[Music]
okay good afternoon everybody welcome to
our work session of the las cruces city
council today is monday november 8th
2021. approximately 1 p.m
if you please join me in the pledge of
allegiance please
foreign
you
okay we're going to start off with our
pet of the week and we have jennifer
martinez from our communications office
is going to introduce
those pets
good afternoon mayor and council i am
jennifer martinez with the city's
communications office and today we have
a couple of furry friends that would
like to find a new home so i will begin
with our cat of the week camille is a
one-year-old spayed female she is a
mellow cat and hangs out in the vic
which i just recently learned means the
very important cat cattery room
that means she hangs out but not in a
cage so that's kind of cool she melts
when you give her chin scratches and
sometimes she gives little love bites on
occasion she does need a home that is
mellow like her
then we have zorro this three-year-old
is a large breed he's been at the
shelter for quite a while he has a
little history of picking on little dogs
but is great with dogs his own size he
loves human interaction and he is polite
enough to sit before feeding you can
meet these guys by calling the animal
services center of the messiah valley
and setting up an appointment and if
you're interested in either of these two
cuties just jot down their animal number
then call the ascmv at three eight two
zero zero one eight to make an
appointment to go visit them and as you
can see for zarro his number is six zero
three four and for camille her number is
three nine
zero four zero you can also interact
with some of the center's animals at the
downtown farmers and crafts market this
weekend from 9am to noon on saturday at
the plaza de las cruces thank you so
much mayor thank you jennifer
okay now we're gonna have our jobs of
the week and looks like dr francisco
palladas will present those thank you mr
mayor
and for today's jobs of the week we're
going to have an art instructor with the
city of las cruces this position is
going to be open until filled there's
also positions available with electronic
caregiver there's five positions for
care coordinators these are going to be
closing on the 28th of december we also
have some driver ambulance non-emt with
american medical response and these
positions are going to be closing on the
29th of january of 2022 we also have
positions available with frank supply
company and these are on the counter
sales and rentals these will be closing
on the 27th of january 2022. there's
also its quest is looking for eight
positions for holiday decorators these
are going to be closing on the 28th of
november of this year
for a full list of jobs internships and
volunteer opportunities visit
www.employeename.com as well as
www.governmentjobs.com forward slash
careers forward slash las cruces
and the contact information for for our
friends with new mexico workforce
connections are located at 226 south
alameda boulevard and their phone number
is 5246250
additionally mr mayor we wanted to let
you know that the job fair on november
the 4th was a success there was over 200
attendees and over 60 businesses that
registered for it so it was it was good
good good success that we had in there
and the web webpage is employing
them.com thank you very much
did you get any police officers signing
up
we had a vote for them as well
good good job
thank you dr payalis
okay before we get started on our three
item on the agenda three items on the
agenda we have counselor beta stewie who
is supposed to be out of town and she's
on at the airport
her dedication is impeccable but before
we begin we need a motion and a second
to allow her to participate
telephonically please so moved second
action made by councillor florida second
by mayor pro tem gandera to allow
councillor uh tessa peter stewie to
participate in today's work session via
the telephone christine
this is on the motion to allow counselor
beta stevie to participate
telephonically
counselor aveda stevie
yeah
counselor vasquez yes councillor ben
como yes counselor sorek yes
concert florida's
yes
comes for gandalf yes mayor yes
okay so the first of three items is item
3.1 the las cruces police department
update and i see chief dominguez here
and
i introduce his team
good afternoon everybody police chief
miguel dominguez for the record
appreciate the opportunity to provide
the las cruces police department third
quarter
update
with me today uh presenting as well will
be deputy chief brock
lieutenant gutierrez lieutenant wiedela
sergeant austin and lieutenant bradley
uh we're gonna be covering uh some some
personnel
will be covering uh
crime statistics
some an update on our internal affairs
and community engagement
and we'll be uh available for questions
after the presentation
without any further ado
we'll go into our personnel
currently on paper we have 172
commissioned officers of a 202
authorized strength
the positions of the 172 also includes
some officers that have been
hurt recently and are on extended
medical leave we also have a few
officers that are
extended family leave
due to uh childbirth and other reasons
we also have an officer that is actually
uh in basic training for the navy so uh
we have some some uh
some issues where uh where 172 drives us
down to about 160
if our current count is correct but
that's about what we have on the street
right now
we do have our academy set to start in
january of 2022 sergeant austin will be
going over our recruitment efforts here
in a little bit during his portion of
the presentation
14 code enforcement officers and eight
animal control officers we have a couple
of brand new officers in those two
sections but they are
at
at their full strength
we have six uh police service aides that
have assisted us greatly in uh
in pursuing smaller type crimes
misdemeanors as well as
non-injury crashes
after we last spoke during one of our
work sessions it was suggested that we
do
increase that
our
our police service aids so we have
hopefully coming up here at the mid-year
adjustment an additional stakes officers
that are police service aides that we'll
be asking for and 83 diligent civilian
staff that assist us greatly in our
day-to-day operations
calls for service this year uh we have
671 current calls for service 2020 uh
the entire year of 2020 we had 168
we are currently
uh it doesn't look like we're going to
reach that 168 000 mark we're currently
in trento beach approximately 145 based
off of monthly
monthly averages so year to date we are
at 103
671 calls for service
incident reports however 2020 saw 23 139
actual incident reports taken from those
calls for service
this thus far this year we are at 2715
we are on track to
pass uh surpass the 2020 incident report
level of 23 139 our online reports as
well uh continue to increase and we uh
we
encourage the citizens to continue to
use this this
way of reporting crimes we get we get
them immediately to go into our system
and we can at some point assign them a
lot faster than uh waiting a couple of
days to report your crime and and
things of that nature so there is an
online portal through our transparency
page that we encourage citizens to
please use this online report
system this is our third quarter violent
crime update i will uh advise you all
that we have a ten percent uh
of uh
um
uh they're within ten percent of
variance of being correct they're
constantly moving up and down
specifically in violent crime we get
robberies aggravated assaults reported
two or three weeks sometimes after the
actual incident occurred so we are
within the the error margin of about 10
so just keep that in mind when we look
at these numbers is as we port them out
as we report them out to fbi they do uh
fluctuate uh
a bit
uh currently we have uh or through
september we had seven criminal
homicides uh we did have one in october
which leaves us at eight for the entire
year
the good news is all of these homicides
have been cleared out through arrest
our sexual assaults are down negative
three percent through the year these are
actually here today uh 2020 january
through september numbers as well so
we're comparing apples to apples on this
our robberies
our robberies are up significantly 61
percent i will point out that that uh
typically you think
robberies and people think of
convenience stores and banks being held
up out of those 58 percent only four
uh
involved in establishment many of the
rest of those are
are other types of
of robberies we have 26 percent or 15 of
that total that we know through
investigations were drug related
they met up to exchange drugs of some
sort and during the
that transaction the the victim was
robbed of their money
we also have uh 45 percent of those
where the victim actually knew the
suspect so we believe to believe that
there was some sort of uh personal um
dispute that was going on at the time or
an afraid of that something something of
that nature there were several several
of these were taken in parking lots uh
backpacks and uh purses things of that
nature and as we get along further into
our uh
into our presentation lieutenant bradley
will can
expound on that
aggravated assaults which is the
majority of our violent crime rate uh is
up or up 21
last time we reported out on violent
crime we are 55 percent uh for
aggravated assaults
since may we saw a downward trajectory
month to month uh september saw a spike
again but the majority of these in our
large percentage happened in january
february and march where we saw
significant increases over 2020
for instance january had 50 uh for 2021
and in 2020 we had 30 aggravated assault
incidents and we saw that trend january
february and march and then in may we
started trending downwards uh with the
exception of september that did see a
spike uh so currently we are at 21
again these are reported often times uh
later to us but we are
still investigating those these so 430
might actually go down or up given the
details from the investigation
another important statistic in here is
that 20
of these aggravated assaults are
multi-victim cases in which case uh
for example uh five people got a gun
pointed at them during the same incident
and that balloons that number up very
quickly because we have to present it
out or report it out as five individual
aggravated assaults even though it was
the same incident
currently uh here today we are running a
22 percent
increase on violent crime
again the last time we reported out
violent crime in may was a lot higher
so we are hopefully trending down and
hopefully the trend continues
this is our five-year trend of violent
crime we presented this stat or this
slide at the last presentation it shows
us moving up uh from 2019-2020 and
currently we're on pace to exceed that
546 number that
that was reported out last year uh
hopefully not by a lot but uh there's
there's a lot of initiatives and
programs and projects that we have
running to hopefully keep that number
down and
at least get us to be flat with 2020
and if it doesn't increase hopefully
it's not a large one
i will point out that 2016 and 2017 seem
a little bit low that was when we were
reporting out ucr
uh to fbi that was uniform crime
reporting
in 2018 we started reporting neighbors
which includes all incident all crimes
that occurred during the incident for
example in 2016 2017
if there was a robbery a burglary and an
auto theft that occurred during the same
incident we would have only reported the
robbery since snipers took over we have
to report all three as an individual
incident so that ballooned these numbers
up all the other agencies throughout the
nation are seeing this because it is
mandated that everybody go to the
neighbor system
for property crime
currently our burglaries are
at a deficit 14 decrease over last year
the large portion of that has to do with
commercial residential burglaries and
non-residential burglaries a large
decrease in each one of those
has uh has allowed us to keep these uh
below 2020 level a lot of it we
we we know that covet had a big part in
uh especially commercial burglaries
where businesses were closed weren't
getting into their businesses until two
or three days after the actual burglary
occurred we know that these uh
these uh incidents have have gone down
significantly because people are coming
back to work but also
deputy chief brock and his
personnel have done a lot of
footwork and
and
put together a lot of projects to bring
help bring these down
auto burglaries jumps off the page at 25
percent
these uh again continue to spike
especially when college is in session
we know that 63 percent of these uh
occurred in apartments and residences
we are we also have information that we
know that there's
possibly crews that are working
throughout the throughout the night as
we'll have 12 or 13
auto burglaries happen on the same
street so we know that there's crews of
four or five often kids that are going
through and
we call it popping doors they just check
to see when the vehicles are left open
and crimes of opportunity getting
whatever they can out of there
um
we do have some felony larcenies as well
this is uh this num 117 really jumps off
the page the large issue there it has to
do with catalytic converters
last year through 2020
we had a total of 16
catalytic converters that were stolen
last year this year we have 128
that's really ballooned our larceny
theft number up
to give us that 117 percent increase we
also have a
large increase in building supply thefts
from work sites
as uh materials for construction have
gone up so has the need to uh
to you know procure them however however
they see fit but we do have some
projects going on especially when
they're building a lot of homes to keep
those numbers down we also saw a
significant increase in atv and utv
thefts
tools and electronics especially
expensive cell phones which which is
part of that felony larceny
our vehicle thefts uh continue to
be an issue for us at a 25 percent
increase over last year and that last
year's number was also an increase over
the previous year we have several
projects that we work with our local
agencies and federal partners to keep
these numbers down out of those 382
however we do have 66 percent of those
or 278 recovered vehicles that we've
been able to uh recover in the city
in the county as well as el paso and we
actually recovered one in colorado as
well
a lot of these had to do with juvenile
crime the during the summer months we
had a rash of uh
about five or six little groups of
juveniles that were going around town
stealing these vehicles
and that drove our numbers up
significantly so through the air we are
actually flat we have two more incidents
of property crime than we did last year
and that
again is due in part for our
our officers deputy chief brock and his
personnel
and lieutenant wheeler and hers
doing a lot of projects to keep these
numbers down
to keep
you know and we keep catching these
folks and
and uh prosecuting them
our 2020 or 2021 year-to-date property
crimes this is the same uh information
on as it was on the first slide just
breaks it up a little bit more so you
can see exactly where
our increases are as i stated earlier
residential commercial
non-resburgs all down below the 2020
numbers our bnes have gone up slightly
auto burglaries as stated before 25
percent increase
felony larceny thefts largely driven by
catalytic converter thefts is up 117
our missile
misdemeanor larceny thefts seven percent
increase misdemeanor larceny threats uh
have uh we've seen a significant
increase of stealing items from
somebody's front yard and or backyard
bikes lawn mowers we've even had
wheelbarrows stolen all the things of
that nature are all reported as
misdemeanor larcenies
our
misdemeanor shoplifting has gone down
and
kudos to
lieutenant wiedela and her work with las
cruces retail asset protection
association
there was a time when misdemeanor
shoplifting was accounted for a third of
all thefts in in las cruces but due to
their work with this association they've
been able to bring that number down
significantly we continue to work with
our retail partners as well as our local
partners uh
federal our law enforcement partners and
federal partners to bring that number
down
vehicle thefts again
stated earlier this this is a problem
and i also forgot to mention that 33
percent of our vehicle thefts are all
vehicles that are left unsecured or the
keys
somewhere they can find them so again
these are very easy vehicle fed for
somebody for somebody to steal any
vehicles and the key is left in the
vehicle or the vehicle is left unlocked
makes it that much easier so we have put
up some information through our pio
office to keep
off keep citizens aware that they have
to lock things and keep things out of
their vehicle to keep
to keep criminals at bay a little bit
our arsons are at 250 increase
we we
get the arsons reported to us but they
are investigated out through the las
cruces fire department they they are the
investigating unit for that so total
property crimes thus far we have an 11
percent increase over 2021 with a downer
trajectory and several of our
residential commercial burgs we're
hoping that that number will drive
that 400 396
total property crimes down for this year
this is our five-year trend
and with that i'm going to bring up
lieutenant peter bradley he runs our
criminal investigations section he'll be
going over our clearance rates as well
as some metro narcotics numbers
and then we will stand for questions
after the
the presentation
thank you sir
so
first when we talk about clearance rates
we have to understand what exactly a
clear a case cleared is
by fbi standards they're going to be
cleared upon arrest whether there is a
warrant issued for that person's arrest
it's been sent forward for prosecution
all of those would be considered cleared
by arrest the other accepted clearance
is an exceptional exceptional clearance
which would be if the crime is not
within our jurisdiction and we cannot
enforce it or
if we have enough to go forward but the
victim refuses to pursue any kind of
charges with us
when we compare
the city of las cruces
numbers to the national average we are
above the national average and
everything except burglary
and we're tied with the national average
as the chief alluded to earlier with
homicides the national average is about
62 percent of homicides are solved
right now year to date we're at 100.
