Ending Community Homelessness Organization

0:00 Good morning, everyone, and welcome to this morning's meeting of ECHO, which is Ending Community Homelessness Organization. We have a special meeting today that we have been working on for a very long time putting together. We're in the presence of some very important people in our community, and we're grateful for the time that all of you have spent to be here today. And the purpose of the meeting today is to have a panel of law enforcement to help our local elected officials as well as the public to better understand law enforcement's perspective on local and regional approaches to engaging with those who are homeless in Clark County. We all know law enforcement is a very large component, not necessarily by choice, but

0:57 just by the nature of your work in this issue. And ECHO's goal is to better understand the overall landscape of how local law enforcement agencies are navigating camping ordinances, community court programs, and other policies and programs related to homelessness to help identify the impacts of policy differences across the county, what works well, and where potential improvements could be made. So once again, thank you all for being here. We have folks here from the jail, from Clark County Sheriff's Office, Vancouver Police Department, Battleground Police Department, Clark County Fire and Rescue, Kamas Police Department, Ridgefield Police Department, and then we have staff here as well as our other members of the ECHO. And then we also have some state legislators and other local electives here, and we appreciate everybody taking their time to come today and be a part of this. And what I'd like to do is go ahead and kick it off with introductions.

1:56 I am Glenn Young. I serve on the County Council, also serve as Chair of ECHO, and just each of you take just a quick moment to introduce yourselves. Tell us anything that you like about your job, anything real quick that you want to mention to the group. Good morning, everyone. Will Fuentes, Clark County Council District 3, East Vancouver. Thank you so much for being here. We're excited to be here, and thanks to everyone for being in the audience. My name's Dave Shook. I'm the Director of the Clark County Jail Services. We have about 522 beds in our local facility, and we're building a new J-Pod with 64 more. My name's Chris Skidmore. I'm the Patrol Commander for the Clark County Sheriff's Office. I cover our night watch, so our swing shift and graveyard patrols that are out in the county. I'm Darren McShea. I'm an Assistant Chief with the Vancouver Police Department, and I oversee our Patrol

2:55 Division. Dennis Flynn. I am the Chief of Police for the Battleground Police Department. Been there two years. I spent 30 years, though, in Las Vegas, where we dealt with a very, very large homeless population that was there. I'm Sam Lewis. I'm Program Manager with Clark College Fire Rescue and our CARES Program. Our CARES Program serves, we are a mobile integrated healthcare program that we do follow-up services for folks needing them, as well as acute behavioral health crisis services. Mike Jackson, also with Clark College Fire Rescue and our regional Fire CARES Program. A little bit on the periphery, but we work close with our law enforcement partners to help engage folks with a variety of needs, behavioral health and otherwise. Tina Jones. I'm the proud Chief of Kamas Police Department. I've been there, it'll be three years in July, and prior to that, I worked 21 years with

3:55 the Portland Police Bureau just across the river. And during one of my assignments, I had our behavioral health unit, which had a co-responder model with clinicians and officers. And so, I've got kind of a broad experience with patrol and some of these other assignments, with how we partner with our agencies in the community, and then individuals experiencing homelessness on the streets. Hello, my name is Kathy Doriot. I'm the Chief of the Portland Police Department. I've been Chief for about three years, but prior to that, I served approximately 35 years with the Richfield Police Department, so from Reserve all the way up to Chief. So I have a really good knowledge of my community and the challenges that we face, and I'm looking forward to talking about it today. Thank you. Sean Mativea. I'm one of the heart officers at Vancouver Police Department.

4:53 Mr. Young asked, "What's one thing we like in our job?" For me, I make 50 to 100 contacts probably a day with our unsheltered folks, and I enjoy getting stories from each one of them and building rapport based on that. Sheriff Horch, do you want to go ahead? We can't hear you. There you go. Go ahead now. It's not working. It's working. We can hear you now. All right. Sheriff Johnson. Sorry, couldn't be there in person, I have a scheduling conflict. What I like about my job is all the regional partners. I know almost everybody there are online, that we work well together no matter what the problem is, so I appreciate everybody being there. Great. Thank you.

5:51 So we figure what we'll do is, well, ECHO has actually gone over this for quite some time, and there were so many questions that we wanted to ask, and there's just not enough time in this meeting. So what we plan to do is the first two questions, we feel they have enough important information and provide enough perspective that we would like each jurisdiction to answer that. After that, we will go further onto those questions, and we'll ask one to two jurisdictions if you have a strong feeling or anything that draws you towards you want to answer that question, and we'll take one or two jurisdictions on each question, and we'll move through that point. We have nine questions. We'll see how many of them we can get through in this time frame. So we'll go ahead and start out with question number one. Officers, when you respond to a routine call for service about someone camping on public property, what does your response look like?

6:49 What steps do you take to handle these types of calls? What does a routine response to a mental health crisis call involving someone who is unhoused look like? What steps do you take to resolve these types of calls? So for Chris Kidmore for the Clark County Sheriff's Office, we kind of have two kind of pronged here, and one of them is the downtown campus response, and the other is kind of the rest of the county because it looks a little bit different for how that is. So on our downtown campus, we've been really grateful. We've had a lot of help from VPD's heart team for the folks that are around here, but that kind of starts with every day in the morning our campus deputies are around checking on people and talking with them. So a lot of those contacts are pretty simple, talking about, hey, what you guys have, what you need, kind of different things like that. They've had good success working with Recovery Navigator for coming out to people when they've felt like they needed more resources or stuff there.

7:46 For as far as our response out in the county, we get a lot of requests from like Public Works is usually who, or Parks is who identifies if people are, you know, if there's homeless encampments or those kind of things in county parks or on county property, and then that response looks a little bit different because a lot of times we're sending officers or deputies out to those camps, and a lot of times they're checking on them. The vast majority of times those camps aren't occupied at the time when they're doing them, so there's a lot of kind of working with Parks to do postings for removal of stuff, especially if it's in the county parks or kind of on county property out in the county, but that's kind of, I guess, what that looks like as far as for the unhoused piece of it. With the mental health crisis, we're still trying to use resources that are available for us with the cares and some of the co-responder programs that are out there. Can we have you talk more into the microphone? Sorry. Thank you. Sorry, I wasn't sure the echo was pretty hard if it was bad, but yeah, so as far as for the mental health crisis, you know, really trying to use those other resources that are

8:44 available for us with cares and with the co-responder programs that we have out there. All right, from the Vancouver Police Department, I want to give you just an overview of our philosophy and how we approach these types of calls, and then I'm going to ask Corporal Metivia to give a more rubber meets the road answer so you can see practically what that looks like, but really our overriding principles are public safety, public health, and partnerships, which I'll also call outreach. So we want our touches on these types of calls, our initial touch to be engagement, and really an assessment of what do we have here. Do we have a public safety issue? Do we have a public health issue, or do we have an outreach issue, or a combination of any of those three? I think as we all know in this room, these are not easy situations.

9:43 They're very complex and multidimensional, so you may have a law enforcement issue. You may have a mental health issue. You may have a life circumstance issue. It can be a number of things that lead you to the place where you're meeting this person in their life. So our officers, when they're responding to these calls, they have to be aware of that, and they have to understand, and they do, that that initial contact is engagement, because ultimately what we want is for folks to get services so that we can be looking long-term. We always want to look with the end in mind, and what is the end of mind is getting them off the streets. So that's really the overriding philosophy, and I know Corporal Mativa can tell you what that looks like in a more day-to-day context.

