001good evening everyone i call the september 20th 2022 school board meeting to order it is 607 pm we are in conference room c of the fisher administration building at 12121 west north avenue dr means please call him mr info here mr lee here mr meyer here dr jessup anger here dr hoy here mr phillips here is willis here um thank you everyone for being here tonight um we are really this is meant to be kind of an informal conversation where we're working through the mou between the wauwatosa school district and the police department of the wauwatosa this is something that i know i talked to dr bernal about several like last time i was born president of saying something had come up and i had asked kind of about this document uh dr means uh
002started on this with chief mcgillis several months ago and we've been continuing conversations we had a meeting scheduled that we needed to cancel for very reasonable reasons in july um the board was not able to take this up because of our vote needed to focus uh during the month of august on our strategic plan so that that was prepared before the beginning of the year and then uh wanted to make sure we came back to it uh right away as soon as we could reschedule in september so we are here to kind of just work through some key details um alem and i asked dr means to kind of do a a setting up of the work that's been done what the processes look like clear community interest in this topic um so we can
003kind of get a sense of what why why is an mou a thing how is it important uh what does it all mean uh how does it fit with the broader scope of things uh and then we'll just kind of talk through and continue working through this tonight not up there's no board action tonight so we're not approving an ammo or you're not approving mou we're kind of talking through it my plan is to give the board each board member if they have things that they'd like to discuss we'll give 10 minutes uh to each to start and then you may pass this may be something that you want to hear from your colleagues first and then we'll do a final opportunity i'm sure uh chief mcgillison um sergeant [Music] moral um want to make
004sure i got the designation correct um we'll uh have some things we'll talk through as well and the goal will just be to take off all the things um kind of get to a place and then uh go back and do all the word smithing that needs to happen and then ultimately uh the goal will be for this to end up back on an agenda for board action at a future meeting so that's our goal tonight um this is kind of like getting to watch how the sausage is made um may not be particularly exciting and probably not particularly explosive or anything else this is just public servants trying to figure out how to how to get things to work well together um [Music] gentlemen do you want to come up to the to draw
005us jesus is a overview and backdrop the school districts has a long standing relationship with the wauwatosa police department we have a good working relationship um in terms of documentation there is a letter from then chief weber uh in september of 2020 2014 outlining the relationship and what the sro or school resource officer process would look like in most school districts there is a memorandum of understanding or mou between the school district and the police department and we're going to kind of unpack all of these different things this evening but the expenditure um around this relationship is 400 000 um right now we've been utilizing fund 80 that is called the community service fund to pay for our our outstanding service from our school resource officers the community service fund is different than fund 10
006which is the general fund where we pay for teachers and books and so on and we'll we can talk about this a little bit later i think our school resource officers are doing the majority of the work that is obligated by the department of public instruction or dpi to utilize fun80 there are certain stipulations that the governing body or dpi has stated you have to do in order for the school district to use fund 80 to pay for our school resource officers it is a great benefit to us to use fun80 uh for this service and and we're pleased that i think we're we're really close to to meeting those those uh stipulations but i would assume that this evening you would discuss it um we asked can you explain why it's benefit to use
007fund 80 yes thank you um so fun80 is a different fund it does not win into the fund that we use to pay for teachers or for books or other instructional needs it is a separate levy that we we provide to the community and the name of it itself is community service um is the community service fund often people leak to the recreation department when we discuss fun80 but there are a lot of different ways you can utilize fun 80 and in the past this district has been very strategic in uh forward thinking and utilizing fund 80 for this service we we aren't penalized from the levy from the tertiary spending for over overspending that's correct not that we do overspend but we get a dollar services for a dollar taxpayer money and fund 10
008at the margin we lose aid for every dollar we spend i think that that needs to be understood by people thank you i don't want to interrupt but that's really important it saves us money what mr meyer is referencing is that the nuance of the legislature and how they control fund 10 and it's not a dollar for dollar um it's uh transfer with tax dollars versus what we spend that's not available in fund 10 that is available in fund 80 and and so it's it's beneficial for a number of different reasons not only are you getting a dollar for dollar value but also it keeps the expenditure for this great service counting against what we need for for teachers and and books and other instructional materials it is usual and customary for school districts to
009have a memorandum of understanding with their police department and and so we started the process of identifying the fact that i want to thank miss laura breissler who's our safety coordinator and mr opinion our chief of people and family supports we realized that last year early last year that we didn't have a memorandum of understanding in place and that's not to indicate that there's a lack of interest of continuing the relationship it was simply we need to do our due diligence and document uh the relationship and so that's why we're we're here this evening to talk through um the finer points of the memorandum of understanding i think there are varying uh opinions and perspectives on the memorandum of understanding i think this is is good that we're having these discussions i know the chief
010and sergeant morrow and i have really we've done i think we've had a lot of good discussions around this but i think it's now time for the board to be engaged in these discussions as well we started the process but we just ran out of time and i'm really happy and pleased that we're here this evening to to continue the conversation uh i i'll let them introduce themselves but i would say we have two individuals who are deeply invested in our community chief mcgillis is a proud graduate of waltosa west and grew up here and and while this is a different stage in his career he's i've talked to him and i've talked to people who know him in his previous department they know he is tinkle he's he's just really uh tickle pink that
011he's here and so we're happy that you're back home and sergeant morrow is a former school resource officer he served as a school resource officer at wauwatosa east and so he's walked the walk and i think that's really valuable to have someone who has done the work so without further ado unless you have questions for me in terms of background um i i want to turn it over to uh a chief and a sergeant for their perspective i'm going to go inside sure thank you dr maize everybody um as you said you talked about our our passion for this and our interest for this and i really wanted to take an opportunity to talk about that for a moment he said i was a spooky resource officer um indeed i was for seven years at
012tulsa east and i can tell you our police department right now is understaffed we could use everybody on the street we would benefit from pulling the sros from the school district and using them on the street however we don't feel that benefits the community nor the students or staff everyone it serves i am absolutely without a doubt passionate about having nassar rose in the school district uh having walked the walk as dr means pointed out i see the values in it i i've seen so many positive things come from it uh whether that be dealing with an incident at the school with with something that is a legal matter or a student who's in crisis at home and really doesn't know who to talk to that they come to the sro or that kid that
013just stops in the office each day and grabs a bottle of water and wants to talk to somebody other than maybe their teacher or somebody else we build relationships that's the number one goal of our program is to build relationships we clearly benefit from that by having building relationships in a community but those kids who have good experiences with the sro they go out in the community and suddenly maybe uh their perspective or what they think police are really isn't necessarily true um that they if they had a bad impression or a bad experience we try to give them a good experience that's that's a huge benefit for us as a police department so i guess i say this because what i'm trying to say is we don't we don't need your money and however
014however it's funded it should be funded and we're not doing this because we think this is a benefit for just like running a business where we're like oh we really need this account we don't need the account we want the account we want to be a part of your schools we want to continue we've been doing this for nearly 20 years and we can't wait to continue we're very hopeful that we get through all the things in the mou answering any questions that you have regarding and continue with this great program how do i follow that up um chief mcgillis we've met before um i know jim sergeant morrill from back in his recruit days i actually was one of his trainers back at the milwaukee police academy how did he do say again how
015did he do he did very well and i i was so happy to see sergeant morrow when i came to the wauwatosa police department because i know what sergeant moral how his heart is and how he releases and his beliefs and what he's trying to accomplish by supervising the sro program from my perspective we need to have this relationship relationships in my opinion are the conduit of influence and developing understanding so every question that's come up every concern that's come up i want to be receptive i want to be present that's why we're here tonight to answer those questions and words do matter words from the community words from you questions that come up and we're an open book i'm glad we have several members of the community here to see this dialogue to see
016this discussion that's how business gets done how good things happen so i'm all in on this as well i appreciate our relationship even sometimes when we don't agree on certain things we always can find perspective which is wonderful so that's why we're here tonight so let's get down to business i'm excited um colleagues on the board what i'm going to do is just kind of swing around the table and sharon i'm going to put you on the spot and let you kind of go first of anything you want to talk through it well it's almost like the white elephant gift exchange if you want to pass and say i want to pass and go first you can kick it to leanne i'll end with you but otherwise we'll start with you and we'll give everyone
017uh 10 minutes to kind of ask you don't need to take the whole 10 minutes but you've got it and then uh if we still got things at the end we can come back and talk through uh additional items as well the floor to us i only have a few opening comments at the present time um i'd like to hear some more dialogue my colleagues on specifically on the mou i think it's well known that i am one of the original supporting board members of the sros in our district i believe the program is in partnership with the police department anywhere maybe three or more i have many more roles you know the law role the education role but i truly um i look at this as a partnership and and it's evolved over time
018and i think today we're trying to reconcile what is it the district would like and you know and how can we come together in a more meaningful way for the students so those are my comments and i'll pass because other than hsa do you want me to respond at all or just 100 this is meant to be a conversation so i would say free flowing is completely fine perfect well i share that same perspective about where we can take this i look at where where is our shared vision where our common goal something that dr means that i've talked about at length we want to have a safe environment for students we want to have a safe environment for the teachers so they can do their job we're not there to be patrolling around and
019law enforcement is part of policing but it's not the only part that's one of the things that i've been trying to dispel as a bias or a perspective of what this uniform and what this patch stands for we're there to keep the school safe work with the school staff to work with the security director so the kids want to come to school so they want to learn so staff feel safe so they feel they can do their job not to be overbearing i can just comment too on the on the mou itself so this has been a work in progress for many years believe it or not we've been trying to take another department's drafts um their policies procedures sort of blended it but one thing they've done more with this and i think it's
020the reason you guys have more questions is because we didn't use a cookie cutter mou and say this is how the sros are paid this is where their office will be and uh here's the contract between the school district and police department we went up much further and that's why the ammo is a little bit deeper and talks about how what do we do with it there's a serious crime in the school of sexual assault or something that's going on where sometimes traditionally everyone with the best interest in mind of the student handles things differently so sometimes we've stepped on the school district's toes and sometimes the school district has stepped on our toes so we actually put documentation together with plans and and even cheat sheets for principals to look at as to how
021we believe these cases should be handled and again that's open for discussion we understand that but for the partnership we want this to work because traditionally we've done this for many many years and there's been uh police officers myself included have been upset about how things were handled there's been principals superintendents prior to this gentleman that have been upset how things were handled and it's because we didn't have the clear-cut mou so i'm glad that it's here and i'm glad that you guys have questions regarding it but it is much it's bigger than your typical uh moe i think one piece of it too is that this codify is what's an administrative school violation versus a violation of ordinance and law we have different areas of responsibility in this relationship and we need to be
022talking about this that's where i think the discretion of that sro that talented very highly trained sro can work with school staff we want to keep kids out of the criminal justice system they do have to be held accountable for their behavior if it's something that's disruptive to the school or an ordinance violation or a law violation but that's where officers can utilize that discretionary piece to figure out what is the best course of action that's where we need to have i guess more perspective of each other's framework the disciplinary framework the administrative side but also the criminal justice side so um i would just also like to say thank you for being here i've had the pleasure of going um for a long time and i i liked the fact that my kids knew
023who you were and at the same time they didn't spend a lot of time with you um and and so the thing i want to start with is um a statement that i've got a question so the statement is um i i grew up in the military council so rules procedures consequences were all very clear and i think when we we do a disservice to students and families when we don't have that clarity of what you can expect and that there's the need for consistency so that everybody is having the same experience regardless of their age or their race or whatever their identity is that you want to throw in there um and i i think the last couple of weeks last year whatever time frame you want to put on it i think it's
024been really hard because kids have seen and families have felt like there is a lack of consistency and that kids don't know necessarily what's going to happen when they do something um and we sort of hit this crisis point um so my question for you all because we've received so many versions of this and there's so many opinions on this my question to both you all and dr means is what are the things that are currently required by dpi to use the honda 80 money that are not currently captured within the mou and are they are they sort of disagreements in terms of whose job that really is or are they philosophical um i'm wondering if you all can illuminate that a little bit because i think the use of fund 80 is a priority
025just in terms of us being good financial stewards and at the same time i'm curious what are those things that might be holding us back that i lack clarity on i can take this one doctor dr means sent or correspondence about fund 80 and some of the requirements concerns um we're not there to provide school security where there's police officers that's another differentiation i think that needs to be made people say well you provide security no we're police officers we're there to do that policing component which again is multi-faceted law enforcement trust building relationship building those kinds of things the job description agreement um the jurisdiction this position is not confined within the walls of the schools you'll see our sros out there doing community engagement events they're out working at football games parades those
026kinds of things it also states that we have to work with service groups churches municipal teams local businesses parochial schools our sros do all that they do the work schedules position is not limited to the work hours of the school day and i can attest that my sros are working all the time a lot of times on overtime when we're not dealing with our own internal shift shortages where they're covering a regular shift they're great team players getting back to fund 80 students reach out to individuals on and off school property that has been a consistent component of the sro job is that they develop those relationships um i can tell you one circumstance where there was a congregation of kids at whitman and west and the older kids at west were going to meet
027up with their younger siblings over at whitman and one of the school staff members said hey sro there's something going on over here looks like there might be a fight see something say something the sro went over and said hey these are kids that are related to one another it's not there's nothing going on here and the staff member was like oh this is great that's one of those resources where they develop those relationships between the schools over time and there's a concerted effort to document this as a community-wide program that's something that as sergeant morrow had been working on this mou even before i got sworn in we recognize our own need to do better tracking of not just the quantitative components of it but the qualitative components of it that has been shored
028up where we do the non-contact tracking as well where if we talk to a kid a young person in one of the schools and just give them some guidance or say hey let's go to the social worker in the school or the guidance counselor we need to document that that's a qualitative component it's not a metric for a citation or an arrest that's something that we recognize is something that we need to do a better job of the other side of it if one of the sros inter beans find somebody for example a kid smoking in the bathroom and uses their discretion to say hey i'm not going to issue the citation to you but i'm giving you a warning if this happens again you're going to get a citation but that's also informing school
