001um the tuesday october 26 20 2021 meeting of the independent community police oversight commission will come to order ms jeunesse could you call the rule for us absolutely commissioner mary president and ann arbor thank you please raise your location thank you for reminding me commissioner phillips president in ann arbor okay commissioner president in ann arbor commissioner present in ann arbor kia jackson president in pittsfield township commissioner mohammed president ann arbor chair tudor ohio graves present in lodi township council member lam wawi relaui president ann arbor council member song president ann arbor did i miss anyone i don't think you did i think okay everybody um and so before we um i would like to propose some changes to the agenda if before we get to the point of approving it um we are going to
002reschedule the report on the police officers wellness program until november 23rd and we also need to add complaint review process to old business um are there any other changes we might need to make is there then a motion to make those amendments it's almost is there a second second all in favor aye any opposed okay and so then is there a motion to approve the agenda at with the new amendments yes second second second uh all in favor aye aye any opposed okay um and so now we've come to the time for the public forum if there are people who would like to speak at the public forum you can call eight seven seven eight five three two the meeting id is 935-1520-9819 yes we have one caller good afternoon is it star six to
003unmute yes he said star six or you just a listener this evening i am expecting dr carpiac to to join us when we talk about some of the traffic stop updates but i do not know if that is him on the phone yep that is probably him hello did you have a public comment are you just getting ready for the traffic stop discussion this is dr cartier and i have no comments at this time okay thank you hang on though for us please and thank you any other callers denise nobody else this time denise there's no other callers okay so in that case i'm sorry someone just came excellent good afternoon star six please up one more time perfect good afternoon say that again please harvey summers okay it's harvey summers um i have just
004one comment about it's a little difficult to keep up with your meeting the email that came out yesterday from the city of ann arbor said to watch online at a2gov.org watch and that link did not work and so uh i had to find you on my television and just wanted to say that somebody should look at that and then a zoom approach to the meeting would be so so very welcome and so i want to thank you for all you're doing and just ask you to think about that bye thank you mr summers thank you and so ctn um i uh if we can figure out if the link on the website is live if it is live now um [Music] and then i know we've had this conversation before but i will follow up
005about how we might be able to have people participate a little bit more actively in these meetings as long as we are still doing them remotely and then perhaps even when we are in person if we might be able to have people join us remotely by way of the meetings um because i think we've learned through this process that that access is certainly important but um people being able to participate on the phone is not the same as them being able to participate you know more in person particularly for meeting the size of ours it's not quite as unwieldy as city council so um is there a motion is there any discussion of the september meeting minutes i am um assuming that everyone has had a chance to look at them are there any additions
006or corrections or comments to them hearing none is there a motion to approve the september meeting minutes i make a motion to approve these minutes of the september 28 2021 uh ecbac meeting is there a second second all in favor of approving the september meeting minutes aye aye any opposed okay old business um so we need to talk about traffic stop data dr carpiac is on the phone and um the first thing we should probably talk about is the ongoing um process of actually getting the data from the police department he has been running point on this and of course we are participating in that process but at this time i think after all of this time we still do not actually have the working traffic stop data set yet is that crack doctor carpiac
007yes that is correct so can you update us on what are we missing um so right now we're missing a few fields in the data set a age being one of them which we've been told is coming soon um and there's some other fields that we've requested that we actually haven't heard affirmative or negative on also we were originally given traffic stop data for 2017 2018 and 2019 and the latest data set we were given was 2018 2019 and 2020 that might sound like an improvement but for us we know that 2020 is an anomaly year particularly for traffic stops when because of covid the activity of police making traffic stops was drastically changed and so for us to have a good picture of what's happening in ann arbor we prefer to have three sort
008of typical years 2017 2018 and 2019. um however one tiny tiny bright spot in this is that because of the request of dr carpiac other institutions will have access to new information can you expand on that a bit sure um it had to do with the age specifically uh we um we requested that age be included in the data set that was uh given to us and initially that was a bit of a problem i understand in that it was the the data is comes through a program called klemis and then through an application called business insider and business insider i believe his name of it um was treating age as a protected category and so it's actually technically impossible for aapd to share it with us um but the but jeffrey mcdole worked behind
009the scenes to actually change that in that application which then now makes it possible for basically all the all the departments and municipalities throughout southeast michigan that use the columnist system through business insider to now share that data in a way that they were previously unable to so thank you for pursuing that and thanks to jeff mcdole for work from the ann arbor police department for working on his end on that we are eagerly awaiting the the corrected data set and um dr carpiagg is the head of the southeast michigan criminal justice policy research project whose acronym is smart and he is his team will be doing the analysis of the traffic stop data and they are a team of um criminal uh research experts who will be diving in and making complicated decisions about
010how to analyze the data and the best way to do that because there are many ways to do that and trying to get the most accurate information from this just sort of clump of information and make something useful and informative for the community and so his team will be doing that and the plan has been all along to have public discussions about that data certainly to write a report about that data and um perhaps for them to publish some work about what they found um do you want to add anything to that sort of the goals of sort of like the public engagement piece sure um well for sure we plan to do an analysis of the data uh at which you're you're you're absolutely um right there are many ways to to do an
011analysis of of this type of data um but another component that we're really hoping to to do alongside ekpak in the broader community is to think about ways that the data can be useful for the community as a large and large how it could help make decisions how could help educate about the nature of our collective public safety and that's really um i think we're looking forward to having a more conversations about what we can do as both a educational component and the public service component with with this data in this report um and i think that's an important part of furthering the goal of transparency it's helpful for people to understand um how processes work um in the city and so in addition to writing a report we would love to facilitate community conversations
012about what's going on with traffic stops when we get to that that point and then last but not least the southeast michigan criminal justice policy research project partnered with ikpak to apply for a grant from the community foundation of southeast michigan and was awarded funds from that competitive process and um it's it's the community policing innovations fund and they were specifically looking to help fund um analysis of policing processes that would be useful for the community and to create help create community and law enforcement partnerships and so we're really excited certainly the smart team did the bulk of the work i did just a teeny bit of that application process but we were very excited to um to to be awarded the grant and igpak will not be receiving any money it will go to