10:38 Yeah, so Chief, I went over the overall philosophy. What that looks like from a patrol level ... Man, that is really loud. Try and get this at the right distance here. What that looks like on the patrol level is we want to be intentional. We don't want to just show up and say, "Hey, you need to move along," because that doesn't really solve anything. It may solve the issue for that particular moment and that particular timeframe, but the person is still going to be homeless 100 yards down the road. So we try to be a little bit more intentional around our response. Each situation is different and unique. Outreach could be what is needed in that particular scenario. It could be somebody in crisis. In that case, our officers have access to a patrol resource guide that we've created. What that looks like, it's 15 to 20 different organizations that operate within the city. Many do street outreach, and if somebody, let's say somebody's car is broken down, they

11:36 need a part for their car, then we can call a certain program. They'll come out and potentially engage with that individual, offer to pay for the part, get them going, and then on top of that, now they're engaged with that particular entity. Whether that be substance use treatment, detox treatment, whatever that looks like for that particular scenario. So that's kind of the outreach piece. As far as enforcement is concerned, we do have a daytime camping ban on public property between the hours of 6.30 in the morning, 9.30 at night. Enforcement is a tool that we use in order to solve certain situations. Let's say the health and sanitation have become far and beyond what we would like for the area. That usually results in a citation into community core, and I know that's a question further down, so I probably won't expand too much on that, but citation into community core,

12:34 booking into jail if the jail, based on the jail booking criteria. So those are all the tools that we have in our belt in City of Vancouver, but I want to point out that we try to make it very intentional rather than just, we respond to the call and then just leave it five minutes later, so. From Battleground Police Department, we have ordinances that we can take enforcement action on. I'm fairly certain in my tenure we've never done that. I think that I'd be shocked if my colleagues don't feel the same. Enforcement-wise is not going to be the way that we go about this. The challenge that you have is we are, first, we're very, very fortunate to have the, like

13:30 Sheriff Horch said, the Partnership with Fire, with CARES program. There are a tremendous amount of services, and we are unbelievably grateful. There has never been a time for Battleground that we've called that CARES has not made themselves available to us. So for those part, it's relatively easy. We're connecting people services. The challenge becomes in a phrase that I think accurately describes some of the people that we're talking about is when they're service resistant. When you pull up to them and they say, "That's great. I hear everything that you're offering. I don't want it. Leave me alone." That becomes the challenge. Everybody says they want to help, but everybody says, "Dossel, not in my backyard. Make the bad go away," and that's what we're calling law enforcement for.

14:25 So I think like when you have people like Corporal Mettev, am I right? You have to have the right people. One of the things that's missing is empathy. The beauty with empathy is you don't have to agree with someone. You don't even have to like them. You just have to be able to understand their position. The problem is when you put law enforcement in, we are problem solvers, and we will go in and look for a way to solve that problem. And when you have somebody who is facing all of these, like the Chief said, all of these life stressors, and we want to hurry up and solve this call so we can go on to the next one, but to that person, that's the biggest event that they're experiencing. And if we don't match the right people, and when you have experts like that, typically

15:21 in law enforcement, in my opinion, we don't have as many of those who are experts at doing this, and that's why we have such great relationships when we have the CARES team come out. So, I think that I know that for Battleground Police Department, the officers are very well versed in the services that we can connect them with. The bigger challenge becomes, like I said, when they don't want it, and how can we try to resolve the issue that typically somebody has called and complained about where we're not criminalizing it, because putting somebody into an overburdened jail system is just simply just making the problem that much worse. Thank you. I'm Sam Lewis, again, with our CARES program. Essentially, when people are kind of camping on public property, our team won't go out unless requested or unless there is a mental health issue on top of that.

16:19 If we do get called out for any one of those issues, we do take steps to try to navigate through a lot of different systems to get folks help or get them assistance, even if they are kind of resistant to that. Our team is pretty tenacious and able to help folks. They do show a lot of empathy. We're able to kind of stay on the scene a lot longer with folks and able to really engage with them. Our team typically engages a medical provider, a paramedic or a nurse, a mental health provider, and/or one of our social service coordinators that really have a plethora of different skill sets that they can offer to someone really in need. If that's a mental health crisis, it's really being able to, "How can we resolve this safely?" We can transport to Rainier Springs or Lifeline or one of those centers, and we don't need to involve law enforcement or other fire EMS crews. We can do that kind of independently without tying up additional resources when leaving the additional resources for those that need it. For our folks really that are going through a lot more and/or maybe a little resistant

17:16 or have really just had that system fatigue, they've already been through it. They could probably tell you exactly what they need to do, but they haven't been able to get through it. We'll try to walk with them through that as best we can. We use our community partners a lot, anywhere from law enforcement partners to the outreach teams that are out and about. We try to even be sometimes a little more creative in how we get approached in folks, especially if it's the first time we've met with them, the 10th time we've met with them, the 20th time we've met with them. We've got a couple battlegrounds that we've done that with. Sometimes it does take multiple attempts for someone really to be able to accept that help. A lot of people aren't trusting of the system in general, and so being able to really gain that trust, build that kind of relationship with them, and be able to have them get through the steps they need. Again, we couldn't do it without our community partners and all the help that they do. And then we've run into a lot of roadblocks just for getting folks' help sometimes.

18:14 Missing anything? I think the only thing that I would add about the program is we're a little bit resource-constrained right now. From a response standpoint, we have a single unit, and we're primarily funded from crisis response. So, it's limited, and we're available when we can, but when we do get on scene, then we'll spend whatever time we can to try to truly solve that problem. And if that means other calls are missed, we'll do that to address the issue at hand that we're focusing on. But, yeah, a close tie with our partnerships, and then trying to cover the entire county with the one resource leaves it to where there's a little bit of a wait at times for us to be able to get there, which can certainly extend the time that our partners have to remain on scene before we can jump in and help. So, like the other jurisdictions- Just real quickly, a good point. Thank you, Diana.

19:10 If you could make sure and introduce yourself and your jurisdiction each time when you speak. Thank you. Okay. Tina Jones, Camas Police Department. So, like other jurisdictions, we also have a camping ordinance. We rely on an education first strategy, and then there's steps for how we would enforce. Our team, I'm very proud of their outreach efforts. When they get calls, they treat individuals who they're encountering, whether it's a homeless issue or a crime in progress, but the goal is to treat people with compassion and care. They're part of our community, and we try and solve problems. I will share a story, because for me, it's important that we remember these are people in our community, and their stories matter.

20:09 So, we had one particular camp that was very entrenched, had a big structure built on public property. There were fires that were happening for cooking or warming in a very brushy area that was near residential housing and kind of in a gully. So, there's a lot of dangers, a lot of sewage issues, and some real significant public health issues. This was an individual who almost daily we would get calls, who had a shopping cart and was on a treacherous road that didn't even have a bike path, and would nearly get hit by traffic very frequently. And so, we were always concerned that something was going to happen to this individual. We made a number of outreach efforts trying to connect, share our resource guide, which we develop and share.

21:06 It's a waterproof one, so that it keeps up in the rain that we have. Anyhow, we went to check on the camp because it was to a point where it was so bad for health reasons. We needed to interdict it. Our code enforcement officer and a police officer went up and ended up finding another individual at the camp who we had not encountered before who was experiencing hypothermia, had a dog, was a veteran, was in medical distress and didn't even know it. And so, we were able to call medics and get him transported, and it saved his life. So, this outreach effort saved a life year before last. And that individual, we were able to get the dog to a place to care for it. He was able to get secured housing, which is rare, which is why I want to highlight this story, too.

22:06 Housing is so important. He was able to get housing and get reunited with his dog, and he had a gallon bag of medications that he needed. He had significant medical issues, and so he was able to get connected to that resource. So, that is one example of just one outreach effort. We ended up going back and interdicting the camp. The individual who had significant mental health issues was able to -- he had relationships in our community, and a lot of the homeless we encounter are people our team know by name. We encounter them, you know, repeatedly. He was able to stay on a property, private property, and help the individual who owned the property do odd jobs. When we interdicted that camp, there were buckets of raw sewage.

23:00 Underneath the floorboard where this individual was sleeping, there was a nest of baby opossums. And so, you know, as hard as it is sometimes when we have to force the enforcement piece and take action and clear these camps, it's our human duty to support our community members and get them to a place where it's sanitary and safe for them. The challenge is there's not always options that we can point people to. There's not always housing. There's not always mental health services. So, this is one story where we had, I think, two positive outcomes, and I was very, very proud of our team for how they worked with the individuals involved, and repeatedly, you know, went back, checked in with them, tried to get them connected to resources.

