Good afternoon everyone and welcome to the public safety work session of Monday, October 14, 2024. Today we have one topic on the agenda. It's a briefing of office legislative oversight, also known as OLO, report 2024-13. The implementation of the 2020 use of force and no knock warrant law. As we began, I'd like to thank Aaron Trumpka for preparing the stair report. And once again, and always assembling a most informative packet for us. And unless the committee members have any opening comments, I'm gonna ask the panel to please introduce themselves and ask if they have any opening comments. And then, alas, Mr. Trump could have walked us through the packet. For the walking us through the packet, I've asked, and if the committee will agree with this, I've asked Mr. Trump to break it down into two different parts, the first part being the use of force, and then we'll have that discussion, and then the no-knock warrant part as well. Is that okay with? They're not knocking me so I guess that means we're okay with that. So if I could ask the panel to please introduce themselves. Good afternoon everybody. Nicholas Pesano, captain with Montgomery County of Police Department. I am the director of the special operations division. Good morning, Darren Frank. Good afternoon, Doc. Good, good. Yeah. It's afternoon already? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good afternoon. Darren Frank, Chief Management Services Bureau. I will have a brief opening remarks, but I'll let everyone else introduce themselves first. Thank you. Good afternoon, Jason Cocinos, Commander of the Third District Silver Sprint. Thank you all. Please. Susan Farah, essential staff. Chi Frank, did you? Good afternoon. So we appreciate the opportunity to be before you and have this OLL report. I think it goes to represent what we believe already with the Montgomery County police. We have one of the most advanced progressive restrictive use of forced policies in the entire country. We have taken best practices, we have certainly taken into account Bill 2720 and put that into the numerous revisions we've had to our use of force policy. With anything, you always need to assess and see where you can do just a little bit better. We think we have a great policy. I don't know if there's a perfect policy out there to be had anywhere, but that's what we're striving for. Something that our citizens understand, something that our officers understand, so that again Montgomery County can lead the way as we normally do across the country. I do want to take a second and again express our thanks to Aaron Trumpka and OLO for their review. One of the things these two gentlemen I have with me, all of us have been involved in numerous reviews, numerous revisions and training to the use of force policy. And what I will tell you is when we look at it hours and hours and hours at a time, sometimes you don't see something. Sometimes there's a different perspective. And I do think the work that Erin has done is very valuable to us and very useful and will help guide us in the next revision of the policy. So thank you again and to this committee. Thank you for taking the time to hear us and speak with us on this issue. Thank you. Maryann, if we can have the presentation ready, please. Thank you. Good afternoon, if I think that correctly. And some people are. Yes. As mentioned, I'm Aaron Sch's correct. And some people are. Yes. As mentioned, I'm Aaron Tromka and I'm pleased to present summary of the OLA report on implementation of the 2020 police use of force in No Knock War and Law. Open I do express my appreciation to Chief Yamada and the other members of the executive branch for their cooperation and assistance. I also want to express my gratitude to Susan Farad for her guidance and insight throughout this project. So some background. In 2020 shortly after the murder of George Floyd and Minneapolis and the fourth century in Louisville that resulted in the death of Breonna Taylor, the council passed bill 2720, amending sections of the county code that address use of force by police officers and the circumstances and conditions under which police may execute a no-knock warrant. The council directed OLO to prepare a report describing how the Montgomery County Police Department, or MCPD, has modified its policies to implement the law. The council also asked OLO to present data on the use of force incidents and no-knock searches and further ask us to research whether new best practices have emerged since the Council approved the legislation. Some important background. MCPD has updated both of their use force and their search warrant policy in 2022 following the Council approved of the law. And MCPD recently informed me that they are currently working on a new revision to the use of force policy and they expect to complete that later this year. They expect what was the latest report. There's going to be new years of force policy. So this review is looking at the current use of force and no knock war in policy, but do expect the police to later this year issue. Later this year. Another revision to the use of force policy. Thank you, Chair. Okay, a few points about how they develop their policy. They have a process of drafting, reviewing and finalizing policies. The process and review involves review by executive officers within the department, the office of the county attorney, as well as the fraternary order of police or FOP. And note that while provisions of state and county law have greater rate than MCPD written policies, the collective bargaining agreement with the FOP controls in case of conflict with the MCPD policy. Also note that components of both the use of force and no knock more policies could be subject to bargaining with the FOP. So now let's focus on use of force. And as the chair mentioned, I'm going to provide an overview of that section first. I'll then break for County Committee discussion. And then we'll resume with a much shorter section, which is the No Knock Warren section. So according to the US Department of Justice, there's no universally accepted definition of the term use of force in the context of policing. What constitutes use of force is determined by state and county laws and policies. Today we'll focus on how county laws and policies spell out what types of force are permitted, prohibited, and what must be reported. And the county code in the law that you passed in 2020 enumerates 10 minimum standards that must be included in the MCPD policy. So in the following slides, I will present side-by-side comparisons of standards established in the county code and then compare them with a parallel text in MCPD policy. In comparing the text of the county code with MCPD policy, OLO found for the most part a degree of consistency. I will show a few examples starting with the standard of use of deadly force. So as you can see on the screen, the code only allows use of deadly force as a last resort to prevent imminent serious injury or death, or only when it does not and only when it does not pose substantial risk to others. The MCDPD policy contains very similar language you'll see. Now for the sake of this presentation, I've excerpted only portions of the relevant text. Of course, review of the full text would provide a more robust comparison. And so note that on each of these slides, I have included a reference to the page in the report if you're interested in comparing the full text for a full review. Now let's compare text about deadly for the text about deadly force on a fleeing person. The code limits this to a last resort if it creates no substantial risk. And if the officer has reasonable suspicion that a fleeing person committed a felony that resulted in death or serious injury. The MCPD policy includes similar language, but replaces the reasonable suspicion standard with a probable cause standard, which is a much higher, more restrictive legal standard. For the standard, unshooting from a moving vehicle, the county code and the MCPD policy include nearly identical language. Now, there are other use of force standards specified in the county code with similar language in the use of, in the MCPD policy. And these include, for example, the standards for shooting at a moving vehicle and protections against retaliation for officers who intervene against unauthorized use of force. But now I'd like to highlight three use of force standards where OLO found variation between the county code and MCPD policy. The first involves the duty for officers to intervene when they witness a fellow officer using unauthorized force. As you'll see, the county code mandates that officers must stop or attempt to stop excessive force. If you look in the MCD policy that addresses the duty to intervene, the policy directive reference to something called rule 6 in a companion document called function called 300. Rule 6 indeed requires an officer to stop or attempt to stop another officer from inappropriate force. However, OLO found that when the MCPD revised function code 300 last May, Rule 6 was emitted from the updated policy directive. And so, a present, the duty to intervene standard does not appear in policy. Now, MCPD has told me that the soon to be completed use of policy revision that we mentioned a few minutes ago, that it's there intent to restore the text about duty to intervene in that new policy document. Next, the standard for neck or carotid restraints, which involves applying pressure against the windpipe or the neck to control a person's movement or to render render person unconscious by blocking the passage of air through the windpipe. The code unconditionally prohibits this technique. However, the MCPD policy applies a condition permitting this type of restraint when deadly forces of authorized. Two additional points and welcome councilmember Drondo because I'm about to mention your name, when we spoke before you asked me to review about the Neck and Karate restraints to review the history of the legislative history, and you were right, sir. I found that when the Council considered this matter in 2020, it discussed whether to place a condition on use of Ne of neckrestings and explicitly decided to make this prohibition unconditional, which is what you would suspect when we spoke. Second, this is a good time to point out that the full OLAO report includes comments from the CAO and on this matter, if you look at the CAO comments, they state and this is their quote, if it is necessary to use deadly force, a carotid restraint would be less likely to cause death or serious bodily injury than other types of deadly force, such as a firearm. One more standard, the use of less legal force, such as the use of a taser. Here the code prohibits the use of less lethal force only after exhausting alternatives. The MCPD policy does not require exhausting alternatives. Note however, the word necessary in the policy. In an entirely different part of the policy document in the definition section, forces deemed necessary only if the officer has no other reasonable alternatives. So if you do apply this definition to less legal force, it could be understood to require for seeking all other possible alternatives. Nonetheless, what we're pointing out is this condition of seeking alternatives is not explicitly stated in the less legal force section of the MCPD policy. Next, please be aware that the policy includes many provisions that are not listed as minimal standards in the county code. So, a full list of these are on page 23 of the O'Leary Report and among other things they include are requirements that attempt to de-escalate conflicts, a prohibition against threatening to use force to resolve situation more quickly, a requirement that officers attempt to identify themselves and state their intent before using deadly force, a prohibition against firing warning shots, and a requirement to immediately call for medical assistance if the citizen, if the civilian exhibits or complains of difficulty breathing. One more item regarding the MCPU, the use of force policy. In approving the legislation, the council establish a requirement that MCPD seek guidance from communities such as people with disabilities who historically have been adversely affected by use of force. OLO asked MCPD to describe how solicited guidance from the public, what was learned from the guidance and how that input influenced MCPD policy. So the police department submitted a statement that cites, among other things, challenges in receiving community input and asserting that they receive no useful comments. The statement concludes with the commitment that their website and the future will have a feature to allow community input. Full text of their statement is on page 25 of the report. So now we'll move on to data on the number of use of force incidents. But before we proceed, I must highlight two critical changes in MPCPD's definition of a reportable use of force. First, before February 2022, an office reporting, but not the charging of weapon, Taser or Pepper spray, was not required to report this action as use of force. MCPD modified the reporting requirements in February 2022, mandating that police officers report pointings as a use of force. And in July 2022, MCPD replaced the requirements to report, quote, force used counteract of physical struggle with more expansive language. The new requirement mandates reporting of, quote, the intentional use of any physical athletes. So actions such as grasping the shoulder of an individual that previously would not have constituted use of force became reportable under this new definition. The combined effects of these two changes had a dramatic effect on the number of reported use of force incidents. In this graph, the yellow bars show reported use of force incidents in the years prior to the changes in definition. The Green Bar 2022 is a transition year during which MPCPD modified the definitions mid-year, and the Blue Bar 2023 is the first full year in which new reporting requirements were in place for the whole year. So while the number of incidents tripled from 2021 to 23, we have to recognize that the data are not compirable. This table shows the type of force used by police officers on civilians for all 2023 incidents and you'll see the two categories of force affected by the change in reporting requirements, use of hands and pointing, comprise 92% of the reported incidents. Now the written report has much more data on many other aspects of use of force incidents, but for the sake of time for this presentation, I just want to focus on one last set of data dealing with rates and ethnicity. You will see a pronounced racial disparity among the civilians involved in use of force incidents. 57% of the civilians involved in use of force incidents. 