

And you will notice that these two eldest age groups, both Black and White, were the only groups to show an increase

in the number of arrests over the last 10 years.

There's also a second group of arrest that the Virginia State Police compiles as Group B arrests.

These are generally less serious crimes.

But they also show a similar decrease, and that decrease is nearly identical for both black and white arrestees.

We move on to jail data.

I have records for every booking and release at the jail from January 1st of 2011 through December 31st of 2020.

and those are all filterable by race, gender, age, charge, jurisdiction.

And it allows me also to calculate length of stay by race.

So the first thing I want to look at is intakes.

And these are people.

And intake is a person who is taken into the jail, processed.

They may be released almost immediately.

But their booking is recorded at the jail.

And as you might expect from the arrest data and reported crime data,

the number of intakes at ACRJ has dropped 30%.

This means the number of human beings who are being arrested on Charlottesville charges and taken to the jail for processing has dropped 30% over the last 10 years.

Much of that just in the last three years.

Down more for white

inmates than black inmates, although that difference is not statistically significant.

And when I look at booking types by race, this is very busy.

This is the raw data.

But what it shows is

These are these are arrests on the top 10 booking types for black inmates.

These are for white inmates and sizable drops among black inmates in alcohol charges, narcotics and operators license charges, sizable increase in probation violations.

and the greatest increase among weapons charges.

For white inmates, down 57% for alcohol, also down strongly for DUI, down strongly for operators licensed offenses, and to a lesser extent down for narcotics and fraud.

So when an individual is taken into the jail, they can be booked on one charge, they can be booked on 20 charges.

And I was interested in looking at that booking to intake ratio to see if I could see differences in the number of charges per intake that inmates were being booked in on by race.

And you can see at the beginning of the decade, there was virtually no distinction between black and white inmates in terms of the number of charges they were being booked in on.

But as the decade progresses, while both of these trend lines are rising, the black booking intake ratio rose at three times the rate that the white booking to intake ratio rose.

I also wanted to understand a little bit better about how pretrial release rates might differ between black and white Charlottesville inmates and whether that was changing over time.

Both decreased slightly, but you will notice that throughout the duration, white inmates were bonded more frequently than black inmates were.

Next, I looked at average length of stay.

And average length of stay is a function of a person's length of stay averaged among all individuals of each race.

And you will notice that over time, the average length of stay of a Black inmate has been dropping down 16% over the decade.

The average length of stay of a white inmate rose very slightly up about 3%, but still a significant gap exists in the average length of stay between black and white inmates of more than 24 days longer sentences being served by black inmates in 2020.

So I also wanted to look at length of stay by race in a little different way.

And what I did is I took the black jail cohort and the white jail cohort and I cut them up into length of stay bins.

And as you can see,

Here's a length of stay been of individuals serving less than a day.

And this is actually 33% of inmates are gone within 24 hours.

They are predominantly white.

and the number of white inmates who were in this length of stay bin dropped 48% during the decade.

The number of black inmates in this length of stay bin dropped 45%.

So virtually no difference between the percentages on one side or the other, the pie just got smaller.

But as we increase length of stay, here's one to seven days,

Here's 8 to 30.

Here's 31 to 90.

And here's 90 plus.

The blue side of the pie gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, even though along most of these trend lines, there were drops that were either identical between the two groups

And again, pi gets smaller, but the arrangement of the pi stays virtually the same.

Here's a category in which white length of stay dropped a little bit more than black length of stay.

But in the next one, the only category in which average length of stay actually increased, white length of stay increased more than black, the black rate did.

and there was an identical drop in the longest length of stay category between black and white inmates.

So all of this adds up.

Oh, one more thing.

What happens after 90 days, after 180 days, what after 365 or some inmates even serving two years locally at the jail?

There is a cohort and it's a fairly small cohort that gets

transferred into the Virginia Department of Corrections.

And in recent years, there has been a decrease in those transfers among both black and white inmates.

The reason I didn't calculate a percentage change is that starting in March of 2020, DOCC stopped coming to get anybody.

So this is an artificial result right here.

However, you can observe that the blue line stays well above the red line or the yellow orange line all the way to 2019.

And the last thing I looked at is bed day expenditures.

Bedday expenditures at the jail drop 36%.

And the way a bedday expenditure is calculated is you take the number of people who were brought into the jail, and then you multiply that by their length of stay.

and that produces the bed day expenditure.

And since we have a reduction in intakes and a general reduction in average length of stay, then that produces a 36% increase in all of the bed days that the city expended over the last 10 years.

And this has a direct impact on jail cost.

as Charlottesville's footprint gets smaller, the jail, if Albemarle counties and Nelson counties stay the same or grow larger, then those two jurisdictions are responsible for more of the cost year to year to run the jail.

And you can see that bed days expended were down equivalent amounts between black and white inmates.

So all of this suggests that crime is down in the city, at least reported crime is down in the city, arrests are down in the city, incarceration is down in the city, all of them substantially, and all of them in a way

that does not appear that they are significantly influenced by COVID.

These are longstanding trends.

They've been going on for a long time, and they hew fairly closely to the trend line, which suggests that they're fairly durable.

However, while there are fewer number of people incarcerated, it has not significantly changed

the disproportionality between the number of Black people being arrested and incarcerated and then the number of white people being arrested and incarcerated in the city.

And it also bears repeating that while the intake and

Average length of stay and bed day expenditures are all down sharply for black inmates.

They still are disproportionate to the white cohort of the jail when we look at the demographic representations of both races in the Charlottesville population and even in the population of adjoining jurisdictions.

Thank you, Neil.

And just for the, you know, individuals in the audience, we'll, you'll be able to ask questions.

Someone has already texted me with a question.

So you'll be able to ask questions at the end of the present at the end of the presentation.

All right.

So now we'll try to get back to our just a little

families, local experience.

Yeah, I'm here.

All right.

And

So you all have often heard me talk about that even my family and the experience that we've had in this community and especially through the criminal justice system.

So I asked two of my cousins

and younger cousin.

So three total, but my cousins and Rajon is my older cousin's son.

Wanda is

one of my favorite people, you know, in the world.

So when we were younger, you did not see either one of us without each other.

And so, and Rajon and Wanda, Rajon is Wanda's nephew.

Rajon, my, their mom has three children and two of them, my aunt, my dad and their, and Wanda's mom are brother and sister.

and two of them spent a significant time in federal prison from a 1997 arrest with Jade and they are just one year and three years older than I am and stayed in federal prison until the Obama administration changed the disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine.

And so the impact that I'm often talking about, and I say it all the time, that I don't know a Native family, a Native Black family from this community who family members, friends, loved ones have not spent a significant amount of time from our local

to state and federal prisons.

Wanda, you're going to start?

Yeah, I can start.

My name is Wanda Smith.

I grew up right here in Charlottesville.

I have one child, she's 21.

Yes, and I have a, my sister and my brother was incarcerated for, is it 13 years, 13 years, 13 or 14 years.

John.

How you doing?

My name is Rayjean Smith.

Nikuyah Walker is my cousin.

Juanda Smith here is my aunt.

I did six years in federal prison, five to six years in federal prison.

And my aunt was basically there the whole time, all the time that my mom was gone.

My aunt was basically my mom and my grandmother.

and Nikuyah was a big, a big, big part of my life.

When I made like bad decisions and stuff like that, she was one of the people that like stepped out there and helped me out and took risks with me, even though I was still messing up.

And that's why I'm here today, you know, just to show my gratitude and stuff like that.

But yeah, I'm from Charlottesville as well.

I'm 28.

I have one year, I have one daughter.

She's nine years old.

And I think just from what they just shared briefly, and that's why I asked Wanda to join us, is just the understanding of how families are and the families who are left, how they are impacted.

I mean, even though I grew up without my mom, I still had like people there for me and stuff like that, but it was just like a burden.

It was just always on me.

It was just like stressful.

It made me depressed and stuff like that, you know.

It was really hard, you know, knowing your mom going to be away because her sentence was more than what she did.

It was like seven to eight years more than what she did.

So, you know, just having that in your mind coming up.

and knowing it early as I did, you know, 11, 10, 9 years old and stuff like that, it was hard.

But, you know, I grew up and I put my daughter through the same thing.

So it's just like, I got, I got, like right now I'm trying to fix myself and fixing relationships with my family and stuff like that.

And it's been hard.

And that's also hard.

You know, everything, everything about rebuilding after going through things like that, it's hard.

It's not easy.

And I deal with emotions and stuff like that.

and problems within myself behind it.

So it's a battle.

It's worth it, but it's a battle.

It's definitely hard.

I played ball.

Growing up, I played ball, a lot of basketball.

Most people know me out here from playing basketball.

I was supposed to go to college and stuff like that.

In the same year, I was supposed to go to college.

You know, I was indicted on distribution charges.

So my life just went downhill from there.

But, you know, I'm still going.

I've played semi-pro basketball for a couple of different teams here in North Carolina.

And I'm still working.

I'm still trying to get somewhere with basketball.

But basketball was always my thing.

And them bad decisions and all that stuff I went through, you know.

kind of got in the way of it and my decisions got in the way of it, you know.

So right now I'm just working, I'm building, I'm working hard right now.

And what he's leaving, this is what helps me knowing all the background information, but I was one of those people who would help Rajon through school and talk to teachers and meet with them.

And as most of you don't want to talk to me if you're not doing the right thing, he did not want to talk to me if he wasn't

doing the right thing either.

But what every teacher that I ever talked to would say about him is just how brilliant and how smart.

And so while he's talking about basketball as his option, he could have done anything.

He's an amazing basketball player.

And I was talking to this about some with someone earlier, you know, some people think they can play, but he's one of those people when you hear the people who make it to the NBA and stuff who say there are people back home who didn't make it who was better than I am.

That's him.

And

But even with that being the dream, he could have done anything.

He is brilliant, brilliant mind, very, very smart.

And, you know, and his teachers always talked about that when we would meet.

Could you talk a little bit about just how your thoughts about being a black man in Charlottesville and

Well, I mean, when I was coming up, I really didn't pay attention to it.

It wasn't until I got older that I started noticing stuff like that.

But I will honestly say it's about where you at.

For me in Charlottesville, it's about where you at.

is when you become a target, you know?

So if you're in a certain spot of Charlottesville and you look like you've been in there or you look like, you know, you belong there or on a way, you know, then you are targeted and looked at a certain way.

But if I was certain, you know, if I'm in a certain part of Charlottesville, which is not looked upon as a bad place, then, you know, I'm okay.

That's how I feel.

I never really dealt with too much racism until all that stuff happened a few years back.

And then I really started seeing stuff.

So I'm just adapting to it myself.

Honestly, I'm just learning how to recognize it.

Because being away in prison and stuff like that, you really see it a lot.

I've seen it a lot being incarcerated.

It's a lot of politics with that.

and that goes down to race, like period.

Sometimes where you're from and sometimes like your race, but I don't know.

I dealt with it in there and then I dealt with it out here.

It's not a good experience.

And, you know, and it's kind of getting bad.

It's getting worse in a way because, you know, things are getting worse.

Circumstances are getting worse, but there's ways to fix it.

Can you talk about a little bit about your friends who may not have the same like family supports that you have?

Yeah, I mean, I got a lot of friends that that if they had the opportunities and the support that I had, that they'll probably be, you know, either way ahead of me or somewhere that, you know, that they belong, you know, but

is all about your support system and who actually believes in you.

And then sometimes some people got to take the risk on you.

You might not be the best option for somebody, but if you find the right person to take the risk of what you are, and they believe in you and push you in the right way, then anybody can beat anybody.

But it's definitely, if you got a supporting cast, it's much easier to survive in a place like this.

But when you don't,

and you're going away and you're doing these stints in prison and coming back to nothing and no family and stuff like that is hard, you know.

And it's not easy to adapt.

It's not at all.

Yeah.

I'll just interject here again, you know, my family and the way they have no matter what and no matter what the struggle is that they have always made sure that, you know, we were okay.

It's just, it's just been in an area where things have not been perfect, but

You know, our family has a really just very well connected and it's people who just know how to show up.

And so we're going to get to one of those people right now.

Are you there?

17 when they went away.

So it was like raising a child.

I was raising a child because my brother, he had young kids and then it was Rajon, which my mom had him.

So we was in the same household.

So basically I was raising a child at 17 years old.

With my siblings being away, it took a part of me when they went away.

So basically I was

had to be there for them.

Going to see them, they needed money, put money on the phone.

How was that?

So.

Is there anything else you'd like to share?

All right.

And thank both for agreeing to come on and talk.

I know it's not easy.

to always, you know, to share and especially in a room or on a Zoom full of strangers.

So thank you.

And just to wrap that, you know, I just want to, you know, say, you know, the same, we're the same age, the same people raised us, the

The same things that have affected them have affected me.

And it was possible for me to have their life and it was possible for them to be a member of city council and the mayor of Charlottesville.

Very smart, you know, brilliant people.

And I asked them to come on because that is the story of so many family members in this community.

And Neil made a point when he was doing his presentation and he said an intake is a person.

And throughout all of my time trying to maintain employment in Charlottesville,

One thing that I've been consistent at every, whether it was at Region 10 working with a drug court, family treatment court program or in group homes or just interfering where people didn't think it was my business.

What I have attempted to see because I know it so personally and I could never not see it is that the humanity of the people who

other people, people in positions of power just take as a number and don't see the person.

And the fact that this has happened to every family that we know is the reason why I'm so dedicated and so passionate every day.

And

You know, I'm sure if we talk to, you know, even the professionals that are sitting here today, you know, Major Mooney could tell you about Rajon, his friends and the case from their policing perspective.

Joe Platania could tell you from the prosecutor perspective and as the person who prosecuted cases from his perspective.

And I just want you all to

understand that even in those positions of power, that when you truly understand systemic racism and the effects that it has on families, that at some point you're going to have to make a decision about whether it is legal in the moment.