23:57 Hi, I'm Kathy Doriot with Richfield Police Department. I think people have covered a lot of the things that I would say. What I will do is speak from my perspective when I was on the road as an officer, and some of the challenges I still see our officers having is we obviously go out. We're called there for a reason, so we assess that reason, figure out if that's a public safety issue, if there's a crime that's been committed that's seriously and that is the overriding issue, or if maybe there's some under causes as to why we're there. And quite often, what we will find is that there are mental health issues involved in many cases, and they're needing resources, and the challenges that our officers find is where do we get those at two in the morning prior to CARES. Now, a lot of my conversation will be prior to CARES because CARES has been, in many ways, such an impactful tool that we now have that we didn't have even, what, five years ago,

24:57 and it has been life-changing for people, I think. It's safe to say that. And it has been, to some degree, life-changing for the officers because I can tell you there's nothing worse, and I bet this officer can speak to it. When you go out on a call and you're trying to assess, and you see a person who is clearly in need, and we have no resources for them. I know myself, I have bought groceries. I know my officers have mechanically done work on CARES for people, and that is not their role. That is not their function. You know, we have one officer that's a MacGyver, and that guy can fix almost anything, and I've seen him out there with a motor home trying to replace parts of that and paying for it out of his pocket because we don't have resources. But what our team is doing is they go out, they try to figure out is this really a significant police issue that we have to use our codes or is this something where this person just needs a hand, a hand up or a help. And our officers, I'm very proud to say, are really good about that. They care.

25:56 Three of our values are compassion, respect, and service, and they really do embrace those, and they try to come up with ways to help people. The frustrating part for us, and I'm worried about CARES capacity because the frustrating part is where do we find those resources. And we can get into that more in these questions that go down here, but what I will tell you is the officers have the heart of service, and they want to help individuals, but we have to give them more resources and access around the clock. Chair, Dave Shook, Jail Services. I wanted, of course, law enforcement to kind of go first because we're the end result oftentimes of that contact with the police. And so anyways, there's probably more officers and deputies on the road that probably pay for things out of their own pockets, clothing, umbrellas, different things. I definitely remember that when I was on the road as well.

26:53 So this is my 34th year in law enforcement in the last three years being in charge of the jail. I have a significant team who work on a lot of programs, and the main priority that we often deal with is homeless outreach services. And so just some of the listed things I wanted to share with this team. And so again, some of those informational passings of requests and things like that, there's no magic bucket for us and resources. We actually are using the same resources that you all use on the streets. And so it's just a matter of that coordination of trying to get folks into it. So if you're having a limited time, we're also having that limited time. So oftentimes we hear law enforcement is just get them to the jail. They have extra stuff, and we don't. There is no extra stuff generally. So just some things that I wanted to make sure. So we actually co-locate with the Council for the Homeless.

27:53 We have them there, and they're actually doing housing assessments for also the vulnerability housing as well as normal housing assessments. So we recognize a significant priority, and while we have folks there, to make sure that we are able to assess that as it's happening. We have about a 20 percent population who self-identify as homeless, but we know it's a little bit higher. Some folks don't want to recognize that, or they don't want to notate it because it may get back to other programs they may be involved in or probation services or other. And so again, we recognize it could be higher. But we also coordinate with CEMAR, with Peer 360. We have co-located with us who are providing peer services for some of the folks that are coming in and out. And then we of course are setting up other different resource and passing of information for either the COVE Collective, CEMAR Outreach Teams, the Streetlight Teams, Recover Cafe

28:49 Navigators, Columbia River Mental Health Response Teams, and Sharon Outreach. Quarterly we have these teams, and there's probably 100 to 125 different resources that show up, and we connect. We make those connections. We make relationships. We know because some groups come and go, some groups grow, and they have more resources, but we're connecting those groups together so that we know if you're full, you may have a partner or somebody else that you can push folks to and provide those resources. So again, we provide a lot of those resources, but our reentry team is limited with some of the staffing and some of the needs. Today we have 474 people in the jail. We focus on those that are likely to release local. And so again, it's a voluntary program. We don't force anybody to come talk to us, but we also have other priorities, which is MOUD services and other things that take up a lot of time and space.

29:47 This is 1984 jail, it doesn't have a lot of room for that, and so we spend most every day, Monday through Friday, providing services, and you would just be amazed on the amount of folks that filter through there talking to folks in different groups. And we're also limited because we have a lot of professional visitors coming in to do assessments for either drugs or mental health or other things, and we don't have those. So again, it's quite the amazing thing. So as we continue to talk about some of the different resources available and the methods and processes, everybody likes to come in person and do that. And so technology is available. We're looking at alternatives to do some of that as well, but somewhere in there, resources are limited for all of us. And so again, as we continue to point people in the right direction, my program manager, Anna Looking Bill Shofton, tells me if we let all the folks out of the jail, we would

30:44 overwhelm the county, and again, all the resources available. So again, we're trying to work within the parameters and make sure that what we have is also being used and effectively used. So I think for this question, that kind of fits some of the questions of what we constantly are working on, so ... Great, thank you for those answers. It was a long question, and we promise it is the longest one. Thanks officers again, and thanks jail service director Shook. So the next question for you all, you're on the ground. You see everything every single day, but there are misconceptions from residents. So what we'd like to know is how does law enforcement, what can law enforcement do or should be doing about homelessness in our communities? And why don't we start off with the gentleman over there. Mativea.

31:40 Thank you, Mativea, Officer Mativea. The first part of the question is fairly simple, and sorry, Sean Mativea, Vancouver Police Department. So the first part of the question is pretty self-explanatory, pretty easy to answer. I think most of our residents expect that if they call the police, that an hour later the problem will go away. Obviously, homelessness, unsheltered homelessness is much bigger than that. The person that's occupying the camp also has rights. The police do not have the right to just come up and scoop the tent up and the person away and make the problem go away. So that's why we have the intentional process that we have in order to respond to these types of calls, up to and including outreach engagement, posting the encampment for removal

32:35 depending on the circumstances, in general we give, depending on the location, the size of the encampment, we give about 24 to 72 hours depending on the situation. So that's the common misconception that I can see some of our residents, what law enforcement can do or should be doing, man, that's a huge one because it's multi-level, each situation is unique and different. The person in that encampment could be there because they have severe high mental health or they could be there because their substance use problem is beyond what they can control. I personally don't have an answer to that, I'm sorry. That's like a three-day conversation that we're not going to be able to solve with this panel.

33:30 But yeah, I mean that City of Vancouver just has that process, the initial outreach engagement, assessing the situation and then just kind of going from there. Once again, Kathy with Ridgefield PD. I think the misconception I agree is that you're going to call the police, we're going to show up and we're going to make the problem go away. But I will tell you there's a couple different perspectives because not every community member has the same perspective. There are those that want us to give them bags of groceries and help them, they'll be on a sidewalk and they'll want us to help support them and they believe they are helping to support by bringing food and things and making their little encampment even bigger on the sidewalk. And while that may feel compassionate and like it is helping, in the long run what would really help is the ability to give them services and tools to get them off that sidewalk, right?

34:24 Because that is a public sidewalk, we want everybody to be able to enjoy that. So I think the misconceptions kind of go both ways. They want us to remove it so they don't have to deal with it or look at it or they want us to come up with solutions that we don't have. I can tell you what the first step is, we're doing it here today. And I don't think we do this often enough and I know in the law enforcement community we all talk kind of on the side about oh wow, what are you guys doing, what are you doing? But we never have really intentionally got together as a team with all the agencies to share our challenges, to share our solutions that maybe have worked in the respective agencies to really work as a team. I think some of that is evolving now with the introduction of CARES and I keep bringing up that, I keep bringing up that name CARES because I have a lot of expectation myself as a police officer for CARES.

35:20 So I just think this is a great step, I hope it's not the last step because I think there has to be more of this and what I would think would even be more valuable is instead of Q&A like this, but just really a conversation with maybe a moderator where we are all just brainstorming okay, what do we do and let's have a really live back and forth conversation about challenges and maybe solutions and what that looks like and I think that would be productive. Tina Jones, Camas PD. It just made me think when Kathy was talking about a conversation years ago when I was a supervisor in our domestic violence unit, we got together for a forum and I want to say it was at least a day with prosecutors, community advocates, people in a variety of different people with lived experience, people who were helping in support roles and in law

36:15 enforcement and we identified, we kind of mapped our system and identified gaps and a lot of it we identified came down to communication that we were able to fix pretty quickly. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit, sometimes hearing about, you know, sometimes we just need a partner who maybe a church or somebody who's willing to step up and donate a car part, a battery so that we can help this person to get to work so I fully support that and I've seen it work in other forums and I hope that we can maybe look at that. Related to the question, I've seen both in a large jurisdiction and now in Camas different perspectives and Camas I hear a lot, we'll get calls frequently, you know, because maybe someone's just yelling.