57% of the civilians involved in use of force incidents in 2023 were black, a proportion that greatly exceeds the black population of the county. In contrast, the data shows nearly exact proportionality in the race and ethnicity of officers involved in use of force incidents compared to their representation amongst foreign officers. In assigning this report, the council asks that we look at whether new or different use of force best practices have been identified since the council amended the law in 2020. We found that many multiple entities representing different perspectives have published best practices in recent years. The report presents best practices from three perspectives, a state government commission, the law enforcement community, and social justice and racial equity efforts. In 2022, the Maryland Police Training and Standards Commission published a new use of force best practices. OLO found that MCPD policy closely correlates with all of the commission's best practices, including those related to conflict de-escalation, cessation of force, rendering for state, and supervisory reviews. From the perspective of the law enforcement community, we looked at a 2022 policy paper called the National Consensus Policy and Use of Force, produced jointly by law enforcement leadership and the law enforcement labor organizations. And here too, we found the MCPD policy closely correlates with recommended best practices, including those related to among other things, discontinuing force when an incident is under control, allowing a civilian sufficient time and opportunity to respond to verbal commands, and prohibiting shooting at or from a moving vehicle. We did find one best practice in the National Conscious Policy that is not explicitly mentioned in the MCPD policy. The law enforcement group recommends that the use of force policy prohibit the use of deadly force against persons whose actions are threat solely to themselves. Next we examined materials produced by the Center for Policing Equity, a nonprofit with the stated goal of making policing less racist, less deadly, and less harmful. The Center produced a community toolkit that sites best practices published by the New York School of Law, policing project. The MCPD closely correlates with many of the best practices, including requirement of necessity and proportionality, prohibition against use of force as retaliation, discontinuing force when an incident is under control, or requirement for investigation of all use of force and prohibition against firing warning shots. However, the policing policy goes further and recommends use of force policies that include several provisions that are not explicitly stated in MCPD policy. These include a requirement that police officers consider persons language barriers when determining whether use of force is appropriate. A prohibition against using force to support a person who is not suspected of any crime unless necessary to protect an officer and other person's safety. A prohibition against using force against a person who only verbally confronts an officer and is not involved in a criminal conduct. A prohibition against using deadly force solely to protect person's opposed to risk only of harm only to themselves. This is very similar to the best practice recommended by the law enforcement community. A prohibition against shooting at a target that it's not clearly in view. A limitation on intentional weapon stripes to the head only to situations where deadly force is permitted. And a prohibition against officers deploying a K-9 off leash unless there's an imminent risk of death or serious injuries. Now, I need to note that just because these provisions recommended by the policing project are not explicitly stated MCPD policy, that does not necessarily mean that MCPD engages in these practices, rather the purpose of this analysis is to point out recommended practices that do not have parallel text in MCPD policy. I will conclude the use of force presentation with a statement from MCPD stating that in their language the department provides quality and comprehensive de-escalation training and strives to maintain community safety and the dignity of those who officers and counter. So at this point as the chair said I'll return the discussion to the chair and after the committee discussion on use of force I'll then come back and summarize the no-no section. Thank you. Again, thank you, Mr. Trumpka. I think probably the way to go through this, if you can go back through the slides from the beginning rather than leaving them. What I'll do is we'll talk about the slides as we go through. And if anybody has comments, and we've been joined by Council member, Juwando and I wanted to say, wanted that to be noted please. So we'll go through those slides as we go and if people have comments, we can comment on that slide. You did say that later this year, we're gonna have a new policy. And I guess, Assistant Chief, is there any time frame other than later this year? Is there anything for reporting purposes, we're targeting January 1st. So one of the things that the OLO report shows, and we've testified before, when we've had changes in the use of force report it makes the data that's getting collected problematic. So we're going to target it January 1st for the change and certainly there are contributions from the OLL report that'll be this is very timely. And if if it starts January 1st you have any idea when we'd actually be able to either have a discussion or know about what the policy would be? So we can, so the way that we do this, well first go to a couple of things, I know this question is coming later about the input from the community. We are going to go about it. I'll address the input to the community aspect of it, what we have already done and the simple explanation is that it wasn't successful, so we're going to find a new way to do it. I've spoken with chief Yamada and chief Yamada is all for doing it a new way, seeking input. We'll put that into effect before then. But the, yes, we can certainly talk about the new policy and the changes that we're going to make. There is a process for where this policy is drafted, written, finalized, then goes through a collective bargaining agreement process, Article 61, where we sent it to the FOP to review. And if any issues come up, and I do want to point out, the issues that are brought up aren't about the use of force so much as a document that needs filled out, how long it needs to be filled out. The FOP is very much in support of having a policy that's clear to officers so they know what's expected to officers so they know what's expected to them. So it's a review that's good, again, to have another set of eyes on it in case we miss our subject matter experts miss something. But I would imagine that we could talk about the changes as soon as the middle in November and where we're going with it. Okay. On slide four, we talk about as a last resort. Can you give an explanation of an example, I guess, of what as last resort would mean? So I think that we've Resort would mean? So I think that we've relied on the idea of last resort as the concept of there's no other alternative to use deadly force. We, for many years, the concept in use of force was using a use of force continuum. You kind of work your way through a level of decision making process and you end up where you end up. That's kind of been proven over time to be an antiquated way of looking at use of force and the concepts we teach in our academy and through entry level and in service trainings idea that you will use force that is necessary and proportional, as the state standard right now. And looking through that necessary and proportional language, last resort to use deadly force, would just be that. It's a, it is the force that you are required to use because you are being presented with risk of death or serious physical injury to yourself or another person. Which was why even though it's not specifically articulated in the policy that you can't use deadly force against the person whose risk is only to themselves, it's still, um, flack of it, we're like silently implied, you can't use deadly force unless the risk is to yourself or somebody else. So it's, it's the same way of getting to the same result is through different path and do other agencies have similar? Discussion similar examples I'm sorry of like for deadly force use of deadly force so the the state After the 2020 I believe Mr. Trump talks about its report, after the 2020 change to the county's minimum standards, there was then a state law change. So our policy has to navigate both nuances of what the county law requires and what the state law also requires. So there are a lot of things in our policy that are required under state law that we address in our policy as well. So a lot of the minimum standards set forth in policy, for years it was the grand standards of use of force that were from federal case law, around 2020 state started passing legislation that regularly used the force. So in the state of Maryland, the same, the force standard exists and that was, there's a painting document like I think it was 81 page, Attorney General's opinion that kind of went along with that, that gave us some additional kind of guidance is what necessary proportional meant. But everybody in the state of Maryland operates, unless it's federal, operates under the same kind of standard for what force means. Thank you. I can explain. Yes, please. I'm in briefly. So, with the last resort, the way we teach officers, right, we have the, we want them to attempt alternatives, right, reasonable and safe alternatives. So with your getting to deadly force, that is the last resort you've tried or tempted to try if you were able to, if you had time and the ability, if it was safe to do so, other alternatives, that could include repositioning, creating distance, attempting communication, isolating the threat to reduce that threat to third parties, different things like that. If an officer's getting to the point where they're using deadly force, they'll have to be able to articulate that these things were attempted, I tried these things, and they were unsuccessful, or I was not able to for the following reasons. And the threat level was imminent to either the officer or a third party or death of serious or serious bodily injury. So that would be the last resort is they're going to have to and that's where we get away from the use of force continuum. We go to a critical decision making model as developed by the police executive research forum is because just in the use of force continuum, if someone has a knife, you're supposed to have equal gun out right for deadly force. Here if someone presents a knife, we may be able to resolve that in a lower or hopefully no use of force depending on these reasonable alternatives. If we can create distance, if we could put barriers between a established communication, you may be able to end that encounter with a reduced level of force or no force. So if they're getting to that point, it's a really bad situation and that's the last resort. Okay, thank you. I'm working through slide six through nine, which all have to do with use of force. Does anybody else have any? Please. Yeah. Yeah. It's all use of force. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you so much. And thank you, Mr. Chompka. Thank you to MCPD for being here. Thanks for the committee for holding this session. Just on that one we were just on. So since we're there, I'll go in the order of the chair. So the word safe was not in the law, but it's in the policy. Did you move forward? Can you just go back to that one? The next sort of I can one. You need your mic. Well, what you had up there, I just the basic question is we didn't have safe in there, but you put safe and I just want to know what that means in the context. Yeah, I think it, I think you can see it there, right? No, it's not up there. It's in the full, it's in the full one. So that's one question. And then the other is, which is up there, the unnecessary risk to a third person, as opposed to no substantial risk. Like just, could you just talk me through like what that means? Like what? Because the law was passed and then you put the policy out and just was there thought that went into adding those words and what that means in the context of how you train or what those did. You got it? Yeah. So the answer to these things, or anybody can see the language, you can see the translation. It's tiny. Can you just say that? No, I can't. But you know, we can't, but the public can. Maybe the public can. But we can read it out, maybe. So on top of your TV, that's health. Yeah. So you need to turn your mic on too, Aaron. Yeah, turn your mic on, yeah, at least. I believe council member, you're referring to this language. Yeah, the reasonable and safe alternatives. And then that was the first question. And the second part was around at the end of the definition or the policy, such force must not create substantial unnecessary risk of injury as opposed to the county code which just creates no substantial risk of injury. So I'm just wanting to know the distinction of what was the difference there? What does that mean? So I recall correctly when adding the additional language of both the minimum standard and our policy talk about last resort. But there was some question from when we were trying to interpret the best way to provide guides to officers of what last resort means. We determined the best way to explain that was what does last resort mean. It means that there are no other reasonable and safe alternatives to use deadly force. So it's a way to enhance the officers understanding of what last resort means. And so, yes, so we say obviously to prevent imminent serious body injury to an officer, another person, and it creates no substantial risk. What is, so what is, how is safe taught? Because, you know, what is that standard? Do you understand what I'm saying? No, I'm trying to get at how you've- Right, I understand why you're saying that way. But say I could think something safe that someone else doesn't think so. Right. And so it goes to when we talk to officers about what they're observing, what they have been trained to do, what options they have available to them. You could do any number of things that aren't safe, right? And would jeopardize the lives of everyone involved in that encounter, because you just had this blank open ended statement about doing anything. I think it's important that we have our officers understand that what they need, what is expected of them, is to use a tactic, use something that is safe for all involved. And I think that's an important delineation. And one of the things in the report, we'll talk about later, we may talk about later is when we I think there was a reference to exhausted define exhausted it's it's one of those things as as our both our county attorney because we spoke with them too about how do we have a standard that folks understand our use of force experts how do we give give something to officers so that they understand? And I think putting the safe in there, how allows them to process that in their mind based on all the training they've received, what is it safe for me to do? What do I have an opportunity where I'm not going to jeopardize the citizen that may be at risk in the encounter or even the subject that we're working with in the encounter. So I think it just draws a finer line that we need in training officers. And we sign a Sanctity Life Pledge. We have to take into the safety and sanctity life of everybody involved. Subject, officer, community member. So in our critical decision making, we want those decisions to be proper, but also safe for everybody. So that's kind of where that's coming from. On the last part with the substantial risk, so it doesn't happen often, but sometimes actions have to be taken that could pose a risk to third parties, but the necessity of engaging in that is needed to prevent larger loss of life. For example, we treat, we teach with deadly forest that you have to know your backstop if you're going to deploy a weapon, you need to have a clean backstop. Well, if you have someone, and this, if you have someone that's running towards the Silver Spring Metro at rush hour with what is believed to be a bomb, and they're saying they're going to blow up the Metro, and you have to shoot this individual. There may be people in that backstop traversing, right? So that is a substantial risk to those third parties to deploy that. However, it is a necessary risk because if we don't deploy it, this person's gonna run into the metro and blow the whole thing up. So when we were teaching this, this was a specific case that has happened in Montgomery County years ago, we had a deadly force encounter with this exact scenario. And that was the scenario in the discussion of, if we had to do that again, we don't want to have to do that. But if we have to do that again for the preservation of life, there may be necessary risk. But we don't want unnecessary risk. And that's something that the officer needs to take into account. All right, that's how I appreciate you explaining that. So I'm reading it correctly that to kind of say there could be whereas the law says no substantial risk. It doesn't allow for that caveat This is to allow the intention here was to allow for a caveat if the officer deemed had intelligence for example that it was a vet like you know that reasonable intelligence that there was that this was the only way to Stop somebody even if you had to take the substantial risk. Okay. Yeah. And, and again, it would be probable cause. It's not something we take lightly, but, you know, when that situation presented itself, you know, an officer has to make a split second decision. In all this use of force is very dangerous and we have to make split second decisions and we don't want risk to third party but sometimes there is some risk. I have other questions, Chair, but there are other parts of it. I'll yield back now and we can continue. Is that the way you want to do it? Okay. Okay. Yeah, sounds good. Thank you. So prior to the state law change and the county's adoption of this particular law before that, all the use of force policy and or form was negotiated with the union, correct? Like the form for reporting? Correct, the form for reporting. Right. Because there wasn't anything comprehensive that dictated statewide a standard for that type of reporting. Correct. Okay. And I noticed that the excerpts you put in Mr. Trump got from the Center for Policy Equity. Those comments and suggestions that are in