Good morning everyone and welcome to the public safety work session of Monday, December 2nd, 2024. Today we have one topic on the agenda which is an update on police staffing and there will be no vote needed. As we begin I'd like to thank Susan Farag for preparing the staff report and for once again and always assembling a most informative packet for us and unless the other committee members have any opening comments, which they don't, I'm going to ask the panel to please introduce themselves and then ask if they have any opening comments. And then is Ms. Farag to lead us through the packet. Chief, please. Mark Yimada, Chief and police. Good morning, Darren Frank, Chief of Management Services Bureau. Any opening comments? I mean, I have things I can say, but I maybe I'll stop after. Okay, or during, you know, no one should ever interrupt Ms. Farag, but you know, you might consider it. You just gave him permission. Yeah. Okay. Wow, that's a big choice. Okay. Go ahead. Good morning everybody. This briefing I just wanted to be clear that this is covering sworn staffing only. The committee has discussed professional staffing three times this year in March at a full police staffing briefing which included sworn and professional in May during budget and then October was specific to the emergency communication center. However, since the department is facing a potentially large loss of sworn staffing beginning in January 2025, which is due to an enhanced pension benefit multiplier that provides more money for fewer years' work. This briefing focuses on current sworn staffing levels, staffing projections, and the department's planned approach to maintaining sufficient patrol coverage moving into 2025. As people are well aware, appropriate staffing levels are critical to community safety, most obviously appropriate staffing ensures timely responses to emergencies, and we are going to talk a little bit more about the impact of short staffing on response times. It helps with proactive crime prevention and effective community engagement. And as we asked police to do more in terms of community policing, which it really requires true engagement and partnership with community members, which includes more time and care necessary to identify and address root causes of problems in the community. And it also requires more time and care necessary to work with other partners like HHS and nonprofits. On the very immediate downside to insufficient staffing, it creates burnout among officers. And that could also in the long run compromise, public trust and safety. And we'll discuss as well that overtime use is skyrocketing, particularly in patrol. Over time use and burnout are real health and wellness issues for police officers. So the good news is that the department's field sworn positions have increased slightly. They're up from 111 in March to 1112 now, that's 11 more on the street. The vacancy rates currently 13%. The more complicated underpinnings of that, however, may include the fact that some retirement eligible please have delayed their retirement or entry into the discontinued service retirement plan, which is also known as the drop waiting for this enhanced retirement benefit in January. There's three main things that any organization can do when they're facing short staffing, increase recruitment and hiring, increase retention or lower their turnover, and finally redeployment of existing resources and staff to meet their operational needs. So the departments worked very hard for years now on the recruiting side, but they do face some external pressures there that are really outside their control. There is significant competition in this region and the DMV region, including federal departments that aren't really subject to balanced budgets, and they can more immediately and effectively increase salaries, benefits and bonuses. The department has also worked on retention, including some enhanced benefits through collective bargaining, those include better salaries, some longevity benefits, and enhanced personal patrol vehicle use, and more. Still, it takes about 18 months from advertisement to putting a new officer on the street in a way that's meaningfully increasing sworn strength. And the department faces more losses in 2025, which recruiting itself is not going to immediately address. And for that reason, the Council had approved $160,000 in the FY25 operating budget for a Department workload analysis and staffing study to better help the Department redeploy resources as needed. In terms of the current short staffing impacts, the authorized sworn compliment is 1278. As I mentioned, 1112 of these are filled. Patrol staffing has the most officers, approximately 65% of the authorized sworn compliment are assigned to patrol. That does not include patrol administrative positions like the district commanders. The patrol vacancies rate, however, is 17.3% a bit higher than the department's overall total. To add to that, many more patrol positions are unavailable through no-duty and light-duty designations, and that reduces available patrol strength to about 77%. 640 officers on paper are available on any given day for patrol, but that doesn't include things like regular leave for annual sick parental court or training etc. Those are often backfilled with over time if minimum staffing amounts are not met Response times are longer since 2019. They're about 41 seconds longer for priority calls and about 53 seconds longer for routine calls across the county. The good news is that response times have dropped slightly from last year, about 13 seconds lower for priority calls and four seconds faster for routine calls. Over time however does continue to increase. The approved FY25 department wide overtime budget was 11.6 million but the department overspend that by 8.2 million or 86%. There's a chart on page six that shows how overtime has been increasing over the past three years. The 2024 numbers there are only through October but already 4D, Wheaton and 60, Gatherersburg, Montgomery Village have overspent last year's full amount. In terms of future staffing considerations, attrition rates have varied over the past three years. The turnover rate was 7.3% in 2021. That bumped up to 12.5% in 2022. Drop down to 10.5% last year. And now it's slowing to just 6% this year so far. Again, this may be because people are delaying retirement or entrance into the drop the department has estimated that it may lose more than 30 officers to direct retirements in 2025 and more than 70 who enter the drop. As I mentioned before part of the operating budget the council approved 160,000 for an external staffing study. This study was meant to cover the entire department and provide a data driven understanding of how resources are currently used and identify areas for improvement and redeployment if necessary. The department advises it entered into an agreement with PFM, which is a company already under contract with the county, to review the investigative services bureau. The cost of that is $188,000 with delivery terms no later than June 2025. The department advises that the study must be limited and scope because available funding is insufficient for a full department study and they've advised that they chose ISB or investigative services bureau because it had the internal capacity already to conduct a patrol workload analysis. Back at the October 7th work session on the Emergency Communications Center, the department, the council, the committee did ask the department to provide a quote for studying the entire department and the department is indicated that that would be more than $400,000. Absent, a timely workload analysis, it would be helpful. I'm going to shift it over to the department for them to explain its plan to ensure both officer and community safety with any of your deployment plans it may have. It would also be helpful to understand the status using non sworn staff to provide operational capacity. And there are some outstanding items that the committee has been briefed on several times, including a proposed retired officers bill. Potentially enhancing capacity with the telephone reporting unit, potentially building an online reporting system. As I stated before targeting certain positions that may be better used as civilian positions, professional positions, and things that are unique to patrol, such as potential patrol district realignment to balance officer workloads. And finally, one of the most the best emerging practices for retention, for increasing retention within the police department is creating and maintaining a healthy internal work culture. Officer wellness is critical to this job support paths that are very transparent and identified for promotion, wage transparency and equity. I do mention in the staff report some concerns that have been pointed out for several years about wage compression. This does create problems between people who might want to get promoted, want to seek promotions between Sergeant to Lieutenant to Captain. The FOP scale has increased by about 35% I think since FY 15. And then the Lieutenant and Captain scales which are on the same pay scale increased at lower rates, but not identical rates. Let me find that. It increased 25% over that same time period for lieutenants and 28% for captains. The executive did recently change the salary ban for assistant chiefs from EX3 to EX2 on the executive pay schedule. The wage compression between sergeant and lieutenant could often dissuade officers from taking a promotional test, often believing that such a promotion may result in more work for less pay. And since the assistant chief salary band has been increased, there may be more room to reconfigure police leadership service salaries to be more appropriately create very obvious transparent promotional paths for officers who wish to move up through the ranks. I also did want to point out that district commanders have traditionally received a 10% pay differential to compensate for their larger span of supervisory control, as well as the need to be readily available to the community for day, night, and weekend meetings and other types of engagement. And I just want to point out that a fair and equitable wage structure is critical for maintaining officer morale and encouraging equitable promotional opportunities for those who may wish to advance, including women and officers of color. So at this point, I'm happy to take any questions on the packet, or I can turn it over to the police chief to discuss their plans for moving into 2025. Well, I think we should turn to the police chief, please. And then there's a few, there's some questions. But once again, Susan, you really have given us a lot of information and a lot to think about. And a lot of things we have to do as a group, as a council, as a committee, because we are in dire straits here to figure this thing out. Chief, please. