Good afternoon everyone welcome to City Hall good to see everyone here. I know that we we have a a heavy agenda on Public Safety today but I did want to take a moment to say I'm glad that everyone is okay for the accident outside City Hall and thank you for the response that you all have over there right now making sure everyone is taken care of all right Madame clerk will you please call the rooll thank you Mr Mayor mayor Williams I am here mayor proen Moten I'm here council member Baker here council member cabayo here council member cook has been granted an excused absence council member Freeman present council member rist here thank you all right colleagues are there any announcements council member Baker jaier.
Freeman council member Freeman do you have any comments com announcements any announcements or anything sorry oh okay council member WR thank you mayor pro thank you Mr Mayor no no announcements I just want to associate myself with your comments expressing gratefulness that our our officer and and residents and civilians were were not seriously injured in the accident that occurred outside very grateful thank you sir s good all right me one moment here on the. Internet I went offline not sure what's going on yeah yeah there we go at rather man.
Russ I'll now recognize any priority items by our manager good afternoon Mr Mayor Williams Mr Mayor Pro Mr Mayor protim Moten and members of the Durham City Council I do have a couple of priority items for your consideration today agenda item number 16 which is the 2023 fourth quarter crime report includes a presentation and we're estimating approximately 20 minutes to receive that presentation agenda item number 24 which is a shot spot spotter evaluation presentation by the Wilson Center that we are are that presentation has been added to your agenda packet and we also are anticipating approximately 20 minutes for that presentation thank you that is all I have for you today thank you Madame attorney yeah you know what we'll go ahead and I'll entertain a motion for the manager's priority items so move second mov and proberbly second all in favor please show by raising your hand all right thank you all right Madam attorney thank you mayor Williams good to see you all today I do not have any.
Priority items but if I may have a point of personal privilege May awesome I would like to introduce the newest attorney who has join the city attorney's office Sarah laws if you would come introduce yourself to the council good afternoon mayor mayor members of council I'm Sarah Lef I'm joining the city attorney's office from the North Carolina Justice Center I'm a graduate of Duke Law so I'm very excited to be joining the city and to be working with such a fantastic city attorney's office thanks.
S Madame attorney I would like to take a moment and just thank you for your intentionality on how not only skillful but diverse your office is it's a beautiful thing to see thank you Mr Mayor we appreciate that all right Madam clerk thank you Mr Mayor the city clerk's office has no priority items all right thank. You all right second order of business I will read our consent agenda item one Durham affordable housing implementation committee appointment item two human relations Commission appointment item three January 2024 bid report item four interlocal agreement for the distribution of sales tax between the city of Durham and the Durham County item five amendment number one for justice matters Incorporated contract number 18355 for the immigration legal defense pilot project number six agreement to fund el Central hispania Co recovery initiative operated by El Central hispania Incorporated using city of Durham Grant funds s American Rescue plan act project road to wealth building project number eight I'm going to port number seven myself number eight amendment to.
Contract 18394 between the city of Durham and Durham County for the provision of the housing opportunities for persons with AIDS haa housing assistance and related Supportive Services item nine fiscal year fiscal year 24 Debt Service fund and water and sewer funds budget ordinance amendments number 10 resolution resolution authorizing the Virtual City auction number 11 Cooperative group purchase contract no boom trucks number 12 structural maintenance improvements for parking facilities design agreement with kimly horn and Associates number 13 service contract triangle stop removal service LLC for right of way stomp removal 14 purchase contract with bars Recreation LLC for the playground and surface replacement project at wherwell Park 15 purchase contract with game time for the playground in surface replacement project at CR Wood Park 16 2020 16 2023 fourth quarter of crime report 23 fourth quarter crime report that would be presentation all right number 17 contract for spot Shadow response Services agreement pull that one number 18 purchase agreement with near map USA Incorporated for near vertical imagery number 19 contract with nwn.
Corporation for City Network core switch upgrade 20 Transit Grant project or amendments 21 fiscal year 2023 2024 Services agreement with go triangle for the regional information center our presentations 2020 22 fiscal year 2023 2024 second quarter financial report and Hall River presentation and 24 shot spotter evaluation presentation by the Wilson Center and public hearings to be heard on Monday 2020 25 consolidation annexation Olive Branch Reserve North 26 zoning map change old west D Farms Duram 27 zoning map change or Green Hill right and we have some citizens matters here Josh Ravit Amihai Rosenthal Katherine wolf phoe wolf Sarah Maxwell khed Harley and J Jullian Julian Mack and then 35 we have a closed session to discuss negotiation of contract terms for a proposed contract regarding real property all right that is our consent agenda it seven and 17 have been.
Okay all right so that's our consent agenda with pulled items 7 and 17 we will move to our consent I mean our citizens matters first the names that I called I'll call again want to see if they are in the building Josh ravage Amy Rosenthal Katherine wolf Phoebe wolf Sarah Maxwell KET Harley and Julian Mack Madam Clerk do you see any of them.
Online. Of them are online okay thank you very much so you have three people here okay I didn't see those I'm sorry on Cien and an item that we have on the agenda so those will be additional people if you perm them to speak if they're here Madam Clark can you see if we have Jeremy bergren or dearen lley online no or Julian Mac or juliia. Mack okay German is there German can you hear me yes may Williams can you hear me yes if you will please speak up closer into the Mike and you have three minutes all right thank you mayor Williams and City Council Members my name is Jeremy bur and my address is on file I live in the Southside I just wanted to share this week following the ceasefire resolution I'm a member of former member you know of Iraq veterans against the War I didn't really have any you know theoretical problems with the the ceasefire but I wanted to share with y'all the City Council because you.
Have a role in some of the things mentioned I really had to sit and agree with everything council member Freeman said as really a person inur with disabilities a poor person someone who needs Social Services in veteran specific housing the the victory that people claim in 2018 about separating the security measures really what I experienced as someone on EVT was that Durham became more militarized in Social Services building to get in and out of that building and so I had this experience of being an anti-war veteran in a community that wasn't really necessarily capturing the militarization happening on the streets in nurh and so I'm concerned about moving forward for exactly the raisins council member Freeman stated all the killings and Durham and what's the time we're going to spend on the ceasefire in our own city several months ago I got back involved with Veterans for peace to bring this issue up bring some issues in the school system up and even since I'm figuring out how to bring it up and.
These are our comrades who have really educated me on a lot but there's a vast difference between people in Durham that you know like me I've experienced gun violence I have H someone dying in my hands you know what I'm saying and so I was that was really hitting me I appreciate council member Freeman the the space of Silence You Gave and the words you you gave because I there's really blood on everybody's hands in Durham and I hope that moving forward we y'all can lead and really folks who are showing up for the ceasefire can can start incorporating themselves or have some type of relational accountability to people on the ground who are experiencing War right at home through poverty through gun violence and other forms of domestic violence I thank youall for time and I just want to share those thoughts thank you so much thank you so much for those comments thank you next I have Deen Langley can you hear me me yes I can can you hear me I can.
Welcome you have three minutes thank you mayor Williams mayor Pro 10 mlon members of the City Council I come this afternoon to ask for a drop you all had your budget Retreat and I heard a lot about drops in the bucket and I wanted to talk a little bit about the Charles Hamilton Houston foundation and our commitment to fostering the academic leadership and professional development of boys and women of color in our community we often hear statistics about boys and young men of color what I'm calling on for you all to do today is to make them a policy and budgetary priority the foundation mission is to provide a comprehensive Continuum of strategy centered skill-based and career focused program services and mentorship we have been doing this since 2016 transcending theoretical knowledge into practical strategies to help them understand the prepare for not only academic Excellence but to succeed in the competitive Workforce most notably our Flagship young men of Excellence program has yielded remarkable results working with boys in middle and high.
School 100% of our Scholars attribute their empowerment to the program citing increased confidence knowledge and support critical for acquiring education skills and a winning attitude for college and CIS success our Scholars consistently scored at or above grade level on ingrade tests demonstrating efficiency of our approach graduating Scholars have achieved outstanding Milestones with 100% of them gaining acceptance into college and securing scholarships while also transitioning to our career pathway program which boast a 98% success rate with fellow securing career oriented full-time employment with an average annual income of $69,700 per of our fellows who appli to graduate school were admitted underscoring the caliber of our programs your investment in the Charles Hamilton Houston foundation will be an investment in the boys and young men of color in our community that we often hear should be a policy and budgetary priority not only does this work drive positive change in their lives for them but it also contributes to the long-term prosperity and viability of our community thank you all so very much and.
I look forward to meeting and speaking with each of you in order to secure some support in the upcoming budget thank you Mr Langley for your comments I also do we have anyone else come online at that list oh no that's everyone right people online okay I also wanted to state that I have so Mr dson I have you for item 17 and Abdul Nasser I have you also for item number 17 I'm going to call you all when we get to that item in the agenda which won't be long and we we'll just go through and also anyone else who signed up of course I'll call you at that agenda.
Item all right number seven yeah number seven I so I just had a question for number seven just considering the way arpa who's my resource person. For good afternoon May Willam members of city council Al Bera wimbush Deputy City Manager for operations good afternoon thank you I just conceptually I I really look forward to this I think it's a need in at the ground level in our community I I but I know it's also really ambitious and I want to just State publicly if there is any support that's needed to make sure this goes to fruition like where where are they in the process have they already conceptualized it do they need more support connecting with other organizations or are they all lined up or are they trying to get started with it so the sessions for the work are spread over four sessions so it's over a time period and they have a minimum number maximum number of participants in the program Mr Larry Hester is here with us today if.
You want to ask him additional questions I I think I can considering I was the only one that pulled it what I'll do is I'll reach out to you Mr Hester and just speak with you directly but more so it's just seeing where you are in the process and if you if I can be of assistance of connecting with other resources to help bring it forth that's what I've been doing with a lot of the other projects so just offering that here as well thank you thank you Workforce Development is important all right what's next 17 no River yeah all right next item for us to discuss is a hall River a presentation which is a presentation I I will be going a little out of order here based on what's on the agenda but want to address it and I request those items so I can just as as a bit of background so obviously water quality is so critical in our community we are reached out to by some colleagues from Hall River.
Assembly to have receive a presentation about research they've been doing in the waterways to identify what kind of litter we find so much of our the the challenge in water quality is runoff in our streams and so they've done a research project identifying what kind of litter is running off in our streams and how it what what need to address that and what that means in terms of policy so you all the experts I'll let you take it away but thanks for coming and sharing your research with us yeah thank you so much am I so welcome if and yeah that mic you will have to speak pretty much into it not that uncomfortably but just make sure you're speaking a little close to it so we can hear you thank you sounds good thank you all so much for having us here today it's a privilege to speak to you all about this very important issue my name is Madison Haley and I work on plastic pollution issues for a local.
Nonprofit called the HW River assembly Emily Sutton the Haw River Keeper who leads our advocacy and pollution work is here virtually or at least will be soon and will be able to help me answer any questions at the end to first introduce our organization we are a 501c3 nonprofit citizens group founded in 1982 to restore and protect the Haw River in Jordan Lake and to build a community that shares this Vision while today I'm going to focus on our plastic pollution work we also Advocate against things like industrial contaminants and like pasas and 1 for dioxane and have a robust water quality monitoring program in addition to running an environmental education program and many many other things the area that we advocate for is the entire Haw River Watershed which includes not just the hot River itself but Jordan Lake and every little stream Creek and Creek that flows into the river watersheds are natural boundaries defined by where the water flows so here in Durham we're actually in two distinct watersheds the hot water.