As I just said,

Rajan mentioned his mom was released about eight years earlier because President Obama's administration decided that it was unfair what previous administrations had done.

And there, his attorney general worked to undo the disparity between whether you were arrested on a crack cocaine charge, which primarily

meant that you were black and brown and lower income, which is not true, but that's what it meant in the criminal justice system and anyone who works in the system know that it's not the case, but a powder cocaine, which is perceived as your higher class and higher class is often perceived that you don't deserve to do time and there's more understanding and resources are allocated to you and you get help.

and just as the Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch changed it at a federal level, we can either wait until there are more people in office at state and federal levels to change things or we in the positions that we are in and with the power that we have can make decisions and change them on a local level.

And there is a lot within the power at every point in the criminal justice system for us to make those changes.

So next we have the power and impact of officers discretion and oh yeah okay and I'll let

You there?

Yeah.

I'll let Chief Brackney, Dr. Brackney, introduce this point and introduce Nancy.

I am in.

And Nancy, thank you so much for agreeing to come.

And Chief, you already, you know, I thank you for enduring, you know, what you've been through.

I've apologized before, but I am

I appreciate that your willingness to continue this work to this point to do this presentation.

Thank you, Madam Mayor.

And thank you to the rest of the team.

It has really been a collaborative effort.

And we'll walk through it.

Mr. Wheeler, if you can pull up the PowerPoint, please, that Nancy sent to you.

That would be most helpful.

We're going to talk really about the power and impact of officer discretion and build a little bit on what Neil just said.

If you can go to the next slide.

The freedom and power to leverage officer discretion during a police encounter and the long-term impact of those subjected to the authority must be examined through the lens of justice, equity, and community wellness.

One of the most powerful tools that an officer possesses is discretion.

So since August of 2018, we have tracked and examined the exercising of that power within the ranks of CPD.

As you can see here, we'll talk a little bit about the background and historical context.

First, by presenting this information, we presented it as early as September of 2018 to council.

We examined and asked for community proposals to determine how data might be collected and presented to the public for examination.

and then through the creation and hiring of inaugural position of a Fourth Amendment analyst to eventually analyze every encounter.

But the historical perspective and background on this, I have to

Acknowledge who was often my nemesis in this work, Jeff Vogel, who pushed me and challenged me and challenged CPD at every level to look at the historical ways in which we did it and went about our work.

He pressed through the DMC reports.

He often asked me to look at stop and frisk and

and then also to really look just not even at the non-officer initiated counters, but where officer discretion could be leveraged with officer or non-officer initiated encounters.

And in fact, he actually helped in participating in the background examination as with Liz

and a few other persons who are on this Joquitini's team to determine how we would collect data and present that in the future.

And through the creation and the hiring of the Fourth Amendment analysts to examine every encounter, those encounters from outside sources like 911 and those in which the officer had the sole determinant to determine whether or not they were going to engage with the person.

If you look at the stop and frisk information, we took a lot of background information and created a database for the first time, which could be searchable and then could be public facing and which we could examine every encounter.

If you go to the next slide, what we did through that examination and through that background is we created a standardized way in which we could now use tracking so that someone like Neil could go into our work

and do tallies and look at that and possibly look through disparities.

We standardized how we identify an encounter, how we attract the encounter, then how we triangulate that encounter through the body worm camera footage, through our CAD notes, our incident reports and photos.

And we even had to create codes that literally told us we were involved in an investigative detention and whether that encounter was one that was

either non-officer or officer initiated.

And we've been doing that now since, posting that since September of 2018.

And we have a lot of data in which we've not done a thorough or deep dive or an examination into what officer discretion looks like.

And we're going to talk about that a little bit more.

We just want you to understand the background of what we're going to be using to present.

Nancy's going to present in a very thorough way the information

about the study that she's doing and that we're doing as part of this group that could help us inform ways in which we could disrupt negative encounters or entry into the criminal legal system.

If you look at the next slide for us, we're going to do, thank you, Brian, a deep dive into discretion.

When you just heard Neil say that over a 10-year period, the severity of a principal charge

the number of companion charges and the intake rates specifically to Charlottesville, which would mean they were an outgrowth of the Charlottesville Police Department.

We have to realize that these are points where officers may have some discretion.

So in order for us to do a deep dive into discretion, most often we associate discretion with the officer's decision to arrest or not arrest.

However, what we found is if you look a little further, if you peel back the layers,

Discretion is revealed in the way we exercise and leverage the encounter and then how that encounter translates into the legal system.

So when I was presented with the opportunity by Squires Pat and Boggs Foundation to host an inaugural racial justice fellow law student focusing on Black community police relations, I was beyond thrilled.

and Nancy, who is now a 3L at the University of Texas School of Law in Austin, Texas, where she is vice president of the Muslim Law Students Association, pro bono chair of the Thurgood Marshall Legal Society, a member of the Women's Law Caucus,

She is newly elected as the Editor-in-Chief of the Texas International Law Journal.

She serves as the staff editor of the American Journal of Criminal Law, which she said that she was willing to come from Texas to Charlottesville to work with us.

And she graciously accepted that offer and has continued to do the work beyond her internship that speaks to the character and the type of fellows that Squires Patton Boggs has put together.

So what we asked her to do is I've asked her to analyze officer initiated contacts by race and gender.

I've asked her to look at the legal reasons for the interventions or the encounter and to push even further.

What were those legal or law outcomes?

How were people affected by neighborhood?

And what was the legality of the encounter?

She also was looking at capturing officer discretion.

More importantly, what were their influencers to engaging when an officer had the sole discretion?

They were not being leveraged by 911.

They were not being leveraged by a witness or a victim.

They just had the sole discretion to encounter.

What kind of language did they use?

We think of discretion often just as arrest, but the discretion to use language and how language is used, the type of force that's often utilized in response to resistance or otherwise.

when they chose to divert from or introduce someone to the criminal legal system when reasonable suspicion or probable cause existed.

She then was asked to look at identifying variables or triggering factors associated with discretion and then track those outcomes by race, gender, what type of defense were they provided with, who the prosecutors were, who the judges were assigned once they were in the system.

And then with the purpose of identifying a variable or an influencer to see if we could disrupt when an officer decided to introduce an individual into the criminal legal system or to divert or off ramp them and not exercise

their discretion.

So the whole purpose was could we mitigate harm or trauma?

We just heard stories from the Smith family who's been generationally impacted when a person most often of color or their family members are introduced into the criminal legal system.

So Nancy, it is with my honor, with my pleasure, and thank you for doing this work.

But if you could just

Thank you so much, Chief Brackney, and thank you to the Foundation for allowing me to work at the Charlottesville Police Department this summer, and for the City, Mayor Walker and Chief Brackney for allowing me to continue my research just because I was so interested in it.

It's remarkable research and I'm lucky to be the one that got placed with CPD.

Let's see, can we go on to the next slide?

So this is a quick summary of the data.

Although disclaimer, some of the data has not been fully and completely mined, particularly when it comes to the area of legal representation, mostly because I decided to add that within the last few weeks after discussing

it with my SPB mentor.

So as you can see, in 2019, my sample size was 187 people.

And the primary reason for the officer encounters were alcohol, narcotics, and minor and major crimes against property.

Of those 187, 15 were consensual.

Wait, yeah, 15 were consensual.

57 were due to reasonable suspicion.

And in 115 instances, officers had probable cause.

Of the 187, 45 of those cases led to an arrest.

And significantly, in 66% of those cases, individuals did not have an attorney.

And in 62% of those cases, people were found guilty.

In 2020, we see that sample size almost cut in half with 97 people detained.

The reasons are the same with the addition of traffic stops, which had a small spike.

So those ended up having the same numbers as minor property crimes.

And in 2020 we have seven casual consensual encounters and five of those are juveniles and it's important to note that that's over three instances.

So three of those juveniles were encountered once and then two were encountered separately on two different occasions.

and then probable cause also increased in 2020.

So out of the 97, 64,

64 people were stopped because the officer had probable cause.

Law enforcement outcomes, 38 out of the 97 people detained were arrested.

And the judicial outcomes here were 70% guilty, not guilty, or dismissed were 3%, and no pause were 27%.

However, I think that this is primarily due to the fact that

We're seeing less charges.

So I actually went back.

And again, this data hasn't been fully mined.

I'm still wrapping it up.

But what I see between 2019 and 2020 is the average number of charges significantly decreasing.

So while in 2019, a DUI charge could have three charges associated with it, in 2020, it's just one DUI charge.

Mr. Wheeler, can we move on to the next slide, please?

So now I want to highlight some significant cases and take a deeper dive into discretion, focusing again on what Chief Brackney was saying about the language and also about the inconsistencies about who decides what officers use to decide who they arrest and who did who they decide to again off ram.

So this first case, it was the initial reason for the encounter was it was an alcohol related crime.

It was a white female.

and she had had an accident with a concrete wall.

She was injured.

She was bleeding, but she was also passed out.

She was clearly intoxicated.

She had said that she wasn't the driver, that someone else had driven the car and she had

hopped into the driver's seat afterwards because they took off, which wasn't factual because there's body camera footage and vehicle footage showing that no one had exited.

She was argumentative, rude.

She had lied multiple times, citing that her injuries were due to being in a police vehicle, although she had requested to be transported to hospital in that vehicle rather than in an ambulance.

And

With that being said, even though her blood was drawn, she was intoxicated, the outcome on the legal side was not guilty.

And then we have two narcotics cases.

One of them involved a black male.

He had purchased a $20 bag of cocaine and officers had been sitting or I guess had been sitting outside of the house that was known to sell drugs,

and so the man had been around that house.

He was stopped.

A $20 bag was found on him.

He wasn't driving and it was a personal use amount.

He ended up being arrested.

He was found guilty of a felony charge.

It resulted in $998 in fees and 12 months of jail time, which was later suspended.

The second narcotics case, completely different outcome, although

It was more severe.

So the officer had found him passed out in the vehicle with a personal use amount of drugs.

He stated that it was a crystal like substance and there was a loaded heroin needle.

The white male openly admitted to recently injecting a screwball, which was a mixture of heroin and meth, and he was driving, he admitted to it.

He had a long history of drug use.

The system showed that he was recently involved in a drug investigation in Abemarle.

Sorry to butcher that, I'm not from Virginia County.

And although I was so easily able to pull up in the system that he had been arrested multiple times, he had this long history of drug use, this resulted in no arrest, which is very problematic, in my opinion.

And then we had this next case, which really highlights the use of discretion, especially when it comes to language, and even in the arresting stage.

We have a white male.

He was arrested because he had bottles of mouthwash in his car and officers suspected that he was intoxicated.

He performed very well in the field sobriety test.

He was an alcoholic, numerous DUIs.

And there is one point in the video where he says that this is his fourth one.

And the officer, when giving him instructions on the breath machine, even though the guy has done this four times now,

He says, this machine is older than blank.

When you blow, do it how your girlfriend does.

Blow it like a blank onto that black blank, as you call it.

Very unprofessional.

The man was taking it as a joke the whole time.

The arrest was a joke to him.

And although he was found guilty, his charge was also really strange because he admitted that this was his fourth DUI.

He only got charged as a second DUI.

He had 180 days in jail with 140 of those days suspended, $859 in fees, and his license was suspended for three years.

This last case did not result in an arrest.

It was a consensual encounter.

It was a black male.

He was waiting outside of a tennis court.

He was making phone calls.

An officer approached him.

And this was a

I call it the guilty by association case because the officer approached him because he had a family member.

His brother was recently arrested or had gone to jail and the officers knew his family.

And so the officer kept telling him, like, are you doing anything illegal?

Do you have drugs on you?

Do you have this?

Although the officer had been talking to him for quite some time, nobody had driven by, nobody had come by, nobody had called him.

And then you see a circle of officers kind of encircle this man in a threatening manner.

And then he gets searched.

There's nothing on him.

Officers let him go.

There's no arrest.

Mr. Wheeler, can we move on to the next slide?

And this is my last slide.

It's about discretion on this claim.

And these two cases are almost identical, exactly alike.

However, officer reasoning led to different results.

So in the first case, we have a suspected DUI traffic stop.

No field sobriety test was administered.

The man was a Hispanic male, only spoke Spanish.

There had to be a translator on the line.

Um, the triggering variables were, honestly, the officer was impatient.

He didn't want to talk through the translator.

He was very frustrated.

The man kept asking the translator questions.

The officer didn't want to deal with it.

Um, and so he counted it as a refusal.

Refusal to take the the breath test in in the jail.

Refusal to do a field sobriety, he refused to do a field sobriety test, even though in reality he wasn't really asked to do it.

The question was given to the translator.

The translator asked him about it.

He asked the translator, what does that mean?

The officer got frustrated and just moved on to the arrest.

And the legal outcome for him was he was found guilty of a DUI.

His license was suspended for one year, even though in the video it shows that he needed his vehicle to get to work.

He didn't live in Charlottesville.

There was $439 in fees.

However, there was no pause for the refusal, most likely because the court saw the body-worn camera footage and decided he didn't refuse.

He just wasn't given the option or he wasn't explained what a refusal was.

And then we have this case on the right.

It's also suspected DUI.

It was an accident.

There was no field sobriety test administered.

The woman was an English speaker.

She was a white woman.

She says it was her birthday.

She was crying.

She claimed kids were at home.

But what was most significant is that her best friend was an officer, and she told the officers

This is my best friend.

You can call him.

I'll call him for you.

You can talk to him.

And you hear the officers talking about, yeah, we know this guy.

She's not taking the field sobriety test.

And if she doesn't take the field sobriety test, not the PBT test where you have to blow into, but the actual field sobriety test, we have no reasonable suspicion.

Although she admitted to openly drinking.

She admitted that she might have had too much to drink because it was her birthday.

but in the end she wasn't arrested and not only was she not arrested she was allowed to drive go park her car and then take an Uber home.