37:10 They're on the sidewalk and they're just yelling and we do a welfare check and, you know, being homeless is not criminal. Having mental health issues, it's not criminal but we're the ones that respond and, again, most of the time we know the individuals and we check on them and often it doesn't meet a threshold where we can, you know, put a mental health hold on them. We don't need them taking up space in an emergency room where people need that service and so we do have huge gaps, though, in our mental health care, addiction services, and housing. Sometimes it can be challenging when people don't want to see, they don't want this visible stain, I guess, is the best way and I'm not saying this from my perspective, this is what

38:04 I hear sometimes, to be clear, and that can be hard because, again, these are people in our community and I think sometimes I hear people coming from a place of fear and rather than kind of knowing the situation. And sometimes we do have situations that are unsafe and we need to intervene but it can be challenging trying to navigate that and then navigate expectations people have of we just don't want them to be here, can't you just make them leave, and things like that and more like, you know, it's a nuisance and so those are sometimes difficult situations to navigate but education helps and our officers are very patient in their responses. Mike Jackson, Clark Regional Fire Cares.

39:02 I think the only thing I would add to the comments about the expectation that law enforcement or whoever the responder is will show up and the problem will go away is that it's compounded with some of the nuanced stuff with behavioral health and even some of the misunderstandings between a law enforcement hold and a true involuntary treatment act and what those different actions take and what that involves because oftentimes even if it's a transport to the hospital, either for a medical reason or for a behavioral health reason, they can usually self-discharge even if they get there on a law enforcement hold. That doesn't do anything other than get them to the ER and then it again just shifts the problem and for true involuntary treatment act where they're held is a much more complicated process that isn't solved quickly or easily with the same process as a law enforcement

39:57 hold and even if our folks, even from the EMS side, it's kind of a shift because all of our first responders, law enforcement, fire EMS, the goal is to quickly solve the problem and then be available for the next one because the next one might be a bigger problem. So there's even a push to, even if you have to chemically sedate someone, to try to do that because it is a quick solution and it moves them in a different direction but doesn't necessarily solve that long-term fix so that's all I'd add from our perspective. Sam Lewis with Clark College Fire Rescue. Again, just to add to that, again, regarding the ITA process and having a designated crisis responder come out and review with someone, it is a lengthy process. It is an intricate process and we don't take taking people's rights away lightly and so when that does happen, they have to meet full criteria and I think a lot of expectations, especially when someone is experiencing mental health crisis, is people just want it solved

40:55 or out of there right away and unfortunately people are allowed to have and experience those issues and have those so again, sometimes you might see the same person over and over again and it feels like nothing's working but as I said before, we continually try to go out there and respond and build that relationship until something does finally work but it's not always timely, especially in the law enforcement and EMS fire world where things are usually solved kind of very quickly so that's just one of those, I know, expectations we come across a lot. Dennis Flynn from Battleground. I think it's probably been asked and answered but, you know, as the corporal said, we could spend all day here talking about what it could have showed us, you know, the public's misconception of I call the police, I want that solved. We can't just go in and lock somebody up and bring them to jail.

41:48 Yeah, we can get creative but like Cheek Jackson said, these things, we've tried, we've unfortunately exasperated the problem. We've overflowed jails so that didn't work. We've tried taking them to the ERs. That compounded the problem drastically so are they committing a crime? So if we go out there and there's nothing that we can do enforcement wise, it upsets that person that called because, hey, I called you, I paid my taxes, I want this solved. Then they see other program, they see other jurisdictions where community group will go out and bring food and that feels good to them but it causes other problems because now you have this group because they got their feel good that they went out and felt like they helped.

42:44 They're bringing people into areas and you're disrupting what, you have experts that do this 50 to 100 contacts a day are trying to establish programs. And then the other problem that we have is police are in a horrible position or threatening. We're often looked upon as they're the person that's going to take somebody's liberties from them, take them to jail. We are not in the best position to do that. We are in good position for support but we have people that have already demonstrated so their worth in making progress towards this rather than just shifting problems.

43:38 And so, as Kathy had mentioned, the communication but getting the right people at the table to say what does good truly look like and what should our role be, we'll get into that but the community court because you do have to have some type of mechanism that we're going to -- you've committed an infraction rather than lock you up, we're going to hold this in abeyance as long as you complete these programs. That's where we're seeing differences but it's such a much bigger issue and those wraparound services that everybody talks about but what do they truly bring to the table and then more importantly, what should law enforcement's role be? And I would argue that it should be very, very minimal.

44:37 >> Darren McShea, Vancouver Police. And regarding misconceptions, I just want to start with, you know, sometimes the easy thing when it's not the right thing becomes the hard thing. And that approach, I think we see it a lot in this circumstance that when you're looking at misconceptions and I think a lot of people have touched on it is that the police are going to come in and the problem will be gone. Trying to solve a problem like that when people are in homelessness is unrealistic. It doesn't -- you can -- there's no immediate fix to this problem and I've talked about this a little bit before is these are complex situations and so I guess in some sense we have to manage expectations with the community and help people understand is what is an effective approach here? What is an effective approach for law enforcement and what does it realistically look like for

45:33 someone who is going through a process of that initial contact to receiving services who want services to getting off the streets or getting out of their circumstance or whatever that is. These are all long-term solutions and so when someone calls the police and they're expecting us to come in and deal with the problem at its root when we may be just mowing the grass then and there's all this problem under there, that's difficult. That can be frustrating for people in the community who call 911 expecting that solution. So I think it's important -- there's an education piece to this as well. Not only educating the community, educating our officers because they also have to understand is I may not be able to fix this problem but I know someone who can at least help this person down the road or get down the road.

46:30 So I would say that's one of the biggest misconceptions and everybody's hit on it is that when you call 911 you're going to expect us in this situation to fix that and we have to learn how to manage that better. Chris Skidmore with the Clark County Sheriff's Office. I think just to echo what Corporal Metevia said exactly and the other chiefs have said about the response and the expectations, Chief Flynn touched on it I think a long time. We've pushed people either down to the jail or into the ERs and we've seen that actually overloading those systems doesn't help us solve any of those problems. So it may fix the problem for the person that called who didn't want that encampment or that person in their neighborhood but it actually doesn't help the system. We think about the taxing on that system of overloading an ER or taking up an ambulance so now if there's a true emergency it's not available or pulling the CARES team and doing that just I think the misconception is how resource intensive it is to truly make a difference

47:29 in this aspect. It does take a law enforcement response a lot of times to get that ball rolling and then using an outreach organization or CARES or somebody like that to then help to be able to provide those services. Answer the jail to be able to do that and I think that's probably the biggest thing I see is just not realizing it's not as simple as you call and the problem is solved. Just in the layers of resources that it takes to do that is probably the biggest thing but just to echo I think that's already been well answered and I think that's the role that the law enforcement should have. Should we be doing kind of like Chief Flynn said is you know maybe it's a less of a role than people envision. It's maybe that initial contact doing the stuff that like the HART team and Corporal Metevia are doing where they're you know kind of making that initial contact building that relationship and then hopefully providing them with just as a bridge to the services that are going to actually solve the problems for them. >> Dave Shope, Jail Services. I think a misperception oftentimes can be and I remember this when I was working on

48:29 the road is that the folks we encounter that are homeless or in camps are unlike anybody in this room potentially. You know I remember speaking to trauma nurses and professors at colleges and other folks who had an event in their life and it had turned negative and they found themselves in these places so this isn't somebody who's not maybe a neighbor. It's somebody who's had something happen in their life that has ended them up there. The jail is not the answer for homeless arrests and placements. Added burdens of the criminal justice system which is slow, arduous, it's not helpful right. Now I remember talking to Officer Chambers a few years ago about having a stick, needing a stick and that is absolutely correct sometimes but the first response sometimes is maybe

49:26 easy for first responders sometimes to say we'll just take them to the jail and the jail will get them into the right resources. But I remember when I first started this position I asked our law enforcement partners like what's the diversion efforts that we do here in Clark County and in fact in 2021 we had a group come in and do an effort from SAMHSA and the response was not anybody really knew and I've as down this panel here chief three years, chief three years and I know Kathy three years or whatever it is and chief and new to this leadership but through those relationships it just felt like here was a process we checked the box but what happened to that process and so some of those efforts this county and this community and all the cities involved have done it just feels like we could circle back and look at some of those conversations to say what happened to this and where we at and so that misperception is this county