Shed and The Noose watered the Southwest half of Durham drains to the har river which we defend and protect and the Northeast half of the city drains to The Noose river which has a different River Keeper called Sam crop now for what I came to talk to you about today is our Plastics pollution program which includes our trash traps which you can see on the screen here one of our most visible environmental problems here in Durham is litter I'm sure you all see on the roadsides at local parks or and walks in the neighborhood and next time you go for a driver walk I challenge you to start actively looking for it it's become so ubiquitous in our environment that especially those small degraded pieces that it simply just Blends in this is a problem for many reasons first when it rains the storm water carries litter into our local waterways and negatively impacts how our local residents both human and not human get to experience their Community second.
When litter is left in our waterways it breaks down into chemicals and microplastics that can harm both human and ecosystem Health it breaks down into chemicals microplastics third our Rivers lead to the ocean so pollution here isn't contained here we're sending it to other communities to deal with these problems that we're creating so you ask what can we do well first I want to tell about our trash trap program we've been working with municipalities and storm water departments across the wed including the wonderful folks here at Durham to install these three-sided floating traps in local streams to collect litter that flows down them these trash traps serve many purposes first it helps us facilitate regular and efficient cleanup efforts with our fantastic volunteers second we collect data about this litter to help us understand the issues that we can better address it and third we put these traps in public places so that the public can interact with them and hopefully take pause to think about why we need these in the first.
Place this slide here is a diagram about how the traps work essentially as water flows Downstream it carries Litter with it and is Guided by buoys into our traps these traps don't have a bottom and the cage material is large openings to ensure that no wildlife is harmed or get stuck these are pretty simple structures and many cities are even paying for them on their own they're effective eye-catching and they would be a great interactive component of your storm water education program the the map here on the right is the hall water shed where we have five traps currently installed including here in Durham's third four Creek and then also Chapel Hill Pittsboro carboro and Greensboro and we're currently working with the dorm STM storm water department to get a second one installed in Northeast Creek because of how great our first one has been like I mentioned before we collect litter data with big thanks to the Duke environmental law and policy Clinic in our Durham tra trash trap in third.
Fort Creek we've collected over 40,000 pieces of trash the vast majority of which have been styrofoam and other types of plastic on the right here on the right here I've listed out our top 10 items which again are a lot of Styrofoam plastic bottles and funnily enough storm sports equipment so make sure you bring your basketballs inside when it rains and while litter and plastic pollution are big systemic issues there are short-term things that Durham can do to help first is ensuring large contributors of litter have better systems in place for for example Upstream of our Durham trash trap is Zip's Car Wash where trash accumulates covers the local flood plane and then flows directly into third Fort Creek and into our trash trap we recommend that Durham plays a fence around this car wash so that it doesn't get into our public waterways and the responsibility for collecting that litter shifts back to the business this is a relatively simple fix that can be replicated in other with other big litter sources in near.
Streams another recommendation for reducing plastic pollution is making erosion control measures more natural and safer for our environment and water supply we routinely find old plastic silk fences and netting in our cleanups and they're quick these plastic fencing they fencing they're quick to degrade and they break down our environment and instead of preventing pollution like they're supposed to they create it we encourage Durham to require more environmentally friendly erosion control for Public Works projects and we have documents to share with more information I know that there are certain things that we are unable to do right now with State legislation but there are still ways to incentivize folks to use less plastic materials that litter our our water bodies thank you all for listening and we encourage you to get involved with our work we have a big cleanup event in trash tra cleanout on March 16th and we'll be the Durham Southwest Regional Library on March 11th presenting our comprehensive water quality report the state of Thea we wanted to keep it quick but.
We welcome any questions either now or by email at Emily Hall river.org thank you thank you so much and these mechanisms are quite impressive want to see it in person yeah they're they're incredible we're having a trash talk clean out on March 16th if anyone wants to join it's a really an incredible Community event we've had a lot of public support and there's a lot of really beautiful things that have come out of it good deal colleagues Madison thanks for the presentation you went quickly through the recommendations here for plastic reduction can you just say a little bit more about this idea of wildlife friendly ways to control erosion and what some I know there's a lot of lot of ident a lot of proposals you've identified here like what are the two or three top things we could do as a city right now to address erosion control in a more Wildlife friendly way that's a great question I want to check in to see if Emily's had the chance to.
Join what's the name yes I I am here if you guys can hear me yeah we canar we can hear you thank you great I can even turn my camera on hi hi so I'm so appreciative that Madison could be there with you all today the list of I mean the two or three things right now that I would recommend are using those having requirements for the devices in sediment erosion control issues you all know very well that there's preemption laws right now that prevent municipalities from prohibiting plastic single Ed plastic containers but there's not anything in that law about other things outside of containers so we're really working with municipalities right now to promote Alternatives that are storm water erosion any kind of construction materials that we see in our streams all the time these like Madison said break down very quickly and they get trapped in our stream Banks and so that can be included in a unified development ordinance to have requirements for storm water and sediment erosion control.
Measures thank you and Emily could you could you also just you know are there other communities that have done this can you give us examples of communities that have that have you know sort of pursued these kind of policies to to to improve the ways we control erosion that are not so Wildlife unfriendly sure so I've worked with Chapel Hill storm water Community or the storm water department to make sure that their programs their sites that are within their own storm water and their local government have these Wildlife friendly materials they have not yet put it into their unified ordinance for their entire jurisdiction to cover all of this projects that happen within the jurisdiction but it would be it's already in place for their own properties thank you how how often are you all having to change the the the trash cats the trash trash catches we so those trash traps those that physical mechanism they can be in there for up to 10 years.
But as far as how often we go and clean them out we go about right yeah yeah they're very yeah they're very resilient but we go in about once a month we we have volunteers our last DM trash trap cleanout was a few weeks ago we had about 25 30 people come out and help us clean out we schedule them about once a month and you can sign up to be volunteer on our website and we'll send you out emails yeah do there's an adopter Street program Statewide is there like an adopter Creek program that you would know that you know of we don't run those types of things D Durham storm water might be more integrated in that work maybe Emily knows more well thank you for taking the lead on creating that program thank you look forward to organizations adopting a creek to help clean up okay we just kind of make policy on the spot not officially but keep that noted all right council member Freeman thank.
You I think that's why Elby Creek Water crochette Association exists they adopted that Creek I will say that I wanted to know if the Lakes because of the trash traps are kind of like a later evolution is there any way that you've thought of to address the trash that's still sitting a top many of Watershed sides and Air areas to collect that trash as well yeah so we do do regular class trash cleanups just generally we have one coming up on March 16th in the same day our big giant clean up Aon there are also lots of other fantastic organizations like I believe it's called clean up Jordan Lake there's lower hob area I'm butchering that but there's a lot of different environmental organizations that do these kinds of cleanups what I think is really special about our organization is we do these cleanups but we also Alo do them in a systematic way where we are collecting data and we're using that data for advocacy we're not here to necessarily.
Clean up after people's mistakes we want to make sure those mistakes aren't made in the first place and so I think that's what sets our organization apart from other cleanup Crews but there are lots of fantastic organizations including our our own that do regular cleanouts of places like Jordan Lake and then I just wanted to make sure it was clear where to find the white papers that you have published yeah so this right now we're still working on some more comprehensive documents but we have a story map on our website that kind of walks people through all of our data and the wonderful Folks At The Duke environmental law and policy Clinic have created a dashboard so all of these all this data is available to the public the instant that it's recorded and this is all across the entire State too so we all submit our data to this dashboard and that's on our website if you want to learn more about those specifics and we're kind of we're working more on.
Distinct policies that we can use all the types of litter to recommend recommend and write white papers like you mentioned that's all one last thing Madison thanks Emily for joining by phone Emily mentioned that that the legislature has preempted local governments from from enacting ordinance ordinances that would regulate single use plastic right so that that's something we can't do but I'm just wondering from your perspective and Emily as well if you want to chime in you know what's the you know what do we need to communicate to our residents what are things consumers can do since we can't regulate that ourselves as a local government what what are the most important things consumers can do to reduce the amount of trash that you described to that's that's being littered and coming into our creeks in terms of communication public education what can we do and which we support that's a fantastic question I want to make sure Emily has a chance to chime in on that sure I think that the the.
Preemption laws that went through last session were pretty devastating and don't serve the public these laws that were put into place to protect the retail Merchants so I think first and foremost we need to be paying attention to who is making those decisions and who they are actually representing but on a independent scale for personal Behavior changes I think being aware of you know where our trash actually goes and using reusable materials when possible every time there's a major storm event or anything like that I'm out in my yard making sure that everything is secured and that the trash cans don't turn over and we see a lot of trash coming in from parking lots and curb inlets and so really connecting that to the general public for public education every time there's a storm drain on the side of a road that storm drain goes to a creek and so there's trash that's collecting along sidewalks and along side of Roads that's going to end up in our streams and I think people.
Are very disconnected from how this stream of water running down the street actually gets into the Creeks that we want to.
Protect thank you I just want to say thank you for the presentation I know there's been several rounds of previous councils working with don't was room in particular specifically on how we could manage our our our trash better and it was it was particularly devastating when we got preempted U from doing that I know there's been conversations around what the city Solid Waste Department can do around education and potentially hopefully running some kind of program for businesses to start opting out of plastic Cutlery and different types of TCO containers and figuring out a CommunityWide wash station that l a lot of you know lots of entities or organizations in the city could potentially use communally so I just want to lift up that vision and I know I think at our last budget Retreat I named that dway Durham had a couple of budget asks so thank you all right those are all our comments thank you all so much thanks for being here I may be reaching out to you all.
Personally we we do have the El l Creek Watershed Association the concept I'm speaking about is a bit more broader so I'll reach out thank you thank you so much again all right colleagues what was that next one oh yeah so we had I as you all know I'm pretty strict on our rules as far as folks signing up before but we had some folks coming from work city workers that want to make sure that I did get a chance to hear them so I'm going to make an exception that there was one additional person that was getting off the bus to get here in time so I want to go back Julian Mack is online now Julian can you hear me we're back to Citizens matters all right yes I can yes I can hear you all right welcome you have three minutes yes I'm a dam bus operator and my bus got shot up back in November and me and all the other operators we have we just have big concerns about the.
Safety of us and and and our passengers and we just want somebody to recognize that is a problem and that we need we need to support from the city to do something about it the day my bus got shot up I came home I shared it with my wife and my kids and you know we all got fames to come home to every day and I just you know every day every day on my way to work I I say prayer that I can get back home to my wife and my kids because it's it's we we we be in some dangerous situations not not just our operators but the pass as.
Well pretty much this about all I got to say but I thank y'all for let me let me share my share my story thank you so much thank you for sharing that with this the next person I have they are all in person where the rest of those. Cards I have Sarah Maxwell and after Sarah I have khit Harley okay Jaren GBS.
Thank you thanks for joining us you have three minutes all right let let me let me know if I'm if you can hear me I'm Sarah Maxwell I'm a a go Duram bus driver Durham saw 49 murders last year since we go Durham bus drivers travel every Major Street in Durham we are witnessed to much of this violence and sometimes it engulfs or buses honorable mayor honorable counselors I want to recognize you 3 months ago a hail of bullets rained down on a Route 8 bus and you just heard the bus driver that that happened to 3 months ago no one was injured but the passengers and the driver on that bus must carry the terror of those moments for the rest of their lives we are here to demand that you act when an act of violence affects the black community when an act of violence affects our passengers our drivers and our workers we demand that you instruct the police chief and work with the district attorney to bring the perpetrators to.