there are also consistent with the state's new standard, correct? I'm not able to answer that. I don't know. Okay. Any of the other panelists capable of answering that question? Whether those standards are in fact commensurate with those states standard that we have presently? What I can say is I believe that our policy is commensurate with the state policy. So, and we're obligated to follow the state laws and considering best practices, but we're still bound by the state law. Right. And in taking what was done here at the county, which preceded that, and then you have to reconcile all the parts together to make them workable in a way that's trainable, teachable, and followable by those who are in the field doing that work. The standard that exists presently under state law for reasonableness is still an objective standard, correct? Sorry, nodding of head. Correct, sorry. All right. So, that's still a reasonableness standard and that is based on the totality of the circumstances, right? Correct. Okay, so if someone, there is the possibility that someone may subjectively believe a thing not to be reasonable that a finder of fact would in fact conclude was objectively reasonable under these state law and under our county code correct? Yes. Okay, and in terms of the way that standards work there's a temporal relationship between all the many things and the use of force, right? Correct. Okay. So that takes into account what occurs leading up to any use of force. And and involves an assessment of the type of force used, whether or not it meets the necessary and proportional standard, and whether there was a true law enforcement objective being met and or risk to the life and or series bodily injury to officer or another, correct? Correct. OK. And there's a requirement that the use of force has to cease once the officer has the person under their control or they no longer possess an immediate threat to the life safety of the officer or anyone else, is that right? That's correct. OK. And so remembering and recalling the attorney general's opinion on this that helped flesh out what this would mean, right? So that everybody could get trained appropriately on this statewide because there was no use of force matrix for anybody in the state or didn't just didn't exist prior to those 2021 changes. That involved looking back and that language necessary and proportional also comes from our self-defense law. Is that all right? Correct. Okay. And so that is grounded in what is trained and taught to our officers based on your policies, which are designed to meet both the state's standard and the current county law standard, right? Correct. Okay. What if anything have you discovered since putting this in place because we've had a little time to have lived with both the county standard and the state standard with officers trained under those. What have you learned from that now in the real world as Captain Cokinos was explaining, you know, application of this now in what we're doing day in and day out? Mac, I could talk to what's going on in the street if that's what you're asking for. Yes, yes, sir. Significant increase in use of force, mainly because one thing we did with this policy is we made it so restrictive on when you have to report use of force. Right. Furthermore, which I would say is probably one of the most restrictive of agencies that I'm aware of, because we got way into the weeds on if you use any physical effort, whatsoever, if someone moves their elbow against your hand and you push it slightly, that's a use of force, just a simple touching, which a majority of our use of forces are. Their hands, which is control techniques, which is just, it's very, very low. And so we're seeing an increase in those numbers because one, we've clarified through the culture that there is a black and white line on when reporting is necessary. We've clarified what use of force is specifically anything that's other than compliant hand-cuffing or unresisted S-coording. So anything else is reported. And obviously all the accountability and reviews that go into that, there's layers of review at the Supervisor-level Lieutenant commander all the way up. So we are, you know, in Silver Spring in particular, I can speak. We have officers every day that are going out to a wide array of calls. And they're attempting deescalation, they're attempting communications, there does come time where we need to handcuff someone and they move their arm. And then there's a, you know, no, we need to put your hands behind your back. That's a use of force. Right. So we actually are reporting probably way more than many other agencies on what they're doing. And the reporting requirements just in this mate. I don't know. Assistant Chief Frank, do you want to say something before I? No, I might I might follow on with your thought. Okay. The reporting requirement requires not just the office or involved, but any other officer who's present to report, correct? That is correct. And so and that involves also as you noted the layers of review that would mean that the body camera footage of the officer's present on scene both the one using force and any others who are reporting is reviewed. That is correct. It's a very extensive process. It goes beyond what many agencies do. Well, and for example, we've included that the pointing, just the mere pointing, weapons is reportable. So when we have a felony vehicle that is stopped, let's say, carjacked or whatever stolen. We have officers that are engaged in a felony traffic stop. They may be pointing weapons. Some officers aren't, they're the communicators. We have different roles for people. So we may have a number of officers that are pointing weapons. All of those officers, after the event, back to the station, docuabody cameras, everyone's writing an narrative. So we've had cases where entire shifts are out of service, which is what we're doing. And we're fine with that. You know, in the sense of that's what the policy is, we're not complaining. I'm just speaking to the severity of a use of force and how we take it very seriously. And I want to be very clear on what we're saying and what the report says about our use of force and our numbers specifically. Our number we have no information to show that we are using force more often. What we have is we are reporting use of force to a tremendous way beyond what we have ever done before and that's through good policy and honestly the hard work of officers, the officers that want to do right and want to follow policy and want to follow law and they are, that's why our numbers are through the roof and in fact when you look at other agencies, other agencies will eliminate reporting on use of force for handcuffed discomfort. It's captured somewhere else. They also another definition out there is de minimis use of force, right, which is what Captain Cooquino, Commander Cooquino spoke to about me just grasping someone in them flinching. We're reporting that. Other agencies don't report that. So our numbers are up because of those things and weapon pointing as well. Um, and I'm apologizing for not knowing which slide. This might be covered on. But, um, in, in, in, to Council member Joandos, um, you know, points about, um, you know, no substantial, how what is it? Use the words, use the words. Yeah, and so they're again back to the temporal requirements of what we have and and reconciling that with the state's policy, or state statute, sorry, and how that works in your policy. It's that when time circumstances and safety allow is the state law. And so, you know, we have the, as a last resort and we have to also read the time circumstances and safety part of the state law together with that. So how have you all reconciled that and how does that fit into the training under that policy piece that's up on the screen right now? So I think you're speaking to alternatives essentially? Right. Yeah, so we define that in our policy, the tactics and methods used by law enforcement to effectuate and arrest, or we have the legitimate law enforcement business, that do not unreasonably increase the risk posed to law enforcement officer or another person, again, we're talking about the totality of safety to including our suspect and we give lists of all these potential including right verbal communication distance warnings de-escalation tactics tactical repositioning again we're creating that space right distance space could be putting objects in between us so if you're holding a knife it would be in my best interest to have objects in between us. Because if you have to jump the table, jump this table, that allows me more time to back up, reposition, create extra distance. So all these things we talk about space time and distance is what we've trained our officers in for a long time. The more time we have, the more time we have to try alternatives, make better decision-making, establish communication, the more distance and space can slow down the threat, reducing the immediacy of it. And so we kind of mix all those ingredients together. And essentially it says it's intended to stabilize the situation and reduce the immediacy of the risk so that more time options and resources can be called upon to resolve the situation with reduced or without the use of force. So that's how we're kind of packaging that up. Great, thank you. And I can assure you I am not capable athletically of jumping over this table and that table, but thank you. I'm done. Thank you for this. To a point that Councilmember Diwondo has raised and that wasn't in the text here but is on this from the same part the reasonable and safe piece. Sorry to our tech to the viewers at home. That's the part where, and Councilor Rolunki alluded to some of the relevant pieces of state law, but as you noted, there's a lot of different pieces here that officers are taking into account to make that judgment about what reasonable and safe means on the ground. And the more that, if it would be possible between now and the next time we look at this, to get something and writing that would help break that down for a little more whether it's so we've got the state law pieces we've got your training but whatever would be helpful for helping kind of us and the public at home to get a better clear understanding of how officers are making that judgment would be helpful because I can definitely see this being a piece that we get more questions about. To clarify what you're asking for, man, an explanation, a better explanation on safe. On? Yeah, specifically as relevant to when you can use, when officers may use deadly force. So from the county code, it prohibits the use of deadly force, except in moments of last resort, and then the policy further explains that by saying due to a lack of reasonable and safe alternatives. So some more information about how officers are judging reasonable and safe, which I know obviously you're going into more in training and so forth, but that would be helpful. Did you have anything to add? Okay. Very good, thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Appreciate that clarification. And just for context, I dove right into questions. The reason here, we're talking, this part of it is the whole policy, but this part in particular is about Use of deadly force like when the ultimate as you all know. It's a very serious thing We don't want people to we don't aim when to die and so what is our policy when an officer Can use deadly force and the reason I'm harping on these words and how they're trained is because that has really, really, it's super important, as you all know. And the goal of the policy as the drafter of the county bill, and then obviously working with the state folks too, was to say that, which I think there's a lot of similarity here, but I want to make sure there's perfect alignment, is that deadly force should not be used. It should be a last resort um, unless uh As the county law says as a last resort to prevent imminent and serious the bodily injury or death to the officer or another person um, you raised the question of another person You're in practice. You're not taking that to mean the person themselves, even though it's not explicit in the policy. So that's could be something we clean up. And so there's two requirements. Death is serious bodily injury to the officer or another person, third party, and the use of force creates no substantial risk of injury to a third person. You added a necessary risk. That would seem to me to be a lower standard than the county law as I read it. And while you must comply with state law for sure, the county law can go, it's not a preemption issue if the county law goes above state law, which in this case, in several cases, but I think this is an example of one where we do. So I think the Cateroid is another example of that, which we'll get to where the legislative intent was to prohibit that in all cases, whereas the policy says it is okay in some cases. So I just wanted to get your take on that point, whoever. I would go back to the exchange we had on this sentence already in the sense of, if you say no substantial risk, I would say that if I'm deploying a deadly force implement and my backstop is not completely clean or 100% certainty, there could be a substantial risk to a third party if my bullet unfortunately was to travel. And in the situation, the example with the Metro and the individual with the potential bomb, there was risk to third party, hundreds of down range there, you know, towards the metro and That officer chose to deploy that that tool and had to and there was Rist other people, but it was necessary to deploy that so that's where we were Going with that with that definition and that sentence. I think with regards to using deadly force, it talks about in the policy, right? It's as a last resort, and we talk about due to the lack of reasonable and safe alternatives to defend themselves or another person. We have trained for as long as I can remember of recent memory, even when I was the trained director, that we do not use deadly force on people that are looking to commit self-harm. There has to be a third party. And we talk about the officer. We talk about this. Comes out of 21st century policing, creating the moment. We teach you do not create the moment. So if we have someone that wants to create a private active violence against themselves. We're not going to go into that space and create a moment now where the officer is at risk. So now, so we're training not only are we not going to use force on someone who's wants to commit suicide, and there's no risk to others. We are further teaching officers not to create the moment themselves by inserting themselves into that. So that's been established training for us. And the other thing, the key words with deadly force last resort, but also imminent threat, imminent threat. And so that is the most significant. Yeah, that's the most significant. And so if there is deadly force being deployed, it is because there is that imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury. And based on the time, the conditions and everything else, there was no ability, there was no alternative. We want in use of force for officers to use alternatives. That's why we define it. That's why we teach the de-escalation techniques. If there's no alternatives, as a last resort, imminent threat, they unfortunately may have to use that. And that's where we talk about that in the policy as well and the training. I think one of the things that I believe you all recognizes that there's no way we can think through every single way something can happen. And so coming up with policy on something that there's just, there's so many ways that a situation can unfold and become tragic. I think probably, and I apologize, this is kind of what the think tank does when we sit there and review the policy. Well, what if this happens? What if that happens? It's a very difficult concept. So what I would say is if council member, if you have a specific example of something that folks are thinking about, how our policy, how we would react, that would be helpful too as we're gonna go back and as you've requested, get some more clarification on our thinking because again, these are tragic situations and I go back to the sanctity of life statement and what our officers are doing. They don't want to make this choice. All of us have had officers that have unfortunately been put in the position where they had to use deadly force and it's life changing all the way around 360 degrees. And we don't want to get there and we believe this policy helps us get there and again we'll clear up some of these things for you. And I might just add one brief bit. We've all reviewed a