013facilitate some of the complex analyses that we think will probably be necessary to sort of um to analyze the data in a way that makes sense and so that there will be um that grant was sort of just awarded earlier this month and so the process will start pretty soon um and we will have a meeting about um how everything will work going forward but i just wanted to sort of point that out um because we're excited about being able to partner with a community group in that way and their criminal justice research policy and be able to make use of some experts that we wouldn't have been able to do otherwise without these funds so we are very excited about that commissioner hoffman yes um it is it it looks like it's a one-time
014grant and uh uh what time limit it has is 20 years or six months is two years what what what you know i do not know that yet i do not know i know like in a typical grant you have x amount of time to spend the money i do not know that yet our um our meeting with the funders and smart um will be coming up we it had to be rescheduled and um so we i will know that in the near future um there were a number of other cities in southeast michigan um that that were also awarded the grant and so i i will have a meeting with the smart team and with the the funders to to talk about the details of that hopefully that meeting will happen in the next
015week or so thank you would it help if i give just a little bit more context on absolutely please and thank you all right so it's a so it's the community policing innovations initiative is the specific program uh the larger philanthropic organization is the community foundation for southeast michigan which actually uh funds a lot of different projects throughout uh southeast michigan some people might be familiar with it um what they like to do with the funds is to that you're absolutely correct they don't like to give them they like to support innovative community partnerships with either law enforcement agencies or city governments uh so they were looking for that as projects that they like to kind of support but what their model is that instead of giving the money to police which they don't want
016to do they don't want to give it to police departments or necessarily directly to community groups what they give it is to they give they give the money basically to a network of technical support partners that help that are brought in to help support and facilitate the partnership and to help establish goals in partnership with all the the partners and then make sure they happen and so smart is has been brought in as basically one of those technical and training assistance providers that will facilitate this project but it very well could entail bringing in some other kinds of partners as well uh once we start kind of establishing goals and timelines and broader strategies and objectives which are all part of the the framework of this grant um the the strategies gold outcomes kind of
017thing could be um a multi-year project uh three years down the road five years down the road but the funding for the technical assistance providers is for one year okay thank you is there anything else that um dr carpiac you want to talk about the grant for that before we move on um i don't have much more to say in the a large part of what the goals and specific objectives and benchmarks for what we want to do are are part of the conversation that i think they will be having going forward but i think the the overall idea is to bring in some resources to do exactly what i mentioned before making this data available making it accessible making it comprehensible to the larger ann arbor community to rethink how data is shared and
018collect and collected and uh make use of to inform the work of ikpak uh are all the kinds of things that the the these resources can be brought to bear on and what we hope is that you know it will increase transparency and that people will have a better understanding of of what's actually happening in the city and so um dr carpiac mentioned making the work more comprehensible more digestible and um [Music] i am a quantitative researcher and um the ways in which i thought this traffic data could be analyzed were all wrong and um it appears that there may need to be some qualitative work that happens which is way above the way more complicated kind of work than what i typically do i do lots of statistics and lots of analysis that way
019and um so i have i i have joined a class basically in traffic stop data analysis where every other week dr carpiac makes me and others read really complicated journal articles about how best to do this and um so i am learning along with everyone else well most of the people are far ahead of me in this um how these this analysis might happen and why it might happen in the way that it does and thus well we'll be able to talk about intelligibly why we chose this way to analyze the data um the the the criminal justice people could do this easily but this is challenging for me but at least i will be able to be conversant and we did it this way instead of that way because of these things here are
020the flaws here the problems perhaps with doing that uh council member song i saw your hand was raised now i'm really curious as to what the data sets reveal if there are any biases in our work um i guess i have two questions for um mr carpio uh is this will will this be something similar to like stanford's open policing project because i took a look at their work earlier and how they have data sets from states all around the country um and then if if this if this work uh advances you know are there is there a possibility of having this project um expand to other cities in the county and so that we can coordinate with maybe the sheriff's office getting other cities to participate um so uh how this data is shared
021i think we hopefully can think creatively about including using something like the stanford open policing project as a model for how we might begin to make use of data that's already being collected by the ann arbor police department i think could be a a great model especially since just a side note one of the the interesting and a little bit frustrating parts of specifically that stanford project is that um it collected but could not make use of data from michigan and that it collected uh data from i think several thousand incidents from the michigan state police traffic stop data but had to basically throw it all out in making its larger conclusions because of the way race was recorded in in those reports and made it basically all the data unusable for michigan um and
022so there's there's work to be done there um but again the ultimate way that we make use of and share and uh and use this data for public decision making i think one of the exciting parts about the this grant from the community foundation of southeast michigan is it lets us think a little bit more creatively about what we could do there that that answer your question yep that's helpful thank you i know you guys have heard me talk about that before actually how um startling it was that you know michigan was i think number one on the list in terms of having this sort of um lack of transparency in terms of being able to to look at traffic stops and so i was very specific to say i was talking about the state
023of michigan the michigan state police who more than would be likely due to coincidence mark people's races undetermined and um so we've had conversations about that and we've had conversations in this meeting about that about how do you identify people's ethnicity and the pros and cons of asking people the pros and cons of saying that and i know um some people here here have said they'd be offended if someone asked them what their ethnicity was but we have talked about the need for that information as it's collected to be accurate and right now any ethnicity data collected by police as indicated on a traffic stop data or on a ticket is the officer's perception of someone's um ethnicity and so um you know i have been long been thinking about some public education campaign could
024we ask the police 2 4 12 18 months say hey you know city council has asked us to really double down on the accuracy of the ethnicity data that we're collecting and we're sorry sir as we pull you over but we have to ask you how you identify it's not us it's city council making us do this and we just want to record this accurately and could we do that for some period of time um you know to to say you know we just want a trial run and we want to see can we you know does it make a difference if we ask people do um the data points look any different for example but what michigan state police do is just say they can't tell and they say that all the time um
025and so uh many people speculate that there might be some specific reasons why they do that but in any case it certainly isn't very transparent and so you can't make any conclusions about who gets stopped and how and um you know you could you know you'd have to determine why that happens um but and i know we've had that conversation here but it is a problem with the project council member song did you have another question did you ask them both oh i was just saying i was hoping to look for biases that was the or uh well no the two questions were if it was similar to the stanford project and if we'd expand it to the county so i think kevin covered both and and you know that's outside our baby with celine