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. I trust everyone had a good Thanksgiving. Chief, please. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. I trust everyone had a good Thanksgiving. I brought a number of my staff with me today. Commander's Dom, Jason Cookeenas, Commander Dave Smith, from the second, third and fourth districts, Captain Gagan and Captain Bungie from our major crimes and special victims divisions, and I think in the back there somewhere is FOP presently Holland. Each has a different perspective on the staffing plan and the impacts it has on them, how they're dealing with the challenges and the adjustments they've made. One of the things I mentioned during my confirmation was a goal of improving communication, especially our internal communication. We have for some reason rarely asked for input from our executive staff in the past on major decisions impacting the department. By having them here with me today, it demonstrates that we are taking steps to make positive change together. First, a huge shout out to the officers and professional staff on the police department, despite all of our staffing challenges, violent crime is down in almost every category. As Susan pointed out, our response times are down for this year compared to last year. And they continue to do more with less despite little recognition for the hundreds of outstanding things they do each month. They remain motivated and continue to provide outstanding service. The department has been working on a staffing plan that would incorporate a workload analysis for some time. I'll ask AC Frank to go into detail on both shortly. My goal since I took over as Chief and July was to make the best decisions possible when it came to these two issues. That will have a tremendous impact on our entire department, including delivering, effective and efficient service, officer morale, retention, all of these are of critical importance to the department. We want to point out that our approach has been purposeful and intentional. None of this has been done randomly. I have been given great consideration to officer wellness and work-life balance, and I have leveraged my solid relationship with both of our unions and Formulating different aspects of this plan, which is why Lee Holland is here today joining us Creating a positive medicine time. He sits all the way in the back. Oh this time the three C three rows earlier. Yeah, that's a step in the right direction. Yeah. Creating a positive, healthy work environment, one that prioritizes officer safety while enhancing community well-being, has always been a priority, and will continue to be a priority for me. And it is absolutely critical to improving morale, which in turn will optimize our ability to provide the highest quality of service to our communities and enhance our chances of improving morale and retaining officers. This plan, although not here today, also includes our non-professional staff. An analysis of ECC staff, as Susan said, is ongoing in AC Frank Ken if you want to provide some additional details. To coincide with our staffing plan, I've been working on finalizing my strategic plan for the department. This includes focus on officer safety and well-being. I've identified officer wellness space at the PSTA, that's our training academy, that focuses on counseling, therapy, communication, career track and promotional mentoring and financial literacy. We have also approved effective wellness training for our academy staff all while working closely with the FOP to gain approval and support to move forward together. The staffing plan includes a redeployment plan which also includes and keep in mind that any change is viewed as temporary, we could return to normal when our staffing stabilizes and when we see consistent improvement with our recruiting. We've begun distributing recruiting videos developed by our private firm that we hired. We hopefully will see positive results from this with our next class. I'm exploring the possibility of redrawing district boundaries to equalize the workload between districts. This would be a pilot plan right now involving the third and fourth districts and as an option as opposed to moving officers from one district to another. It's also less disruptive, but it also comes with some challenges as well. I'm including or considering moving one to one consistent deployment plan in all six districts right now we use two its traditional and geo deployed. Consideration has been given for the span of control for supervisors and this also comes with pluses and minuses. We're also looking at assigning an executive officer to oversee daily staffing for the entire county as opposed to one single district. This will help with monitoring over time, holdovers, and callback. Ultimately, we have been discussing and evaluating critical staffing level points to include worst case scenarios. We openly acknowledge the possibility of difficult decisions that exist in our very near future. This would include things such as consolidating, specializing in investigative units, re-evaluating follow-up investigations, re-evaluating true workload, much like we did during the pandemic, assessing our response to calls for service or currently evaluating nationwide best practices and the possibility of using AI to our best to best leverage that. A new report management system is on the horizon that includes more effective use of officer's time and better tracking of data which I'm sure will make the council happy. Addressing the potential benefits of utilizing a civilian response team to handle identified calls for service, this would include a training component, of course, that would fall on our PSDA. A continued focus on leveraging technology, the expansion of our DFR to 60 and eventually to White Oak and Bethesda, improving our ATEU, that's our automated traffic enforcement efforts, implementation of our Arctic, our real-time information center, enhanced that by utilizing FUSIS and our camera program. All of this supports patrol and our primary focus of answering calls for service. Our tech efforts serve as resource multipliers, improving de-escalation, diverting calls for service to other agencies like HHS, and allowing officers to make the best decisions possible by getting information to them quickly as possible. Full analysis, what I'm looking for still is a full analysis on the decision to move out of Rockville City and Gay Through City and I'll ask AC Frank to cover our efforts as Susan pointed out in our efforts to rehire retired police officers. I have been actively engaged in conversation with supervisors and my executive staff on trying to change our culture, our use of overtime, officer stress, and how it impacts our performance, holding everyone accountable, because I simply can't do this alone. Everyone here must step up and commit. And believe it or not, everyone in this room plays a role in what we are trying to accomplish in terms of morale, staffing, and retention, and that includes each of the council members. We take part in numerous discussions throughout the year, each of us has a voice, and each of us needs to be cognizant of the impact that voice has on our goals. Like the negative rhetoric surrounding police officers and law enforcement, the constant scrutiny and unethical expectation that the only acceptable level of performance is perfection. And of course pay and funding as Miss Farad pointed out. We truly appreciate the partnership and support we have with each of the council members and we look to that to continue into the future. Please feel free to ask any of the commanders or the investigative captains for their perspectives on any of the questions that you might have, which is why they are here. And I'll turn it over to AC Frank to go over the analysis and detail for further discussion. Thank you very much, Chief. Please, AC Frank. Good morning. I want to point out a couple things in Ms. Farog's excellent report, as far as indicators about how we're doing. As she referenced, our response times have maintained, and if in this last year went down slightly. Our closure rates, which we have excellent directors, commanders of our investigative units have maintained. Our ability to respond to 911 calls, which is a huge thing, between adding drones as first responder, a lot of overtime hours, unfortunately. Again, we've been able to maintain our response. And what I want to point out is that illustrates the thoughtful manner that has gone on for the last year in addressing these shortages, because the shortage is not new. We just now happen to be heading into the worst of it as we have talked in front of Council a number of times. So that thoughtful work continues, and with the assistance of Council in the last budget, we are putting in funds given to us into effect in that thoughtful manner. So let me address the first part which would be the workload analysis. So when this was first brought up at Council about putting in money towards an effort to do workload analysis, at the time I did testify that we have an internal tool. We have been using an internal tool that tells us what our patrol services needs are. What we didn't have is ability to do a investigative services workload analysis. It's one of the toughest you can do because it's more art, although I will say the PFM consulting, which we have under contract with the county and just had our kickoff meeting for our workload analysis, they are bringing more science through their experience through the years that they've done. But we chose investigative services for a couple of reasons. Number one, I go back to the, we can do patrol services right now. In fact, our most recent effort was to reset minimum staffing numbers using that tool so that commanders knew the minimums they, when they went below their minimums, when they would need to call in overtime. The