029staff making the notification to the parent that's how that sro role fits in this there's also 10 different requirements on here in reviewing the district's needs for sros to be favorable to following tasks or additions um doctor means i'll go through them if that's okay um before you do yeah please so those those are the requirements for fund 80. okay that's it that's it okay and so i think the last component um that the chief didn't mention is that we have to document all these different items and make it available to our financial auditors so the financial auditor will come in annually and say you're using fund 80 can you prove to us how you're utilizing fund 80 in a community service way and so that documentation is going to really be important for us
030to tighten it up and to to make it very clear but once we do it then the auditors will be able to come in and say we we are able to justify this to the department of public instruction that you're using fund 80 appropriately so those are the components another example i went over to a parochial school to meet the principal to talk about how can you shore up your security making sure the doors are locked and what type of security procedures or like an active assailant drill i referred that principle over to our community service sports specialist the team of laurel risky some of our community support officers so that work can also continue but it has to be documented even if i'm going out there if i stop by tulsa west to check
031on my officers check in with the principal have that interaction that has to be documented too that yeah we are having the space time we are talking about critical issues and problem solving is that language in the mou draft but that language that those encounters will be documenting that's part of the documentation piece under font 80. that's something we've done procedurally to change it sure so i think what i'm asking is we've never historically like never in the history of the district and the department so is that language in the mou saying that those persons will be documented in what i would say is i think there was a draft that was done in june the fund 80 alignment conversation has been happening since then and so now it will be documented in the mou
032is it like have we seen the like the current draft no okay so this is the draft we have it's not what the draft map is very much a working draft from kind of i think probably from may so our goal tonight is to figure out what things need to do the word smithing of it the inclusion of it that will happen uh with the district administrative team uh and the police department and then it'll come back to us okay uh so we're this is literally kind of like our conversation around what's in there what's not and the fund 80 piece is one of those things that has kind of emerged as something we need to shore up from when the last draft came forward to now that makes sense yeah i get a little
033context to that too when we call on a call for service that goes into our computer dispatch system that's not a good place to house it um so sergeant moral and i talked about this probably the second month me being here i said well why don't we keep it on the school system server that we do have those documented calls in our shell inside the computer dispatch system but why not put it on some resource on the school system server so you have internal transparency you can see what we're doing i'm perfectly fine with that i promised you transparency why not put it there so that's i think an ask and i don't think it's an unreasonable ask it's something i would absolutely promote i think just to comment on that further that so the
034spreadsheet that we put together with the data of contacts with students statistics for you guys we if you notice every every one of those pieces of data starts with a police call number you what you don't see is the stuff that that we're doing behind the scenes and for example that the reprimand and released or we turn them over to a parent or chief gives the example someone smoking in the bathroom or we maybe not use some discretion we turn it over to the principal made contact with parents but what the sros do is that they're they wear multiple hats in the school district and one of those hats is the dispatcher they're actually a dispatcher because if something happens the community called police this batch of call numbers automatically generated whether they take action
035or not they're tasked with entering notes into our system so we know what occurred as an sro what we learned and what i learned in my first my first year i called for everything dispatch said you're driving me crazy quit calling so much right so what we do or what we've been doing as sros is we'll be that dispatcher get some information that something's occurred in the school could be petty theft or something for example yes or no we'll then sort of investigate speak with the students speak with the administrators maybe even call parents and if they determine that this isn't gonna no legal action will be taken then they oftentimes almost always won't call dispatch for a call number to document that incident now i used to keep a spreadsheet of all my contacts
036regardless because my memory isn't the best so it helped me remember i had a contact with that kid three years ago i don't know why i could look in my spreadsheet so it wasn't a legal matter it was something we we dealt with and turned over to a parent so some kept better records than others now we're asking them to use that same spreadsheet that you guys have um it's a live document that's being filled in as yes rose continue about their day each day our plan is to move on through remainder that they have those contacts that don't result in the police contact they're going to document that regardless if and and i'm even guilty i went and spoke to saint jude's and i did a safety presentation for them that's technically i'm not
037a school resource officer but it's affiliated with the school what fund 80 is driving at really i should document that i did that so you have to get better at that that's why the statistics you have don't show all the multiple contacts that the officers have where they didn't take any police action so you look at the stats and said oh my gosh all they do is arrest recite somebody we do all kinds of things in documents and that's where we need to improve internally are qualitative versus quantitative i can give you a quantitative of citations and arrests but those other types of contacts are just as important so getting back to fund 80 conduct daily exterior school campus checks situational awareness training is something that i would offer if there is some type of
038staff in service i look at it as a force multiplier one sro can only do so much when we drive up to the school we drive around we do an external school campus check or security survey if you will we're always doing that as part of our profession we're always sizing up the room and sizing up what's going on not to make school staff paranoid that's not our goal is to be situationally aware so you can recognize those environmental clues that hey something might be escalating and then i can use the escalation tactics as a staff member something that i think we could do going forward number two is assist with traffic coordination we do that every day school kids parents dropping their kids off for kids driving to school and then when they leave
039strategically and continually collaborate with the district school safety coordinator conducting threat assessment drills tabletop drills and principal or with the principal and the building crisis team i don't know sergeant morrell you'll have to speak to that i know we have a good relationship with ms geisler um and we talked about those things we work with her um the standard response protocol which is the safety thing that we're using in the schools we work with on that we present to the staff members on and on we are discussing tabletop exercises i think those are very good resources always ways we can expand this year we were hoping to we ran out of time with the school school starting and the end of uh basically summer to put together a large-scale training where we would offer and
040and work with all of you and your teachers and staff and do actually like an active shooter uh training hopefully in a school building dr means has been open to that moving forward so next year we plan to put that together and do that type of training so yes there's multiple trainings we want to do and some that we current and i also get the fact that doing that type of training can be very scary for both staff and for students but that's the world we live in nowadays about doing age-appropriate type of training um staff level approach because it's different for elementary level school kids versus teenagers um that's something that's in several of the department members wheelhouse so that's something we'll continue our work on with a district school safety coordinator and reviewing
041safety protocols with a specific school in collaboration with the district safety coordinator to be present for emergency drills that's part of what we do those are ongoing objectives based on the specific training of the sro provides service to the schools in the areas but are not limited to conflict resolution atoda another specialized training i understand we do this already as part of the sro curriculum i know there's been discussion about further training for the sros and that's something that i talked to sergeant moral about is figuring out where do we have those redundancies because sros are specially trained they go through a lot of training and ongoing training you want to speak to that sergeant moral well i i honestly i think you covered it i doctor means to ask for they're in the mou
042we have some specific training that school district um provided by the school district in the mou we've put that in there we definitely agree to you know having the sros do that training along with you as well so it's it's we're constantly trained and just just from the law enforcement perspective we have to be just to stay uh certified so there's that in addition to the extra stuff and then certainly being present for the school on stuff as well i only have a few more to go better i'm sorry i'm just she's she is she's way over her time we're going right after this to mr meyer i'll be in greece i serve some of my time serve as the immediate contact in the case of emergency for the district instead of calling 9-1-1 there
043are some things that are just appropriate to call 9-1-1 but the use of technology having handheld radio school radios has increased the security capacity of the sros to have that instant communication if you call 9-1-1 that's the best way to notify an event of emergency but i can cite several circumstances where the sros people call 9-1-1 or they alert school administration they call 9-1-1 the sro already knows and they're responding over there already because of radio or because their cell phone availability and you guys benefit forgive me that's what you're trying to say that the school district provided radios for our police officers so we have our own radios and we also have school district radio so we have access to and we're always on the emergency channel so something happens that you know longfellow
044and you're a whitman you're going to know there's a crisis often times before 9-1-1 even call the officers are responding thanks to you guys providing those radios number eight assisting and extending last chance agreements to students in lieu of distribution of actual citations and arrests to reduce the school to prison pipeline so i'm going to unpack this it's a little complex when it comes to administrative rule violations and violation of ordinance and law we're there to be keepers of the peace when it becomes an administrative sanction by the school that's your wheelhouse we're there as keepers of the peace but we can add additional context of what we have as far as relationship building what we've experienced as far as the school-to-prison pipeline i've looked at the research i've divesting from school policing i read
045this article about that topic and i don't think it's an issue in wauwatosa because i've said it time and time again our sros we're trying to keep young people out of the criminal justice system this topic came up at council talking about decriminalization of thc and i'm asking the council they're actually meeting on it tonight my captain is over to discuss it it gives officers that discretion versus an all or nothing where we can make it an ordinance violation i bring up the example if there's a young person in the parking lot at one of the high schools and they get found with some thc in their possession giving the officers a discretion to write a citation versus making it a state charge it's technically a felony to be in possession of controlled substance within
046a thousand feet of a school i don't want kids we're there to keep them out of there to make them into productive adults in their developmental stages of life not to insert them in a criminal justice system sometimes that happens sometimes we have to do that that's very fine please there's uh an instance where we when i was a at least east we had two students who were one was 17 one was 16 and they were caught having sex in a hallway and underneath the stairs became a major issue now kids under the age of 18 can't consent to anything but they can do something willingly so boyfriend girlfriend right but technically by in the eyes of the law they've committed a crime they were caught by a school official and we have suddenly a
047crime we have a sexual assault that's occurred in the school between basically two consenting students so i'm tasked with i have to do something with this i have to we don't have can't write a ticket for that that's a crime that has occurred however when i handled that situation i did something well outside of the box and and wasn't even sure how that was going to fly with the da's office but i i didn't i sent the case down to the da's office the boy who's 17 would be considered an adult so he would be charged as an adult for a sexual offense and be labeled a sexual offender i looked at the totality of the circumstances and thought this is this is probably not the best path for this young man or his family
048so i sent that down to the da's office i refuse to arrest this individual and normally when you send a case to the da's office someone has to be arrested and i called the d and i spoke with them that length about it said here are the circumstances i know you're going to review it and my gut tells me you're probably going to know process this case but i also know you need it to come across your desk if you guys charge the case i will then go backwards and arrest him but right now i don't want to put that on this kid because it'll follow him the rest of his life even if it's dismissed and so that's that's a pretty shiny example not trying to say pat myself in the back and try
049and see the sros do those kinds of things to avoid that school-to-prison pipeline and in that case it worked out to our benefit the da just documented that it occurred all parents were brought in there were no charges and and the case was dismissed that was the end of it so another example of trying to avoid you know going all in and just following the letter of the law as opposed to maybe the spirit of the law and that's officer using discretion using the tools and it's perfectly legal it's called an order in something that we do in law enforcement versus having to take that person into custody so when we put handcuffs on somebody there's a decision-making process there as well leverage sros to secure external social services for students and families in need
050i've said this before especially with what's happening with cobig i understand the situation going out with teachers and with students and that additional stress that's happened over the last couple of years i was a very big advocate that tulsa a verbal advocate that additional social work help was also offered but not at the detriment or pulling sros out of the schools i think there needs to be that relationship so both aspects are being covered and being present in school events where an anticipated large volume of people will be in attendance that's happening already so hopefully that answers your question so it sounds like all the fun dating things are covered and and more um are there any things that are not covered that we'd like to see happening that you're not seeing captured there no
051okay so it sounds like we're like really getting there in terms of what's if i can interject something i know there was a concern about having um officers wear a soft uniform at all times don't steal my thunder oh i want to ask about that too late hey president if you want me to wait so i i end up responding back that actually this is a very essential tool for police officers it's a visible display of our authority but officers need to have that discretion where a staff member an administrator may say hey sergeant moral can you come to school tomorrow because we have this event going on can you wear the soft uniform but our go-to is to wear this but also have that discretion and i don't want to arbitrarily say no officers
052you have to be in soft uniform versus the physical police uniform it's a visible display of authority the first day of school i saw my sros out there they were all in uniform i was out there in uniform to make people safe yes they see that the police are out there it's not appropriate at that time to be wearing a soft uniform that's why i didn't want to take away and i won't take away that discretion from the police officers to make that decision or for an administrator to call sergeant morrow and say hey we have this event coming up having that back and forth type of relationship i'm going to hold on my second question sorry president just a finger no that's good i'll come back yeah so i have one big question and
053i think i'm in agreement with what the draft says on this topic but there's disagreement from the community and i want to first be sure that i'm understanding correctly and second i want to try to address the disagreement from the community people might not be happy with the outcome depending on what happens but my question has to do with the sro interviewing students about when the parent is notified now i'm going to frame this up to say mike meyer in this chair i'm wearing the hat of the school board member and i am not wearing the hat of the parent i am not wearing the hat of defense counsel i am not wearing the hat of the sro so well what does that mean that means that i want to keep schools safe and i
054want students to have the best journey possible through our schools so if there's going to be questioning going on [Music] i want the least possible number of arrests i'm going to distinguish between you can arrest as compared to you should arrest and for me and for my opinion i want to show the rest to be as narrowly tailored as possible so that if there's any other reasonable path to put this student on we can take it and that arrest is is only where we we really have to keep everybody safe now if i'm wearing the parent hat i'm going to say well you know it depends on the situation i had somebody who was a minor that i was responsible for in a car accident and i showed up on the scene and the person
055kept saying it was my fault it was my fault don't say that anymore you know just let's let the process figure it out but on the other hand if my child just got involved in something and might know something that could help save you know other people from injury or death or or you know great harm i hope my parent hat would say you know what my child you we need you to talk to the police here okay now if i i i did once long ago as a student attorney defend um i i represented a defendant in a criminal case and as a staffer on a law enforcement um advisory committee for the for a section of the state i recommended attorneys at the jailhouse door and local judges weren't happy with me on
056that recommendation but i don't rec i am not a defense lawyer here wearing that hat yes i believe people should have lawyers there's there's civil rights and constitutional rights but that's not my job here that's a job that has to be done but it's not my job here just like it's not my job to decide when to arrest that's your job so i'm not gonna wear any of those hats so what i i need to know is somehow what's your approach and you've kind of explained it about the you know the the two teenagers in the stairwell you know you know there's gonna be times where as a school board member i'm gonna hope you did get a chance to ask questions to the young person before the person with a parent had or the