026oh go ahead i'm sorry doctor carpiac sorry to answer that second question certainly i think and the what we do here uh can be a model for for something that could be done similarly at the county level uh the county uses the same columbus system that ann arbor does and so the the age category that was previously unshareable is now shareable for washington county is as well as all the other counties in southeast michigan so it absolutely could be a model it would require a different set of partners and a different set of agreements but i think it could be a model for sure and so we'd have to look at would you be interested in information from the washington county sheriff's office would you be interested from other municipalities like celine the city of
027ypsilanti um would those people be willing to sort of collect that data and analyze that data and form those partnerships to do that so that we could have a big picture of what's going on across washtenaw county um and so um there is interest in what ann arbor does in terms of um you know serving as a model i'm sorry commissioner othman is it possible to make it easier for the police officers who are involved in in uh trafficking all these scenes um instead of just uh telling the people right away you know this is what what's happening is if there's any decision on part of the city council to say that we are going to have this kind of project that would last x number of months and just just orient the people that
028this might happen so if you are going to be asked by the police if you are stopped it's just it's just you know give some people a bit of information knowledge that this project is is going to start or starting and based on the recommendations or based on decisions that was done by the city council that we are basically uh executing the the decision of the city council versus abrupt just come to somebody and say what type of ethnicity you think you are so it's just it's just make it a little bit easier that this stuff is is happening and you could you could start somewhere you know next month or or uh in the beginning of the uh 2022 or something like that well if this body is is is interested in in asking
029city council um to do that and if city council our our liaisons here think there's um an appetite for that we can certainly write a resolution to a city council to ask the police department um to begin to collect that data and one of the things that often happens with these kinds of resolutions is that there's a training period there's a learning period and there's a public information period where you educate the public about what's getting ready to happen before it happens when police officers get trained on how to do what they're going to do before they need to do it and then once those things are in place you could perhaps start a campaign where you do something like this where you start to collect data and so if this body isn't interested in
030that we could certainly write a resolution and present it to council and ask them to consider it and we could certainly work with the police department and the city attorney's office to make sure that any such resolution is appropriate and then we could ask council to um have the police department act on their guidance the reason why we have gender information collected is because city council decided that the police should do that um i think it was 2009. um uh deputy chief forsberg and i were talking about that actually with dr carpiac in a meeting and and and city council said hey we would like to know that and so start collecting that data and so that is when that started because city council said so and so certainly we could ask about an initiative
031to for some period of time to try to collect accurate data on ethnicity um i'm sorry go ahead counsel uh uh commissioner amiri you know my thinking is like if i think of immigrants and people who don't have documentation being in this country and african-american who don't look african-american might not want to reveal that that's something to keep in the back of your mind why are they asking me you know and when you do when the city of ann arbor do the announcement and public information these are the last people the information reached you know they don't go to city council they don't look what resolution they not necessarily read go to m live and and and search for that kind of emotion so imagine you yourself a recent immigrant who don't have documentation and
032the police ask you what's your background and you're going to say i'm puerto rican and or i'm from mexico or whatever country or syria or iraq and you don't have documentation and you're here you know so or that also go for minorities who feel there's a bias they might think they're asking them and if i am of mexican origin they're going to be attacked or if i'm that we have to keep that in mind as we do these kind of things not assume that everybody read what the city council does and and assume because they have their experience tell them otherwise yeah so i don't know how to deal with that but it is something to i don't have an answer how to deal with that but it's something to keep in in the back
033of our mind as we move for if we to decide to move forward absolutely and and your point about the people who could be most negatively impacted being the last to have the information disseminated to them resonates um so clearly that that seems to be the case almost all of the time and thus any kind of public information campaign should take that into account before it starts and it should make a concerted effort to use people to um get that information out in ways that information is not typically disseminated and sometimes when it is when the information is disseminated people still don't trust you know there is a different experience between certain people certain clusters and ethnicity of the government so if the government say we're doing this so we want to be sure that
034everybody is treated equally equally and the answer will say oh well you know this is we've heard this before we have experience so that's actually complicated work of complicated work but it's good to be aware of it as we move forward yep and i think that the reason why it's complicated is the reason why we do our work that very reason is why we are here and so it is incumbent upon us to make sure and so what we're talking about is people who get stopped they're the ones who need to know right and so we're going to keep talking about who gets stopped and traffic stops we're going to talk about that a little bit more but what you're saying is absolutely why we do our work council member ram lawyer you had your
035hand up too thank you and appreciate the conversation as always commissioner amir that's a very significant and relative observation to make about minorities who are avoiding persecution in other parts of the world where we leave giving information as as what you're describing um causes harm um and and and for them to to give that information out they they have preservations and so getting that you know accurate information is is very difficult for many different reasons um i i was just have a question for for um chief cox or um city prosecutor aaron slay on whether um the the legality of doing such and asking these questions um whether there are legal challenges um and what is the current practice if they if we can get a refresher as to what the current practice is if
036it's just gender that's being asked are there other questions to to aggregate the information that's being collected gender's not being asked so i just want to clarify make sure you didn't misunderstand what i'm saying that data is being collected they are definitely not asking people what their gender is so i just want to make sure that everyone's clear on what i was saying that information is now being collected police are not asking people what their gender is thanks for for clarifying that i guess so just asking what the current practices and and again what the if there are legal challenges to maybe asking that information that was was earlier described chief cox you want to talk about how people usually identify ethnicity on the ticket when they write it um it's it's based on the
037officer's perception um we don't ask the question unless it's already on the license uh i i will say this and it's a little off a little bit from your question i think um the legal aspect is without certainly let attorney slay answer that portion of it is we're asking um or we potentially might be asking officers in a time when we're you know when we're trying to build more trust to ask a probing question that the state doesn't even require on a license or things of that nature to potentially get information to be researched later for whether or not we're you know participating in some type of bias when the reality is that person right then and there is going to feel like that they are we are um you know i i would think
038you know and and this is just my opinion you know i would think that if if government or certainly um you know from a political perspective if you want to capture the data required to be on the license and then you'll get accurate data almost all the time we don't have to ask but the reality is you know the state doesn't require it and so you know we could stop people and they could tell us false information we can stop people and we can guess what it is but the reality is i don't even know how reliable it's going to be anyway unless the state requires it on a license of some type you know on what people would like to report so from my standpoint you know i don't know why we would want
