001um it actually looks like you are okay well i can't reach william leslie it looks like the call-in phone number is in the meeting invitation which was sent on the email since i couldn't raise him [Music] welcome to the ann arbor human rights commission um let's begin with uh introduction of our members um diana you want to start hi i'm diana cass commissioner aisha hi i'm a shigazi commissioner uh linda linda winkler commissioner pam pam dent commissioner um judah judah garber commissioner um elizabeth i'm elizabeth nelson i'm a council city council liaison and um julie julie grant i'm the other city council liaison did i get everybody out there except william william william is a guest william you want to introduce yourself just did quickly i'm william hampton i am not a city council member
002okay and i'm leslie stamber and i'm the chair um we're going to start this meeting as we always do with public comment and oh and heather i'm caught heather why don't you introduce yourself and tell people the um this call-in number and the rules all right um i'm heather cook i am from the city of ann arbor human resources department um and i am the guest um admin for tonight as you could say and anybody wishing to speak um during public comment um there's actually two phone numbers available to call um the first one is 877-853-5247 the second phone number option is 888.788.0099 and you will need to enter the meeting id which is 971-0416-6913 anybody who wishes to speak at public comment will have five minutes to speak and leslie i think we can
003just give it a couple minutes to see if anybody calls in and it'll show up on my queue okay fine so it doesn't look like we have anybody there but i can definitely let you know if anybody okay let's move on okay the first thing on our agenda is we're very happy to have william hampton who is the president of the ann arbor branch of the naacp and he is here to give us to share with us the official statement of the ann arbor branch of the naacp on criminal justice improvements and race william take it do i have to unmute myself we can hear you is he unmuted um we heard you when you spoke earlier i think you need to unmute yourself you do need to unmute yourself william if you wiggle your
004mouse across your screen there should be a mute button in the lower left corner oh no nope do you see anything if you move your mouse across the screen does any is there a toolbar that pops up at the bottom my mine is actually at the top right of my screen if you click on the three blue dots william on the top right of your picture it should give you an option to mute or unmute yourself um we should be able to no i guess we can unmute if you whatever you did earlier worked because we heard you i wonder if he hears us in the bottom corner it will pop up a blue thing that says unmute so there's the little microphone under your own picture i are you talking to me or william
005no i was just so either either way you can unmute by using the mute along the toolbar or there's usually a red microphone with a line through it and if you touch that in your own screen it should also come up with a blue yes mute or unmute option or if you have a laptop you can press the space bar and temporarily unmute he still muted i'm hitting the button on my end that says ask to unmute and i don't know if it's popping up for any if it's giving him anything um hi can you hear us william i don't know can you hear me now yes well i don't have a screen so i had to guess with that oh i have no screen presence on my on my uh computer we can see
006you we can hear you too you look great yeah that's awful nice of you to say thank you so much i guess the first thing i want to say is thank you so much for finding some time for me to speak to you guys um my fraternity brother from alpha phi alpha fraternity incorporated was supposed to be here with me however he has forgotten that april 12th is his anniversary with his wife mary so so he's not here obviously right but he did send a statement for me to read this short statement i'm going to read it to you that's okay sure all right okay sick good evening my name is marion hui and i've been invited to this meeting by my good friend and fraternity brother brother william b hampton as a member of
007behalf of fraternity incorporated and the annabel branch of the naacp now the reason why why he was invited was because there's a memorandum of understanding on this project between alpha phi f fraternity incorporated and the animal branch of the naacp he says in a strange irony uh my relationship with alpha 5 actually began as an as an act of housing discrimination at the beginning of my senior year at u of m a high school friend of mine and i reunited and planned to rent a room together we filled out the application and were told to return in one week when we returned the apartment manager told us that the owner had determined that the room would not be rented to a negro and a jew we were upset but since i had neither time nor
008resources i told ron to find another roommate and i sought accommodations in a house rented by alpha brothers on oakland street it turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me my relationship with alpha alpha was c minute and eventually led to my meeting william in what has become a lifelong relationship i didn't complain although ron and i discussed it but i wonder if there are still those without time or resources as i was forced to seek alternative uh also facebook with discrimination today ron and i had to sense that others were isolated in cases like this obviously this is probably true otherwise commissions like yours probably would not exist this work assures that a citizen that he or she has access to someone to provide those resources in a