other thing we've done and I need to refresh it for Chief Yamada, our policy and section, is for his strategic plan and his staffing plan in the future, is how many officers we truly need in patrol services bureau, which we can do. We've already done it. It needs refreshed based on new data that comes in. And that's the interesting thing about workload analysis, especially when you talk about patrol. It's not a one time you do it and be done with it. We have been positioning ourselves to do it every six months so that when rookies come out of the academy, the chief can be advised where all of those rookies need to go. And I chief your modern, I have had discussions about that and he truly believes in that and he believes that that's what we should be doing. So the investigative services bureau, what that offers us, there's some tough decisions to be made especially when you get into the bigger staffing deficit because there will be less service to the community especially when you get into the bigger staffing deficit because there will be less service to the community. And where that comes from is going to be in follow-up investigations. We don't want to do it, but the reality of the numbers that are coming, and without some miraculous event to turn around our hiring fortunes, which again, we continue to turn around our hiring fortunes, which again, we continue to turn around slowly. Without that, the chief is going to have to make difficult decisions on what investigations get followed up. Or do we limit investigations more? Or for this investigative services bureau workload analysis, one of the things we've asked for is current best practices on follow-ups and solvability factors so that we can give the captains of the unit the information they need based on now best best practices now how they might be able to get by with less as we don't fill vacancies or unfortunately units may need to be temporarily sent back to the road to fill staffing vacancies on the road. So the investigative services part is very interesting. It covers all of our, it covers major crimes, special victims. It covers our electronic analysis unit, which I included from our crime lab, I've talked before in Council about the critical, which is grown even more than last time I talked about, the critical overload of work that is going on in evaluating electronic devices as part of investigations. looking at our special investigations at division. We're also looking at a couple things that are outside of the investigative services bureau, which are our patrol investigative units, which are stationed with our district commands. We're also looking at a new unit that the chief formed when he was in the field services bureau, the behavioral analysis unit, because we know a large part of our workload has to do with dealing with folks with mental health issues, and how to best deal with those many, many calls, and divert officers away from those calls. That unit has done some excellent things so far. It's an army of one right now, and we want to know growing towards the future, how many people do we need for that effort? So this becomes very valuable, and the way we've looked at it is when we get the two pieces together, when we get the workload analysis on investigative services bureau, combined with our efforts and patrol services, the chief can issue a staffing plan that we used to issue. In fact, we had one pop up in a meeting just last week, get back to where we were issuing staffing plans. And I will address the staffing plan issue in general through no fault of anyone's. The staffing plans that we had before were made because we were always looking to add officers. And honestly, the last three years, the message has been, well, you can't fill your current vacancies, why are you asking us for more officers. So our desire, our belief, is that through all our efforts we will continue to turn the ship on recruiting. We're in full-term bargaining now with, with Lodge 35 and there's very thoughtful discussions going on about officer pay, officer wellness, and then in addition public safety needs. So in a matter of months, it could be we continue to turn this around even further and that would be a great thing. But we have to weather this next year and that's why we're meeting today. Thank you. Susan, do you do anything in addition at this point? I don't. Well, first off, again, thank you all very, very much for what you and all of the men and women of the your department do. You save our lives each and every day and that's not lost on us. You're not always thankful for it, but you should be. And I think it's been noted time and time again, how much concerned we are, all are about police staffing and that involves recruitment and retention. And AC Frank, you mentioned the patrol analysis one, but we haven't seen that. Is there a time that we can see that? Chief Yamada has directed me to refresh our last effort. We'll provide that to him in the county executive. And I'll let Chief Yamada speak more to that. I foresee it before the summer, sometime in the spring. Okay. It's obviously something that's a great concern. I know not just us, it's certainly a greater concern, probably, to you, but this has been going on for 18 months longer, so the sooner the better. And I know that it's not just for area, for air department, it's throughout the region and the United States. So the whole idea for the pension multiplier chart, which is new, had on page three of the packet and the patrol staffing chart on page four is of interest obviously to us is there a way that we can can do a better job on what we're doing on that? I apologize, Councillor, Councillor Mallow. You don't have it? In what sense as far as enhancing? Inhancing. Yep. Certainly, you know, again, those conversations are going on and, you know, as a guy that gets a paycheck every week, I mean, I can say whatever you can do to enhance it is outstanding. I think that for the Montgomery County police and I'll go back 20 years, right? We have been a leader in the area in law enforcement. We continue to be a leader in the area in law enforcement. And I think one of the things that becomes important is that as you lead and pay, we require college educations of our officers. We require a college, an actual degree to get promoted, whereas other agencies around us may not necessarily do that. So to get those individuals that want to be in law enforcement, we have to be candidly the most competitive we can possibly be. We've done a lot of things now internally. We epic recruiting, just we just kicked off our website through that effort and it looks very, very good. We like it and we're going to continue to expand on that. We've changed our application portal to NeoGov and has seen tremendous increase in applications so far this year since that was turned on. So we continue to do this and I think the other part of it is what are the benefits, the actual monetary and retirement benefits that go to officers. Are we positioned to be, if not the best, but in the top three of the area. Because as I've testified before, right now in policing, especially in the DMV area, you have to approach it as if you're a Division I college football team. There's a lot of limited resources for the best out there. There's, you wanna get the best of the best and the way you do it is you offer the best benefits, the best wellness, the best and the way you do it is you offer the best benefits, the best wellness, the best environment. And we simply have that. And with our efforts with epic recruiting, with our efforts with other things that we're doing through our police information office, we are getting the message out there that you want to come here and be a part of this community, all the opportunities, drones, canines, patrol, investigations, this is where you want to come make a law enforcement career. So the, again, the obvious part is the more we can put towards benefits that helps to go for our recruiters. And then internally, I Mr. Frog mentioned it, but we're in a situation now where a sergeant on the road makes more money than if he were to try to get promoted to lieutenant in a lot of cases, not in every case. And then subsequently up the road, the lieutenant makes more money than a captain might make. Just due to the overtime and the availability of callback and other things that go into their pay. And that's the bottom line. They're hard bottom line monetary figures for people that they take into consideration. It's not so much looking 15, 10, 20 years into head at your retirement. It's what is it going to do for me right now? And we're struggling with that internally. There again, we need to figure out and I guess some of that is bargained. Some of that is I guess coming from the county executive side for the salary schedule. We need to have a table. I like it used to talk about we need a bigger table. We need to have a table where this can get straightened out. Everybody needs to say, look, this is the problem, how we solving it, rather than this is the problem and it's not my fault. I'm not saying you're saying that. But that's what we need. We need to figure this thing out. And air competitors, we need to be better than air competitors. And I think it's page 10 or something, page 12. Page 12. You have the listing of air competitors and not to say that air municipalities or our competitors, but they are in some ways. And we need to figure out how we're going to hire some of the people that they're some of the people that they're able to attract. Why aren't we able to attract them as fast and how fast do we tell them if somebody gets a you know Montgomery County says yes we we certainly like to have you on and the police department are they paid right away how does that work to keep people in line to keep people so that they won't go somewhere else so a couple things first we've reduced the amount of time it takes to do our background investigation so once we're able to get through the background investigation we are able to get through the background investigation, we are able to make a conditional offer and then a final offer. Once we give you a final offer, we do an early higher program because we have the capacity in our budget. We'll early hire office, we'll early hire the police officer candidates and they'll come in and work in places where we need assistance everywhere, but