039to put officers in the position to have we'll put them in a position where we're not building trust particularly in this day and age to potentially get research data multiple years later that might not be accurate in the beginning so but that's my humble opinion on some of that stuff you know i'm not sure we want to suggest that asking people how they identify is going to be less accurate than officers guessing at it i mean i don't think we want to make that comparison i think what you're saying is it might be challenging for officers to do and certainly we understand that we also understand the state of michigan doesn't require it on a driver's license lobbying that is far above our pay grade i mean you know community groups could lobby the state
040to say everybody needs to self-identify on the driver's license that's not in our bailiwick though but i don't think we want to say that officers guessing at that is more accurate than what people would tell us about themselves i know council member sonia had your hand up again i'm sorry i just want to mention um i'm pretty sure we remember when there are folks in our community who are being deported in the past couple years and there's a lot of concern in organizing around immigrant coalitions rights and how in ann arbor chapter 120 of the city code prohibits public servants from asking about immigration status except accepting cases of criminal investigation warrant or federal order that was really meant to encourage trust in our local law enforcement and encourage undocumented people to work with local
041authorities so we do have some concerns have been addressed many times over i think in the past couple years to make sure that we care for our residents and are considerate about their legal status and i i understand that's also shared on the county level too but correct me if i'm wrong thanks commissioner you know the the the ethnicity is not something that that is like it's not there in the census it is there is there any way you know failing everything failing everything cannot go and and get the information right information from the individuals or because of concerns about the the immigration status or because of minority being uh treated differently or the biases and all that stuff um you know the census is there and and ethnicities are there um is there any
042way um we can you know not asking the police what to do is from the census uh do you have access to the information census information or it's also privileged information and no one can access that so i i really don't know and and if if we're going to be tackling the issue of of who's going to be stopped and if by chance some segments of our community feels that they are stopped more frequently than others and we don't know the ethnicity of the individuals yet we know the stories it's just it's just um how how we're going to gain the trust the other thing is is this is not a a permanent uh venture it is a project that's going to last x number of months or if we get say number 500 or
043thousand whatever if we if we find x let's just say a particular number and say if we collected enough information that's specifically if you revise it statistically would be significant it's 200 300 500 1000 and if we reach that point that's it we stop it the information the information that is collected the information is collected is not going to be stored the only time is going to be used is for the analysis and there are no identifiers in terms of other than ethnicity we don't know the person we don't know the name we don't know the address we don't know any of that stuff so so it's just i just wanted to to um say that it can probably be done if we um take into consideration all the um deficiencies or all the mistrust
044or the status of the individuals that we are trying to get information from thank you commissioner phillips i apologize i missed your hand yeah no problem i i've been listening i think it's going to be a hard sell to the public period i think it's um and yet my it's part of our role to be able to explain it as to why we're collecting this data and why we need this information but i'm thinking of people who i would reach out to and explain this to it would be that information is not needed and i'm not giving it on some level and so uh you know i think we have to really set our our standards on this low i don't think we're going to get a lot of information this way i believe it's
045valuable information that we need but i don't i'm sitting here trying to figure out how we explain this or sell this to people that if they're stopped that this is a question that gets asked for research purposes or whatever i do do you think people are aware that officers just guess and check the box anyway that they always check a box i think people assume that yeah i think people assume that order automatically uh and i think you would get some blow back when people if an officer says well can you tell me what your ethnicity is i can i believe people are going to say why do you need to know that and don't you know you already know what i am or whatever you understand what i'm saying so i think we just
046got to figure out how we educate people and and how we get true data but i'm sitting there struggling trying to figure out how this will work you know we have time but we really have to figure it out so yeah it's definitely not an easy it would not be an easy thing to do um i think i think it is significant though that the information is being collected now right and and and and that's a thing and so you know you could certainly not you but one could certainly go in the opposite direction and say don't collect it at all but that's not helpful either and so what we have now are our guesstimates about that and there are people in ann arbor who may look ambiguous but have clearly stated even in our
047meeting that they are they get a box check that says unknown often and and they feel like um you know why why didn't they just ask me what that is or and other people feel like uh kind of what you said is uh you know what i am right all of the whole gamut is possible i i think it is fascinating though to understand that what we're working with now are guesses and assumptions yeah and that may be good enough because it's what we have but and and and i would suggest that that data would not be collected for a research project as much as it would be collected for accuracy because the public deserves to know exactly what is happening and so that data should be accurate no matter what happens with it if
048it's never analyzed and so i wouldn't suggest that this is you know happening for a research project but as much as it is happening because the information about drivers that's who gets stopped needs to be as accurate as possible um and so it would be in the interest of accuracy more than a a research project yeah i agree with all of that i just think it's going to be uh a hard sell from the police perspective i represent a trusted non-profit agency and we have to ask those questions and we get blow back why do you need that information what are you using this information for and we're a trusted organization that's a social service agency that's helping people with specific things at that time so i can just imagine what this would cause for
049the police department so i think we need to just you know no no i i agree so i'm not suggesting that if this is an easy thing that people can just snap do so please understand that um but i do really really worry about this um commissioner mary you know i i just want to say the same thing is that i worked with access and access in in derby and been around for 50 years and serving the community and still sometimes you were asked question like why do you need to know why do i have to give that information how you you get a grant and you're going with a report what did they ask you you know there is this lack of trust so before my thinking is if we decide to go to
050the city council and ask for something like that we have to have all these answers under our belly answer you know because if we don't have the answer it's too early to ask the secret for resolution of this nature so maybe we need more discussion ask the other then they do it if we know of other people doing it then when we go to the city with the resolution say we would like this to be done we have to have an answer how do we get the trust of the community how are we going to inform people that this is going to happen otherwise we're going to find ourselves in a position like just as bad if not worse agreed um commissioner carter yeah i um i i agree with commissioner phillips i i don't
051think it's something that should be asked i just i i would i would not want to be asked that question i'm wondering how often the police officer cannot tell i mean is that a large percentage and and i guess i'm just willing to go with their best assessment i i just i feel i don't know and i it's no data that i'm coming from it's just from a personal feeling i would not want to be asked that question so i i think we ought to go with what we can get council member rum lawyer and then commissioner tudor hargraves um you know i just have a same type of um reaction to it i know a person of color and that wouldn't i'd be skeptical even though i was born and raised here and i'm