50:26 has put lots of resources and people and places and programs into this effort and I think everybody's doing amazing that way but sometimes we don't talk together effectively and so working on that so misperceptions is we're not doing something or maybe we're doing too much but sometimes there's lines that are not straight or they're not effective in nature and so again knowing who that population is understanding that the justice system isn't always the best place to have resolution. Thank you for those answers and I appreciate how this discussion is kind of evolving as we go and this is really question number three really has been touched on by many of you already but I wanted to give anybody an opportunity if they had further comments on this and how

51:19 law enforcement essentially is being placed into a role that likely could be better served by other services you know health housing and service providers if anybody wanted to add to that. I'll take a stab at it Dennis Flynn from battleground in Las Vegas I was part of our hostage negotiation team for twenty years I was the team leader and we went out and so we dealt with many people that were homeless that had substance abuse problems that had a litany of issues and I can unfortunately tell you about chapter and verse of things that turned negative very very quickly because we relied on our positions of authority and it typically ended it started I can tell you of certain of several that started dealing with a encounter with somebody

52:19 who was homeless and just a single or two officer response that turned into what we would call a contempt of cop because they pissed off the police and I'll be damned if you're going to do that to me don't you know who I am I got this badge and it turned violent very very quickly and then other resources will come in and these have such negative consequences. It's not just for Las Vegas not just for Washington it's nationwide that we have a tremendous amount of the people that we've been involved in shootings with that have mental health issues and of course we certainly see that in homeless issues. I'm in a little bit different position I'm the oldest of four boys. Oldest and the youngest both cops in Vegas I have a younger brother that has experienced

53:18 homelessness for about 18 years and I can tell you not proudly but I can tell you that I used my position of authority in Las Vegas as part of the management of in the police department that I could direct somebody to go solve that problem and I would since firsthand what I thought was I was doing the right thing and how it had such negative consequences on him in so many different areas certainly trust but we are just further breaking people down and so when you try to use you know the hammer for every situation and you keep pounding that round peg into that square hole and you think it's going to work it doesn't and so

54:16 by continuing to force police to deal with these issues and not using the other resources that are available out there it drives a further wedge which makes it even harder for the experts who are out there dealing with it and trying to connect services it destroys the trust and the rapport that they're trying to build so it's very very dangerous to continue to rely on policing because we have witnessed all over that it does not work so we need to acknowledge that part and then as my colleague said get the decision makers together and say okay what does good look like and how do we get there and then start working on that nobody wants to spend the money because it is very very expensive but if we do not fund the right resources the people who have proven to be more effective than what we have

55:13 we're going to just keep chasing our tail because if we had a answer for this for homelessness we'd all be the most wealthy people in the world because this is an issue that affects everybody worldwide but I think it's in time that we have to continue to make those investments. Kathy with Ridgefield PD I think realistically just think back a few years I think our state legislators said hey we don't want police to be the first ones coming to those types of calls where it's mental health issues or other challenges that are not necessarily public safety and the pendulum kind of swung and then we had a lot of conversations with the fire department and the paramedics and embedding people for cares and having different we want the people with the best skill sets to be the ones helping these people navigate their their difficulties and I can tell you historically in a small agency police officers have been expected to be the solution for everything you know we're wizards apparently

56:08 and we're not so I think we recognized as a society and a community that we're not necessarily the best suited to solve these issues we can be a part of it and we certainly can be there for the safety aspects but let's get the people with the right skill sets in place let's make sure they're supported in ways that we can work collaboratively to solve this problem because I can tell you I'm not a professionally mental health trained person I get two hours here I get two hours there but I would rather call Chief Jackson's team in who I know have the skills who are gonna be able to make significant impact not only that there's the whole perception of when an officer shows up and they have a gun on their hip right is that a calming necessarily well if there's a home invasion in your house that's probably pretty calming but when it's somebody experiencing a mental health crisis they're not exactly exactly soothed when they see an officer show up in uniform so I think it's critical that we get

57:02 the right people in the room to help the people Tina Jones camera speedy I agree with all that I just say we need to be smart and look at what options are out there there's a lot of research police executive research forum has done various studies on homelessness and co-response models I know from my experience Portland had analysis of their co-responder model for behavioral health and when you get people connected to the right resources with the right people it actually helps them to get to a better place and reduces overall system strain and cost so you know if we keep just doing the same thing all the time without being smart about what resources are available or how we're communicating that we're going

57:58 to keep you know perpetuating a situation especially with the way the economy is going we could be facing you know an influx of homelessness if people aren't able to stay housed and if we're not solving the underlying issues with addiction treatment and like Kathy said we're not mental health professionals we get 40 hours of training which is a big step from where we were 25 years ago I will say law enforcement has stepped up sometimes we've been forced to and that's okay it's good for us to learn and grow but we're not the experts we need the clinicians and we need the domestic violence advocates and people that we can partner with and have trusting relationships who are really good at what they do and so that it helps also free up our time to focus on some other things. Thank you.

58:56 Chris Gilmore from the Clark County Sheriff's Office I think just one thing to add to like to the question says how does it push law enforcement into these roles I think a lot of it has to do with you know how these programs are available and funded you know you look at it and it's like Cares talks about they've got one team that can respond currently and be able to do that when we have deputies that go out and try to look at this they're trying to figure out which resource is the best because you know adult mobile crisis is funded and programmed separately from the youth mobile crisis which is separate from the co-responder program which is separate from Cares which is separate from the recovery navigator program which is separate from the VA which is and so I think that's a challenge too just in itself where we end up getting pushed into these situations because you know maybe Cares can't come out because of their restrictions of what they've got or same thing with our adult mobile crisis where they'll get turnover based on their program and then they may not be able to come out so then it's left with in the like the chief said you know we end up having to solve it and we're not the best people to solve that but I think that's part of the challenge and what pushes it is kind of how everything is patched together to figure

59:54 out which the best services are out there. Anyone else want to answer that question before we move on? Thank you. Some of you did mention what some of the challenges are in addressing unhoused individuals. You mentioned lack of funding or only minimal training to be able to deal with mental health crisis. That's not your job. It's very understandable. So just to add a little more, what are other challenges in connecting folks to resources like mental health, outreach, minor medical emergencies or transportations do you encounter on a regular basis? And anybody could take that on. I can speak a little bit. Mike Jackson again with Clark Regional Fire Cares.

1:00:50 We try to fill this space with the connection to resources and fill the gap where we can and really try to operate between the silos which is the challenge. I think transportation for folks is a big issue. We're working to try to fix that. There's a lot of constraints but in some circumstances we have the ability to directly transport folks or occasionally arrange ride share, things like that. But with the current funding streams there's usually a lot of restrictions that don't directly allow funding for transportation even though it's one of the larger needs. And I think the other thing, our folks are usually pretty well aware of the resources but again it's just what resources are available and when we look at bed space and things like that there's often constraints there. I'm confident our team is as aware of all of the available resources as anyone out there

1:01:46 which is the big piece of what makes it functional. And we've worked well with braided funding but some of that becomes a challenge because each little piece of funding has different constraints on it. But we've had pretty good success taking a regional and collaborative approach on it. I guess that's all I've got to add to that. Thank you. Anyone else want to share their perspective on the challenges? Yeah, Chris Kidmore from Clark County Sheriff's Office. I think one of the things I've seen where it's been successful when you talk about what resources are there are the resources that can come out to people. I feel like those are a lot more successful when we get the CARES and Recovery Navigator that will come out and actually work with them or the crisis will come out and actually work with them and take that time to make that connection. Because I could give them a 150 piece resource sheet and the odds of them being able to take

1:02:44 advantage of what those resources are seem to be way less than if we can get people out. So I've definitely seen a better response with the organizations and the programs that come out to people. Dave Shook, Jail Services. The release times of most people who leave the jail are not controlled by the jail. It's the courts and when they're released from the courts. And so our current court processes have everything happening in the afternoon. So after five hours, documents come into the jail to release times or to get people out. Most of these resources are eight to five folks, Monday through Friday. So we have a very short window. And so those two things compete, right? How do you get people to the right resources when things are closed for the day? So that 24 hour resource is definitely a deficit for this community.