057lawyer had got on the scene because it might save somebody's life and that that's my concern and my wish so can you if you have any more to expound upon that about you know the police questioning the student and when the parent is notified and under what circumstances would you feel a a should question before the parent is notified as opposed to what we would like to but we're not going to can you help us with that sure we're obligatory reporters as well we take somebody into custody we have under law we have to make that notification of the parents when we conduct some type of custodial interview of somebody that's not the point because they may end up walking out the door um i sent some correspondence to the board about that so we
058had clarity that if it's an administrative rule violation that's the school administration's purview um we're not going to get involved in that as other than beekeepers of the piece if we have to make an arrest we're going to try and be respectful be discreet about it as much as we can we also have to weigh out the need for putting the handcuffs in the school versus outside of the school i'm sure that's a question broiling people's minds the the vision or the the ideology of the perp walk no that doesn't apply in an sro or in a school environment in fact we want to be very discreet about it and you know as well as i do in a school where it travels fast among students and people play fill in the blank that's where
059that relationship piece and having that trust between school administrators and the sros is so important so we know where our lane is in this depending on the circumstance obviously if it's a crime or if it's a school sanction um i don't know jim do you want to expound upon sure so there's a couple of times there's several reasons we talked to students uh if we're talking with a victim for example we will outside of some unusual circumstances and i always go let's let's think about a sexual assault or something like that we're talking to a victim where if there's some reason that the parent might be implicated in in maybe um having something to do with that sexual assault in other words that they are sexually abusing their child or they're exposing that child to
060do something to where that victim is being further victimized by a parent we definitely don't want to contact the parent but nine times out of ten if we're talking to a victim in the school the parent is welcome to be there we'll tell them we're going to be talking to your child if we're talking to a complainant we don't have an issue with that where we run into the biggest problem is when we're talking with suspects of a crime not not of a school violation something that rises to the level of a crime in those circumstances we have the right to talk to a juvenile without a parent present legally so if i have a 16 year old that's breaking into a car right now in the parking lot i can go out there and
061detain that juvenile i can ask them investigatory questions and i can take that person into custody and i can bring them to the station and once they get to the station i can call mom and dad and say guess what they're here and the mom or dad still doesn't have the right to come in now and say now i want to see my child you have my custody i demand to see them they're not allowed to legally they can't do it they can't invoke rights for their child they can't say the fifth amendment i want a lawyer my kid i want to tell my kid not to talk we need a lawyer they can't do those things that's hardcore that's that's the nature of it all we don't do that we try our best if
062we're interviewing a suspect we like to have generally speaking if there's a suspect of a crime that's occurred in a school the school has a vested interest in knowing all the details that's going on with that crime because they have a responsibility to either suspend somebody or potentially expel them or at the very least have some sort of a disciplinary hearing they want that information and they want it quickly so we try to do those things in front of a administrator but there are times where something rises to the level of a crime and the school doesn't want us to talk to the child and it's living it's a criminal act has occurred we can just exercise our authority and say well we'll just take the kid with us and and we will let the
063parents know when we get to um to the station or you're welcome to call as we're leaving to let them know because you guys are basically the parents while their parents are awake so i guess to answer your question the first part of your question is we do have the right to talk to juveniles uh we have the right to investigate things without a parent present and then we can take it even further if we need to but we always try to notify parents immediately as well we will absolutely if we take them into custody so that we have that option i have one thing to add to that mr meyer that again you said it that we're there to protect the rights of all people victim suspects i explained what miranda is where when
064we go into that we're taking you into custody we've got to be very careful because we've got to protect the rights of that individual we also have to protect ourselves too because if we do it wrong we could be subject to legal sanctions as well it's a very delicate line we've got to walk but the sros are trained police officers are trying to do that delicate walk so if if we have you the officers in the building you don't stop wearing your police officer hat just like i you know if if we had legal aid office in the building though they wouldn't ever stop wearing their lawyer hat so there's there's nothing here that as a board member i can address about your you wearing your hat you're supposed to wear your hat and and
065you'll do to do that job i am comfortable that you are wauwatosa community police officers and you think like wauwatosas and so that has to be enough and you know for me when i vote and it is enough so you know i'm going to have to if if we let you in the building on this agreement basis are you of course to enforce the law you have various duties and rights to go places that we can't tell you not to but um it if if we agree to this we're you know agreeing to some level of trust in that you're a member of our community and i'm i can sleep at night with that i think that's the gratification of our relationships because as you said police officers can come in the building it's a
066public building that's not about forcing our authority it's about really codifying our relationship that we're working towards that same vision about having school be safe so teachers can do their job students can learn that's really what that codifies i would just respectfully ask the board and the community to review policy 5540. under clause b it talks about interview procedures so as a board you while the mou is one component of this conversation you have already dictated and framed what the interview procedures are for any law enforcement officer is very i think it's unique language and i'll i'll stop there i think i know you want to talk like one more point please thank you um i'll forget it this is important i think um just for clarity's sake there's there's you can argue and scholars
067could argue this is when has custody occurred right or we're talking to a student are they technically in custody there's the there's a the free leave uh test basically if if i'm in plain clothes and the chief's talking to me do i feel like i can walk out maybe not because he's the chief he's wearing his uniform so we are careful with that too so when we talk to students and they are free to leave generally sro will tell them immediately you're free to leave you do not have to answer my questions we even document our reports there was two people in the room there was a school administrator there was myself i was in full uniform i sat away from the door so that i wasn't blocking the door in any way i told
068the student they are free to leave so we we absolutely established that and when we do that is when we're going to ask some investor investigatory questions that we haven't necessarily mirandized for but we're kind of digging around to see has a crime been committed or not where are we going with this we might have the wrong kid we don't know exactly what's going on just yet so that's where we do that then there's another area where is between that free to leave in questioning and custody and that's a detainment so if i have reason to believe that a crime is about to be committed or has been committed i have the right to stop anybody on the street or in the school or anywhere else and detain them and say hold on a second
069i want to make sure that you're not the bad guy who's about to go do something who has just done something i can detain you you're not in custody but you're being detained and you are being asked some questions about what happened if it rises to level that now i have probable cause uh stop dr means because the xbox just got stolen on a target the back seat of his car is a brand new xbox but the target bag is up and it seems to be there's some evidence maybe they say there's video of dr means taking said xbox now we have probable cause it's risen to the level of uh sorry chase risen to the level of we do have probable cause that crime has been committed now custody has occurred i have you
070in custody i can ask you questions but if you answer them all and you confess to killing somebody too all that's going to get thrown out the window because i didn't read you your rights at that point so there's there's gray areas there there's but the biggest thing is the investigatory piece of it we have the right to ask questions otherwise we would never know if a crime occurred if there's an issue or not we can't talk to anybody and why i pointed out 5540 and why i indicated some of the language is interesting under number two under interview procedures it states if the principle concurs that the questioning is appropriate dot dot dot so i would encourage the board members in community to read the language that's a little contrary to what we just
071discussed here uh it's putting some [Music] it is putting the the principle in a judgment call position um and so without the policy being definitive that's the way that the language currently reads and that's something we need to be very careful of the administrative component of it when it goes into the lane of policing or where we're doing that possible criminal investigation that's where we have that authority to do that in private we would i'm just saying with the law says very specific about that and so we've talked about our aligning our policies with the actual law so it goes on to say under b2 um if the principal concurs that is appropriate the principal will send for the student move into an occupy an occupied room and if appropriate and and and and if
072a parent is not present remain in the room during the questioning so i i think i would assume my experience in working with law enforcement that may not align with how they want to proceed with interviewing and questioning um is is just something for you to ponder as as we look at policy and i think it puts the principle or the administrator in sort of a bad spot if we don't fix that however we come to an agreement here because we don't want to have them something against us or vice versa but that's where we then if that ever happens to the point where we absolutely disagree on that then the police department will in all honesty just take the person into custody and take them off your property but we don't want to but
073heads with the school we want to have an understanding this is how it works and why so i would agree that if we if if you guys end up adopting that language or if we need to adjust it however that may be that the policy aligns with it so there's no confusion it puts the principles in a bad place and we don't want to do that and that's our policy as written that's your current policy that was revised actually in 2012. my next question on this topic is so the policy says i think you're reading from the creative guidelines but it says you're right that parents will be informed whenever they remind a minor child is interviewed so currently as it stands that's not the practice so you're saying that you can interview children because
074you i think you you know i guess what concerns me when you use language like generally the sro will tell the student you can leave you're not being detained but they don't always no because there's their they the child might actually be in custody and if that's the case we'll tell them they're in custody okay so but the difference is when they're being interviewed and they're put right now as it adds some practices the parent does not have to be informed for their minor child dinner that is correct and we will we tell them we we do inform them regardless if i have a conversation with a student that even rises the level of the school consequence we always free touch up touch base with parents say yeah just so you know i talked to
075their kid today so we do do that so where my concern lies is if you're investigating marijuana on the property and another student that you're interviewing says oh actually i have some in my locker too then are you you know legally bound to then pursue that you know criminal act well where it might just be a student who you know they just admitted something because they don't understand their rights absolutely because they're consequences sure but in the school they have a lower level and we've talked about probable cause where i need absolute you probably did it i have some factual evidence that says you did something i can take into custody for that and the school it's lower it's reasonable suspicion so they if if you say that you saw him in the bathroom uh
076selling a green leafy substance and got cash i can probably reasonably suspect that it was a marijuana transaction the school can then literally search that the principal can search or can ask an sro to search him based on that if that happened across the street we can't do it the police can't do it but the school has a lower expectation of privacy because they have a higher expectation of keeping kids safe from whether it be violence or drugs or whatnot so it's it's a little bit different in the schools and that's another thing that's hard for people to understand and it's a there's a lot of case law in that too but we do we do always tell people when we talk about kids okay and something above and beyond just a casual conversation or
077there could be an administrative sanction that's dsro's job is to have that dialogue because parents have i mean the biggest piece of this we're not there to raise kids we're there to keep them safe and make sure parents have the information so they can do their piece of it as well and also talking to school staff members so we're all on the same sheet of music or why the discretionary decision was made to not write a citation or make an arrest the other side of it thank you mr meyer you've doubled your time [Music] you're just a banger i'll fall on my sword i'm the one who's invisible so i said too much away so back to i'm gonna i'm gonna go through a bunch of different items that we've already talked about that were
078on my list um the training and support piece i'm a big fan of i my context i come at this through is having worked much of my career on college campuses and conduct uh where i've worked really closely with police on a college campus different context so i'm kind of like navigating the over 18 generally police don't want to be involved at all unless they have to be like i thought of all the protests we've staffed they're always there we're coordinating closely but they're like at the point the police are involved we're off the rails so i'm trying to like think of this in a k-12 context versus that and kind of muddle my way through of thinking about what partnerships look like in a higher end context versus the k-12 context so there's things
079that i might just be wrong on that i'm navigating in my head the training support piece i like a lot i think anywhere we can have this component of a really well-trained staff um that we understand each other and that we've given everyone all the tools they need to be successful i was really glad to hear that kind of we've come to a good place and landing on on that piece um i one of the one of the concerns i had when we talked about this a while ago was the rotating sros out of rolls and this may be one i'm probably not getting my way on and i understand why you would want to rotate them out um the idea of and i know she's retiring in december but you know like there's the
080idea of officer tracy not being an sro was hard for me to imagine after she spent so much time in my kids schools and was the graduation speaker and a variety of other things so i understand from your perspective why it's important from my perspective it's not essential that they don't transition out but the time it takes to understand schools relationships build connections with kids that stuff takes time and so how we balance those things there's not a answer to that but i would love to kind of grapple with this may not be in the mou but somewhere we grapple with how do we make sure that there's time in that the capital that's built up in developing relationships with kids and i think it is different it takes a i'm gonna guess a unique
081personality for each different type of police work and working with adolescents as a parent of an adolescent i'm figuring this out that like it's a complicated endeavor um that is i think a learned skill um i i'm really a big fan of the soft shell um and and i i will keep this isn't the hill i'm dying on but i think anywhere anytime we can get cool like i'm imagining folks in east apparel west apparel longfellow whitman eisenhower kind of everything else and i'm happy to put a budget in the line item in the budget to make sure that we're helping supply those but that i would love to see that whenever we can i get that that's not always there's a time and a place but i would love for that to be considered
082wherever wherever we can i would love to find ways for the district to be involved in hiring an evaluation of officers not as primary but is inputs so that there's feedback loops mr phillips is one of my colleagues who we can't get through a meeting without him saying something about a feedback loop and kind of continuous learning and improvement and i would love for that to be a component again i'm not expecting a principal to be co-supervising an sro but wherever we can have um those feedback loops for me that's important i think it will help the program get better and improve how who's involved in that i'm actually in my mind i was like like where does students if students are in strands i don't even know if there's a launch for ins a
083strand for launch of law enforcement um but of creative ways for students to be learning some of these things uh and wrapping in and again some things are appropriate some are not but i would love some creative thinking about how we can do that um i think the fun idi alignment stuff i was really glad to hear all that all the other kind of components i was excited about engagement at athletic events um is top of mind for me right now um i want to keep working through the clarity and investigations my experience in working with police is that there are very different roles for administrative responses to behaviors and there's a different level of we're operating from a preponderance and in the criminal system there's you have a higher threshold so it's all the
084different tools that we can use and resources we can use and making sure that the mou has components that speak to these both um so that we are working in concert and this is this is messy like there's personalities involved in it like every like no matter what we have in the mou when you get to the situation you're like oh we hadn't foreseen this one um so i think whatever we can we can add in um i would love to see i love this stuff about internal data tracking um one of the components that i was involved in when i was working at colorado state with the several of officers is i would go into middle schools and high schools with members of uh there it was the colorado state university in the pooter