Justice we dur city bus drivers sit for 8 10 12 hours at a time wearing out our backs our hands and our wrists we carry disabled adult bodies in our arms we clean up vomit and bodily waste we are exposed to the passengers saliva and shouts and epithets we do so at a humble wage and without complaining until we begin to suspect that assaults on us are of no particular concern to city and judicial officials we demand that the city of Durham work actively for our safety and bring the perpetrators of violence against us to Justice Durham saw 853 shootings last year a 12% increase over the previous year meanwhile felony convictions have gone down no one's life is dispensable no matter the color of their skin their economic class or the vital and underappreciated role they play for the city of Durham we will not stand idly by as our brothers and sisters come under the line of fire and no arrests are made dear mayor and city council it is time to.
Act thank you thank you so much thank. You any of the other names that I called are you here okay I wanted let you know you're you're you are heard I and I I had a.
Question all right and just this is a very serious matter going to reach out to our staff to make sure that we're ensuring that this is community communicated with the what is the technical term the the the oper carrier yeah the the the carrier the service that that godor works directly with and just for public just for The public's information because we want to allow well I don't want to get too technical but there is a middle operator between the city and our drivers but these are our drivers they are our residents and I want make sure you heard and make sure we're communicating with them to to make sure they're acting so our pressure has to be activated there and so I'll personally be reaching out as.
Well okay got it got it all right our next item back to the port items was which one was it the presentation was the quarterly quar okay director Ren we are on you with the quarterly financial report welcome welcome I'm going to just pull it up.
Here. Mayor mayor protm members of council Christina Reen budget and Management Services and I am here today to deliver our second quarter financial report many of the information that I'm providing you today is some of it will be a repeat from the budget Retreat we had last Friday this is a report that we do four times a year with our friends in finance who are here with me as well today and we are about halfway through the year and so I'll be providing you with an update of where we are and where we think we'll end the year for this fiscal year I'll start out talking about the general fund which as you all know is where most of our departments sit about 24 of our 27 departments sit in the general fund the two major Revenue sources for that fund are property and sales tax and so when we talk about expenditures for the general fund we are our projection for year end is that all departments will end.
Within budget with many of them coming in under budget for expenditures large portion of the expenditure savings are from vacancy rates in some of the Departments and so we are anticipating at the end of the year to have a positive budget variance of5 um9 million in or almost $6 million for expenditures and then this is kind of giving you a breakdown of the expenditures about 4.3 million of that is coming from Personnel savings and about 1.7 in expenditure savings this is just a summary of what I've kind of talked about expenditures are projected to be about $6 million less than budget Personnel at about 4.3 operating at about 1.7 and as I said before no no departments are projected to go over budget this fiscal year moving on to revenues in the general fund we have most of our Revenue sources coming in either at budget with the exception of a couple of Revenue sources our occupancy Hotel Motel occupancy tax is doing very well and we anticipate that this Revenue Source will be about.
7607,000 $100,000 to the good at the end of the year our utility and Franchise Tax we are expecting that to come in under budget this is a revenue Source that mostly has to do with Municipal sales of telecommunications and video programming so it's a a source where it's cable franchise and home phones and so it's a a revenue source that has been decreasing in in previous years and then our pow bill has been very strong as well that's a state revenue Source we get two payments a year and that is about $1.1 million over budget by the end of the year and then we also expect our charges for services to be slightly over budget as well which comes to about $1.4 million which taking the revenues and the expenditures is a 7.4 positive budget variance for the general fund which is good news just talking a little bit about property tax which is our major Revenue Source especially in the general fund you'll be reminded that all property tax bills are due at the.
Beginning of January and we do project that our property tax for this year will come in at budget at the end of our second quarter we were slightly under where we were the previous year but we don't expect there to be any issues with that and do expect that we will receive our full budget by the end of the year for sales tax sales tax is on a three-month DeLay So the numbers you are seeing in front of you are through October collections at the end of the second quarter we were under budget from where we were last year but I will say that we've had and and I think a lot of that was due to some sales tax refunds so refunds that we refund some of the sales tax for nonprofits so we had some large refunds in both July and August that may have affected that first or second quarter number but by the end of November we are slightly ahead of where we were.
At this point last year so we do feel like sales tax are very conservative estimate would be that we will end the budg end the year at budget but sales tax has slowed as you know this is a this is a revenue source that has seen a lot of growth over the last several years we're not seeing that amount of growth but still doing well so this gives you an overview of just the revenue sources that I've been talking about breaking up that $1.4 million sales tax as I talked about at budget property tax at budget utility Franchise Tax under budget and then charges for services occupancy tax and p po Bill all over budget by the end of the year which is good news this is a chart that you saw at the last Council budget Retreat so I won't spend a huge amount of time on it but it just kind of breaks down those major Revenue sources and you can kind of see comparisons from last fiscal year.
On Q2 to this fiscal year moving on to our Enterprise funds the first fund I want to talk about is our water and sewer fund which as you know is funded through user fees this fund is expected to have a positive variance but budget variance at the end of the year by $2.7 million a large portion of that is Personnel Services which are expected to be under budget by $1.7 million and then operating expenses and operating revenues are expected to come in at budget as you can see from the revenues here most revenues are expected to come in on at budget the one except section is investment income which is doing much better this year and so as is making a little bit of a difference in this fund water and sewer expenses as you can see here the the thing to point out is our person the Personnel Services which is due to those vacancies that'll be coming in under budget in the fund for that moving on to our Transit operations.
Transit is projected to come in is they they will have a positive variance budget of 4.1 million and there are expected to come in under budget due to some delayed service enhancements and just as a reminder the transit fund is does receive some grant funding there's about $6.5 million in FY 24 of Federal grant money and 3.4 million of State and also this this fund is supported by tax revenue so about 3.75 cents or about $15.5 million is budgeted in the transit fund for for tax for for property tax here is a breakdown of the transit operation revenues and as you can see about $1.3 million in Grant Revenue which is has to do with our Transit plan so some of those service enhancements are reimbursable so if we don't do the service enhancements we don't receive the revenue so that's where some of the under budget is coming for that Revenue source and then the expenditures here with Personnel Services being slightly over and then operating expenses being under by $4.2 million.
Moving on to our Solid Waste fund their operating expenses are projected to be under budget by $427,000 and then Personnel Services are projected to be over budget by $29,000 and then their pos positive budget variance of. $345,000 so this is a breakdown of that the revenues that I was talking about with operating revenues coming in slightly under budget of and then this is a breakdown of the expenditures with Personnel being slightly over and operating expenditures coming in under budget for a positive variance positive budget variance of.
$345,000 so moving on to the storm water fund this fund is expected to be overb or to be over budget in operating revenue and then under budget in some of their expenses for personnel and operating and the pos positive budget variance for the storm waterer fund is $7.6 million so as you can see they are projecting to be over revenues to be over over budget by $6.5 million some of that is due to some streamlining of some of the bill collection that they've been doing also some development would also have an impact on that as well too so that they are expecting some strong Revenue numbers this at the end of the fiscal year and then moving on to their expenses you can see that they are projecting to be under budget in both personnel and operating expenditures parking fund is projected to be under budget in revenues and slightly over budget in operating expenditures the parking fund just as a reminder does receive a subsidy from our debt service fund for.
Some existing debt in the fund and then their projected variance is a negative budget variance of. $326,000 this is a kind of snapshot of the parking funds revenue and like I said they are expected to come in under budget for some of their operating revenues and expected to have be slightly over in their Personnel Services Mr yes let me just make sure I'm understanding this correctly so the parking fund does not pay for itself is that is that right well the the operating in that Revenue line the operating revenues you're seeing are the fees that they charge for parking fees but there is a portion of the of the fund that does receive Debt Service payments as well too so and it has this is a fund that has been significantly impacted especially during covid and so they have you know they have ex had experienced some Revenue lost during that point in time too and that has affected the fund as well was it operating positively before.
Co I would have to check on that to make sure I don't want to answer that you know I can I can find we can find out for you in other words okay thank you you can keep going you can Contin you colleagues Al recognize you when we have questions for just make sure they can keep the flow you want to wait till after to the presentation okay and then these are just some of the other major funds that we have our ballpark fund is expected to meet our FY 24 operating Revenue projections and then our DPAC fund has a positive budget variance of $1.1 million and inspection fund is expected to come in over budget with for their revenues with a positive budet variance of $820,000 and these funds you see you will see more detail on these funds in the exhibit pages that you received in your packet and I'm happy to answer any questions Council W oh sorry yeah I was trying to point that together Miss BR thanks for the.
Presentation first of all it seem seems like in most of these fun or it doesn't seem like in most of these funds there was a a positive variance to the good right could you tell me what the total of all the if you add up all the variances there are a couple that were negative but just What's the total we're talking maybe 15 17 million or so yeah I don't I I generally don't look at it that way but I so I haven't done the math but I could we could I could do the math I don't I'm just challing it down right here yeah it seems like around 15 million or so okay thanks.
Did you have more questions about the parking do we manager page do we have any insight into parking and if we are expecting it to be able to pay for itself at some point in the. Future to put you on the spot here that that's okay I'm always on the spot for all of our Enterprise funds we have multi-year Financial planning and projections so even though we don't have a crystal ball we do make projections and and in those projections we're always trying to assess when we expect the fund to be break even or or positive so just like the rest of our our funds that you see here there is a multi-year projection that will that will show when that when that will happen it will be over time unless something major major happen happens okay in those funds so if you if you're looking specifically at the parking fund that that answer can can be obtained I'm not certain exactly what year it is but every year we refresh.
Those projections because we have to give consideration to what is actually happening we may have projected parking to be at 90% capacity but it ends up being 95% you know certainly those projections change every year here but our goal is that any of our Enterprise funds with the tax support that they're receiving and the fees that are coming in based upon the service that we're selling that it will at least Break Even because it's an Enterprise yeah okay and it sounds like that one just took a big hit from from covid and has just not recovered yeah that is correct one one other quick question can you just explain when we look at the slide with major revenues comparing 23 and 24 and 22 fiscal year 23 and fiscal year 22 and 23 is lower can you just explain what why it's lower are you still talking about parking are you talking about no no talking about general fund f the the slide where I have I think it's.
The bar chart this SL slide where you're talking here this one right here is that the one you're talking about yes yes so so this is just a snapshot of where we were in Q2 for FY 23 and where we where we are in Q2 for fy4 so you will notice that the revenue it a lot of this is timing for some of these Revenue sources so it is we are under Revenue when you look at where we ended the year on December 31st the the biggest portion of that would be in property tax which we were down about 7.5 million from where we were in F in in FY 23 but when I which I talked about in The Retreat last Friday when I look at the January and February numbers I just looked at them today we're at like 95% of our budget so although we were down in December I don't anticipate it to be a problem by the end of the year tax bills did go out a little.
Later this year so that may have had an impact on where we ended the the Q2 thank you colleagues any other questions I want to follow my question so just back to my question about the surpluses so by my math it's maybe like if you compare to the total budget of 610 million it's maybe like 2% Surplus right so not a huge number I guess my question is more especially on the general fund side where the Personnel costs were the biggest chunk of the Surplus right $4.3 million and so and this is not a the issue of vacancies is not a short term issue for the city this has been going on for a while I'm just kind of curious from your perspective or the manager perspective what is our what is our policy about maintaining positions on the books which is a large budget cost right here that are that are potentially not a we're not able to fill in a year for example so so how long do these stay.