1:03:41 Resources sometimes require lengthy applications and have wait lists because everything's full, right? So getting folks in and a quick resource and how does one person prioritize over somebody else? Again, it's a lack of resources there. More than 90 days in jail can equal housed. And so some of your steps that people have made towards resources can be eliminated because somebody may be in jail at that 90 days or plus for whatever charges just to be released. And so sometimes some of those federal rules, local rules, state rules can conflict with the kind of population and the efforts that this county and really everybody is trying to resources. And then of course, just lack of time, space and resources in the jail to serve every incarcerated person. Again, as we continue to work on those efforts, we add some different staffing and programs.

1:04:38 A quick response team is somewhere in our future, but it's not today because we just don't have enough room or space or the people to do that. It's how do we get somebody who's brought in on maybe a homeless cluster of charges? So trespassing, unlawful camping, those kinds of things, my staffs, criminal mischiefs who are going to be in within 24 to 72 hours to get, again, 474 inmates and trying to focus. Some are more acute, some less. And so do you take care of the seven-year-old in a wheelchair versus the 20-something-year-old who could have opportunities out there? And so that's really a lot of the day-to-day decisions and efforts that we work on and my team works on in the jail to provide these resources. And then sometimes navigating those local resources. I remember some of my last experiences on the road here in this county is trespassing

1:05:35 somebody from a hotel that had just enough money for an overnight stay to clean up and do different things. And when I'm walking them out to the parking lot saying, "Here's a phone number. This is the resources, Council for the Homeless, and six or eight people in cars in the same parking lot," we've been calling for hours. Nobody's answering the call. And again, this is a few years ago, so maybe those processes are different. But it was everybody's trying to funnel into the same site at the same time looking for very limited resources. So again, just some personal experience and then, of course, my team, so. I can go. I'm Louis Silver with Clark Health Fire Rescue. I think in addition to kind of what I'm hearing also, we've kind of had that experience. We went 24/7 with our crisis team several months ago, but before that, again, there were limited times where things were open and things were reachable. Our crews go out with a paramedic that can do within their scope medical stuff, but even

1:06:33 space to extend kind of that street medicine and be able to do more for folks that are unhoused at the moment, especially medically, because a lot of the facilities won't take folks unless they're medically clear. Even then, if they have some of their ADLs or their daily living skills that they're unable to do, folks won't take them, including detox centers, mental health centers. And so sometimes it's hard to get them into different things because of their medical clearance or because one of their specific disabilities that they have that could be cause of their unhoused and homelessness also. I think a lot of that we are coming up to in fighting with some of the bigger systems, even with VA systems, Medicare, Medicaid, and getting folks onto all those tends to be very difficult even for our skilled clinicians to navigate through. It's still a process that takes quite a bit of time. Tina Jones, Camas PD.

1:07:28 So on the wish list, drop in sobriety center that's connected to addiction services, drop in mental health center for folks so that they can also get connected with appropriate social and medical services. I'd love to see some more investment in some of the well-managed tiny house villages so that people can have a place to start and get out of some of these camp situations that are not sanitary or helpful or that also have connections to services. So that's a few things in addition to the services we need that can come out in the moment. But again, housing, mental health, and addiction, and then domestic violence, I will always advocate for us to support people who are trying to leave violent situations often with children and pets.

1:08:28 And that goes with our homeless community too. We're big dog lovers here. But that can be a big barrier and so we need options for people that can support them to have their, for family members, supported too. Kathy with Richfield PD. I loved what Commander Skidmore said which is getting those services out at the time because not only that's probably when they're going to be most receptive or maybe encouraged to accept some help in services is in that crisis moment maybe, but also in my experience when I was on the road, a lot of times the information I had was stagnant. It wasn't good information anymore. So here I am as an officer trying to figure out where can I find these resources and I would call numbers and they're not even good numbers anymore. So I love the fact that CARES can be kind of almost a holding house of all that information that is most current and contemporary because when you're looking for help, there's nothing more frustrating than having to call a phone tree or another phone to only be told that's

1:09:26 not the right phone. So really I think it would be helpful for us to have a central place where when you need resources, you know that's going to be current, contemporary information that's going to provide some impact now. I'll be real quick because I want to touch on it. Sean Matimita, Vancouver Police Department. One of the biggest challenges we see in the conversations that I have with people, they're ready for detox and treatment right this second. They have a dog and none of these places allow for animals. Most don't. I've heard there are some but very far between. So the biggest barrier is the animal. So that's the biggest challenge I can see going forward. You guys did a great job of answering the next question. The next question and I'll give you an opportunity to chime in on anything else but we can have a panel we were having with law enforcement. We can have a panel with caseworkers.

1:10:25 We can have a panel with mental health services. We can have, there's so many components of this system and there are gaps in everyone. You as law enforcement have a very specific viewpoint and on the ground experience with this. So from your perspective, what do you think the most needed changes or additional resources, changes in policy or coordination would make the largest difference in both reducing the need for emergency services, so repeat calls, as well as more importantly that would lead to people's ability to exit homelessness? I hope there is going to be, Dennis Flynn from Battleground, I hope that there's going

1:11:19 to be some real witnessed promise and results that we're going to see from our community court. Again, you have to have something in place for people who have violations to hold them accountable and then be able to offer those but there is a tool and mechanism in place that should they choose not to, then we have to go this other route. So I'm hopeful that the progress that we've seen in Battleground's community court will continue to bear fruit. But I think that to answer the second piece, an idea, just simply an idea, is things that I think all of us have had experiences with, I'll give you an example. We had a sexual assault task force and so once a month that task force would meet.

1:12:18 It was always on the same date, same time, same location. So when you had issues, you had this multidisciplinary group that was already together that we could bring in ideas and say I'm struggling with this, I'm looking for some help. I think the problems when you're dealing with homelessness and I'm going to speculate that Chief Doriot and Chief Jones that we don't have the same volume certainly that Vancouver does, so ours almost becomes somewhat, I don't want to say one-offs, but certainly not to that same volume. So when we involve CARES and they come out and we've taken a stab at it but we're just not making the progress. If we had, as an example, someone like a group together and you have Corporal Mativia, did I get it right finally? Thank you.

1:13:17 You have him, but then you have all these other groups that you had talked about, representatives. And so I can send one of our officers to this panel and say here's the issue I have, what can we do? And I think it's great that you have all these chiefs and directors here. We're missing the boat. We set vision. The officers set the sails. That's where you have to get, it's wonderful what we think, but almost all of us here, we're so far removed from this. We haven't been out on the streets. We don't know what it really, it sounds great from us, but what really works? And then having those people that we can go, I've tried this. It's not working. Do you have some suggestions? I think if we look towards moving in that type of direction, that maybe that would bear

1:14:12 some additional successes. Darren McShea, Vancouver. I think one thing that we've seen work really well in Vancouver is our HEART team. And one of the reasons that I've seen why it works well, well there's several I want to talk about. The first of which is it's multidisciplinary, is there's a lot of different services that can be poured into people. The other part of that is they have time to build that relationship. And Corporal Mativia hit on it, and I think in a pretty strong way, when he said that when someone needs that service, they need it now. And they need to be able to take a pet. But the thing that really resonated well, I think with what he said, is they need it now. And do we have the services that are available now that can meet that person where they are

1:15:10 and help them along the way? Sometimes that's all it takes is someone to care a little bit more about them than they may be caring about themselves at that time. So do we have that key to unlock that person? So if I were to say where can we direct our efforts? What can we enrich? What can we increase? What could policymakers support more is that teamwork approach. And I would say not be heavy on the law enforcement side. I think we've said that across the board, is this problem is not best solved through law enforcement. So really, when you're looking at the people to invest, it's really those root cause services. Those are where we need to increase our efforts. Tina Jones, Camas PD. Another story.

1:16:08 We haven't touched a lot on the courts today, and I think that's a little bit what's missing here. There are times when we do have crimes that are committed and we have to engage and do something. So one of our probably most prolific call generators who experiences homelessness and mental health issues recently was engaged in screaming at a small child, I think around four years old, was coming towards the child. A business owner stepped in between to protect the child, and the business owner was assaulted by this individual. And so we ended up making an arrest. The subject ended up spitting in the face of one of our officers. So there were a couple different crimes. They went to jail. This individual's been to jail before for various trespass issues. And I will say the vast majority of the contacts we've had have not resulted in arrests. So this is more of a rarity.