009timely manner so they will help keep us as close to equal as possible that's his statement so i'm going to read to you the official statement from the annabel branch of the naacp can you still hear me okay yes still have no screen presence but that's okay here we go from my perspective our most recent ann arbor naacp meetings have been more revealing than ever people seem to feel comfortable regarding their private thoughts and feelings for each person who shared who shared either at our meetings or directly to me i am forever grateful i have crafted an official statement from our branch which includes thoughts along with information extracted from our recent meetings feedback from the membership along with a review from our legal redress committee period each of them contributed to the formation of
010this statement our police departments are commonly known as paramilitary organizations some estimates state that approximately 20 percent of all police officers are military veterans it has been shared with me that at least one study indicates these ex-military veterans are two or three times more likely to deploy their firearms than non-military officers the numbers even higher for those who participated in active military service is this something that we should contribute to continue to embrace fire police departments it is our opinion that we need change in our entire criminal justice system our statement intended to promote long-term procedural changes and not simply one time only consideration is as follows the animal branch of the naacp believes there should be widespread transparency in our criminal justice system especially as it relates to race you have you may have
011noticed that all of the recent um high-profile incidents happened quite some time ago so that's not exactly transparent it is our position that negative background information for each of our public servants should be available for review we believe that any negative incidents including written warnings verbal warnings suspensions mandatory leaves complaints logs lodged against all law enforcement to be available for review and or action it is our contention that bad police officers should not be dismissed from one location only to reappear in another jurisdiction the tamir rice shooting in cleveland ohio comes the map he never became a a teenager he was only 12 years old because of the actions of an unqualified law enforcement officer who had been dismissed from another jurisdiction still it took over two and a half years for that one officer
012to be fighting we further believe that laws which allow for so-called citizens arrest should be reviewed to allow for community input right now i'm i'm thinking about amman arbury his death while jogging peacefully in a georgian neighborhood accordingly all know knock rules policies warrants were where presidents should be reviewed and are eliminated who could ever forget the horror of brianna taylor's last few moments living in louisville kentucky stand your ground policies should be reviewed for race biased potential let us not forget george zimmerman's involvement in trayvon martin's death and his subsequent acquittal for that crime it seems to us that vascular neck restraints commonly known as choke holes should be eliminated many friends and relatives have lost their lives because of this so-called necessary technique we further believe that all agencies within counties and municipalities
013should be reviewed for diversity makeup all race related cases including those that have police connections which have resulted in death or injury should have an outside review police unions which i support our support union should be continuously evaluated for potential bias or misconduct additionally it seems to me that police union contracts should be scrutinized more frequently than they presently are collaborations between law enforcement prosecutors and judges should have review mechanisms which includes citizen input it appears also that local coroner's officers may sometimes also be complicit in the death resulting from police involvement in some instances there should always be a mechanism for review but by other independent event evaluations all of this may seem time consuming but getting it right is more important than time served time saved qualified protective immunity for police officers although
014i understand why it's there should be revisited with change in math i am told that this might result in higher insurance premiums for police officers but we believe it is more important to have lives saved than saving a few dollars we demand accountability from our law enforcement officers especially whenever when it relates to a life-ended prematurity it is not enough for law enforcement persons to take a life and simply say i thought this was reasonable at the time it seems to us if we continue to normalize bad behavior it comes across in the same manner as us giving consent for that bad behavior the animal branch of the naacp will continue our partnership with the annabelle public schools to educate and to recognize our children in addition we will be persistent in our collaborations with
015other entities for the public good lastly we will we will vote and we will always work for the election of people who share our value by the way it pleased me that a good infusion of diversity was added to a presidential campaign recently some of this may be may appear unreachable in terms of goals however i believe that if we reach low goals the value of that success will be limited it should be our ultimate goals to make law enforcement better than it is right now and to remove law enforcement officers the u.s there may be from the streets which we walk on i believe that a more just and inclusive and equitable america is still possible we appreciate the changes which have been made in our country these changes include but are not limited