On the books when do we how do we adjust those to make sure the budget reflects the reality of what we're what we're accomplishing as or trying to accomplish as a City ad a manager so so thank you for that question for us so as everyone is is aware we we we had a very impactful Corona virus or or or period of time when there was a lot of uncertainty around just the ability to recruit retain how we maybe changing the way we deliver services and some of that is normalizing now and during the period of time where it is uncertain how we may be using funded positions in the future we adjust our overall budget through not budgeting 100% of those funded positions because it would be unrealistic to think that we're going to fill all of them and that would be the case in any year so we make adjustments to the amount of our funded positions for the budget overall and that is one of the ways that we.
Actually balance our budget with funded FTE on the books but we are estimating what portion of those FTE that we probably are going to fund in the next year so instead of eliminating them we we collectively estimate how many we may have and we're looking at Trends around those vacancies in in preparing the overall. Budget thank you all right all colleagues thank you all so much director thank. You our next item presentation our next presentation I believe is our crime yep our quarterly crime.
Report.
Good afternoon afternoon welcome mayor Williams mayor protim Moten Durham City Council members and city of Durham staff that are here and watching virtually I am coming before you once again to present the 2023 fourth quarter report so just a little background as I always say as you understand that this report is really just a the the overall snapshot of where we ended up this quarter but also previous quarters for part one violent crime and part one property crime our clearance rates and also how we respond to to those crimes so this slide that you have before you this essentially shows our three-year average and where we ended up and whether we were above our our where we ended up last year or did we fall below and also the averages so what you notice right off off so red is never good so red is definitely never good but we noticed that for that we did have notable increases in in rape and and we had an increase in.
Homicide last year we ended up at 49 homicides for the year our robberies though we saw a significant reduction in our robberies compared to where we ended up in 2022 and so that is notable because last year we had what seemed to be a NeverEnding cycle of armed robberies from persons in particular our armed robberies from that involved one or more Hispanic victims and the reduction really did come from the amount of work that staff put into invest investigating each one of these robberies but also dismantling some of these group systems that were operating and and and committing these robberies so for context we had 484 is what you see 76% of those robberies were from people and that in itself is a reduction of about 14% or so from the previous years 39% of those robberies were from Hispanic victims one or more Hispanic victims in those robbery cases 24% of those robberies were from commercial businesses and then 88% of those involved our retail businesses Firearms were consistently.
Being used in about 55% of all of our robbery cases but overall we we did have a reduction of 3.79% in our overall violent crime I do want to just maybe take a moment now while I'm while I'm thinking about it to highlight the work that's being done by our staff specifically in our aggravated assaults so we've we've heard today from our community servants with God Durham and you know no one should ever have to experience violent crime period but we know that we live in a world where that happens violent crime happens in any Community our investigators whether it's a property crime or it's violent crime they investigate each each incident to the fullest until either they make an arrest or they've exhausted all leads and so I asked staff just to take a snapshot of 2023 how many of our aggravated assaults that occurred directly were linked to to the god Durham buses and so we had seven seven events in 2023 that we could link directly to.
To an event that occurred on a godor buses this is separate from what happened at bus stops separate from what ended up in in the area within 400 ft of a bus stop we had seven events three of those events were robberies the rest were aggravated assaults either by a gun or a stabbing or some other weapon investigators cleared by arrest three of those cases by arrest that means someone was physically taken into custody two of those cases are pending warrant service which means investigators discovered through looking at all of the evidence that they feel very strongly this person or these people committed that particular offense and so those two of those are pending warrant Serv service the most recent case that occurred in November that you heard our community servants with God Durham mention is is still open we are having difficulties with our victim of course not wanting to cooperate fully with the investigation but that's not the case is still open we don't we're not going to let that.
Stop us we'll keep moving forward and then we have one case that is inactive so we and I say we I I don't do the hard work they do the hard work the investigators do the hard work my staff does the hard work they are committed to investigating every single case to the fullest extent of the law and within their span of control it is then that case is then turned over to our district attorney's office for prosecution which is a separate arm of of the Criminal Justice System so our shooting incident so we we had somewhat of if you remember I believe it was last quarter I talked about we seem to have more shooting incidents with less persons shot in in those incidents so our confirmed shooting incidents increased by 11.8% in 2023 compared to 2022 but the number of victims that were actually shot in those incidents decreased by 13.6% we were up 5% for our fatal shootings as we were up in our homicides but our non-fatal shootings.
Were down and so I think that may lend to some of our discussion we'll have in a little bit around technology and an around shot spotter 79% of our incidents were initiated by shot spotter that had no corresponding 911 call and that is that is significant there were 1,00 almost 1200 well 1119 guns seized and 826 incidents so what significant about that is we are seizing multiple guns in these incidents it's not just one or two there's there's multiple guns and so that gives us that puts us being up 99.5% overy year year overy.
Year so often times people don't really think about property crime until property crime starts to be so noticeable as what we're seeing here lately it's been a nationwide Trend motor vehicle theft is driving us in property crime and continues to do so we are up in all of our categories our burglaries larsy and motor vehicle theft motor vehicle theft most significantly we are up 134% in those categories which drives us up almost 19% increase in all categories property crime so how does that look for each each one of our categories so at the end of the year we had 1359 burglaries 1359 actual burglary offenses 61% of those were from homes so were from residences so that's a that's an 11% increase and this is not unlike a trend that that's being seen Nationwide in in our residential burglaries and also here in this in our area we had 7,597 Larsen offenses 42% of those were from Motor Vehicles so it's up 9% so you always hear me talking about.
Guns what how many guns and were were taken from those cars 54% of all stolen guns that we had came from Motor Vehicles 51% of those Vehicles were had guns that were stolen they were unlocked so they were they were unlocked 31% of our lares were related to shoplifting so that's always going to be we are always going to have the shoplifting and then in both categories burglaries and larsy are tools really kind of outpaced our stolen property overall so let's talk about motor vehicle theft so here's what we are seeing increase in motor vehicle theft obviously Hyundai and Kia are are are have trended over the last year or so we call this kind of the social media effect this really started once folks that you know decided to put their intelligence into criminal activity versus something being being actually a worthwhile Endeavor and being a productive member of our community decided to start putting it into showing each other how to steal cars and it started on Tik Tock and and.
It caught fire and and and we started to see this trend Nationwide so 85% of our vehicles that were stolen and this doesn't include the attempts and vehicles that weren't registered or not registerable those veh have been recovered So within the city we see a lot of vehicles stolen and recovered soon after they are stolen and what that tells us is that many of these vehicles are being used in crimes and they're dumped pretty quickly and then those groups are going out and seeking out more vehicles in which to steal in order to commit crime 23% of those Vehicles were that were stolen were were left unattended or had the keys somewhere in the vehicle so the key fobs were were in the in the cars and that's that's not that happen seasonally we see that most often when the weather starts getting cold people will warm their cars up and and either inadvertently leave their key fobs close or will leave the key actually in the vehicle so that's a crime of.
Opportunity so this is for me is I love to really talk about our clearance rates so what you see here are numbers but what I see is the hard work and dedication of our entire team our sworn and non-sworn staff that work very well together in order to clear our cases so a clearance rate is essentially calculated by dividing the total number of offenses cleared in any one given time period and by the total number of offenes that were reported in that same time period and that's how you get your clearance rate the FBI reports on their clearance rates on a national level and so we often we will kind of gauge how well or not well we're doing on our clearance rates by how the FBI is reporting so what you'll notice in our homicide so we and I still don't know how they do it but they're amazing our teams clear homicide rates consistently over the national clearance this year in 2023 they cleared at 71.4% which is well.
Over and and that's not that's not an easy feat and they do very well I do want to highlight some of the other cases are aggravated assaults we are clearing slightly below but for the amount and the number of aggravated assaults that these investigators investigate I I think that they are doing very well in in the clearance category for this category and then if you start looking at burglaries and laries and motor vehicle theft what you'll start to see is our our we're trending downward on the clearances does this mean that investigators are not attempting or trying or they're not putting their all into it no traditionally crimes property crimes are some of the the hardest crimes in which to bring some one an offender or offenders to justice for because of the of the you know they you have to leave something behind right there oftentimes we have to have good video or we have to be able to to retrieve DNA or prints and there.
Everything has to align in a in a in a big way in order to clear some of these cases and what we've seen is we have shared folks that are committing crimes in Durham but also going to other jurisdictions are surrounding jurisdictions and committing those crimes there so we make it a point to really work with other jurisdictions in order to affect some some change within our clearance rates for especially our property and violent crime so 80 86% of our violent crime cases were cleared by an arrest so why is that significant because it means a person or people were identified and brought to Justice and they were placed into custody can you repeat that one yes 86% of our violent crime so our violent crime cases they were cleared by arrest which means that person or persons has actually been brought to Justice and served on those warrants and at some point was taken into physical custody 14% of those cases were exceptionally cleared so what that mean.
Is that there was evidence to support an arrest however we didn't have maybe the final piece there was an element beyond our control that did not really allow us to be able to affect an arrest or obtain an arrest warrant and sometimes that means the victim suddenly now is is unwilling to cooperate or maybe the offender passed away or there was prosecution declined by the dist District Attorney's office and so those are when we when we talk about ex clearing cases that's what we're talking about we we identified an offender but we don't have all of the the pieces that we need in order to be able to charge them 94% of the property crime cases were cleared by an arrest so while we cleared our clearance rates were a little lower in our property crimes we were high in in actually taking individuals into into custody so I I show this just to so that everyone knows where we are trending especially for our our response to calls for service from January to December.
And I don't really think that it's a it it is a huge surprise to everyone that we are we are trending upward and our our response times are increasing so we've increased every year we increase just a little bit more in our response times this year it's about 1.9% from 2022 and our average response time to our Priority One calls for service so thank lights and Sirens calls those that response time has increased our Target for that is 5 minutes and 48 seconds so we have not met the target the percent of the calls that we did answer in less than 5 minutes was about 49%.
So do want to show you just kind of what our violent the picture of our violent crime rates look year to year so we generally report crimes based on raw totals but we want to see them in what does it look like population so as as as population changes over time what does what do those violent crime rates look like so from 2000 to 2023 just last year the population of our great City increased 63% that's a lot it's a lot of people increased 63% but our violent crimes remained somewhat unchanged over a period of time in fact our violent crime rate actually fell 38.3% over that time span period and the national rate actually fell 24.9% % so often time when you see the what we show here there's also a a big possibility that the Nationwide Trends are also trending downward for for the same type of crime so in 200 the Duram rate was 93.1% higher than the national rate and it was 58.5% higher in.
20123. Okay so I always really like to we like to highlight and talk about our staffing and kind of bring you up to to to date on where we are at the end of each quarter for Staffing so at the end of our fourth quarter so by December 31st we were at 76% Staffing and our non sworn we were at 86% Staffing and so what this essentially shows is yes this is you know we we we are not immune to the staffing issues that everyone is feeling no matter how small your municipality is or how large it is everyone is feeling it across across our country what we like to do is is is take this and say well what more can we do to make this profession more attractive make people want to join our profession and and come to our city and the City of Durham Police Department and so we have increased our engagement around recruiting we've we have really started to highlight our officers as human beings because that's what they.