1:17:06 This individual ends up getting referred for mental health for state evaluation, does not meet the threshold to go to the state and get treatment, ends up having an assessment and is determined to not have the mental capacity to fit for the crimes. And so they get released again. And so we end up in this cycle where our community members are often fearful because of what has happened, and they worry that this is going to happen or escalate. And then the person isn't obviously getting the treatment that they need. They're back out on the street and maybe have some more restrictions about where they can or can't be due to protection orders, which are mandatory arrests for our folks. So we end up in this cycle where we end up continuing to take people to jail, and we're not solving the problem.

1:18:03 And so when we look at challenges and the repeat calls, unless we can find ways to get people adequate mental health treatment, and sometimes that means compelled treatment, for their protection and the protection of the community, that's a big gap right now that we're seeing. And so I think if we're able to problem solve in some sort of forum some of the chronic people that we engage, and also include the court side, parole and probation, I mean there's a lot of different pieces to this, but we're very siloed here, and I'd love to see that get broken down and have those relationships get improved. And part of that is to have multidisciplinary opportunities to connect and solve problems. Kathy Doria with Richfield PD.

1:19:01 I think, not to make this even a bigger discussion, but I do think that I love the concept of the HEART team. I don't know a lot about it, but just even what I'm hearing today sounds amazing. Unfortunately, as we all know, Washington is one of the lowest funded law enforcement communities in the country. And so while I would love to be able to have one of my team members embedded with CARES so that we have an officer there, that's time, right? And I don't have a very big staff, and so for me to commit a lot of law enforcement, even to just help CARES do what they need to do, is a heavy lift for an agency my size. I would love to have a HEART team, because I believe that the need is there. We don't have the call volume, but even one person, the need is there, right? But we as a state need to think about putting more law enforcement on the street in addition to more CARES. Mike Jackson with the Fire CARES program.

1:19:59 We've spent a lot of time trying to navigate policy and resourcing. I think we've been looking around the state more successful than most at trying to braid that, but even from the policy and funding standpoint, things are very siloed. We've worked to take a regional approach to try to make it more efficient, and we run into constant barriers there, whether that's ... We've found a number of partners with aligned interests, although the interests are aligned, they're still somewhat unique and siloed and have a hard time getting there. So I think policy to break down some of those barriers to better facilitate braided funding. We work with the Area Agency on Aging. They have restrictions with their funding specifically for older adults and folks with disabilities. That fits a piece of our population. They have money specific for medication reconciliation. That's a little piece of the funding. The hospitals have a vested interest. They give us a little bit of money.

1:20:56 We've worked ... There's been a lot of grants and a lot of opportunities for startup programs with doesn't seem to be a lot of thought from the state level on how to sustain those. There's lots of grants that have been available for startup and initial positions. We've certainly taken advantage of those to the best we can, but now we're running into what sustainability looks like. We're trying to be as resourceful as we can, but even the separation between 911 and 988, it's the same population of folks that are in a mental health crisis. It just depends on which door they enter through. But funding for 988 crisis response really isn't designed or functioned to share for people that need those same services on the 911 side. We spent a lot of time trying to navigate that, communicate that, and we've had a lot of partners that work with us and understand what we're trying to do and try to navigate the constraints they have as best as possible to help us get there, but there certainly

1:21:56 could be some policy work to break down those barriers and better facilitate streamlined, braided funding so we don't build more siloed programs and we can kind of work together for common interests. With us, we're working across multiple fire agencies, multiple police agencies. We happen to kind of fall into the space first, but our hope is to not have duplicate programs to where we're all competing for the same limited funding, but where we can better spread that across the need across the county. Great. Thank you. We have exhausted our time that we had set aside for these questions, and ECCO primarily membership is elected officials, policymakers in our community, and the value of this meeting is incredible for us to be able to hear your voice and help deliver ideas for how we can improve things.

1:22:51 What I would like to do now is we have about 25 minutes that I would like to invite first individuals that serve on ECCO, and then following that, other elected officials, and then following that, hopefully if we have some time, then we would allow the public to come up, get in line, and ask questions of the panel and just some quick, quick answers so we can try to answer as many as we possibly can. This is always so difficult because everything that you have to say is so important, but we do want to give as much opportunity as we can. So with that being said, ECCO members, come on up if you have questions, and then elected officials following that, and then the general public. Go ahead. So I've been making ... Is it working? Okay. So I've been making a lot of notes, so forgive me if it's all scatterbrained. What I'm hearing today ... Introduce yourself. What?

1:23:51 Oh, sorry. Thank you. I'm used to being nobody. Okay. I don't feel like it. No way. Victoria Ferrer, city council member of Battleground. So what I hear is every one of you have a heart for service. That's why you came today. That's why you do what you do. I would like to speak on behalf of my city, and I'm sure any citizen who would be watching this, thank you for everything that you do. But what I also hear is we definitely need more services, right? That's why I think ECHO, we're coming together today to try to figure out how we can better serve our communities by supporting you and hearing what your concerns are, because we're not out there on the streets like you guys are. So yeah, but I don't think that's anything new, right? We already know that there's huge gaps in services. There's not enough funding. There's not enough resources. We're overloading the system. Thank you for saying that.

1:24:49 I've been seeing that, and that's been my biggest thing, is we're overloading our ERs. We're overloading our jails. I appreciate, again, what I've heard today by saying that the justice system is not the solution, but placing a team such as CARES, HEART, I don't know much of it, but I'm looking forward to looking more into it. It sounds great, but yeah, putting in the solution, it sounds like everybody might be on the same page as to looking at more of CARES teams, taking the burden off of our police who are not the best solution to the issue that we're faced with in regards to handling homelessness, mental health, and addiction crisis. Thank you for bringing up the cycles. I've been telling everybody and their mother who will listen that this cycle, ER, the cycle

1:25:43 of ER, and the cycle of the jail is not the solution, and it's overburdening the resources that we are already limited on. So then, what I was thankful for today as a policymaker is how can we better support you through our policies, and it sounds like maybe funding is a big one too. One unit, are you serious? One unit for the whole county? It's crazy. So as also I will be speaking, I liked hearing about the animals, that we have people that are willing to jump on board that want to get the help, but they're not willing to leave their loved one, which is their animal. And then I also hear as a citizen also, right, is what I'm seeing on my thoughts that I'm

1:26:39 going to leave with today is this needs to be a community effort. Not just you guys, not just us lawmakers, but citizens as well. I'm hearing how can I help as a policymaker, but also as a citizen, getting out there, helping with fundraisers, ways to create, to help, those fundraisers will help create more resources, and it also will help educate people who are scared. I've seen homeless out there. I used to be one of those people that were scared until I had a child who had to go through it. And so now I'm trying to educate people out there that this is just what they're dealing with. You know, just keep a distance. So thank you again for everything that you're doing and coming here today so us policymakers can work together and find a solution.

1:27:37 Thank you. My name is Katie Favela. I'm with Ridgefield City Council, but I'm also a licensed clinical social worker and child mental health specialist in Clark County, all over the state, actually. I appreciate all of you being here. I am very familiar with all of the things that you speak about because this is the world that I live in as well. My husband is also a first responder, so I feel like we're coming full circle. My question really is, when you go out to respond to calls for adults, but they have children involved, are you finding that the child welfare, the child mental health system is easier to navigate than the adult system, or do you vice versa? And where do you see crossover and where do you see larger gaps for families who are in crisis trying to access services?