same thing when we say sexual assault by
fbi standards that would be forcible
rape
68 of that is solved
by our agency 33 is the national average
and it carries on the rest of the way
you've robberies we solve better than
half of our robberies
aggravated assaults are also well higher
and that just kind of carries over motor
vehicle theft is the closest we have to
it's to the national average outside of
burglary which is 25 percent versus a 14
average for the
for the nation
no lieutenant excuse me you said these
are clearance rates so this means that
you've been able to
solve these yes sir yeah okay so these
would be like i said these would either
be solved or we could solve them but the
victim doesn't want to pursue this is
not the amount of crimes that happen
of basically the cases that get referred
to
my
section
roughly 44 of them are assigned out
but this would be of the 100 of cases
that are sent to us
um as the chief also kind of spoke to we
we have to understand that there's a
narcotics nexus with crime in general
a lot of property crime but also as he
also pointed out a lot of violent crime
robberies things like that all have this
narcotics nexus going with it
metro narcotics here to date has had 234
call outs um
with that they have 314 or i'm sorry 313
arrests
they've served 47 search warrants and
had 27 different undercover operations
a call out so that you would understand
would be if a patrol officer in the
field has uncovered somebody with a
felony level of narcotics whether it's
heroin methamphetamine or anything like
that and then they would contact an
investigator with metro narcotics to
continue that investigation
for their seizures right now they have
105.7 pounds of methamphetamine
23.2 pounds of cocaine
10 399 fentanyl pills
one pound of heroin 4.6 pounds of
marijuana and
as we all know firearms tend to go hand
in hand with narcotics they've also
seized 38 firearms
and
as far as strategy goes i will pass that
to deputy chief
before the dc broadcast sir councillor
bethesda when do you when do you have to
leave
um
maya i can stay um
until about three o'clock
three o'clock oh okay good so you've got
a little bit of time i just wasn't too
sure i was gonna let you ask a few
questions but if you've got that much
time we'll go ahead and continue thank
you thank you
mr mayor city council good afternoon
deputy chief brock deputy chief of
operations for the police department
i'm going to cover this slide and talk
about some of the strategies that we
employ with operations at the police
department
the first one you see is community
policing initiatives and this doesn't
refer to the actual
going out and making contact with the
community sometimes it does with the
patrol officers but under operations
what we're talking about is
working hand in hand with our community
partnership officers the community
outreach officers that lieutenant woody
love will talk about hearing it
later on in the presentation so i don't
want to steal too much from her but
on a normal day-to-day basis patrol
and community outreach are working
projects together
they're sharing intel together
they're checking checking statuses
they're getting information from the
intel section
identifying problematic areas issues
that are going on uh different crime
trends and then they're working
hand-in-hand with each other
in order to
find solutions for those crime problems
that were seen um some examples are the
the auto burglaries and
the auto thefts that we're seeing they
work hand in hand with each other
sharing intel identifying suspects
involved
and work together they also
with community outreach officers will
work with both
neighborhood homeowners residents and
also
commercial owners of businesses
throughout town
the the next bulletin there is
interagency intelligence meetings and
and our justice partners what we're
referring to here is our
uh intel section which is under uh
our reports directly to the chief now
um they look at the intel the crime
coming in on a daily basis monthly basis
quarterly basis and they're sharing that
information on a daily basis with patrol
operations so every day we get a crime
report from the previous day and we use
that
in conjunction with
determining exactly where and how we
need to deploy our our resources where
we may need to conduct
special projects whether they need to
move or we need to slow down on one and
develop another one depending on the
intel and the crime
uh information that we're getting from
the intel section and it goes both ways
patrol
will develop some of their own intel
immediately during the day while they're
taking calls for service and they'll go
over and speak with intel and start
sharing information immediately so we
try to get that as quickly as we can
in order to deploy our resources
in the most
progressive manner in order to address
the crimes that we're seeing pop up
this also includes
our cjcc meetings that's our criminal
justice council
meetings with all our justice partners
here in town that includes the courts
adult probation parole cyfd
lieutenant bradley is now attending
those meetings and we pass along
information with the courts
in regards to uh procedures and
different things that are going on with
the court it was big during covet
because there was a lot of things that
needed to be adjusted and then we passed
that information along to the officers
our problem
oriented projects and our directed
patrols and this kind of goes back into
the intel so sometimes i'm going to be
going back and forth between the
different bullets here on the
presentation are
problem oriented projects and directive
patrols these address the different
types of crimes that i was speaking
about
earlier
and going about
how to deploy our resources
burglary auto theft larceny the cadillac
converter
test many of the things that chief has
already mentioned this also includes
traffic issues that come up we'll
determine
what kind of project whether it's
frequent patrol bike patrol foot patrol
how best to address the issue
a lot of those include
for example the mall parking lot where
we're seeing some catalytic converter
thefts the retail parking areas where
you had the same
occurring and also larceny thefts
so it really depends on the type of
crime that we're seeing or noticing come
up but we'll deploy our resources in the
best manner
and determine what's best to do that
whether it's just a frequent patrol
in other words the patrol officers try
to
be a presence in the area more often to
deter crime or if we're going to use
an unmarked vehicle with officers inside
it to conduct surveillance to watch for
thefts or see what's going on
bike patrol or foot patrol
our community of retail
partnerships again this includes
community outreach officers assisting
with patrol and we're work hand in hand
the street crimes unit which is also
under operations we'll work with our
local motel hotels
a lot of times we
have a lot of narcotic activity at the
hotel's motels
and when you have the narcotics going on
you have stolen vehicles you have a lot
of burglaries and other that seems to
follow so we'll work
with the managers and business owners of
the different hotels motels
in order to find solutions for the
problems that they're having at their
businesses as chief mentioned uh lc
rappa
i will work hand in hand with the retail
businesses in order to address
shoplifting and
thefts larcenies at the businesses
again sharing information known
offenders will issue trespass
warnings to offenders that are caught
shoplifting so that they know they can't
return to the retail establishment so
we'll work hand in hand with them to try
to address those issues with the
different retail businesses
on the online reporting again we
encourage people to use the online
reporting system we check that on a
daily basis as chief mentioned
this also includes
you know anonymous reporting
crime stoppers tips
but the important thing about the online
reporting is it also helps to free up
the officers in the field because they
may not necessarily have to respond to
the actual address and allows them to be
more proactive
and work a project or frequent patrol an
area where there's high crime going on
crime forecasting again this goes back
to the intel section daily crime report
mapping of crimes the daily crime report
actually has a map on it that's a
hotspot type map where the officers can
take a look at that
and actually see okay the day before on
my shift where was the problem or the
night before and get an idea of how best
they need to approach their
patrol on that day
that includes trends methods of
operation by the offenders how are they
committing the crimes are they going
through windows are they checking doors
are they breaking glass
and then
we also put out information about known
offenders that we know are active in an
area or a group of offenders
and
are actively committing crimes in
certain areas
our smart technology deployment
this includes our the surveillance
trailers that i'm sure you're all
familiar with and what's important about
the is that it gives us real-time
monitoring we can look at a specific
location
uh in real time and see what's going on
there i think you're familiar that we
used them uh down in the downtown mall
for quite a while and that gave us
real-time monitoring so that we could
see actually what was going on and
whether or not we needed to get some
resources to that area
technology also includes our our drone
program at the police department we've
expanded the drone
program has a variety of uses and again
it's given us real-time feedback when we
utilize the drones
we've used them to attract suspects
after a crime
we've used them to follow stolen
vehicles so that we're not in a vehicle
pursuit and they don't even know the
drones following them then they park and
we move in and
apprehend the offender
and again as technology continues to
advance and develop and change we'll
continue to find
new technology that can assist us with
fighting crime here
in the city and we'll
work towards uh
getting that at the police department
so that's the last item
that was on my list
and i'll turn it over to lieutenant
gutierrez for my internal affairs
good afternoon mayor city council i'm
lieutenant gutierrez part of the
internal affairs a little background on
it
we do honest fair and thorough
investigations
to ensure the integrity of the
organization the safety of the community
and the rights of citizens and employees
alike internal affairs is comprised of
an internal affairs lieutenant a
sergeant two investigators
and we are progressive in the area that
we have a compliance sergeant and r d
specialist now the compliance sergeant
we are one out of three in the entire
united states that we're aware of that
has a compliance sergeant
he is responsible or she is ensures that
lcpd complies with the current and
upcoming laws and trends reviews
policies standard operating procedures
by researching policy and procedures
through suggestions of the ia
investigations and our oir
group reviews and through the citizens
through the community as well as we've
looked into a couple things from city
council as well
so internal affairs
updates are going to involve i'll just
go a little bit of background our
internal investigations our
investigations
that are
related to misconduct or operational
actions of employees on or off duty and
they're created internally
external investigations or as we
consider ei as you can see on the slide
there's different categories a one two
or three
a one is going to be a formal requiring
extensive follow-up category two is
going to be an informal where the
citizen only wants to inform the
supervisor that something may be
occurring and wants to make sure that it
is lawful and proper
and then a category three is when a
complaint that we're unable to
articulate a bona fide complaint so just
as a reminder of those
the current update is we've had 21
sustained where the conduct allegedly
apparently occurred it amounts to a
violation of general orders
and or other city policies or procedures
we've had four
non-sustained in other words
insufficient evidence exists to clearly
prove or disprove the allegations
three were unfounded
the acts allege apparently did not occur
20 of them there was no findings the
complaint found
it was to be false or erroneous
three
were exonerated employees conduct was
lawful justified and proper
so what this says is 59 of complaints
are found to be within policy
and it shows that we are continuing to
develop and train our officers and once
again this includes going back to our
compliance sergeant going back and
reviewing policies
and changing
some items which brings us to the
research and development and the oir
group
so 12 cases have been sent for reviews
to the oi our group since may of 2021
and through that we've received several
positive reviews most of them were
positive but there were some changes
that we did make
on there
most of them were correction in language
in other words who the policy applied to
some of them were online training
refreshers that people needed to be
reminded that we do have a policy or a
standard operating procedure in place
for certain items or events the
transparency page
was needed to be updated to compare the
new policies that had just been passed
one or two of them oir found that they
didn't match the policies that we sent
them
in other words we didn't update it on
time so that was taken care of as well
so those are some of the suggestions
that were given to us and we actually
look at them took into consideration and
and changed some either standard
operating procedures or the policies
now as far as research and development
goes
there was 19 policy updates
some were needed they were just outdated
others were completed through the
assistance of the oir group
three policies were actually created
that needed to be
created that
once again we're trying to be
progressive and stay ahead of the curve
in cit crisis infra
excuse me crisis intervention training
we've improved that so we can track
where mental health issues are a factor
at certain calls
we've made it so the officers can make
an assessment if a person was
intoxicated or possibly suffering from
mental illness
our de-escalation efforts are now being
tracked
and with that
that ends the internal affairs update
and i will turn it over to sergeant
austin
good afternoon mayor council my name is
cody austin i'm a sergeant with the
academy section
so before you is just a comparison
between the requirements of nmlea for
the minimum required for officers to
obtain their certification and a
comparison with our department and what
we offer
the standard set by nmle is 677 hours
our agency as of the last academy our
50th academy is at 1081 hours there's a
breakdown or comparison between the two
to your left is what the state
requirement is
and below ours under the
1081 hours you can see we increase some
of our training and specifically
domestic violence we offer 32 hours but
on top of that we also offer a scenario
based training to our officers
we also exceed the standard in our use
of force and defensive tactics
cit and communication skills we're at an
additional 24 hours and we also offer a
total of 136.5 hours related to firearms
this next slide is the standard that's
set by the state for officers to
maintain their certification
these are the 2021 nmla requirements and
training that has been conducted so far
by our agency to maintain our compliance
in addition to that our agency has also
required all of our officers to attend
the following
we've required our officers to attend
four hours of realistic de-escalation
training
interactions with persons with mental
illness for an additional four hours
which includes virtual reality training
with empathy training scenarios
we were fortunate enough to partner with
hearts of autism for two hour training
so officers are aware of
the autism community that we may
encounter
in addition we've recently wrapped up
our fair and impartial policing and
reality-based training scenarios in the
spring and in the fall
recently our department was awarded the
de-escalation grant for a total of 188
the goal of this grant is to help
improve de-escalation training
some of the highlights of this grant is
to increase our virtual reality training
systems
have additional instructor training in
de-escalation and crisis communication
continue our partnership and obtaining
professional actors for our crisis
intervention courses and our realistic
training
we also hope to improve some of our
equipment and also help with the cost
for overtime and additional training
hours that we're going to require of the
officers
so far related to our recruiting efforts
specifically to laterals
this is still open
for lateral officers
we recently had an increase for our
incentives and so far we have had five
that successfully passed the hiring step
we currently have one who is about to
complete his field training program
currently we have three laterals um that
are in our lateral academy that will
graduate this friday and be hitting the
streets effective on sunday
we have one that will start in january
2022 with an additional eight that are
in the wings or in the hiring process
right now
our recruiting efforts this is
specifically related to our cadets
at the end of our hiring efforts we
received over 700 applications for the
51st academy
this is uh
this is because of some of the
incentives it significantly boosted our
application numbers uh we were open for
about three months and we were hovering
around 300 to 350 applicants and we had
kind of stalled um and with the
incentives that we brought in actually
boosted our number above the 700 mark
the incentive significantly increased
the number of college applicants
currently we're in the polygraph stage
of the hiring process
and of the remaining
45 64 of those applicants do have some
type of formal college education
as well
so in short we're very optimistic about
the upcoming academy in january of 2022
by being able to fill
the 25 slots even up to 30 if possible
and with that i'll turn it over to
lieutenant wigala
good afternoon mayor good afternoon city
councilors good afternoon citizens at
home it is good to be here today and i
am here to talk about our community
partnership community engagement
community outreach
first off as far as the last quarter
what we were able to do
we still consisted and conducted those
neighborhood watch meetings
i'd like to definitely put a shout out
to officer glimp here when peak was
initiated we started with seven
neighborhood watches we are currently
now at 23.
uh national night out occurred this last
quarter again i'm gonna champion officer
glimp here i will go further into detail
later in a slide in reference to
national night out but that is something
that is known nationwide it occurs every
first tuesday in august
um we also
championed our summer internship program
uh this was started a couple years back
where what we're doing is we're
partnering with nmsu and dacc
where they will send us students for an
internship what we like to do is
specifically look at
what area of study are you going into
what are you interested in so we've had
both undergrads and grads some
undergrads are like i don't know what i
want to do and so then we purposely
come up with a program for them that
really demonstrates all the different
aspects of the department and to really
get them as included in those programs
as possible
but then if they do have a specific like
for instance i really want to become a
detective then we try to get them as
many hours as possible with lieutenant
bradley in his section
so that took place as well
presentations are ongoing um i'd like to
champion officer kelly here he was
reached by one of our high schools and
asked to come up with the
vaping some kind of vaping presentation
because they're having issues with the
vaping he ran with this came up with a
whole program that he likes to call
connect protect and respect and
las cruces public schools got word he's
presented it i want to say to a good
dozen different schools now both middle
schools high schools and even like
presented like elementary school-wise
for their red ribbon weeks so wonderful
um assisted living facilities this is
where we've come up with again different
presentations in reference to frauds
just scams um again for that specialized
population group uh dui awareness this
is one of my passions as well as
lieutenant gutierrez who you just met we
were able to partner again
with our national guard and they wanted
us to come in and actually give them
some training in reference to hey what
is your dwi awareness and what is
occurring in this area
and a shout out to sergeant chop is
there too
the movie night this is where i want to
champion officer hernandez
this took place back in july at apodaca
part with our mobile operations command
and this is where we were able again to
make those partnerships um including
like different again restaurants um a
construction business all these people
coming out through the woodwork to make
this happen where we offered free hot
dogs free pizza free popcorn and were
able to put on a great big movie within
apodaca park
there's significance to this one because
obviously it was after a tragic event
and we wanted to show our community how
much we cared about them and how we
wanted them to feel safe but then also
have a reporting spot to address their
concerns
some ongoing community engagement
projects
special olympics typical took place this
last quarter
again this is specific to codes where
they um partner again with the special
olympics but then officers myself
included love to help out with this one
where what we do is usually it's at a
restaurant this last time it was at on
delays and we're raising money to help
special olympics and that money goes
towards their equipment it goes towards
their uniforms and it goes to travel for
different events
also another program that codes
champions is the gold golden shield
program where that helps and assist
people with codes violations that we
would normally cite for but instead we
say hey wait a second there's a special
situation here where this individual
can't take care of these violations so
let's get them some assistance
some other things that we've done this
last quarter is we had several different
meetings with subcommittees in reference
to our animal ordnance update uh that
did the update did occur as far as
chapter seven uh and now we are
currently working on that trap neuter
and release program
we also did several different identities
bike rodeos
this is something that again community
outreach does as far as the identity
child's taking their fingerprints the
bike rodeos is specifically put on by
our code section but it is something
that
for instance an event will be held like
pechanga this last month where they'll
reach out to us and say hey we really
like it when you have those bike roadies
can you show up with it
hence we'll show up and we'll
participate
urban dweller projects for those that
don't know me that's where i say it's
our homeless community like population
okay
we have several projects for this
throughout the whole city
most of the time what we're addressing
here is not necessarily felony crime but
it's the misdemeanor crime where what
we're running into a lot of times is the
criminal trespassing the criminal damage
to property
the littering and so again it's having
people like officer klimik i'll champion
him here where he's done things like
working with like the burn lake which is
the next like category where we go in we
take a look at what's occurring we see
how we can address them connect them
with different facilities and then say
okay
how can we help and again a lot of this
is like again back to those partnerships
again some ongoing projects we have the
package theft project this again has
it's gonna come around holidays are
starting again so this is in reference
to people leaving packages on the front
porches but it's the amazon it's the ups
again we've been able to partnership
with them as far as contacting their
drivers as far as like working with
their drivers and even just simply
having a cell phone contact cell phone
information um having those officers
officer apollos officer rodrigo's having
those contact information so that if we
do have a ups driver saying hey i think
there's somebody following me they can
simply make that phone call and we can
respond and say okay let's look into
this let's take a further look
uh
shoplifting project again this is
happening at different retail stores
across our area but it's connecting
again with those businesses and saying
where are you having issues when are you
having issues and again trying to
facilitate and problem solve as best as
we can
same thing with the storage unit
it's again working with those different
storage unit facilities to say okay
where are we having the issues
again when it comes to those
partnerships it's also looking at things
like hey like is there a problem with
the fencing is there a problem with the
lighting because again it's one of those
things where we want to take a look at
all angles is how we can best resolve
those problems
play streets and block parties this has
been a huge success
and we've done it in different areas
around the cities again partnership
partnering with parks and rec through
the city
and i will go into this point a little
later too
we've also did a bicycle registration
along with the vin etching for the utvs
again this can be
uh and something that we offer to our
community where people can again
register their bicycles
again not every crime is going to be a
felony crime and a lot of times
the misdemeanor crimes can have
devastating effects
this is where again we can have the kids
that have their bicycles stolen but if
we're able to take those registrations
and actually have the vin numbers
associated with those bicycle
registrations it gives us more to go off
of
business decals this is where i'm going
to champion
officer rodriguez
so we talked about how
we have the smart technology and how we
have the capability of going in with
those video cameras
wonderful and it's a it's a great
deterrent we've seen it already work
with the different projects especially
like in burn lake especially in downtown
however we can't afford to have all of
those spark technologies at every single
location in the city but again officer
rodriguez thinking outside the box he
came up with a sticker decal
where literally what the sticker says is
that lcpd
can
and does have access to the businesses
cameras and so this business can put a
sticker right up in their window
that says hey guess what everybody lcpd
readily has access to our our cameras
and again those business cameras can be
ring cameras can be any cameras that
that business is using but that business
is saying hey guess what we're
partnering with lcpd and making sure
that we're ensuring our safety and our
patron safety
libby visits for those that may not know
we do have a dog in our code section
named libby libya's been around for 13
years um libby in this last quarter
visited um some elementary schools libby
is all about keeping our earth and our
community green and works hand-in-hand
with keep las cruces beautiful
um new partnerships we're always looking
to establish different partnerships and
again thinking outside of the box so
some of the ones that we highlighted
this last quarter again thinking outside
of the box we reached out to ebid like
in reference to
hey are urban dwellers where are they
going uh like a lot of times it is those
irrigations so can we contact ebid can
we work in partnership with them and see
what's happening in reference to that
other things we worked with local
breweries um wanting to again looking at
how they can keep their establishments
safe so again establishing those new
partnerships and again
we assisted with different parades
red white and blue parade for 4th of
july
we worked with
one of our assisted living facilities as
far as giving them a caravan parade
and then this is one of those ongoing
ones where a lot of times we'll get that
opportunity whether it's a children's
birthday whether it's somebody that just
found out um
they're in remission as far as cancer
but we're able to like put on a little
parade that will brighten their day
okay let's get into the highlights
first off
i know several of you have heard of
lcbd cares right
i'm seeing nods okay i'm seeing head
shaking yes yes
great well here's the thing
we do have lcpd cares and we want to
highlight that but we want to also say
it's not a program
it's a philosophy we look at it as
a way of life and so in other words
that's us saying
guess what las cruces community we care
about you we care for you we care with
you and so we just really want to
highlight
lcpd cares
i look at it as
again a philosophy and do i dare say
trying to create even that culture as
far as like us caring and caring for our
community because again a lot of us live
here work here grew up here have our
children growing up here and so we do we
care for it
with that
as far as the last quarter some things
that i do want to highlight is we had
our youth leadership camps so those are
the camps put on in the summer time