Are our non sworn staff really trying to pull the curtain back so that so that you can meet our non-sworn team members we have changed how we onboard board are candidates now so you know we we changed very early on how we test and evaluate recruit candidates police candidates and saw and we did see an increase in applications and also successful applications and candidates coming into the actual Academy so when you're hired you're extended the hire offer you come in as a pre hire so you are basically in the queue awaiting your first day of the actual police academy and during that time we have over the last six months or so actually started really prepping and priming our preh hires for what they are going to experience when day one of the academy so it's not like throwing them in the deep end of the pool when it's really cold water it's dipping their toes in very slowly and getting them used to what they are going to see when.
They when they start the first day of the academy we we really start to focus on and work on their physical fitness as well as their academic ability right how how well are they able to study and and also trying to give them tools and and give them a PE Peak into what they will see with their curriculum and this allows them the opportunity to bond with each other you can't get through a police academy if you don't feel supported if you don't have that bond with some of your Academy mates and so we've seen I think actually very good we've heard very good feedback from our officers that were some of the first officers that started this new preh hire initiative that they did feel like it it was helpful for them and so it's it's helped us successfully to to follow and and keep our officers in the program successfully until the until the very end so in the fourth quarter we had 94 applicants for our applicant testing.
So this is just in the fourth quarter and that is that I want to note the most applicants that we've had during any quarter since the quarter first quarter of 2018 so that's that's saying that there is the interest people are interested in the profession we can't do it all for them so a lot of that is on them but they are taking a chance and actually coming to test for the entire year of 2023 we had 298 applicants that actually came to test that's the most applicants we've had since 2018 we had 306 applicants that particular year so we maintain and we still do our 30x30 initiative and I do want to just say say a special acknowledgement to Captain Ronelle Hinton when she when I got here she was in training and recruiting and she brought forward the the initiative and so we adopted her idea it's actually a nationwide initiative and we signed the pledge so it's it's a coalition of police leaders I'm professional organizations that have committed to.
Increased representation of women in the ranks by 30% until the year 2030 or by the year 2030 and so in 2023 we had a total of 52 female applicants that applied to become sworn police officers and that's the highest number of female applicants that have applied with the Durham Police Department since 2017 and that is commendable of our staff and we currently have 70 females out of 401 sworn officers with within our ranks and just of note we actually are higher than the national average national average I believe is like 12% we're 17.5% female officers in the Durham Police Department so U visas we continue to process our U visas quarter by quarter so you'll see this is just a snapshot and and it es and flows just depending on the quarter I'm not sure that there's a Neary Trend may be attached to that but you'll see that in in 2023 or October through December of 2023 we received 40 U Visa or VISA requests and 30 of those requests were approved and.
10 were denied just for the group we do if we have denials we do make contact with the representative that completed the paperwork to to help them understand why it why the paperwork was denied or if we have incomplete applications that come through we will assist them in ensuring that that they are completed so that we can make a sound decision so I will always say each one of you and everyone in this room and out out virtually please follow us on all of our social media platforms we have great engagement we are we push a lot of information out on social media and we encourage everyone to to like and follow and share that concludes my presentation so I'm happy to answer any questions thank you so much Chief for your presentation it's lots of information colleagues council member Baker so our clearance rates are amazing for homicide can you just explain how we are doing so well on homicide homicide clearance rates but we're a little bit below average on.
Other and we can just focus on the violent crimes why are we a little bit below average on the other ones how are we so far above clearance rates on homicides compared to the FBI rates and then how do we how do we fill that Gap how do we improve on clearance rates for the other types of violent crime yes thank you for that so essentially homicides just in the nature of of the in ENT typically will you'll have a lot of evidence a lot more evidence than maybe what you would normally have at any other scene and you also have a human being that is no longer with us and so when a homicide you know is is occurs we have on call teams that will respond and we have our forensic staff that will respond and often times we can can retrieve digital evidence so if there's a if there's a cell phone Left Behind if there's video Left Behind certainly shell casings and things like that but.
We have a lot more the potential of a lot more evidence to be left at the scene of a fatal shooting or a fatal incident than we would at a non-fatal one which in essence it decreases our chances of being able to clear clear the nonfatal cases is because a lot of times people take the evidence that is critical with them and so that's kind of in a nutshell why we we have such a high clearance rate but why would we be so much High why would we have such a better clearance rate for homicides compared to everywhere else where they also have the same conditions of evidence well we have one of the best teams in the state of North Carolina and in the country I'm I'm just and I'm not saying that because I decided to come back to the city of Durham I would put them up against any team in this state the amount of knowledge the amount of just you know training also too not because he's.
Sitting here but Mr Shea's shop our our our Intel folks our forensics staff our capabilities are far more advanced than many agencies in the state thank you and then just how can we fill the gap for the other types of violent crime what do we need to improve there so you know for us it's how do we make our victims feel more comfortable with having the conversations with us right but without being pushy right how how do we do that I think it's when we you know we can we can retrieve the casings and we can we can we can take the photos and retrieve the videos but ultimately if we don't have a victim that's surviving that's willing to say yes I know who that is and yes I feel if I stand up in in court and I feel that I would be protected ultimately they they're going to back away from that and they're not going to do that so for us it's how do we make make them feel more.
Comfortable doing so and and I think you know we are constantly trying to find the best way to navigate those Waters because we do understand that long after we're gone our surviving victims have to live in the communities in which they were victimized and you know I just it's just making sure that they know that we're here whether you want to talk now or later we're we're here and we we stand ready to help you solve your case thank you you're welcome you thanks council member Baker for those questions rist yeah yeah Chief again thank you for the presentation just following up on the the the that line of questioning so for for those non-fatal shootings and pardon my ignorance on this one but would those appear under where do those appear is that aggravated assault where would that show up in the statistics correct that would be your aggravated assaults so your anything involving your your firearms and that are non-fatal that does show up an aggravated assault and I.
Know that data is not here broken out but do you have What's the clearance rate for those non-fatal shootings do you have that number do you know Jason I so yeah I don't we can break that out though if that thank. You okay Cole May pro thank you Mr Mayor Chief it's always good to see you to see you sir your command and staff we continue to be grateful to the men and women under your command thank you for being with us today and thank you for this report so as I say often it's really no consolation that the general numbers are going the right way to an individual who's been victimized but it's important to say that it's important to to point out to our residents and citizens that in general the numbers are going the right way but we know we still got a lot of work to do I want to add my I guess celebratory remarks and congratulations to you on on the clearance rate given our staffing issues given our.
Challenges we face as as do many departments around the country and you you you said it I think you hit the nail on the head about our team and how excellent our department is and how celebrated our department is around this state and around the country I I do and I want to use that as an on-ramp for my question I have very nuts and bolts policy question for you an impact question for you but first all I want to say I remember one of the things that that most impressed me about you Chief when you were coming here and even before you came here how you you were unafraid to speak of your your Humanity not just a uniform you spoke very candidly about being the mother of a black son and how you have you're not immune from the considerations that often come with that particular responsibility and your uniform doesn't exempt you from that and you're sensitive to that you're sensitive to the issues we had in.
Policing in our country you've been in a Vanguard of discussions about how do we better police our communities particularly communities of black and brown communities I think that's evidenced in your commitment to U Visa results and other things with that said my belief is that you wouldn't ask us for something or do something if you thought it was harmful to any Community and I think that's that's part of your brand and I think that's why we've had so much success as a department so I I want to go back to the shooting incidents slide where you indicated via asterisk that 79% of the incidents that we responded to gunfire were initiated by shotspotter technology which of course is is dark at this point one of the things I love about local politics and Municipal politics is the instant gratification you see the pothole get fixed you see the crane in the sky you know you know they're responding to 911 calls the other thing is that that it's non-abstract in.
Nature it's right there in your face so the decisions we make at the local level you unlike many decisions in politics particularly the high level ones you immediately see your impact those decisions and they are life impacting decisions so my assumption is that when your department asked us for an extension on pending a report a shot spotter my assumption is that it was based upon something my assumption was that if y'all thought it was doing bad or harm you would have been the first based upon what I know about you you would have been the first to say hey so the the for me at least intellectually the comfort with asking for the extension was based upon probably numbers like over 75% of incidents that we were responding to were not initiated by 911 and for me the the problem with public knowledge is that you can't pretend you don't know it anymore so when a request came to our Council and we exercised our power to turn the sensors off what we could not.
Turn off was one the gunfire that we know those sensors were picking up and what we could not turn off is what we already know so we can turn the sensors off but we know that didn't stop the gunfire so my my direct question to you the the nuts and bolts question is because this number is reflective of when the censers were on now that they're off and we decided to turn them off as a council what was the the posture what was how did what did y'all do what what was the posture response what was how did we handle shootings in those areas that we were that we did have Aid and technology and that we no longer have was there any substantive or or noticeable response in policy or response posture on the part of our officers no we so you know we continued with the service that we have really set ourselves at a high standard and a high level we continue with that service we we understand and recognize and.
Obviously respect tremendously council's decision but that's not going to keep us from performing at the highest level so knowing that shotspotter is a resource and a tool we didn't have that but that did didn't mean that we reversed or re you know went back to doing things as business as usual one of the things that that I would say is it was it's a it's tremendously helpful that you know sound of shots shots fired calls we had those proactively we we raised those from a priority three call to a priority 2 call and and that's been helpful but really for us it was we knew that we needed to get on scene and get on scene quickly we knew that we needed to try and collect as much evidence and locate and collect as much evidence as possible but we also respected council's decision but that did not have an effect on how we did our work absolutely thank you and let me be clear I'm I'm not in no way asking you.
To opine upon the the correctness or non-correct of the council's decision as you never do and and I think and part of our job is to exempt you from that but the decisions do have impact and and it was a policy decision and I wanted to to get into some real world kind of data points on one other question regarding that I know that response time is is kind of a golden measure for us to quicker we can get there the better the outcomes for all involved whether it's evidence collection saving lives possible arrests whatever it may be when you last you were before us you you had and I didn't see it in this report you had reported that the response time for shot spotter to shot spotter incidents was actually better than the response time the general response time for 911 call do do you have that number I do I I don't have it last time but I do have it for the fourth quarter so our median response.
Time or from the publish shot spotter alert to when the first officer arrived was 5 minutes and 11 seconds and that was approximately 1 minute and 17 seconds for the call processing time but we were still below below what our Target response time for Priority One calls okay thank you for that Chief again thank you for being with us and please pass our regards to the men and women at your command thank you Mr Mayor I yeld back Council M cabier good to see you Chief thank you for the presentation I just wanted to say that you know going back we've had lots of conversations particularly around robberies targeting our Latino community and I just wanted to say I know that we're trending in the right way and I know that's because of just diligent work on your department with community and building trust in community and that that has played out interestingly in our climate surveys with residents that was something that we reviewed last week at our budget.
Retreat and so I just wanted to thank you I know that it is a big lift I know that we've struggled to get enough bilingual bicultural officers it has been a struggle but you know as I was the last time you presented there had been kind of a string and it's seems like it's gotten a little quieter in general I think the beginning of the year has been I'm going to knock on wood a little quieter sometimes you can attribute it to the cold but it hasn't been a particularly cold winter either so I'm just hopeful that that is a trend I really appreciate you starting to include the kind of long-term Trends over 20 years because as you can see one one h homicide or for homicides or you know it can do a lot to our percentages year-over-year and I think that it's really helpful you know to to tell the story that Durham is safer regardless how people perceive it we do need to tell the story around facts and that we.