the academy they'll work in our supply section, they'll work with investigative units, they'll work, I've had one work in our management and budget section. So that's how we keep them there in Chief Yamada has recently made a change to our, the schedule of our academy classes, we're going to go back to a schedule that coincides with the graduation of colleges so that we're going to go back to the June July, slash January, February timeframe, which our recruiters, what we're seeing, is that will help to a degree. One of the things we got out of that pattern because of how big our academy in length had become. It's still around 29 weeks. It'll be a challenge but our folks have been directed to find a way to get it done and have those starting dates then. And we've made some strides with working with our cadet and explorer programs to try to sink our hooks into people earlier on and then drag them through. I hate to use that term, but I can tell you're a marketer. Yeah, entice there, but entice them through the process. There's some parts of this that would have been of the session that would have been great to just like clip and put into the promo ad. Not that one. That's a little more real tough. Maybe not that one, yeah. And to keep them engaged in the process of joining law enforcement at a much younger age than we have in the past. I guess bottom line for me is a few thousand dollars more when you're trying to attract 50 people or whatever. Really is a small investment. We're not at the top of the starting salaries. And in some cases, others need to give a better starting salary because they're not going to have the movement, you know, for various departments that they can move up. They don't have the rank and what not. They're smaller departments. But at some point, those few thousand dollars makes a big difference. We need to be able to beat air competitors. And we're trying, we're doing a much better job, but we still need to, we're still not there yet. And I do want to say, because we talked about it before, we truly need to thank our partners, Rockville and Gathasburg for always being there, for certainly working with you all and for the communities. And we need to make certain, we being the county, need to make certain that we're paying them for what they're doing. There's been a time during my lifetime when that was not the case, and that's not fair and or smart. So we need to thank them and to really let the public know they're our partners. We also need to talk about for the response time. How do you work, how do you count if a drone for a first responder gets there? Once they get there and they say, you know, you need to continue to send officers, you don't need to continue to send officers, how does that work on response time? So the drone response time does not factor into our normal response times. We count our response time on officer on scene, but what the drone allows us to do is, first of all, it allows to get on scene in number one, verify there's actual need for a response. And we are collecting data on how many calls we've been able to close out with by telling an officer, you don't need to go there anymore. So our drones first responder is collecting that data. Also, again, it provides crucial data on officers responding on whether or not they need to speed up or slow down their response. So it's one of those things as we're going through, that drones' first responder program has taken off. It started as a pilot, like a year ago, and it's exploded. It seems like it's been much longer. I know, right? So it's exploded in one of the things that Commander Cooquinos and now Captain Paserno are challenged with is as this program has so rapidly grown, how do we assess the data that's coming out of it? Those are some of the things. But again, we don't count it towards our response time because honestly that would be disingenuous. A drone is not going to arrest anyone. It's still the men and the women pushing around the patrol cars, getting there and putting their lives on the line to get into those calls. So that's what we count on there. Well, and I appreciate that. I understand that, but it certainly has helped with response time. If somebody can get there in 90 seconds or if information can get there in 90 seconds. It has and then in addition to that, I will say the enhancements of the real-time information center are gonna be critical. Because again, we have some other tools technology-wise as the chief spoke to like Live 9-1-1, where our real-time information center can hear a call as the caller is on the line. Right now because of how the system works, it's really a telephone game up until the addition of this Live 9-1-1 and now our real-time information center and the Joneses first responder. We can act in real-time on calls as opposed to once I type it in and get it sent over to someone and then someone dispatches it. So those are enhancements that as we continue to look at our response times and continue to look at the output of these technological enhancements, it will go and help us assess how many officers we are we able to find efficiencies in other places? And what I've cautioned everybody on is we sort of felt like the DFR, if it was a hit, like it has been, people would want it everywhere. Those officers have to come from somewhere and unfortunately they come from the district commanders to help support that. So we've been managed to get by with decentralized pilots and things like that, but there will be a point in time where we have to either slow down our progress or look to some more full time support or the retired officers. Well, if we look for more full time, can we get it? Is there other people available to do it? There are. There's young folks out there that really enjoy flying drones. It's about offering them a competitive salary, getting a classification in. And as the chief said, right now our program is a majority of it, is over time by officers that have taken on the challenge to become pilots. And we want to get to, we're forced to get to another direction on it because we need to officers on the road. We're not taking them from the road, but it's wearing folks out having to wear those two hats. So there is an opportunity there and we're excited about some potential future. Well, there again, I'd like to we would like to see that plan as well. We can help until we know how we can help. So we do need that and I'm going to stop on this. But I do think Miss Frog that we need to have some sort of discussion about this starting salaries. And I know that's bargained. And we certainly, when our union partners to be at the table, we need to figure out, when you raise someone's salary as they begin, what does that do for the compression along the way? And we need to make certain that we're doing the right thing, and that we're beating air competitors on that, because that's what we need to be doing. One way that could possibly address that is if the executive branch wanted to do a true comprehensive salary survey of the region because starting salaries are not the only story as you pointed out how rapidly people get promoted, how rapidly their pay increases matters. Even if we're third highest starting salary maybe our our promotional salaries work much slower than Prince George's County I don't know but they have they have better opportunity to do that on the executive branch side and to ensure that there are that police are being appropriately compensated throughout their career. And yeah, we're actively discussing a lot of this with the county executive, Rich and Earl trying to come up with a pay scale, get away from the pay per for pay for performance that we've been sort of caught up in. It's led to some of the compression issues, but I don't know if Darren wants to. Yeah, the pay for performance for executives, it's a, it was at the time, it was a good decision. Now we're looking at some other things that we've learned in hindsight about it. And I know that the CIO and Dr. Stodder and support of looking to do something again to fix those compression issues. And then as far as the study, I know from the bargaining process that the same company that we hired for the workload analysis also has a branch that does the area studies on salaries and benefits. So that's an ongoing thing. It's being done right now. I did talk to Director Anderson of OHR a couple months ago, and she was having executive pay looked at as well. So there are efforts in place that are being worked through. And we appreciate that. We need that sooner rather than later for the budget. I mean, that's when monies are counted. And so we have to figure it out. As soon as we can get it, doesn't mean we have the magic wand. Doesn't mean you're gonna get everything that we would, you know, it would be nice if we did. Well, you're gonna get everything that you need. But we certainly need to know what you need. And with that, which lady would like to speak first? Would you like to speak first? Would you like to go first? Sure. All right, this is a lot of great information. So thank you, Susan and thank you, team. Okay, where to start? Oh, before I forget, I wanted to go back, a follow up question to a conversation that Chair Katz was having about monitoring the response time impact of the DFR program and just figuring out how we're doing handling data analysis from that. I think it makes perfect sense what you said that we're not counting, like it's not a response when the drone gets there. The drone is helping officers to get there and to know when they need to get there and so on and so forth. But sometimes what we're seeing from the drone is that it's OK if the officer gets their later for whatever reason, like you were saying helps to know if they need to get their sooner, but they need to get their later. So the response time of the officer may be reflective of that information. And so I don't know the answer to this. I don't know how we best reflect that in the data. Let me clarify that on response time. When I say get there sooner or later, I'm talking about a priority response versus a routine response. And in these areas that we have these drones, except now that we're getting the Montgomery Village Germantown drone off, which has a much bigger area. The areas that the drones are flying have a smaller footprint, so the officers are still getting there pretty darn