052part of government i just for some reason i just don't like those invasive questions many times um i i write other many times as an arab i'm supposed to fill in caucasian and i still to this day don't understand that and so i'm glad this discussion is being had i just was interested in whether there's any uh movement at the state level to require this so we're we're dealing with consistent information across the board with all jurisdictions and in law enforcement agencies in having this information given at a time when people are probably in the most apt position to give accurate qualified information whether there's any efforts being made at the state level commissioner todora hargreaves um i i think i'm going to give the viewpoint from the other side of it and it's not
053um because i feel we should be asking the question or that people will not feel uncomfortable i i agree with all of you people will feel uncomfortable um but i am somebody who's um ethnic background is often mistaken um you know um i i am regularly mistaken as latina and it's even been as recent as last year someone who'd known me for over 10 years um an acquaintance um in the community and she was shocked to hear that i was not latina she has known me all these years and she thought for sure that's what i was um so i understand from the viewpoint of data collection that mistakes do get made and and i don't know how often it is i just know it um i'm somebody it happens to regularly so um it
054is it is there and you know maybe we need to do a sample or something like that to see is it a problem you know maybe it's just me maybe there's only five of us out there that it happens to regularly but you know it it might be um something that we may want to look at just to be sure that we have as accurate of data as we can apparently dr karpiak has his hand up and i cannot tell that from the screen dr carpiac hey so thanks i i just i'm really appreciating this this thoughtful discussion i just wanted um to say two things wait hold on one second could you could you just like give could you give a couple sentences to explain why you happen to know so much about policing
055why i should happen to know so much about policing yes i don't think we've ever said that in this forum and so that might be helpful background for what you might be getting ready to say which i have no idea what that is sure so uh i've been studying policing uh in in several contexts across the world for over 20 years now i wrote my dissertation at uc berkeley on community policing reforms in france actually and i'm a professor at emu in the department of sociology anthropology and criminology teaching mainly the classes i'm policing for um about 12 years now i'm the director of of smart so uh my my research has has very much been on uh kind of how to assess how to uh make um decisions about and how to understand uh
056specifically police administration uh across across various contexts so that's i guess a little bit of my cv um but just two things i wanted to say um one i just wanted to make clear because we kind of i know i opened the door a little bit when i when i mentioned the open policing project but the the specific project that smart is doing with ann arbor pd is in no way really related to this question of police asking race or not we have no we haven't done much analysis yet but we have no indication that the problems that that occurred in the michigan state police data where over 40 percent of the the records were marked as unknown so any analysis of racial bias couldn't be assessed that that is not the case with the
057ann arbor police data we i could talk more about and certainly chief cox could probably talk more about the specific categories and arbor police use in their traffic stop data which are which are different um from for example what the county uses and what and what the the the state uses they're different categories actually that they use um and i could talk a little bit more about this issue of we should please ask ask those kinds of things is a complicated one that probably could use more more discussion but there's actually benefits to both approaches um for example if one wanted to do an analysis of whether police individual police officers are making stops or making decisions based on racial bias actually the data that the racial data that uses their ascribed racial category is
058probably actually more useful than how people themselves self-identify because what in an order says that you want to understand what police themselves are seeing and then track their decisions from what they see on the other hand police described racial data might not give access to for example if there are systemic biases for example on a systemic level whether we're exposing uh ann arbor residents or or people who come through ann arbor of color if we're exposing them to more forms of penalty through our traffic enforcement uh that might not be uh as is legible um in officer ascribed race versus selfless crime race so it's a complicated it's a complicated issue um but as to right now is really not a part of the traffic stop study that we're doing as of right now thank
059you for clarifying that especially because you know the research study thing got thrown around a little bit and so i i would have clarified that had you not that this has nothing to do with the ongoing project at all um and and that data you know we're looking at three four years ago um and so that those data points just are what they are and will not be changed by any future conversations at all so totally unrelated to that um that conversation um i'm sorry councilmember song although if if there is interest in like the rece the researching part of that there's a really good 538 article uh talking about encounter denominator versus population denominator it's why statistics don't capture the full extent of the systemic bias in policing so it's good it's from last
060year i i i i have had to read some articles like that about um thanks to dr carpiac so um uh commissioner carter i don't want to i don't want to just beat this to death but it was interesting when dr karpiak talks about the difference between self-identification and how the police identify maybe that's even more important how do the police identify the person that they are dealing with i think that's very interesting that's why we are lucky to have experts yeah absolutely absolutely um commissioner hoffman did you have your hand up as well i i had one and and if if the issue of of asia or not asking about ethnicity at stop traffic stop is not is not really pursued uh at least of the data collected you can't go and change it
061for prospective data if that question is going to be there uh would it be easier for the duration of the of the project so if we're going to be doing a year or a few months or so down the road that individuals who are conducting the research would be accompanying the police and they will ask the question not the police the the researchers would ask the question would this somehow make things a little bit easier for responders for for the people are going to be stopped that that it's not it's not the bias coming from the police it's just this is for research purposes only and i'm doing the research not the police the police stopped you but this is my question to you is this there are a lot of different ways to do
062it i mean you know the city could explore adding more boxes you know i prefer not to say or i i mean we have an unknown box because no one is actually saying um why is arab american not an option for example so the city could explore lots of different things um and and as commissioner carter said i don't want to like belabor the points so we could um so we could move on and talk about traffic stops in another context which is i am sure you are all aware that the city of philadelphia has joined several other cities in having police officers no longer make what they call low-level traffic stops and so those things include temporary registration permits that are visible to law enforcement but in the wrong place for example motorists would
063no longer be stopped for such infraction they would no longer be stopped for having one light one brake light out one headlight out one running lamp out one turn signal out one light in a turn signal out one light out in a cluster of lights all these things are currently illegal in michigan um objects hanging from a rear view mirror that do not obstruct the driver's view i know some of you have had conversations about graduation tassels um i was recounting how when my daughter was in a wheelchair we had the handicapped placard that we'd have to put in when we parked and take it out when we backed out of the parking space and i got ticketed at some point for having the thing hanging while we were still driving and we had to