specifically usually in june and july
by our school resource officers
hey highlighted one in particular
officer yarnell he was recognized as
officer of the year by the las cruces
greater chamber of commerce
kudos so again this is something that
we've been able to partnership with and
we've partnered with
new mexico foundation
university foundation but then also las
cruces public schools
and then we've been able to
give these youth leadership camps again
usually at six sessions in the
summertime one week sessions up to 25
kids per session it's entirely free
and then they do different
activities throughout the day so yes
there might be
some presentations like a libby
presentation that we talked about but
then also we've incorporated life skills
i loved it um when i showed up one time
the kids were learning how to change a
tire
and i thought how appropriate very
appropriate but then we are also able to
do some additional partnerships this
year where we partnered with national
guard
and they were amazing were the last day
of camp on some of the weeks they were
able to fly in the helicopter and
actually have the kids go into the
helicopter and show them the helicopter
again it's a great way of being
proactive and in the community and
getting those officers
yeah
aware and like having those relationship
with those kiddos
the next thing i want to highlight is
national night out and particularly
highlight officer glimp here because he
has ran and organized this for several
years now
again national night out occurs that
first tuesday in august and
it's like the largest block party so to
speak and if you look at the history of
it it actually started as a little block
party but the whole goal of it is to
bring the community out and get the
community to know their law enforcement
and their first responders
officer glymph has been able to
expand our national night out in las
cruces where this last grow around we
had 70 plus participating agencies
whether that be our own the fire
department but then other places too
including state police
again like a variety of different people
next bullet point is those block parties
and play streets again this has become
very successful kudos to our parks and
rec department because it's been working
hand-in-hand with them and what we're
doing is actually saying okay
community over here our community over
here we're going to block off this
street for a certain amount of time and
we're going to provide
family friendly events that the kids can
come and enjoy
major shout out to um officer johnny
rivera and this one where he was working
on his master's degree and so what he
did for a particular block party that we
did was he went into the initial
community at first did a survey as
reference to hey how do you feel about
police officers what would you like to
see more of
and when he got those surveys back he
discovered that okay a lot of them the
community is saying okay we we like our
police but man
there's really nothing for the kids here
and so he got really involved and
discovered okay working again in
partnership
there's nothing for the kids here
what can i do we discovered in this
particular area that they needed a
basketball court and that they had one
but that it was full of
different construction material and that
the kids weren't using it because well
it's not available because it's full of
construction material so again it was
working with our community working with
different stakeholders bringing them in
working with our summer intern
bringing her in and saying okay can we
get people to like work together to make
this like an actual
like basketball court that we can play
on that all of that took place we were
able to do it we were able to celebrate
as far as
hey now you have a place to come and
play
hey
you know like the grandparents that were
living in that community they can now
have their kids over and say hey go play
like you know some basketball go play
next to that park so again
block parties and play streets we
discovered that that's really taken off
we had one in the weeden seed like as
far as like the schools and
again i can't say enough about it
another one of the highlights
and i you know what i have pictures that
i was forgetting to flip through here we
go with the youth leadership camps
that was our helicopter
or not ours but the national guards in
partnership with us
that was national night out
and here we go with the block parties or
play streets
and again champion officer rivera that's
him playing basketball there
and the
next one i wanted to champion was again
officer rodriguez where
he realized that if we're running with
this lcpd cares and really making it a
philosophy then guess what we want to be
able to sort of like shout it out and so
this is where um he came up with a
brilliant idea of hey i've heard of
different rock art and i've seen it in
our community and so we were able to
work with kathy morrow and she was able
to organize a whole group and a great
team and it was everybody from nmsu
different volunteers throughout the city
again that organized this beautiful
mural that now you can see over at our
east mesa public safety complex
now this isn't the only thing
that i'm excited about so those are the
four highlights as far as like what
community outreach did this last quarter
but what we're super excited about is we
have community advocates in the process
right now
they've already gone through the
backgrounds and it's my understanding
chief that they are ready to go fingers
crossed but here's the cool thing about
that it's a lot of times especially like
in our community partnership and with
the community policing officers we can
definitely
start something
and we're excited about it like similar
to those block parties and we can get
everything like going but sometimes it's
really hard to do the follow-up and
especially when it comes to
even the crimes that we are seeing um
it's having those connections to say
okay
we're caring for the community but how
can we do better as far as the follow-up
so that's where our community advocates
come into play
they are going to be there to identify
the needs and identify the gaps in
service they're going to engage in those
community members who have been
identified as having social barriers
such as housing food insecurity
transportation employment education and
legal aid services so in other words
they're that bridge
they're going to be all about bridging
that gap and saying okay
we truly do care for you
here are the services within our
community because what we've discovered
is we've got several
great
stakeholders here we've got several
great wonderful people living in this
community that want to help that want to
do better as far as like the whole
community
at large and so by us having these
community advocate members they're going
to be able to like make connections and
say okay
person like yes i see that you could use
assistance here let me help you like get
in contact with that assistance and so
again
that is in the works and hopefully next
quarter
we'll have some updates in reference to
how they are assisting and how they are
helping
but yes we want to let you know that we
do care we care about you we care about
the community we care about everybody
that's here uh this is all of our home
this is all like this is where we're
growing up this is where we're raising
our kids and so yes lcbd cares
thank you lieutenant she's very very
enthusiastic as you can see
and we'll stand for questions
okay thank you chief and let me go right
to counselor beethoven so she can
ask her questions uh
in case she needs to leave suddenly
counselor are you still there
counselor bait this duvy
okay well i'll go check on her in a
minute so i'll start with her yes my
apology she texted me that she got
disconnected and she she had to jump off
and i just realized oh okay no problem
so i'll start with um airport tem and
then councillor flores and then yourself
thank you mayor
thank you chief and all your staff um
very impressive all the work and
programming that you
that you have um completely supportive
of you all and the work that you do
um i'm especially excited about the
the cadets and the laterals i think
that's going to be so helpful to all of
you
so keep us posted on how that how that
is all fairing for you
um some of my questions are around um
let me let me get to them i've
highlighted
sorry i feel like a little
um
your interagency intelligent meetings
with the justice partners when do they
happen and are they open to the public
mayor mayor
the interagency intelligence meetings
are done once a month and we we invite
different organizations but we invite
the sheriff's department state police
our federal agencies we have height of
representatives metro narcotics it's a
law enforcement intelligence meeting so
we can share information throughout the
law enforcement community that's that's
pretty much privy to the to uh
to law enforcement okay all right but
the justice partners meeting occurs
every other week
it's it's once a month as well and that
that uh
it's it involves
a
municipal court magistrate court they go
over different
different issues that they're seeing in
the court systems including how we can
improve
our prosecutions things of that nature
so that goes on monthly and that can be
attended
by the public okay all right thank you
and slide 12
the community and retail partnerships
you spoke a little bit of about it but
what does it include um very specific so
for example i'm a business person
and i've experienced maybe a
a crime and you've done all the
investigating and whatnot
well
what can i do and maybe i don't have
proper lighting and alarm systems i know
that you have possibly programming that
folks
can reach out to you and say do you
think you can come right and educate me
look at the way my store is set up and
give me some pointers in terms of
of of how safely we can we can have the
setup in our store can you talk a little
bit i know because we've talked about
this before but i'm i was hoping you'd
mention it it didn't happen so
mayor mayor pro tem so we we do our
community uh partnership officers go out
and do safety assessments if it's a
neighborhood they'll do a safety
assessment of the neighborhood and look
at lighting we recently had one with the
uh the community around med park to to
look at some areas specifically with
lighting because that's the issue in
there or a large part of the issue but
we're able to get our our community
partners or retail
agencies and come up and talk to us this
is what i have going on in my in my area
if it's outside if it's an indoor
problem we'll go do
an assessment
as well as looking for shoplifting areas
areas that are dangerous things of that
nature we'll also partner with the fire
department so they can go and look at
safety as as hazards but we'll look at
uh other things as far as how can how
can they keep shoplifting from occurring
or keep their their personnel safe and
their customers safe as well sure
all the way up to active shooter
training so chief is that something
that's more reactionary
um
in terms of something happens and then
if if
then i'll have to advocate for myself as
a business person to you to ask for that
or do you widely advertise this
particular
um
project or a program that you have like
where would businesses find this out
mayor mayor pro tem so we have uh we
we're we're proactive on it because we
see a spike in shopliftings in a strip
mall for example we'll go and even
though all the other stores it might
just be one store that's having the
issue we'll make contact with the rest
of the establishments in that trip mall
let them know there's been a horizon in
shoplifting for that matter and ask them
if they would like to partner in with
the retail asset protection association
most times we get yes and we get a lot
of involvement that way they want to be
officially involved or they just want
notifications when things are happening
in their area but we do go over there
and and solicit
their their input and and try to get
them involved with the
uh with the association but we also do
things through community partnership we
have some some items on our transparency
page and and we as our transparency page
is a
work in progress but we can add a little
bit more
information as to how people can get
involved that way yeah i think that
would be really helpful chief if
it's listed in our transparency page
maybe
working with our chambers to include our
community development you know they have
a list an email list of
our businesses right our licenses and
and it would be nice to maybe send email
but a document of source that says look
if you're looking for this we care about
you this is what we could do for you
let us know
i think being being much more proactive
about it i i think
what i hear mostly is when things when
bad things happen is when everybody
starts to
be more reactionary right and
understanding that maybe our environment
is isn't as safe in terms of lighting
and alarm systems and and those things
so that would be one of my
recommendations moving forward um that
probably goes across not only lcpd but
our community development
and maybe something that sits in our
website through the economic development
department's
page would be helpful
and then my next question is on the
smart technology
how many of those apparatuses do you
have and how much do they cost
and how do we get more
mayor broke down we currently have five
towers two of them are brand new so
they're just barely getting set up with
camera systems as far as how expensive
they are it depends on what we put on
them
obviously the better systems the more
expensive cameras things of that nature
are going to drive the price up but to
answer your question the average price
is about 100 000 for uh for two of them
it's what we just bought so 50 000 and
we'd like to get a little bit fancier
with the cameras but you know price
dictates sure absolutely okay and um
going back to the data that you shared
with us chief related to um i'm just
remembering remembering um
i'm sorry i don't remember the name who
presented this but that there's always
this element of narcotics right that to
some of our crime
are you seeing
lower level
[Music]
drug dealers if you will that are kind
of
getting involved in things that they
know really very little about and find
themselves in violent situations or do
we have these bigger
operations that we should be concerned
about
uh mayor mayor pro tem if i'm
understanding your questions are we
talking
your question is are we is it street
level crime uh that we're seeing or
things such as the cartels and things of
that nature
so there there it's been recently uh out
there that there has been some incidents
that there are some large organizations
uh to include cartels that do operate in
this area and are constantly trying to
get uh business for for lack of a better
word uh
you know for for their organizations
most of the crime that we're seeing
aggravated assault fighting crime rise
has to do with uh street-level crime
so
then to drill down more chief i i maybe
i didn't make myself clear around those
drug the drug types of crime like the
drug dealers they're smaller
more brand new to the system if you will
i don't really know the terminology and
how to describe it but i guess i'm i'm
interested because i i read an article
recently
about a program or a project that
they're conducting in tucson
arizona related to sort of those lower
level drug
dealers
and and and um communicating with them
and saying look we care about you this
it's not going to end well you should
probably should intervene and these are
the projects or programming that we can
make available to you and i thought hey
that's kind of a cool i don't know how
new and how successful it's been but i i
thought that would
it feels like when
we get the the
the texas that these kinds of things are
happening that it feels like it's these
lower level drug dealers
um that don't have any experience and
then that there's a lot of violence and
gun violence especially
and so i'm just trying to figure out
other programming that might that we
might institute that will be helpful to
try to deter some of these to getting
into
you know just getting in deeper if you
will
mayor mayor pro tem uh we we have looked
at several other programs and as you
well know i like to plagiarize a good
program if i find one and there's a
couple of them that we've been looking
at
to target um
people that are new to the trade
hardened criminals and and the larger
organizations are very hard to target
that way because they're they're
hardened but to your point there are
some
low-level street crime uh
folks that are dealing low-level drug
stuff that
it's just not good for them you're not
very good at this maybe we can provide
you an avenue to get out of the sure get
out get out of the business so yeah we
are looking at a couple of programs
through uh through metro narcotics and
and haida as well that's great chief
thank you and then slide 15 chief around
the
the policies um that you updated what do
they consist of i i don't think there
was specificity
related to to the policies
in terms of revisions and
the three additional policies created
just a little more detail if you would
mayor mayor pro-tem i'll defer to
lieutenant gutierrez on that one
but we are we do see
they make suggestions oir is our auditor
and they make suggestions uh instead of
waiting until they report out to city
council we know that we can jump on top
of it and start modifying the policies
but i love it i love the initiative
thank you
mayor mayor pro
lieutenant the three new policies that
we created had to do with liability and
protecting us as well as the city the
first one was a gym use policy
the second one was a person we're still
working on this on the personal
communications devices
and an officer wellness policy
okay those are the three new ones that
were developed
and are being put into place i'm sorry i
didn't get the first one the first one
is the gym use policy to use our gym yes
yes yes inside there all right and then
some of the other policies that were
updated
were the adult read-along program
grooming standards
uniforms
assignment of relatives police reports
awards
complaint investigations
undocumented foreign nationals foreign
nationals
use of force
lineups
vehicle pursuits or pursuits
the early intervention system
outside employment and recording devices
so lieutenant guterres can you speak
more um
with more specificity related to the
the undocumented portion of that the
foreign nationals what does that consist
of and
you have to develop one or you change
the one you had currently
we updated the definitions as to what is
a foreign national what is a
uh well the counselor's office the the
office
basically all the all the definitions
were updated on it we didn't really
change it just updated the definitions
okay all right thank you and then you
made mention about the mental health
call something about
helping you identify which of these
calls had to do with mental health i i
guess and how will that be then
distributed to the general public
did i make that did i miss that or am i
no mayor my
on that was part of our blue teams it is
a form that we fill out anytime a use of
force
or a show of force is used
and we added a block in there which
would allow the officers to make an
assessment if the person was intoxicated
or possibly suffering from mental
illness so we can make that report to
our cit sergeant and they can do further
follow-up from there using some of these
statistics okay and so as far as the cit
follow-up what does that consist of
uh sergeant mccord is in charge of the
crisis intervention team
uh he will go out and actually make
contact with the individuals find out
if they have
if they are receiving
current services or in need of services
and they will become educated on where
they can go or how they can receive
services
without going into the exact details of
medical
okay all right and then um
the the training that you're
i'm on to the next section is around um
training i think that you get
depend yet new mexican law enforcement
the domestic violence 32 scenarios are
you working with any dv partners
like la casa
and or state organizations in terms of
the the various scenarios that you're
being that you're
exposing your cadets or or
your current staff
mayor mayor pro tem yes yes we are we
work with anybody that we can get to
assist us in putting this these
curriculums some of them are are state
driven but when we talk about putting
together scenarios things of that nature
we always look for local experts that
can assist us in making the training
more realistic so we do partner with
local uh local partners
so not only the scenarios but what about
maybe um training
specific to domestic violence and the do
you have that and
what does that consist of is
evidence-based
programming
or or is it just maybe a presentation
from a db specialist
may remember pro tem i'm going to defer
to sergeant austin as he runs the uh
part part of the academy i wouldn't do
it justice to explain exactly how they
uh go about getting this thank you chief
mayor
mayor proton uh cody austin with us the
sergeant with the academy and to answer
your question i believe it's you are
asking if we partner with la casa or
like la pena on uh
with part of our training scenarios is
that correct
it's more about i think i got the answer
related to scenarios
but it's more specific to training
um that
maybe a dv specialist or or
someone that would require not require
but have conferences related to very
specifically domestic violence
yes ma'am
so right now we have our domestic
violence unit and that unit specifically
works with
organizations within the community and
those are our instructors that help
develop our scenarios and so they are
actually working hand-in-hand with these
organizations and bringing the most
recent experiences and cases with
updated case law um and they're
developing the scenarios and from those
scenarios that's what we put together
and include in our package for domestic
violence okay got it so case law it's
relevant to case law and
the scenarios that maybe you might
encounter as you walk into a situation
that is correct got it okay thank you
thank you for that and then you
mentioned the cadets and the training um
the academy the next academy what is the
cap on that can you just
say you have 80 people can you take 80
people or is there a cap i believe we're
currently at 25 chief and i will let him
uh answer that question okay
mayor mayor pro tem with our current
staffing levels and the difficulty in in
attracting applicants if we can hire 45
i'm going to beg and plead to hire 45
even though it goes over our 202
authorized so so chief would you have
like two training sessions or how would
that work and what would you need from
us to in terms of resource to make that
happen
mary mary pro tem if we if we were to
hire 30
for this next academy that would put us
right at 202 our goal if we don't get
there would be to run back-to-back
academies which case i'd go to the city
manager and ask for approval to do that
and then we've come to you okay good
good will you let us know what you need
from us if you need to do back-to-back
and or simultaneous i don't know if
that's possible of running something
here and maybe
i don't know partnering with another
agency that might do that just so that
we're working you know so you don't have
to wait an extra how long is the
trainings
i don't know how many weeks the current
academy is set at 22 weeks and
to answer your question we have gone
over a contingency plan if we were able
to get an excess of 25 to 30. we do
still have our our former west academy
along with our east mesa public safety
complex and we do have a plan in place
if that was to take place to where we
could accommodate it to maximize our
training and also
after several months go on if the group
lessens then we can consolidate that at
one location good okay great i'm glad i
asked that question yes and then you
mentioned the urban dwellers and some of
the concerns that i get is
littering for sure but the
grocery carts
and i know at one time
you would pick that you would have
a program that you'd do a sweep every i
don't know once a month i'm not sure
what how frequent it was but
um those are probably the more
consistent complaints i get is around
grocery cards so lieutenant what do we
tell our constituency related to that
who do they call
um
do you need to have a number of
complaints in order to get out there
so obviously we always advocate like if
it is a
walmart shopping cart we advocate for
them to go get it yeah try to contact
walmart and go get it um what we've
discovered is
a lot of times walmart necessarily isn't
interested in that one
shopping cart
and so when we have done these cleanup
projects um we've taken the initiative
so
okay
we'll have another cleanup project let's
see how many shopping carts we get guess
what we have trailers we can go out and
we can do this however obviously we
would like to encourage
something different yeah because it's
just that like it's a shopping cart um
i understand it's part of like the
retail businesses loss prevention
and
when it comes down to it yes one
shopping cart really doesn't make a
difference but when we can take a
picture and see
several different shopping carts
that's what it does and that's usually
like if we've got like a good batch of
them then the experience has been yes
they are interested because again that
that's that whole loss prevention and
they're going to want them back
obviously
my thing is always encouraging people
well what what can be the solution um
you know what like sometimes it is just
that it's saying okay residents they're
not interested but you know what i got a
jeep at home and maybe i can come pick
it up for you and we can get it over
there and just drop it off
again it's not a long-term solution
and so this is where it would be or
again having those meetings with the
different retail centers to say hey
we're having a lot of people taking your
shopping carts what can we do to like
solve this and so
having discussions and future
discussions in order to make that happen
i can tell you that we do have another
um cleanup plan for the sale coming up
um november
20th it's that saturday november 20th i
believe it is and so yes that will
probably entail
some shopping carts as well yeah i know
that that had been a specific an issue
there that specific location but now i'm
seeing them everywhere right
walnut and um you know close to the
walmart area
lowmen um just in different areas that
i've not seen
in the past so i i definitely think we
should probably put our heads together
and figure out a way and there was there
was one time where we were trying to
even like again trying to like problem
solve um so for a while there
with our urban dwellers in particular we
were trying even like a backpack um type
of initiative we were like hey leave the
shopping cart take this free backpack
it sort of worked
but at the same time sort of what we saw
was that they'd want the backpack and
the shopping cart then
and so some of them are carrying all of
their rurally
it's too many i think for a backpack but
i get it yeah okay yeah maybe we have a
conversation with a community of hope
and some others with the
um the chambers and see if there they
have some suggestions
maybe some kind of alternative yeah yeah
yeah for sure thank you lieutenant um
and then i'm really excited about your
community advocates i've been advocating
for that for some time i think it's
going to be a real asset to you all
especially
around the follow-up i think that's
going to be an important avenue or
aspect
of how how that you know the las cruces
cares lcpd cares
philosophy not campaign of philosophy
and so i appreciate all the work
that you all have done putting this
together and what you continue to do and
please stay safe thank you mayor
thank you thank you mayor pro tem
councillor beta stevie unfortunately had
to her plane kept
getting uh delayed so they decided to
drive so she's on the road
yeah so
to phoenix
and also on a
counselor i can't forgive my manners i
the chief's been blocking you here but
i know you're here uh
in support and and good to see you and
thanks for holding up that sign jack is
here so
okay counselor photos
thank you mayor and um thank you uh
chief and thank you uh lieutenants and
officer and
lieutenants and
who else lieutenant says thank you so
much for this uh very good
report to city council
i think that it's it's amazing that you
do so much and i think that we will be
seeing a lot of good results and it's
good that you explained
how there was a certain way of
categorizing things so the
the number went up but in fact it was
because you had to oh when there's
two or three incidents
two or three crimes or potential crimes
in one incident they're all reported and
so the numbers went up and i think that
gallagher did that too chief gallagher
did that
so
again thank you so much now as far as
[Music]
i have a question for
[Music]
i think it was
deputy chief brock
did you do the presentation on crime
that included crime forecasting
that would probably be page 14 13
yeah
12.