So these are two cases almost identical when it comes to like not taking a field sobriety test but in the first case he was charged with the refusal he lost his license and he was found guilty of a DUI where the second case the woman kind of

played on the fact that she was friends with an officer.

The officers discussed it.

The supervisor even came onto the scene to discuss it, and no arrest was made.

In summary, we still have so much work to do.

There's still so much information that we have to go through.

However, with the constraints of November 30th being our deadline, that may not be entirely possible.

But I think this research is extremely beneficial to Charlottesville, especially when we start looking deeper into these variables and breaking down these variables even further.

Thank you so much, Nancy, and thank you, Madam Mayor.

As you can see, discretion really does impact the way officers not only go about the work, the language they use, who they choose to introduce into the criminal legal system, who they will penalize.

One person gets to park their car, another person's car is towed, thereby eliminating their ability to have transportation to work.

often don't see the humanity and no empathy for a person who doesn't look like them, who's not crying, who's not in an accident, who doesn't remind them of themselves.

The whole reason for the work is when we look at discretion, is there an opportunity that even when a system is racist and biased,

and possibly even officers, although we have current op-eds that say that there's no racism in Charlottesville Police Department and we have heads of agencies who say that racism doesn't exist in policing in Charlottesville or in the system of policing throughout the nation.

Just as the quick sample of someone just pulling out two years

of data that we've decided to collect that was not being collected before, and we're not sure how it will be collected in the future, but just look at two years through the lens of someone like a law student who says, I'm going to neutrally look at this and examine those influencers, why we really do need this committee as we imagine a just-see bill.

So thank you for that opportunity, and Nancy, thank you for the work

that you agreed to continue to do at the behest of myself and the mayor speaking with you at length.

So thank you.

And I see John Oberdorfer is on here from the foundation.

Thank you all so much.

Thank you, Nancy.

And, you know, I just, I would like to, I have two things to say before, you know, we move on, but Nancy, when we met, maybe, was it a week ago, two weeks ago?

Nancy started getting feedback, I think, alerts from friends, you said, about what was happening in Charlottesville.

So the decision,

you know, to fire the police chief and

you know made it to her before she heard it from the police chief and when we spoke it was attempting to convince her that it was worth continuing this work not because she didn't see value in it you see Nancy you know we had talked to her about can you move here because we need because we need you know people like you in this community

but really started her questioning working with a community such as ours.

And I bring this up and I wasn't going to ask Nancy any questions.

Yeah, so I think I may have offended you when I had even asked that question.

So I've always been interested in public interest work, even though I do want to explore big law.

And after what happened with Chief Brackney, people, my friends who know that I've been working with the Charlottesville Police Department

They informed me that her time with CPD has been ended and that Mayor Walker is no longer going to be the mayor.

And I had asked both of them

Why do you pick towns and cities like Charlottesville to attempt to make a change when you can go to these bigger cities?

I'm from New York, so why don't you go to somewhere like New York or Austin, Texas, where it's liberal and there's people that think like you and they will appreciate your work.

And perhaps maybe then it could influence these smaller places like Charlottesville.

and I don't know if I had offended you with that question but in my opinion I felt like why go through all this emotional labor and just tire yourself out to fix a community that may not even appreciate it but and it kind of made me think like is public interest really the way I want to go what if I go somewhere that doesn't want me there what if

Houston, where my family is now, isn't as liberal as I think they are.

Or maybe Austin won't be as liberal 10 years from now where I'm midway through my practice.

So yeah, that was my question to you.

Yeah.

And my response and Chief Brackney's response were very similar.

But the story that you heard before, and I shared that with Nancy,

and some other things when asking her to continue and very thankful that she has agreed and that Chief Brackney, even with all that she's been through, has agreed because the work is so much bigger than us.

And I hadn't seen this presentation yet, but I know those stories from my time working in the system.

being on a drug court, family treatment court, and seeing if you're white and female or white and male, that you have very different outcomes.

And even those two systems, if you ever make it to those systems, because most of the time you don't, as you can see.

And I just ask you all to think back to what Rajon said.

He's 28.

He spent six years in prison.

He has a daughter who's nine.

and it could have been something as simple as not whether you did something wrong because most of us have not been perfect and we've done things wrong but that if you are white and if you are black or Hispanic that no one ever sees you they don't see you they don't value you and you're automatically rolled into the system that causes harm

and I know there are people who are like, oh, she just mentioned a few people, oh, it was just, you know, a couple years, but it is significant.

And as you listen to the, you know,

us continue our presentation and the next group.

Think about all the lives that have been affected.

Get stamped with felonies, can't get jobs, miss time from their kids.

Think about what Neil said in terms of 55 and older being the population that is filling the local jail here.

That means that that's probably a person who started going to prison at Rajon's age, early 20s, and still haven't been able to figure it out.

I know some of those stories, too.

I just hope you all think about it.

So next up, we have Joe Platania talking about the reform efforts of the Commonwealth Attorney's Office.

Good evening, everybody.

Thank you, Mayor Walker, and thanks to all the other members on the committee.

I saw my name on Chief Brackney and Misameen's PowerPoint, and the two of them did all the work on that.

I didn't participate in any of that excellent presentation on officer discretion.

At one point there was a talk, and I think Chief Brackney said this, about severity and number of charges maybe being driven by officer discretion on the front end.

I think that there's great interest for Ms.

Amin and Chief Brackney to then loop our office in on the back end to see

Just because a charge might start out at a severity level or a number of charges based on officer discretion, we want to look at where it ends up after it runs through the prosecutor's office.

So I'm hopeful Ms.

Amin will continue with the project and our office will certainly be a cooperative participant in that important work.

I'd also just like to, I've only got 10 minutes, so I'll try and be brief.

I'd like to just acknowledge the Smith family and Mayor Walker's comments that, you know, Neil's presentation was a lot of numbers and statistics and graphs, but we're talking about our fellow citizens.

We're talking about people and human beings.

And I think it's just a good reminder.

I can't really say it any better than Mayor Walker did in her comments that I think that's

something that's important for us all to be mindful of as we do this work and look at reforms.

So I don't have a PowerPoint, but I do have three numbers I want everyone to focus on.

And if you want to write them down, you can.

The first number is 500.

The second number, if you're writing it down, you should write to the left of 500 and you should write 300.

and then the third number, if you wanna write down to the right of the 500 is 900.

So 300, 500 and 900.

And just to give a little bit of historical perspective to Neil's presentation, about 15 years ago, so somewhere around 2006, there was a needs assessment conducted at the local jail.

And at the time, 15 years ago, the jail population was somewhere around 450 to 500 inmates.

And that's Charlottesville, El Morrow and Nelson County.

And back 15 years ago, they said, all right, we're going to do a needs assessment and look at population growth and arrest rates.

And we're going to do a projection about where you're going to be in 2021, which is where we are now.

And the needs assessment predicted 15 years ago that if we continue doing what we were doing, and we can continue with business as usual, that we're going to need 900 beds at the Charlottesville Elmar Regional Jail.

And so about 15 years ago, a bunch of folks got together, many of them who are on this call and formed an EBDM evidence based decision making team to say,

What can we do to hold the line at 450 to 500 and not have to expand and add new beds and be up to 900?

And a lot of that work's been going on by many people for the last 15 years.

and I was just on a call, I believe it was yesterday, and I think under roof at the jail right now is 300.

And I think there's about 100 under roof that are facing Charlottesville charges.

And I'm sort of using round numbers.

So how did we, and I want to stress something at the outset.

Does that mean that there are no problems?

Does that mean everything's fine?

Does that mean that we don't have structural institutional racism?

Does that mean we don't need to tackle reform efforts?

No, that is not what I'm saying.

I want to be clear that I'm not saying that and that

the work of Mayor Walker's committee is vitally important and we need to continue with it and dig deeper and keep doing the hard work and having these conversations.

But we did as a community hold the line and now have 300 under roof

And I think Neil talked about the footprint being smaller, the arrest being down, the bookings being down, the length of state being down.

And, you know, you need partnerships amongst people within the system.

You need a partnership between the prosecutor and the chief of police and judges and probation and the public defender's office.

So a few of the things that we've tried to do in our office to hold the line and even lower the number

We try and reduce all first-time felonies to misdemeanors to not saddle people with those debilitating and crippling consequences of a felony prosecution and a felony conviction.

You know, if there's a violent crime, you know, that's a different story and we go case by case, but our default in our office is looking at felonies and saying, does this need to be a felony prosecution?

Can it be a misdemeanor prosecution?

We're trying to reduce the time that people are on District 9 supervision.

I believe I read a study that said if someone's compliant for 12 months, continuing them on supervision after the 12 months does more harm than good.

So we're advocating as prosecutors for judges to reduce the length of probation from two or three years to 12 months.

They don't always listen.

I was in court today on a couple cases and asked for 12 months and the judge didn't agree.

But that doesn't mean we can't continue to ask for decreased time on supervision, which is off ramping and off roading people out of the system.

as soon as possible.

We're also asking that people be removed from District 9 earlier and not keep them on indefinitely, 5, 10, 15 years.

If they have a violation or something happens and we don't think they need to be supervised in the community, we ask the judge for some sort of a consequence and to remove them from supervision and place them on good behavior.

We as a prosecutor can write to the judge and say it's a good behavior violation.

They don't need to be monitored by a probation officer.

You need supervisor approval to prosecute a mandatory minimum offense.

So if Ms.

Murtaugh cannot do a thing about it if the evidence is there to convict her client.

Judge can't do anything about it.

So, and it's not just firearm offenses, it's other areas where there's mandatory minimums.

So, you know, we try to not charge mandatory minimums and leave sentencing up to the judge in many cases to have defense attorneys advocate for their clients and argue for something less than a mandatory sentence.

I believe I saw Jim Hingley on the call.

We have also is a system that

greatly expanded our use of home electronic incarceration.

And that's really a credit to Superintendent Coomer.

He's been doing it at no cost to folks where they have a GPS ankle unit on and are able to be at home and at work and not in the jail.

And they're still considered in custody serving a sentence.

So we've greatly expanded the HEI program.

I believe there were 50 people on HEI at last check.

And Mr. Hingley, the Admiral County commonwealth's attorney, asked Mr. Coomer

And at one point it was 400 plus people that had been released on HEI.

I don't know what the number is now, but the number of people out on HEI that had committed new criminal offenses was like one and a half percent.

So folks are not being released that are out committing new crimes.

They're doing well and they're not getting into trouble.

So that's important.

We continue to advocate for as many pre-trial releases as possible.

We don't use cash bonds in Charlottesville or in Albemarle.

Sometimes, you know, it takes a defense attorney getting on board, and Ms.

Murtaugh is going to talk about that to get us more information or to get a judge more information.

But we favor pre-trial release for folks that don't pose a threat to the community.

And just again, really an overall mindset of trying to look at jail as a last resort and not as a first option, I think has allowed us to be down to around 100 folks over at the jail.

So those are just a few of the things that we're doing.

And the number going from 500 down to 300, that would not be a success story.

And I want to make sure I mention this.

And I know Chief Brackney and all folks involved in law enforcement are worried about and charged with keeping the community safe.

And so the corresponding dip in the number of folks over at the jail and some of the things going down, they're consistent with, I think there's been a lot of media attention on the shots fired legitimately, but it's consistent with, you know, the crime numbers going down also that Mr. Goodloe talked about.

The second thing I want to mention is, again, Jim Hingley and I just met with Martin Coomer, the superintendent of the jail and the architects that are looking at the jail renovation and improvement.

And Jim and I are going to be very publicly involved in advocating for holding the line and keeping the rated capacity of the jail the same and not expanding or adding more beds, but improving the spaces

in the facilities.

And there was talk of a community garden in a rec area.

So Jim and I are going to be very publicly involved on the jail renovation and holding that line and not expanding and adding more beds.

You know, I wish they had more than three minutes and part of that work and part of alternatives to incarceration, you're going to hear about great work being done by Miss Sherry Henley, Jay James at the Bridge Ministry and Sandra Carter, the Restoration and Hope House.

So we need to partner as a system with folks that are providing alternatives to incarceration and programming and residential beds for women, for Ms.

Henley and Ms.

Carter.

So places for folks to go other than jail when they need a place to transition to.

And then lastly,

Mr. Smith said something about rebuilding is hard, and I once heard a safe and stable community described as a stool with three legs and the three legs are enforcement, education and reentry.

And, you know, there is the enforcement of laws that's part of the safe and stable community, but there's also education and prevention and then there's reentry.

and our office partnered up with a professor at the University of Virginia and Mr. Coomer at the jail and we just started books behind bars class.

I think there's 20 folks over at the jail taking that class.

It's being taught by a UVA professor and there was a documentary made on it.

Seats at the table, and they're getting college credit from the University of Virginia at no cost, the jails covering the cost of that.

And the logic behind that is a system I think we also need to focus on, you know, what happens to folks when they are released back into the community and have all these hurdles and all these problems.

and building some self-esteem and having them have some academic credit and not having to pay for it.

We're hopeful that, you know, that's something that is some programming at the jail that helps when folks are released.

So I think that's about my 10 minutes, Mayor.

Thank you very much for that.

And we've said this before.

And when Martin Coomer came to the

group to talk about the jail.

He talked about, you know, Home to Hope and Stacey Washington being instrumental in the success that people have had during this pandemic.

So that's just another example, you know, outside of the ones that I figure we've heard from Home to Hope enough, we'll hear from other people who I think are going to help us change this community.

But

They're so vital to us getting this right.

And I just want to say that again.

Next up, we have Chief Brackney and Joe Platania talking about one of the recommendations that we all have is creating a lead program in the community.

Thank you so much.

And Mr. Wheeler, if you could just pull up the remainder of the PowerPoint, that would be helpful.

Thank you.

Also, too, Mr. Will, I had asked, and I don't know if you saw my text, if you could elevate Janice Redinger.