085uh city of fort collins police and we would do a lot of training on pure sexual assault how to interrupt things that are going sideways in different ways like bystanders bystander intervention um those are things that i would love to be able to offer to students and families and that again doesn't have to be an mou but i think is fits uh some of the community education component uh and that's one of the things i wanted to mention of i think that work can be really important um and um it was a fun way to work uh and do some stuff and and get to work with some of the adolescent populations um the the one the the one thing that i'm struggling with is and when i've talked to folks is the interviewing of
086minors and this is i think where we all have different views on this i find myself uncomfortable and part of this is i never even if i would have known i would have never walked out if there was a principal this is my german lutheran elementary school upbringing i would never walk out even if you would have said 10 times you can walk out you don't have to talk to me i would never have not talked to a police officer and i find myself uneasy with the idea of not engaging families in those conversations with the caveat there's things where there's an immediate crisis concern safety well-being that i would always carve out but i do find myself uncomfortable with that um maybe i'll always be uncomfortable with it but that's the one where i'm
087stuck uh and part of it is i'm looking it through my lens um and every single time i ever did anything wrong i got caught and i was generally a pretty good kid um but i remember on two different occasions please show up in my house one involved a water balloon slingshot bad decision making on my part and the other one was a carmex bottle that wasn't my fault it was a friend in the back seat and i yelled at him but both times i remember my parents being there and i was totally honest i totally straightforward not arrested um still got to go to college and do everything else but how terrifying it was and for me i keep thinking i really am going to be more comfortable with parents involved and i don't
088know what the nuance is there but i would ask that we kind of sit down and think about other models that we can look at um that don't impede your ability to keep school safe and that was one when i when i when parents are like i got a lot of questions of like are you getting rid of sros i'm like not that i'm aware of um and i was like here's like the four things that i'm concerned about this is the one where they were like yeah of course like universally people are like they would like to be involved if their kids get in trouble they would like to be involved and engaged and for me i'd say the parents should know and be engaged because they they have some parenting to do um
089two hopefully they're partnering and i know this isn't always the case hopefully they're partnering with the schools with social workers with police that we're kind of rallying around saying something's gone awry here let's let's figure out what's going on and there's just me wanting to [Music] do all we can to make sure that we're building those relationships so that's the one based on my set of life experiences that i'm struggling with um and nothing you're saying is making me feel better and it's not that i don't trust you but i'm just worried about kids who no matter what you say thinking about eric is a 13 year old or an eight-year-old i wouldn't have been hearing all that i would have just been like i'm just gonna do whatever you say i'm really scared whatever
090you tell me i'm gonna do exactly i may not even know if i'm telling you the truth i'm just gonna tell you everything i said everything anybody's ever done wrong um you didn't ask the question i'm telling you everything um that's what i'm struggling with sure so and i don't i don't have the answer to it but i would love for kind of as you all and dr means kind of sit down and if there's models and stuff that's what i would ask that that one is the one that's a sticking point so miss rules is absolutely correct is the minister administrative guideline but it is i would encourage everyone to read b it's very clear so at some point a board of education in this district has clarified how they want administrators at the
091school level to engage it even goes down to the point of if a police officer let's just assume from i don't know from what's been wants to interview one of our students that happens a lot right it happens a lot where a student did something in a different municipality they but they know that the kid goes to walla toast west or waltel sees they'll call the police in wauwatosa and said we want to interview damon the way that this guideline reads right now it places the principle in the middle of it and it also clearly states that if that interview is to take place the police department has to contact a school resource officer the way that the language reads right now which i think that's unique language to me um in past administrative experiences
092sro is involved the police just come in um and then it goes on to talk about the role of the administrator through that process so it i i would again i think you're going to have to reconcile that administrative guideline and i think it also gets to the issue of how we write policy versus administrative guidelines as i read these guidelines it reads like a policy um and so you'll have to determine if you want to move that over to policy or keep it in guidelines so what are the chances and i'll ask this to you both that you will and i won't use the right word so correct me that you will have to detain or remove a student because you could not talk to them i'll take this one jim so i'm going
093to go back to dr joseph anger the the first piece of this it has to be an age appropriate the officer has to show that the person that they're talking to understands that they're in custody otherwise we're technically violating that person's rights so we've got to show that the person that we asked questions do you understand why you're here um do you understand why i'm talking to you and if that person doesn't have that cognitive ability or that level of understanding that's when we hit the phone and say hey parent there's something i don't correct me if i'm wrong because i well we've got to show that proof you mentioned ignorable eight-year-old derek we're not gonna that that interview or interrogations would be completely different than it would be with say a sixteen-year-old eric right
094because that that so if we recognize their cognitive abilities where they are as far as you know being itself a little kid or an older kid so that that has an impact on how that conversation goes or what parent we're going to contact now if we're talking about someone that's has a gun in their backpack or something if they're eight years old i mean we might have a little bit differently so we do look at again we look at all circumstances the law book the if you look at the statute book that the black and white pages they're not it's gray it's great for a reason because there's way too many things that could come in and influence how something is done so a lot of people want to cut and dry here it is
095there's a policy here's what it says here's what we're doing in law enforcement we have to think outside the box constantly so those are examples of that um i think i think there's a there's a misconception amongst adults um certainly in the public we see it obviously seeing here in schools law enforcement has a right to interview and target taking the custody of juvenile without parental permission and i think that's a stumbling block we're hitting here because if let's say the sros are out of here tomorrow i'm not saying that they are but wait just to clarify the community it's not so let's use that example and you call the police because something's occurred on campus when you have the road cop show up they're not interested in sitting down with an administrator or calling
096mom and dad or looking at video or taking a little bit of time talking extra kid here extra kid there maybe you know hearing about the student's history from a social worker and whatnot they're saying who is the problem you come with me and they will take them out of there immediately conversely though that another officer from like you cited west bend i can only speak to what our officers do and how they handle business but i get that that's a concern too if somebody is a non-wauwatosa resident they live in another jurisdiction something happens let's say in milwaukee or west allis or and that officer comes over i would recommend you codify in policy that hey my policy here in the school says we got to notify the wauwatosa sro and act we would
097act as a liaison i don't think that happens very frequently it does happen occasionally i don't it doesn't better than i do it doesn't happen often and we've always tried to be the liaison for that department and we'll they usually contact us then we talk to the administrator and say here's what's going on what we what we've what we've tried to avoid is using the school as a convenient place to come talk to a suspect in any crime because especially if it's an ordinance violation or even a minor crime we don't want to just have well guess what junior will be in school tomorrow we'll just go pick them up there and disrupt the school day disrupt him out of his class it that is not good for anybody so our policies and procedures have
098always been if we will make efforts outside of the school day if a crime that has been committed outside of the school something that happened in the community but the suspect is in the school we don't just go to the school and go get that suspect we'll always try at their home we'll try at their place of work we might wait outside of that school we try not to just go into the school the only time we would do that is if it's a very serious issue where we have someone who's caused a very serious crime or they're a threat to the community they've made a threat to do something to school shoot somebody do that kind of thing but suddenly safety is a priority so we're like well we're going to have to come
099in today but other agencies it's rare that they come in and we act as a liaison for them so they don't come in and try to strong-arm an administrator who's looking at their policy saying no this isn't how we do it and then suddenly they're talking about obstruction of police and all these other things that's what i worry about if the sro program didn't exist is you're going to have cops that handle the things the way they do on the road as far as it is black and white and here's what i'm doing because you called me as opposed to yes or else as well slow everything down we've got we've got parents that have an interest in us we got teachers the staff i know this kid i know the social worker i know
100the counselor let's slow this down and work together as opposed to just exercise our authority and say no we have the right to do this and we'll take them out so i understand what you're saying i i honestly i could be overwritten i don't see a whole lot of room wiggle room on that that's why i was talking to a suspect if we choose to interview that suspect and we have reason to think they committed a crime a law is going to trump a policy and we're going to we can do just that we don't want to do that well i'll drop my opinion on it too you know and this is like one of those where i'm comfortable with us having like different priorities that are i mean my priority may be your priority
101b and your priority be mine might be in mind a and it may result in kind of different perspectives on this and i'm okay with that i think how we kind of figure out that's what figuring this out is so like i i think we just have different views on this uh and i don't think you're wrong and i'm right i'm just kind of like this is one where i'm like uh i don't this one doesn't feel quite right i want to say one more thing and then i'll go back to you i'm way past time yeah which is i think this is where the data actually is going to be really helpful because in a year from now we'll be able to look at how many times does this actually happen we've now spent
102an hour plus talking about this this happened once did it happen several times but only with a particular option you know what i mean like i think that's what's going to help us right now we're operating in this vacuum and i think we're all thinking worst case scenario best possible outcome for kids and we're all wanting the same thing but you are having to abide by the law and we're trying to make sure that parents who are our most important partners don't feel like we're throwing their kids i want to just touch base on the parents we talk about parents a lot and the majority of parents are supportive they're holding their kid accountable and that kind of thing a lot of the kids so that that commit crimes and are problematic for your district
103they get that behavior from their parents and that parent when they find out that the police department's involved we think we have trouble with the kid well we have real trouble with mom and dad we have disruptions at your school people wanting to fight with us yelling and swearing if you think you're taking my kid into custody you're taking me too it is very complex so we try not to cause that storm in your school by inviting the parent in and having that happen a lot of times the kid will text the parent anyway and they come in and cause a huge disruption in the school there are reasons we do things the way we do we much rather have them at the police department beating and yelling and screaming at our desk than doing
104so in your main office so it isn't always the supportive or the kid that's frightened of law enforcement a lot of times we get kids have been around the block a few times where their parents aren't the model citizen and suddenly they're instilling these values in their kids and then we're dealing with that too so rather than have that major disturbance in the school we opt to go a different realm it isn't pretty and it doesn't feel good but oftentimes that's what happens yeah i i think leanne's point is really well taken and i i have so many conflicted internal views on this i'm this is what i'm struggling through but i want to kind of do it publicly as well uh last thing i want to say is thank you both uh for the
105sros uh there's certainly been a lot of challenges um and i'm thinking back to all the to issues that happened several years ago at west in partnerships uh around a really a significant uh threat threat of violence um there's i think a lot of good opportunities here so thank you for your service and kind of thank you for kind of working through this and kind of uh navigating it together through us i really appreciate you taking the time um okay um well thank you again for being here um so i really appreciated you saying at this at the start of this that building relationships is your number one goal in this role um which i do think is is probably unique from a law enforcement officer i don't know how i'm using that terminology correctly
106but but that it is a unique role to be a school resource officer and so i want to be really thoughtful about that um and i think we would be remiss not to acknowledge that there is a difficult history in our country and also in our community between the police and people of color in particular and so i think it's really important that we kind of start at that place and then sort of move from there recognizing that that your role and our role too is to keep children safe in schools but that means lots of things to lots of people um so you're thinking of it i think often from sort of a legal standpoint or a criminal standpoint and we're thinking about it as far as you know psychological safety um you know
107making sure that people feel like they're safe to come to school and they're not going to be um there's not going to be sort of a bias against them so i want to you know i guess i just want to acknowledge that that's an elephant in the room and if we don't start from there we're sort of not listening to what's happening in this country so with that in mind i have um a number of different sort of concerns questions i mean i'm going to obviously assume that the things that make sure that we meet fund 80 our fund 80 requirements and meet that list of 10 needs of the district that that's going to be written into an updated sro so that that becomes sort of a foundation of what is is in this
108contract for for you all just that would probably make sense right you're saying most of this is already happening so this is again just codifying the what's already happening so the questioning of a parent presence so i'm going to come back to this and i know you've kind of already talked about this and i guess what i'm stuck on because i'm hearing what you're saying and while i understand that our policy is in does not match what is actually the law um what you're saying though is that as an sro you use discretion and it would really be your last case scenario to talk to a child without a parent being notified or present is that what i'm hearing not necessarily no um if there's a criminal investigation going on that we have to do
109someone about a crime that has occurred what's about to occur that that is the priority to get that information out of whether it's a juvenile or an adult that is the priority so we don't we try to in every scenario if we can include parents or we can include an administration or anything we we always try to work towards that but that isn't the end all the end-all press is getting that that information that is key to a crime that may be about to occur has occurred so the crime happened that we have to do our investigative phase component of it and i'm glad you brought up the elephant in the room um we do have a diverse crew of sros you've seen them you've met them and that's an important component of that interaction
110that our sros look like the community that they're out there serving as well but i respectfully disagree we don't look at things through black and white especially with the sro role it has to be more holistic it's not black and white it's not just the law or they walk free violation of law it's how can we problem solve and have those partnerships and holistically look out for what we're trying to accomplish keeping the kid out of the criminal justice system or the young adult making sure that parents we're not there to parent these kids we're there to keep everybody safe and we don't do it alone we don't do it in a vacuum it has to have school involvement it has to have parental involvement but it also has to be at the appropriate time
111if we're in the investigation phase and information gathering phase we have to determine if a crime is occurred or not so we can make that problem-solving judgment we can figure those things out what are our next steps going to be sometimes it'll involve handcuffs and taking a young person into custody other times it'll be using our discretion and having the parents be involved or having a school administrator have some type of administrative sanction yeah and i appreciate that that is that there's there's sort of all these shades of gray about how you do your job i think though the struggle is is the way that the mou was written currently which is not shades of gray you know for example it says parental contact of a suspect shall not be made until law enforcement interview
112on campus is complete so i would love to see us softening the language to match what you're telling us here today so that it's it's uh you know we will try to we will use our discretion i think there was something you said i think the reason i put that stronger language in there is because we have times where um we're in the middle of an interview i can take this one jim absolutely wear a school administration then you'll fall on my shoulders where a school administrator will come in and say don't say anything wait a minute here you're now interfering with the police investigation that's like mr meyer said that's not your job we're there to protect the rights of the individual that we're interviewing we also have to determine if a crime has
113been committed as well um we don't want to have parents showing up at school you can call that i mean you have your rules of engagement when it comes to parental notification you're obligatory reporters as well i would caution it's a delicate subject or it's a fine balance i should say where you don't want to have the parents showing up at school and next you know you have problems then peripherally in your school that can lead to other things yeah oh and i hear what you're saying well i think that's the that's sort of the rub is like if you and i'm not suggesting we don't have sros but i'm going to give this as an example so i just don't want anybody to jump on me later to say that i'm saying this but