i think that was you
mr mayor councillor florida's yes it was
yes okay
first i had to make sure that uh had the
i had nabbed the right subs suspect okay
so um
my question is um
doing all of uh you know you you have
your intel section and all that now the
crime forecasting
how what kinds of crimes can you
forecast and and how is the forecasting
um
how is it structured
i mean can you do crime forecasting
because if if you could then our crime
rate would go down
but
and then as i said it seems like it's
gone up but it has to do also with the
way
the different one incident may have
three instances of
potential crimes
so can you explain to us what this crime
how this crime force
forecasting process works or
is
applied
mr mayor councillor flores yes i'll do
my best to try to explain it to you so
um in a perfect world yeah we could
forecast perfectly but of course
we want to try to prevent crime so we're
going to look at crime trims what's
going on who the players are if they're
known
uh the offenders
we know certain areas of town
that we're familiar with where crimes
may occur we may see a pattern one night
in a certain area and then deploy our
resources trying to forecast where that
crime's likely to occur in the future or
the next night we'll look at
times of day
days of week
whether it's weekend is it during night
hours uh early morning hours and we'll
try to narrow it down
uh using communication through the intel
section with the patrol section with
community outreach what they're learning
reviewing police reports so we're
getting information from the intel
section trying to put it all together
into one thing to best forecast
in order to either
catch offenders in the act or
be a deterrent in that area to push the
crime down yes yeah i would assume that
that's what you do but what is it what
sort of data do you gather and how are
you able to gather data for example if
you were to gather data that
shows that there's a higher incidence of
of
course
a particular crime and then a particular
age group for example so maybe you have
some sort of vandalism going on and then
you identify the area maybe it's at the
schools you know school windows are
being broken down and then you're able
to um
ask maybe community members you know do
you know of any kids who you know have a
bad time at school i don't know how you
do that part but you know you're able
somehow able to identify the
perpetrators or the suspects and then
and then you can probably hopefully
implement some kind of community service
such as lieutenant wittala went into
with really because i i imagine and i'm
imagining because i don't know if you
have these stats that a lot of there's a
lot of petty crime going on
and and it's probably the younger um you
know younger teenagers do you
so do you understand what i'm asking
about crime forecasting and how do you
gather good data and then how you could
use that data to
um
then you would be able to go to those
areas to do some education or
education and
um you know take some
you know remedial steps
uh mr mayor counselor floaters i think
you're asking specifically how we
extract the data that we use to
determine so we'll look at police
reports
for similar crimes of the currents and
we'll pull the data as far like i
mentioned before date time day of the
week if we have offender information
we'll look at that information
as well
we will
if there's a certain crime that occurs
we'll search for video
has been mentioned in the presentation
to gather further information about
vehicles that were possibly used and try
to put that
information into the picture to narrow
down what we're looking for
and then by narrowing it down what
you're looking for what further steps
then do you take you know as a police
department um to
go to the the source of of that activity
as i said maybe it's uh you know maybe
it's school kids and i don't mean school
kids but more like the teenagers the
middle middle age school
children
so do you go and
do you do educational
in schools i'm not sure i saw anything
like that
or
any do you have anything like that any
kind of preventive work once you do the
forecasting now
since you're able to do crime
forecasting and you can probably
identify the perps or the people who are
engaged in that activity or that
behavior
mr mayor councillor florida so if we
identify the offender that's that's
involved in the activity
and we have enough probable cause to
charge them with a crime then a warrant
be issued the information goes out to
the police department all the officers
get it whether it's through email or
through our
our mobile system which is our computer
aided dispatch system
and that also can communicate with
surrounding agencies and that'll provide
the information that hey we're looking
for this vehicle or this suspect they
have a warrant
the warrant information will be in there
and then
the law enforcement community is working
together to locate that suspect
well okay well i i think um
i think i haven't made myself clear
my question isn't clear and i'm not i
think i'll just
uh maybe um
maybe i'll just ask chief dominguez uh
off the record
mayor concert florida if i could take a
stab at this we have for example crime
or crime forecasting knows we know that
a certain type of vehicle and a certain
color vehicle
are being stolen
and we we get that information through
sources and through
through data we've even that's actually
happened and we'll contact uh for
example the mall security because we
know that that that's where it was
occurring we know that we had
a certain type of vehicle white in color
that was being taken right around this
time of day
and it was they were being taken across
state lines so we partnered with them
and and gave them the information and
became very diligent and and looking for
that we also had undercover vehicles in
there and we were able to deter that
from occurring
yes and that's what um
and that's what lieutenant
the sergeant was trying to
i'm sorry the
deputy chief brock so sorry i'm looking
at my
list of
all of you i'm so sorry yes and that's
what you were
explaining to me and i didn't quite get
but somehow
it clicked when
but you were saying the same thing so i
appreciate that very much
deputy chief brock
i also have a question for lieutenant
gutierrez
so thank you very much uh lieutenant um
so you um
oyez oir sends you
you sen you have sent 12
cases
to them
so they're limited to reviewing only
what you send them
is that correct
mayor council florida is yes ma'am okay
it's in the uh contract of what of what
i have to send them i see i see the
the give and take of the contract and
it calls for that for them to review
based on what you send them yes is that
what it okay
so um
then uh you indicated that the reviews
were positive and there were three cases
where they had specific recommendations
is that what i did i get my notes
straight over several
of the reviews
three of those recommendations right
and
[Music]
so
what
what were those cases because you did
say how those change you said that they
were implement changes were implemented
that you corrected the
logic maybe i can't even read my
handwriting
that you also have online training
refreshers and transparency page update
um
what
yeah how what exactly
does that
what is the
content of those changes
mayor councillor flores i don't have the
exact reviews with me but the
one of the changes out of the three is
the corrected language in other words
the policy was unclear as to who it
applied to
so one of the sentences that we changed
in the very beginning of the policy is
this a policy applies to all lcpd
employees
instead of the policy saying that this
applies to employees
also it was kind of
just yeah it's logistical yes ma'am okay
okay and then uh and and the online
refresher
uh what exactly is that what is the what
is what kind of training is it and
how long is it uh why is it online or
mayor and councillor flores we have the
ability to send out
online through the computers all the
officers are issued computers as well
training refreshers instead of bringing
everybody in
all at once we give them several days
to go online and review a video
of training that is basically read
verbatim and
as the officers reading the policy
verbatim on the training
it's also explained what it means
certain definitions are expanded upon
oir hit on a couple of
of definitions that weren't exactly
clear for example i run the ia office
well ia will be notified but it didn't
specify who will notify the ia office
so a refresher went out to supervisors
that they are responsible to notify ia
of certain actions
and that is what it means by online
training refreshers
on that part and going back to the
transparency page it's a it's a living
page that's always constantly being
updated oir found a couple of outdated
policies uh part of the contract was
that i supply them with the current lcpd
policies and standard operating
procedures they read the whole thing
compared it to our transparency page and
found a couple of items were outdated it
wasn't the same one that they were
provided with so we went back through
looked at it oops somehow we updated the
wrong one and we corrected it and
updated the current policy that they had
to match
and those are the corrections
thank you thank you uh thank you
lieutenant
um
and my my
my
the question i have is
another question i have is
how do you determine which cases you
sent to them um
are how are they are they randomly
selected or do you look at the ones that
maybe you won't be corrected on i mean
with all due respect i mean i i need to
know i would like to know
how
what cases and um oyed i think uh we
contracted with them oir
in may
right yeah it was me
so um
we um
with all due respect
there's
been only 12 cases between now and may
that you had some questions about
yourself and so far as practices go
within the police department or
who
oversees that who
[Music]
yeah is there oversight or
who
who does that who makes that
determination as to what goes to oir
mayor and councillor flores like i
referred back to the contract all formal
completed investigations will be sent to
oir
all our formal complaint investigations
are sent to oir i do not have a choice
in that oh okay there is no
there is no i can choose okay so there's
only been 12
formal and finalized complaints and all
went to to oir mayor and council flood
is yes that is correct because i i that
certainly wasn't clear in my in my mind
and i'm glad that it's it's as clear as
can be because i ask a lot of questions
but just because i want to be sure
and also um
the undocumented nationals what exactly
uh how is it that you a cup you come
upon them presumably
based on
chief jaime montoya's policy
that you do not stop but the lcpd does
not stop someone who is
suspected to be undocumented i think all
of us well most of us up here would be
stopped you know 24 7.
i know but um
[Music]
so were those um
undocumented nationals uh incident they
were involved in a suspicious activity
and or and what do you do with uh
undocumented nationals
mayor and councillor flores uh this was
a policy that needed to be updated it
had not been updated uh since it was
implemented
and through our compliance sergeant
the policy came up for review on that
but lcpd doesn't stop any everybody or
anybody and ask them what their
nationality is or what their immigration
status is correct that is just flat out
a policy the policy that was updated
just it was time for it to be updated um
because it hadn't been touched since it
was put into place
so what when you do have someone who's
undocumented how do you find out that
they're undocumented for example if i
were to be arrested would you be asking
me to show proof of uh
citizenship or nationality
mayor council florida's we don't ask you
for proof of nationality or anything
like that we are if you are stopped and
detained we're going to ask you for
common information and try and get a
positive identification through you
through mervda through msi valley
regional dispatch authority
if one doesn't come back
it depends on the situations whether we
continue further questing you about the
incident of why we stopped you but not
not where you come from okay so you stop
it's a pc it's a probable costume that's
correct okay
all right thank you so much thank you so
much
uh lieutenant gutierrez and then i have
a question for
the sergeant who presented on nmla
and
chief dominguez what's his name his last
sergeant austin austin thank you
thank you so much for your presentation
that's sergeant austin i have a question
about the in-service training and then
there was also a training on page both
each
in-service training found at page 18
training found at page 19
and
so um what the in-service training
what does that consist of and is it
across the board for every officer every
police officer everybody who's involved
with the public
mayor councillor flores
looking at the training on i believe
it's going to be
slide 20
for the 2021 nmle required in-service
training that standard is held to all
officers across the state of new mexico
all officers have to obtain that
training to maintain their certification
our department does that at the baseline
minimum but in addition what we also
like to add
is our realistic de-escalation training
we identified a need for this and so
that's what we
require of our officers in addition to
the minimum
along with that was the interactions
with persons with mental illness
but to go further than that we included
vr empathy training to make it as
realistic as possible for the officers
and also their decision making
and then from there we also identified
a need for autism awareness within our
community because we do have members
that may suffer from it and we need our
officers to be able to properly identify
if somebody is autistic we would hate
for an officer to perceive this as
some type of
hi from a narcotic and we would like
them to be able to identify common words
that are used and part of the training
is we show officers um
a comment or repetitive word that people
who have um seek counseling for this is
i'm okay they'll say i'm okay i'm okay
i'm okay and that's a cue to the officer
to realize maybe this isn't a danger
maybe this is somebody that is in need
of help
also some of their sporadic movement of
the arms that's something called
stemming and so we need the officers to
not identify that as as a threat or as
an attack but then trying to calm
themselves and so we we felt that was
extremely important to partner with um
heart of autism to provide that training
in addition uh to the baseline minimum
along with the fair and impartial
policing uh the implicit bias training
that we require of our officers
and also across the nation you saw some
some issues with officers not
intervening when they need to and we
take that very serious and so with that
we included it with scenario-based
training so it's not um it's not silo
type training to where i just uh sit in
a classroom and tell you about it but i
want the officers to actively have to
make decisions and do it with their
equipment on and make it as realistic as
possible so that we're seeing
the true product on the streets as well
and uh last the reality-based training
or scenarios uh we're trying to offer it
more than just once a year but try to
bring it in the spring and in the fall
and make it um ever evolving and so that
we're back we're practicing best trends
and keeping our officers up to date
as much as possible
thank you and then um i was waiting for
maybe i missed it but i doubt it um
i was waiting for a presentation or
something on
the kind of services that are provided
for you the officers you know all of you
from the chief down to
uh
you know
acos maybe i don't know if they see us
falling yeah they are in your department
but i don't think they're commissioned
officers but
but just a total inclusion of the entire
lcpd and so far as
training
mental health for you
and
and i don't mean mental health like
everybody needs a psychiatrist or to be
on uh prozac or something but
but i mean
in terms of
keeping it together
and
making sure that
an officer
is able to confront
very difficult situations
and do you have you know those those
sorts of situations where you're going
to be sure to
um
you know just keep keep your cool so to
speak i don't know what other term to
use and i i i mean i personally
you know i could never be a police
officer i really my hat's off to all of
you
i'm too you know hot-headed and
oh yeah you think something
you know no not not really
i'm not violent but um seriously is
there anything any programs that you
have
either
that you get sent to
you have a psychologist psychiatrists
social workers anyone in the mental
health field that comes and talks to you
or
do you have any resources that are
readily and happily available to you are
you able to have
we can't have these conversations
otherwise except in an open meeting like
this so
i don't mean to be intrusive but i do
care i care i think all of us here on
city council care very much about police
officers and really incidental to that
thank you so much for putting your lives
on the line for me
and i've said to many people
yes this this that and the other nothing
in the world is perfect but when
something's going wrong or you're scared
seriously are you going to call you know
your best friend
well yeah police officers your best
friend that's who you call
so thank you so i don't mean to be
intrusive but i do understand
the pressures of of your work of your of
your
of your duties
and
so do you have
do you have consistent and i i see that
as part of your training quite frankly
yeah i think that
and i think that it's very difficult to
find um well it's been difficult to find
police officers or the field of
vacancies that exist in the police
department but in so far as yeah just
have that you know just maintenance for
you you know tune-ups for you you know
take your car in every so many miles you
know to whatever
uh engine checks you know battery checks
whatever i i can't find any other
analogy except to make sure that you've
you are taken care of and that you're
fit for the job
is does anything like that happen
mayor councillor florida's as a matter
of fact yes uh part of our realistic and
de-escalation training this was all held
together in one day so we did the first
portion of the day
until 12 and then
for the later portion we did the
interactions with mental illness and
empathy training but at the end we
required our officers to speak with dr
pete devosto our psychologist and
bernie maynor and all officers had to
have a
conversation and a wellness check
to go over any concerns that they have
any issues that they may be suffering
another thing that our department does
very well is after major incidents we do
a really good job of holding debriefs
for officers that may have suffered some
type of traumatic experience or
event and we do it not only for the
officers but
for all involved to include dispatchers
and those that may have
been called to the scene to include fire
department ems personnel as well
officers do have
the ability to go to our cortical app
which is anonymous and allows them to
kind of take self-test
to help them if they need services and
to provide
to provide them an outlet or at least a
route
along with speaking with the supervisor
if they're having any type of
issues and you fi do you find that that
is being utilized is that monitored at
all in so far as uh whether those
of you know those available resources
and recourses
are being utilized
mayor councillor flores yes uh we've
actively done a survey i don't have the
results with me uh right now but we're
constantly exploring the effectiveness
and the need to uh if we need to update
uh the officer wellness
program as well great well thank you
very much again for your service and
thank you for answering all my questions
thank all of you for answering all my
questions and thank you mayor
thank you councillor councilman cuomo
did you have some questions here yes i
do thank you mayor
um and thank you chief for you and your
team today i think i have questions for
all of you
um
maybe i'll start with some easy ones
no they're all easy chief
i'm curious about
in some of the metro narcotics reporting
you had
cannabis on there i'm just curious how
that will change
with the new state laws
uh mayor conservancomo the the
marijuana that was seized in these cases
was obviously there was some sort of law
that was broken and and it would involve
the marijuana that's why it was seized
obviously with the current law law
changes have come up you know those
numbers are probably going to go down
so it's just going to go away completely
and forgive my naive question i just
sometimes i can't believe it
uh mayor councilman cuomo there is still
a
limit that people are allowed to have
okay yes things of that nature so
there will still be an illegal amount of
marijuana yes okay thank you
thank you chief
um with the case clearance
i'm
curious if you will speak about um and i
think i don't remember who that was i
have all your names on here but as you
remember lieutenant
do you have can you speak about the
department goals like what are your
goals in terms of
case clearance i know that you mentioned
right that there's these differences
between the national
rates and their local ones but what are
are you know lcpd's internal goals when
it comes to some of these
rates mayor uh councillor michael
so
as far as our internal goals they vary
depending on what the climate is
categorized as we view crimes very
differently
property crimes while they're important
take kind of a back seat when you look
at crimes against persons or most
importantly crimes against children
those are our two highest areas
overall though we our goal is to
maintain an 85 case closure rate of all
of the cases that come in per year
right now i just did the numbers before
i came in i forgot to grab the sheet off
the printer but we are running at
86.3 case clearance rate
so those would be of
basically all of the cases that cid
get criminal investigations
those are going to be the cases that are
reviewed
and if they are solvable or sent out to
a detective or administratively closed
if they're just not solvable
most of those unfortunately are our
property crimes that's why property
crimes is so low as far as
case clearance
you have to
for for these things like chief alluded
to when you have people that just pull
open a door
wearing gloves in the middle of a
pandemic also wearing a mask there's
very little solvable evidence that we're
going to be able to find from there
so unfortunately property crimes are
probably the highest level that are
administratively closed crimes against
persons crimes against children are very
rarely administratively closed they're
pretty much always assigned out to at
least be followed up on
well that's super helpful to understand
thank you i appreciate it lieutenant
um i have some questions on the internal
affairs pieces
just for my own
clear clarity when is when is our first
oir report out
mayor councilman cuomo we had a meeting
with them uh recently and i reminded
them that they have a biannual uh
report out and they put it on the radar
so we should be hearing from them pretty
soon great i want to say maybe december
great great great thank you
um
you had some sort of i missed your
statistic you said something about 59 of
complaints and i i was trying to type up
my notes on what you were saying and i i
missed it and i wanted i was hoping you
circled back on that
mayor councillor ben como the 59 percent
rate that i referred to was 59 of
complaints are found to be within policy
shows that we are continuing to develop
and train our officers in other words
they're doing the right thing 59 of them
um were basically either unfounded
which means the act allegedly apparently
did not occur
or the complaint was found to be false
or erroneous
or the employees were exonerated meaning
the employee's conduct was lawful
justified improper
thank you
that seems
hi to me and i don't mean and i that's
obviously a good thing right we want to
report that police officers are doing
the right thing
however if there's uh if there's a
number of complaints and that many are
coming back
and we're saying these sort of are
cleared
what's the misconnect then between
you know the officers and the community
making some of these complaints
mayor councillor ben cuomo some of the
complaints
that we receive
they're complaining on they received a
citation for speeding
okay the officer
illegally gave them a speeding ticket
they just want to complain to somebody
that is between them and the judicial
system i mean the officer
you know goes through training
a radar is certified
he
gets a reading from his radar unit from
the vehicle assigns a
speeding citation i can't do anything
else but exonerate that officer it was
lawful proper and justified
and they want to make a complaint
because they received the ticket
now for example
on crashes
the officer did not cite the person for
speeding
well number one the officer wasn't there
he can't tell how fast the cars are
going without doing an in-depth crash
reconnaissance
but if it's a minor
crash the officer is not going to do a
100 complete crash reconstruction of the
event and there's no way possible that
he can tell that that person was
speeding therefore he didn't issue a
speeding citation but the person was mad
and called in a complaint or filled out
a complaint form because the other party
did not receive a speeding ticket okay
okay thank you do you have broken down
data on this 59 percent