016to removal of confederate statues the names of bridges which bear names such as edmund pettus who was a senior officer in the confederate army and a grand dragon in the clubhouse clan that bridge name might be changed anja mayama's image has been removed boston has declared racism as a public health emergency and the governor of the state of west virginia is introducing legislation to make juneteenth a paid holland holiday for that state these are but a few recent changes but we seem seem to be moving in the right direction we have much farther to go everybody should be against racism in response to black to the black lives matter campaign we have recently heard that the retort all lives matter well everybody knows that right it is correct that all life should matter but it
017is it can't ever be true if black lives are marginalized therefore it pleases me that my own city of ann arbor even though they've received some pushback is now proudly flying a black lives matter flag over city hall our truly disadvantaged population who built this country will not go silently away ever again african americans who went from 100 illiterate to nearly 100 percent literate in one generation after the civil war will remain diligent in the pursuit of total equality right now african americans are the most economically underserved subgroup in america we are also per capita more likely to be victimized by the misconduct from our criminal justice system none of this is by accident we have been patient we have waited too long and suffered too much to continue to believe what the reverend dr
018martin luther king jr referred to as the tranquilizing drug of gradualism incredibly this statement was delivered by him well over one half century ago we believe it is too late for us to take one step at a time everything should be geared towards immediate change we are watching we will continue to observe and we will always be willing to fight for positive change thank you so much thank you there questions for william we have a copy of of what he's just read and it'll be um it'll be in the legistar it'll be in our minutes we'll attach it to our minutes um i have a question william hi it's linda winkler henry's cousin how are you hey hey funds his cousin how are you doing good um are you reading this statement um at an
019icpac meeting also one more time sorry are you planning to read this statement at the independent police oversight commission meeting i am but i wanted i read this statement at juneteenth uh i've got several entities that i'm going to read it at including the police oversight commission oh great okay so as a lawyer what advice do you have for me on this statement oh my goodness i mean you've always given me good advice before right linda yeah yeah well yeah i mean you make a lot of good reasonable demands requests and i i hope we you know if there's any particular way in which the human rights commission can help you uh specific specific things you can think of that we can do i hope you let us know well we have one member of
020the human rights commission who's a member of the naacp and it would be nice if we had more i'm not gonna call any names but uh you guys always welcome and collaboration is always better than competition when we're fighting for the same cause right and we should read his statement and and see if we can identify something we can do we can help anybody else well thank you very much for coming and you've given us a lot to think about we appreciate it thank you thank you okay minutes time to look at our minutes and get agreement on it get them right and uh pass them is everybody everybody has a copy any comments about the minutes nothing in that case we can uh entertain a motion to approve i moved to approve the minutes
021from uh july's meeting second june second yeah i second that thank you all in favor hi hi hi hi minutes approved hey leslie after this meeting will you email me who created the minute so i can make sure that the final version is put in legislature created this min these minutes yeah for the um the july meeting okay i i'm i guess i'm going to who oh you mean the minutes the the minutes from last meeting yeah i'm taking the bunch for this game yes uh i've got them okay in fact kelly had no he doesn't i'll send them to you okay thank you sure um asian community outreach aisha hi everyone so um you know i've still had the president of the asian american united organizations which is the kind of an umbrella organization
022over various asian american organizations in the nation contact us about doing something around anti-asian american sentiment and also kind of just taking a stance around racism in general they want to know what we're going to do how we're going to do it so um i've invited them to come and give a testimony at the next meeting where one of the president of united asian american organizations is going to kind of share her upbringing in ann arbor and what she's really working towards and how she sees us being able to collaborate um so she'll be attending the next meeting that would be good are you gonna talk at all about the meeting you and i had with um the initials i can't remember may pack oh yeah um no leslie and i know it's a difficult
023one to remember leslie and i had a meeting with the chair of the governor's uh commission for asian american affairs which is called the michigan asian pacific american affairs commission maypac and we talked to tashiki masuka and denise grimm and they also asked like you know you guys have a huge number of asian americans in ann arbor and what are kind of what are you guys doing um and we had some discussion around what we could do and collaborating with them i think it's also important for us to think about how we would connect it to a larger kind of strategy around racism and us taking a stand against racism and what that campaign may look like for various groups um so yeah it was a good meeting though we're still kind of talking back