lot of use of force. I reviewed a lot of it. I used to be the chair of the use of force review committee as Captain Pacerno was as well. And we dissect these use of force and we say could the officer have done this or could they have what do we have here? Can we adjust our training? What we found, at least what I found, I can speak for myself, through many reviews, is that unfortunately we've had cases in the county where deadly force was used and that's sad all the way around. We have had a larger number of cases where deadly force could have been used, but because of the training, because of the policy, because of the critical decision making model mindset that we put into officers. I mean, I just had a guy down in White Oak the other week had a gun in his waistband on Lockwood Drive and the officers repositioned. They cleared the area of third parties. They've reduced the threats. They were able to deescalate this guy and take him into custody safely. And we've seen countless times where on a use of force continuum, subject has deadly force, but because of our policies, we elected to use alternatives and we've had successful outcomes. And we've had many more successful outcomes that could have been really bad as well. So I think the policy, the training, the police executive research formed the ICAT training and the critical decision making model has led to a reduction of what could have been and luckily they weren't. And those are, we have body cam of those things. So I appreciate that. I mean, I think when I came on the council, one of the reasons we put this in place is we were in a period of time, not only nationally, but in our county, where we had a unfortunately a lot of deadly force incidents that resulted in most of life for us a lot in a relatively short period of time. And, you know, and so I do think, you know, the movement generally is where we want to go. I just could I just get an answer to the question if the policy itself, because this will be pro-probative for other parts, if the county law exceeds the standards of the state law, are you adopting the policy and training towards the county law? Do you understand that question? Yeah, I understand that question. We're, and yes, the county standard, whichever one is more restrictive, is the where we're obligated to go by. Perfect. And I'll tell you that we worked on what we trained the county law the first time around. And we sat in our training meetings and our goal was to make it so we complied with the county law, but it was in a way that was as clear as possible for officers having to make split-second decisions. So I know for a fact, because we sat in the planning meeting, because I was the train director, where we ensured we went line by line with the county law and tried to make sure that we were achieving what you all directed us to do and in a way that we could teach it and it could be safe for everyone and the officers can make good decisions. So the Cotterroy restraint piece, could you talk about that in the context of this? Because that's one where I think there's a discrep, there's a piece on paper, there's a piece. Correct. And I know what Mr. Trongo said about the legislative the discussion. So I was chief then Marcus Jones, executive officer at the time. I do remember conversation about this component. And when we've never taught in our careers, maybe chief Frank's career at some point, but certainly not in cap and clean as Mike's career. That's a nice, I That's a low career. I'm not saying you as a polygist. But certainly since 2002, we have never taught any sort of technique that involves anything to do with the neck. There was a tactic called the lateral vascular neck restrained that some police departments still teach that involves reducing blood flow to the brain to put somebody out. We have taught that since 2002. After the George Floyd and Senate Chief Jones the time put out a reminder, saying, hey, this is still our policy from 2002 that we did not use the LVN, the lateral national lateral vastness for neck restraint. There was some discussion at the time, I remember about the idea that, hey, if an officer has to use deadly force, there is nothing, there are no prohibited uses of deadly force. Deadly force is going to be that force which is likely to cause death or serious physical injury to a general person. And the idea was if we are obligated to, you know, deadly force encounter to grab somebody around the neck or to potentially choke somebody because to prevent them from killing or seriously injuring somebody else, anything is on the table at that point. I think it would be much better for a person to grab somebody than it would be to shoot them. It is certainly more likely to kill them if you shoot them than it is to grab the around the neck area. So that was left in, that was part of the conversation at the time. I remember the the the hesitancy on council's part, my memory serves me correctly, was they didn't want to, it was not wanted to create a bunch of miniature exclusions for things that couldn't be envisioned. So this is the end result of that. Let me give you an example. We carry OC spray. So an officer can use OC in a situation to try and take someone into custody, you know, someone that's being combative, and either the officer gets contaminated or it has little effect on the other person, the officer's contaminated. Well, it would be unreasonable for the officer to draw their weapon when they can't see, and they can barely breathe and start putting rounds down, because again, at that point, in that situation, depending upon what is going on, deadly force may be authorized. So by training people that you can't use certain things, if they're in a struggle, if they're now in close quarters, contact with someone, right, we don't want them pulling out a gun and doing things like that or a taser, which is ineffective. So they may have to put an arm around someone's neck to fight for their life. And so by prohibiting it outright, you've taken that away from an officer who's been disabled because of the situation, because of another tool that they had to use. So those were kind of, you know, as we're sitting there and thinking through the examples of what can happen, why would we take something out of play that could save a number of people's lives? And with the, again, we don't appreciate the nod to what I was trained. I was trained on the lateral vascular necrestrain. And again, back in 2002, when they came out, said said you can't use this anymore immediately put it in the roll of decks I can't use that anymore But if I'm in a fight for my life to protect someone or protect myself from dying That's still way back in the roll of decks now for these gentlemen probably not there for them So it's it's, one of those things. How do you think through all of the things that could possibly happen and account for them? Right. There's a lot of forms of deadly force that could fit that category. I think the goal here obviously was to say that this shouldn't be attacked, that that's taught or used, which you're saying is the current standard. And the question of whether it should be, there should be an unless here, I get your point, but I think you could put in less on a lot of different restraints. But what you're saying is it's not taught, it's not used, it's against policy to use it, but you added the unless because if deadly fourth is off the rise, which is a whole set of standards around it, which we were just talking about, which is why the safe and reasonable and all that stuff is really important and unnecessary, which is defined. Right, but the county code definition is necrestrain. Necrestrain is anything. Now, if we had been specific to lateral vascular neckostrain, that's a technique that we, again, we haven't taught for over 20 years. So that's one of the things in reconciling what's a neckostrain? Now, it says carotid restraint, but there's both there. And again, I go back to, again, we can't possibly account for, and we can't possibly account for every circumstance that's going to happen. And we want our officers to have the ability to go home safe, and to end a situation in a manner that could possibly be safer than other options out there, such as wielding a service weapon when it's not safe. Okay, thank you for now. Thank you. I'm an Aquaman Council member, Minkin, two seconds. I think when we talked about the whole idea for unnecessary risk to a third person, if I'm assuming that you can't let a crime occur, if you see something that you know that you can prevent, then if you took out the word unnecessary, does that allow for that? Well, on the way it was worded, I think it says no substantial risk. So that's, if there's a, oh, sorry, good. Oh. Oh, yeah. So there could be risk to third party and things that we do. We do not want unnecessary risk. So if you are going to put somebody else at risk, it better be necessary. And you better be able to explain why. And in this context, obviously, last resort and things of that nature. So it would be a really extreme situation, much like the example provided, which unfortunately did happen. but yeah. So we... Well, and the other thing, and as I said, I'm going to call on Council Member Meng, but to Council Member Juando's point about the the chokeholds, and I know that you have not taught them for years, but if there's a fight that someone is involved in, and someone happens to grab someone's neck. You certainly don't want the officer to get in quote unquote trouble because they did during a time of restraint of a, they had to make a momentary decision and they happened to grab for whatever and have to grab somebody's neck. There has to be the part that's difficult for everyone is when you're making policy that we're trying to make policy when we're not doing it. And somebody who's involved in a fight for their life or for the life of someone else is having to make a policy when they are doing it. And we need to give the greatest education to that police officer to understand what they can and can't do, but we also need to make certain that they and the public remain safe. Council member Mc. Thank you. I just want to understand because it seems like there might be two parallel questions before us. So correct me if I'm wrong. One of the questions being is the MCPD policy compliant with County Law as it was with the code as it was written by the previous council for example does changing does adding the word unnecessary to substantial risk of injury. Does that is that still compliant even though it adds a limitation where where in the code there is not a limitation written and then there's if it and then there's you know is that is that okay and I'm misunderstanding the conversation we believe we believe our policy is consistent with the county code in the sense of of it represents what was trying to be achieved and also gives something that is teachable to our officers that they can actually comply with. And when we drafted the training and policy, we in hearing the council and the bill and different things like that. Obviously we took legislative intent to the best that we could into account and thinking of okay, what was the intent of this paragraph or this sentence? Obviously we have words on paper, but what were some of the intent in those discussions during the legislative matters? And we tried to conform everything because there are gaps, right? And we tried to say, okay, we err on the side of the legislative intent also with what could be easily taught and digestible by officers. So I know from drafting this with others, our goal was 100% to be in compliance with the county law. OK, thank you. Because my understanding was especially when I came to the Necrostrians or the Caratid Restrains, that there was a lot of conversation within committee and council about whether or not they wanted to have conditions written in there and which there now are, because it refers to this portion about use of deadly force and substantial versus substantial and necessary risk of injury. My understanding was that the legislative intent was there to not be any condition in which those restraints can be. We're having the conversation now about whether we want that to be the case, but if we're looking at just the first part of the question of matching up the policy with the written county code and with the legislative intent of the previous council. My understanding was that they did not want a condition in regards to the necristrains, is that inaccurate? Yeah, yeah. Factually, that's absolutely correct. I went back to the packets, the minutes, the video, and it's exactly as you described it, council member. Okay. So yeah, so I guess that would be my question and concern. Now, we could have a separate conversation about whether that council and passing this made a good decision or not, but my understanding is that the, that if we're trying to match the legislative intent then this piece here would be a concern. One thing I was kind of know on that is, we still had the legal obligation to also, remember under the county law, the chief of police can be told what to do. There are no criminal or civil remedies associated with it. The state law there are, obviously can be charged with a crime for not following the state law on use of force. I think it creates a situation where an officer would be expected to use deadly force in an encounter where due to the lack of reasonable safe alternatives, potentially grabbing something around the throat may be considered one of those reasonable and safe alternatives. So even though the county code may prohibit, an officer could potentially be charged criminally for not following that standard. So I think it creates a very unusual dichotomy. At the time, I remember the conversation, was limited with the department on what that part of the code was gonna look like. Like Chief Frank said, we believe what we have is compliant with both the county code and with the state law requires. And I have some say, and Chief Frank and I sat with the IID. What was that last week? And they are using policy in their review of officer involved death investigations. And so that was obviously one thing that's come to light now. But when you are in a fight for your life and it is a last resort and the outcome is comply with this policy or die, I think people are gonna do what it needs to happen to survive and save lives. And so when we talk about deadly force, we define what deadly force is and when you can use it, we, anything's on the table. Pipe, pencil, motor from a car, I don't know, anything is available. So it's a very tricky thing. To his point back when I started, we actually had a use of force case where an officer grabbed a muffler because it was the only thing they could grab and they were in the fight for a little life. I will say this. This discussion we're having is very, very important. I think after the tragedy that was George Floyd, a lot of people were working very quickly to do the right thing. What we're doing right now, and we've set this example recently with this council with a lot of our actions, is having in-depth discussions, maybe before we get to legislation, but have deep discussions, so everything can be understood so that we can craft outstanding policy and outstanding county code. And again, we're not, I like answering these questions for you and would like to do this at any time so that again, both of us can get to the right place where we need to be for the citizens among Henry County. Mr. Calcutta. Yeah, just wanted to point out. I pointed this out in the report because I thought it was necessary for council members to see the distinction and there is that legislative history. That being said the law issues what are called minimum standards and the intent of the council is not to cover everything in the policy. The policy is a much, much greater, in volume document than what's in the law. And so there are things that are expanded on in the policy that are not necessarily discussed in the law. I try to point that out in the presentation. And so I think it really is an open discussion. This is, I pointed this out because clearly it is a mismatch from what was in the text of the law and the legislative history, whether or not one makes a determination that this is inconsistent with the law. I think it is up to the policymakers, but as the author of the report, I am not chiming in as to whether or not this is inconsistent. It is a variation and I thought that was important for you to see. Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate that. And I think there's two different things that are happening even within this one portion of the policy. One is the reasonable and safe. And to me, that's different than the adding the unnecessary because the reasonable and safe alternatives, that's adding a definition that's expanding upon what is stated in the code so that officers can better understand what is meant by the code and that's why I thought I would appreciate some additional written materials so that we can also better understand and so on. But I don't see that as necessarily being non-compliant with the code itself, just something that we would want to also better understand. Adding unnecessary to substantial to me, I still don't understand. The adding unnecessary to substantial to me, I don't I still don't understand. I can see why you would say that's you know you wish that it had been done differently from the jump, but it wasn't done differently from the jump. You know, the council discussed it at length and decided not to add conditions, especially in regards to the to the to the neck restraints. Now here, they have been added. If we want to have the discussion about whether the code should change, that's a, people want to have that conversation. We can have that conversation. But right now, the code is what it is. To me, I don't see how we can look at this and say that it is compliant because it adds a condition where there was not a condition. Anyway, I'll go back and I'll watch the committee sessions again, and I'm interested to look at the state law, and I understand the legal issues that officers may face. So I want to better understand all that, but I'll just note for the record that as I'm looking at it now, I'm concerned about compliance for that piece. Thank you. And thank you. And I think that this is something that we almost should do in reverse from what we've done. When your new policy comes out, I believe we should have the discussions to make certain that the new policy is in compliance with the legislation or we should have the discussion to change the legislation to meet the new policy. I think that that's all part of what we should be doing rather than, then, exactly, as I say, it's the practical side of what we should be doing. Now, I have, and it didn't work. I'm going to try, I tried to go through slides. And I believed to my good friend to the right. He's never to the right of me, but to the jumped all around for the... So I think what we should do, yes. I think what we should do is bring up whatever someone wants to bring up, because we're jumping all through this and we need to and I'm not I'm I'm being flipping about trying to go through the slides, but I also believe that that we need some of this is a lot of overlap. I'd like to bring up the part about and I don't know if anybody is wants to talk about the duty to intervene, which is in fleeing persons. But I'd like to bring up about the whole idea of about community involvement. And of course, we're at some point, some day we're going to have a civilian police chief, I guess, is what their official title would be. Again, we had one and we don't have one now. But I would assume that part of that person's job would be the community involvement part. Is that your understanding as well? Yes, sir. And I also understand that there's discussion on trying to hire or trying to get to the point that we would have a civilian police chief, not that they've given names or anything else that I've served. But I do think while we're waiting, we need to make certain that the community is aware and how, did you want to update us on that, please? Yes, sir. So again, we made efforts to contact groups and I have a list of the groups. We created a form. We sent our policy, we asked for feedback. We did not get any feedback. I have the list of different groups that we sent it to because we again wanted to comply with what was expected of us. What we found in that, in doing that, is that the method we chose didn't work even though we thought it should have. What we have done, I've made a recommendation to Chief Yamada and Chief Yamada was thinking about it already. We are going to do what some other agencies have done as far as posting on their website how that they are going to be making a change to their policy with the current policy, with bullet points on how it's going to change. And this just isn't use of force. This is other policies that we have that are important to the public. And to be honest, we would do them with all of them, but then it would maybe become noise. But we're looking at the most important ones where we put a function on our website. Well, first of all, we're going to continue what we tried to do already, which is reach out directly to groups and request feedback. Secondary to that, we're going to build a function in our website like other organizations do, where people can submit feedback on the policy, the exact look of that, whether that's going to be an open loop where people can continually comment, comment, comment on existing policy, or if it'll be kind of like we have with things that go in the county register, right? You have 45 days to respond, 60 days to respond, and provide feedback on what we're going to be doing. So we are going to be doing. So we are going to be enacting that chief Yamada's gave the direction that that will happen and we're figuring out the details of how to do that. But again, it won't stop what we've already done, which is trying to reach out to groups and get feedback. Now, to be clear, we've gotten feedback through the years from many groups on how to deal with different individuals from different cultures that may have mental health issues that may be have different sorts of handicaps and that is included in the training with both of these gentlemen have played a huge part in. And so they're applied in training all across the board on these of the options. I mean, one of our first options that we had that we created, and as a model program for the country is through our CIT school, which has been going on for over two decades now. So we have been doing this, we'll continue to do it, and we do absolutely, first of all, we have made efforts to comply with the expectation of the county code, and now we're going to try a new way and ramp up our efforts. Thank you. First off, could you please send to us what you've sent to the various groups so we can see that. And I don't, I believe we always need to mention that there's a police officer in Montgomery County who were all very, very proud of, we're proud of many, but Laura Reyes and what she's done for autism and Alzheimer's, etc. And so, and of course I know that she reaches out to those various groups herself beyond what anybody else does and she's done that for years. So we always like to mention how proud we are of Laura. We are and we keep adapting based on feedback and of all of our systems, you know, tragically we had a juvenile with developmental disability die recently. And Chief Yamada has directed, we change our response to those incidents, improve our response by saying officers need to go as soon as we get the call, officers need to go lights and sirens to get there to establish control, establish the search and put resources into play. So we do have a learning organization and we're proud of that. And again, any input we get, we are certainly going to evaluate and see what we can do better. Thank you. Councilmember Joondo. Thank you very much, Chair Katz, for raising this issue. I know it's something that has been an ongoing conversation. And I think the conversation we've had up to this point underscores why it's so important to have community feedback on use of force, right? This is the change in state law. There's a lot more force being recorded. You talk that length about use of hands and other things that have, in pointing of firearms, that has been creased our numbers of use of force. So you're talking about a new policy that you're working on. Obviously that the law, both county and state required a new policy. And what's put on the board here is what the actual county code says. And this part has been very frustrating to me because we have 90 boards and commissions, including a commission on the elderly, folks with disabilities. There are a lot of advocacy groups and others that represent, we have a ton of mental health and medical folks who have physical disabilities as well. And so I think seeing the list, and I still to this date, even though I've asked the question in a lot of different formats, a lot of different times, not just in hearings, I'm not a, I can't, I wouldn't be able to say who exactly was reached out to. And so that being said, we want to help you. I want to, I want to help you do it because I think, you know, we just had a, we had an attainable housing strategy listening sessions. We had a thousand people turn out in, in Bethesda. I think if, if we co-publicize that the police department wants to know your thoughts on their use of force policy. I think we will get a response, and we can get people, and then in particular, we can focus in and have focus groups. I think you have to do multiple levels. I think you need a big level. I think you need focus group levels. I think you need the boards and commissions levels. But the idea that in, you know, four years we haven't been able to get any feedback from people in organized ways is tough. So I just hope that as you're taking a crack at it, I'm really happy to hear you're going to go back in. I personally want to help you get that, those responses. I'm going to take you up on that because as frustrating as it is for you, it's frustrating for me because it looks like we're not, I mean, it's being assumed, we're not doing something. We are, we're trying. So I welcome that opportunity and we'll get you the form that we have and again, we're going to have a new method to do it. And we're certainly, we will advertise that through our media section that we're putting this function into place and where people can find it, but definitely we'll take you up on that. I appreciate that. And I think you'll get, some will be not, you know, I think you will get feedback. So I think it will be... Well, and again, I do want to be clear, like, there's, in you suggested, there was multiple levels to this, right? You cannot put everything in policy. And I think the things that we are going to get from any sort of input really is going to come into the training aspect, which officers are held accountable. So officers are held accountable to training, to policy and to law. And it goes to, if we got back around to it about the duty and intervening, we talk about that and how we are covered there, but how we're going to make a tweak just to make sure everyone feels like we fully, fully. We know we fully met that obligation, but for the public view, make sure everyone understands that. If I could chime in on the intervene, so it is in our training, the duty intervene, we've covered it extensively. It's also covered in, I believe it's covered in the state law, where an officer has duty intervene. And so we have in our function code 300 is a rule violation for violating law. So a duty intervene, which is state law, would be whether or not it's in policy here or in county law officers with because of the state law, have to intervene to prevent cease. So if they fail to obey that, their in violation of function code 300 rules, which would carry the same as if rule six was still in there, because they're violating the state law. Now I agree we can make a tweak to have that better defined in ours, but just so the council and the public's aware, today officers have a due to intervene. They're trained to do such and it's state law. And if they don't, they're violating state law, which is violating department policy and training everything else. Absolutely, yeah. And there's two separate issues but related. Could you just go back to the other one for a second, the last, what were we just doing? So, just so we're clear too, I just want to say that. You can't really see it. It's kind of up at the top. But the, so can we scroll down on teeny bit? There we go. Okay. The Chief of Police and Consultation with Impacted Persons, the Police Advisory Commission, which again, to my knowledge, I don't know if it was formerly, now it's the ACP, but we changed the name. Communities and organizations, including representatives of civil and human rights organizations, victims of police use of force and representatives of law enforcement associations, must provide written guidance regarding. So if you take off all the parts that's in opposition from the chief of police period to the end of the comma and in the other comma, the chief of police must provide written guidance regarding all of these things. So it's not just the engagement. And I've said this, it's yes, we need to do the engagement because you can't provide written guidance if you don't have the engagement. Then it's saying, and it could be saying, well, we don't think we should do anything different for pregnant individuals as far as our policy or training. You know, if that's the answer, that's the answer after you've done it. But the intent of the law and the way this is drafted requires that there be guidance on each of these specific populations in training or it could be referring back to something you're already doing in the academy, but it needs to be understood. And did you see what I'm saying here about you need to engage? So there's step one is engaging with these folks and then guidance and it could be this is covered under ex-policy we already do this in Y training but there needs to be something produced by the department in reference to these vulnerable populations. Can I can I just be clear as to intent so that it's our chief Yamada has made it clear We will be in compliance when you say provide guidance do you mean like provide a report to council or? I mean, I think public to the public but you're to us specifically yeah Okay, yeah about the types of lethal force and deadly force that are prohibited For these again how you can assess whether the force is appropriate necessary and how to use the least amount of fort necessary with interacting with these folks. So, yeah, I just want to be clear on that. And again, happy to help, but I just think it's really important. When you look at the numbers, for example, that 57% of the use of force is happening against African American black individuals in the community. And that was true under the old numbers, you know, before the new law and that's true after. So I think I wrote down AC Frank, you said nothing's the, you don't think the actual use of forces change. You just think the reporting has changed. Oh, I don't have data on whether the actual use of forces change. Yeah. Again, just to be clear, I don't know if it's up down the same, because again, we've changed the standard. What I do know now is we're under this standard, we have some numbers to work from, and we'll see where we go from there, because there's a lot of factors to put into play there, calls for service, number of interactions, I mean, all kinds of variables that does affect that. So I have no data on what are actual use of force under the new definition for reporting what is going on. Right. Well, my point being that the disparities have been present under both definitions as my point. And as I say with all disparities, we want to, we need to get into that about why and how that's happening and what we can do to prevent it. And part of that is this community feedback. We should, if African-American folks are making up nearly 60% of the use of force, we should be in a room with the folks that have experienced that talking to them about context of when that force and how it's used and how we might not do that or how it might be avoided. Again, sometimes it can't be avoided, but that's significant of a disparity. It's incumbent upon us to investigate that critically. Would you agree with that? Oh, absolutely. I agree with that. And I agree that it needs to be fully outside of just basic demographic information. It needs to be fully looked at. And it's one of the reasons that one point I asked for a data scientist. We would love to see what universities might want to look at that. Because I will say in another part of the report, it would have been shown. You would agree on that vigorously. Yeah. I want you to have it. Yeah. The other thing that stood out in the report to me is that when you look at the demographics of our officers using force, it matches across the board with our demographics of officers. Right. So there's similarity there, and then we have disproportionate. So getting to the bottom of that is to everybody's benefit. Well, if I may chime in real quick on that. So