She was actually one of the persons on the panelists and will be part of that question and answering as we get to the first slide.

So if you can go to the next slide for me, please.

So part of what I was asked to look at, and Joe and I have had lots of conversations over the past three years,

as we were both arriving in Charlottesville, very similar in time, January of 2018 for him and June of 2018 for me.

And what we talked about often was what were we thinking about?

Were we thinking about rehabilitation and opportunities or were we thinking about retribution?

And I've had the privilege of going to speak to one of Joe's classes at UVA.

And, you know, oftentimes we realized that prior to our arrival,

We were doing procedural policing and procedural prosecutions kind of by the book, right?

It was that, you know, there were no conversations around diversion.

You just heard the commonwealth's attorney talk about all of the options to exercise his discretion.

And through those conversations, we landed on that we actually had some very mutual ideas and friends and advocates in the criminal legal system.

And Joe and I don't know if you'll be able to pop on as we talk about what could procedural restorative justice in policing and now with the new push for the 21st century same kind of task force by the Biden administration towards

Fair and Just Prosecutions as well.

So as Joe wants to jump in there, if he does want to chat just briefly about how we were vision and value aligned around these ideas, which then led us to the possibility for an authentic diversion program that would actually have two safety nets.

So I can talk about briefly what the first safety net might be.

Brian, if you go to the next slide.

and then Joe, if you can just pick up how those that safety net might work if they do get into the system and we're not able to fully divert and identifying triggering our identifiers and variables for officer discretion.

So in 2012, in the city of Pittsburgh, I created an authentic diversion program that meant pre-arrest, pre any charges, pre any sort of

fingerprinting or introducing someone into the criminal legal system.

And the way that was started, and Liz Martog and Janice Redinger, and with some spicy input from Jeff Fogel, were looking at what could those possible identifying charges, those charges we could identify that where an officer had discretion, we could off-ramp them all together.

Yes, a police report might is taken if there's some evidence that's put into the evidence.

And then could we give people choices and empower choices to be better and resilient persons

if they had options.

If you presented someone with an option of, hey, are there some resources and tools that I could have or be given to me and supported versus being introduced into the criminal legal system wherever they are.

If they've been previously introduced 100 times or never, is there a way to off ramp them, particularly if nonviolent offenses

where oftentimes you'll have what is called a victimless crime or something of that.

And then how could we empower them to make the decision to opt in or opt out as an option?

And where could we do that at several places?

One, immediately on the scene with the officers to say, yes, I'm interested in the diversion program means changing the forms so that literally an officer can check that someone has been given an option to opt in with some qualifying paperwork.

and then even possibly at the magistrate's office that the person is presented with the option again to opt out before they're fully invested into the magistrate system.

And the reason being is temperatures, emotions at the original scene may often be elevated.

And when you put some time and distance between that space and then a person is possibly in front of a magistrate, is there some clarity to thought?

Is there some emotion?

The next step we would do as part of the process is immediately schedule.

and intake appointment.

And then there would be this intake conference.

And that would be between, and we would have to identify staff members.

These are all in its early stages.

In Pittsburgh, I had full staff that I had funded through a foundation in which the intake person and the subject of the encounter

as part of their conference would create a resiliency plan around, it could be drug and alcohol, it could be workforce development, it could be resume writing, it could be GED prep, anger management, mental health, helping with housing, all of those things that normally influence why a person may be involved in crime or resorting to criminal behavior.

Out of that resiliency plan comes a resiliency agreement.

And the reason I call it a resiliency is so that people do have the opportunity to be resilient and healthy and thriving in their communities.

And there's an agreed upon pathway forward for that individual as an outgrowth of that original encounter.

And then out of that plan is an outtake and processing upon the completion of the plan.

What it does provide for is grace, that people do not succeed the first time around.

Most of us don't succeed the first time around, even at the most mundane task.

If you think about

Oftentimes when you were first learning to ride a bike and you had the training wheels on and when someone took those off, that was a healthy exercise.

But did you master that skill set or did it take lots of practice, lots of support, lots of encouragement from a guardian, a loved one or someone who was mentoring you for you to be successful?

And then when you are outtake and processed out of that original resiliency plan, the original

Susan C.L.

: Reason for the encounter, you know court orders for destructions of evidence, so that a person is never entered into the system.

Susan C.L.

: We heard from Neil about bed days and the number of days and how it changes significantly after one day for for people of color that one day in a jail it changes significantly in blocks completely over.

Susan C.L.

: Now everyone's going to always say what about funding and how do you fund these kinds of things well i'm going to actually.

I've had some pretty robust discussions with the mayor and with other persons who fundings.

What about vibrant community recipients?

The city provides a lot of money to vibrant communities, not-for-profits, who could be part of this authentic diversion if there was some support needed, and more importantly, if the person who was the subject of the diversion wanted to participate in those.

Do we make room for that in those funding streams?

You know, a creative way is, Joe, we both get asset forfeiture funds, right, that come through the police department and the Commonwealth's attorney's office.

Is it possible to use those funds, not just for the education and training of our staff, but the community and those persons who are diverted so that we could use those monies in a way that reinvests back into the community?

You know, the less people who are introduced into the criminal legal system, that translates to CPD overtime, court savings for them not being there and they're not paid over time.

And then this also, I've had a move over the last three years to civilianize positions that police officers were performing that had nothing to do with policing and those everyday functions of policing that they were originally hired for.

For instance, like a Fourth Amendment analyst

and accreditation.

We've looked at it for training.

We've looked at it.

We now have for our analysts, our intel analysts, a lot of the functions in our records management.

What might we think about changing or unfunding a single position within CPD as a full-time equivalent

to just unfund it, you hold the position to then think about the funding that would then alleviate the burden of officers doing all of the type of paperwork for intake,

Arrest, Charging, etc.

You actually free them up to do the work that they say that they're interested in doing, and that's policing.

So that's kind of how we can do it.

It can be funded, it can be very successful, but it says that we are interested in investing in people, and we are authentically diverting people and off-ramping people

and we saw the impact of discretion.

What happens if we remove some of that discretion so that we can, you may not be able to train out implicit bias or explicit biases within systems or individuals, but if you take some of that discretion away and it's agreed upon, what is the type of resiliency you could do?

What type of harm could you reduce?

And I moved every day because my family has been heavily impacted, although I do

Policing.

My family has been heavily impacted by being introduced into the criminal legal system and always seems to be trying to find their way out of it, particularly my nephews and my cousins' males.

And what does that decimation do to families if someone had given them an opportunity to empower them to opt out of the system?

I believe if it was a healthy system and a robust system and one in which they actively were participating in, then you could

create a just, a more just Seville.

Thanks, Chief.

Hard to top that or add anything to it.

Chief Brackney used the words disruption and diversion, and we all know what she means by diversion, and once you're sort of on

on the, you know, on the, in the system, in the criminal legal system, your options are limited, and it's harder to do stuff, and you have less flexibility, and so, of course, diversion, like the chief just talked about, is before people hit that system, but you also use the word disruption, and I think the disruption part in that is disrupting the cycle of

in the court system, arrest, prosecution, release, re-arrest, re-prosecution, re-release after you serve time.

And those are the 55-year-olds.

We never figured out a good way to divert and disrupt their involvement in the cycle.

And I think that's what Chief Brackney was just talking about.

And you need partnerships.

She talked about being vision and value aligned.

You have to have a police chief in department that's on board to do that work.

And all the hard work is by the police department, by the way.

And then you need a prosecutor's office that is also vision and value aligned with and supportive of the work of that police department.

And, you know, I think we have that here in this community.

But thanks, Chief.

That was all you.

I definitely was talking to myself.

Thank you.

I said thank you to both of you.

And then I was introducing Liz to talk about

One of our other recommendations, which is to make sure that people have access to defense if they are introduced to an adequate defense if they're introduced.

So we have participatory justice, a request for funding for the, and I did make a phone call to Diantha McKeel with the Board of Supervisors today to just say one of the counselors,

The, you know, while I'm here, I will participate in this, but taking it on through the next budget cycle, because the way the office is funded, Almar will have to, you know, contribute to to make this

That's great, Mayor.

Thank you very much, and thank you for all the hard work everyone in this committee has done.

It's been really

It's been very satisfying to be a part of this group and listening to people's stories and their experiences.

I'm Liz Murtaugh.

I'm the public defender for the city of Charlottesville and Albemarle County.

My office covers both of those jurisdictions.

Our attorneys cover six courts.

So there's the circuit court, the general district court, and the juvenile and domestic relations district court.

There's six because there's one, of course, for each jurisdiction.

Our caseload is we most of our I guess we have 47% of our cases generally are coming from the city and 53% were from the county last fiscal year when I checked that so I'm in the process of looking at that again with this fiscal fiscal year in FY 2021 we had opened 100 I'm sorry 1646 new cases.

And as of this morning, when I checked our numbers, we had 816 open cases.

And I have eight lawyers.

So that means it's an average of 100, over 100 cases each lawyer is trying to handle.

So that goes to the point I think the mayor's making is to make sure that people, when we are represented and are adequately represented and that the people, attorneys have resources that they can use to represent people.

One of the recommendations is the mayor talked about was that we wanted to try or we felt like because of the the study was that if there was an attorney present at the first appearance that that could merely make a difference for people when someone is arrested.

And they're not granted bail by the magistrate they're brought before a judge.

the next day that the court is sitting.

So if it's on a Friday, it's going to be on Monday.

But if it's on Monday, it should be the next day on Tuesday.

And when the person appears, the judge advises them or tells them what their charges are against them.

And they advise them that their right to have an attorney and that the judge will review the bail or the not bail that the magistrate has set.

Typically, the Commonwealth Attorney is present at that, but there's not a defense attorney present.

In Virginia, we have a statute that allows for children that if they are arrested and detained and held in the detention center, that when they have their first appearance and their detention hearing, the law guarantees them the right to have an attorney and have an attorney present and that that attorney can start

working on the case before the case actually gets before the judge.

That's not so with adults.

It'd be very nice if we changed the law and made that mandatory.

Research shows that when a person has a lawyer with them in court for that first bail review, that they're more likely to be released from jail or they'll receive a lower bail amount and that they overall have better outcomes of their cases.

The earlier you get counsel in to help somebody, the better the outcome will be statistically.

It is incredibly disruptive, as the Smith family told us, and traumatic for individuals and their families when their loved one is locked up.

So our working group has agreed that we would like to have an attorney present in court for all indigent people that are coming before the court for first appearance.

I would like to be able to provide an attorney to be able to represent people when they come in for that first appearance, but not just be present, but to be an active participant in those proceedings.

But I don't have the capacity with the eight attorneys that I have now in my office to dedicate an attorney to do that right now.

So I'm here with my handout asking for assistance from the city, and I will make the same request of the county.

But what I'm requesting is that the city provide funding for a part-time attorney position for my office, and I'm requesting $37,502 for salary as well as benefits to fund this position.

This amount I arrived at is the half, it's the half mark of the

entry-level position in the Commonwealth's Attorney's Office.

That's where I came up with the number.

The attorney would be able to actually meet with people before they have their first appearance.

They could meet with them at the jail.

They'd be able to talk with family members, employers, verify employment.

Some of that is being done through offender aid and restoration and a risk assessment, but this would be different.

This would actually be

preparing information to present and getting witnesses lined up to actually have them in court for a meaningful first appearance.

This information could be used as Joe was talking about to develop a release plan for somebody to be able to be admitted back or come back into the community and be admitted to bail or to have if it was not a cash bail, which we generally don't have in Charlottesville.

They could be on pretrial services or just a personal recognizance bail.

The judge, I think, appreciates getting information like that from us, but as it stands now, it takes a day or two to get that information after we've been appointed and after we get the paperwork.

What I want to do is get information the day someone gets locked up, we're notified that morning that someone's being held, and we go over to the jail and we see them and get a plan set up for them.

You know, a plan like this really does benefit the community as a whole, and it helps families, and it certainly helps the person that's being locked up.

They're allowed to keep their jobs.

They're able to go back and forth and maintain their daily obligations to their family and to their employer.

It also, you know, it reduces the number of people that are in jail if they're getting released into the community.

Currently, the city has generously provided supplements for three core or salary supplements for three quarters of the employees in my office.

But there's still a significant difference in salaries of the employees of the Public Defender's Office and the Commonwealth Attorney's Office.

On average, there's a 39% difference in salary between my office and the Commonwealth Attorney's Office and with some of the discrepancies as high as 55%.

Being able to pay employees a competitive salary helps to ensure that we retain good people in our office.

Historically, my office has had very little turnover, and the salary supplements we receive from the city and the county play a large part of that.

I'll be submitting a funding proposal to the city, which will include this request for the part-time attorney position, and in addition to the salary supplements from the city.

Last year, I estimated that it would take an appropriation of $120,579 to make the public defender employee salaries comparable to the Commonwealth Attorney's Office employees.

The appropriation we received was half that amount, but I'm going to come back again and ask you to fully fund us.

I want to work towards pay equity, and I believe that we can retain attorneys and staff with adequate salaries.

and to be able to meet our needs to our community if we can get this part-time position funded.

I think it would really go a far way to be able to better serve our community and certainly to help incarcerated individuals and try to get them released and back home to their families.

Thank you, Liz.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Okay.

No, we can.

You're talking.

It's your, you know, it's reception, I think, on your end.

Okay.

Mr. Fogel, you might try turning off your video.

Yes.

Does that help?

Yes.

Okay, well, as I was saying,

It should be apparent from what Neil presented in terms of statistics and what Joe talked about.

And included in this is the work that was done for the task force on juvenile connections to the criminal justice system, which task force I sat on.

In each of those instances, we've been able to make the system better.

But we have not cracked a system.

And that's apparent from what Joe presented as well.

address the question of what do we need to do in the police department?

And the answer I have is we need to dismantle the police department and reconstitute it with people who share the vision of this community.