around
what these cases look like like
do you have you know part of those 60 59
are they mostly cases like this do you
have cases that were potentially
complaints of excessive use of force
like where do you have that sort of data
broken down
i didn't bring that exact data with me
but from the slide that we can tell here
the internal investigations are the very
first color that you will see there on
the far left
and then we have the very formal
complaints the e i c ones
that are there and then c twos are just
i wanna notify your supervisor those are
rare and few between
and then
the non-bona fide complaints for example
like the last few examples i gave
are the c3s
so these are the statistics that we have
broken down these are the number of
completed
cases that we have i still have
some cases that are pending under
they're still under investigation that
haven't been completed that didn't make
it to this chart because they are not
completed okay so lieutenant gutierrez
are you saying then am i hearing you say
that the more formal ones in the orangy
color that those may be more of the ones
that i'm talking about like the more
excessive use of four types of
complaints
yes okay
okay thank you i appreciate that this
i'm gonna lie to you your graph was the
most complicated out of all the graphs
thank you for breaking that down i have
i think i might have a couple more
questions for you
um oh you said that um you've started to
track de-escalation efforts
how long have you been doing that and
then when do you think you'll be able to
provide us some data
the
the drop down box was added to the forms
that the officers fill out uh within the
last within the last four to five weeks
we had to do training we had to update
everybody on how to use it uh and of
course there were some errors made so we
had to backtrack so by the next quarter
i should have some good numbers for you
okay perfect thank you so much um i
think those are all my questions for you
lieutenant thank you thank you
um i have some questions on trainings
um and i'll wait for
sergeant austin mayor councillor
vancouver on the de-escalations our cit
team has been tracking those for a lot
longer but
officially through the ia unit we we
started doing five or six weeks ago so
we'd have some data from before then uh
but
officially we started about five or six
weeks ago
thanks chief
thank you for moving the slides
um
and i think it was actually maybe the
the one before where you had the 1081
yes okay
so you say 1081 hours provided is that
how many hours have been completed by
officers
i cannot say i'm sorry mayor councillor
cuomo i cannot say that um
all officers have completed that because
we do have laterals and so we have some
levels and for example if i have one
that came from new mexico state police
for example they wouldn't have attended
our training okay so they will make it
up through in-service training and they
will get the required training that we
expect of them i can't say that every
officer gets that anybody who goes
through our academy does receive that
1081. okay that's super helpful to
understand
um
i had one question for you on this
and then so for example like the use of
um or the impartial police training well
any of these right that you have four
out so then in the next slide um the
ones that you have
four hours is that for the whole year or
and i know that you've talked about this
before i just you have to re refresh my
memory
mayor councillor ben cuomo that is for
this year um and this year alone with
the addition of the interactions with
mental illness and the two hours of
autism so all together that one day
was about give or take 10 hours
and then so in 2022 for example they'll
have a refresher that's correct okay
and who are these sort of like four
hours for some of these are are those
national
trends
mayor council picomo i don't have an
exact answer i can tell you this
realistic de-escalation training yeah we
went to was in phoenix and is put on
through uh for science institute which
is kind of like the leading um
the lead in law enforcement training
most up-to-date policy that course was
about three days and what we try to do
is condense it uh for the officers with
the most vital material um
to ensure that we have adequate staffing
and we can still maintain the streets
and also get our officers in time that
makes sense so you so a couple of you
will go to trainings and then it's like
a train the trainer model and then you
come back and it's officer-led trainings
that is correct okay do you partner at
all with any local folks i know like i
think some you mentioned the autism
do you ever go out to partners to help
you with some of the trainings
mayor councillor ben cuomo
autism awareness to my knowledge is the
first one where we really start bringing
them in we kind of want to be cognizant
of who we're bringing in and what their
background
is to the officers and embedding them
off the cuff i don't know of any other
ones that we have brought in
specifically like that
like i mentioned before um when i talk
about the domestic violence unit and la
casa we don't have la casa there with us
actively training but our officers are
assigned a majority of them are assigned
to internal affairs i'm sorry
cid and so with it they're normally
working felony level cases with them on
a regular basis and so that training we
extract from them and their personal
experiences and again the most
up-to-date uh case law that we're
experiencing okay yeah that's that's
good to hear i mean i i would i i don't
know how this would work right i know
that you've been doing this forever but
i think it's really important to bring
in
um outside partners to train on the very
expertise that they have right and how
they sort of handle some of the these
very specific issues i know that for
example like pflag and eq m they've done
training sensitive trainings on the
lgbtqia community right and how to
relate to folks and so um that's just
what came to mind and i think it's
important that you continue to reach out
to some of those local partners
yes ma'am thank you
and thank you that was it for me on
trainings and then
honestly i think that the thing that
caught my eye the most was are in the
strategies and and the forecasting um dc
brock
and even dc um sorry chief dominguez
what you mentioned about you know
bringing in a program to really target
those
i think you said low-level street crime
right the folks that you're like you're
not very good at this you keep getting
caught how can we veer you towards
something else i've seen those programs
in other places work really well where
there's
ceasefire programs where there's peer to
peer mentoring even where folks are
being like
look we've cut you like you have an
opportunity to really change gears here
right and so i'm really curious to hear
more about that chief and um
how you're bringing those programs and
how you're thinking how you're thinking
about bringing those programs
mayor conservancy like i stated earlier
there's already a couple of programs
that we know that are working here uh
in the state as well as in the phoenix
area which has the large uh drug issue
their programs are already set so we're
actually sending some people to these
jurisdictions to get a little bit more
on the program and tailor it to our
community
as i stated earlier i'll i'll plagiarize
any good program if i can find it and
implement it here absolutely i don't
think we have to reinvent any wheels i
think this nationally probably these
trends look very similar right so what
have other cities done
um that has that have worked for them
yeah i i fully support your plagiarizing
um and so lieutenant i am so sorry dc
brock
i
i would
like to understand
the data in a deeper way and so i don't
know if
um that's where for the forecasting
comes in but i would like to understand
the patterns in the data i would like to
understand
so much of what lieutenant wittillo was
saying around you know the
in the problems that we're seeing
throughout a lot of the individuals that
she's coming into contact with in the
advocates to me those don't seem like
individual problems these they seem like
systemic problems and i would like to
have a deeper understanding and i don't
know when you know mayor and ifo and all
of you and we can do that because
i would like to understand how us as
policymakers and the community at large
can support your efforts and
in targeting some of these
hot spots if you will but i didn't see
that today right like when are we able
to to see some of that information where
are there high crime communities and
neighborhoods and in the city and how
can we better organize resources
mayor constable cuomo
um to your point we do do a lot of we do
a lot of forecasting in certain areas
and we do know or realize that there's a
larger amount of domestics for example
in a certain district in a certain area
or we call them beats
that
garner a lot of attention from from law
enforcement that's kind of where we're
going with this community advocate
program so we can put them and have them
go do the door-to-door
work with
council members and and other
organizations
throughout the city without having to
have police input that's kind of what
we're going with this community advocate
program uh to your point there's a lot
of juvenile crime domestics uh a lot of
burglaries things of that nature in
certain areas that uh
that we recognize that the root cause
has a lot to do with with with poverty
and things of that nature so that's what
we're working on also uh
mr pealey's also working with us uh
through all the departments with the
city to target certain areas with with
that in mind absolutely i really believe
that
it is not the sole responsibility of
lcpd to ensure we have safer healthier
communities right through crime
prevention that should not be your only
responsibility and that and that's
unfair
and so i you know i think it's so i'm
glad that you know you're bringing this
all to us and i would absolutely love to
work with lieutenant wittel on this very
interested
about this
community advocate program because
the research
shows us over and over right that uh
communities in neighborhoods with higher
poverty rates
may experience and probably do
experience higher crime rates as well
and these communities are also where
people live that have little access to
social services to education to health
care
and we can't
out police ourselves out of
these challenges right we have to
include a community empower
empowerment model where our communities
are taking are having buy-in in in the
way that we're
addressing some of these issues and for
me it's really important that
all that of that information all that
data even even if it's just stories that
you're hearing get to the policy makers
because i want to better
like i said organize the resources and
how we're you know
whether it's the jcp program whether
it's creating another recreational
center youth mentoring programs whatever
it might be
and i think it's maybe all of those are
solutions
um
i i just think we have to do a better
job at communicating with each other
what those solutions might be
um but that's all i want i'll get off my
horse now chief
i just it was important for me to make
that statement because i just feel like
we have to break cycles of disinvestment
in certain neighborhoods in certain
areas
rebuild trust and i can see that you're
doing that through lcpd cares
but i would like to have that space
mayor and ifo where we drill down on
some of these community-based strategies
so that the chief isn't thinking isn't
juan doesn't think he's plagiarizing
solutions because he's not those are
important
evidence-based solutions um that we can
all have time to um to talk about
discuss and then implement
thank you
so counselor if you would either drop me
an email or at our next council meeting
during your council comments let's dive
into a little bit more and then we'll
take a look at and then see when we can
set something up
for me
yes
yeah thank you counselor bencomo for
your questions and um
comments i i do want to say that even
i've been talking a lot about this and
um
i've i've
plagiarized your or followed your lead
related to the distress indexing and you
did a lot of research and looking as you
know i've had several public
safety meetings
trying to understand what the public
right is is for their perception
um and and it's vast right it's from
defunding police don't be doing that
our law enforcement officers need to
have better pay which all of that is is
in my estimate true we're not defunding
police in fact
you're the department that has probably
the highest budget of all the
departments in this community
um
or excuse me in this city
but i've asked that we use that distress
indexing look at the zip codes
um
use the gis mapping tool right
to couple that with the crime and then
look at the zip codes that are have the
highest level right of poverty and crime
and
unemployment the average income all
those things i address those by infusing
resources not only that what the city
kit has but what our nonprofits have
just sort of redistributing if need be
write these so i know evil's working
with the with all the departments i'm
working on um
you know that portion with resilience
leaders the group that i have founded
and
there's a lot of movement in that area
in regards to ensuring that people have
the survival and thriving services right
and so um i know that ifo i think you're
ready to come soon to us
with all that data um and identifying
where the zip codes with the most
right need is and then and then coming
up with solutions and strategies moving
forward i think but i really i wanna i
wanna say that but i also want to
encourage
um
um you chief and and departments to to
there are so many evidence-based
programming out there
um that that shows right if you do this
particular program or project you're
going to get some great results and
it's good to not reinvent the wheel
right to look at other partners there's
some fantastic programs out there and
and the other thing that i i'm just
concerned about is
um
and and i agree with councillor benkomo
the the expertise there's so many
experts out in our community that work
very specifically with like for example
domestic violence which i know is a good
part of the cases that you're receiving
and how we're
identifying those cases and linking and
referring to those resources i just feel
that in our community today there's so
many people that are trying to address
conflict with violence and and kids are
seeing that and they're unfortunately in
their in their
their home life and we need to right
intervene earlier and so partnering with
the schools and other entities and and
and again i've reached out to la casa
over the weekend and they're interested
in
people um
partnering with us to put a conference
together
and then being able to educate you all
um lcpd and the staff being able to
identify the red flags right and and
then addressing them accordingly so um
i i appreciate this i think what would
be helpful and i know that's coming ifo
is just giving us a time frame about
where we're at with that and when can we
expect that kind of that level of data
thank you mayor what's up okay yes yes
thank you mayor
yeah i appreciate that this is a it's a
pretty exciting
uh project for our whole staff i think
everybody that's been involved in our
initial meeting have all expressed
excitement and willingness to
participate and
you know one of the reasons why it's not
included as a part of this is as you
mentioned uh councilman cuomo
this isn't this isn't just police this
is a police's
to have a seat at that that table but
it's a community-wide issue and it's a
staff-wide issue
and it's exciting because it's something
that we're all moving together in
solidarity with and
what a focus for a city to have
and so our next meeting
is tomorrow so we have a neighborhood
we're calling our network coordination
meeting for now i'm sure we'll find a
more exciting
thing to call it uh as we as we get the
data but
from our first meeting the action item
was really to have gis come back with
the map
overlaying the poverty index uh with the
crime index and again appreciate all the
input and feedback um
talking to all the counselors that have
given us a feedback staff and you know
of course
uh pd and
so we're kind of overlaying every
putting everything together
here that's the next step is to have
this map so with this map we'll identify
those areas and i'm sure many
you know
just anecdotally or even chief could
take me to a neighborhood right now
without a map in front of it
but when we overlay the poverty index as
well as the crime data we're hoping to
see some some more refined even even
getting down to
something more
more specific than the zip codes
if we can but identifying a couple
neighborhoods
and then of course this was you know
this was mentioned in by the council as
well using the pavement management index
and everything capital
outlay
maintenance budgets it's all going to be
included in our plan of attack here
but that's that's what we'll bring next
will be
the areas that we've identified based on
that index based on the map
and then uh
some strategies that we've we've come up
with as this this committee we formed
internally
um probably
you know
not
coming with the presentation but after
that we'll come to council and and
you know we're all kind of working
together together to provide something
but this is very very exciting and i
think
i think we will i think it will make a
difference i think it will
impact if anything it unifies us in one
cost as a
as a city
and and sorry i i talked a lot but
didn't give you a timeline like i said
tomorrow we'll have that meeting and so
we should have that map
in a presentable form
right after that meeting so i can either
send that out to council or
or even have a work session if the next
work session has come that would be
great i think a work session there would
be a really good way of presenting that
data and then looking working together
for the next steps
um and i just wanted to remind folks my
november um
16th meeting at 6 for public safety at
the homebuilders association i think a
number of us will well i will be there
and i believe chief and some of your
staff will be there if you haven't been
invited already i'm looking at jamie
she's shaking her head that you've been
invited
so it'll be another opportunity to meet
with community related to public safety
i'll be sharing some
some data
incorporating some of the things that we
talked about here today and some
solutions moving forward
very good
councilor vazquez
thank you mayor
um thank you chief thank you to all our
officers as well for all your hard work
and
uh for your reports today um especially
excited to see the lcpd cares program uh
growing and expanding out to different
communities it's really exciting
to see the work there i do have just
some very specific questions and i want
to thank my colleagues for
all the great questions that they asked
there was a lot covered here today
the the first one is just around the the
burglaries um i know that i think you
said nationally and locally um the the
rates to actually solve those are about
is that right uh which is
it's fairly low um but i know that
that's uh
looking at the national standard here
that we're right along those lines but a
source of frustration with constituents
i think seems to be around um that lack
of of being able to solve some of these
crimes and i'm wondering if you could
just elaborate on on why some of those
crimes are so hard to solve and perhaps
what we would be able to tell residents
especially with the advent of new
cameras and that kind of thing folks can
put
what are some best practices to make
sure we're keeping folks safe from from
burglary
mayor concerbusquez
lieutenant bradley spoke about
solvability factors specifically to
burglaries when we have somebody that's
wearing a mask in pitch dark wearing
gloves and they open they get into a
vehicle that's open and grab a laptop
that's sitting there and just walk away
with it the solvability factors there
unless somebody saw something right next
door or something it's going to be very
difficult to for us to uh to solve that
type of crime we put out several pio
announcements throughout the year on how
to keep from being a victim or becoming
a victim
you know keep your doors locked take
things out of your vehicle
don't
park in lit areas if you don't have
lighting around your home get some that
that kind of thing really helps us out
in being able to
get some solvability factors
against surveillance cameras things of
that nature are huge huge uh help with
with solving some of these crimes but as
you can see there's there's a lot to
overcome when it comes to property crime
specifically auto burglaries which are
extremely difficult to uh to find any
type of uh solvability factors
lieutenant bradley if you'd like to
expound on that
he runs our cis section and is
constantly having
operation meetings with the property
detectives
mayor councillor vasquez like the chief
was saying solvability factors are a
huge issue the sheer volume of the
crimes also
weigh into it um
of my property and financial detectives
they make up about 30 percent of my unit
and each one of them has a case load of
well over 100 cases that are those are
workable cases those aren't just what
we've received
and looked at
but like the chief was saying we view
everything for solvability factors
another issue that we run into
unfortunately quite frequently is we
provide a link to homeowners to upload
their video directly to us
so we don't have to wait for
getting somebody available or getting a
thumb drive we can do it on scene
unfortunately there's several instances
where the homeowners just don't follow
up they don't follow through with these
things
another huge issue that we run into is
cases that are being reported you know
two three four weeks after they occurred
it makes it extremely difficult to
follow up on anything or find any kind
of evidence of merit three weeks after
those quotes have occurred
thank you i appreciate that and just
seeing the trends in burglary and auto
theft and felony larceny go up i think
getting that information out in a way
that
that is both timely but also responsive
i think to the trends that we're seeing
uh is is appreciated as much as we can
continue to to do that to make sure that
folks are engaging in those best
practices
another question related to that is have
we seen an increase in particular with
the property crimes of juveniles
committing those crimes uh here in las
cruces
so to the specific i'm sorry
mayor councillor vasquez i can't speak
to the specifics of the offenders um
auto burglaries tend to always or not
always but auto burglaries tend to
have a lot of juvenile offenders just
because it's a simple task to have
it's very simple to commit these crimes
you go you pull a door you throw a brick
through the window and pull whatever you
want out
so
as far as an increase i would say as of
right now it's been pretty much a
constant these tend to be
generally speaking your teenage
offenders into your early 20s that are
continually just going into cars things
like that
as far as catalytic converter thefts
things the felony larcenies that you
alluded to
most of those offenders that have been
identified have all been adults that i'm
aware of okay
thank you thank you for that
the other question here is around the
expectations when the department is
fully staffed
um assuming that we have 30 you know 30
new cadets make it into
past past training and become police
officers uh what what is your
expectation with the fully staffed
department in terms of the overall
performance of of your department and
things that perhaps
you will improve on
and have more capacity for what kind of
things would you prioritize chief
mayor concert vasquez i'm glad you
brought that up we would
we're hoping and i'm knocking on any
type of wood substance that i can find
to get fully staffed because that allows
us to be proactive
right now we are
largely reactionary
we're doing some proactive things
through community outreach
but we've been stymied because of our
staffing levels as soon as we get
staffed we'll be able to do
deploy a full street crimes unit for
example get a lot more of our officers
involved in these projects with
community partnerships our officers are
assigned to districts and they take an
ownership in the district but when their
show
they're call driven right now so it's
kind of hard for them to do follow-ups
things of that nature your area uh your
district
that you're in charge of you know the
areas that we'd love to have officers in
there all the time on bikes things of
that nature making that that connection
with the community that right now we've
we've had an issue getting getting
officers out on the bike you get out you
know three blocks away from your car and
you're gonna get a call and you gotta
get back in your car and get back on
there so to answer your question our
expectation is once we get fully staffed
we will be a more proactive department
so we're i'm glad to hear that chief
thank you
and the other question i have here and
this is maybe more of a philosophical
question i'm sure if you can answer it
or not but
uh the recidivism rate in in dona ana
county is uh is one of the highest i
think and really in new mexico uh so
folks that are uh re-entering the
criminal justice system after going
through um you know being
in county jail or whatever type of
criminal justice experience they have