when we look at and we review use of force, there's two different types of policing to kind of sum it down to be simple. You have your officer initiated proactive stuff, and then you have your calls for service driven. A majority of our interactions in the police department are in response to a call for service, a community report of something going on. So we don't get to pick and choose who's involved in those encounters. So when we look at numbers, there are numbers that are higher and it's troubling. If we are responding to events reported to us where we don't have a choice on who the folks are. It does raise a question of potentially outside of the policing discussion from a larger whole of government. What's going on in these areas? How can we better the community? How can we reduce use of force and what are some of these causes before we even get called to having to deal in those situations? So that's something we've looked at. Yeah, absolutely and I'd be You can always have more data to to your point You know What is that breakdown? How many are the result of calls for service? How many there are how many of these use of force incidents are a result from non calls of service right from patrol? What is the breakdown? I would I don't know the answer to this, but the secondary question would be, what is the disparity for each, right? Like is it the same, right? Like you gotta be able to answer it. You can't just pause it, one part of it, we gotta be able to answer the other part of it too. And for example, this was used in traffic stop context, where 25% of our folks are from out of county that are pulled over and there's severe disparities and traffic stops, but even if you control for that because we did this ourselves, the 75% the disparity still exists for people who are from the county where black folks have pulled over much more. So you need to know all of that and dig into it, but agree with you. Like certainly the police context is not in an island, and we need to be looking at everything. I don't disagree at all. Thank you, thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, and I think to Councilmember Juando's point, we've said time and time again, we need to make certain that you have the resources that are necessary. And I don't know that we have done a good job doing that. And I certainly am someone that believes that an academic researcher who can do a thorough analysis is what we should be going for. So I'm certainly, and I have a feeling that others might agree with that. I believe we need to do, we need to get the information that is necessary, and we need to do, we need to get the information that is necessary and we need to do it in the best way. Councillor Mourbook. Just to follow up on that topic and thank you for raising the need for a data scientist to tackle some of that in terms of if you're trying to determine a disparity exists other than a sheer number if you're trying to determine if Conduct occurred that was disparate You have to be able to pin that down with what were the differences in treatment with like Circumstances are they attributable to race or ethnicity and so You know, I appreciate in that and thank you, Mr. Tromka, for the report, but also you couldn't go into all of that and go, well, what happened here, what happened there? This situation was factually identical to this situation, but they were in different zip codes and involved suspects of different races. That's not the subject of today's report. That's not in the chart. That wasn't something that was analyzed. And yet that's relevant to actually getting to what causation may be. And I know we've talked about this with respect to other OLO reports or just in general, if you're trying to discern and to Councilmember Jawando's point about people coming in and out of the county. We have numbers. We don't know where they live, right? We have numbers. We don't know where they came from. Especially on the eastern side of the county. We have to look at things based on our census tracks as well, which is a far more sound data science methodology in analyzing differences disparities and other circumstances, which I know we have the capability of doing because I know that obviously we have census track data available for researchers to utilize. And you would be able to know where calls for service are coming in to your point, Councilmember Joando, about what's know where calls for service are coming in to your point, Councillor Mourn-Jawando, about what's coming from calls for service versus what's being initiated by patrol, and then you know the geolocation of the incidents that are occurring. And so all of that is relevant to getting to that analysis, and also I'm gonna add here as I've talked about in other contexts as well, not losing sight of especially when you're talking about use of force where you're trying to protect both the officer safety and the third parties who were the third parties affected and not their identities, we can't do that. But what we're doing in terms of minimizing potential and why potential areas are having higher calls for service what's being done to minimize impacts to those areas and what's being done to prevent victimization of people living in those areas who want to be safe when these things are happening, they want them resolved. So there's a lot of layers to the type of statistical analysis that needs to be done to effectively start to address the why of why these things happen. And we're not there yet in the data we have. In addition to that council member, you brought up a couple of very good points. You know, one of the brilliant things about today in policing that we didn't have way back when I started, actually when neither of these guys started, we have mandatory use of body-worn cameras. All of these events are, and you can discuss whether it's a review or an investigation. Every single of the one of these events unless there's a violation of that policy which we don't have many of is reviewed by not only the supervisor but then the executive staff. And so for 2023 there was 1722 of these reviews of body-worn cameras. Out of those reviews, again, just to hone in on some things of how good your officers are performing, there were 14 complaints. 10 of those were external and four of those were generated by executives, were supervisors. But the behaviors that we're seeing also becomes important to see, like, why did something get there? It's not really about color. It's about what were the circumstances that happened? Why did it get there? And those said another unique characteristic of what's happening. Why did it escalate that force needed to be used? Or why, or why when I grab hold of an individual, did they, for any number of reasons, why did they tense up and not come with me? All very important factors that we need to look at and look at very critically. Thank you. Thank you. I mean, I just wanna note for the record that, when we see dramatic disparities, whether it's looking across the country or right here in Montgomery County, and we see those dramatic racial despair, like there is no like race of people that's obviously inherently more criminal than anybody else. When we see disparities like this, we know that there's a problem with the system systems right somewhere and it's incumbent upon all of us to work together to find out where those are. And I'm not saying that those are just in policing. Obviously, this is a broad issue, not just here in Montgomery County, but across the country and beyond. So I just want to make sure that that's very clear that again when we see those disparities it's not because you know that that is indicating to us that we have systemic problems that we as the people running the systems need to make sure we are identifying and addressing. On the difficulty now that we can't really compare apples to apples as we look at the use of force numbers, because we've totally changed and expanded upon what is being reported as use of force, which I appreciate, obviously. Is there a way to break down with the way that the data is being compiled now to look at apples versus apples? And maybe this is a question for Mr. Tromkin. Look at a subset of what's coming in now versus what we got previously. Thank you, Council Member. So first, 2023 was a year where there was no change in definition and were near the end of 2024. So soon we will be able to do a two-year longitude and all this study to see whether or not that 1722 has gone down or changed. In my report, I did try to isolate many of those issues. Also you need to remember that a use of force incidents may involve multiple uses of force. So an officer may engage in three different techniques. And so that clouds the data a little bit. That being said, the effect of pointing where we change from the physical struggle to any physical activity that so dominates the data that it is a little bit difficult to do. I will call something up to show you. While you're doing that, I'll just say that I appreciate that the fact that we see that huge change in the data on the basis of that reflects that this policy is actually being followed and people are officers are reporting and so on that reflects a success measure of the change in policy. That is that the change in numbers is what you would want to see there, but it does make it difficult to do those comparisons. One point I'll make while Mr. Trump is looking up the data, and it's a commitment that both myself and Captain Cocinos or Commander Cocinos met said, in 2021 we provided training to every single option in the department and in-person capacity on the county change to the use of force law that's right the training again a year later when the state law changed. And we're teaching officers the new standard for how we're going to capture use of force as any contact or any exertion of effort beyond compliant hand-cuffing or unrest-scored, uncompliant escorting. Officers said we're going to have double the amount of use of the force video as we always did. This is going to look horrible for us. And our commitment to the officers was, we will explain why that is. We were telling, we told officers from the very beginning, we understand you were going to report a lot more things than you used to. We will explain that for you. So part of our commitment to them was to be able to explain that this was a completely foreseeable increase. Then when you add the weapons point on top of it, if you would ask me in 2020, what would those numbers look like? I would probably say about three times who we're currently doing. And I think that's kind of worked out to that level. Yeah, I appreciate that. I mean, if we had not seen a change in numbers and we'd have a lot more questions about what was going on. So this makes a lot of sense, but it does provide, again, the comparison difficulties. So to that. And just very briefly to your question, because I too wanted to try to isolate the things that did not change. So you have to take pointing off the table, and hands are a little bit difficult because of the change of that definition. Here in the graph and the table I can show later are the other categories going back almost a decade and where they were and where they are. And for all except for that other category, there are some fluctuations, but no great changes, even into 22 and into 2023. What you see in that other category, let me scroll this up here, the black line, is a major jump. And as far as I can tell, this is also a subsidiary effect of the change and definition, because in other use of needs to control a civilian, often is put in that other category, because it's not literally use of hands. And because of the same standards that cause the jump of use of in use of hands, my suspicion, although I can't tell you with the entire uncertainty, is that this jump is because of that portion of other that is because of use of needs. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, as we continue to collect data, obviously it'll be helpful to keep having these breakdowns until we get, you know, a little further into the future. Thank you. On the conversation about the outreach to the communities, I will just note, I also find this part a little bit aggravating. So I appreciate that the chief is going to move forward with that. We talked about this back in March of 2023. That was a question that I had at that time. There was the difficulties during the peak of the pandemic around bringing people together to have conversations that was noted and understood. But now we're a year and a half past that. So I also am happy to help without reach. We do a lot of outreach to talk about with different commissions and so on to get feedback on legislative stuff and other issues. Sometimes it takes a couple of extra emails or calls, but if there's folks who are also, especially on our appointed commissions that are not being responsive or who are not fulfilling their obligations to the community, then it's important for us to know about that as well. Thanks. Thank you. For the use of force, multiple officers are involved. I'm assuming that each officer would be part of the statistics for that. Did that happen before? Did everybody report it before? So every officer who used force on an event for as long as I recall was required to report that. What did change in 2021 was the requirement that every officer who uses force or witnesses use force is obligated to write a statement as to what happened. So that's where the change was. We have always one report for one suspect. So you could have three or four officers on one suspect, the same through four officers, another suspect because it was like a fight or something like that. But the big change to happen in 2021 was the requirement that every officer filed a report, either indicating why they use force or that they saw force was being used. Is there a way that you could break it down that shows how many people were involved, not the officer but the civilian, the person who was having the force used against them. Is there a way that we can tell how many more people or less people were involved in that? I'm sure we could. To me, that would be something that would be useful. I mean, the fact that you have ten people or five people, five officers involved in that one circumstance, it tells us one thing, but the fact that it's still only, I'm saying only, the fact that it's still one person that it involves tells us something different about what's happening in the community itself. Go ahead, please. about what's happening in the community itself. Go ahead, please. Thanks. One question I forgot to ask that I've gotten from the public. If someone is wondering if a particular event was recorded as a use of force incident, they want to know for sure that that reporting was done, is there a way for them to find out? And what would that look like? So let me chime in here. There's a state mandate for police accountability board. And almost a year ago, the local police accountability board reported that they're working on a dashboard to achieve that same goal over the summer. I contacted them to ask them on the status and the timeline. And the answer is we're still working on it and we don't have a timeline. But it's in the works, I just don't know how immediate it'll be available. Thank you. But for your question, if we had a member of the community, they say, hey, I believe a police officer used force on me. I'm curious if they reported it. Yeah, there's a number of ways. It's whatever they feel most comfortable. They could call the station and ask to talk to the supervisor. They can call the station and ask to talk to the lieutenant. They could make an inquiry through our internal affairs division. If they feel something was improper, they can go to the PAB and make a... So a number of different ways, whatever the community members most comfortable with. I always say for something like that I would prefer the community member if they feel comfortable just to call and ask for the officer supervisor and say this happened to me did they do what they're supposed to do. You know that would be my suggestion but of course they are free to do whichever they're most comfortable. Thank you. And I also, in Councilmember Joando, has something to add, but I also think that maybe we would be better off if someone would also put that in writing that they're from all sides, that someone is asking about this type of situation so that it were aware that they're asking and somebody can say, well I called and then they didn't do anything. I think that's always a concern as well. Councilmember Joando. Thank you. I'm also knowledgeable that we need to move on to not, no, not