Do we can get into a cycle and I will comment on the news you know the news are always here when you come they don't show up often when we're telling good stories about Durham they show up when there's something salacious to share and I'll say it I think it's personally because it links to a racist history of how Durham is perceived not just in the drangle but across North Carolina and so I'm just going to name it I see the news here when there's something salacious to report around crime and they can continue the story that oh Durham's unsafe and I would say that if you look over our 20-year data no I think we've made some huge improvements that is the diligent work of your department and also just the community broadly and so I want to liftt that up and I think it's just really important to share that and I appreciate the slide being included and it's a change from a few years we can one or two things change.
Percentages very drastically when you're looking at small data sets and we do need to actually think about what are we seeing what are the trends obviously the the dangerous side of that we're seeing a lot of younger people carrying guns and shooting each other and that's a trend we really need deep deep work on that's not going to just take the police we all know it's going to take everyone thank you thank you thank you council member Freeman you have any comments U I would just Echo council member caber's comments and in appreciation of the way that the presentation is put together as well and I would also Echo well just to say I I really appreciate the way in which you're going about pursuing female officers and recruits in a way that we our numbers are demonstrating that we are doing much better than the national average as well so I other than that I think you're doing a great job I want to be as supportive as possible for the.
Work that you do and I'll continue to have conversations thank you thank you thank you colleagues thank you Chief I I want to add to that as well I know Raleigh has some issues going on no shade at Raleigh but seems to be Durham is a little more projected sometimes so thank you all for for you know doing the work you're doing I know folks outside of the outside of the Bull City like to say oh don't go to Durham and I like to tell them stay where you are we're good I I feel fine in Durham me too and and as some of you all know some of the things that have happened lately and I'm still walking out in public feeling safe so thank you I wanted to ask you you probably don't have this data cuz I did not give it to you before but there are some cities that we get compared to often as far as how we're trending such as like Austin Texas or Portland.
Oregon do you know how we're lining up in regards of violent crimes to those specific cities and I ask about those because we are being compared to them as far as how we're trending in the housing market and and economic development and so on I don't but but I can I know people okay I'm sure I surround myself with people that know more than me so it's good and they also have similar political Char character ristics like Durham I'm just really interested in that another question I had was do we know what the recommended percentage and this I'm going to ask this question with the grain of salt because we we also have the community safety department which is very unique and we want to continue to grow that alongside with you know just being able to balance out a response to the issues we do have in VI violent crime and then mental health but do we know what the recommended amount of officers we should have based on our.
Population I I don't know the exact number what I can tell you is well we should have 100% of our officers I'm going to say that but whenever we look at our shifts so that's really what what we look at is is a good indicator of where we are with the entire agency we want to always be above 70 80% Staffing level for each one of our shifts and so that's really that's what we look at as a benchmark of how well we're doing within Staffing because as you know it's if we don't have the patrol officers I can't send anyone to investigation right so that really is kind of where it starts a little more context on why I asked that question the dirt bikes for example there were times on a Sunday I would see two to 300 dirt bikes and then on average you know we would have I don't know maybe seven or eight you know Cruisers On on the beat I'm not sure.
However many and I don't really want to say publicly how many but I know it's not two or 300 you know and I'm and and you know granted I grew up riding dirt bikes this was a struggle for me because I would see them like oh that's cool but it's not cool when it's unsafe and it's not cool when there's lots of drug transactions and weapons and all that stuff in the midst of some kids actually trying to have a good time so that being stated one of the worst departments to be under staff is the police department because you know we had a situation where you know the trash didn't get picked up and the City started to smell in a sense but I'll take City smelling over being underst stabbed and being shot at so that that does bring me concerned which also brings me a little discomfort when we're talking about response time and I feel like it's sort of like a it's like wishful thinking how can we reduce the.
Response time if we're so understaffed and if we're understaffed and what type of culture are we building here cuz we are responsible for you all what type of culture are we building to ensure that people actually do want to come to this this profession so I I that is my discomfort how do we you know and this question may even be rhetorical we're trying to reduce response times without increasing the capacity of the force and I just think that those those two things are going the opposite direction and so I what that's that's why I showed up to South Point to help recruit that night and take pictures and get folks to sign up when you all recruiting I'll continue to do that and I'll state that confidently and publicly so I I really just wanted to say that that that that that's something that does concern me in the presentation I don't want the officers or the entire force to feel it feel bad when it's not even.
Realistic to get to that Target where we are now but I do know that we holistically have to continue to work toward that and so as we are contining to hear more data and more information I'm going to base my decisions on that data and not how I personally feel so thank you all thank you for what you're doing thank you I sort of turned that question to a statement rhetorical right y yes well right U Mr Mayor if if I could I if that it concludes the questions I would like to just have a point of personal privilege as we transition into the next with your permission yes please okay so I as we transition into our our our study results for sound thinking formerly known as shotspotter with with the good folks from the Wilson Center I do want to just publicly commend my entire team that worked this year on probably one of the most groundbreaking Pilots for this technology and I am extremely thankful to have.
To have been able to witness it from from my perspective and what I can tell you it was done very well I have an amazingly capable group of sworn and non-sworn staff that understood the assignment that that understood that we were trying to be to hear all of the concerns of not just our council members right but also our community because many of us understand and feel you know how we we understand how important it is that we're doing things the right way I can't comment on who's doing what where in another jurisdiction but I know we have control over how we do things here in this in this great City and so I want to just say thank you and commend my entire staff for their work having said all that if I could just bring up don't worry I don't have a plaque or anything for you Jason but if I could just bring up Mr Jason Sheets you all know Mr Sheets he is our analytical services manager he will bestow the.
Introductions at this point in time for staff that are present from both the Wilson Center but also from sound thinking shotspotter thanks thank you good afternoon I'm just going to transition the presentation here real quick as I get start. Started okay good afternoon mayor Williams mayor protm Moten members of council my name is Jason Sheets I am the analytical services manager for the police department and the overall project manager for the shotspotter pilot it really is my privilege today to introduce Dr Philip J cook professor emeritus of public policy and economics at Duke University honestly he is one of the foremost experts in the country on the study of gun crime very early on in this process in the interest of transparency the Durham Police Department asked the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law to conduct an independent evaluation of the shot spotter pilot program thanks to the leadership of Faculty director Brandon L Garrett and policy director Angie Weiss gaml the Wilson Center facilitated such an.
Valuation at no cost to the taxpayers of Durham the evaluation was performed by Dr Cook in conjunction with Adam Solomon assistant professor of Economics at Clemson University and Dr today Dr Cook today will present their findings I also want to mention in attendance today from the Wilson Center is policy analyst Lindsay Bas Patel and researcher poar Kelly in addition there are representatives from sound thinking present today to to answer any questions that you may have about the shot spotter system itself and those include Aaron Edwards senior Vice President of Sales Paul lazinski customer success director and tahara Moore director of community engagement so without further Ado I introduce Dr Philip.
Cook you can just Advance you can just advance slides with that button right there okay look something I can manage thank you Jason and good afternoon mayor Williams and and the council members thanks for the opportunity to talk about this work we have just wrapped up an evaluation that did begin in the fall of 2022 before the installation was actually implemented and as as he mentioned I was working together with another Economist Adam Solomon on using the data that was compiled by the Durham Police Department and by Jason's shop to analyze the process and and the impact of the shot spotter pilot project now we've already begun the conversation about this and but and some of what I I'm going to say is going to be very well known to you I'm I'm sure so I'll try not to bore you too much with that and Skip ahead but just let me say about myself and and explaining why I'm here that in my 50 years on the Duke faculty my one of my sustaining.
Interests has been guns gun violence and gun violence prevention and in recent years in particular I've been looking at the policing function with respect to gun violence prevention written a book on it last year and continued to be interested it was a real privilege to have the chance to actually engage as I've done now several times in the last few years on projects that concern the city of Durham my city.
So so as you know the the shotspotter pilot was instituted on December 15 20 2022 in a three square mile area that very small percentage of the city but it Incorporated about 29 % of all of the gun violence so relatively High rates of gun violence there I think that what is important to understand about shotspotter right in the first instance is that it's not a standalone system it it is in fact a supplement to the existing 911 system and that was important to the evaluation that I did together with Adam because the the question is what does it add to what we already have through 911 the chief mentioned the that that she had upgraded responses to gunshot calls as of December 15 2022 to Priority 2 so two cars dispatched ordinarily though without sirens and and lights but on a high priority and that came with a carefully worked out protocol advising the patrol officers about their job when they responded in these cases and the the protocol.
Included a statement that they should not use the shot spotter notification if there was one as justification for detaining or arresting any persons on the scene when they arrived that it was not going to be a case that certainly had made waves in Chicago for example where shotspotter was contributing to over policing along the way and you know as best I can determine in fact in that way in another ways the implementation of shotspotter the shotspotter pilot in Durham has been a model for the nation all more valuable than to understand what it accomplished the shot spotter alerts are are designed to detect outdoor gunshots and they come with a a time a more or less precise location based on the triangulation on the part of the the three acoustic sensors sometimes with the number of shots fired and they are then the alert is sent directly to to the cad system and typically very quickly we found almost always in in less than 60 seconds from the time that the sound was.
Detected so what what we're getting from this then is the increase in coverage because the shot spotter is picking up shots that were not otherwise wise known as a result of 911 calls and it's typically picking them up faster okay so let me talk about that in some more detail in the pilot area in this three square mile area there were a total of 1447 1447 total notifications during the pilot year 2023 and 57% of those were from shotspotter only that is there was a shotspotter alert but there was no 911 call if if you do the math it's clear that what that means is that in the pilot area the total number of gunshot notifications more than doubled as a result of the shot spotter installation the second bar in this graph shows you what happened to the 282 cases about 20% of that total that were actually confirmed by the responding officers as gunshots so for both 911 calls and for shotspotter alerts more often than not when the officers arrive there's no.
Evidence that there was a gun fired and so when there is evidence of that sort either Witnesses or or shell casings then there's a crime report written and that becomes a confirmed case as I say about 20% of all of the cases during this were confirmed that confirmation level tends to be twice as high for 911 calls as it is for the shot spotter calls along the way the highest confirmation rate is for when there's both which as you see is 15% of the total if we just focus on the most serious gun violence incidents cases where their victims were wounded or killed there were 52 such incidents with one or more victims during 2023 in the pilot area U half of them had shot spotter alerts including two where there was no 911 call and 50 of them had 911 calls all but those two it it certainly is a matter of concern that of those 26 cases that shotspotter did not alert eight of them were missed due to.
Human or system failure so that is just to say that that shotspotter is not perfect that it does make mistakes I'm sure of both kinds both false positives and false negatives but this is an indication that there were eight false negatives the rest of the cases that shotspotter Miss were because of the design of shot spotter it it does not detect gunshots that are fired indoors and very small caliber and some other cases here's the statistics we were able to put together on response times certainly that is one of the important promises that shotspotter makes that it will reduce response time to the scene and what we were looking at is is trying to be true to this idea that it was a pilot project a sort of experiment and so that we could compare what happened in the pilot area with what happened in the rest of the city as kind of a control group in this experiment and of course also look before and after the installation of.