quickly. But when I tell you that when the drone folks come back to dispatch and say you don't have to respond lights and sirens, that slows it down. That's the later part, right? And that's what we want for the safety, the community, for the safety of the officers, not having to drive with lights and sirens for no reason at all. So that's where it's helping in that sense. So if it's for, you know, being able to know when it needs to be a priority and when it can, when it doesn't need to be, to be a priority is good. And then, but we also don't want that to like reflect negatively against our calculation of overall response time. So, you know, if the drone comes back and says this doesn't need to be, or our drone pilot comes back and says it doesn't need to be lights and sirens, and thus we're going to end up with a slower response time. You know, that's different from somebody not coming, you know, not getting there earlier because of staffing issues, for example. Is there a way for us to analyze that in a way that makes sense? So before Director Ongley retired, we had a conversation about our response times and those instances where we reduced response times and the overall effect. Her initial analysis is that the overall effect of reducing response times was not severely impacting our averages that were tracking in our data. We could make a change where we drop out calls from the response time. Let me give you a better example. This happens on occasion on the road where a call by protocol is dispatch lights and sirens. And a supervisor who we entrust with the experience to know here what's going on with the call will say you know what you don't have to go code three for that call you can slow it down routine dispatch that changes the response time to agree what to a degree we can back those out there is a way to back that out in our cad and assess that and we can go back and look at doing that. But our preliminary information is it's not making that much of a difference. And the reality of our workload is that's a decision made after the fact about what really is experience and instinct on a call. And when you talk about looking at the data that goes into determining how many officers you need for the workload that's coming in, you got to go by your protocols. You got to go by what are national best standards. Our accreditation of our Emergency Communication Center is the very top 1%. So we're doing it right in that manner. And I would say it's Izikia word. It gets a little bit too icky when you try and get down into that. Technical term. Technical term. When you try and get down into that granularity, it's not helping the overall cause. Makes sense. Yeah, and I mean, this does feel very nitty gritty, but I feel like, you know, given that we are moving into a space where we're kind of on the forefront of this and figuring out how we can best present our data as we get things going and start growing the use of drones is going to be important. Okay, shifting gears. When we did the late night safety bill, one of the things that we were looking at was if we would be able to move some night shift officers into the daytime, has that had an impact? Does that had a staffing impact? I don't know if we wanna go to the commander of Cacinas for this or if you all can speak from what you've seen at a broader level. Check. I would welcome Jason to the surprise guest. There you are. Are you. Good morning. So the late night. Introduce yourself. Oh, sorry. Commander Jason Coquinas from the third district. So the late night bill has been a huge success. It is significantly helped the calls for service, particularly the violence downtown. I would say that our staffing has been problematic for a while. So what the bill did was, in my opinion, took us back to where our current staffing can handle what's going on versus before it was so out of control that our midnight shifts were overwhelmed. So I haven't taken officers off midnight shifts to transfer them to other things because now we're back to a point where the current midnight staffing can handle district-wide what's going on. So it certainly helped, but it hasn't gone that far to be able to reassign, if that makes sense. That makes sense. May I interject one thing? Do you know if it's impacted use of overtime? Have you been able to reduce overtime at all on the late night shift? Yeah, I mean, without knowing the exact numbers, I would say yes because when critical incidents happen, particularly if the evening shift is still working, sometimes we get holdovers or supervisors will holdover or call extra people and knowing, hey, it's a Friday night, I'm going to have a late night issue. So I can assume to say it probably has in some degree, I don't know the exact numbers for that. We are using some overtime, particularly in downtown Silver Spring, with like I have officers on Friday and Saturday nights, every once in a while just making sure we put two extra officers and stuff. We have some garage issues going on and those are on overtime. So I'd say yes. And to add to that, I mean, I think that bill contributes to potentially fewer arrests, which would be less court that officers would have to go to. And midnight officers, it's all overtime court. Thank you. And speaking of overtime, I think, chief, that you had mentioned the possibility of having an executive officer to monitor overtime across the county and just wanted to hear about what they would be seeing, what they would be doing that's different from the kind of district level analysis. So at the district level, if the sergeant comes in in the third district and says, hey, I'm short to people. They will either hold somebody over or use their district call back list to bring somebody back in to work that shift. Versus if you look at it from a county wide perspective, true that shift might be short to officers but Commander Dom it might be overlap in the second district and she might be able to spare two officers to go work in the third district for whatever given period of time thus eliminating the need for a hold-ever or callback. In an ideal world, that's the way it would work. And I think it's similar to something that Fire Rescue currently does. It's something that we're looking at. It certainly makes sense. Temporarily assigning one officer from a day worksheet from one district to another. It's probably not convenient for that officer for that day, but I mean, it's something that we have to do. And certainly beats making a permanent transfer from 1D to 3D or 4D disrupting an officer's life. Yeah. I mean, I think that makes a lot of sense because the commanders are responsible for, you know, crime levels in their district and that has to be their first priority. I'm sure that's what the public wants to be. They're first priority and so having somebody who's able to kind of step back and, you know, their role is to bring that together with looking at how staffing is deployed. It makes a lot of sense. The question that has been mentioned also about how many officers do we really need in patrol and doing a regular analysis of that, what do we look at to answer that question? Is that are there like best practices that we are leaning on or our own statistics about what do we look at to look at that answer? We look at a lot. So the first thing we look at is the calls that are coming in the call volume. So you look at the call volumes, you look at the type of calls, you look at priority level of, you look at the type of calls, you look at priority, the priority level of each call which it separated out. I simply talked about priority response versus routine response, but there's actually four categories within there. So that's the first thing you look at. Then you look at how long it takes an officer to work on these different types of calls. A robbery takes more officers and more time than say a shed burglary. The homicide obviously takes a lot more time than what would be an assault call. So you look at those things, the information that's in the CAD. The CAD is the reservoir for all the information, because that's how we operate. That we get dispatched on the CAD, we go on scene on the CAD, we go off scene, we go out of service, it contains a tremendous amount of data. Then you also look at road miles, where things are. The road miles in downtown Bethesda and downtown Silver Spring are much different than the miles out in Poolsville. But also there's a consideration for backing up an officer in Poolsville. We can't leave one officer out in Poolsville without backup. You have to have an officer there. So that's looked at as well. In addition to that, you look at time of day that calls are coming in. And you know, one of the moves that we made, well, it's all of these things mesh together, but it's been a minute, is we changed the start time of our evenings because of what we were seeing in call volume that was coming in in the hour of three o'clock to five o'clock. So all of those things were looked at, it's in our CAD. We have a computer program that analyzes all of our CAD data and makes predictive analysis on what we need to get the job done going forward. In addition to that, we can change our organizational goals. Each chief has different organizational goals. When Chief Jones was there, we ran it based on having 24 minutes an hour of proactive time to either engage the community, to do traffic stops, to walk around a shopping center. That's where we want our folks. That's what we want our folks have the ability to do because we know from best practices that's how you connect with the community and reduce crime and reduce fear of crime. Chief Yamada is working through the final things he wants analyzed and we plug that into the system and determine how many officers we need to meet those organizational goals. I should go back. There's other organizational goals we can do. We could say we want a hundred percent of our calls to have a less than five minute, a hundred percent of our priority calls, lights and sirens, to have a less than five minute response time. I'm going to tell you that's an extraordinary amount of officers. So you have to balance what the organizational goals are, where you want to come out. Response times are part of it. How much time an officer has to put towards community engagement and all of those factors are analyzed and then you match it up with your staffing