114if we didn't have an sro program in our school school administrators would just would decide that we want this is this rises to the level of a criminal concern we need to call the police the police come in and then we know what you're going to do we know that you're there in the sro role though you're walking around the schools so you're in our buildings we're funding the program but you're saying basically we don't have any authority to make some of those decisions about the administration saying we want to do this or we don't want to do this and i and i really i really struggle with that because again it isn't that we do have different roles you know our the school the administrator in the building the principle of the building is
115controlled complete control of his or her building it is their ability we are there just to supplement and help them in any way we can but if something rises to the level of a crime we have now risen above the control of that administrator it is now criminal matter to where the police are involved and then are then in charge so it's a hard pull to swallow you're right we are there you know we service mayfair mall we're officers in there we have facilities there we're there constantly to support them but we don't ask the manager necessarily if something if someone's got a gun and they're walking around the mall like are you okay if we do this or do you want to contact somebody you know i'm not trying to be rude on dentistry
116i say as an example we have a responsibility as law enforcement to take charge in those situations so you're right in that circumstance law would then be above the administrator of the building there's some context to that if you find dr hoy we're there to stabilize the scene and then investigate in that order and it's something that is codified our policies and our rules procedures the law tells us we have to investigate any crime that comes to our attention the outcome piece of it i think is where people have concern with in that process again having that relationship with the school administrators with the sros i would expect them to notify the sro have that discussion but hey this is we got to take it to this place over here this is now a serious
117crime and you can't be in the room we have to interview this person we have to protect the rights we have to protect you as a school administrator so you don't interfere in this as well this is the thing i'm thinking is actually two examples that you brought up earlier the thc uh and the bad choice of sex in the hallway of of right of there's there's these two things where you have to behave in certain ways even if you're looking for creative ways to alternatively respond to it like certain things your hands are tied and so this is some of the this is those are kind of examples of spaces where you have to follow the law you have to follow certain processes and whereas the district might say we're going to deal with
118it this through an administrative process that still is going to have some teeth and consequence but may look different than in the thc piece a felony that would make me very happy if we could find a middle ground that goes to an administrative sanction versus a civil ordinance violation citation or a criminal sanction yeah the officers don't want to do the reports and see a young person and in the criminal justice system when we're i'm telling you we're trying to keep them out of it and this is this isn't the mind of myself as a conduct officer on a college campus through much of my career of what are the different tools and resources you have to get to the same the same desired outcome and that's one of the things that maybe as we
119look at the mou too to figure out maybe it belongs in the mou maybe it's a policy something else of how do we make sure that we're utilizing all of our tools not tying our hands uh handling i've always had the flaws we've handled the things at the lowest level possible sometimes the lowest level possible is a really high level and you jump right to that but for some of the stuff i'm thinking about how do we make sure that we're keeping kids on the right track and figuring this out i don't have the answers here but that's one where i'm i i think you all as i was listening to you talk that's the thing i'm figuring out knowing you have you're bound in ways that the district may have different flexibility i i
120think the better we do our job wearing our hat to keep kids from getting to the resource officers and we know we need to do a better job with our deans of students with our social workers with our psychologists i think if we're doing our job wearing our hat well it's a different mou need than if we're not doing our that's our school district administration job well and we do know in the past we didn't lean too much on the sros and and from the board level we saw that and we didn't like it and um and you know now there's things we need to have behavioral interventions earlier and we'll have less things go to the so this whole it's not like an ecosystem of people wearing their hats and part of our solution
121to our concern with the police wearing their hat is look to ourselves to wear our hat better it's also mutual respect for each other's role i excited the example of having a school administrator come in during the middle of a interview well please respect our role we're here to do our policing thing but that respect has to be mutual the other direction too that you're trying to manage and take care of the educational needs of this particular school staff the students administrative function all those things awesome um uh we already talked about socks uniforms i i'm in agreement i don't remember who said that but i'm in agreement i i think it's okay to have it written that there's some flexibility in that but i would love the soft uniforms to be the rule not
122the exception i think the sros basically they like the soft uniforms it's very much more comfortable it's more comfortable there is a question though like oftentimes like you're using we are trained with muscle memory for where our tools are and if you wear the soft uniform suddenly you're like oh where did i put it so there's that one of the things with the the soft uniform that we agree with it for many reasons and at times we don't but the number one thing we have a defense arrest tactics is something that we're trained on that's state mandated but the very first piece of information in there is what one of what is our first use of force if you will it is merely our presence in uniform right so if we have if you're dealing
123with a kid at the school and they know who you are and they may not need that presence there but if you have the bad guy who comes off the street and something wants to cause a problem for the school but like who's this guy in this long fellow shirt it's a de-escalating effect too but you're saying also that your primary goal in that role is to build relationships so i think what you wear on a daily basis should reflect that i think safety is also a very full second to that right so we have to make sure that we're safe so the other thing is let's say a worst case scenario there's an active shooter in the building and cops are coming from all over the place we got them from every jurisdiction you
124can imagine and there's someone running through the school with a you know whitman polo on was a gun in their hand that the officer's responding i don't know who that is but that looks like that looks dangerous and we've had cops getting shot by other cops because they're not even recognizable we have an instance where let's say you're at longfellow the bank's getting robbed across the street the sro by proximity is the first one there because that's happening right there they step across the street and they're not in this uniform that creates big problems for us so it's yeah i said this before i think we talked about last time we were here sort of talking about both sides of my mouth i'm advocating for the uniform and telling you why it's so important at
125the same time understanding why the soft uniform is important but trying to lead that discretion to the sro because they know in their minds how they feel safe and how what they feel is required to do their job safely and to keep everybody else safe if they're comfortable with a soft uniform then so be it but if they're if they're adamant that they want the uniform and part of our interview process by the way is to ask them that question because we want them to say no i like the soft uniform so we we understand it we like it one more piece about the soft uniform we are trying to build those relationships as we discussed and we want to be seen as human beings in the schools and the uniform is a barrier to
126that we know that but we also want them to get familiar with the uniform because we want them to be on the street like no these cops aren't all bad at master oh was great you know and associated the uniform with the patrol officer on the street so there's that aspect of it too it's really kind of complex um but we are completely open to letting nazareles do that just didn't really want to put language in there and say they shall do this or they shall not and i can't do that because of operational necessity too there's sometimes that my decision-making process no i need people in blue uniforms out there or there's an sro who's working a shift because of our staffing they've got to go immediately and cover a patrol shift as well
127but again i'm not going to lay the law down and say no you you got to be in this uniform all the time the sros know when it's appropriate we all recognize that this is a barrier to effective relationship building and one thing dr hoya i want to correct you safety is my first concern always if people are upset with decisions i make or what the officers make our safety or everybody's safety is my primary concern the relationship building is part of increasing that safety capacity so i definitely agree with that so um two things that i think we we sort of skated by and it's fun i have my notes here but as far as the interview and the interviews with the school district involved in our interview process we did do that recently
128we have um talking about the rotation and people retiring sros that are in place and ready to go um to work in schools and we had laura geisler on board for that your school safety coordinator so it was great to have her there and give some opinions and see the people that were running up there ultimately that discretion ends with the chief as far as who's going to be hired well we are open to the input that we like the idea we're servicing we're worse we're working as partners with you and serving your schools we want you guys to have at least a voice in that so that's something that that's important the elephant the room that was spoken earlier and i agree with you when there's the history of this country in law enforcement
129particularly with people of color um it is there it exists and we all know it i think we've gotten far far better i know our police department does not want any racist in the building because that's just bad for everybody right what's interesting though about the uniform is and and i don't i'm an old white guy okay but i wear this uniform and i have been called a racist more times than i can count before i can even put my car in the park people are so so people discriminate against us for the job that we do so i'm familiar with discrimination certainly not to the degree that that you know minorities maybe um but we know what it's like and i think that's actually it's like we have we go through training we carry
130a taser i have to be tased to know what that feels like well i have some knowledge of what it feels like to be discriminated against and we fight against that i always say and i said in high schools for years i wish we'd get rid of race altogether just call it the human race that would be far better with me because that's what we all are we're all brothers and sisters and so we try not to look you know the lens of race i bring it up because you brought it out but i think it's important but i can tell you working on this police department i've been with tulsa for 14 years i've worked for mpd for two before that that is that is something that the department is against we have a
131very diverse department and we are we want to get over that hurdle like everybody else and what i think hurts the most as a cop is 2019 like right before covent struck everyone that was coming thank you for working officers you guys were working you know we were working 12-hour shifts while everyone else was sheltering at home we were trying to be out there and people were bringing us cookies and putting signs you know thanks for your help and then george floyd hit and suddenly those same people were all attacking us and you're a racist you're a problem and you're this year that we hadn't changed anything we were doing so going through those experiences that's life experience those are tough experiences but we bring that knowledge to schools too when we aren't there to
132discriminate also the humanistic piece we want people to see us as human beings i've said that from day one as being the new chief not so new anymore they want people to identify with us as human beings behind this uniform so that's where that relationship piece is so important and then having the empathy piece again talking about the elephant in the room yeah annoying i appreciate that and you're right like i i i i can appreciate that the police have had you know some difficulties um sort of a few bad apples kind of mentality but i but i also want to be really thoughtful that that like this is 400 we're here to get 400 years of real racism like sort of thread into every into our institutions including how we enforce laws so i
133i think it's very aspirational to say someday we'll all be the human race totally want that as well but we're not there and so i think we have to recognize that there's implicit bias and we have to sort of acknowledge it if we want to not continue to to perpetuate itself okay so i mean that's fine um can i just add dr hoy some some some people are still fearful and how lots of people are still fearful i just want to bring you back yeah i appreciate that and how can we how can you help that how can we help with people's fear of police by being human by being connected by having these open conversations that talk about these critical issues and i guess dispelling the bias piece of it when people say over
134nationally police it well i can tell you from my very short year went pretty fast that that's not the wauwatosa police department i've never seen a more caring and empathetic group of cops that really care about this community i'm proud to lead this department because i've got a stake in this i've shared that all with you in private in my correspondent so how do we get past that by having these types of critical conversations by developing those type of relationships with staff making sure a policy aligns with what the law says and figuring those things out we're not going to figure out overnight but we're making progress that's steps in the right direction i think the sro program to it in itself i mean i've spoken countless classes um i was invited to speak in
135classes usually do an hour presentation on any given topic and it's the give and take with the students on those that's where we earn a lot of respect from students or or show them a different side so that's helping with that some of the best relationships i've had with students at school and i i kind of was hard on myself because i'm not officer burbach she is officer friendly she is like everybody loves her right oscar tracy so i am not that person i i'm friendly enough but i'm not bubbly tracy vermont but uh one of the administrators the school told me i wasn't i wasn't the best at that with all the kids but what i was the best at was the troubled kids the kids that had problems the kids that were in
136trouble in school getting arrested that kind of those are the kids i had the relationships with they came to see me before they would talk to an administrator or talk to their teachers so those types of bonds that we built i had i showed the kids respect the decency if i took them into custody they were generally surprised by the time they left i mean it wasn't uncommon for me to have to arrest somebody to take a mcdonald's and sit and have lunch with them afterwards before bringing them home and bring them to school i'm talking about the street as an adult late shift i'm talking about the students in the in the school so those types of things help but some believe they've been wronged they they believe they've been wronged and and how
137and if there are complaints like that how do we mitigate those by being transparent i i've said this time and time again police work is not pretty there's a lot of ugliness to it when we have to use force deadly force sometimes sometimes lower levels of force that you see in a youtube video of us having to take somebody to the ground or wrestle and fight with them but then explaining why that had to happen we don't want to do that i can tell you last school year three sros had to take a young lady into custody and they were beating themselves up around the station because they felt like they had failed that young lady they felt like they failed and i said no you did what you had to do and the parents
138were not called until afterwards i said no you're not not showing them the body worn camera we have an obligation to show them that conduct of their child and have that critical conversation that's how you build trust not to cast blame but hey so they understand why we had to take their daughter to the ground and wrestle with her to get her into handcuffs you know what we did our job we wrote the citation we stabilized the scene we investigated here's your child back intact but we need to be talking about that to keep them out of the criminal justice system that's how we build trust on our end hopefully that's helpful i think we need to keep things in context too understand what it is you're speaking of we're very quick in this country
139and i'm guilty of it to the knee-jerk reactions to say oh i got an excerpt this big from the news this must be fact get the facts first right people are jumped to conclusions immediately about what police are doing um i mean if you get a phone call from an administrator i want that conversation to happen what really happened from our perspective why that person had to be taken into custody versus having people fill in the blank with their own whatever i've sat with irate parents and brought them in and let them watch video show them what has happened explain to them what has happened so we do our best to talk the people and explained circumstances we can't fix hundreds of years of you know mistrust um thousands for that matter but within law
140enforcement but but little by little our interactions with people hopefully even like a meeting like this today you're getting a piece of what our perspective is and what we're trying to do i mean people probably don't some people probably don't trust what we're saying right now but all we can do is continue acting and hopefully you can tell from our actions that we're not out really about to get anybody and certainly aren't biased and doing so i just have a couple can i i just i'm going to list my things real because otherwise i feel like you're going to tell me if my time's up you can list them and then we'll go okay okay um uh so tracking the data i think that's really important i'd love to see us re-examine what data we're
141tracking um and think about how often the board is gonna get updated on that data um i said your internal server though you can see that through dr means at any time i would still well it's probably maybe more of a doctor means put it onto his plate but yes we're asking for lots of doubt on lots of things yeah um uh i would like again this is more of an administrative administration um thing that i'd love to see us identify when our sros should be getting engaged with our students and when it should be more of uh our mental health i forget how the what those that student services student services yeah when that when that should be the team that's intervening um would really also like to to think about the grievance stuff
142i think right now it's written that the the school administration doesn't have much of a role or any role in um identifying or learning about the investigation or being part of the investigation if there is a grievance against an sro but um i i really feel like that's a really important part of that that collaboration and partnership is that if there is a concern or a complaint that that should be something that we're doing together in my seven years as an sro there hadn't been a grievance against an sro at least not one that was brought to our attention we had one last year that turned out to be unfounded and it was investigated i think certainly by the school and the police department but where we ran into trouble was the school basically wanted