064constantly take it up and down and got a ticket once because it was in the front window but not hanging so i got two tickets for the reverse kinds of things um and and those are things for which the um philadelphia police can no longer stop people they could certainly um mail them in you know citations these are um civil infractions as we have discussed here before um and they can certainly ticket them for those things if they're stopping them for something else like running a red light etc um and so um they they have made a pretty clear delineation of you know things they they were they did not have an exhaustive list but they have you know kind of indicated these are primary things that officers may stop people for as far as
065traffic violations but these things are um lower level is what they call them sort of infractions that we are not going to have um uh officers are not no longer going to be able to pull people over and ticket them for solely these things um there is of course i think a 90-day or 120-day training period for police to get used to the new law and um then it will be implemented um you all know that the washington county prosecutor talked about pretextual stops and he did clarify sometimes it kind of sounds like a dirty word but that police officers are often able to cite any number um of infractions to um to pull someone over and that they were no longer going to prosecute cases where it seemed as if evidence was collected after
066you know that kind of stop um i have had an officer sit me down and list just off the top of his head at least 50 kinds of tiny infractions for which they could pull anyone over at any time um so the city of philadelphia's list is certainly not exhaustive of that um but it's an interesting thing to ponder um whether um those are things that that this city might consider um whether it is necessary or appropriate to pull people over for those kinds of stops um in the in in ellie savage um i don't know what they call it in his bulletin sort of when he made that announcement he cited um lots of stops and you guys have heard me say that traffic stops are the number one way that people come in
067contact with the police um we know you've already talked about undocumented people here this is um i'm sure all of you have been in the position i've certainly had people um undocumented people talk to me about the fear with which they drive or ride with someone if they have papers if a family member does not have documentation the fear of driving to you know simple things like the grocery store or the market for fear being pulled over um and that then leading to you know other kinds of consequences for them um and so we might want to ponder where um you know the city what the city would be willing to consider if anything in that vein um the other thing that philadelphia did in tandem with that was that they made all traffic stop
068information available to the public and so they are every month going to publish information about where a traffic stop occurred what in what area it occurred what police officer was assigned to that area the date the time the location year make model the driver's race ethnicity and gender the race ethnicity and gender of any passengers the primary vehicle violation and any and all secondary violations um what police action was taken whether there was a warning given or a ticket given or whether um people were arrested whether the car was searched or not whether people were searched or not whether the stop resulted in contraband um whether it was a firearm or narcotics or other kinds of uh you know other contraband that might have been collected and all of that information will now be um
069publicly available and it will be updated every month and then an annual report detailing that information will be published each year by the police department and what that would mean for ann arbor is that the information that we have now about traffic stops for a couple of years would be public to everyone and there's an argument that that data already belongs to the people because it is the people being pulled over and stopped and that um that is certainly there there's no argument that that that's certainly a step in the direction of transparency um comments questions and thoughts about that you all are surprisingly quiet on that one okay um i was waiting for someone else to join in first but um uh i think that a lot of that is great i i think
070you know i don't know how we get that happening here or county-wide or statewide but but uh i know personally myself as an african-american man i've been stopped on numerous occasions by different police departments and it seemed frivolous as to why i was stopped uh and it's been because of things like you have a tassel hanging or your license plate is covered um and by the way can i um you know in the past it hasn't happened in a long time but you know can i look in your car those kind of things right um so and i know plenty of young people who um i work with who we try to educate with you know all of those concerns about all of those things you know that that these might be reasons that you
071might get stopped um so i think that there are reasons why some of those things should not be on a listen and uh chairperson uh just like you i've spoken to other police officers who've given me a list of all the possible ways that they can stop someone and i'm not saying that i i think that the the issue is also about fairness and equality right that if are you stopping people in other neighborhoods just like you would stop people in poor neighborhoods or minority neighborhoods for the same thing that kind of stuff so i think it's something for us to discuss i think we got a while to try to figure out how we um add those kind of things and how we take into you know talk with the police department to find
072out about those things i think the information the data that will come from you know uh 17 18 and 19. will allow us to see if there are some things like that that we can say yeah this is a problem in ann arbor or we say it's not a problem in ann arbor maybe it's outlying areas and maybe it's just the state police who knows so any other comments okay um commissioner todoro hargraves is going to give us an update on the complaint review process and if it feels like you've heard updates on the complaint review process before um that would be correct but unfortunately the complaint review process is an ongoing um evolution and um is still evolving in terms of of how that happens so she will update us again and i suspect
073again next month based on new information today yes we will um it's it's definitely an ongoing process i do want to um give a shout out to our it department or the city's i.t department um they've been meeting with us over the last month and trying to give us us meaning the information managers the proper access to things that we need such as evidence.com and body cam footage and reports and so on um and how we do that in a secure manner and uh what they're also working very closely with um miss jeunesse on is setting up a dashboard um so that as the complaints are filed on our web page ms jeunesse and the five information managers will get a notification that a complaint has been filed and we will immediately be able to
074start processing that complaint through the the process that we're putting together now the written process and that dashboard um we'll be able to go to for regular updates and tracking um we are also then able to and and that one's ready pretty much almost ready to go for our use then it is also working on taking that dashboard and reconfiguring it um so it'll look the same but you know like officers names will be redacted or witnesses names will be redacted so that it can be put on for public view so that way anybody in the public can click on the dashboard and see that complaint number 65 is under review by the information managers or complaint 72 is pending police review um so that'll be a regular update system the third thing um which
075will be a part of our web page is as we do our final documents the pdfs of those final documents can be placed on our web page so that anybody can go and see what were our findings for complaint 75 and those um if need be will be redacted um but um as far as officers names will be redacted and and and something i know we've spoken about this before but this comes into importance when we talk about what our final document is going to look like so when a complaint goes in directly to the police department ickpoc is not informed of the complaintant's name that is kept confidential due to victims rights so we never see the complainant's name or contact information or anything like that so when the final document comes we don't
076necessarily have a complainant to send it to um whereas if the complaint is filed through pickpock i know that you know dr lisa jackson is the complaint and i can send her a letter saying here are our findings so in the case of when we do not have the complainant's name what we are looking at doing is doing basically an internal memorandum so the the information managers assigned to the review of the complaint will do a memorandum to the full commission stating what our findings are and then it'll like i said that document will be made into a pdf and it'll be put onto our webpage now if that complaint for complaint number 20-035 is out there and they know that that was their file their case number or their complaint number they can go