warrants at some point, but I had one question about the less lethal force. There was a potential inconsistent to see. Here, this was one of the all-own discussion questions. I just wanted to bring it up. So the county code permits the use of less lethal force as necessary and proportional, quote, to effectuate an arrest of a person who the officer has probable cause to believe has committed a criminal offense. The policy that you all have permits Leslie's will force quote to affect the constitutionally permissible detention of an individual, right, which is a little different than could be a little different than what I just read. And then further, the county code also permits less lethal force only after exhausting alternatives to the use of such force. And your policy does not contain that. Could we talk about, is there a discrepancy there? Or could you just talk about what it seems like a potential discrepancy? Certainly. So, there are going to be time for an officer to use force. That's not because they committed a crime. It could be to enforce a, to make a rest for somebody on emergency evaluation petition. It could be to, I'm talking about less lethal force, of course, to execute search warrant, like a search warrant, somebody's person that's authorized by a judge that would be a non-crime. They're not being arrested for crime, but there's a judicial authority to use force to affect the judicial order. But wouldn't it be a probable cause of a crime if you had a search warrant and you said you can't search me? Not necessarily. A judge can get a search warrant authorizing a search of somebody and they may not be arrested for a crime. No, I'm saying, but isn't it a crime in of itself to deny a lawful order from a judge to be searched? So that becomes a nuanced kind of discussion and that's partly we could argue, all right, right well now you're hindering an obstruction there for violation It's a nuanced it's a nuanced discussion. We didn't want officers to do Kind of that very reason that our eventually arguing in a criminal territory commit the argument later on that Yeah, and I've committed a crime we can arrest you We didn't want officers to do was to stop and be like well he hasn't committed a crime yet. Can I use less lethal force to effectuate a constantly permissible detention? But see, I think that is the intent of the law, though. The intent of the law was to prohibit less lethal force and less a crime. There's probably a cause that a crime has been committed. Because again, I know it's less lethal, but it's still force. And the idea that the whole kind of tenor of this law and the state law is to shift the decision tree a little bit so that there's a presumption against using force as a last resort. So I Get what you're saying, but I don't think I still that doesn't help me I still think the intent of this law was that we should not be using less legal force if someone hasn't committed a crime, even if there's a constant, like you said, a legal reason to search them or whatever. If they are obstructing, I do think it's a distinction that matters because if they're obstructing a search warrant, for example, the example you give, that is a crime. So you could use that force, but I don't wanna, the presumption should be on not using the force, not on using the force. I remember the discussions on when we had on this. So we read this as probable cause, right, for the criminal offense. The issue is, less likely the force includes using hands. So there are other mandated things that we need to do law enforcement tasks, whether it's taking someone into custody on a heap, whether it's taking someone in a custody who has an arrest warrant. That's not something that if someone's actively wanted, there may not be probable cause that they committed a new crime. It could be that they have an active warrant. So there's the emergency evaluations. There's, you know, investigative detentions. So you may have someone that we reason, have reasonable, predictable suspicion is about to engage in a crime. So we go to stop them to investigate it potentially to prevent a crime. And then there's some noncompliance and there may be a grab their arm or something like that. Hey, no, no, we need to talk about this. There's a whole litany of constitutionally permissible actions that law enforcement can take. And that's why it's imperative that when we talked about this we were focusing on the county code saying hey regarding the criminal arrests we want there to be probable call you know that obviously we're fined that but then we basically expanded it to discuss the other allowable things and that's what you'll see in the policy and we gave examples of the constitutional other actions that we could be taking because those are mandated by law that we have to take, we have to do those other actions as well. So we have to have the ability to use necessary and proportional. We teach to use the least amount of force necessary to safely resolve an incident. And sometimes that's just having a communication and we get someone to comply. But we have to be able to engage in those other things. A search warrant, for example, I mean, yeah, we could use force to seize somebody, to search them related to the search warrant, but not arrest them for a crime. And if they don't comply. So just, I understand what you're saying. I just think the time for this was when we passed the law. I think not now when you're saying, well, we don't like this. Well, no, we discussed this. We interpreted this in our conversations with the county attorney that this was pertaining to probable cause for criminal arrest, not broad for the others. Okay. So the ruling you got from the county that's I appreciate that from the county attorney was that it was the way it was drafted was limited to these specific Circumstances so less lethal force can be used in other circumstances that aren't related to criminal activity That's the way we understood that's why we wrote this way because we said okay We're confused and then we're saying okay well if it's related to criminal Arrests that's one thing we have all these other activities over here, so we're going to obviously make everything consistent, right? Across the board of all the things. Yeah, well I think you could also reasonably read this in a way that I think it was intended as the drafter that left less least so forth is only to be used to effectuate and arrest or probable cause or a person who has an arrest that an officer has probable cause. You could also read it that way. Wouldn't that be a reasonable reading of that? You could, but you're saying, no, because of the reasons that you, that can manage that. We're saying we were saying that, and again, not to revise the history on this, right? We're having a great discussion right now about intent and what we should be doing and all the things that the police are responsible for accomplishing. But if you take and I appreciate what you're saying about how it was drafted, but if I have to go take someone in a custody on an eat. When you're saying you see it down in the ground, I apologize for your emergency evaluation petition. Emergency evaluation petition. Yeah. And I can't use force. And I have medical workers saying the person or their safety needs to be taken into custody. And now I can't use force. You can't accomplish that. I think there were things, again, going back to, we were doing a lot of things very quickly. And I think what we're engaging in right now, this conversation, can help everyone understand each other in the obligations that we have in the circumstances that we have in this particular example, when we have to use force, from our experiences, when you have to, unfortunately, use whether it be a slight as a hand, whether it has to be, you know, multiple people trying to take someone into custody that again doesn't want to be eaten, doesn't want to get help, but yet they've showed themselves and such. By interpreting it that way we would have had to say we would have to give up that responsibility so that the discussion from the other side would be, oh my gosh, you're not going to help us out with my 16 year old that's out of control and needs to be heaped. So it's a hard balance. Sure, sure. I get that. And I think there are always going to be exceptions to policy that should be potentially allowed for. And that's a discussion. I think we should, we should, we are having now, but probably should have been having then in this context. I'm not sure if OLO was aware of this distinction, sounds like no. And I can tell you just that in the other thing, for example, investigative detentions, I think was mentioned, those are not mandated by law. That's something that you do on your own. That's not required. Well, if we get a call for a robbery, and we get a look out, and we're in the area, and someone is running that matches the look out, we're expected by the community. Right. No, I understand what you think the investigation is. Yeah, but again, you're not nothing's requiring you to do that. You know, it's not. I would say there's a public expectation. I'd say our oath is requiring us to, it will really certainly be. Well, my point is they're discretionary. They might be, you should do them from, there's there are circumstances in which you should do them. My point is it was stated that the law requires us to do them. I don't think that's correct in that way. My point being the larger point is that there might be a set of exceptions, but the goal of this was to reduce the use of Leslie Thouforce to a smaller group of circumstances. And I think the way you I was just told today that you interpreted it was that only if there was a criminal act suspected does this apply. That's what I heard you say. You distinguished it, the Leslie Thalforce prohibition to a set of when there's a criminal act, not other things. Well, but in the county code, it said that we had to have probable cause that a criminal act was taking. So we said, okay, we can use force, obviously when there's probable cause, if someone's engaged in a criminal act. So we looked at that. And then we have all these other things that we have to do in our day to day duties that are constitutionally provided court orders, different things. We say, okay, this appears to be silent on that. So we'll just make it all the same so that if you are engaged in one of these things and it's in our policy that you have to comply with the use of for standard of necessary and proportional and it has to be within obviously the Constitution. Okay. Do you have anything to add? Okay. All right. I appreciate that. Again, I think this is one where it's a little different from the law but we were having the conversation and we can continue to have the conversation on it. Thank you. Councilmember Luki, and then we're gonna try to move on to new knock. Yeah, I just, I'm glad we're having the discussion and having not been on the last council when this bill passed and hearing the author's intent of what it should be. I have concerns that we not have in Congress results where a local law requires an entity that is supposed to do a job to not do all the jobs that it has been authorized to do under state law. Like that's a problem for me. Whether it's in the emergency petition context or whether it's in service to the judiciary, which is required to be done and obeying court orders and performing your functions that you took on oath to do and I will say that after after the passage of the use of force statute at the state level there were some concerns and there were some challenges that arose at the state level. There were some concerns, and there were some challenges that arose around the state in how law enforcement were then subsequently interacting with our EMS providers. And I raised this because the emergency evaluation petition context is a perfect case example of that. And it wasn't your department, so I wanna say that straight out of the gate. But we had ongoing challenges where EMS clinicians needed assistance from law enforcement who were on scene to help get a patient ready for transport, to definitive care, and they were agitated, unruly, what have you. And there's a host of reasons why you might have an agitated patient present on a scene, right? It could be had trauma, could be substance use, there's a whole range of them. But at the end of the day, that time is critical and not getting them to the hospital for transport for definitive care at an acute medical facility could cost them one their life. And to be fair, during the floor debates and all the debates in the passage of that law, they never talked about what happens when you're on seed with EMS and previously all had been very collaborative and now some departments are not wanting to do that. And so I was asked by the director of MIMS to write an advice letter that was meant to go out to every law enforcement department in the state as well as our fire unit. It did. It went out right before this law went into effect on July 1, 2022. And it talks about that. And so earlier we had a discussion about, it's the protection of the office or the third person. There is information in there that talks about that and this went through, I had it vetted through the chief of opinions and advice at the Attorney General's office because it was a follow on and quarrelary to the other work that had been done. But it does discuss that and does discuss, you your supposed to be engaged in conduct that's helping prevent harm, right? And then some of those cases, the preventing of the harm requires the use of the force to help get the person. It's not lethal force. It's not deadly force, but it is a use of force in order to get someone who doesn't want to go to the hospital, but desperately needs to be taken to the hospital, either pursuant to emergency evaluation petition or because the EMS provider on seeing those they've got to get there and time is at the essence that law enforcement can in fact help and that fits within our state to use a force statute. And so I wanted to raise that because I, again, I'm just trying to avoid and we need to be very mindful of the things that happen in the field day to day. And are we doing our level best for all of our residents and everyone who needs support and service, right? And so I think that we should probably revisit this and have additional discussions as the chair suggested after your new policy comes up, but we do need to be really mindful that we are not doing or saying we need to do a thing that creates in Congress results with our other laws because that's not going to work and that's not good for the people. Thank you. If I might raise one point on that quickly so no we need to move on. We have the assisting EMS in the field, but we also have instances, and this is a gray area, and we tell the cops, you need to be careful, you need to really assess what's going on. Once they've been brought to the hospital, they become resistant or combative with doctors and medical staff. And at what point is our intervention administrative or necessary related to one of the outlined. So we tell officers obviously they can use the lowest amount of necessary and proportional force to protect a third party from injury, something like that. But we stay away from you know if you need to hold a patient down that's going to have to be security that's going to have to come in. But we have officers that are standing there sometimes. And the doctors are looking at them saying, can you help me? And well, our policy doesn't necessarily fit into administrative force. Right. And I'm sure we could have the Maryland Hospital Administration and our ER providers come in and talk about what they're seeing in the ERs as well, where even with security and the number of people who have to be on constant observer status, this has become an incredibly challenging environment to manage. So thank you for raising that. Thank you. We're going to move on to No Nox, please. Maryann, can you switch back and? Thank you, council members. Yeah, so we'll go on to the No Nox Lawrence. I can do this review of the report in about five minutes. I'm starting with an introduction. I'm starting with an in-darkening. Give me six in words. Okay. So just brief introduction, some of the background, fourth amendment to the US Constitution, Maryland Declaration of Rights, the fourth protection from unreasonable search and seizure, a judge must determine the reason for this of the search and may issue a warrant to search and seize a private property, the standard. The standard is known as not an announce that is alerting those on the premises that the police have authorization to search, but an officer may apply to a judge for a known not warrant in case of reasonable suspicion that the life or safety of an officer or another person may be endangered. So just as we did with use of force, OLO compared the standards specified in the county code for no-knock warrants with the parallel language in the MCPD policy. And we found a high degree of consistency between the requirements in the code and in the MCPD search warrant policy. This is one example. The code requires that only SWAT team members participate in the execution of no-knock warrants. An yearly identical language appears in the MCPD policy. Similarly, we found close alignment between the no-knock requirements in the code and MCPD policies related to knock-and-announce, mitigating risk, and other standards. The MCPD search for policy also includes multiple provisions not mentioned in those minimal standards in the county code, including among other things or requirement for supervisory review prior to applying for for a nonoc or requirement that no knock warrants be executed between 8 a.m. and 7 p.m. Epson accident circumstances and a requirement that absent those circumstances officers allow minimum of 20 seconds for occupants to respond prior to four-century. And those last two provisions, while they're not specified in county law, they are mandated in state law. So now let's move to some of the data. This data shows the number of search warrants executed by MCPD during each year over the past decade. Those are the blue lines. And the number of no-knock warrants executed each year since 2017 and those are the orange bars. You'll notice that the number of no-knock warrants have fallen precipitously from 128 and 2017 to 9 and 2023. And a key factor in this decrease is the state's removal of narcotics investigations from the list of crimes which potentially could qualify for no knock search. Not only have the absolute number of no knock warrants decreased, no knock warrants as a percent of total warrants have dropped from 63% in 2020 to 16% last year. Now, OOLO acquired from NCPD, demographic data about the 53 people who are present on the premises at the time at the time of each of the nine, no knock warrants executed in 2023. And here's what the data shows on the demographics. 