seems to be
you know causing a lot of repeat
offenders right folks who are repeatedly
in and out of jail
what can you say in terms of the trend
of who you see kind of committing some
of these crimes whether they're violent
crimes do you tend to see that a lot of
them are from folks that are
that have been in and out of the
criminal justice system
uh mayor claustro vasquez
yes
i don't have that statistic right now
but when we last reported out in may we
had 258 i believe arrests were felonies
at the time 14 of those arrests were
rearrested on a different felony so we
do see a lot of the same customers if
you will uh based off of uh you know the
judicial system and things of that
nature the way it works there definitely
has to be some programs to get people
out of the business
thank you chief and that that yeah that
was going to lead me to my next comment
about the type of community investment
we can make that
is impactful and effective and i think
that rehabilitation getting getting
folks jobs and getting them back on
their feet you know after they've
entered the criminal justice system is
just as important i think as
some of the other solutions we've talked
about so thank you for that i think
those are all my questions chief um i
know we've spent quite a bit on this
conversation but again i want to thank
you and um hopefully we'll get you the
resources you need soon to be fully
staffed thank you man thank you
counselor counselor sword oh thank you
mr mayor
um and thank uh
chief you and all of your officers here
for for this report that's quite good
um
my colleagues here have asked a lot of
good questions and
more everything that i can possibly
think of except one thing
um i have a question about the term you
just used called street crime
i don't know if you could hear me well
street crime
could you just find what you mean by
street crime so i understand
so
mayor concert slog we have a unit called
the street crimes unit street crimes
speak to
levels of crime that are in the street
violent crime aggravated assaults
burglaries that are violent in nature
robberies things of that nature that's
that's what we call street crime okay
thank you that helps
i get a lot of calls
about non-violent crime that's going on
in person's neighborhood
these aren't
obviously they're not your highest
priority for sure
but
i was wondering if you get a an
overwhelming number of those kinds of
calls for service
mayor concert store unfortunately yes uh
especially in your district we get a lot
of uh these crews that i was talking
about bouncing around they'll hit a
couple of dark streets in your district
and and give us 20 burglaries to
investigate the next day
okay and so um because of that i because
of your shortage of officers and all i i
understand it's you're not going to be
able to
to go to
i mean these are not not burglaries
either these are
more of
nuisance crimes i think we're nuisance
calls
i'm not using the right term there maybe
but
they're not high priorities for sure
so anyway
i just wanted to point and point that
out
and by the way i just want to give a
shout out to your new traffic lieutenant
officer
uh he was in a meeting with with us last
week and i was quite impressed with what
they were telling us yes um so
just
hello to them thank you he's he's right
here oh his name is sergeant or
lieutenant sean mullen i'll introduce
him he didn't have
he's been on in his new position all the
two weeks so i don't want to put him on
uh put his feet to the fire but he has
been attending a lot of a lot of
meetings yeah he was good he was very
good thank you very much thank you mayor
okay anybody else okay so i have just a
couple chief thank you very much for
that presentation each and every one of
you is excellent
regarding the
auto burglaries
i know 382 sounds high
albuquerque i was just there this
weekend and you know i was just hoping
that my vehicle didn't get stolen of
course i have a few things down there
but i mean i think they're up to four
thousand so far here today
but the vin etching how effective is
that
in your opinion and would you encourage
if they can get that to have that done
mayor the vin etching is as far as
recoveries it's huge it works a lot for
us because once they get stolen vehicles
a lot of them try to manipulate the vent
and when it's been etched were able to
go and and find it where it was secretly
placed on the glass i noticed all right
i referenced the 66 recovery rate
several of those have been recovered due
to the etching okay good
the second is and i i like that idea
about the business decals i know the
lieutenant was talking about that
and so if we can get some more
information on that i can try to put it
on social media mind and i'm sure i
don't know i don't know if i've seen
that on the cities maybe on your all's
website but
the city's website as well but i wanted
to know if there was a way to
to encourage or if there was businesses
who wanted to have a certain type of
equipment or cameras that are compatible
with yours it makes a little bit easier
so you know in addition to that decal
maybe if there's any particular
type of cameras a business should
purchase that is more compatible with
say yours as opposed to you know because
i'm sure there's all kinds on the market
but if there are some that you know
maybe you provide two or three different
ones that might be good that work well
with your department that might even go
a little bit further or it doesn't
really matter
mayor uh there there are cameras out
there that that are a little bit more
compatible i i don't want to you know
put it out there because then uh other
cameras that aren't set camera systems
might have a have an issue with that uh
but there are camera systems that that
do work a little bit better with with
the items that we uh we deploy okay good
well that was all i had uh it's good to
see a couple of your
man the the sergeant austin and
lieutenant bradley
their their
their fathers had distinguished careers
with the department and so it's good to
see them following their footsteps so
thank you very much and thank you for
all that you all do
legacies for sure thank you again thanks
okay very good so next we're going to go
to item 3.2 the neighborhood leadership
academy update jamie
rickman good afternoon mayor council my
name is jamie rickman for the record
i'd like to also introduce my colleague
carla walton we both comprise the
community engagement office in the city
manager's office
so i'll be brief as brief as i can and
that way we can move along with this so
this is to just provide an update to you
uh regarding the neighborhood leadership
academy it seems to me like it's been a
very long time ago since we've heard
anything about it
and uh we can thank the pandemic for
that for sure
and
just as a refresher let me get to the
next slide
so the mission as a reminder for
everybody and also in the audience too
the mission of the city of las cruces
neighborhood leadership academy is to
provide improved knowledge of city
government to residents so they can
become effective neighborhood advocates
and community leaders
this was always important i printed this
on the agendas for the classes that we
had so it was a constant reminder for
folks
and then as an objective summary you can
see that
but the objectives were to provide an
understanding and knowledge of city
services and processes promote civic
engagement and residents roles
in decision-making processes increase
residents pride in their community and
understanding of how government works
for them and to develop neighborhood and
community leaders
so a lot of what we talk about every day
in work sessions or council meetings or
what have you kind of interweaves with
neighborhood leadership academy and its
concepts and its mission and its
objectives
so just to kind of remind folks too
with the organization that we had with
neighborhood leadership academy
i had it divided in what i call
semesters if you can compare that to
what nmsu provides
with weekly in-person
classes that were three hours or more in
length per class
and we usually had that on wednesday
nights to avoid tuesday and thursday
nights for your district meetings so we
we had full weeks sometimes
the
nla also had we had pre-semester survey
which asked for demographics and
interest areas mid-semester surveys
post-semester surveys presenter
assessment surveys after each class post
semester facility survey
and we requested also free form input
sent by email from the participants so
you can see we had a lot of data
and by gathering this data it provided
us some benchmark information for us
so the surveys and assessments allowed
us to make adjustments throughout the
semester to better target needs and
interest and to provide timely feedback
to presenters as well as information to
upcoming presenters to avoid certain
things or to emphasize certain things in
their presentation so this was all
real-time feedback that we would be
swift enough to be able to make those
adjustments as time
permitted through
the upcoming days so the program
culminated in city council recognition
as you may remember for some of the grad
for the graduates and a formal
graduation ceremony both of those had
certificates
the process resulted in creating a
comfort level to access personnel for
queries or projects
and open the door for participation in
city projects
for the future for the for the
participants
and then if you could indulge me for a
moment if you don't mind
i want to give very special thanks and
credit to city personnel who
participated in these classes
it is because of their willingness to
participate making a brilliant effort
and positively interacting with
community members attending these
classes that make this program
successful and i just really wanted to
emphasize that tonight
they have an innate ability toward
continuous improvement which means
delivering their information in always
professional manner and but still being
very engaging
and for this i am eternally grateful to
all of them for their participation
so next i'm going to provide some quick
statistics again as part of this
background
so i lay out the following information
to provide that context for the program
adjustments that we are doing so you can
see where we were and where we're going
so the frequency of the program um was
that it started in in the fall of 2017
followed by two semesters in 2018.
we adjusted the program to once per year
for a spring semester in 2019 and 2020.
the adjustment was due to issues of
lighting in the fall semester and
personnel fatigue
we also had a dip in signups at the
third semester which was in the fall and
all of this factored into the change to
make it just offered once a year and
then of course the spring of 2020
semester was cut short in mid-march due
to the due to the pandemic that was just
last year but it sure seems like it was
a long time ago
at this point
so with regard to the next point bullet
point is demographics we asked city
councilors to encourage constituents to
apply to the neighborhood leadership
academy and we thank you very much you
did a great job
sometimes it got a little competitive
so the number of attendees to date we
have 130
attendees and i say attendees rather
than graduates because of that last
semester when we had to cut the semester
short
so i'm counting those that last semester
of 2020 in that count
and then
over the course of the five semesters we
had and these are percentages from your
districts of that hundred and thirty
total so for district one there are
eleven percent represented
district two thirteen percent district
three thirteen percent
district four fifteen percent district
five twenty nine 29
and district 6 19
and i'll just kind of give you some
highlights on these some of these other
statistics so we don't get bogged down
in the numbers so um the largest age
groups
were 55 to 64. that was our first group
65 to 74 was the second highest group
45 to 54 and so on and so forth and then
our lowest attending group was 18 to 24.
so the reason i'm bringing up these
statistics is because it's important to
be able to focus on those lower
statistics so we can do better
a better job at recruiting
and and making sure that everybody gets
you know some exposure to neighborhood
leadership academy
and then we had also we asked them
to self-identify their ethnicity
and the two top categories of course are
caucasian at 34.6 percent and hispanic
latino at 26
and then 4.6 decided not to
self-identify at all so that was fine
and then we have several other
categories very small percentages
um
their employment statuses i found very
interesting
36.9 percent of all attendees were
employed so that means that they carved
out this time three and a half plus
hours out of their work week to attend
and be dedicated to
learn from the neighborhood leadership
academy
23.8 percent were retired that was the
second biggest group 13.8 percent were
self-employed and then other categories
made up 5
and then finally the percent education
levels overwhelmingly everyone had a
high school diploma some college credit
or were degreed almost 94 94 of the
total
so
now what we have here are featured
topics i'm not going to go into a great
deal of detail because of the time but
just to give you an idea how we selected
topics to begin with for the start of
the program through the evolution of the
program and then as we move forward so
we're for broad topic areas
these were selected based on the
frequency of interest
from constituent complaints or reports
or queries that came in and for areas
identified in need of awareness in other
words we we assume that there were some
certain areas that people needed to be
educated about and made aware about
and so i worked with department
representatives our presenters and asked
them to touch on certain points of
interest to highlight in the
presentations based on their experience
with the public as well within those
topics the subjects were refined again
based on constituent complaints or
queries what people needed to know about
and for later semesters the feedback
from the actual participants too
and so the ju for and general purposes
we had a
an introduction budget basics uh capital
improvement program public safety
utilities community development public
works economic development quality of
life programs parks and recreation city
attorney's office city clerk's office
codes animal control neighborhood watch
fleet streets traffic engineering
transit and npo and our joint powers
agreement partners and for those
partners we brought in the partners the
representatives of those partnerships
and they were able to talk about their
respective areas
and then always a part of the
neighborhood leadership academy where it
was hosting classes at city facilities
to provide tours and and quality
experiences and it was important for the
facilities tours because
they
some of the attendees might not normally
have an opportunity to see the
facilities and so it was a great
opportunity to be able to show them them
so the evolution of content occurred
based on the feedback and an arc from
providing department overviews to
delving deeper into topics and providing
hands-on activities one of those
hands-on activities were our signature
tabletop exercises that that folks
really appreciated and that came mostly
from parks and recreation and from
transit i'll go into that a little bit
later
so let's see
so further refinement of content also
occurred with other input opportunities
such as asking the participants certain
questions
the responses for those questions were
compiled and then shared with
administration and we did that as a way
to be able to help the departments make
improvements in communication and focus
on certain topics that were of interest
rather than just kind of you know seeing
what's what's going to stick to the wall
and and just making sure that it was
quality information that we're giving
out
so some of the things and this was kind
of tough to take in some cases because i
told the participants be brutally honest
with us let us know what we need to do
so i asked them what are the top three
things you like about the city what are
the top things you dislike about the
city
what do you plan to do with the
information you've learned so far in the
academy and how can you how can we help
in your plans to share that information
or to whatever your intent is with that
information how can we help you and then
what additional resources are helpful
and then what sort of follow-up would
you like to have from the city to help
you as a leader in your community in
your neighborhood or community and then
also
soliciting what their top three
questions were for each topic so like
for codes
or animal control um and or some topic
that was presented just basically
anything
and then
further with neighborhood leadership
academy it didn't stop with just the
class or with that semester we also
invited them back to take surveys to
participate in city projects um to be
focused groups that sort of thing and so
they really appreciated that
and uh we appreciate it having their
input definitely
so and some i've noticed too that some
alum also serve on boards and committees
which is great and then most are just
better informed to know where to find
out more information and then use our
office as their resource to finding more
information
so
why are changes needed to the
neighborhood leadership program
well the biggest thing was the impact
from covet 19 it put a stop to
everything in that personal interaction
and
the
positive thing i guess if you can have a
positive thing with the pandemic that's
why i hesitate
is that it gave us pause to figure out
how can we approach this information in
a better way to make it more accessible
accessible for people but keep everybody
safe as well
and so it provided new ways of giving
access to certain
detail and information it enables more
convenient ways to interact but we also
had to be aware of
that lack of connection so we had to
preserve that in some way make the you
know help people to make those
connections and those networking
opportunities so zoom didn't really
exist before us before the pandemic but
now we know its capabilities and now we
can complement what we need to do and
create a hybrid situation where we have
resiliency that if we have some sort of
emergency or weird thing happen again in
the future we can deal with it and we're
more nimble to deal with it because
we've had this now this year to be able
to
to you know think and and
be able to provide better
so
the other piece of this is that more
general information is easily available
rather than you know trying trying to
have a lecture type environment and and
speaking at people so the descriptive
information on departments programs and
services should be readily available and
generally accessible not only to
neighborhood leadership academy but to
everybody right and so we're creating
that platform to be able to share that
generalized information in a fast easy
way for people
and then we have interactive information
that needs to delve deeper and be more
meaningful to community members that's
where we get deeper into those questions
and a deeper understanding for people to
know how the city actually works and why
that's the big question right is the why
does the city do certain things it does
and then the information of course
should always be digestible easy to
communicate easy to understand
so that's what we focus on
and then more specific information is
tailored to participant interest so that
means facility access tours and
experiences what i mean by that is that
maybe somebody is not so interested in
and i apologize to the respective
departments and sections for saying this
but maybe someone's not so interested in
going to the streets department but they
want to do something else they want to
see canines instead so we have a way to
be able to tailor this experience for
them
so they're not trapped in three and a
half hours of something that they're not
really that interested in
we are also provided it also provides
the specific information provides
hands-on widening perspectives and
making connections like i said that
networking
more focused on engagement aspects for
the information that's another focus
three categories of people's interests
really rest in curiosity a particular
focus or interest whatever their agenda
is and then how to use the information
that they learn so those are things that
you have different levels of
how people want to be involved and so
you have to accommodate that involvement
so in forging the future this is what is
different
what's the same and what's new with the
leadership neighborhood leadership
academy what's the same as input input
input
in the form of participant surveys
dialogue and interactions then we
continue to have strong and continuously
improved content and then positive and
meaningful experiences you'll notice i
keep mentioning these experiences
because that's what makes information
stick for people and just gets them
engaged with the organization
so what's new we've added five classes
which i now call modules because it's
more more
descriptive i think than just the class
per semester so this expands from 15
classes to 20 classes
and then in summary basically it
separates fire from police which we had
lumped together before
it adds an extra class to parks and
recreation utilities and as another
neighborhood involvement module so in
other words that neighborhood
involvement module might represent
projects that they can suggest or it can
be
you know how do you apply this
information to what you want to
accomplish in your neighborhood
oops sorry i knew i was going to do that
so we've also added back an extra
semester so instead of one semester it's
two semesters because
the ability to provide virtual
experience or virtual interaction
makes it irrelevant that the time has
changed right and that it's dark outside
and you can't really take tours it's as
if the facilities are outdoors so it
helps us with that
and
they just have more flexibility to see
what they need to through this other
way that we have planned
so it also provides a more robust
learning materials using multimedia
which we haven't had before
more flexibility in attending so we are
anticipating that the new format will
better will provide better scheduling
for both nla participants and presenters
it's more inclusive anticipating that
the new format will allow people with
mobility issues either physically or
lacking transportation to participate
easier those were two main things that
were a problem in the last in the
previous semesters is that some people
didn't have vehicles um
consistent vehicles or they had trouble
getting around and it was just very very
tough on them
and then again improving experiences uh
smaller groups and even one-on-one
contact between participants and subject
matter experts will improve their actual
experience for everybody
so that
so what we have these are the components
so
most modules will have the components
listed here but not every module will
have videos or podcasts initially
as asset assets get developed they will
be plugged in
so you have
watch
listen read and act
and the video the watch part is having
videos and presentations to support the
information that's developed
listen will be providing podcasts
of different topics such as the
importance of civic engagement or maybe
it's a chat with the police chief about
crime and community policing you know it
could be all kinds of different topics
read this is where all that generalized
information is is that it's instead of
the physical notebook that we had it's
online people can print it out if they
want to or use it however they need to
also in that printed material will be
support things like flyers or how to's
and things like that that they can use
for the neighborhoods
then act and this is the most crucial
part because you have discussion input
tailored activities and using the
information and that's the key thing is
that we want people to use the
information
so
the new format allows us to use tools as
appropriate
for example we may need to continue to
use zoom for discussions these
discussions are time for nla
participants to ask questions about the
material that they've seen heard or read
the activities will be arranged in an a
la carte feature or will entail our
signature signature tabletop experience
exercises finally one of the most
important features is how do and will
nla participants use the information
they have learned again we go back to
those three categories from slide four
they're in it either for curiosity
they have an agenda or they want to know
how to use that information
and finally
always as part of the successful program
as the feedback of various forms
so to give you a small taste of
something that would be included
please indulge me in showing you this
hopefully it'll work
hey
the city of las cruces is making it
easier for residents to report problems
to make our community a better place
3-1-1 ask las cruces is your portal to
get things done visit los hyphen cruises
dot org and click on report an issue
need to report a pothole three one one
need a report graffiti three one one is
your street light not working three one
one choose three one one ask las cruces
and get things done
so that's courtesy of miss walton
thank you very much
this psa or public service announcement
can be adapted not only for nla but to
the digital newsletter program that
we've adopted
and general public consumption and also
promoted spanish so it can easily be