024and forth about what we can do it was interesting that one of the things they focused on was um getting getting asian americans to answer the fill out the census and they've been very successful yeah which is something that we you know you don't usually think about that as a human rights issue but in fact it is and we might it might be wise of us to put out something that reminds people how important it is to do that especially people minority groups because it is the basis of all kinds of things like aid like everything like like how uh allocation of resources yeah i think something for us to think about doing something around um the census is coming to an end i believe it's at the end of august or they may have
025extended it because of covet i don't know if anyone knows i don't know they they actually cut it a month oh so whether i mean somebody doesn't want us to know how many people there are yeah no it's it's it's a month or so shorter than it was planned yeah i think around equity issues in general you know having people accurately counted kind of shows the breadth and the and the diversity of economic class and status within population so they found that like the more asian americans respond to the census the more clear it is that there were high levels of poverty especially among chinese americans and indian americans so i think it is something that we can think about incorporating into a larger strategy around racism and stuff like that yeah the other thing
026i we learned is that they don't have uh right now they don't have a standardized kind of um complaint handling and we talked about sharing that information um but they really don't have very much right now they're really just getting off the ground i think is that true i share my i think when it comes to documenting incidences of hate yeah i think there's there's always been a fight at the state level to ask like state entities to desegregate asian american data so that people can figure out like are certain religious groups being targeted more or people of certain you know nationalities being targeted more maybe that might be south asian over east asian or vice versa um but instead because of the way the census is categorized and has been for a long time
027data collection hasn't always caught up with that so everyone's kind of luck together so it makes response efforts and also makes like where money is allocated difficult to do in a strategic way so they've had a fragmented kind of complaint i guess a fragmented response on how to collect even incidences of hate like the state has one entity where you can call in a number department of i think hate crimes or something um under the attorney general then city of ann arbor i believe has one different universe i mean they just they're not all talking to each other well every every police force and lots of other agencies report into the federal statistics that are produced every year [Music] but no one does it very well yeah and some some of these entities don't want
028you to they don't want to be known as having hate crimes and so they call them other things and that's been a problem for a long time yeah yeah absolutely so that individual will be coming to our next meeting to kind of just talk about like you know what this means to them and how we may be able to tap into this any questions thank you thank you yeah that's that's um a community we we need to work with more closely i think and this gives us an opportunity um just a few comments about things that are going on that you might want updates on the aapoa collective bargaining mediation process is working sort of um there was a meeting i think last mediation last a week or two ago and there is going to
029be one i think next week but it's just so you know it's progressing and no one can talk about it so but but i'm assuming people are wondering how that's going julie do you anybody else sit on i don't sit on the budget and labor committees so i haven't been as looped into that so it's it's not something we're getting regular updates on by any means yeah and i don't just you can just on going you you were looking like you had something that i don't know no just like we're waiting just like your way that that that was that look like yeah yeah we're just reassuring you that it is happening yeah yeah oh no of course but these things take longer than everyone wants them to take right everything does especially in this
030environment um another thing that is uh that is going slowly but going is the trespass work we're doing we're meeting with i think four people from um the community police oversight commission um and one person from the community now uh who used to be on the oversight commission and isn't anymore and there are um linda and i and judah and pam i think on our our side representing um human rights commission and we're we've pretty much got a a list of things that we want to talk about with the uh chief of police and the probably city attorney maybe the city manager the city administrator when you get one um about trespass you know so we're zeroing in some people are showing it around to shelters and to housing facilities etc to see if we've
031missed anything and when we will always miss something this will probably always be a you know something in progress but we are moving on it and it's and it's slow too because we can't get together with the it would be nice to do that in person but we may have to do it virtually like everything else is happening just so you know it's we're still doing it um the next thing on our agenda is the fair chance ordinance and it is we'll see but it we think it's about ready to go so let's look it over together and see if there's anything that needs to be discussed has ever have people seen it and read it do you have any issues about it or any questions about it or have any thoughts about it this