32 of the 53 people were male. The ages of the people ranged from two to 73 years with most between 18 and 40 years. And 39 of those 52 people were black. 13 were Hispanic, one white. Also the council asked us to look for non-occupant best practices published since 2020. Now I found little literature invoking the term best practice but we did find entities that have reviewed non-occupant standards and guidelines. For example, in September 2021, the U.S. Department of Justice, DOJ, revised the standards for no-knock warrant, served by federal law enforcement agencies. And what we found was that the MCD-PD policy closely correlates to all of the DOJ no-knock warrant standards, including a requirement to not can announce, limit on no-knock warrant to situations of imminent threat, and a prohibition against executing no-knock warrants solely to preserve evidence. Another organization that reviewed no-knock warrants standards is an organization known as the National Tactical Officers Association or NTAOA, a nonprofit organization supporting police tactical teams and the law enforcement community. And in February 2022, NCOA issued a position statement on no-knock warrants. In that statement, NCOA concludes that there's little no justification existing for no-knock warrants in light of risk and safety concerns associated with forced-century searches. The statement says in part, this is their language, no-knock-sort to warns, the well-intended, no longer passed the test of tactical science, risk-migagation practices, and liability conscious decision-making. And if you go to the end of the statement, the statement concludes by saying, when considering the priority of safety in life, it is difficult at best, says in Atoa, to justify or defend no knock warrant service. So finally, I ask MCPD to provide its perspective on the use and roll of no knock warrants. And MCPD views no knock warrants, and this is a quote, as a specialized tool, only to be used in cases where occupants have a significant propensity for violence, and the Department attempts to utilize other less invasive means to achieve its goals. However, they conclude there are instances in which alternative solutions present more in her danger to the public suspects, cohabitants and or occupants. So that concludes the brief summary of the No-Knock War in Section of the Report and again, turn it back to the chair. Thank you very much. So, what is considered an imminent danger? Why would you apply for a No-Knock Warren? Thank you. We look at the numbers, our No-Knock search warrant numbers are significantly down over the last three or four-nox, our sworn numbers are pause for 20 seconds and then go that looks like that's pretty significant. We only, there's the state law has a series of steps that are put in place that require detective to go through several steps before applying for a no-knock warrant. In fact, officers required not only to have, we put in our policy requirement that every search warrant is re-by both a supervisor and an executive officer for a no-knock warrant, it adds in the prohibition of the requirement that the state's attorney himself, that cannot be delegated. The state's attorney from Montgomery County, John McCarty himself has to approve the application for a no-knock warrant and then it has to go to a judge. So it goes through at least four different layers of review before it comes to us. And what our position is that the only time you can ask for a no knock warrant is if it's for the safest way for officers to serve that warrant. It's important to know a couple things. One, just because we have a warrant as a no knock, does not mean it's always going to be executed as a no knock warrant. If things happen between the time the warrants obtained and the times officers make entry that mitigate that imminent risk where the subject came out has been taken in custody or facts came into the officer's presence that hey we thought he had a gun we found it doesn't have it anymore we will still execute that warrant as a knocking announce. Also just because we have the ability to do an warrant without the requirement of knocking announcing, does not necessarily mean we're going to do a warrant dynamically, meaning we're going to go in quickly and seize the structure fast. We very well, if I can too much into into tactics, there are times we will open the front door and then we'll call the occupants out. It all depends on the various different factors of whose presence the crime being vascular, the size of the structure and all those things. But I can tell you, even as recently as last week, we served in NONOP search warrant where the suspect had barricaded his front door shut, officers made entry and they took the suspect into custody within seconds of making entry and the suspect had a hand gun on his pillow, slept with a hand gun on the bed with him. In those circumstances, serving a warrant without the requirement of knocking and announcing, and considering the fact that we had no safer alternative is still the safest way to secure a structure and take subject into custody. Thank you. How often do you ask to go through the four steps, I guess, before you get a no knock warrant? How often do you do someone ask, and how often does it get turned down? I mean, I think it kind of depends on circumstance, right? Of course. A young detective or a detective, it's part of the conversation they have to that chain to command asking a supervisor, asking a second officer how it wouldn't should go. I know a very few times where the state's attorney's office has said no, we're not going to approve one. We normally, and we'll have that conversation back and forth as well where there may be things that we know That they want to see articulated differently in the warrant before they sign off on it. I am I am unaware it doesn't mean it's never happened, but I don't think of a case where the state's attorney's office has said we are not going to approve this as a no knock. I do know there's been a back and forth about putting more facts and circumstances in the warrant application, so they feel more comfortable with what's being presented. And that's always the balance, because the search warrant application, unless it's sealed, becomes a public document. There may be intelligence that doesn't want, we don't want to disclose in the process. But there is a give and take. I'm sorry, just to be clear on that give and take, it starts at the detective level and the detective sergeant level and the executive level. So when you say how many have been denied it could be early on we we have that discussion because again we train our sergeants and lieutenants and captains to know this is the standard you got to meet and if they're if it's just not there they just don't apply so we don't even get to that we don't even get to that phase. And there may be times one of the, you need to demonstrate that there's no other reasonable method to take this person to custody or whatever. So there may be times where they're talking about doing one and a reasonable method appears. And so the no-knock gets scrapped and they go do another operation in a different way as well. All right. And to get to the point about the National Technical Officer, Tactical Officers Association, I'm assuming that means there are jurisdictions that do not do no-knock ones. Certainly. So, you know, the NTOA National Tactical Officers Association, their great organization, we attend training from them. I think we're both members of the organization. It's important to understand that we in Montgomery County have a team of both centralized and decentralized SWOT officers. We have officers the only thing they do on a day-to-day basis is train repair tactical operations. The NTAA represents officers from all across the country. I was a police officer in New Hampshire before I came here and the Myr Local SWAT team was a couple officers from one place, a couple officers from another, a couple officers from another. They have collateral responsibilities. They come together to serve the Lawrence. I understand the reservation of serving a no-knock warrant with a regional SWAT team, because they don't have the training, they don't practice together all the time, there are concerns there, I understand that. But one of the reasons why we've been so successful in Montgomery County with a judicious yet intelligent use of no-knock warrants is the training our officers go through. And I think the NTOA's assessment, I would frankly, I have since this came out, disagree with it. I think when you have a tactical team like ours, like Howard County, Baltimore, that train together every single day, that there are times when serving a warrant in a no knock style without knocking and announcing is going to be safer. That may not be the case if you have a regional SWAT team from that one day somebody is a detective and another guy is a motor officer and then one day they're a SWAT officer. I understand the reservation there. I can take you for us and for full-time SWAT teams. I think their assessment has missed the mark. I would add that like Captain Captain Besurner said, we have what's called the Tier 1 SWAT team. So we're trained for hostage rescue. We're trained for the highest level of complexities. And there are other SWAT teams nationally that are not at that level. I agree detectives shouldn't be serving no knocks themselves and things like that. We don't allow that. But I will tell you that when I was the director of SOD, I went out, we had very few no knocks, but I would go out on them. And there was multiple occasions where, in my assessment of review, had we knocked and announced, there would have been deadly forced deployed. There would have been a shootout, there would have been something. We had the homicide suspect from Lockwood Drive that was in the enclave, that was a no-knock, that individual had a gun next to his nightstand. Had that person been given the 30 seconds, 20 seconds to know what's going on, there undoubtedly would have been. We've had apartments up in Germantown, multiple gang members, armed with guns, had the SWAT officers had to knock. That would have been potentially a shootout where now we have innocent residents and neighboring structures had we waited to take armed felons off in traffic stops or subject encounters in the community. Now we open up third party risk. So we have, if you look at all of the number of no-knocks we've served, and I know the report goes back to 2017, and you look at the safe outcomes. That speaks volumes. Thank you. I just want to thank you, Mr. Chair. There's a couple of things I think hopefully we all agree it's good that the number has gone down. You know, I think that's the goal. That was the goal. So I'm glad to see that. I just wanted to talk to a couple about a couple components of it and just make sure I'm clear here. And this was brought to my attention by some folks in the community. Can officers who are not a part of SWAT participate in a no-not warrant? They cannot execute. They do not. Distinguished. So, execute from participate so participate could be that I have I'm happy to detect I was detected before game promoted I can apply for a no-knock search warrant the SWAT team's going to execute the warrant the SWAT team now keep in mind the SWAT team also includes ESU which is gonna be our SWAT medics could have a drone operator, but they will make the entry secure the residence and then it gets turned over to regular police detectives and things of that age. So in order to execute the academic entry, you have to be a swap. Until the residence secure, it's swap or it's, you know, RES you guys are with them, but we might have perimeter security that we have officers who are covering, you know, back doors, make sure no one goes running or anything. But we are very clear in our matrix that it is, and it has been forever. This wasn't a major lift for us because we never, we always did a threat assessment. Only members of the SWAT team can execute a no knock-one. Okay. only members of the SWAT team can execute a no-knock one. Okay, so there's that out there that suggests that non-swat officers are serving no-knocks. That's not the case. It is that they may be applying for them because anyone I can apply for one. I obtain it. I'm not the one serving it. It's the SWAT guys are serving. Got it. Okay, so that would explain if there was a search of your dad, someone could apply who's a non-swat member, but they wouldn't be executed. Correct. You definitely not want SWAT officers applying for them, you don't want the detectives. Got it. Then the other question I had was around the exigent circumstances. We had a long discussion about this. It was online, it was during the pandemic, obviously the pandemic and I remember this day in particular. The requirements of when you can enter or execute were meant to be conjunctive in the sense that they are all together. So it reads there are exigent circumstances, other methods of serving the warrant would pose an unacceptable risk or be futile. The crime being investigated meets one of the law's seven specific categories, which we had a lot of discussion about too, what those categories should be. And D, there is a reasonable suspicion that the person is either demonstrated a propensity for violence or that the location is fortified or booby trapped. So are you all interpreting that the law as all of those must be present? Well, let me rephrase the question. If there's one or more. If, yeah, that so you have to be unacceptableacceptable risk has to be one of the criteria is reasonable suspicion prevents the violence or The last one is an or or that it's booby trap to fortify so it would need to be all of those at the same time three three and maybe and maybe the fourth maybe the fourth correct And that's so that is currently the that's the way your policy is being that's when it's applied You're executing it that way correct? Okay Okay, thank you. Thank you anybody else Do the juwando roll we're gonna go through everything at once. That's it. He did Okay, anything else mr. Trump? First off, thank you all very, very much for what you do. We do want to have another conversation, as I know you do, on the policy that you come up with is when you come up with it, we'd like to work with you to help facilitate, et cetera, et cetera. So with that, are you, no, you're good. With that, thank you very much. We are adjourned.