bilingual
so carrying the concept further we're
developing a how-to video for the 3-1-1
for the public and then future releases
will also feature the 3-1-1 app so that
we have
so what are the next steps for
programming
so you may have heard me mention earlier
a la carte and this has absolutely
nothing to do with food so i apologize
we have been offering
through nla what i call the 101 level
and that's the basic getting to know you
information and then we have the ability
to expand and delve more deeply into
particular areas in what i call the 201
level of information
this little conceptual matrix that you
see don't worry about being able to read
what's in there
this is what we can focus on in the past
nla classes individuals expressed an
interest in knowing more about utilities
regulatory compliance and this is true
they they wanted to focus on that
which is something maybe not everyone
would have an interest in doing right
so any graduate of nla 101 who wants to
pursue this can sign up for that
particular topic and they sign up with
the subject matter expert they spend
time with that person
at a at a pre-agreed to time and they
can spend uh four hours an hour whatever
length of time they agree with with the
subject matter expert to learn more
about that particular subject
so
they whoever has an interest in watching
canine demonstrations as i mentioned
earlier could sign up for that as well
the whole point of a la carte is to
provide flexibility for mla attendees
and city personnel allowing them to be
involved in a more meaningful manner
than just a few minutes during a night
time of a three and a half hour class so
i think it brings a lot better quality
to the program
in this process we have to ensure that
everyone who wants to can participate if
they have a bad internet connection at
home or no computer can they still
participate absolutely there are public
computers they can use or we can make
other arrangements for them to access
materials and participate in those
activities
so nla also has the ability to not only
provide information to the adult
community members but to youth as well
to include middle school and high school
kids covet severely impacted the youth
component that we are planning
but as we recover from the pandemic so
will these efforts in coordination with
the public schools i personally have a
soft spot in my heart for middle
schoolers because they always have
trouble with transitions
and so i really want to have an ability
to incorporate them into this program as
well
and in my discussions with public
schools they're just all for it they're
very interested in it they they want to
go for it my heart goes out to them too
because they've had a horrible time with
all of this
so it's just we're planning to get
together i think in the spring
later in the spring to be able to work
out a curriculum that works for the kids
and the schedules and all the logistics
that go with that so we'll be able to
help that
so if somewhere along the way we can
help these students all these students
find an interest through meaningful
civic engagement in their lives it's
well worth the investment it's well
worth the time and effort
so it's exciting to me
so the next added components and again
we're almost at the end here
we're looking at her i'm looking at how
to include shadow and mentoring
opportunities for both adults and for
youth
and oftentimes it's easy to kind of
think of what those mentoring
opportunities might be for youth but for
adults it's a little more challenging
because of the logistics and
you know who knows it's going to be
something that we're exploring at the
moment
we're also looking at the formal status
options for nla graduates that might be
along the lines of ambassadors for the
city facility facilitators for
neighborhood efforts or other options
which they may have an interest
earlier in the presentation for police
[Music]
city manager pili talked about the
mapping
and so i see an application to be able
to develop neighborhood groups through
that mapping project that really
intertwines with all of the other
departments that are involved with that
project as well so that's another
exciting component of it and how
everything kind of fits together
all this works toward growing an active
and productive neighborhood group
and identification for these groups and
as as you have noticed from slide seven
and this slide the asterisk information
is elevate las cruces all these things
are related in some way to the goals of
elevate las cruces in the city strategic
plan
so that's really a helpful guide for us
to keep on track and to keep them
synthesized with all the other
departments and their
goals
so finally we're also looking at
providing template services to other
municipalities in the state this is the
direction that city manager paley wants
us to head and we've already been
working towards that end with recent
collaborative projects such as census
2020 and also current dona broadband
survey effort what that means
template services is
here's kind of a guide or an outline
that other municipalities can use to
provide information about their city
services and programs and it's already
pre-made for them and they can just pop
in their own personal information and
provide that to their to their
communities
and lastly i'd like to just share with
you
some testimonials
so it makes always makes you feel really
good when to read these so since the
class started i recommended a few people
i know to look into signing up for the
class when it starts again in the future
i believe that this is a great
opportunity for residents of las cruces
to get to know the people that make las
cruces a very successful community and
city
and then the nla gives the average las
cruces resident the chance to peek
behind the curtain and witness for
themselves the inner workings of one of
the best places to live in america
and then with that i will stand for
questions and discussion and as you
notice this is all the photos that were
in the presentation were from
various scenes of neighborhood
leadership academy
all right thank you very much jamie that
was an excellent presentation as usual
thank you
to councillor um flores and councilman
cuomo
thank you mayor thank you so much jamie
for your presentation
i was happy to see luis guerrero's name
there as one of your graduates
he's now serving as one of our planning
and zoning commissioners
so there you have it
and uh
and another graduate
well no i'll just share that with you
later
and sound too uh
but another let's put it this way
another graduate is pursuing a role in
local government excellent
thank you excellent so thank you so much
jamie and based on our conversations you
had a lot to do with that
and um and i'm sure that you touched i
met some of the students at the
graduations the ceremonies that we
helped and
they've made one wonderful contributions
and thank you for yours thank you thank
you thank you mr mayor
thank you councillor ben cuomo and
councilman sword thanks mayor thank you
so much jamie and carla for all the work
that you do it's
been really incredible working with you
both on all you do for our constituents
um yes i have a couple questions jimmy i
wonder if you all took any specific
feedback from the 18 to 24 group
range around what could help
bring more younger people through this
program not not yet excuse me mayor and
counselor ben cuomo
jamie rickman for the record not yet but
that's on on our list to be able to do
to tap into those age groups and those
other demographics to say what would
interest you what makes it easy for you
to attend what would you like to see you
know just how the nuts and bolts of
what'll work for them
and i think we've got enough flexibility
and nimbleness now to be able to offer
a lot of opportunities for people in the
community regardless of what demographic
they fit in yeah absolutely that a la
carte part i think is excellent that's
amazing thanks jamie
um yes i was i'm glad you said that next
up on that incredible 3-1-1 commercial
is the app i always tell people to use
the app i always tell them the response
there is incredibly quick and so yes i
think the more you can push the app the
more you'll hit at that younger
demographic as well
um and then
one thing i was going to suggest jamie
as well is
for the younger folks that you're
thinking about um
there's some in lasse teachers
throughout lcps and even the charter
schools like montana
and i named them because
there are folks that are really
interested in things like this and how
government works and how they affect
their students and i always get invited
to their classes and so i'd be happy to
give you some of those names because
there are definitely teachers who are
very
passionate and interested about this
that i think you can connect with to
begin forming those classes thank you
thank you and then the last thing i was
going to say just giving a previous
conversation with lcpd and lieutenant
wittila around their community advocates
initiative how
have you talked to her about somehow
aligning both of these and if you
haven't i think
that that could be a great opportunity
absolutely we haven't had those
discussions yet because we're still kind
of digging out of all of this other
uh covet stuff but definitely she's on
my list for sure
and as well as other youth oriented
programs that the city does offer
because i would like to see an
interconnection that happens with with
all of our programs and have a thread
that goes goes through each of those
that goes back to civic engagement not
just neighborhood leadership academy but
just everything that people can or youth
can participate in through civic
engagement absolutely and for
historically disenfranchised
neighborhoods especially understanding
how the city works and how they can
advocate for services to their
neighborhoods i think i'm like really
targeting
those populations um i think would
you know do do great things for for all
of us so thank you jamie thank you one
thing mr mayor if i may add is that uh
when i mentioned facilitators to
neighborhood groups what i'd like to do
and i've talked to scott rogers about
this is create a volunteer component
where nla graduates can go through that
component and then help us facilitate
meetings
to neighborhood groups maybe they're
loose groups for right now just groups
of people but then help them
facilitate
that discussion to create actual
community groups and neighborhood groups
and so we need kind of this army of
volunteers to be able to help us because
it's just us right now
and we're not able to get to reach
everybody and do everything that we need
to so i think that's the way that we're
going to head
so thank you thank you mr mayor thank
you councillor sword
thank you mr mayor pro tem and then
councilman flores
yeah thank you mayor um
thank you jamie that was awesome that's
very impressive
well done as usual i know you do
excellent work all the time
um i mainly wanted just to simply say
send me that video
i want to use it
um we need to get it on snapchat for the
youngsters
and and instagram too
i don't know if can you do it on tick
tock
can you put it on tick tock
put it there too
somebody's got an account
i don't but somebody has i got an
instagram account maybe i can put it on
there
okay that's all mr mayor thank you thank
you mayor pro tem thank you jamie and
carla for all your work i mean it's just
fantastic i remember when we first got
elected right and just
how do we engage the community and it
was just a whole series of write
different things from
creating this to having evening
work sessions
and and i know that i get a lot of
compliments about your
academy
i think people like i had no idea right
i really had no idea
and it's had to evolve over some of the
feedback that you've that you received
and then covet hit so i'm glad that that
you um are have all these various right
types of
ways to engage the public and especially
our youth that was going to be my
question and i'm so happy that
the youth will be participating i think
there
there's many ways um to do that and i
have a few
especially in that 18 to 24
category been having conversations with
new mexico state university and they
definitely want to partner with us they
see
that that connection so i'm thinking asn
msu and um
i have my social work intern student out
in the audience
um they have
various associations and such right
the aces
group through
it's the department of
agricultural and i'm not sure but i just
know it as the aces
department
i'm thinking at um
cabron park there's always that group of
of um
youth or gentlemen that are playing
basketball in the evening time would be
a cool opportunity right to engage them
to say that has always been that age
group for me that feels
um disconnected right like we there's we
have all these services for the little
ones
some middle schoolers right but but then
as we as they get older there's that
that age group that we just don't quite
um
i think have a varied um amount of
activity
because not everybody plays sports and
and and but i think we're getting there
and this would be one way i think to
access
folks like that and then our soccer
community right soccer and or
and i'm not or and um
the skateboard community
you know they they did an excellent job
of organizing themselves for capital
outlay funding so i i think they would
have they'd be really
interested in providing and those those
services but i agree with everybody
around that tick tock and snapchat and
those podcasts and the small videos i
think is where where that age group
likes to click on and hear
everything right that that they need to
hear
and and just trying to engage in that
way and i think you guys are awesome and
i really do i really do i've appreciated
the work that you've put in the digital
newsletters i think are really important
i've gotten some
a lot of feedback on that jamie and
carla thank you thank you for that and
um
anything else that i can help with this
this has been i know a labor of love and
i've appreciated you know from the
council when i first started to
presently um just working towards trying
to engage our community in various ways
that's right so thank you thank you
mayor thank you
all right thank you
do you have another question or comment
thank you mr mayor and thank you again
jamie
um the thought that occurred to me after
i said thank you
is we did that youth engagement
committee work with the league of women
voters of
southern eu southern new mexico
and um i think that uh that would be a
good avenue and and it was a different
uh
we did we did something different there
we actually had them come in
and pretend
they actually did um let's see we had
workshops where they discussed different
issues we had different department
people in those in those workshops and
then they came up with solutions as to
the the issues we're facing if i could
recall correctly
and i it was a wonderful group of
students it was all day long and they
you know they took over city hall well
not really but didn't take over but
they it was absolutely wonderful
my my only concern about that was that
um
and i think that we
and working with the school district
with lcps
we all agreed that we really wanted a a
different
it was almost like they were
self-starters and and and leaders we did
have a few that were a little shy but
they sort of came around but some didn't
towards the end didn't come around at
all even towards the end so um so i
thought that we could um
i don't know if that's something that
the league of women would voters wants
to do again i don't know if that's
something we could integrate with your
program
um
but i was also thinking of collaborating
with las cruces community schools
because those yes and uh tessa and
mayor pro tem gandala and i sit on that
board
and
and there's various schools and somehow
integrating
what we do here with what they do and
and it'd be great if we could go into
even the elementary you know one through
six and
but um and i think high school is great
too without a doubt but i think
middle school
is kind of like being catcher in the rye
if you don't you know if you don't catch
them then you're never going to catch
them
and
and we have to engage youth
and i think a program like this would
engage
and it'd be a question of uh how it
would be implemented
and
maybe one of the community schools could
be a site i don't know but i'm just
thinking in terms of how to bring our
youth in if they could be it
yeah yeah it is a good idea thank you
but um i i think i think uh lccs you
know dr
hawkis dr wendy tomlinson dr
losano i think would be amenable to
sitting down and and the people we dealt
with lastly patterson jamie patterson
and josie
miller what do you think jamie well
think about it well you have to
yeah
you the two of you have to figure out
how to add something else to do right
but maybe we can expand personnel or
something
mr mayor and counselor flores if i may
um when i mentioned that we were
later in the spring we're going to be
talking to the las cruces public school
people
it's jamie patterson and josie miller
that we'll be speaking to specifically
because that event happened late
february of 2020 and it was so
successful and kids really enjoyed it
the adults really enjoyed it too the
presenters and so it was a really great
interaction and networking opportunity
for everybody and so that was definitely
what spurred this on that we could see
how this was going to work but we have
to look out or work out those logistics
i love the community schools idea again
it's capacity right and capacity
building and so once we can reach that
point then you know we're we're well on
our way but
that's why carla is so brilliant at her
job because she can
reach those the younger crowd you know
and she knows how to do that and so
that's the other thing that we're trying
to strategize as well to see what's
going to work best and so we've got all
kinds of things underway but i really
appreciate your suggestions they're
they're very welcomed and very wonderful
thank you and thank you jamie thank you
mayor okay and well jamie you know how
what i think of this i think is great
anytime we
get the
applicants the graduates to go through
this it's they become little ambassadors
to the city and and
sometimes help answer questions from
people that they talk to
so every time that you seems like that's
maybe why the call volume is decreasing
so uh so try to hit a thousand next time
i will try a thousand applicants i will
try
no okay so that pretty much concludes
your presentation we can't thank you
enough for all that you do thank you
carla as well thank you
thank you
okay so the last item 3.3 upper sale
south salon ad hoc committee report i
know there's going to be some questions
and some other things that will be
generated
as i have in the past i've uh because i
have a business on south solano building
i like to recuse myself so i've already
cleared that with mayor potem she's
going to go ahead and
take over for now and she also has the
the agenda setting information so you
just want to leave early with that uh i
wish you guys well and have a good
evening okay you're you're copying out
okay you're coming really i'll be
watching you you don't have to see me
you just sit there we watching you guys
from no no you can stay thanks man we're
asking you to have a good evening
hi mr weir good afternoon good afternoon
uh
mayor pro tem and city council david
we're at the community development
department um i have a brief
presentation to kind of summarize uh the
activities of the ad hoc committee and i
believe there's one member in the
audience and the committee itself was
chaired by uh councillor vasquez so he
may have some very astute
commentary to make also
well just to start off the presentation
i want to uh summarize what the purpose
was the city council adopted the ad hoc
committee and they basically
started out with two
directives of what they wanted them to
look at basically they wanted to look at
a city-adopted policies related to
corridor revitalization and the
opportunities for transportation
improvements when the committee itself
started to meet they also chose to
expand that to the adjacent
neighborhoods and also to look at
ways that they could increase the place
the place making of those neighborhoods
and make even more vibrant mixed-use
corridors and so um
the policy documents that they started
as a base for their meetings were
elevate las cruces
uh the alpha sale
community blueprint
and the
active transportation plan and also the
infill policy plan so those were
a starting point for the committee
um
this is the membership there were 16
members that participated on that
as i noted earlier uh councillor vasquez
was a chair a beta stu excuse me
councillor betta stevie assisted him
with those items and then when both of
them needed assistance assistance
counselor ben como assisted
the rest of the membership was appointed
by the council and the mayor it was made
up of community leaders whether they be
businessmen community advocates
non-profits
the schools and also
the university we're all represented on
that group
they met for approximately nine meetings
basically december of 2020 until august
of this year and came up with with
recommendations
i'd also like to note that almost every
well i think every department of the
city contributed to the meetings of this
ad hoc committee and they provided that
support with information and then also
actually participating in some of the
the presentations
the committee itself came up with two
strategic focuses one was for
neighborhoods and the other one was for
the the corridors themselves and i'd
like to take the time just to read those
for you
in regards to in
the neighborhoods the
this
statement or vision they came up with
the southern infield neighborhoods
envision and strive to be a place of
economic stability
wealth creation and healthy living they
are attractive people peaceful places
where people feel welcome safe and
comfortable and are hot spots for
dwelling choice local shopping eateries
entrepreneurship and businesses
and then they also
came up with a consensus on one for the
corridors themselves
the southern infield corridors are seen
as and continue to transform into
thriving transit oriented areas where
businesses residents visitors in the
city work together to create maintain a
place of sustainability one that is
pedestrian and bicycle friendly and
addresses the needs of all cities so
through the course of their meetings
they kind of came up that as a common
goal what they'd like to achieve
going forward and
the city assisting in those areas
achieving these visions or strategic
focus as they called it
the committee itself came up with
nine recommendations and what i'd like
to do is go through the slides that go
over them
but basically
they built these recommendations on
reviewing
again the vision of the plans that took
place
the existing conditions of the
properties
what type of tools were available to
them whether it be land use planning
zoning
financing redevelopment tools
they also took input from the committee
members themselves
and what strategies other communities
are using and and basically came up with
basic themes and so there were nine
and i said i'll go through them um
specifically
just as a note uh the meetings for this
committee were all held by zoom so this
picture was pilfered from elevate las
cruces but i wanted you guys to have
some some very he just didn't have words
to look at in the presentation
the first recommendation the committee
made
was that there be a department
designated for oversight of continuing
activities
and basically that there would be
designated staff to this and that there
would be budget for them to move forward
with these projects
the second one was that within this area
and this is a this slide shows the
boundaries of the area that they studied
throughout
that they have a program where they
continually evaluate the opportunities
for either mras and and the the tools
that are available to
encourage redevelopment and
revitalization of areas and so
the stars were some areas that you could
actually look at
they included like the north end of el
paseo the middle of el paseo
and solano some of the commercial areas
through that and then also down towards
the university area that there may be
some vacant properties that would be
available but the recommendation wasn't
to to
just stay on those locations it was
where through
continuous study and opportunities
that there would be the opportunity to
designate other mras and do the plans
and studies necessary
for that
the next recommendation dealt with
fiscal resources
the committee wanted there to be budget
so that there could be these mra studies
and plans developed that there would be
support for low-income tax credit
projects and that's primarily the
multi-family
developments that there would be
financial commitment from the city to
help with that that there would be a
commitment to develop technical
assistance
that basically the expertise of the city
could be
placed in one area and then would be
available to
property owners and and residents of
those areas they could come and get
assistance to
either maximize the use of their
property
help them get started as a business
or just to
organize to help
neighborhood improvements and
maintenance of their property
and basically
when a project did come along that the
city would seriously look at budgeting
those activities
they also recommended that grant
opportunities be pursued
one that's available is the u.s hud