plan which I'm sorry you're staffing decisions as far as chief Yamada addressed it a second ago we're looking at going to one deployment model. The deployment model matters. Right now we're split between traditional and geo deployment. We're going to what I would call a geo-traditional deployment, which bridges the best parts of both of them. And with that, it even gets better as far as our analysis going to how many patrol officers we need. So there are a lot of factors I could probably talk for another 30 minutes on it. But I'll leave it at that. That gives us a picture where we can determine where and when we need officers and then craft our staffing around that fact. And then what will happen going forward is we will need to build towards that. And based on that data, make staffing decisions going forward that, again, as I said, when we have, right now we're down to 27 rookies in the academy, which is an improvement. Right, we started with 32. When those 27 come out, we'll be able to say, this is where eventually you will need to be assigned so that we can balance the workload. Optimally you would like all the officers in every district working the same amount. Putting in the same effort and that's that's ideally where you want to get to. There's difficulties as the chief discussed. We're looking at maybe moving a little on district lines a bit, but that is affected by our municipalities because we can't split, we provide emergency communication services to our municipalities and we can't split them between districts, it doesn't work. While we do share radios or while we do consolidate radio channels right now, that's out of the condition of attrition in our emergency communication center. We will not do that once we get to the appropriate staffing there. So that becomes a challenge because when you look at the workload for a county like ours, or when you look at workloads like they do in cities and so forth. It's easier to block everything off because it's just, you know, NYPD. It's just NYPD. For here we have our municipal partners and we have to take into account the efforts that they need met and how we can work together collaboratively. And some going to keep in mind from a historical standpoint, Montgomery County Police Department has long been under the national average of officers per 1,000 residents. Like the national average is somewhere around 2.5 officers per 1,000. We're at one to one now. So even if we were fully staffed, we would still be below that two and a half, some agencies are as high as three, three and a half. I mean, there's our outliers, but just something to keep in mind. Even if we were fully staff, we're still below where we would ideally like to be. Appreciate that. And it sounds like, you know, this is something that we'll definitely, and ideally before budget Come back and understand in more detail. What is the you know? What is a new deployment plan look like other organizational Goals kind of our internal best practices and then what the budget implications are For that would be great to get a good handle on before we really get into the midst of the season Yeah, I mentioned that because even if we were to get to a really good place I don't want everyone to think we should stop there. We need to, we need to keep moving that forward. I hear you give us something attainable. I got you. And then last come and then I'll get back in the queue is on the drone pilot. Front, I've heard, you know, I've heard maybe this is a position that could be civilianized. I've also heard there's a lot of benefits to having somebody who has had or is actively having in the case. Now, patrol experience being the pilot behind the camera. And so, and I can see both sides of that. And I also, I like to be able to provide opportunities for officers who have put in the time and so forth. But what are you thinking about for that? I'll defer to Jason as the subject matter expert, but there's a definite need to have some of that be sworn as opposed to you can't civilianize it all. Jason speak. It's one thing I'll say I'm glad I'm able to actually mention this is every week things are evolving with this technology. I mean, just last week we had NYPD broke through a never before obtained waiver that could impact us in our ability to grow this program and reduce costs and do things a little bit more efficiently. Technology is just changing. There's just so much rapid. Is that a waiver comparable to what we're looking for on the White Oak and broader area? So White Oak, it could help. Yes, White Oak, we got to shmooze our federal partners a little bit and still on that. But yes, it is because NYPD has obtained this particular waiver that allows them to operate using technology in place of humans. Like, you know, our people on the roof, the contractors, there's waivers now where if we stay below a certain altitude and we have a certain safety technology, which we currently do have now. It actually reduces the need of a person to be out on the roof. So there's some things that are in motion as we speak and where the problem is we're submitting information for budget as these things are changing and it's very messy. So, but the, at the end of the day, the operations room is still going to have to have people in it. And there still needs to be a sworn person in there to make those law enforcement decisions, whether it's canceling officers. So canceling officers to a call. And the other thing that we're doing now with the drone is with the live 9-1, when they hang up with the 9-1-1 call taker, an officer in our operations room is calling that community member on the phone directly, which has been wildly well received. So we're increasing the response time to engage with our witnesses and stuff, but that needs to be a police officer to be able to obtain that information and make those decisions. So could there be a place where potentially we have civilian or professional staff in that room absolutely. I think there's still needs to be sworn in that room. Depending where we all go with this, like the chief said, right now we're filling this with decentralized folks. That would be a decision at some point whether there needs to be full time staff assigned to that unit, but sworn versus professional staff, there's opportunities there. And just to tie in some of our efforts, especially the effort we're doing to go to this one model of deployment in our districts, that's going to give us an opportunity to have additional sergeant positions to put towards technological advancements like that, putting a sergeant potentially in our drone as first responder room on a full-time basis, which, again, the pilot is showing that would be a tremendous addition. So we're being thoughtful in what we're doing, especially understanding that, again, we haven't been able to fill the physicians we have vacant. So how can we do more with the FTEs that we already have? So that's one of the things that we're looking at doing in the next few months. That's great. Yeah, certainly where we see that what is basically amounting to a full-time role is being filled in with over time. That's where we would like to be. Making sure that's one person doing normal hours, getting their salary and pension and so on. Great, thanks. Thank you. Did want to mention the true stands for telephone reporting unit. We've we've mentioned that a couple times, but go ahead. Thank you. That's a I appreciate you hitting on the on the acronyms there. Yes, our telephone reporting unit and just so you're aware we are back to our COVID level of call volume, call types that are going to our telephone reporting unit. One of the things that we're going to be analyzing further is what additional call types can we send to our telephone reporting unit? Because every call that we can take out of an officer's queue, freeze them up, freeze up them to respond to the priority incidents and the other incidents where a response in person would make the most difference. So we're continuing to look in at that, but we are already back at our COVID level, which was pretty enhanced compared to what we've ever done in our history. Thank you. Council member. Thank you. And thank you all for all of the information and thoughtfulness today. I was looking at the numbers and thinking back to 2018's legislative session at the state where the Chiefs and Sheriff's Association during debate on a bill that I was heavily involved with said that the vacancy rate back then was 10%. That was the average statewide for our 160-ish law enforcement departments around the state of Maryland. And it's only grown since then, right? And that has a cumulative snowballing effect in terms of the over-time work, the burnout, and everything else. And at the same time, and I appreciate Chief Humata that you touched upon this, you did it, I would say delicately, to use a different adjective. But the, and I was saying this to chair cats before we started, the level of cancel culture that has been experienced by our law enforcement departments, and we just call it what it is, has been outrageous because it's not to say that there aren't problems to be solved. There are problems to be solved. But how you do it really does matter. And for me, that's been an incredibly challenging thing to see and witness over time because I see the net effects of it. And that's not helping our community. That's not helping make our community a better place. It's not helping to strengthen our departments and no other profession, because let's face it, if every time something had gone wrong and some other profession, we would have canceled schools, church, hospitals, doctors offices, everything by now. But we don't. And we all bear responsibility for dialing that down and making sure we're having positive, affirmative rhetoric about what is needed to benefit our community, what is needed to benefit positive public safety, the whole ecosystem from our emergency call centers all the way through the judiciary. And I got to tell you, they're taking a ton of it too. It's just not as emphatic, but that's why we have a statewide judicial security task force right now, because life is not well aimed at our judicial officers either. And that's not okay. And so, you know, my ask is that those in leadership, those who do have a voice and an ability, take that responsibility to heart because we all play a part in making