143to investigate and speak to our employee without even notifying our department or its supervisors so as an example if you had a cleaning crew here and it was hired by an outside agency yet you noticed something the cleaning crew did that was inappropriate i think it'd be out of line for you to then interview that person and do an investigation of that person that i think that falls more on that their employer you can certainly contact the employers here's what we've observed here's what we think is happening and and be kept uh a prize as to what that their investigation is or maybe they're agreeable to having you there you know as part of the questioning but that's where we ran into the problem it's been one um and at least for two years so
144one in nine years that i'm aware of and it turned out to be unfounded um and so yes we would prefer to investigate our own on that just like i'm sure you would want to investigate your own administrator or something we don't go talking to a school personnel for a violation that they may have done or they may have violated by a school rule that would be something we could turn over all day long we have instances where i know as an sro we had you know people that the food to the students and whatnot with maybe some minor thefts or that kind of thing and this the school district would ask us to then look into that but if it was a personnel matter that we turn that right back over to human resources
145to see if that's all yours so a human resource perspective but that's what you're talking about yeah except in this case you're in our house sort of you know what i mean so like i think it's different than saying like if i came to the police department and i i don't know i i did something i i just i think it's different it's a little it's not as clear-cut and what i'm suggesting i guess is a partnership not uh you take full control or the school district takes full control but really having a partnership in how those grievances are addressed and hopefully to your point it will almost never happen well we do have a a very good internal investigation process complaints can be filed or agreements as you put it you can go through
146the police and fire commission it can go to the department directly and that gets assigned to a supervisor to look to see if there's merit to it and then it's in a full internal investigation we protect the rights of the employee we protect the rights of the organization there's an interview process there's an investigative process ultimately that discipline falls on my desk whether or not to pull the sro out for example or have some type of policy or rule violation and if there is that decision falls on me to decide if it's going to be either termination or suspension pulling that sr out and having them be replaced so we do have a very good complaint procedure if you want to call it that or a grievance process and we'd have it out on our
147website too and if you wanted to take a look at it i can't have somebody from the school board sitting on an internal rules policy violation that wouldn't happen i think for me it's that like that's going 0 to 60 versus like that's like formal complaint i i i don't want to interpret but i think it's just like how do we make sure that we're having good conversations and feedback is happening and you know a student raises something and it doesn't rise to the level of complaint or grievance but that we're we're noticing a trend or we're i think like there's this like line that we have to find where it's like we're in true partnership because we both want the same thing right and so it's how do we make sure that both sides
148are really open to the feedback of like how do we how do we make this relationship work when we're both in uh positions of authority but very different positions of authority and have very different responsibilities in terms of um so i i think it's i totally appreciate that there's an internal complaint process and whatnot but like how do we make sure that like it doesn't even have to get to that level but if something comes up we also don't feel like it's it's jumping immediately to that where that's where we have our sergeant um our supervision team if something comes to my attention then it must be pretty serious that's where i don't micromanage the sergeant or the lieutenant or the captain there's a lot of layers of oversight in the administration bureau of which
149the yes sr will fall under but if those things can be mitigated at the lowest level like you said i would prefer that if it doesn't rise to a grievance or an official internal investigation we're all about quality control of our service that we provide to the community it has to be a back and forth um sometimes those complaints have merits sometimes they don't sometimes people are upset that the police had to use force or they don't like the fact that they got a citation well that's what we had to do and this is what the law and our policy says you may not like it but that's where we have somebody like sergeant morrow will give that information i'm also looking for the development of my sros as well if somebody isn't cutting the
150mustard they're not doing their job there's employee improvement plan that's that back and forth where you have your expectations i have my expectation let's figure where we have that common ground so hearing the concerns i remind everyone that you've said yourself that sros are not patrol officers that the reason to have an sro is that these various incidents that are that have happened are not involving sros with with you know [Music] traffic stops and things that that we addressed your concerns because we have of sros that if a police intervention is needed we're much more likely to have you know this very specialized highly trained talented person that's not your typical not nothing against traffic officers you know but just to say it's a special job you have and you have special people doing it
151and that to me answers some of these concerns societal concerns that are being expressed the good news is that a lot of times we think of law enforcement as the joe friday who are who what where when how we forget the why and one of the things that's given me a lot of comfort i've seen officers in action on the street where they'll take that extra couple of seconds and say here's the why of it people want to know why did i get stopped why am i getting issued a citation and i'm happy to say that even on the patrol force the control side of things those officers do take that time they're carrying on the arm i'm not trying to cast aspersions on anybody i i love you all but but now concerns are
152being voiced and i'm saying well we've addressed it by having it seems counterintuitive but by having sros we are actually addressing the concerns with an extra level of of training and capability for the officers who are in our buildings that you know they are you are special the sros to us you're special you know not the traffic cops anything wrong with them but sros for us you all are really special and so thank you they have institutional knowledge too that needs to be passed on in mentorship to others that is going back to that why do we want to cycle sros through so we can pass on that institutional knowledge of that next generation of sro we want to make it so it's not it's an arbitrary every two years boom boom boom boom it
153has to somehow coincide with the life cycle of a student going through the school system where before it was a place you went to and were an sro until somebody pulled you out there has to be some logical mentorship and progression so people can share that knowledge back on the patrol force they've also done a good job of mentoring somebody to take their place because people will leave they'll resign they'll retire i can just make a comment about dr boyd's comment i think you know we have a duty and a responsibility to protect our students and i think that's where that piece comes in um you know for a process for a student to file a complaint that's outside of what the district offers i'm in no way suggesting or i'm finding that this is
154the world to the wauwatosa police department but there have been historical accounts of sros taking advantage of their position the district i came from and sro was having sexual encounters with students in the building the reality is it happens so there needs to be a process where if a student does not feel like an sro is acting appropriately for whatever reason or a parent that there is an avenue in which they can launch a formal or even informal complaint but there needs to be a process that the district is a part of because there absolutely is and you should and they should do that they should they can voice that opinion to an administrator a teacher a parent a fellow student but i think there's no process according to the mou where you know the
155district has its own authority to investigate that complaint is that correct i mean i want to think about that because i don't i don't chief correct me if i'm wrong i would if a student came forward to an administrator who said the sro did something inappropriate i would have zero problem with it unless we're talking you talked about sex with a student that would be a major major criminal matter but um maybe on a smaller level whatever i i don't have a problem with an administrator asking questions of other students maybe gathering some information for us to say hey this complaint came forward i talked to a couple of people and this this sounds like it's an issue it's a criminal matter it's a police matter yet again now we don't major crimes like a
156homicide or police involved shooting really going to investigate ourselves right and i know there's a conflict of interest there if you're talking with somebody risen to that level i don't know where that i'm not i mean not things that egregious but that's why i think that there needs to be a process in place and something in the mou that dictates what is that process between the district and if there is that codified in the mou that would be for any type of administrative sanction because like i said our policy rules procedures in the law say that it falls under our purview if but if there's some type of administrative sanction it wouldn't have any teeth towards the officer other than somebody bringing it to our attention and then it falls on our purview to investigate
157what's going on but then there has to be that communication back and forth well if a student said that an sro said something appropriate appropriate okay we looked into it um the sro was i don't know there could be several dispositions on that that there was employee retraining there was some type of mediation between the student and the sro or if it's something that egregious of a sro doing something like you described that'd be an easy decision i we have a number of different relationships with other other vendors sodexo provides our food service dan plotz provides our contracted cleaning and under those scenarios if an employee is accused of doing something that we have to investigate typically we would jointly do it with the supervisor of that that service that's provided to us we wouldn't
158be excluded from it we would be kept updated because as part of the mlu is just not identifying the relationship there is there is an exchange of funds from the the school district to the police department just like there's an exchange of funds between the school district and dan plotz or sodexo in the school district so i think there are ways i don't think it's a either or i think it's a yes and i think there we have we have found ways to do this in a collaborative fashion with other agencies that are providing a service to the school district and the one thing i would just point out is that like from a human resources perspective whomever has been accused also has the right to privacy so long as it has not risen to
159a certain level in terms of if the retraining is happening or if that person is is receiving some additional coaching or whatever i think that's one of the hardest things that i deal with on a regular basis is somebody raises an issue you know and they want to know exactly what's being done to that person to fix x and legally you cannot share that and and sometimes it feels very unfulfilling to say to the person we're handling it you know um and it's things to say that right well but there has to be trust and so i i keep thinking about how we change perception in the community is that kids families start having different experiences or we have the data to say like these experiences these situations we agree we're warranted or et cetera
160so i i think this is all moving us in that direction um but to miss willis's point dr quick's point like we just want to make sure that we're capturing in here foundational things to set us up for success in this first year and i fully expect that we will come back as a board um and look at where we need to be more explicit or where we can loosen the reins a little bit i just want to underscore we have we have experiences and protocols where we are receiving services from external vendors how we do this collectively and and there is a there is a demarcation line where the vendor will say we thank you for your input we'll take it from here um but i think there are also there's also points in
161that journey where we're doing it in a collaborative fashion so i i think there are some models and yeah i don't again i don't think it's either or i think it's a yes and i think we can get there um because we're doing it with other vendors right now dr uh wrap up your session with 40 minutes [Music] mr phillips sure one point on the fund 80 before i just put a pen in it um what's the definition of direct employer is it the funder or is it the is it span of control at this the control spanner controls like we're going to get audited on this and that ultimately sign on that i just want to make sure that we understand that yes okay cool and then you know um like i love the
162talk about partnership and some of the reactive stuff that we've been talking about like proactively i know you mentioned about you know having somebody from the district help out with interviewing but like what about training and what about informal reviews or we just did a 360 survey you know feedback on dr means as part of that evaluation how do you see that partnership working you know in a perfect world i know you've done research on it so how do you see that you have a new officer how do we help participate in the onboarding of the school how do we help them with junior high versus high school like like how does that how does that partnership work in a proactive way well i'm going to use the example of dr burbach yeah she's stated
163that she intends on leaving sometime next year so we had the um the hiring internal hiring process of which the school system was involved in it's been part of that interview process file review those kinds of things and the appointment was made um for actually two sros we're also planning for the next step yeah having one reserve or if we have a fourth position somewhere down the road if our staffing allows for it chief before you move on because that's been a community issue or question the district has not backed away from four sros can you explain why we have worked on the three right now yeah we had four and we made the ask we said hey this is the unfunded position but out of necessity we need to pull this person back to
164the department because we didn't have we still are struggling with staffing um so that was a thank you a pd decision um i'd like to go back to four i'd like to see our staffing uh be what it was a year ago um part part of the onboarding is working directly with that sro that's sun setting out if you want to call it that to establish those relations make introductions start to get a feel for what does that role look like it's ojt i'm making sure they go to the formalized training as well before they are fully in their home so they have a partner they have a field training officer just like we do for onboarding new employees until that sro attends the training they are squared away they have those relationships they know
165what that function is and then we see where they're going to take it while they're being monitored by sergeant oral for um specific key performance indicators which that is going the best part of that codification in the mou and they're documenting their contacts that they are developing those relationships they are doing the um i i always hate to see on an officer's assignment sheet for the day their log of what they do unobligated time i can tell you the sros don't have a little to no unobligated time but let's put it somewhere that for 20 minutes i was in the commons of tulsa west and i talked to five students about upcoming homecoming or hey the football write it down put it down then that's what i was doing in that unobligated time that also
166showed the sergeant that they're doing all different facets of that policing mission not just the law enforcement department trust building relationship building supporting school staff developing relationships with students those kinds of things hopefully that explains how that process worked out a little bit i was like you know i have a recent middle schooler and a very very uh current high schooler and they're very different people right so how you know how how can we help in some of that differentiated training i know the mou program or the uh um you know the officer program is is you know seems to be it says basic right so how do you like how can we help or what does that relationship look like where we have to really get granular around that age-appropriate stuff and you know
167middle school versus high school like what is that what's that look like how does that how does that feel yeah i guess before i answer that i wanted to talk about something i think would be very very good to engage the performance of the sro because oftentimes i mean i'm not even overseeing them that much i'm not physically there in the rise with them the people that are the administrators of staff obviously students i would love to see um an annual or biannual review done by an administrator to say here's what we think our sro is doing here's the weak points grade points whatever um so that we can assess that so it isn't just bias on our apartment right or just uh assuming that everything's going wonderfully right because there are times where it
168hasn't we've talked in ministries where it's not working out too great right what we do to fix it sometimes a year is too long it is yeah right so then you do it by i think maybe twice a year whatever yeah also survey the staff and students and families yeah i've seen what their perspective has been granted you're going to get some people that may have gotten a ticket and they know they hate them too so i don't right but you i think if you look at the large number of responses you would get you'd probably get a pretty good deal you bring up some interesting ideas as far as how do you place an sro whether it be an element you know yeah place to prepare yeah how do you do that right um
169i would definitely be open to um input from the district on that as far as how they thought maybe if we if we inserted someone somewhere and they're like boy we think they're better suited for here usually the sros will talk about themselves and say you know what you're probably more suited for middle school or whatnot we do that through the interview process through knowing the officers who worked for us for years and we we kind of get to know their personality where their fit might be we've already done it um you know with the next two that's real sort of waiting in the wingspan i think they'd be best suited and that's that's from conversations with them our observations of them uh seeing how they work with who um i was personally i think
170i was far better suited for the high school than i would have for the younger kids and that was my own personal assessment so i would be open to input from the schools yeah if they if you guys have uh stuff you'd like to have us consider for that yeah there's no honestly i don't know of a great way to do it other than us sort of knowing who that employee right and getting feedback from them i ask a different mr phillips it's always thoughtful i i have a different question which is during the course of this conversation there have been a lot of people give me articles here or there around what they consider to be best practice for school resource officers and you know the unfortunate shooting in texas a few months ago