032is something by the way that linda did a great deal of work on and so did margaret and we also had some similar ordinances from other cities to look at and this is what we came up with thoughts i just want to give keita credit too she sort of directed us to rightly and oakland and was it seattle i can't even remember now and we sort of we use the oakland model pretty much i just sort of cut and pasted a lot of what they had to say and and then margaret cleaned it up is cute is still here she hasn't been here i thought i saw her thank you keita was going to talk to um bear housing about to to get local i i look an idea locally how important this would be
033for our area um but i haven't heard from them keita by the way has um is recovering from um an accident a car accident and so she's not not totally feeling up to herself so this this is something that what we hope to do is if you approve it you're proving it tentatively as a as a working copy we're going to send it around to some outside people who are interested in this area certainly going to send it around to aaron numa who brought this to our attention in the first place jennifer hall who is um in our housing public i don't know whatever she is um washington housing alliance i think um [Music] pam kish from fair housing is there and if there are any other people who you think we ought to pass
034this by please let me know are you ready to vote on it are you is there anything you want to discuss at all before we do no then let's entertain a motion to approve it at least as a working copy i'll move to approve it as a working copy i mean i don't think we're actually voting on anything so because i think we'll need some sort of resolution to go with it we will we will okay and there may be some changes from you know when these people see it but but i'm assuming that's going to happen at the next meeting so we have a motion is there a second i second i can second thank you all in favor aye aye opposed okay let's go on to conversion therapy another ordinance a lot of
035work has been put into it by again wonderful linda and uh and and margaret and it is it is we i think it's better than any other ones we've seen so far um but it does draw on a lot of other ordinances in other cities can i say something please so first of all margaret hasn't actually she she worked with us initially but she hasn't really weighed in on this particular draft which um so we really just sent it to her yet was it yesterday or the day before yesterday so she's she will get back to us on that um from the last one which you might have looked at uh at the last meeting we didn't really discuss it the things that have the main thing that's changed substantively is that leslie contacted some
036some people in florida and got a lot of information and the city of tallahassee bans conversion therapy not only for minors but also for vulnerable adults which when you think about it makes sense um at least to us when we were talking about it so we added it and we the definition is drawn from michigan state law which you know basically defines um here i can read it to you the definition that we have in the working draft refers to the state law which defines vulnerable adults as an individual age 18 or over who because of age developmental disability mental illness or physical disability requires supervision or personal care or lacks the personal and social skills required to live independently also covers adults in foster care facilities and adults defined in the social welfare act
037which are adults in need of protective services uh who are uh let's see vulnerable persons suspected being or believed to be abused neglected or exploited so in general people who are not independent uh rely on other people and if those other people were to choose to give them you know to send them to a therapist a conversion therapist they wouldn't have protection against that of course somebody else would have to probably be aware of it and report it to us but anyway we just we threw it in there for now on thinking that it was worth talking about none of the other cities in michigan have that they only they're restricted to minors and all the information we have uh we've gotten from the law students and the other fellow we were dealing with who's
038a professor of public health um they were all just talking about minors so we haven't done any extensive looking into this so does anybody have any thoughts on that piece of it i think it's an improvement i like it good i think they need it one of the things i found out from talking to people in florida who i sort of got to by you know people referring me to people who referred me to people but florida had a had a a couple a lot of cases and it became very visible in their newspaper and it so they came from this in in a different way although i've been some people think that they're we have a lot of cases too and we just don't know about them uh but so far no one has
039been able to put the finger on it but it it's really a serious problem and and maybe more more visible than we know more more prevalent than we know um and what's interesting what i heard from them in florida was that they had they had a two 200 or 250 dollar penalty but they and it wasn't even a criminal penalty but it it scared people and they left the ones they knew about at least left quickly and that makes me think that the penalty that we have which is now it's criminal and it's 500 tops so i suppose it's as high it can be as high as 500 per incident right um will be enough to to frighten people off well i remember we're talking about making it a criminal misdemeanor so it would be