sure our communities are stronger, safer, and that we're holding everyone to a high standard. I'm not saying we shouldn't, but we gotta be fair in how we're doing it. And I feel like that's been missing. All right, enough of my editorializing. So I thank you, Commander Cokinos, for pointing out the distinctions in the DFR program. Sorry, drone is first responder. I'm going to try not to use acronyms. Having been in the room, watching how it operates, I can say affirmatively as a civilian, but a civilian with a law degree, I can't see how it could work without having a sworn officer in that room. So I appreciate that you all are working through how to make things work and that you need to be adaptive and agile in all that you're doing, but I do agree that you do need to have a sworn officer there in order to do that investigative follow-up and make the judgment calls that are necessary at the time that it is deployed. With respect to the MoCo Connect program, which I also got to go out with Commander Smith last week and Captain Paserno, who's not with us today to work on in my district. I need more flyers because we have more places that we didn't get to that day, but I'm happy to go back out and talk to them about the program. It was well received and I am appreciative of all the efforts that are going on countywide to help boost that program and Again, that's part of positive community policing and taking that time and being able to go out and meet with businesses And explain these things to them. It's those touch points that really matter particularly now during the holiday season, which is always an extra tough time for our businesses. Thank you for elevating the need for a healthy internal work culture. That is tremendously important in terms of job satisfaction and also making sure that as you're marketing the department as a place to be and to work that everybody's walking the walk and talking the talk and making sure that young folks entering the department really feel supported. And I've seen that in action. And so I know that that really is truly a core value of the department. With respect to the questions between priority calls and non-priority calls, I just wanted to get some clarification because there's a distinction between what is dispatched as a priority call and what ends up being a priority call. We don't track data on after the response, whether or not it really would have met the criteria of a priority call, correct? So let me just make sure I follow you. So we get, we dispatch to a priority call, we get there and we figure out at the end of everything that it didn't meet the qualification for the priority. Um, so there is data in the CAD system about how calls end up. And, and we actually have like, you'll see it in our daily activity report you know what the final clearance was I would have to talk to our our acting director to see is there a way to get that information further get it broken out right I think I'm pretty sure you can the cat is is pretty robust. I just need a double check. And even if it can't be broken out that way, I think that's an important caveat or like footnote to any data or charts that go out because the call is dispatched based on the information that is received and the protocols that the ECC has for dispatching. And again, I mean, I've actually seen this happen during a ride along where the call was dispatched as and the belief was and I understood it to be. And then we got there and it was different and it was not. And that's okay. But you know, you have to dispatch it based on the information that is received. And oftentimes when supervisors, we've talked about them reducing it from priority to a routine, they also do the other. They will get information that initially the cause dispatched is routine and the supervisor will say, no, make that priority after whatever. So it goes the other way. It goes both ways. Yeah, yeah And that's that's important because again back to the need to be flexible and fluid and adaptive To the situation that is the call that you all are under all every day all day um In terms of the behavioral analysis unit and I know thank you for flagging that I know it is a Department of one presently But I think it's important to to highlight that as it is separate from the CIT group And it's important to flag in terms of like that's typically Where you're trying to deal with our frequent fires, people who are resource intensive and how best to reach them. And again it's a highly collaborative thing and it's taking a very problem-solving based approach working across disciplines to try to reach a better outcome. Is that a fair way to characterize it? No, that's absolutely fair. And all the goal ultimately is to not have, I don't want to say, a normal patrol officer, but patrol from having to repeatedly go. The BAAU allows for tracking, it allows for monitoring, things like that, and allows for those officers to get in front of those cases with these additional resources that then allows patrol to focus on other things. Right. And there's distinction that are made because inherent in part of behavioral analysis is understanding the difference between a substantive threat and a transient threat. if they are in fact making threats, what's real, what's not, what's, you know, whether the person is in fact a risk to themselves, predominantly and not a risk to the community, but what can we best do to help that individual person not be a risk to themselves? So it's very nuanced and it takes very special people to do it and I know your Army of One is a very special person who is highly invested in that work. And I, again, I know it's hard to do the proactive community-based policing to the level that you want when the staffing is so challenging. But that's the better overall outcome yields when we have time to do those things. And I do want to commend the fact that you've had improvement, even with more limited resources, you've continued to have positive trends. And I think it's largely because of the time that has been spent that we have allocated to those types of community outreach and engagement efforts as well as the force multipliers that we have. I wanted to thank you for sending council updates on what's going on because I think and particularly over the past few weeks we've had a number of updates from you with respect to the real-time information center. And it's use in assisting with particular calls for service. And it's been illuminating to see, of course, these things are happening in every district, right? It's not confined to one place or space. This is across the county. And that's important. And to also give an opportunity to say what's working, how did it work out and for people to see the types of things that are happening across the county and better understand what officers are dealing with, what our businesses are dealing with, what our residents are dealing with on a day-in-day out basis. So thank you for doing that. You mentioned the balance needing to deal with our Rockville and Gatherer'sburg arrangements. I'm going to call it arrangements. So I was wondering if you could speak a little more to that about where, you know, as we've shifted, the shift is still new-ish, newer. Where that's headed and how do you think that creates challenges and or opportunities for the department? elaborate a little bit but we've seen some pluses. Unfortunately, the commanders for those districts aren't here that would be able to best speak to how it's benefited. But we see some officers from the other jurisdictions fully embracing, taking calls, being available, things like that. And then you have times when they're just not able to or and ultimately the responsibility falls back on us. So it continues, it's not like we have abdicated our responsibility. If there's something critical, if there's a murder that occurs, those are all still fatal accident, those are all still Montgomery County Police Department. We work closely with our will with Chief West, acting Chief West and Chief Shroka to iron out any differences or come to common grounds on and how we can improve these relationships moving forward. As far as the response times and availability, the calls for service, that's the information I'm looking for. Is there something positive that we've seen? Is there a negative? Is this something that we should look to? And at some point, do we continue in this direction? Things like that, so I don't know if Darren has any statistical preliminary from an analysis stamp? The main thing we've seen is call times again across the county priority and routine response. They've maintained and that was sort of the idea behind moving resources out and asking really asking much, much more from our municipal partners. And again, as Chief said, they have stood up to the challenge and then some. So we've been able to maintain our response times. And that's a very important indicator, especially in the situation time. Now certainly that's impacted their ability to provide, go back to that community engagement time because they're doing more with that. So right now it has worked. We will continue to monitor that as we go through what will be this very bad part of the attrition that's coming up. And we'll continue to look at what kind of adjustments there and as the chief said we still have sector backups that respond that are available and ultimately it'll be a decision down the road about either putting our footprint increasing our footprint again in those areas or keeping it like we're doing right now which we've got a couple years I think before we need to make that decision. And we still retain investigative services for them correct to a certain extent. The simplest way to put it would be around the major crimes and some of some of the other crimes but I will say that the Gathersbergs Gathersberg City and Rockville City both of them have a good investigative units that deal with a number of cases that are are CID I haven't had enough coffee today or CID criminal the Criminal Investigations Division, normally takes on, so they have that capability there, but we'll still do the homicides, the death investigations, the commercial robberies, and then other trend crimes as we needed. And I will say that our investigative units have a, and I apologize, go back to our special victims unit which covers sex assaults, child