077on and see what our findings were and decide if they want to contact us or not so that's one of the reasons why we're looking at um looking at being able to put that up there so that the public can see what our findings are for each of the the um complaint reviews and i am excited to say is i think we're we have reviewed all of the 2020 complaints and we are at the point where we're putting together our findings for them now and just to clarify i know we have talked about this before but um there is no point at which the complaint's name even though we know it would be put on the public dashboard unless they have consented to do that so just because we know who they are does not
078mean that we assume necessarily that they want that information made public we would check with them before doing that and they certainly have the option to have their name redacted as well as well as any other identifying information that might make it obvious who they are um so that people don't worry about retaliation for example so just want to i i know that might have been obvious to everyone but i just wanted to make sure we clarified that um council member room laurie did you have your hand up and put it down or was it up from before i apologize it did i mean these are always good conversations i always have thoughts that come up um will will this dashboard have kind of an archive uh oh yeah information people go back and yeah
079right now our our complaints on our dashboard that come in directly to ikpak are running complaints so we could go back and see a complaint that came in in 2020 and while it's showing that it's under review by the commission will it be aging so it can give folks like uh real-time information if this has been under review for 64 days or 91 days or it should show the date when something moves so for example the police always have that first and so it may have the date that it goes to police and then you could see oh it's been there for x number of days and then oh the police have finished their review we're beginning ours and you could see the date that happened and then you could say oh eggpot has been
080looking at this for x days so we should be able to have like a time component in there as well at least very least people should will be able to tell where is it in the process it makes me like because there's an interim step right so so the police look at it and do their investigation then we communicate with the police and so that's a process that happens to happen before we can even start to you know come to any conclusions about what happened and so that's a an interim step even between us sort of um you know coming to any conclusions about it and so we could delineate all those different sort of steps in the process so people know where things are oh questions okay commissioner hoffman i just want to add
081to what uh commissioner dora was saying is also we started having oh we're going to have uh meetings among the managers prior to meeting with the uh the chief and the deputies and the uh um pss literate so we we we have more of information knowledge about our cases and to speak with some degree of unity and uniformity about our reviews and of the data videos and texts etc so we are taking that as another step to at least familiarize ourselves as managers with our cases just trying to streamline the process a bit is is what that is um so that we can get through more cases a little bit more quickly but part of what slows us down is that the process is continually being revised and revisited and so you would think that
082we've been in existence for two years and this would be clear but we did not have to reinvent a wheel but rather we had to adopt the many models we had from other cities and other municipalities and other oversight agencies to make it work for ann arbor and that's been quite challenging today we just found out about another piece of information that we will now begin having access to for the first time in 2021 and so um i understand that it can be frustrating to feel as if nothing is moving um but that is not for lack of trying on our part um to be clear there is a lot of energy um spent on trying to make sure that we got all the information that we need to do our job and that is
083continuing to happen um if there are no other questions comments thoughts we could talk about the one piece of new business we have which is um the epoch retreat report and um uh it participated in a strategic planning retreat with councilmember song and many of you present here where we worked on some of the goals for the upcoming year but also you know goals going forward as well you know sort of some short and long term goals and we wrote a report so um we commissioner carter was was kind enough to take that on and um i think we all added some parts to it and she wrote a draft of the report of the retreat because we did get some inquiries from the public about that about what we did and what we accomplished
084and so um i do not know if you want me to share my screen of that and if other commissioners want some input on that if you would like me to email it around and then um have you all give comments back and then we can publish that final version we can we do that in a number of ways what is your preference i i know that at least one draft was emailed to everyone with a request for comments and um there were some comments that were given um and and we can do that process again if nobody has any revisions to it we can we can email this last draft around and everybody and if you have nothing to add we can just put it on our website so people can see what we
085did um i can just briefly summarize um there was brainstorming about how to fulfill the mission that we have um we talked about barriers to doing our work um how we are learning best practices and being trained in this area thinking about future goals more community outreach um increasing the awareness of the commission within the community making sure it is clear what this commission does and what this commission does not do um talking a little tiny bit about the pandemic and the challenges that that's posed um there are certainly some opportunities that have come because of pandemic as well such as our ability now to remotely access information that we would have all had to troop into the the justice center to sort of watch body cam footage all at once look at pieces of
086paper that we could not copy or have copies of and now we're able to get secure information and all information managers can review body cam footage at 3am if they need to at 2pm if they need to so that is a blessing of the the pandemic but um you know that we kind of talked about what the vision was for this commission so i i i can certainly email it to commissioners and council members and you all can um anybody who was present and you wanted to add to it you can do so and then we can publish this final version on our website if you like okay give us a deadline you need information by when in a week um hold on i have a calendar to my right it looks like i'm looking
087out from the space but um maybe we could have it back by um november 4th commissioner ahmad did you have a question um do we have to make a motion to agree on the uh the draft or the final version of the summary of our retreat or or because it's just information we can have it over there just i want to make sure um if there is if we have emotion does this mean that it has more of legal standing versus just information i think it is just an informational piece we had some inquiries about what did you guys do in your strategic planning and so commissioner carter was kind enough to kind of write that up just write up an informational report about what happened um and i just want to make sure that
088it reflects everybody who was there and participated and that people agree on what it is and then um we can share that with the public so i'm not sure we need a motion for that but i mean there there there could be a scenario in which she just wrote it up and it was just put on the website i'm okay with any uh way we present this material all right well i will send it to everyone i was in this last draft to everyone and you all can give comment um by november 4th if you're able and then we can get it up on the website and the last thing we have to talk about um report from committees we haven't had any standing committee meetings with the exception of the group of people who
089are led by commissioner walton who have been interviewing applicants to our um who wish to join our commission and so um we had um lots of scheduling issues but we have um interviewed um the the first round of people and um we have currently three openings and we have interviewed four people and so when commissioner walton returns we will collectively make a decision about those three individuals whom we'd like to ask our council members to present to the larger city council so we have completed step one the hardest longest part of that process and interviewing everyone um each candidate had some really interesting perspectives and and would bring value to our commission so our we have a good we have good trouble in that we have um to select from three of those four people