Shot spotter so that's what this bar chart is showing you a comparison of 2022 the yellow bars and 2023 the blue bars and a comparison of the control group with a treatment group the median response time that is sort of a typical response time declined in the pilot area from 7.7 minutes to 5.5 minutes it also declined in the rest of the city during this period and these are in response to 911 calls but the decline was larger in the pilot area presumably because a lot of those 911 calls were now accompanied by shotspotter alerts which came first and gave a better location indication along the way so if we net out the two gains it turns out that the what can be attributed to shots spotter by our calculation is a 1.2 minute gain so without shotspotter instead of 5.5 minutes as the median we would have had 6.7 minutes and that that's an important contribution that's the median now we can also look at at the cases that had.
More extended or long response times I chose to look at the 90th percentile so that the all but the top 10% in terms of response times and there you see a larger gain as in the pilot area relative to the rest of the city if we net that out we get a 3.6 minute gain at the high end along the way so again shot spotter promises to improve response times and sure enough it happened. So the next thing we looked at was how productive that gain was both the gain in response time and also the gain in coverage of gunshot incidents that we saw in the pilot area so if we think of that as somewhat distinct contributions that shotspotter is making on the one hand it it is the contribution of giving coverage to a lot of incidents that otherwise would not be known to the police because there was no 911 call and then for the ones where there is a 911 call and improved response time what does that accomplish in terms.
Of kind of typical concerns that we would have about police investigation and police police response one of the principal outcomes is was there an arrest or not and we looked at that we also looked at whether evidence at the scene was collected or not or Witnesses interviewed and we say the total productivity gain due to shotspotter is the sum of what is gained from broader coverage and what is gained from quicker response time when there is a 9911 call so I hope hope that makes sense that it took us a while to get here and thinking about it so let me first talk about the cases that represent broader coverage there was no 911 call remember that's over half half the calls that are coming in in the pilot area U including by our calculation 73 that ended up being confirmed cases and of those shot spotter only calls there were seven arrests and there were 71 cases where the responding officers were able to pick up shell casings or.
Otherwise pick up gun related evidence along the way so that's a clear gain in terms of the Durham Police Department's effort against gun violence if we look more closely at those seven arrests all of them were on scene all all of them were on scene six of the seven were directly tied to the shooting itself in one way or another and I'm glad to to talk about that in in more detail but so that looks like one thing we can count on that that chot spotter did accomplish if we then go on and say well what about the the other gain that I talked about that is the gain due to quicker response times there when Adam Solomon and I did did the analysis we used a a kind of an experimental method or quasi experimental method and and some somewhat fancier statistics and our conclusion very surprising from that is that we could not detect any gain due to quicker response time for cases that had 911.
Calls and that is true with respect to arrests with respect to evidence collection and with respect to interviewing Witnesses so for those three outcomes we were seeing a gain because of broader coverage but no gain as a result of the improved response time to to cases where there was a 911 call we don't have a a particular explanation for that that we're just reporting what we were seeing in in the statistics there was another outcome which we see is profoundly important and and in terms of thinking about shotspotter and that is the possibility of saving lives due to quick response or or to a response that would not have otherwise called happened so remember there were 52 incidents in which somebody was shot or one or more people were shot in one of those I think that there is a case that the quick response due to shot spotter it actually had a 911 call somewhat later but the the the quick response of the officers who arrived at.
The scene found the victim who was bleeding out at the time delivered first aid and that difference in response time may have been the difference for between life and death for that individual now we're not medical doctors and I'm not sure even a medical doctor could confirm that but it's plausible that there was that that one case where there might have been life saved because that person that man was then delivered first aid transported to the hospital and. Survived the other big question about shotspotter besides does it save lives is does it reduce gun violence overall and absolutely essential in in terms of thinking of the the value of that and unfortunately we can't give a direct answer to that question based on the data and the as I'm sure you know if you look at the data on shootings in Durham for example there's enormous variability from month to month quarter to quarter and for us to be able to isolate the effect of shot spotter which.
At best might be 5 or 10% reduction from all of that noise if you will was not statistically possible so we're agnostic on that question we we don't have a direct answer to it on the other hand we will say that the investigations have been somewhat more productive and there have been more arrests which ultimately might have an effect on on the shooting rate okay so the other thing for Adam and I are both economists we think about costs as well as benefits as so the costs in this case include the budgetary costs and the opportunity costs the budgetary costs is I'm sure you know we're for this pilot about $225,000 total and the opportunity costs are the because of shot spotter as I say more than doubled the number of gunshot notifications in that area that that just the shot spotter only cases ended up being 2.3 on average per day that would not have happened otherwise where there was a priority to deployment on the part of the officers.
If we look at at that in the context priority to deployments Citywide of which there are more than 40,000 in 2023 it works out to about 2% so there was a 2% increase in the number of priority to deployments small percentage wise but those are resources that could have been used to respond to other calls for service or they could have been used for routine Patrol so it does have a have sum cost so summing up on the cost side we we had the budgetary costs we have the opportunity costs that the 2% increase in priority to Notifications in other cities there there have been scandals there have been legal challenges and other kinds of problems associated with shotspotter and as far as I know there haven't been any of those in Durham that as I say it was a well-managed pilot project and so that other other problematic outcomes have not been part of the story on the benefit side increase in the number of arrests of.
Seven a small number seemingly but it is a 32% increase there was increase cases with evidence collection almost doubled in that case and there was a possible possibility that there was a life saved and then as I said an unknown impact on the overall rate of gun violence so on the one hand you have significant costs something that are are must be judged relative to a somewhat more effective effort against gun violence on the part of the police I'm not going to give you a bottom line and on that I I see that that's up to the council to decide about the relative values on those two sides so my my job is only to inform not to advise in in that respect let me say we also did a another evaluation through the Wilson Center led by P Kelly an undergraduate at Duke who is here along the way and there's also another representative she was working through the Wilson Center as well as with me and and ended up being a.
Interesting pilot study or not a pilot study a a focus group study that recruited 30 residents of the pilot area and had conversations with them in small groups about what the they thought about the shotspotter installation U most of them had no direct information on it at all but most of them had opinions about it and the opinions were based on preconceptions they had about how the money should be spent or about the the players that are involved their trust in the police or in the City Council or in a private firm such as as sound thinking and and so forth so perhaps you you will have questions on that that we could we could develop answers to from p and and also Lindsay so thank you I'm glad to answer any questions about it and I appreciate the opportunity to work with Jason ches and with the chief on this project.
Thank you so much thank you for this information and po are you in the room you want to come on over just over with Professor thank you also for your work colleagues before I bring it before the council I there was a so basically item 17 on the agenda and item 24 are the same thing where it's it's about shot spotter so I want to go ahead and address the the folks who signed up for it before I bring it back for counsel so first I have online Abdul ner Abdul can you hear.
Me Abdul can you hear can you hear me. Microphone. On his microphone is he's unmuted are you able to pull him up M it's muted again ABD you can unmute. Yourself okay M you can keep working with him and see if he can come on I'll go to the next speaker Mr Mayor he just Departed the queue okay next I have jante dunon in person so he left okay so he's going to come over here to that Podium there you go welcome you have three minutes thank you mayor Williams good afternoon city council good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and the service members of our Community I'm here to speak directly to the funding that of spot shotter that we need spot shotter reinstated back in our community now I'm going try to hold my composure and I'm going have to disagree with Duke's findings because the difference is somebody being out there 24/7 someone who's getting a report someone who's witnessing from eye to eye who sees the response time of our Police Department.
Responding out there now in the communities that spot shter is set up in these are communities where no one calls 911 if you hear the shot everybody goes on with their business okay it's it's just it's just a sound but then when that shot goes out we don't know if somebody shot we don't know until like a couple of minutes later that somebody's wounded now within the past 24 hours we' then had about three driveby shootings within these areas that are on this data on this survey this is causing property damage to the residents this is causing mental mental anguish on a lot of the children that are out there now within the 24 hours 15 year-old just got shot and like I said again from a couple of years back it was a big difference between you hearing regular shots but now we're hearing automatic gunfire but it took y'all till 1:00 in the morning to come up with a resolution on something that that does not really pertain us in our community.
Right now but it only took y'all less than five minutes to say no this the the system is is working the studies that these people are doing it's hard for me to sit here and look and and and look at the police chief's numbers and see where yes these numbers are greatly s proving what our Police Department is doing but I'm out there witnessing I'm out there I'm angry right now and it's hard to sit there and the community is so confused that we're angry at the council because every time we want something that we feel that we come into an agreement and that one time that the community says yes we want something yes it's working but then all of a sudden it just looks like it's another defund to police defund our Public Safety I can witness and say I Prov myself to dur Police Department one of their officers out there was struggling with a with with a citizen out there one day and I watched him for.
10 minutes struggle while his backup wasy trying to get there because they was on another call and I'm going to go real quick brother Leo thank you Mr DS I got to I got to cut it I'm so sorry and I just want to I just want to say this real quick okay that officer was struggling and now if that officer would have been nobody would have said D Spot would have located that D thank.
You colleagues I'm going to bring it back I I Know M I know thank. You Madame clerk if you can see if Abdul is available again. Online everyone can you hear me better now okay I can hear you now just make sure you're speaking into the mic of your device you have three minutes welcome than Mr Mayor thank your elected members of the German city council my name is Abdul nasat I serve as the managing director for research and data at campaign zero we commend the council's recent decisions in the past months to not renew the shot spotter contract it reflects your Shar commitment to prioritizing solutions that genuinely focus on prevention and enhance Community safety the recent findings of the evaluation we would like to thank Dr Cook and the rest of the staff at the Wilson Center and Duke University who's conducted this pilot evaluation the findings align with the consensus in the field and the research that the recent Chicago mayor used to that that decided to end the C the.
Shotspot contract in Chicago and this was not because the mayor is not interested in fighting gun violence or because he does not believe it's a serious issue it's the realization that many of other cities and elected have finally come to and that's that shw does not help fight gun violence and as the authors of the most robust and largest evaluation funded by the National Institute of Justice recently published quote agencies that prioritize gun violence reduction rather than reducing calls for shots fired or increasing ballistic evidence collection should consider if resources are better used for Solutions other than gunshot detection Technologies again we'll be here we're happy to respond to any questions we've been doing this work around trying to educate the concerns and issues around gun violence and the concerns with shot spotter generally so I'll leave it here before I I I end up going over time thank you respect members of the council Mr Mayor the chief and the staff at Duke University thank you so much all right colleagues we get back.
To to the council for comments questions council member Baker sure obviously there's a lot to digest here and we just received the report so there's a lot that we need to to look into before we deliberate and cast votes at our next council meeting I did have one question related to the report you showed the cost number of the contract amount I'm wondering if you looked at any of the considered other costs associated for example sending Personnel out to every single gunshot was that factored as a cost or were we just considering the cost of the contract as the total cost of shot.
Spotter so in up there's two kinds of costs yeah the budgetary costs which is the contract amount and then the opportunity costs which is the Personnel cost that you're talking about okay that's that's where you're factoring in the Personnel going out that that the extra deployments each one of them involving two patrol cars a day typically they would go to the scene and spend Maybe about 10 minutes there though sometimes a lot longer so as as best we could tell that was the the main concern along the lines that you're pointing to appreciate that yeah thank you that was that's that's something I needed to dig into in the report thank you yeah of course copy eror Mr Mayor I don't have anything right now counc member Freeman rist thank you Mr Mayor Dr Cook thanks for coming full disclosure Dr Cook is one of my professors way back when when I first went to graduate school at Duke University in in Sanford school so thank you if I can take a.