We have a substantial number of police officers, and it's no surprise, principally in the patrol division, who believe what I'll call old school of policing.

had appropriately described by the chief as aggressive warrior type policing.

And if anybody's paying attention, the shift to guardian policing is something that's been called for widely by anybody interested in the system, going back to the report by the President's commission, Obama's commission on policing in the 21st century.

We cannot tolerate

a substantial number of parole of police officers on patrol who are out of control, which is what's happening now.

If you look through the surveys, as I have, you will see not only criticism of cancer staff, but a dislike for our community.

A couple of remarks, you know, I'm going to just because I can't do the whole thing.

to the command staff.

Stop pandering to the complainers and the mobs.

I haven't seen any mobs here.

The complainers are the people who want to disrupt the system in precisely the manner that Joe talked about and the police are opposed to.

Some of them are upset that Joe's too liberal.

Try to tell them they're lucky I wasn't elected or Ray wasn't elected.

We've got a serious problem in the police department and not been at the command staff level until now.

But the point is, if we dismantle that system, re-contract everybody that we hire, which I think would include many of the police people still in the police department, to commit themselves to a shared vision of what policing should look like in our community, and to acknowledge

that they were prepared to leave this community if they don't live up to those standards.

I really don't have much time to go on any further, so I want to leave it at that.

I'm happy to answer questions otherwise.

But if you ask me what should these chiefs look like, I will tell you, take a look at the website for the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police.

The people who, Major Mooney,

and the city manager we're looking to for an interim police chief.

You, I hope, will be shocked when you look at their advocacy.

They're against everything that is believed in a Zoom call.

Absolutely everything.

And it is shocking to me that that's what happened here.

We have a police chief from that association who is going to oppose every effort that was made, that is being made, and that should be made, ordered by the people in charge.

The police chief believes as to distract me that inroads into the policing if we're going to see a change.

Thank you.

Next up, we have Ms.

Henley.

Mr. Willard, do you see Cherry Henley?

Okay.

Thank you, Madam Mayor.

I hope everyone can hear me.

Again, we're just honored to have the opportunity to be a part of the group.

I want to thank everyone.

It was a wonderful group to be a part of and just want to be one aspect of the many things that we can turn to that can be helpful in this whole process.

It's been very enlightening tonight.

So very quickly, Bridge Ministry, many may be familiar with, but if not, we are a residential substance abuse and reentry program for men.

We offer education, vocational training, professional credentials through Piedmont Virginia Community College, full-time employment.

In our treatment models, we have evidence-based programming and individualized treatment plans as well that we have at a 17-acre facility.

So that's just very quickly on us.

In terms of the pandemic,

We stayed open the entire time and our executive director, Mr. Washington and our staff during the pandemic, we were a part of helping to reduce the jail population, incorporating HEI into our populace, as well as providing a place, a residential facility that can hold 50 individuals

where folks can come from the jail to get out of close proximity and being at risk of asymptomatic or symptomatic transmission within enclosed spaces within the jail.

So what we did at the beginning of the pandemic before the CDC started implementing a lot of their recommendations and eventually mandates, we imposed masking.

We required all of our staff to be fully vaccinated as well as our

We would test individuals before they came just to make sure that they were COVID negative to provide a safe environment for folks especially coming out of incarceration.

We would test them while they were still incarcerated and once they were negative they would come to our facility and we had a 0% infection rate and we've maintained that throughout and able to serve multiple individuals to provide again a safe and secure alternative to incarceration to deal with their substance abuse disorders

but really for us just to get them out of incarceration because we just believe that all of the alternatives and I look forward to hearing from Ms.

Carter and I wish Ms.

Henley was here there's just a better way to do it and we're just glad that we can provide that over 80% of our participants who came to us on HEI were and are successful and some have graduated the HEI got the ankle monitor off their leg and are now going into full-time employment so we're proud of those guys and happy for them

Lastly, I would just leave this thought with everyone because I know our time is short and just grateful for everybody's patience and the opportunity, Mayor Walker.

As we look at the disproportionality, I would ask everybody just to think about the importance of Black people helping Black people, that support network that Mayor Walker talked about.

Our executive director, Mr. Washington, is from the areas that have been impacted by substance abuse in our community, knows those families, knows their kids, knows the generational pieces of it.

And we just want to be a part of helping not only those who look like us as an African American owned organization, but also all people in our populations, demographics show that that we take everybody, especially those who are indigent.

So again, thank you for this wonderful opportunity to share and to be a part of this community discussion.

And Mayor Walker, you know, just grateful for your leadership.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Next up, we'll have Sandra Carter talking about the Restoration and Hope House.

Thank you.

Hi, everyone.

I'm honored to be speaking with you all today.

Again, my name is Sandra Carter.

I'm a Charlottesville native.

I'm the founder of Restoration and Hope House and a graduate of Home to Hope.

Reservation and Hope House is the only transition house forming incarcerated women in Charlottesville.

I want to take some time today to share a bit about my experiences and work at that work I do.

After graduating from Home to Hope, it was about eight of us, and so we got placed in different areas, and I was placed at the Piedmont House.

I've been there for almost three years.

I worked at the Piedmont House in

which is a transition house for men in Charlottesville.

As a peer support specialist, I had to help the residents at the Piedmont house find employment and housing and I guide them through the transition from incarceration to regular life.

I develop meaningful relationship with these residents and I always go the extra mile to make sure they feel supported.

I'm very passionate what I do.

It is rewarding to watch the residents take back control of their lives, find employment, help them find secure housing.

Some start families, some reunite with their families.

As you already might know, returning citizens face so many obstacles when it comes to reentry.

People with criminal records have greatly difficult getting hired and finding housing.

Many also struggle with substance abuse, disorder,

or mental health issues.

Transition housing provide a sense of structure and stability for the residents as they deal with these challenges.

Some of you may know my mother and sister had a store back over on 6th Street for 15 years.

And so we closed down in 2015, but go back a little bit, 2007 is when

I got started right now, my vision.

Fast forward a little bit, I had started a transportation business and I was downtown one day and a young lady that I was in the class at Home to Hope, she asked me did I hear of the Home to Hope program and I told her no and she gave me this piece of paper and I went down to the library and I

I filled it out when I was there.

He asked me, did I have time enough to come for an interview, not knowing that I was going to meet Mayor Walker there.

And so I was one of the people that they picked to come to Home to Hope.

So Home to Hope helped me bring together all my vision and everything I had wrote down for the Reservation and Hope House.

And so

being there helped me structure that.

So I decided to open up the Reservation House because it wasn't any transition women houses in this area.

And I believe that formal and casualty room deserve the access to the same type of services provided by organizations like the Piedmont House.

And after having to work at the Piedmont House, I felt equipped enough to open up

my own transition house.

I've been working with a team of volunteers since February of 2020, UVA students, UVA professors, PVCC, Network to Work, just different organizations.

So Reservation Hope House will house up to 12 women and we will provide them with housing and food, transportation,

Employment Assistance, the wellness counseling.

I have a lot of groups that's coming in from UVA professors to students.

I have teachers coming in from different schools.

So I have NAA counselors that's coming in.

So I just want to be able to contribute a little bit back into helping these these ladies to have a smoothly transition back into the community.

for enormous civil life.

And I just believe that people deserve second chances.

So thank you.

Thank you.

And you all remember that we had trained eight individuals with Home to Hope.

Only one has returned to

Incarceration.

And Joe and I worked together to try to prevent that from happening too.

So there was even an effort after the person had another run in with the legal system.

And as Ms.

Carter said, she's one of the trainees.

And I hope you can hear from all of them that this is nothing that we did.

They just showed up and they were already

They were already ready and they already had an amendment.

They just need the resources and they just need us to support them the way they ask for support.

So Miss Henley says she's here.

I still don't see her name.

Is she?

Mr. Willard, do you see her?

She's in the attendees.

OK.

All right.

So while Ms.

Henley is coming on, Ms.

Henley will be talking about her organization, Lending Hands, which our group didn't have anything to create.

She came out rocking, ready to help change the community.

Ms.

Henley?

Hello?

Yes.

All right.

Good Lord of us.

Excuse me.

I heard everything that was going on.

I don't know.

Oh, excuse me with my technology.

But anyway, I guess it was somewhat of a blessing because I was very overwhelmed at all of the conversation.

My body was going through all kinds of things.

But anyway, first of all,

I guess I just want to give you credit for what you are doing and also just talking about people as humans.

Because a lot of times I think when people are doing this work or either sitting in rooms, they're just looking at the data.

But for me with Lending Hands, I'm doing a lot of

I see the devastation of families and people incarcerated.

So like I said, I was getting very, very overwhelmed.

But the reason grassroots organizations are important for me and my thinking is because I get firsthand experience

of not only working with the community or knowing the community, knowing about what people face incarcerated, but also

I understand all this data tonight that's been presented because I see it on a daily basis.

This information is, you know, I see what happens in courts, you know, I see, and I'm able to

kind of be like a mediator.

That's why grassroots in my work, I think, is important because of the lack of people that are the public defenders that Liz Murtaugh and her agency have.

Then I'm able to, because they can't get to the jail, then I'm able to connect with the public defender's office.

And sometimes, you know, that gives me an opportunity to

You know, half the person incarcerated, you know, they can't navigate inside of the jail.

That's one thing.

They can't navigate themselves inside of the jail.

I mean, the phone calls, because you know, in a way it's difficult.

So, you know, like I got off the thing and I feel like my mind is jumping, but I was just so blessed to hear what Nancy, the information she gave, because as, you know, as grassroots people and lived experience people as myself,

I see this on a constant basis.

I go into court with people, they might have seven or eight different charges.

That's what grassroots, what I do.

I go to court with people.

They might have seven different charges.

They got to go for those plea bargain things so quickly and so fast as soon as they walk into the courts.

And it's not, first of all, I want to go and say for a lot of people who are thinking that this is about people not harming other people,

Because I don't believe in people harming other people or people doing... It's the fact of following the law or treating people as human.

So, you know, I'm able to work with a lot of other organizations, grassroots work, you know, we're working on expungement and things like that now, you know, even myself, who has been charged free for 20 some years and all this kind of stuff, you know, I still face things like if I wanted to, if I needed to do housing,

So I help the people incarcerated when they get out how to navigate getting housing for those not, you know, what do you call it?

Landlords that don't do all that random checking stuff, private landlords.

So I mean, those are the kind of things that grassroots and knowing the information of the

what goes on within the courts and like pre-trial detention, just knowing how to navigate the system for other people.

So I've done a lot of things, whether it's driving for the jail, I did that for years for the work release department, about 10, 15 years, all the work release people, I drove them

to the jail and to get to know the community by doing that and already knowing the community myself, you know, I'm able to kind of grab hold, hopefully, to get them started even before they get out of incarceration.

And one of the reasons that the jail population, you know, this is another thing about grassroots, see, I feel like we get firsthand information, at least I do.

The population dropped because of the pandemic and because of activists who were pounding state and local officials to do something about the outbreak of COVID inside of the jail.

And along with all, some of the people who are on this line,

have worked with like Commonwealth, like Jim Hemsley and Joe, but just to have the information and to be able to navigate the system for other people, because when I got incarcerated, you know, you as Liz was talking, you don't know anything about what's happening.

You don't know what you're facing.

So, you know, I just like to offer that to other people.

And HEI, one thing about that, I mean, it's just so much y'all done talked about tonight, I just don't know, but HEI, which is a home electronic incarceration, that has worked, but it also limits people from being able to, you know,

you know still get themselves back into the community because I house people also lending hands as a house that they you know then I started about looking at the fact that people couldn't get housed in the city of Charlottesville so the things that people face I know I can go on and on with this it's so much so many different facets to this but I you know I started helping people navigate the system whether they in or out of incarceration and I also found that

me helping them navigate the system, working with Commonwealth fraternities, working with lawyers, myself, that there's a better outcome that happens.

So, you know, there's many areas that, you know, I created Lending Hands with the idea of what I had faced and, you know, the challenges that I knew that people were facing

in the prison system.

And there's so many, like the 55, you know, a lot of things that people talked about, like the 55 and older group.

Of course, I see those too.

And what I see is the devastation that incarceration, as you mentioned, Mayor, that has caused on families.

You know, I see those ones.

You know, it's just so challenging for them to, you know,

And I guess you want to say it's almost like an attitude of giving up.

You know, they just have given up, you know, because there's so many barriers like getting jobs or, you know, they might not have got a great enough education or, you know, you know,

and just the barriers of getting jobs and housing and men not being able to take care of their families.

And these are just some of the things that I just try to work with people with.

And I also work with the Commonwealth fraternities and all these other people who are on here because

I don't know, it's just, you know, I think somebody said it, I think it was Sandra, you know, just knowing, trying to help people do better.

Because one thing I always say about myself, even when I was, you know, going through this, is that

You know, everybody wants to do better.

I wanted to do better.

You need to know that I wanted to do better.

There was many things that was going on, you know, that I thought at that time, you know, and sometimes, you know, you can use them as excuses as well, but I thought was going on.

So I look at other people the same way.

You know, I think one of the most challenging things that I had to face was my getting my driver's license.

And I consider myself a strong, smart, intelligent person.

But the fact, every time I would try to pay something, I would run up against so many roadblocks of paying my fine or having the money to pay them or whatever the case.

So, yeah, so I don't know.

I just...

I just, I don't know.

And I created this, you know, while I was incarcerated, because I saw that not only what was happening in the jail system, but was also happening inside of prisons with counselors, you know, who had a heavy workload.

So it's...

It's, you know, and like I said, you know, as grassroots people, you know, we work together to make lives better for other people coming in and out of the prison system and trying to change policies and old traditions that have, you know,

prevented people from succeeding.

But the last thing, I don't know how much time I got, because I could go on on many, many things, but the last thing I want to say is that, you know, I just thank the group too.