090but that's a good problem to have um and we anticipate that um we'll be able to net make the next step um take the next step in that process in the next week or so so just an update because i know many of you have been wondering about that and so we expect to bring on three new commissioners at once and we've also been working hard at having a formal orientation we are very lucky to have commissioner walton who is an hr expert and she has standardized our interview process um she has um questions have been constructed by everybody we all had a chance to weigh in on questions they were sent to applicants in advance so they could prepare thoughtful responses to them and um and so the dialogue that we had was was
091we could compare apples to apples and so that was very helpful and then we will standardize the process for asking council to consider our selections but we're looking forward to having some new members and um for them to bring their their expertise to this group council member song so um that won't be in time for next monday's meeting though are you are you aiming for the second meeting in november i think we're going to have to because um we had um for one candidate we had three uh people interviewing that person for two we had all four and then for the third person we only had three so we have to come together and make sure that we're all on the same page about um trying to evaluate which three we'd like to ask you
092all to put forward um and so we'll do that when commissioner walton returns okay we will do it quickly though like we're prepped and ready to go as soon as that conversation happens we promise because you know we need the help okay great yeah if we if we can put it on the agenda a week before yeah so i will text you guys i will let you guys know as soon as we um get to that step and also when i know when she's coming back i may be able to anticipate when we can do it even before we've done the last step so i may be able to give you guys a heads up even before we have gotten there i wouldn't be able to tell you the names but i would be able
093to tell you hey by this date we'll know and then you guys can get it on your agenda that would be fantastic because we do would like to be as expeditious as possible um councilmember rumlawi yeah thank you uh and thanks for the committee that's doing the work um has as you know i've been kind of uh knocking on the door asking about that for for quite some time um i assume i shouldn't assume but i i will ask have all these applicants applied uh through the city's uh process and that okay and um are they all residents of ann arbor are they gonna require require a seven vote uh requirement if they're outside of nr they actually may all be residents okay and um now the the the idea and the practice and before
094was for the council liaisons for this commission and the human rights commission to take a look at the names before proceeding to counsel with them so um as eager as i am to present those in sponsor that list of names i would like the privilege if if i could to to be able to look at those uh perhaps as soon as possible before it gets sent to council you guys can do that as long as you need to we just want to get it in your hands the subset of the four the four council members uh that would be um i think very helpful for us to see ahead of time um i know we want to fill these positions as fast as possible but i do need some time to look right so so
095we prefer that everyone apply through the city process um we would prefer for all of our processes to be equal it would be helpful if people would go through the city process and answer the questions that were developed by the human rights commission we've tweaked them just a tiny bit to make them current so we're not asking for example what the what you might hope that this co commission would accomplish in its first two years since we are now two years old we're asking about the next two years um just to to make that current um but but we find it useful for people to actually answer those questions and so we would prefer that people not kind of skip that step that they would apply by completing the application online and all of these
096applicants have done that and so you guys have access to that system you can pull them and then um the questions that we asked were actually iterations of those questions that were on the application and we just um discussed um those things with them so um you all can can look at those applicants and we will give you the three that we'd like to put forward we'll let you know who those are um as soon as we make a decision and we will do that as soon as humanly possible we're trying to be very um as professional about that as possible and we're trying to standardize the process so that it happens the same for everybody else going forward as well and so that we could answer intelligent questions about why we thought one person
097might be more appropriate than another person although each of the candidates that we interviewed in this round would benefit us and we may be in the lucky position of having a person waiting in the wings um when um you know a person rolls off this commission which would be a luxury but um a happy one to have so um but but we want to make sure that we we follow a standardized process so that everybody has everyone is given the same thoughtful consideration and we have a record of why we made the decisions that we made and so we're going to do that and as soon as we get to that step we will let you guys know and you all can make your deliberations as the four and then you can decide when to
098take it to the bigger group and certainly you can ask us any questions and we'll be able to answer them um because we all have lots of copious notes and we you know we were really clear about documenting um uh notes for every respondent so that we could also standardize that process so okay so i think um uh commissioner hoffman yeah just before we finish that um also i would like to to inform the rest of the commissioners as well as the uh liaisons about we few of us had finished the three trauma sessions training that we just finished this past thursday on using trauma-informed approach to create culturally inclusive and safe communities um the slides for those sessions would be available for all of us as commissioners and also would be probably available on
099the website for uh community at large to to look into if this is uh permissible kind of thing in addition we had a wonderful facilitator a professional who took us through this process of training us and thinking about trauma-informed um responses um from policing but also having us examine our own um positions and our own biases um which was um informative and challenging and um but i think a growth opportunity for everyone um and and and was well worth the time spent we did three several sessions several weeks apart we had homework in between everyone who participated worked really really hard um some of the work was intensely personal much of it was challenging but it challenged us to see things from multiple points of view um and and and and so it was a
100lot of work but it was very very helpful to us and it helped us think about how we need to do our work and take into consideration the community and the officers who are policing in the community so it was it was often tough commissioner carter unmute myself yeah if commissioner often hadn't brought it up i i was going to um because i think it was a really good and i'm not one for touchy-feely kinds of things um so uh but that the whole issue of trauma informed um took on a sort of a different meaning in that everybody involved has some kind of trauma um the community and the police officers and we were challenged to see what personally can we bring um to the processes that we are going through and so i
101would uh encourage those commissioners who were not able to to uh participate to to go through those materials um because they were it was a very good uh session so three very intense three sessions three two hour or something sessions yeah it was it was a good uh program yeah we had a very experienced facilitator as you can manage uh imagine trying to navigate taking all of us with our different experiences through it um and she managed that well she has done that before she works often with police officers and she that training probably stood her in good stead when she had to work with the group of us and so it was it was very very useful thank you so much commissioner hoffman for bringing that up any other communications any other public comment
102um denise any callers dr carpiac any parting words thank you for hanging out with us for so long i feel like i have nothing he just like drafted you into this this group it's probably hard enough that you have to work with us on traffic stop data but now you've had to hang out for the whole meeting thank you though we appreciate you um thanks for having me denise no one at public comment okay um is there a motion to adjourn then during our october meeting is there a second yeah all in favor aye aye any opposed all right we are adjourned um so my you