choice neighborhoods initiative that's
something that while the committee was
wrapping up its recommendations we
couldn't
hit the deadlines for this year but it
is something on the map for the next
year
there are also u.s epa brownfields
grants
that are available to help with like any
perceived environmental concerns so it's
an opportunity to do studies on
properties
and then as any emerging opportunities i
don't know if some of the
build back better monies would be
available for this but it's something
that that should be investigated and
pursued
and then as as going forward as these
projects are identified that they get
included into the capital improvement
program
and that since we do feel this is an
area that needs
some reinvestment in that an emphasis an
emphasis or greater rating be put on
projects within that area
there are actually four recommendations
from this technical assistance but i
like lump them together in the
presentation they each have a different
emphasis but they really are geared
towards the the same thing basically
getting information out
helping the businesses and the citizens
get the assistance
provide additional awareness
of what the requirements the city has
and helping them get through
uh whether it be a building permit it be
a business registration
being put in touch with a financier
anything that could improve these
neighborhoods and and corridors
the first is a virtual redevelopment
technical assistance program or portal
basically this is something that would
be provided on the city's web page it
would be totally dedicated to the
southern infield areas and corridors
it would have a repository of all the
information that the ad hoc committee
had their minutes their discussion their
recommendations all the support
materials it would have
connections and also material to help
them show what the workflows are to get
a billing permit a business registration
it would have links to all the plans in
that area and and basically providing
that technical assistance so they could
be successful as possible
the building technical assistance and we
used the term
studio was to help people when they want
to upgrade a building or they want to go
into a vacant building and they have to
meet the building codes or there's a
zoning situation
it would be a situation or it would be a
the intent of this assistance would be
able to provide them
the direct citizens oftentimes community
development sees
situations where people want to go into
the building but they know it has to be
upgraded and they don't have the
finances to see what exactly they need
to do
if there were some way either through
the mras and
[Music]
or
lita that we could actually pay an
architect to come in and do a code
analysis and say these are the upgrades
you need to make
these are the zoning variances you need
or these are
various steps that you use to utilize
the infill process but it would be very
focused on those technical building and
site development type of issues
the next one would be the business
technical assistance and i think this is
something that the economic development
department's already working on but
again it would would provide that
assistance on on how to prepare a
business plan
who you need to contact to get financing
what are some of the issues that you
would encounter to start a business
and then the third was to address those
neighborhoods that are in the area
how do you organize how do you approach
the city to get a street improved uh how
do you
make sure that your your your park is
in a good condition that you'd like how
do you establish a neighborhood watch
those type of things so that those
assistances
would be provided and so
i think a lot of those things and
through the discussion you had earlier
today a lot of those activities are
provided through the city but if you if
you
created these teams you could use that
expertise from the different departments
to help address
the needs of those neighborhoods and
corridors
the next one is a project that actually
is is is taking place
the housing authority wants to redevelop
and increase the density of their
properties on
i believe it's colorado and campo wyatt
and so they're calling it the paseos
verdes
natalie greene with the economic
development department is also working
with that group they've already gone
through
excuse me a charette on how to redevelop
the property and have some ideas so
this shows some initial things but the
the ad hoc committee wholeheartedly
supported this activity and wanted to
put their endorsement behind it
the last one was for the city council to
actually adopt a resolution designating
this is a redevelopment area
providing the
stating there this council's support and
desire to have
dedicated programs to this area
developing a program and staffing and
budgeting appropriately so those were
the nine
activities just potential next steps
the first one on the
presentation is what we're doing today
the next one would be from an
organization standpoint
integrating these recommendations into
the city strategic plan the capital
improvement plans and budgets
then organizing to go forward with this
programming and resourcing and last at
all actually initiating those activities
and going forward so
um
with that i'm available to respond to
any questions or discussion you'd like
to have
i believe you all received a email from
sherry thomas your chair of your plane
and zoning commission
just
she
thought other areas that that you may
want to hear today is that
there was support from the committee to
increase density of that area so that it
would help support the economic the
corridors and vitality of it
she also
endorsed
the adoption of a resolution by city
council
to create a program for that area
and also made suggestions on how that
should be managed and then also put a
provided her information on grants that
could help support this activity so i
wanted to make sure that that was in the
record also
thank you david appreciate the
presentation
counselor sword
concert flores
yes
thank you madam chair
let me start off by saying
thanks to orlando berlia i we got a tour
of downtown detroit
about
how many years ago is that four or five
years time flies
and
i see some similarities
uh there is a business in downtown
detroit
called quicken loans
in which they use a lot of
younger employees
and those younger employees wanted
housing
near their work
downtown detroit
so
it just so happens that one of the
buildings that was
on the fire
sale
excuse me
i'm in a fire sale downtown was bought
and
remodeled i could say for housing
so i want to to go to this if you could
go back to the slide where the
affordable housing
was planned on
on campus street
is it possible because we want to have
mixed use housing
take part of that property and have some
workforce housing there
for
people in the middle income or or some
maybe a little below
to
house people that want to work downtown
and electronic caregivers already
indicated that they want housing for
their workers there
is that possible
madam chair and counselor sort
that is something that i believe is
already being discussed the
housing authority
has already had a charette and in which
they were looking at ways that they
could use their property that could
include mixed use various housing sizes
and then there's some other non-profits
that are looking at property across the
street to redevelop that with
not only housing but also supportive
services and i believe that mixed income
was the intent
for those projects so um you have
uh
kind of a catalyst or demonstration
project to to actually show some of
these ideas that were discussed
by the ad hoc committee yeah okay good
um that sounds good in case anybody
didn't hear the word as that electronic
caregiver is going to employ a lot more
new people very soon
they're looking to increase their
workforce quite a bit so this will be a
good fit
for that area so i just wanted to point
that out
we're going to be another detroiter no
i'm kidding thank you
thanks counselors or counselor
i thank you my damn chair and and thank
you uh david mr weir
so as far as
brownfields goes
there's a lot of money sitting there a
few years ago um i don't know you were
probably there lisa larocque uh had the
brownfields thing and i think uh mayor
pro tem was there
you were there anyway i was there if i
remember correctly but at any rate what
i do remember i do remember being there
and i do remember the woman from the epa
who i think is local i mean in new
mexico
saying there was boku
money there there was just a lot of
money there
and it was definitely a question of
identifying a brownfield
so do you or does anyone in the city
know whether there is a brownfield
in the area
or any maybe suspicion that there might
be and that we can look into it and then
and then the owner of that land would
then or wait a minute would it have to
be city owned or no it could be yeah it
could be privately owned uh madam chair
and councillor flores uh the community
development department was recently at a
uh a conference where they talked about
the brownfield
epa grants
and they basically said that they have a
very liberal interpretation of that that
it's even if there's a suspicion of
environmental pro
problem that they they will fund those
uh studies the phase one or phase twos
of the property and so it's something
that oftentimes
in my experience property owners are
afraid of they feel if something is
identified then they have to treat it
immediately
but which isn't necessarily the case
basically it provides
history of what took place on those
properties what remediation measures are
and it also makes more funds available
if one is even found
but what i found uh interesting about
the the conversation was that there
doesn't even have to be an environment a
known environmental pro problem it just
has to be one as suspected and you want
to
find out what took place on the property
and there are funds available for that
even if it's suspected and not verified
correct yeah it was pretty it was pretty
liberal it was like she was saying and
nobody's calling me and so here we are
you know fast forward three four years
and it's nobody's called her so can you
call her please no
but uh seriously
seriously um yes it'd be great if we
could pursue that and then
as far as the infill is there anything
that the city can do uh in terms of some
of properties like i think there's that
one on nevada
that i think gabe uh councillor uh
vasquez had suggested it'd be a um
the city by it and it become like a
record like a park recreation center for
the community
and i don't know if that property is
still there but there's some properties
that i i believe are sitting vacant
and um
and maybe we can look into seeing
whether you know why those properties
are vacant um you know are they
are they uh abandoned are they empty are
are taxes being paid is you know the
county going to put them up for sale and
maybe can we step in i mean how does
that work and can can we do stuff like
that because we and then we have infill
and incentives too
madam chair and councilor flores that
ties right into the recommendations for
studying the mras and so the first thing
you have to do is take make an
assessment of those areas and create a
plan
and then that opens another
series of
financing mechanisms the city can use to
to go forward with those properties but
but the study is is the first step oh
the studies first step and then the next
step and then the step after that and
the one after that and then the one
after that no the the
it is dictated by state statutes so you
do the study you have to make a
designation of blight which
often neighborhoods don't like but again
it's
more of a perception in education
because it it provides a lot more
steps for you to go forward with it um
in a sense it's kind of the missing link
that we've had with some of our land use
plans when you look at amador proximo
apodaca blueprint
um even the el paseo corridor we we do a
good job of saying these are the issues
here's the gaps here's the the uses that
we think would be successful here but we
don't plan for how we're going to
finance that or bring those properties
up so if we create a program where we we
think about that before we even go into
those planning efforts there's a lot
more chances of success i would say
that's probably what differentiated
downtown and its development and some of
these other plans that there was you
know there was an idea that there had to
be capital needs
um you re did the utilities and the
street networks et cetera but you
thought about as a city how we were
going to pay for those improvements at
that time so right and so
in terms of a timeline
do you can you do you have any idea
uh
you know is there a light at the end of
this tunnel because the apodaca park
plan is sitting there right nothing's
been done
we do have a zone change for the
property so uh looks like oh so that's
happening are some things taking
taking place but
i um
today really only prepared to make the
recommendations of the ad hoc committee
so i don't have that timeline for you
oh well
okay thank you very much mr weir thank
you madam chair
thank you councillor poland as
councillor vasquez
thank you mayor pro tem thank you david
uh thank you mr padilla for being here
as well a member of the committee
um yeah i think this takes us back to
our discussion earlier about what kind
of investments we can make in our
neighborhoods as a city and a community
to make
places
in our community safer now i've gone on
police ride-alongs right in these
neighborhoods both on solano and el
paseo and we've looked at different
apartment complexes we've looked at
different what they consider to be hot
spots in different neighborhoods in the
belmont area the nevada area the el
paseo area and it's where you have some
of the more
you know the higher cases of domestic
violence and public intoxication and of
course a lot of people experiencing
homelessness and so uh when we talk
about reinvesting
uh into our city and into our community
in a way that's not just um on the law
enforcement side but the attack that's
actually trying to address the root
causes of
some of these problems that our
community faces i think this is a
perfect example of how we do that and so
i appreciate
um counselor florida's your questions
about what's next and how do we go from
this ad hoc committee's report uh to the
adoption of a resolution that will lay
out the recommendations that will be
accepted by the council that will then
spur action by staff to actually get
some of these mra studies uh done and
and started so that we can achieve you
know so that we can leverage those
funding resources that come with the mra
designation to look at specific parts
including some that were listed here
so that we can get the funding to be
able to redevelop them so you know for
me i think that was the most important
part of of this
this exercise
having done the picturing el paseo study
over 10 years ago i think now and and
not having a whole lot to show forward
except the really great study of what
needed to be done um this is the next
step in in terms of getting the funding
and getting the support of
of staff behind it because it is going
to have to be prioritizing capital
investment and capital improvement
programs for this area over the next
three or four years so there will have
to be changes to the cip there will have
to be some considerations for our budget
and um things like purchasing some of
those vacant lots and making properties
right having actually an inventory of
what exists there and where the city can
create things like green space or
community space or
you know facilitate the the um public
private partnerships of different
business models or non-profits
so i think this is really exciting but i
i want to make sure that we we do
continue the progress moving forward so
um that resolution i think will will lay
out the recommendations for council and
um hopefully the next
this does touch you know three three
city council districts right david let's
go over the okay um
so hopefully this is something that um
that uh you know councillor gandara and
abeita stuvi and um
councilman cuomo and then the next
person who's here miss um councillor uh
graham will will all continue to
champion it right
um because that that's going to be
really exciting to actually see uh see
some of these projects come to fruition
and as you mentioned mr weir the paseo
verdes project is kind of like a pilot
project that that could really help
kick-start uh as an anchor some of this
development that that i know
our staff is very excited about and ms
green is leading on as well so
those are my thoughts um i don't have
any questions i just want to thank you
david for your hard work
in kind of putting all these pieces
together
you know we talk as a community about
bringing a committee together of people
that are representative of a district or
an area
and having folks on from the university
having folks on from the
development comm
committee having small business owners
of course having city councillors but
also
area residents
and
even former
former superintendent karen trujillo
having all these folks being part of
these solutions and asking questions and
talking about what's possible here
to me this is just a great way to
validate
all the work that's gone into from these
different community members and put some
real dollars and use our policy muscle
because when we do this here i think we
can do this
anywhere else in in the city we just
have to have the will power and the
ability to to follow through with the
recommendations of the committee so with
that thank you thank you thank you very
much
thank you councillor vazquez
go ahead counselor ben como thank you
mayor pro tem thank you so much david
for the presentation and for all the
staff that were involved
um in this process and for my fellow
counselors
yeah i totally agree with council
vasquez on honestly
the urgency behind this but also just
the trail that this is laying for
other blighted areas in the community i
feel like mayer would get mad at me but
he's not here so i'm going to talk about
it um
i've already
talked to staff about the
importance of this committee this model
and how we recreate it for areas like
west picacho that are also incredibly
blighted that deserve attention and
investment especially in resources and
and getting a set of stakeholders
involved from the business community
from the schools from
a variety of different areas and so i
feel like
the earlier and the sooner that we
implement this and that we do this right
i think
the better this model will be and so i'm
excited to see what it you know comes
forth david i'm curious if
you have already had conversations in
house at community development about who
will be the staff
um that is assigned to this or if or if
you need direction on anything today
uh madam chair and counselor ben coma
staff has had a lot of discussions
because as you said um
this type of approach could be
replicated there's several
city properties that may have that going
forward but i think the biggest thing
tonight
excuse me this afternoon from the
council is just an endorsement that you
felt this was a a positive process and
and one to move forward and to support
your actions as you go into the budget
uh year and uh
and other activities that impact your
districts so
thank you david and any thought on the
person that would lead this
i think that's a little above my pay
grade today so
okay
that's right
um well i can definitely uh council
vasquez you know maybe that's something
we can follow up with ifo on just making
sure that um i think
sharon thomas member of the committee
made an excellent point about um andy
hume and his prior role and
and and how successful that was so i
think that um it's important that we
start thinking about that and you know
that we don't overwork anybody but that
you know there's someone that will
have
you know
who will be invested in this project so
i just wanted to reiterate that and of
course thank uh orlando for being here
today and um you know dc daines joined
us for meetings and
natalie verde also joined us for
meetings and um
um and and a bunch of other folks so i
just wanted to thank you david
madam chair and um councillor ben cuomo
there were several non-profits that also
presented to you and also neighborhood
leaders and and i didn't want to leave
them out but i think i did in my
presentations you had la esperanza come
and talk about their organiza their
organizing history and
i said messiah valley
community of hope
and fyi both made presentations and and
also started to follow the rest of your
meeting so
i think you
the committee should very be very proud
of the collaborative approach they took
and the input they got from everybody
and then all of city staff was
incredibly supportive anytime
a request was made to present or make
information they always made themselves
available and shared
thank you councillor bin kamal thank you
david i do have a couple of questions
and comments
um david i first of all i'm very
supportive of a resolution bringing this
forward to
study um
this in terms of whether this is a good
design mra designation
and and i think we all feel that it is
it's it's very
blighted you know i think
all of us on this council get a
tremendous amount of
calls and issues related to this and
it's difficult to
redevelop
when we're seeing the kind of crime that
we see there
the urban
right the urban dwellers if you will
that are that that are there and and
just just a number of things so
um is there anything that prevents us
from
um
recommending um that we it
that not only do we study it but do we
ensure that
it's in the budget discussions and that
we put it on the capital outlay
and that we start identifying fts
you know within this budget cycle i i
feel like we can do some of this
simultaneously and that would be my
recommendation
david
madam chair and counselors i think
that's really the kicking off point from
this meeting is starting to flesh out
how a program would be formulated and
and what we are talking from a fiscal
standpoint and and budgetary
wise and and how to it seems to be a
really good time since the city's
already starting to look at budget and
those discussions right that would be my
recommendation to do all of this
simultaneously and ensure that this gets
on our capital outlay um
list if you will and and have
very serious talks about what that would
look like in in the form of
of again the budget fts and
funding moving forward
the other thing is is that i think there
are numerous businesses that really
would like to see this there's a lot of
folks that are not quite informed in
that area especially about med park
wyatt
who have been hit
in the last month or so pretty hard and
some serious um not only property crime
but you know major theft in their
business so i just feel like we need to
have a a robust campaign that we we're
looking at this we we're concerned
we understand what this is basically
doing to your business um
and this is our plan moving moving
forward um and then counselor vasquez
made mention of this inventory
i think that's an excellent idea but i
think we have an inventory and shouldn't
we have that through our neighborhood
action team an inventory of all the
um
vacant properties that are available
there and who owns them and
and
how are they keeping them up and you
know codes that whole vibrant sort of
programming that we developed several
years ago and that would would continue
to be my recommendation that we involve
that letters go out to each of those
vacant um you know the owners of those
vacant properties saying what we're
wanting to do and that it's important
that you keep
up the area and the building and that
that because this is happening we it's
like the chicken and egg right nobody's
going to want to come over there and
invest in that pro in that area if we're
seeing the kind of crime that we're
seeing there so i think
i i love the the ideas that
earlier chief spoke to all the
programming and resources that are being
infused in that area as it relates to
lcpd but i also feel that community
development some of the other our pils
can go out really
expressing what we're trying to do and
it's going to take all of us together
right to manage and maintain
this to try to reduce the crime and such
that we're seeing there
um let's see
i think i think that's it i i appreciate
the conversation um
great work thank you um counselor
vasquez concert bing cuomo counselor
stevie mr padilla i see you out there
you're a bit blurry i'm not wearing my
glasses but i see you out there i thank
you and for all the folks that sat and
took time
um i think it was really important and i
i agree a different a definite um
it's it's just an option and something
we should scale out
right in these other blighted areas it's
it's a it's a nice i think model to move
on so thank you thank you thank you
thank you thank you okay anybody else
thank you mayor pro temple councillor oh
good thank you
david do you have anything else i do not
did you get the direction you think you
need it okay thank you
thank you david all right i think that
concludes all right people all our items
and
so um
i need a motion to adjourn so moved by
flores i'll second it so motion being by
counselor florida second by counselor
sorg christie
this is on the motion to adjourn the
work session counselor beta stevie is
absent counselor vasquez
yes
councillor ben combo
also yes
councillor sorek yes
cancer flores also yes
council counselor
yes and mayor is absent
you