And I had, I heard so much information tonight myself after hearing everything put forth.

and I'm glad this information is for people to be able to look at because the DNC study also showed these crimes.

And you don't, and I guess what to me is we don't want, we don't wanna,

who are dishonest, who are harmed to other people, whether it's from the people you call criminals or police officers.

We want people who have good integrity, who are honest, who make the community better.

I mean, and for me, this seems to be not a simple solution because as far as making

the ex-offender accountable, we surely want our highly, you know, people in different positions to have that same kind of integrity.

So just helping people navigate the criminal justice system, working with lawyers, public offenders, lawyers, Commonwealth attorneys is what I do.

I have people

You know, a lot of times in the end, I'm helping the whole person, you know, as I said, with jobs and housing and all that kind of stuff.

And also, then, you know, like I said, housing was such an issue that I created the House for Women out in Fleuriana County, where women, you know, during the pandemic, you know, were coming and still coming.

Thank you, Ms.

I know.

I feel like I was off, and now I'm just rambling.

You're okay.

Yeah.

People have to be accountable.

Everybody has to be accountable.

Everyone has to be accountable.

It's not that I'm not saying that people don't have to be accountable, because that's what we want.

But we also want a fair and just system.

Thank you.

And Raylaja and I were supposed to close out, but Martez and then Raylaja are going to close out.

Good evening, everybody.

I'm Martez Tolbert, client partner navigator here at the Found Fund, as well as one fifth of members of the Peace in the Streets initiative.

I only have a couple minutes on here.

Apologize about my guy, Nick Fagans.

He couldn't unfortunately make it tonight.

So I am in place of him while he take care of a surprise birthday party for his sister who's in town.

So yeah, I wanted to address a few things.

First of all, I've been in this group for quite many months.

I'm hearing everybody.

So it's good to see good faces.

I see Chip.

I see Sena.

I see Liz.

Hey, Marta.

I see a lot of individuals, you know, that I know from both sides of the law, good and bad, have my good and bads with them.

I also see, you know, interim Chief Mooney.

Well, we had run-ins back in Hardy Drive back in the 90s.

You probably don't recognize me.

I'm a different man today, but trust me, I know you.

So I can go on and on about the things that I've heard today, which is some good stuff, great stuff.

Joe, I heard what you said.

Chief Brackney, I heard what you said, great stuff, James, you my guy, but I only got a couple minutes, so I wanted to get into the youth, because like I don't just work at the Fountain Fund, and I don't just, I'm not just a member of Peace in the Streets, I also work for Redemption Mentoring out of Chesterfield, Virginia, but I'm just, I work out of Culpeper and Greene County in Charlottesville, so I mentor kids in those three counties, right, so let's just talk about what I have witnessed and what I have been seeing

with our youth, as we've been seeing with the local, the recent surge and gunfire.

Let's just talk about it.

Let's just get it out there, because I'm pretty sure everybody here is a parent.

And if you're not, I'm pretty sure you know a parent.

There's nothing here for the kids.

There's nothing here for the youth.

And I just heard Sherry say, I don't want to misquote you, Ms.

Henley, because I love you.

People want to do better.

Kids want to do better.

But what are their options?

Literally, what are their effing options?

And I want to use very foul vulgar language because it's been going on since I was a kid here in this town.

And I've been here in this town when I moved here from Detroit with my brother and mom's in the in the mid 90s.

It was nothing here.

You know, so like I said, I don't have too much time.

So I'm just going to go into a few things that that I want to discuss about bringing

You know, things like Chuck E Cheese or Dave and Buster's or, you know, anything like that, because you can't take the kids to jump, but only so long, so many times.

You only can take the kids to the movie theaters, but so many times.

So I want to touch on three points.

The first is, I want to say, it's because of the recent surge in crime.

If these kids and teams have something else to do, it's likely that the crime levels will flatten.

Trust me, I talk to these kids.

I deal with these kids on a daily basis.

basis.

So I know it will get flattened if they had other options than what they have now, which is damn near none.

Another, I say another reason is the revenue for the city, right?

I don't know all the, you know, statistical numbers about taxes and everything, but we have to, we, we don't have a lot of places where teens can go and hang out.

So this would bring more tax revenue to the city, in my opinion.

I mean, that's a no-brainer.

And the last reason,

is to have somewhere that makes it easy for parents to hang out with their kids, you know, while their kids run free, you know.

I can't name any places like that here in Charlottesville other than Jump.

You know, so like I said, I can go on and on about different things to talk about or bring to the city, but we have to look into our youth, right?

They're our future.

So we have to look at that, you know, I can talk about adults, I can talk about 50 and older, I can talk about all that, that Neil brought up that we all talked about, right?

And we're doing what we can with those demographics, but the youth is hurting and suffering right now.

I go to each neighborhood and I ask the kids, what do you want?

You know what they tell me?

Anything, anything.

That is sad that I have to go to Garrett and I go see Charlene Green over the PHA and I talk to the kids outside

You know, when I go to Hardy Drive and I talk to the kids, me and April, me and April all are out there talking to the kids.

They're all screaming for anything, anything other than what they have, you know.

So that's my spiel right now.

I can go a little bit deeper as the people who know me know me.

I can.

But I'm just going to talk and try to get behind the youth right now and just say, look, let's just do better.

Let's just do better for our youth.

Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you for adding me to this wonderful group of individuals.

I mean, I don't know if I probably will ever be in this type of space if it wasn't for you, Mayor.

And I am one of the graduates of the Home to Hope program.

Yes, I am.

Yes, I am.

So you got two people on this call with lived experience who's been there and done that.

And now they're on the opposite end trying to change, trying to change what they did, you know, and trying to change mindsets and trying to destroy the narrative.

And I'm doing that every day of my being.

is destroying this narrative because you can change.

Look at me.

And if you do know me, you know me.

And if you don't know me, get to know me because I will explain to you and tell you my past, my current, and what I aspire to be.

Thank you again, Mayor.

Thank you again, Chief Brackney, for your due diligence.

At the time we had together, unfortunately, we didn't get a chance to meet like I wanted to and do some of the things that I wanted to do inside the police department because I have a lot of ideas and a lot of suggestions.

I'm just gonna leave it there.

Ms.

Hello, everyone.

Are you all able to hear me?

Because my laptop goes in and out in this office.

Yes.

Right.

Hello, everyone.

I am Relaja Waller, and I was raised here in Charlottesville in the Friendship Court, 6th Street, South 1st Street, and Hardy Drive neighborhoods.

Over the course of my 24 years of living in Charlottesville, I have yet to witness someone be rehabilitated from incarceration.

In fact, every encounter I've had with incarcerated people, they have committed a crime that has led them to jail or prison at least twice.

Being the daughter and niece of men who were once repeat offenders, I have learned that crimes committed were done by choice influenced by three primary circumstances.

with the first being the lack of competitive pay in Charlottesville workplaces, the second being lack of representation in first court appearances, and the third being a lack of grassroots programs to better prepare incarcerated persons and felons for a career field that they can be in with their record.

Often court personnel, law enforcement agencies and other public figures believe that incarceration solves the problem of crimes being committed.

But when a person is released back into society, they still face the same if not worse circumstances than what they were facing before.

Finding a job in homes become more difficult due to the person's criminal record, which easily pushes one into committing crimes to survive society again.

That's meaning incarceration does not solve the problem.

And if we as a community want to decrease crime and incarceration rates in our community, we must give felons a clean slate, increase pay wage and put funding aside for those who cannot afford adequate representation for first time court appearances.

We also must implement grassroots programs to prepare them for promising careers in and outside of Albemarle, Charlottesville Regional Jail.

That is what will restore our community.

And that is what imaginative just Seville looks like.

I have went my whole life with my father in and out of incarceration, as well as my uncle.

So it truly affects children my whole life.

I never had a dad at a basketball game or sorry, I'm going to talk about it.

I'm trying to get a little emotional, but we have a lot of youth here who

who go through what I went through.

So I say this because, you know, I didn't have the opportunity with my father, but I would love to have other kids be able to have the opportunity to have their fathers or uncles

at these events for them.

And part of the reason they don't have it is because we don't have programs out here to help their fathers or mother be rehabilitated back into society in order to be there for them.

I didn't intend to come over here and cry.

I think this is the second time Mooney has had to see me cry, talking about my dad.

So I apologize.

To me, it's just really important that kids be able to have their fathers and their mothers and their uncles and things at youth events throughout their life.

And most of the time we can't because there's nobody to rehabilitate them.

You know, you can slap five, 10 years over someone's head for a crime being committed.

But if we don't implement any grassroots programs to really help these people survive out here in society to not turn back into committing crimes to be incarcerated,

We're not helping them and we're not helping the youth.

As Martesca, the youth are the future and we don't have nothing here for them.

And aside from just activities for them, we don't even have their parents here for them.

And part of that is because rehabilitation has been a huge issue here.

I do want to thank Joe because

When my uncle got sentenced when I was in high school, he actually had said that that wasn't the route he even wanted for my uncle.

And I'm just so grateful that he considered all the things that he knew my uncle had possessed within him, because not often you go into a courtroom and actually hear somebody rooting for the person that is about to get sentenced, especially not typical to hear from the Commonwealth attorney, you know, so I actually want to thank him for that.

But I just really wanted to make sure that you all understood that you have kids out here who go through life like me thinking that sports is going to get mom or dad home.

You make an honor roll is going to encourage mom and dad to be able to come home and it's not to their older that they understand that.

That's not what makes mom or dad come home.

And what can make mom and dad not only come home but stay home is implementing these grassroots programs and making sure that these parents are able to afford to be out here and be a parent to their kid and be involved in their kids' lives and their kids playing sports and afford their kid to play sports is what will help rehabilitate the issue.

Thank you, and you can cry as much as you want and share as much as you want.

Thank you so much.

I'm going to turn it over to Vice Mayor McGill, but I just want to share one more personal thing.

A group of friends got pregnant when we were teenagers, where Elijah just said she was 24, my daughter is 25, Sage, who's missing.

We were all friends.

We used to sit at the lunch table together, hang out together.

And so that's just another connection to understand.

We were pregnant as babies, raising babies.

And I'm just so proud of you all because you all are doing some amazing things, even though people thought that you all would never make it because we were kids.

Thank you.

And before I get off, I also want to thank Dr. Brackney and Major Mooney for allowing me to intern with them last summer in order to get my college degree so that I could provide for my child because that was the only thing that in paying for it.

So thank you, Martez Tobin and the Felt Foundation for approving my loan for me to pay for those courses over the summer.

But those two things are what allow me to not have to be a college dropout to provide for my child.

Thank you, Mary Walker and Imagining and Just Charlottesville group.

I appreciate the time, energy and effort that you have put in.

I'm going to narrow things down a little bit with our group looking at the intersection of mental health and policing.

We've had a couple of different names for the group.

The Marcus Alert work group is what we

kind of landed on, but we don't wanna be defined as just the Marcus Alert.

That was just a good place to start knowing that we have state mandates coming down.

So first, good evening.

This group has spent the last year looking at our local mental health continuum of care, as well as new state mandates.

I'd like to thank our group members, Myra Anderson,

Lisa Bites, Devin Coles, Brian Henderson, Myron Johnson, myself, Joe Powers, Sunny Sexton, Dr. Smith, Lloyd Snook, Tom Vam Hamert, past members, Chief Rochelle Brackney, Kaki Dimock, Emily Policia,

new members, Ashley Marshall, James Mooney, and guest speakers and consultants, Dr. Lisa Job Shields and Darrell Washington.

One thing, I would really like to thank all of our members for taking the time out of their lives to identify the issues in our local community and our local continuum of care, as well as thinking about how different people in our city have different experiences and needs.

One thing we discovered as we undertook this journey is that even as we identified one issue, we found numerous underlying issues that affected where change needed to start.

We all knew this was a complex issue.

However, as we talked to each other from our differing realms of experience, we saw that even gathering data could be difficult and complex.

Luckily, we don't have to start from scratch.

We started looking at some models, both in other states and in Virginia as well.

Thank you.

Thank you, Vice Mayor McGill.

Let me just say real quickly, last summer when

There was a lot of discussion about how we ought to be finding ways to divert people from the criminal system, to have somebody other than police officers answering 911 calls.

There was a lot of folks coming to talk to us at council meetings, filling up our email boxes and so on.

And so I talked with Vice Mayor McGill about it and

The idea was, let's go ahead and have our own little task force, which, as she mentioned, has been called a number of things over the last year, year and a half.

We started trying to put this together in about July of 2020.

And finally, in November of 2020, we were able to get the right mix of people that we wanted.

And we wanted people

with lived experience in some cases with actual the people who would be helping to make decisions about some of these things from 911, from the police department, from the fire department, so on.

And from about November of 2020 up through

this past month.

We've had something like 18 different meetings as people have gotten together to talk about this.

There were a few things that were going on.

One of the things that was going on was in October of 2020, the General Assembly was meeting, and the General Assembly at that point enacted a batch of bills that basically allowed for or empowered localities to create

what came to be called Marcus Alert groups.

And I think Myra will probably talk a little bit about that because she's been very involved on a statewide basis about that.

And we were getting calls and one of the people who was speaking a lot to us was Myra Anderson.

And Myra spoke very compellingly about the need to have a mental health response when somebody is having a mental health crisis.

And so it was with that in mind that we got this group together, looking first of all at what a Marcus Alert response would look like, number one.

Number two, recognizing that also last summer, the Federal Communications Commission established a requirement that by July 1 of 2022, we're supposed to have a suicide hotline implemented.

And that's another instance where the state

where the government as a whole needs to have a response to mental health crises.

So we started looking at all of that.

We were fortunate to have the expertise of people who are involved in this issue on a statewide basis.

And one of those people is the person to, I'm gonna kick this off next, is Myra Anderson.

Is Myra there?

Yes.

Hello.

Here we go.