171indicated where maybe police response was not ideal my question is and i'm not asking you to name the departments and the relationships but are you aware of best practices in terms of relationships between a police department and a school system do school resource officers get together and network and talk just out of curiosity is there some type of of networking that the the a similar position of ms chrysler and your position that oversees the school resource officers is there some type of networking where that happens or are you are you looking at certain departments that would you would say that's what we're aspiring to i think as i was listening to your question that's another element to this well evolving was something that i personally reserve judgment for to see like we're always we're quick
172to condemn officers for their work and the media is nice to do it at the same time like i mentioned earlier i think it's always wise to sit and gather the information no there's an extensive study on that school shooting there were failures in the police department i'll say that publicly they'll say that there are failures on the on the school as well there was all kinds of things that went wrong with that um [Music] there there's people that say there was cowardice there was all these things going on what happened there was scenarios where officers on one end of the hall and officers on the other there's crossfire situations all kinds of things that went wrong in that situation that made things go from bad to worse there's lessons learned in that every single
173time very hard and terrible lessons i did a large presentation on this part of what i did it seemed to to describe school safety and on and on so i can talk about that i agree with you on that i will say this and i want you guys to know this our police development and i'm getting off track a bit but it's important and it's safety our police officers need the chief anybody we're the first responder responder to an active shooter or something going violently wrong in a school or any other place of business for that matter we will go in that is our training that is what we do we've proven it time and again we have the azanda spa we had the mayfair mall most recently at the madison where three of our
174options were shot we go in and we address the threat so i want you guys to be comfortable knowing that that's what we train for it's what we do um and we love to have at least more than one person going but if we're the only one there we're going so there's that piece of it um a network piece i i can tell you inspirationally yeah i i can tell you about it when i worked in milwaukee there was also community outreach and education yeah and they had they were sros as well that um stopped but i know there was a network that i mean i encouraged our sros hey talk to the people over in oco know the sros that work over in brookfield know the ones that work in west allis so you
175can find the best ways of doing business it may not be applicable all the time right um i don't i know there's conferences they can go to there's also training events that they go to and they develop those relationships it's no different than if jim or i go to one of those professional conferences that's where you go to training but then you talk about things afterwards when you're socializing one hey here's this idea hey this is what we explored that's really working well well i've been like what you're mentioning some of that that cross you know cross-pollination there's a lot that um i think our folks can learn from you and then you know vice versa right and so you know to help understand education and help them understand where you're coming from i just
176like those informal formal touch points um those opportunities for proactive collaboration so that things don't get lost in the in the wash and we're not doing reactive things right so just encourage you to think you know you said it before you created you think outside the box like you know and look and embrace those opportunities to do that because i think there's a lot we can learn from each other and we're better together so yeah so let me take one more thing here um one of the things i mentioned months ago is i'm all about doing some type of feedback loop yeah and getting it getting feedback from parents getting it from school administrators from the teachers i think it's important that we get that feedback where people might think oh everything is doing we're
177doing great wonderfully well maybe there's some things we need to tweak absolutely oh i think one major takeaway i will i will um remember from this evening we have something called a cooperative education service agency or csu and our cisa typically they do a really good job in bringing together like positions across all school systems be it all the people who do mr opinion's job to the people who do my job too candidly the people who do the job of school board members i i my wondering and i will follow up with cesa one of you all met sue doyle who's now the executive director and i think this means you are you're our representative you're on the board of uh border control there my wondering is is there any way where we can at
178least get all the sergeant morals of sros across our metro area to come together once or twice a year and talk about best practices um it would be i think it makes all of our schools safer if you're able to talk to the sros in oak creek versus the ones in franklin versus the ones in white pitch bay uh it meets all of our our schools across the metro there's an area there's a network that exists with the southeastern wisconsin sros it's um it's informal it's uh basically it's a list of emails and contact information every year it's updated um there's someone that that does it i think they're in greenfield that is really good about finding out who's new what's changed and everything else and then amongst that group there's an email chain that
179that's exchanged often that someone said hey we're doing this bill what are you guys doing over there so there is some of that networking going on one time we we hosted it's been a few years now we actually hosted an event much like you're speaking of where we had everybody come that was able to comment i think it turned out to be about 15 people but it was a group setting like this where we could actually speak and have conversations and learn uh i think they're great ideas i like where you're going with that as far as having like maybe the supervisors of it and best practices and something that you you hit on earlier and i think it's a really good idea laura and i we need we definitely need one once a month
180we try to need more than that if it's necessary always in communication with each other but i i have not spoken uh with other school safety coordinators um and i think that's a great idea to maybe laura and i can sort of look into that and and other people that have my role as well i love that idea i have to be able to ask for it okay cool thanks all right it's interesting you've bring it best practices because uh document i have put up in front of me um our best practices for school research officers and it was created with wisconsin department of justice and the wisconsin vpi and i think that's an important collaboration and important to consider because it really i think um really looks at the roles in educational facility right
181we're not just talking about policing out on the street but we're talking about police officers in our building so i'm gonna get back to that because i want to talk about some of the things that i wrote down but i think that this is an important place to start and i think with the history of our district and the police department never having an mou um i'm gonna suggest probably something unpopular but we're going to i want to talk about some of the points um just about the sro program so i think probably my number one concern and something we kind of touched on is criminalizing student behavior and i think you gave actually good examples of how that happened so let's say we did not have an sro program in our school and i
182am i i was a high school educator last year um you know and i've seen students make not great choices not great behaviors including engaging in sexual conduct when there are not sros in the building that those behaviors don't get criminalized because there's not an obligation for the spool to necessarily report the behavior to the police department but i think what you conveyed is that if there are police officers in the school then you have an obligation to report that behavior through the criminal criminal system correct no not necessarily there's i got this one jim not necessarily that's again that officer discretion and you're talking about the josh call document it's 20 or 40 pages about best practices dpi it came through the attorney general's office that's the one there's a i don't know there's
183a brief one that's four pages okay i i read one that was uh put out by josh cole attorney general about best practices of sros giving all of us some guidance from a legal perspective how do we figure out this relationship um i take the stance of we can't ignore the fact that a crime occurred and nor would i encourage any school administrator or teacher to ignore it but there are different ways of handling it so as far as a blanket it's criminalized no again we're trying to reform behavior and not put people in the criminal justice i said that so many times already tonight i mean i've taught juvenile justice before criminology before and dealing with young people it's different than dealing with adults who engage in criminal behavior or do those kinds of
184things yeah there's different ways of handling it it's not a one-size-fits-all and i think the expression piece too that not you know as you talked about these officers rotating in and out of our school they're not going to all operate with the same discretion i mean that you know they might view that as a uh an instance that they should criminalize that behavior and send that kid through the criminal justice system and that's where it just gives me i guess and and the other you know since you brought this up you know i've heard a story that was brought to my attention by community members and staff about the incident with the young girl and to me which incident no the one that um chief mcgill has talked about with the three police officers had
185to take take her handcuffs down to the station um so to me as an educator right this is from my education lens i see that in incomport behavior but all of a sudden it became disorderly conduct and i think that's that fine line that we talk about with education and peace in our schools and that's why i think this document really does a great job of kind of delineating some of those responsibilities and i think we need to do a better job of the district really defining what are those responsibilities so when do we want the police to intervene because that's not clear to me like i don't have clarity on you know you you talk about criminal behavior and i think you know all of us you know i have two young kids in
186the district we all think about safety and i want my kids to be safe i want every kid in the district to be safe but that's not what we're talking about with some of these criminal behaviors that you've mentioned you know marijuana for instance um you know as it's becoming legal around states around us you know engaging in sexual activity i'm not talking about those behaviors i think you're talking about violent behaviors and i think that's our call from our communities to address those violent and safety concerns but my concern is criminalizing behaviors that we typically see students engage in on a regular basis and i say this as a parent of black students because i do think that there are students of color there are biases that play into that i also have a
187an on with the law enforcement officer so i understand the complexity of that relationship but i'm also saying it from a lens of i don't want any of our students to be criminalized for making bad choices right unfortunately i don't know if that's happening right but i'm saying that it's not i don't think it's defined enough in our emory mou for me to be comfortable and say that the sro understands their role and responsibility to keep our schools safe you know to keep the violence out keep the guns out but i also don't want them to have that free range to criminalize bad choices that students so is is sex in the stairwell a regular basis thing no but i think i think it's a bad choice and i don't think it's a behavior that
188needs to be criminalized i think it needs to be dealt with so let me let me tell you this so there's mandatory reporting right that's a sexual assault like type of credit but i ask everyone in the gallery to um if you're going to want to have conversations amongst yourselves to uh step out and do that but in here the conversation a sexual assault has occurred whether it's consensual or not by law a sexual assault has occurred this the school then has a mandatory reporting they must report those things it's not like the boy if the nasty police were here they wouldn't have arrested them the police are going to be notified should be notified anyway that there's mandatory reporting for the kindness occurred and this idea of criminalizing student behavior you take sexy for
189example somebody who one kid puts a picture of themselves nude that's considered child pornography rises to the level of a felony and they exchange it with so-and-so and then so-and-so says hey look at this picture and then they all share that with me it gets all centered about we have a major crime that's just occurred for kids acting like kids making poor or decisions so what we've tried to do is we're working with our city attorney and we've looked at ordinances and law across the country to try to decriminalize at least the first offense because almost not every kid but uh probably half the kids with cell phones now are doing inappropriate things their phones we don't want to make it a felony a crime and make them a sexual offender either so we're trying
190to say can we at least get an ordinance so we can write him a ticket and make this an ordinance violation it's not a crime doesn't raise that level so we don't we're not out there trying to criminalize things nor be in the schools to to to try to to catch people and hope that we make an arrest that kind of thing there's a misconception and i take a little bit of an exception with the bias i hear about the bias all the time well you must have a bias you're a white cop clearly you've got a bias against black students i do not i do not and i think the options i work with do not and people consistently tell us that well you're only doing this because they're black that is not the
191case it is not and i can tell you and i i'm suggesting that well you said there's a bias that exists and of course there are do you have a preconceived bias against police officers i'm not saying you do i'm using these things well wait but yeah but i i just want to acknowledge that there are biases that but that's not what's dictating the way we do our work well it's a complex issue because you have a law which should be color blind dealing with people from different demographics different backgrounds but they all want to be treated the same way when it comes to the distribution of the law correct sure so sros are more trained they're more adept they're chosen for a reason and i'm not again like mr meyer said our patrol force
192also are great problem solvers but sros take it to a higher level of again trying to figure out solutions in the best interest of the student while also holding them accountable but the accountability piece can be an administrative sanction it could be parental sanctions i remember being fearful of my parents more than i was anybody in law enforcement and my dad was a police officer so i was always afraid of the parental double whammy component of it it was a double whammy but i also remember my sro here in wauwatosa officer lopey and i remember the conversations i had with that guy um about okay if i ended up getting into trouble that would be the guy i would go to hey i messed up or hey can you help me out i made a
193dumb decision because like you dr joseph anger we all have a past and you know it's part of growth and development and well i appreciate that some students have that relationship with sros because i've seen it in my own family not all students do and i think i just i want to recognize that well can i just it and miss willis i mean the definition of implicit bias is that it's it's below the level of your conscious decision-making so it can actually concerns me more that you're sort of standing in your ground and saying i don't operate with a bias we all operate was a bias and so i i mean i think that really needs to be part of the training um and i think it's really important the second piece i want to
194clarify is that as mandated reporters we are mandated to report not crimes we are mandated to report to child welfare systems that's a very different system so just to clarify okay if it's a sexual assault it's a child it's a child abuse nature and that needs to know when there's two you know when there's when they're sexually action to consenting there's no adolescence yes no you're as a mandated reporter that's not part of what we have to do there's no such thing as consent between people under the age of 18. then you report to child welfare systems and they decide what they're going to do which i can say they will never ever investigate part of that process versus somebody entering into the criminal justice system but still we have our job as obligatory reporters
195to report it to the district attorney by arrest or otherwise but that's the difference between criminalizing the behavior and and operating through a mandated reporter lens which are different things i mean i'm a mandated reporter in my line of work so i'm very comfortable with what i have to report and i've made many many reports but i don't have to report to the police unless someone's in imminent danger right you can report to child protective services no contact the police department so they really but they actually won't in reality they won't why it doesn't it won't i can tell you it never rises to that level really because i've had many conversations with child protection consenting yes just like the da's office it's a whole other argument i think you're i think you're out of
196your league on that particular topic i want to keep us focused on this we're not going to come to a that's very specific i just did some training all of our everybody in the city is going to be taking implicit bias training by our human resources division and yeah we all do have implicit biases but part of it is being aware of them and having respect for one another's differing opinions so obviously we have a difference of opinion here i'm not here to play mitigator but let's leave it at that my next point if i may just training and i think um mr phillips touched on that i do think it's critical you know especially being a k-2 educator that the officers go through training that is tailored to our district even if it's related
197to our strategic plan i mean there are things that are playing around with sort of justice run social emotional well-being and i think it would be extremely beneficial for the officers you know i understand that you guys complete your own training around intensifiers or even work recording practices but to do something that i think is focused on our youth and tailors our dispersing um would go a long way um and so i'll go back to what i was saying about the best practices so what what is unfortunate to me is that we have never had an mou and one of the first steps that um that the the doj and dpi suggests is that we do a root cause analysis to identify if there's a need for sro then i don't know that we've done
198that in the district and i say this too about the three officers there's been a specific call from administrators and teachers and parents to have an sr whitman which we currently don't have and i understand that one officer maybe splits their time between uh whitman and longfellow but maybe it's not attentive to the needs that would warrant an sro whitman so i just encourage us to kind of maybe start at square one and do a root analysis of why do we want sros in our district not every district has sros and i'm not saying that we shouldn't but i'm saying that we should start in a place that we really do a root cause analysis as to why we need it and and and then start to attack those issues because i don't think that