crimes, they still handle that. And elder abuse. Elder abuse, yes. Montgomery County police still handles those. But we do have very good relationships with not only the command staffs but the investigators for those municipalities and the relationships is going very well. And that extends beyond just Gated very and rock city. It's the Metro. You have a shooting or a murder that occurs in a park. It could be park PD versus, you know, so we, we work very closely but Captain Gagan and his team are more than happy to take those cases on. So. My last question is you mentioned challenges with electronic evidence review. And I know our state's attorney's office also, we, you know, last year, we increased some funding for them with respect to that because, again, everything starts in the department or with a with a other department, but a lot of the evidence that we have related to particular criminal conduct these days is, in fact, electronic. And then after you're done with your part and it is going to be charged as a crime, there's the State's attorney's office needs to be able to do its review, manage its caseload. So I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more about what has improved if anything over this past year with respect to that or where challenges have grown more specifically? As far as improvements, I will say our folks have put in a tremendous effort, a lot of over time, to help maintain and keep us from being on the front of the Washington Post. But the volume has grown as we expected. The problem is having a system that can evaluate these devices that can, and then the people to pull out the specific information, the snippets that need to go to investigators because that's limiting, that's a limiter now. So all of its workload, in addition to that, the technology itself, because of the amount of data that is pulled out of these devices, we have a ability to store it, but the computers that, again, in an old school system, the computers needed, need to be upgraded every two years unless you go to a new school system, which is we have options out there We've asked for those options and we're going to ask for them again because they increase efficiency and Again and reduce the backlog and and that becomes critical especially when we talk about the investigations that our special victims do, that our major crimes unit does because there is information there and you're seeing it all the time in the news. There's data in there that tells us, points us to who is responsible for these crimes or for our state's attorney's partners helps us to get the convictions for those responsible. I will say that the state's attorney has hired an individual that's really working to bring all of our departments together, more so than before about transmitting evidence to the state's attorney and giving them easier access, more readily available information. So we have a work group now that I applaud John McCarthy and Darren O'Brien for bringing together as we work towards the future and potentially some funding requests from them to help get their systems where they need it to be so they can do their job. That, thank you for that because that's really important in terms of if they're the receiving entity of it to take the cases on to the next phase, having one unified method of receipt and process, if you will, is going to be the best outcome for everyone, then everybody's level set the same expectations of what's required and what's needed. So, so thank you for that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you I wanted to appreciate the highlight of the importance of maintaining our you know productive collaborative supportive working relationship between County officials and our workforce including police and that's something that I really appreciate here and I really appreciate that we have a police department that sees you know seeking out continuous improvements and advancements and so on you know including working with HHS etc as not only a priority but something to be proud of and to be on the front lines of and that's something that we really have to be proud of here in Montgomery County as we as well and we see a lot of the positive results there and I also want to be you know clear with Montgomery County as well. And we see a lot of the positive results there. And I also want to be clear with the public that, of course, we always welcome feedback and advocates who may speak from a place of pain or of anger. We always want to hear from the public. And of course, it's our job in the county government then to take that and synthesize that and work together collaboratively to come to decisions that makes sense. So appreciate the public for their ongoing feedback and appreciate the police department and colleagues as well for ongoing collaboration. I apologize for Councilman Remenka. I do want to highlight that we have through our next door program put out a survey to the community. As you recall, that's part of what County Council expects of us. And so our first effort, we have more efforts coming. But our first effort for this year for 2024 is to put that survey out. We're looking forward to getting responses out. One of our chiefs said going to our executives and seeing, hey, is there a way we can do something? One of our executives, we did a survey about the usefulness of a fourth district station, a new one. I'm sure Commander Smith can talk at length. You've got a reason for that, he might be. But we expanded upon that. We're trying this survey on next door, because that's another expensive thing to do. But this might be an option to get us some initial feedback. So we're looking forward to seeing what comes of that. Appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you. Ms. Farag. I did have one. Thank you. Thank you. Ms. Farad. I did have one excuse me. I did have one question to circle back to the Drenas first responder in the live 911 and Captain Commander Cacinos can correct me if I'm wrong. I did read a recent article in Police Chief Magazine about patrol officers using live 911 and I didn't know if that's something that the department had considered or any other expansion of live 911. I don't know if that's something that the department had considered or any other expansion of live 9-1-1. I don't know that it would necessarily impact response time so much, but it would get to the ability to provide better informed police officers who are responding to the scene. And I just want to ask the department about that. So we are looking at expanding the use of live 911. You have to be very thoughtful with it because you can basically jump into a call, jump onto a call which creates workload problems. It can create workload problems because we can't have everyone jumping onto the same call. There's some considerations. So I will say that Jones' first responder program has shown how we can use the tool. And we're going to take the lessons learned from there. And what our plan is to do is to expand it in potentially two different areas. Number one, we have central business district units, which are not necessarily controlled, and we may have the ability there to start using it there. But the first place would be our real time information center where we can put that into play with individuals who can get information out that we're already connected. So those are the two expanses we're looking forward to. And then as we continue to learn more, and we get our staffing in a place where we want it to be, then we can look at it expanding it to patrol services in a much broader way. But that's a bit down the line. You know, we've seen great success in this pilot, I always say it's strange to call it drone program, a pilot program, but we've seen it in a pilot program to have great success and if we could do it in a small area and see how that works and then expand it, Councilmember May please. Thanks, I'm just replaying in my head the next door survey. Could we get more info on that and what other additional survey spaces you might be in? And I'm just social media is just, you know, it's a dangerous space for soliciting feedback and and it's hard. It can be hard to get a really represented. I mean, as you know, you said you're doing multiple things. So, but I just how, how are we going to use that? What else are we doing? How are we combining that with info from other places and so on? Right. So that's our first effort. The survey devices before that we've looked at have really the quotes that have come in for one time surveys or actually actually they now have programs that do surveys now that when this effort started like two years ago, we have people wanting 200,000 a year to do this type of work. We've identified internally. First of all, the first thing we got off the ground was the next door survey. Where we're going to go is we want to link surveying capability into our CAD information, where we're calling people that have called 911 that have an experience with officers or called 2798,000, not 911, to get their feedback. So that's coming, we've got some contractual issues to get through, but that's ultimately where we want to go because we think that will be the best information we have and also we're being physically responsible in that sense too. I appreciate that. Yeah, I'm just doing a quick Google on like who's on next door and it really is a very limited slice of our population. So appreciate that we're looking at cost effectiveness and all of that, absolutely. But also some of the folks who might be seeing the most crime, for example, may not be the ones who are on there. So to be continued, I know, but appreciate that. Thank you. Ms. Frog, did you have anything in addition? I do not. You do not. Well, first off, thank you again for everything you do. Please continue to keep us informed. And as you know, I know you know Ms. Farog's number as well, keep us in the middle of this. We want to assist you to do your job in a better, efficient, and effective way. So with that, we're going to be adjourned. I was just going to encourage you to try to find one question to ask each of them so that they could have to come up here and talk. By all means, yeah. Is there a question you would like us to ask? Oh, there's plenty. I can see that your popularity just went right down the two. The fact that they're here. Thank you very much. We are adjourned. Thank you.