So thank you so much for just allowing me to be able to present and share a little bit about my experiences in the mental health system.

I'm a Charlottesville native rooted and raised here.

and went to college at Virginia Commonwealth University and spent many years just working in human services, probably in every major nonprofit here in town.

I also worked as a peer support specialist at On Our Own.

I worked for two years at Region 10 Community Services Board.

sat on their board of directors for two years, so on and so forth.

And I say that because I want to make sure you have a context that I'm coming from a place who has delivered services as well as someone who has received them.

I've been struggling with mental health problems since I was 12 years old.

And the first time that I had a mental health crisis at the age of 12 was the first time that I

got introduced to police intervening during that time.

And I remember it was just very confusing for me at that time because I didn't know why the police were showing up when I had spoken to the guidance counselor.

But I do remember that I felt like I was in big trouble being let out in handcuffs because they do handcuffs kids.

and taken to the university for an evaluation.

That would be the beginning of many, many, many interactions with police while in crisis.

And I will just illustrate very quickly or tell you a little bit about a few of those.

But first, I want to tell you that one of my diagnosis is post-traumatic stress disorder.

So as a result,

You know, when I'm activated, I have a very heightened sense of noises and things like that.

So oftentimes when the police would come to my house, they would do this loud police knock and it would really, really, really not only activate me even more, but I would be so upset that I could not comply with anything that they were doing.

and because I wouldn't open the door they would continue to knock knock knock knock knock non-stop because they knew I was in the house and this was making a situation that was already bad even worse and amping it up and I remember at one point I was so upset that I called 911 to tell them to have the police that were outside the door to stop banging on the door

Another incident, I had went to emergency services, and this was probably in 2009, but I remember the year because it was very traumatic, and they had decided that I needed to be hospitalized, but they didn't convey that to me.

They just left out of the room, and very shortly after that, they came back and the police showed up, and I was unhappy about this and very uncooperative.

and as a result I was handcuffed and dragged out of the building and put in a paddy wagon and this is the only time I've ever been in a paddy wagon because before then they would always just put you in the back of a car so if you can imagine me being in this paddy wagon not knowing even where I was going confused about if I was going to jail or to the hospital so that was a second incident and

another time I had I guess the police were looking for me all day and they had like some be on the lookout all police and I was at ended up at Penn Park when they caught up with me and the Charlottesville police were the ones who were approached me and they were getting ready to bust the window of my car because I didn't let it down but at the same time the Albemarle police are the ones who had been looking for me all day somehow when

It was communicated where I was at and those police showed up and actually told the Charlottesville police to stand back, the Albemarle ones, and they were able to come and talk to me and I ended up letting the window down.

There wasn't any reason to break the window.

I'll also say that if you get pulled over when the police are looking for you, they will tow your car.

And that is very, very, very upsetting on top of

being in a mental health crisis.

But someone was talking earlier about discretion, and I know that they have discretion even around that little bit, police do, because one time police said to me, even though you cursed us out and all of this, we're going to drive your car back to the parking lot so that it doesn't get towed.

So I know even in mental health situations, there are times when police are able to use their

I have a relative who is a second cousin who often experiences mental health crisis and is in need of a lot of support, but his mom will never, ever, ever call the police because she's afraid about what will happen to her son if the police shows up.

So instead, she calls my dad and my uncle to go over there and handle the situation.

And neither one of them are counselors.

They're not mental health first aid.

They're not anything.

but she fears deeply that if the police were to show up with him acting the way he's acting before my dad can get there that something bad will happen and so I want everybody to think about that especially everybody that is listening that is white here because it is a privilege to

to call the police and have a feeling that they will show up in a way that's helpful and not harmful.

The last situation about police that I'll share was actually almost two years ago.

And in this situation, which was a lot different than the rest of them, the police actually saved my life.

And

I have no doubt that I would not be here today if it wasn't for probably a half dozen police officers and Chief Brackney, Dr. Brackney, Queen Brackney, however you want to say it, intervening in this situation.

And she ended up getting her a foot injured in this situation because I was so hysterical and I'm being very transparent about it.

I was so hysterical when the officers were carrying me away that she promised me she would be at the bottom of the stairs when the door opened at the bottom.

And she hurt her foot going down the stairs.

And you know what she did?

She continued to go down the rest of the stairs so she could be there.

when the elevator opened.

Now, of course, I don't remember much of this because at that point I was unconscious and headed to the ER and then headed to ICU.

But my point in illustrating all of these stories is that there have been times when I found the police to be very helpful.

There have been times when things have went horribly wrong.

And there have been other times when the experiences have been lifesaving.

But I kind of feel like when I'm in crisis, I shouldn't have to like

kind of play Russian roulette with how are they going to show up and how are they going to be helpful.

And I also want to say that I feel like there is, for me, there's always a deeper fear because of the fact that not only am I dealing with mental health crisis, but I'm an African American.

And there has been a history, whether you're looking at police or whether you're looking at the traditional mental health system,

that has not been a good experience for African Americans, specifically as related to a lot of the disparities around provider bias and all of those structural and systemic barriers that have not made it conducive for people of color, Black people, to seek help and feel like it's going to be helpful.

There have been a number of police killings, and that's only heightened a lot of the anxiety around that because we already know, or maybe you don't know, but individuals with mental illness are 16 times more likely to be shot and killed by police, but that increases when you add race into that factor.

And I have a slide that I want to share that illustrates this.

Do you have my first slide up?

So on the top corner, on the top left, you have Miles Hall.

He was 23 years old and he was in mental health crisis in California.

His grandmother and mother both were the ones who called the police.

The police got there and very shortly after that, he was shot and killed.

There weren't any officers charged in the case, but the city settled with his family for $4 million.

In the top center, you have Corinne Gaines outside of Baltimore, Maryland.

And in this case, it was obvious that she was experiencing a mental health crisis because she was streaming on Facebook saying very paranoid and delusional things.

And even though that area had a mobile crisis team, they were never deployed.

The police ended up going in, shooting her dad and also shooting her son.

And in that case,

The city settled with her family recently for $38 million.

On your top right, you have Walter Wallace Jr.

This is out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

And this was actually last year.

And he was in mental health crisis.

And he actually had a knife.

So he was out in the street, but the police show up and one minute later, he shot

and the whole time you can hear his family yelling, he's mental, he's mental.

That's what they're yelling to the police when this happens.

In the middle left, you have Anthony Hill.

This is out of Georgia, outside of Atlanta, and he was an Air Force veteran

who went into mental health crisis.

He was naked and unarmed, and he was shot dead.

And in that case, the officers were indicted on two counts.

The officer involved was indicted on two counts of felony murder.

In the middle, you have Tanisha Anderson.

This is out of Cleveland, Ohio.

And her family called 911 trying to get assistance during her mental health crisis.

The police show up, slam her heart on the pavement,

She's going to handcuff her and take her to the hospital.

And by the time she arrives at the hospital, she's not breathing.

And that case was ruled a homicide.

And then on the middle right, you have Daniel Prude.

You may have heard of this case out of Rochester, New York.

He was in crisis, naked in the street, and he was restrained.

And when the police restraining him, his words were, you're trying to kill me.

and very shortly after that he was held down for like two and a half seconds, two and a half minutes and he also succumbed in the hospital to his injuries and that was ruled a homicide too.

On the bottom left you have Pamela Turner, this is out of Texas and her family says she was experiencing a mental health crisis and she got into some type of scuffle with a police officer who had not even been called to the case and she ended up losing her life.

In the bottom middle you have

Asage, and this is from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and he actually was on a 302, which is what we would call here in Virginia an ECO.

So they had served him with a 302, and they went to pick him up, and he ended up getting killed.

And the last one down at the bottom is Ms.

Deborah Danner.

She was 66 years old out of the Bronx, New York, and she was shot and killed in her

her home.

The officers were charged, but they were acquitted and the state of New York settled with her family for $2 million.

And the reason I'm bringing all of these to your attention is because when I see stories like this in the news,

Not only does it makes me highly anxious, but seeing people who look like me makes me worry that the next time that I have a crisis, right, that I could be the next news story like this.

And, you know, all of these stories are coming closer and closer and closer to home.

Could you please show my next photo?

This is Marcus Davis Peters.

And we're talking a lot about we're going to be talking about I'm going to talk about the Marcus alert.

But Marcus Davis Peters was a 24 year old African American.

He had graduated in 2016 from Virginia Commonwealth University with honors.

And he was working as a biology high school biology teacher.

at the time that he experienced a mental health crisis.

And he was naked and out on Interstate I-95 when he came in contact with police and was shot and killed.

And his death sparked a lot of protests in Richmond.

And his sister, Princess Blanding, became an advocate for activists for mental health reform and criminal justice reform.

And she pretty much pioneered

lobbying to get the bill, the Marcus Alert,

put in as a house bill.

And I think she worked with a delegate, Jeff Bourne, on that to initiate that.

But about the Marcus Alert, that's what it's called, the Marcus Alert.

And it's a law that was passed by the Virginia General Assembly in 2020 that directs localities throughout the Commonwealth to develop and establish mental health awareness response and community understanding of the Marcus Alert system.

I would be remiss if I said that Princess Blanding, Marcus's sister, who was advocating for this bill was not happy with how the bill turned out in the end.

In fact, her comments at the ceremony when the governor signed the bill was that it was watered down and she was hoping

that there would be words in there that wouldn't say things like may, like the police may do this or may not, but it would be stronger language to better ensure that when individuals were experiencing a mental health crisis that the police were not always the lead if it wasn't necessary for them to be there.

But in any case, watered down or not, that bill prompted change throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia as under the mandate for every locality to take a look

and develop a system individualized for the locality of how individuals experiencing mental health crisis are engaged with police.

And by July 2026, all community services boards and behavioral health authorities in the Commonwealth will have to have a Marcus Alert system in place to ensure that behavioral health experts are involved

and responding to individuals in crisis.

The Marcus Alert framework can be distilled down into four fundamental things, limiting the involvement of police officers to the safest extent possible in all parties, diverting individuals away from the criminal justice system and instead to resources and supports for treatment and recovery,

achieving a possible outcome for individuals experiencing mental health crisis and increasing awareness, understanding of available resources in the community.

I've been part of the Marcus Alert stateholder group.

We began meeting in January to develop the implementation of the plan for the Marcus Alert.

Our stakeholder group received briefings from a variety of guest speakers as well as presentation from work group members.

And our presentations have included an overview of the crisis services of the CSBs and a number of other things.

In respect to time, I think I will stop there.

But in closing, I will say that I'm very much looking forward to the day when we shift away from criminalizing individuals living with mental health issues

and offering the services that they need.

And until we get there each day that I have the mental capacity, and this has already been a rough week for me, but, you know, I'm here, but each day that I have the mental capacity, I will continue to advocate for a more just system, specifically for individuals experiencing mental health crisis, because we don't always get pushed to the front.

Our stories aren't always told, but I want to make sure

that when individuals are experiencing a mental health crisis, that they are treated as human beings who are worthy of dignity, worthy of respect, worthy of empathy and compassion, worthy of culturally sensitive trauma-informed interventions.

That includes my part, and I'm going to pass on to who next, Vice Mayor?

I'm going to share my screen.

Lisa Beitz, I'm going to make it big.

Lisa Beitz, So thank you for having us this evening.

I'm Lisa Beitz, I'm the Executive Director of Region 10 and feel fortunate to be part of the Marcus Alert workgroup.

Lisa Beitz, I'm going to do a couple of things tonight and I'm going to speed through parts just because of the hour.

Lisa Beitz, But I want to talk a little bit about the Marcus Alert mandates that Myra mentioned at timeframes and deliverables.

and the impacts on the local mental health system.

Really, it breaks down into what the state's required to do, what we as a community are required to do, not just CSBs and behavioral health authorities, but we as a community in partnership.

And then what is it we envision or desire for our communities to reach those goals that Myra spoke to so eloquently.

And so she did a great job, of course, of the Marcus Alert

Overview and the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services in coordination with that statewide workgroup that Myra was on set a definition of aim, which is to ensure that the emergency response to a behavioral health crisis is a behavioral health response, which I think is exactly what we all want with dignity and respect.

The Marcus Alert has statewide components or requirements, as well as local components or requirements.

The statewide components are what the state is going to put into place for us across Virginia, and what the state, which when I talk about the state, I'm talking about DBHDS, our Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services, is saying is that

here's a framework that we will implement and it's going to be necessary but not sufficient to implement the full Marcus Alert Act and to implement a robust crisis continuum to respond to people who are having a mental health emergency with decreased law enforcement involvement and increased supports to maintain people in the community and divert from hospitalization.

And so as part of the conversation, I'll walk through Marcus Alert, but there's a few other initiatives in place that then support some of that sufficiency piece.

Doesn't get us there, but gets us part of the way there.

So there is a four-level framework for urgency.

What the state is asking is that we create a common language that they offer us in determining urgency when somebody calls in crisis.

and that then we use that language in determining where to divert that person to connect to services.

The state is offering equity at Intercept Zero and what that is is an initiative to encourage small local private providers and certainly Black-led organizations and peer-led organizations

to develop infrastructure and partnerships to become integral in the crisis continuum.

And so the department is currently offering one year's worth of funding to support those organizations to think through how best to partner with other people in the community to be responsive to people in crisis.

There are statewide training standards as part of the Marcus Alert.

Everybody will get additional training on cultural competency, trauma-informed care, best practice models, active listening, and then there's an advanced training for law enforcement connected to the CIT programs related to de-escalation techniques which are already in place connected to historical trauma for people of color in interfacing with law enforcement.

There's a public service campaign focused on 988.

Lloyd talked a little bit about that mandate.

What is true with the Marcus Alert is there is a requirement that by July 1, 2022, that 988 is up and running across all regions.