199we're doing that with our experts right now and unfortunately i've seen it you know firsthand i've seen experts in the elementary school responding to behavioral incidents um not to anything criminal criminalizing not at by any means as a staff member in the buildings i've seen officers respond to maybe and maybe that's the administrative piece where they don't understand that you know distinguishing your role versus their role because in my eyes there's going to be very little that warrants an sro responding to an elementary age student and so whose role is it to do that root cause analysis on whether we need an sros is it their role is it the school board's role i think [Music] if we need to do that analysis so be it but that's not when we contract with them to
200be police officers sros in the building they have they have their hat they wear if we don't want that you mean you might be right maybe we don't need sros i'm operating under the assumption that we do so it starts there and then we need to kind of analyze what do we need sros for so but you're saying we should do that i think the district should yes but there's already been a call i think from administrators from district personnel and if that's the case then i think that we need to continue this partnership with the sros to determine and what in what role capacity and where do we need them well it's already two weeks into the school year and we brought this up already months ago i think i guess i need to
201know where the school board stands on this do you want sros or not um i tell you my opinion sros are going to be in the schools they need to be in the schools because but we have to have this type of relationship and have a codified based on what's happened over the last couple of weeks based on what's happened at the end of the school year last year but again let's codify this and put it in the language on a piece of paper but where are our roles on this um i've told you what our roles are here i've tried to explain i've been transparent so ultimately the decision is up to you if you want to make tweaks in the language make those changes in the mou and we'll meet again but again
202we're also in a budgetary cycle you're in a budgetary cycle we have to get this thing codified if we go back to the table and do a root cause analysis it's going to delay what i think we all know in this room already and is that we need to keep sros in the schools so what i think i've heard is that um in ms willis's kind of question of work that the board may do into the future right um i think what our goal is is um it's not on the table right now whether or not to have sros or not that that question isn't isn't in question and honestly has not been a support i don't think in what capacity and i think it's a question that can be considered as with anything for
203those who have been watching school board meetings we're auditing and questioning everything uh so we're just we're we're we're just working on this we're just we're literally kind of like pulling the whole car apart looking under the hood and everything checking the tires and kind of rebuilding our goal is we really are pushing we want to be the best district in the country we're not the best district in the country right now and we're going to [Music] and i would say for everybody in the community who wants to keep pushing this run for school get involved in the schools um i would encourage you to do it um it's it's incredibly meaningful work and it's powerful and um no one's going to say thanks except for your probably kids and your spouse yeah i could
204just follow what was coming what i want to say is we're committed to having the sro program uh i think we want to make sure that it's as effective as possible it's as clear as possible uh i think tonight we've covered a lot of ground and i appreciate kind of the patience and um the kind of the conversation there's a lot of kind of authentic conversation and we don't agree on everything and that's okay but i think we're also demonstrating ability to figure out how to navigate complex stuff with cameras on sometimes and everything else in ways that aren't comfortable for anybody so what i hope that we take from this point forward and then just freely come to you is we we've kind of uncovered a lot of stuff there's a lot of things
205from the point where the mou uh stopped being updated like there was the draft that was in place in may uh we've got a few other things that i know we've gotta um place into it uh some things that it sounds like we're pretty broad agreement on a lot of things about fund 80 and some of the other stuff just document all that and then come back to the board and i think sometimes the board can't help themselves in tweaking things because that's the board's nature but i think it's that's the process of go back work on some of the other things that we it sounds like there's generally broad agreement on everything documented coming back to the board and i think in the next um i don't think it's probably quick enough to do
206it next morning on monday but three weeks five weeks whatever wherever that cadence is we can have the first readout and then that's the pace and timing i hope we can get to i think ms willis did bring up a very interesting point and i think the chief chief's response was also appropriate and i don't want to sound like a broken record and if i do you can you can grow your eyes at me it is fair but mr meyer's statement of whose job is it ultimately when you go into policy and look at other policies across the metro area they they they even changed the title of 5540 to say school resource officer policy how you as a governing board want that language to rest it will give everyone clear definitive pathways uh and
207so i think that's i think that's a that's a discussion that the seven board members have the authority to to point point us in a certain direction i tried to uh emphasize this evening that there's there's some language that is in conflict with what our school resource officers are saying that's how they operate you we're putting administrators if that's ever the case and um in terms of investigations for example we are putting administrators in a tough spot uh because our language is very different than um what i heard this evening and so creating clarity for everyone involved is really i think important so i everyone's right there's no wrong answer that's been stated here i think ms willis's question was i would interpret it differently what does 50 what does this board want 5540 to
208say and i think the chief is absolutely right in saying so that's not my issue that's that's your issue but please keep in mind we have laws we have to to follow so very real to your point dr jesup anger i think very robust conversation that i think will continue into the future but i think the most imminent issue in front of us right now is is to finalize at least this version of the mou for school resource officers so what i was just saying is that i i don't want us to close making you feel like a villain or anything like that i think you're asking really important questions and i think not asking those questions actually leaves us in a place where we don't come up with the best policy where we don't
209come up with the best practices where we don't push ourselves to explore relationships and whatnot so i really hope that the tough questions the questions that made people feel uncomfortable and maybe a little defensive and whatnot are actually the kinds of questions we keep asking that you ask of us that we ask of you that we ask of anybody we work with that the community asks um and i think uh you know one of the things you said um is that like you're operating from the standpoint that we do need them and we should still be asking you questions which i think is a really great you know sort of starting point to say like okay so if we're moving forward with this let's just also all get on the same page across the board
210etc with why we're doing this like and and make sure we're all on the same page so i'll just echo thank you for being here for all the questions and whatnot um and do we have a timeline on by when we'd like to have this turned around so that there is that clarity because you all are in the schools you're doing the work i think the sooner we get it done the better i know it's on our end to get something back let me also make a comment them as well as help you understand my energy is not meant in a negative way i don't want you to misinterpret that because they share the same zeal and enthusiasm that i think all the collective does here we want to get this right we absolutely want
211to get this right so please don't misinterpret that but i'm trying to sound attacking at all i just i want to get this done because we all have budget cycle we also have operational needs i mean that's why dr means and i are continually talking my sergeant uh morals continually talking to laura about where we taking this let's get it rolling because the school year is already in full swing and if i could just say two in response to that um in my role i feel like i need to advocate for all students and that's what i'm doing you know i'm offering you a perspective and and things to consider that advocate for the safety of all of our students it's it's not a personal attack on the police department um it's not a personal
212attack on the sros or or the program that's within our schools but are we do you know my educator had again is this the best practice like are we following the best practices that are going to ensure the safety both physical and psychological safety of all of our students when we adopt programs like this and unfortunately our district and the police department hasn't analyzed this and in the term of its relationship and that's you know it's unfortunate but i feel like we need to reconcile some of the things that have happened in the past and make sure that we are doing things right for all of our students your point is well you just have a new social worker correct that works in the school district that changes that dynamic as well people have said
213police officers are you wear too many hats well we're not there to be social workers we do part of social work is part of policing but it's really it's not a role so it's finding that middle grounding thing especially it's dynamics change and i just want to make one comment defensiveness you are correct i was getting defensive i apologize to you for being offensive with you i am defensive i'm passionate about the program we're all in this for the same thing in the best interest of the student staff families in mind um i i know that we've done this for nearly 20 years and i know that we've never had any of these types of conversations until myself and actually selling phillips the school social worker at toaster east said we have got to get
214an mou and the nasser the national association of school resource officers says you should not operate without an mou and i started looking at this years ago as an esrog we need this and so we do all this work and we try to work with each other in partnership and now i feel like at times we are defending ourselves like trying to defend our position in what it is we do and i and i apologize if i come off as defensive it's merely because i'm passionate about it and i feel like we're doing the right things so thank you you guys for your patience with that may i say something complimentary oh we're going to go to ms mifo first cause she's been super patient sorry um no i give miss willis the patients right
215so are you completed in your questions before i okay thank you thank you mr president so one thing that occurred to me in this discussion that we were having of responsibilities can we reference these different laws policies right in the body of the mou so it's a very clear referencing for what the school district expects what the law requires i don't you know i don't know how quite to do that but in many contracts and agreements there are links in that in that manner which clarifies the responsibilities because um you know as serving in the safety you know capacity as a board member the situations change i mean we're always trying to react and respond to security questions and and these situations on an ongoing basis and what we did 10 years ago isn't going
216to work right now so that would be my first point i also wanted i know we've talked a lot about student examples and how sros handle student examples but the sros also play a role in listening to students for see it you know say it and and listening and they bring to the sros situations unfortunately um even related to administration that have been investigated and and needed needed um you know for criminal behavior i'll just be honest about that and that happened with one of our high schools and and our administration had the high school um so thankfully once that trust is established once you're embedded in the in the schools and you have those relationships students will some students won't be comfortable but the more you can help and i know that there's been
217many situations where the sros has helped students have been in um in adults that you in in difficult and adult situations so i just wanted to say that [Music] and then one thing that is is on the top of my mind uh because we just approved the resolution for dale breitlow we've had weapon incidents of live weapons in our schools as a board member i voted for this program initially because i wanted to do everything in my power preventative to detour any kind of safety into incidents and i wonder you know as part of your role with us and the looking at our facilities again i know that's something that the department wants to help us with and you know these are can we consider and and this might be uh you know i don't
218know what you're going to think of this but it's something across the country that people are doing not only in schools and we've had changed the way we've been doing things structurally in schools we didn't have passcodes we didn't have things like that um but people have approached me kids community members you know do we need metal detectors to detour weapons in our schools and when i voted for this program um the community at that time was not some were not receptive at all about the astral program but i feel that there's a juncture right now where we have fights escalating for many reasons we understand and don't understand um the threat of fights is dangerous enough but include a weapon and it's catastrophic and i want to do everything in my power as a
219board member to protect our facilities and i'm bringing this point up because i know they the police department will help us audit again for our um the safety of our facilities and i just want to put you know put that on the table of course we'll assist on it i mean i know magnetometers are very expensive magnetic wands but it's also palatability is there a necessity that would be something that would need to be researched but sometimes you have to make the decision if that's where you want to go as a school board you just do it you want to be responding to another i went to high school as you all know with the gentleman who killed mr breitlow right here in wauwatosa so this one rings home to me we'll help in providing
220console guidance those kinds of things i don't know what the answer is um again it depends on which way you want to take it as a board yeah i mean concealed carry laws don't help us either and i just you know i feel strongly to do everything possible and i want to ask the police department to staff one more police officer for us so that we have all four secondary schools staffed with sros please help us oh there's a conversation that dr means that i've been having as well as miss guys do you think grace it's sergeant morrow we've been talking about process and then the systems when it comes to events at hart park or fights happening in the schools what can we do to help provide that guidance to increase security or safety
221capacity within the school i thought you were going to ask how do you feel about hiring security guards to work within the schools hey if that's your choice i still think you need to have somebody who has that investigative or arrest authority around it's no different than having event staff at a football game you use visible deterrence you put and there's a reason why we wear those big vests out there those yellow vests so people can see us it's a visual deterrent it's not going to solve all the hills of the world either right so but it will help well those type of process changes will help increase security capacity in the school that's why we have this dialogue and this ongoing conversation about how can we mitigate those things happening thank you so i
222i'm going to take this to a way high political theory level and i'm sure you'll understand and our apse students i'm sure will understand this meeting has been so special and because this isn't like a customer vendor thing this the the school district sits as holder of a piece of the sovereign resp and with a mandate to stand in local parents not the parent with a hat but in local parents over thousands of children we are a piece of the sovereign the police department holds a piece of the sovereign that they have mandate for legitimate use of force and we these two holders of separate pieces of the sovereign have sat together tonight for hours and tried to solve problems and make our community better of course there's going to be some anxiety because none
223of us neither are customers neither are vendors but we are two different government entities with our own independent mandate and mission and rule sets that are working together for the community so as we go to this examination of with our school district piece of the sovereign what do we how should we operate when we invite the police piece of the sovereign into and share a space with us and that's hard because we don't do that with anybody else and i don't think you do that well you know other police entities perhaps but we don't work with other pieces of the sovereign we answer to dpi and that's pretty much you know that's a subservient relationship but we we have to work together as as as kind of titans in a community for the good of
224of wauwatosa and we haven't done i don't remember mrs mitchell have we done a meeting like this and 18 years we we broke new ground tonight and yeah there's going to be tough questions and needs and things but and um so i just i'm just ecstatic over what we've done tonight as as two pieces of government in wauwatosa um we had some final comments from the side of the room anything from [Music] uh i'm deeply impressed with everybody's questions your thoughtfulness uh pushing me to think about this in a variety of different ways thank you for kind of the the give and take and the dynamic tension we have around this um dr means the question was asked i'm not sure if i don't have clarity do we have a sense of timeline of realistically
225of i mean maybe i'm not sure who's kind of doing the the markup and the edits but are we thinking two board meetings out we'll try to get to this as soon as possible so in the coming weeks and months this will be moving forward um i think the question has been asked uh is there a plan to uh drop the sro program is under consideration we're moving we're not we're basically starting from something uh that a lot of people have identified as their being in need uh in lots of different ways for this mou something that i think we all would agree that we would have been benefit to have many many many years ago um so we're doing that hard work now we'll learn from it i'm excited about the data pieces uh
226as well as your kind of root cat root cause analysis component is i think something that we'll bring back to the board and talk about dr means brought up once again as he does every board meeting the importance of examining policy and aligning um thank you come on um and so the board is going to have some more homework on this as well uh thank you to everybody who is here tonight um any final thoughts or questions from my colleagues any closing comments from chief or dr means that for me thank you for the opportunity looking forward to the continued work great it is 8 57 p.m may i have a motion to adjourn so mo second documents can you call the role ms bienville yes mrs freely yes mr meyer yes dr jessup anger
227yes dr hoy yes mr phillips yes miss willis yes