Moment for of privilege to thank you so much for your long long career 50 years at Duke University and for being one of the legends of the Sanford school so appreciate your work over all those years and for for doing this work for the city of Durham for free as I understand my question there's is a lot of data that we're we're looking to unpack here my question is on this quicker response time to 911 calls with shotspotter can you again explain this process by which when you analyzed all the 911 calls found that there was no improvement during the during the pilot year with regard to arrests evidence collection and interviewing Witnesses help me understand that again right and the slides are not showing the work on on that one because the work is a bit complicated along the way but we we were basically say doing something that is similar to what those bar charts are also doing we're comparing changes in the pilot area.
With changes in the rest of the city as kind of a control group in we tried to refine it in different ways like we controlled for the case mix because we know that if the call ends up being for a fatal or even nonfatal of shooting then it's going to receive a lot more attention and that will change the likelihood of an arrest or or some of the other outcomes we looked at so we tried to adjust for the case mix as part of our regression analysis and within that context when we estimated the kind of experim experimental effect the the the change in 2023 in the pilot area compared with the rest of the city and compared with previous years adjusting for case mix what we were finding was statistically null result that the the best we we couldn't reject the conclusion that there was no effect our best guess or the best estimate from those results were actually that it was slightly negative and but it could easily have.
Been either positive or negative from from what we looked at so you know under the circumstances we can certainly rule out the possibility that there had been a major increase in productivity statistically that that just would not be possible for from what we looked at the productivity gain appeared to come from the broaden coverage that shotspotter was giving along the way now I report this conclusion and I'm enough of a criminologist to be wondering what exactly is going on here because of course it has long been accepted wisdom that response time is important and in in crimes like this and improving response times should increase the productivity of responses and so for that I I can only express my puzzlement about the finding but that's what the finding was thank you so much pro thank you Mr Mayor Dr Cook thank you it's an honor to have you here this was a as you know much anticipated and much awaited for report report so I'm I'm I'm grateful for you being here.
Today I'm grateful for your your data and your information which confirmed some things that we already knew and had seen and probably for some other folk just SOL solidified some of their thinking I I I wanted to again thank you and the team the entire team and I know there are folk here from sound thinking as well I want to thank you Chief as well again for your earlier report and for your work on this I want to highlight something you said about Durham being touted as a model for the use and deployment of this technology and I want to thank every person who was against this technology and who spoke up I want to thank I'm serious every person who raised the alarm about the possibility of overp policing about the efficacy of the technology about what the posture of our office offices would be when they responded because I think through their efforts you have actually you actually may be saving lives in other cities around the.
Country who are looking at what Durham is doing I think you made this a better pilot because of the guard rails because of the excellent checks that we put in around this technology I I do want to speak something that I find interesting Dr Cook in the the question as whether or not the the technology reduces gun violence because I don't I don't know that sound thinking has that in any of their literature and we we who were supporting the the use of the technology never suggested that it was going to reduce gun violence that was never a claim there was a claim that it would be a tool useful in our response and that it could possibly save lives and the company said it would reduce response time so I just want to be very clear and it there's an interesting corollary we have spent millions of dollars on a public safety department an alternative response non armed responders one of the things that was said about that is what causes deaths at.
The hands of police when we have folk that are in mental distress is that police are not equipped or properly trained to deal with folk who are going through mental distress and by virtue of police contact that's what raises the number of fatalities so the suggestion was that if you limit those number of contacts then you're going to keep more people alive we haven't done any studies as to how many folk lives have been saved based upon our heart program we've done no data suggesting that because the heart went to this particular incident this incident most likely would have ended in death as police went and we poured millions of dollars into it and I support it because it's a good idea because it's a tool that broadens our response capabilities as a government but we cannot say that the millions of dollars that we've put into our heart program we can't point to one life that's been saved we just believe that that's the outcome because we believe as an article of faith that.
Less police contact will lead to better outcomes in this particular case with shotspotter which is has really we Ed the term pilot with the heart program but it wasn't a pilot it was a done deal from when we announced it this was actually a pilot and we actually have data we actually have data points where someone's life was potentially saved by early intervention we have data about response times and we have no data about how many lives were saved with the heart program and I dare somebody to try and talk me out of my support for that initiative CU it's a good idea it's a tool we need to have in our toolbx so I I just want to frame that that as we digest colleages as we digest this data no one and and I want to make sure that this pilot isn't unfairly burdened with questions or proven claims that were never made about it not by sound thinking and not by anyone we never claimed that it was going to reduce gun.
Violence what we did say is what happened is that we could potentially save lives and that response time would be included improved and that it would be a tool in our hands I I I thank you for the for the for the data I look forward to further engagement I want to thank the members of the community who who spoke today in person and for the emails and and Community responses we've gotten via other means as well and I look forward to I will say finally that there's a lot of attention placed upon Chicago I want to call some other cities Goldsboro North Carolina Winston Salem North Carolina Wilmington North Carolina Rocky Mount North Carolina New York City New York San Francisco California Pittsburgh Pennsylvania who's actually expanding their coverage area I just hope that we're not cherry-picking one city because of confirmation bias and there's even a question as to what really happened as to his Honor's decision in Chicago as to why the contract wasn't renewed but I won't get.
Into that now but if we're going to talk about other cities then let's talk about other cities plural rather than cherry-picking one that may align with an outcome we've already determined thank you Professor s it's an honor to have you here as when I associate myself with Council member's RIS comments about your distinguished Service thank you Chief thanks to everyone here thank you colleagues also for this great discussion thank you Mr Mayor yield back thank you yeah go ahead I really appreciate the work of Dr I'm sorry of Professor ameritus cook and I really wanted to know if the police chief will be at our council meeting on Monday night you will okay that was all council member cavier thank you I just wanted to thank everyone for the presentation today and I look forward to kind of digging into the report I we we didn't get it until right before the work session so I just want to commend both our police department and the Wilson Center for for their work and.
All of the just careful detail I think it it was very useful all right thank you and I'll just give a few brief remarks I I want to make sure so this may protim actually kind of mentioned this confirmation bias concrete bias is what I usually call it I want to make sure I'm not approaching it with that and you know I always tell people I was not the biggest cheerleader for this technology at first simply because I was just I was listening to what was being told to me but I did do quite a bit of homework and you know taking an objective approach to it I'm glad I did that I want to speak directly to folks that I've personally spoken with that are against it against just the incorporation of tech of the sound thinking with shot spot of technology and one I one thing I hear a lot of is Chicago and the AP report so I did a little digging and Brandon is a really good friend of mine.
Brandon Johnson is the mayor of Chicago and he just held a press conference they gave it an extension to pan it out and they have they have reasons for panning it out ending their contract but I I think the best way to look at it as is that's Chicago and this is Durham and their police chief is there police chief and ours is ours and what he said to me he said brother he said for whatever you all do don't use Chicago as an example because we have our own issues and it goes way back multiple Mayors ago they have a lot of issues in that City that we don't have in Durham and and so I just want to be really careful about saying Durham shouldn't because Chicago XYZ that's just not a fair comparison and you know in in other cities you know especially to you know mayor Pro named some of these cities a lot of rural North Carolina cities don't have our issues either and.
They also don't have the same push back I just really want to focus on Durham and allowing the data here to help us make this decision the other thing is I want to make sure we're asking the right question and and this this really goes into you know the the scope of this of this research people are saying we shouldn't spend money on this because it's it's you know it doesn't reduce gun violence I have yet to see where it's supposed to reduce gun violence I don't know if that's the right question to ask you know is it allowing is it being a resource to help us be more efficient as a department are we trending that way and if so then yes people say we should use the money for an after school program for someone who used to design after school programs as a former principal associate superintendent or School administrator it cost a heck of a lot more than than 200,000 to run an after school.
Program we're talking over a million if you're going to do it right so that's not really an even comparison either I just want to make sure that there's Fidelity to this conversation and I don't want to sensationalize it and I I live like two blocks away not far from actually I probably live in one of the safest parts of the city so unfortunately my my personal lived experience does not inform me on how I should or should not you know determine on this so all all I have to rely on is the actual data and part of that data is concrete and part of it is anecdotal the anecdotal is when I go into when I was actually on the campaign trail and I had to go and pay one of my campaign workers and he said it's okay it was 11:00 at night he said I really need the money he said it's okay you can come over here there's a shot spotter sensor right over my.
House and I said well it's not listening to you it's not watching you but the fact that he felt safe that he can invite me over at 11:00 at night that's anecdotal concrete the data is speaking for itself so I just want to make sure that we're having a fair assessment of this we did just get this report and I want to make sure that I as well as my colleagues of you all are okay with this really take some time to dig into it and and really be able to educate ourselves more on on it and you know at that point the Fate will present itself but I I really hope that we make the most objective decision here and when we ask if it's worth it only thing I needed to see was the data point of how many lives potentially was saved when no one called 911 one it's worth it for me one so I I this is a resource that will help us be more efficient you know.
And I think the data speaks for itself it's not a resource that's going to completely stop gun violence it's not a resource that's going to you know some of the things we've heard and lastly there I there are some people that come and say to me well it's going to overp police the black and brown Community hello the black and brown community that I've talked to are asking for more police but we're short so I just want to be very Frank and direct and transparent about this about how I'm thinking about this and I look forward to digging into the report thank you all for for doing this thank you for being that independent third Third Party Source Chief thank you I'll put your compassion for this community over any Chief in this entire nation in your entire department and parlar thank you thank you as well for your work so there are no more comments I I think we we are we're all good on this one right thanks very much.
And I'm available if anybody wants to talk so thank.
You colleagues give me one moment there's something we're going to have to discuss where we have to give some directions.
Staff council member Baker Baker okay council member Baker sorry to interrupt your conversation but we need direction on an item that you pulled that's number.
17 so it's a unique setup here because we've had so much information on it but this is the actual contract so we we can discuss this contract now or it can go on GBA after we kind of dig into the contract GBA okay I just needed to know that in order to settle the agenda and I believe that's it we're going to go ahead and settle the agenda and yeah we'll call it a day excuse me Mr Mayor oh and we I.
Actually we do have a closed session so so what I'll do is allow the manager to settle the agenda but first I'll come to Diana there's a lot of moving Parts up here and there's one more moving part Mr abdulah is back online did you want to hear from him or no we we've already give it space for that okay all right thank you all right we will. All right good so Madam manager we will go ahead and setle the.
Agenda yes Mr Mayor I have a board and committee report oh that's right yeah I'm sorry please report out it's very short the Durham affordable housing implementation committee appointment for the category of Resident from Durham Housing Authority properties the nominee is Glenda Jang and for the human relations commission appointment category of other person the nominee is asme kou and that's the end of my report thank you so much Madam manager thank you Mr mayor I have for.
Your consent agenda items 1- 16 and items 18- 21 for your GBA agenda I have item number 17 and for GBA public hearings items 25 through 27 thank you all right thank you and at this time I'll entertain a motion to go into close session second been moved and proberly second Mr Mayor oh well you we need to actually have the motion read right correct yes thank you we didn't do that at the retrieve that I'll retrieve that motion all right thank you and this is a little little different from what you all are used to because the Clos session is actually under a different category than it is when I call a Clos session with you all so this one is to hold a closed session to seek instruction in negotiating the material terms of a proposed contract for the acquisition purchase option exchange or lease of real property pursuant to North Carolina General statute 143 31811 A5 so move right it's been moved second and seconded all in.
Favor I all right thank you we are now in closed session well we are now going to close session correct up in the committee room the committee room.
Upstairs.
For.