And what that means is that for us in Charlottesville,

that our region 10 catchment area, which is Louisa, Fluvanna, Green, Nelson, Charlottesville, and Albemarle, that we are combined with all the catchment areas of eight other community services boards and that we stand up a regional crisis call center that will receive calls from across the region and that we partner with 988

for those calls that come in that are one or two on that urgency level, those lower levels of urgency to divert people to getting immediate services in the community rather than having law enforcement involved and ending up in a state psychiatric facility.

There are required components locally for us.

That was the statewide, locally,

We are required by the act, the Marcus Alert Act, to create a voluntary database.

And so if people want to add information about themselves so that when there is a crisis call, information pulls up to inform that it's a mental health call and helps direct people to services more easily, more efficiently, that needs to be in place.

What we're doing at the stakeholder group is consistent with bringing together people to begin the discussion and then looking to the community for who else we need to hear from and how we need to get inputs from people who have lived experience to craft the framework and the service infrastructure within the community for Marcus Alert Response.

That state triage framework, which was that one to four in terms of

criteria of urgency of call, that we create a local response that uses that language and that framework.

And then the 988 we will implement and that there will be MOUs created through all community stakeholders to include CSB and law enforcement that as we build out a way to respond to people,

in crisis without law enforcement being involved as a first responder, that there are times that law enforcement will need to be involved and that we well define those times and that there are agreements made about how that's going to go ahead of time.

And then the specialized response protocols, again, that's further defining how we would respond together.

And there's a couple of different ways.

There are different models.

where you have community response teams or community care teams that do or don't include law enforcement to be able to respond in the community in the moment the person is experiencing a mental health crisis to help support them and to connect them to services and to have an experience that is focused on the individual and what they need at the time they need it with dignity and respect and that decreases

the crisis as opposed to, as Myra spoke to in her experience, increases the crisis.

And then community coverage plans, what that means is saturation.

And so how to create infrastructure and a service response that is ready and available across our community at all times.

Karen Hollweg, This is just, I can breeze through this for us, Marcus Alert deadlines and deliverables.

I think I spoke to that.

We have some near-term things.

What Myra spoke to is that the Act itself requires that by 2026 all localities have a Marcus Alert framework implemented.

And that rollout comes with five localities or five areas, I would say,

rolling out in December of this year.

There will be five more catchment areas.

And when I talk about catchment, I'm talking about CSB catchment that will roll out by 2023.

And then we are slated to roll out by 2026.

What is also true is that the General Assembly allocated funds to the first localities that implemented Marcus Alert.

How that will go with the second round who are implementing and then the rest of us in 2026, what will be allocated to support our vision and what our community needs and how we'd like to respond in the community to people in crisis is a bit unknown at this point and is connected to General Assembly.

So then I want to talk about Region 10 specifically because we talk about people in crisis and what you all probably know is that by Code of Virginia, community services boards are the entity responsible for conducting pre-screening assessments for people who are experiencing a mental health crisis and may need to be involuntarily hospitalized.

So last year, and these first numbers are our full catchment area.

They are not Charlottesville.

They're all six of our localities.

Region 10 conducted 2,614 evaluations.

And of those evaluations,

that resulted in 1,385 prescreens.

So we may get a call with somebody in crisis and we'll determine, does that mean we need to see them and prescreen them for involuntary hospitalization?

So of those we evaluated, 53% of those turned into prescreening assessments.

If the person can consent for treatment, has the capacity to consent,

We like them to go voluntarily.

5% of those prescreens were people who ultimately were admitted to a state psychiatric facility voluntarily.

Of those, 613 people were under an emergency custody order.

That places, and this is important for the next slide, but that places a timeframe of eight hours to determine if the person needs involuntary hospitalization to secure a bed.

and connect that person to the bed.

And 72% of those under emergency custody orders became needed involuntary, involuntarily, involuntary hospitalization, sorry, and needed then a psychiatric facility.

18% of those were released.

And what that means is through the process of pre-screening,

An alternative disposition could be found that would help keep somebody safe in the community.

So for Charlottesville last year, Region 10 conducts about an average of 38 prescreens a month.

And so that's an average, which was more than 450 prescreens for Charlottesville last year.

You might ask why it's important to know this and what

What is true is in our conversations within the work group, really understanding how often the data, right?

And I can't see Chief Brackney, but I think she should be smiling right now.

Because understanding how many folks we're interfacing with, how often is law enforcement involved, how many folks who we then interface with end up needing hospitalization, and is that a function of

of not having other community infrastructure to connect people to or the acuity of the crisis or, you know, that the crisis episode itself escalated because of how we all work together to handle it.

All of those questions become important to ask and answer and are connected to what we know now.

And so this data offers that.

So the current crisis landscape, what is true and what you all know is that the crisis system in Virginia has not been without significant historical challenges.

And currently those long standing challenges have been exacerbated by several factors.

First, early in the pandemic, there were significant workforce challenges with illness, caregiver responsibilities, fear of COVID

or having COVID or another medical condition.

The stay at home order changed parental responsibilities with school and daycare and other family members who needed help.

It impacted revenue within many community-based organizations and residential facilities.

And so our service system, not our crisis system, but our service system that supports people in the community, ongoing community tenure,

closed down for lack of funding, and people got laid off and fired.

And so creating less ability to support people in the community, and what we know is there's an inverse relationship with community infrastructure and supports and need for psychiatric going into crisis, having a crisis response and needing psychiatric hospitalization.

For state hospitals, state psychiatric facilities specifically, there were COVID outbreaks, staffing challenges, higher acuity and fewer available beds.

And so what is true is there are times when somebody has a mental health crisis that there are services and supports, especially if they're in place prior to the crisis that help keep people in the community living their best life

Sometimes that crisis means that psychiatric hospitalization is the way to keep someone safe.

And so we need it there and available and through the pandemic that was less available and there were no other resources.

So what made that more challenging was in August of 2020 Governor Northam issued Executive Order 70.

which stated that if state hospitals were at 100% capacity, they would not accept anyone who wasn't under ECO.

And so all those state psychiatric facilities that were constituted as the bed of last resort saying they could not refuse admission to someone who needed involuntary hospitalization and there wasn't a private psychiatric facility that could take them, there wasn't an available bed there.

This executive order said, well, hold on just a minute.

We're not necessarily going to do that in the pandemic.

And there was a request for law enforcement to delay transportation of a person who might be experiencing a mental health crisis to not transport them immediately to a state facility until there was a confirmed available bed.

So there were less beds, more people experiencing a mental health crisis,

and a request for our law enforcement partners who could be involved in a person's crisis episode to support them and get them to safety for at least eight hours.

And suddenly they were saying it could be an unknown amount of time.

And what we've seen through the pandemic, it could be days and even weeks where a person sits and waits to connect to a bed.

and they sit in our emergency departments often.

And so the other impact was that our emergency departments were being flooded by COVID.

And then we had people who were being sent to the emergency departments who were having a mental health crisis.

Emergency departments are reasonable places for that to occur, but then you get COVID, you get

Somebody sitting there for day hours and days, that's going to increase challenges both for the system, but most of all for the person who needs to get to their destination for services and be safe.

And our law enforcement partners would say, I have to transport the person, I can't wait.

And that's our duty.

and so we were having incidents where they would actually transport someone to where it said on the petition for TDO to the facility and the facility wasn't ready to accept them.

And then again, that person in crisis was not able to connect to services safety and supports in a reasonable way.

I tell you all of this because one,

The system, which has been challenged historically, like I said, was brought to a new level of unprecedented challenge with COVID.

And what we learned was that the rubber band doesn't stretch any further and that all the systems were unable to well serve people in crisis with all of those challenges in place.

because even as community services boards and law enforcement were feeling that, so were emergency departments and state psychiatric facilities.

And then again, most of all, the person who just needed services in the moment to make them safe.

So what is true is that a crisis system

is built on interagency collaboration and some mandates like Code of Virginia with every part of the system working in concert to execute on their part and that works and then that person becomes well served because they touch multiple agencies and getting to a service.

But what we have seen is that doesn't work well on its best day and then you put a stressor in place such as COVID or the pandemic and

and people are not well served and actually it creates more crisis.

So what I will say to you is then as this group began to talk through what does it mean for our locality, we can talk about Marcus Alert and the mandate around the framework, but what serves our community well

There are some other things to know that are at play that are helpful, but I would say the same thing I said at the beginning that the state has said about the Marcus Alert statewide components that are being offered.

There are some state and regional intersections of services and supports coming online

that are going to be mandatory and available, but still not sufficient for what we might desire for people in crisis in our community.

So let me talk about those really quickly.

We talked about Marcus Alert.

There is Step Virginia that is a statewide initiative, and that's a longstanding one.

That's not new.

But if you think about a Venn diagram with a bit of overlap,

Step Virginia is initiative in Virginia to say that community service boards across the state, of which there are 40, must have these essential components or services.

And it includes same day access and some other pieces, primary care screening, things like that.

But as it relates to the step of a robust crisis continuum,

What Step Virginia is offering is a regional crisis call center, which will be up and ready to receive calls for people in crisis with the goal of then connecting them to services and supports before connecting to law enforcement and pre-screening for psychiatric hospitalization.

And so that includes a mobile crisis response, a little different than those community care teams that would respond in the community to the person while they're experiencing a psychiatric emergency.

A crisis receiving center or a crisis assessment center or a CTAC, those are interchangeable where someone can go and be in a safe, respectful, quiet place to be assessed for hospitalization or connected to services.

23-hour drop-off beds, which is for people who are experiencing a psychiatric emergency, but if they had services and support in a quite safe place for about a day, they could get back connected to services and divert hospitalization and a broadening of crisis stabilization units.

So those things are coming online and they're going to be great.

They are going to be regionally operated, meaning they'll serve all nine of those CSBs I mentioned before, and they are not funded to support saturation across the communities, certainly not our community as it's structured right now, it's just not enough.

And then there's Project Bravo, which is a Medicaid initiative

which is an effort to offer a robust array of services to Medicaid recipients using best practice models of service.

And so the benefit and the intersect with MARCUS Alert is as we build out community infrastructure and services for our community and for people in crisis that there may be some reimbursement that hasn't been there historically for Medicaid recipients.

Okay, that was my presentation.

I am going to stop sharing, and I am going to hand it to Lieutenant Jones, who will speak about how Mark's alert affects our local emergency response.

Hey, everyone, I'm Lieutenant Jones of Charlottesville Police Department.

Can everyone see that?

Okay, good.

All right, so I will.

Sorry, first time doing this on my laptop.

There we go.

All right.

So,

Charlesville Police Department is currently staffed at 98 police officers.

We have 19 vacancies.

So those vacancies do affect us in terms of our calls for service, particularly when responding to these mental health crisis calls, just because of the time that goes into each one.

As a little background, I'm sorry, I'm also

one of the CIT trainers for our department, so crisis intervention training, and I also command our crisis negotiations team.

So I regularly interact and talk with a lot of these different things, two ends of the spectrum, crisis intervention kind of engaging with people on the front end of when an incident is occurring, someone's in mental health crisis, or on the far end where things have gone very different.

and a police response is needed.

And we may need to engage in some sort of crisis negotiation with a person.

In either one of those situations, the resolution could easily become something like an ECO or a TDO related to that call.

Because of that,

The vacancies that we have can negatively impact how we're able to handle all those calls for service just because of all the time that kind of goes into it.

You can see we've responded to 36,000 calls in 2020 and another 27,000 currently in 2021.

Looking at mental health calls right now, we are often sent as a primary to those types of calls, and we handle the initial response.

So again, that's kind of sending CIT officers to the scene to begin engaging with individuals to assess their needs and see if we can help them voluntarily go to a hospital or reach out in collaboration with region 10 to see what services we can offer them.

If it progresses further, there could be a custody issue where we wind up taking them to the hospital or an officer-initiated ECO or a paper that has been obtained by the magistrate.

And then from there, a lot of times we serve as a transport to these facilities, whether it be a UEA hospital or if it's a TDO to whatever hospital the person has been designated to be sent to.

Currently, calls for service

We are at 387 for 2021, but last year we did 551 mental health calls for service.

Of those calls, 14 in 2020 were high risk and 11 in 2021.

And that's significant in that if the Marcus Alert program

gets going, those are the types of calls that we will be primarily sent to as opposed to the crisis team that will be put in place.

So police will still be engaged in those types of calls just because of the need for them because there may be a weapon or some type of other immediate danger in that situation.

ECOTDL service,

272 ECOs or TDOs were issued and served by the CPD in 2020, 211 so far this year.

So those have been very time consuming for us.

As Region 10 works to assess those people, we often have to sit with them during that time period, which can be anywhere from a couple hours to eight hours or

even longer if a TDO gets issued.

And we've been currently staffing around the clock sometimes with people for 48 and 72 hours at the hospital waiting for a bed to open up at a facility to assist this person.

This has cost us considerably in overtime and staffing assignments as well as supplementing a lot of the other functions of the department because we just haven't had enough people

to manage the overwhelming number of calls we've received.

Our current role is responding to mental health and responding to mental health calls is initially getting there to assess and talk to the person.

Again, CIT trains a lot of officers on how to do this better.

And then also it informs them better about services and ways to help resolve the call.

And a lot of times that can be offering them

for crisis and going up to the hospital to speak with someone there.

And again, working very much hand in hand with region 10 for other referral services.

We go back to being kind of the de facto transport a lot of time as well and getting those people to those services, whether it be up to the hospital for crisis or if there's an ECO, TDO situation, we handle that as well.

So currently in the interim,

With the Marcus Alert system beginning to get phased in, we've already started to have conversations about what does that look like.

One of the big challenges will be how these calls will be dispatched, and since the police rely heavily on our dispatchers to get the information out to us about these calls to service, one of the protocols will be about

how those calls will be dispatched to us and also how they will also be diverted to another emergency service line 988 or 998, I believe.

And so I've been in conversations with Mr. Saxton prior to this to start talking about what that looks like.