040punishable by i think it was up to 93 days in jail or and or a fine yeah that's right yeah um the other question aisha raised correctly was we probably need to take a closer look at the definition of of providers or license providers the definition that i used was the one that stephen postema had put in a draft way back when when margaret was gone um and it refers to to michigan what is it the michigan public health code the licensing code and it covers a lot of different things including trainees and people under supervision and but the question is does it cover you know other sort of certified practitioners and i don't know but i kind of think that the authority for this whole act comes from um the ability of the city
041and state to regulate practitioners and so if you go outside to say you know like for instance if you had a a religious person who was certified by their church to provide counseling the first amendment would prob would would probably prevent us from regulating that um so it gets tricky and i think that's probably why stephen postema used referred to the state law um on licensing but that's another thing that we need to talk to margaret about and i asked her in an email so let's see so it is almost ready and when we get those things dealt with with margaret we're hoping to send this around also and i should give you a list of people who we know to send it to and you might want to add people to that as well
042um you didn't have your hand raised here okay um but uh okay are we are we sad i think we should just wait to hear back from margaret circulate another draft when after she weighs in i mean aisha diana leslie and i can can see what margaret says talk about it and then share it i guess so makes sense okay um what okay if that is true the only thing that's a process question um just in terms of of when you're hoping for us to bring this to council so you want to approve it circulate it and then get feedback or draft circulate approve bring to council yeah we need a we need a better draft first okay sorry drop draft after we talk to margaret circulate uh then well maybe run maybe run by
043hrc get their tentative approval like we just did on fair housing fair chance housing i guess and then and then circulated to whoever might be interested i know like the jim toy center for example right people like michigan equality and human rights campaign who have all both asked for our copy just to see because they may have some changes they may they may have some good arguments about ways we could make this stronger also the law students who helped us and the public health professor we should we should probably include them okay just want to make sure i'm not neglecting my duties that's all yeah okay cool not yet no no just let me just let us know what right thank you yeah okay the last thing i have on the agenda is um the
044non-discrimination ordinance and if you remember the last meeting um the question was asked about the 180-day limit um where the the ordinance says that we can that somebody should file an ordinance 180 days no longer than 180 days from the time it happened or the time they would have they should have known it happened um and that after that beyond 180 days from the first time they can't file anymore and we can't look at it um i remember that keita made a case for um that it should be longer or that we should at least have a way to um to do a review a review of the incident even if we can't do an investigation and the full human rights commission complaint handling that we should sometimes you want to learn from it or
045sometimes you want to at least have let the person air it and record the pain of the incident that this would help is anybody having any feelings about this issue i think we should wait until i did since keita raised it uh should we wait for her for her to be here or no would be fine with me it's it's it's pretty is that okay with everybody else i said we could you could talk about it at this meeting and that's why yeah i was going to say the same thing because i'd like to hear her flesh it out because my inclination would not be to extend it or at least not indefinitely because there's a lot of reasons why you don't want to have something open forever but i'd like to hear her uh
046i'd like to rather have a discussion okay well then let's let's i'll leave it until the next meeting um is there any new business or any any new business we have we should deal with if not we can go on to commissioner communications and i sure you had something you wanted to announce uh it's not really an announcement and i wanted to share that you know i'm um in charge of facilitating a virtual discussion for university of michigan school social work and it's open to the school broadly and the public on uh racial equity in washington county and they're asking for you know links to historic documents policies and they've also asked for work that the human rights commission does so i'm gonna create kind of a document of resources that we can share with
047participants but i just wanted to see if anyone has any sort of resources they want to share something that they think i should mention uh do let me know okay and i will make sure that you have the non-discrimination ordinance and the link to our website and our flyer about how to file a claim um yeah yeah that would be explanation stuff like that okay thank you anything else that we should deal with because this is it's early but we could we could say good we could end this meeting quickly nothing well does anybody want to make a motion to adjourn i move to adjourn the meeting second second all in favor aye aye thank you folks thank you bye thanks you