1:28:33 I know it's a big question. I'll talk about it a little bit, but I don't know if I can answer your question because I think what you might be asking is a little bit downstream from where that initial police contact is going to be, is we know people who know people, right? So we're going to refer you to a service that will refer you hopefully to be where you need to be. If it's an immediate problem, a safety issue, then it's going to, for us at least it's going to be a removal, a CPS type situation. So I don't think that answers your question, but I'm hopefully providing some perspective on how we might experience that on a call, that it's going to be a referral so that the report we write would get sent to another agency or another organization that might

1:29:30 be able to help them, or we're going to refer that family. Chief, I could probably expand on that just a little bit. Sean Metemia, VPD. So the initial assessment is going to be the welfare of the children, quite frankly. That's going to be my priority in that scenario. If the adults are able to provide the necessary food shelter accommodations, okay, we'll probably move on to the next step, which is the referral that the Chief is talking about. But our initial assessment is always going to be the welfare of the children in that scenario, and it could just be that the parents are doing their best, they just don't have the means, and that's when we would get CPS involved in that particular scenario. Kathy Doriot with Ridge Hill PD. I have a sense of kind of what you're asking. It seems to me we have an officer that was particularly, he's now our detective, interacting with youth, and it seemed for a pretty significant period of time when we would have a situation

1:30:28 involving a youth, we got response pretty quickly that night. I mean, they would come quickly. But I also feel like that has changed, and I have a feeling it has to do with volume. There is so much demand that I think it isn't as quick as it was before, but I do think that youth get prioritized, children get prioritized really quickly. Tina Jones-Camas. In my professional experience, we didn't really touch on it today, but we have a lot of homeless youth who are preteen or teenagers, and often there's always a story again, and often they're victims of a variety of crimes, whether it was abuse at home, and so sometimes we'll encounter those situations. We have a multi-jurisdictional approach when it comes to child sex assault and things like that, good relationships to try and support our youth in those regards.

1:31:26 Sometimes there's also addiction. They're challenging when we have those situations. We have runaways, and usually, again, there's a reason, and often there's a high level of distrust with law enforcement, and so that's another area if we were to map out our system and what resources we have. I suspect we have some significant gaps based on experience, but it's hard. I think, like Kathy said, sometimes if there's children involved, we might be able to get somebody into shelter faster than if there weren't in those situations, so it just depends, and CPS is definitely involved in a lot of those cases as well. I'm Ty Stover, City of Vancouver, and I've been involved with all the different iterations

1:32:26 of ECHO since the beginning, and the kind of conversations that's happening here today was when the initial thoughts were put together, this is the kind of conversations we wanted to happen, the people we wanted to have around the table having these conversations. I heard from Jail Director Shook, from others, how do we make this next step happen? How can we find the time and schedules where, and it was mentioned it's maybe not you, but it's your patrol officers, how can we be bringing those people together? Your thoughts on how we create what I would view as the perfect ECHO group that's much

1:33:25 more cross-functional, and because I would, as a policymaker, get more out of sitting in the audience talking to all, or listening to these conversations than necessarily being at the table trying to force the conversation, so thoughts you have on how we take that next step, and what we, as policymakers, maybe need to do in order to help create that environment. Dave Shook, Jail Services. I was just thinking about some of the arrests that were made in 2025, and so we have some that have been in our facility nine or 12 times, and we have some that are one or two times that have homeless clusters, and I often am curious about what diversion efforts have been made, and so when you have an interdisciplinary team, and I have Dave Shook, who is the problem

1:34:24 in whichever community he is, it's what resources have been applied, and maybe this is happening, and it's happening in a smaller group, but I'm just curious, is there's a limited amount of resources, and in Oregon, because it wasn't communicated, I could go to Clark County, Washington County, Multnomah County, and get different resources versus saying, "No, no, you're from Washington County, stay there. That's where you're going to have it," so I'm just curious, how do we connect the conversations to say, "This person," which we all know the name of, "We already have a person who's focused on them," and so that would be the question I would have, is how do we create more, because when I was on the road here, I didn't actually know what resources Clark County had as a deputy. I knew I had a phone number to call. I didn't know how many I'd call, "Hotel," "Hey, sorry we don't have spaces," so I think more communication counselor is probably better, interdisciplinary might be interesting, and

1:35:23 the name's confidential, all that stuff, maybe, but maybe there's a place, and I'm not sure if it's already happening. Maybe it's bigger, though. So, are you suggesting that we have barriers to data sharing that are standing in the way? I think it's barriers to communicating or conversations about a person, and again, if we have homeless folks that want help, and we have some that don't, so do we spend more time on the people that don't, or do we hit the folks that we could click off fairly quickly with providing resources and taking them out of the bigger pile, go back to this other person, go back to the next person, so I'm just curious how that communication happens, because we have them in a place, right, but I'm not sure what's happening, and so again, that's something that I'd love to see more expanded for different groups, so I think a corporal over here has ... Because I really hope that we would have gotten

1:36:22 to six and seven, because I think that's kind of my wheelhouse, since I make the 50 to 100 contacts a day while I'm at work, so ... Kind of touched on it, Sean Metemia, VPD, sorry, so the answer to question seven, at least on my level, and if I'm not aware of it from a command staff level, I apologize, but the collaboration amongst agencies, that's very lacking, so that's the answer to seven, the answer to six, I envision like a RMS system, a report management system, some software, where we can have a regional, everybody in the agency, everybody in the region has access to this system, and you're just documenting contacts, whether, hey, I met so-and-so on this day and time, there's a few bubble questions that we could ... Have you been offered resources? Yes. What are those resources? Oh, we call recovery navigators, oh, by the way, he's got this caseworker, this case manager

1:37:21 that is assigned to this person, we can document all that in this RMS system. Have you been offered shelter? No, you haven't. Okay, well, do you want a shelter bed? Oh, no, they refused shelter bed on this day and time, so if we can document these repeated contacts, because the problem is, in law enforcement, what we see is a lot of migration, and Vancouver actually receives a lot of migration, it would be beneficial in my job if I could look this person up in this particular system and say, "Hey, you've been in Battleground, or you've been in Ridgefield, this X amount of times, you've been offered these resources, your case manager is this person, can I call your case manager for you? Let's get them, you reconnected with your case manager," so that way, when I make a contact down the field, I have to start from scratch. I have to say, "Who are you? Where did you come from? What are your intentions here?" Because if we come across a person that has been offered shelter 15 times in five different agencies, now we know what this person's intentions are.

1:38:20 It doesn't mean that they won't take shelter the next time you offer it to them, but it just gives us a broader picture of what we're dealing with in that particular timeframe, so I think some sort of software system to where we could actually document these contacts would be beneficial for all of these agencies and the officers that are making the contacts in the field. I think Sean's ... I'm sorry, Dennis Flynn from Battleground, I think Sean's idea's brilliant, and I don't think it would be that hard to achieve, especially knowing that we have so many tech-savvy people, you could get a college intern that can help put some of this together and make it almost a searchable database. I think for the smaller agencies, the challenge that we have is, and ladies, correct me if I'm wrong, but we just don't have the same volume, so it would be nice to know that every

1:39:17 other month, every month quarterly, there's a group that meets, and as we have that particular person that we're just banging our head against the wall of, "Gosh, what do we do? We have someplace we can go and go ahead." What's been working for you guys? Like you said, our communication, let's be honest, it sucks. I think we do a really good job individually in each of our specific cities, and as you had said, Victoria, they have a heart of service and they want to do good, but what does it look like and where do you go? I think until we have the appropriate funding, and I get it, it sure is nice to be able to reach to this money tree and be able to pull all these fundings, but when you have an issue that's so severe that it's impacting so many and that it's now rolling into the healthcare

1:40:13 issues and the jail issues, because at some point, I think I would be fairly accurate in describing at some point police, "We're going to solve the problem. We will get creative and we will do it. It might not be the best, but we will find a solution and now it's just making it worse." You're destroying the trust that say Sean has built up and now that person's migrated to battleground, maybe the officers that we have going out there don't have that same skill set and we're going to bring that same hammer to that same round peg into the square hole and we're going to force it to work, and that's not the solution. So maybe having that group together, but again, it would be wonderful if I had the resources to be able to say, "Hey, Chief Jackson, we're going to dedicate a body along with my partners to be able to go out with CARES, because they do need to make sure that they can do it safely."

1:41:13 I think it's safe to say we just don't have that without that funding and it's not cheap. Public safety is very expensive. Darren McShea, Vancouver. I think this is a good example of what a next step could be is you've got a bunch of chiefs up here that don't work as close to the road and don't see the issues the way that Corporal Nitevia sees it or anybody else on our heart team locally, and that's where the solutions come from. We can provide the opportunity, and to me it looks like something more like a regional group where the commitment is maybe weekly or biweekly or monthly, something along that line where that purpose is information sharing, and the people that are there are people like

1:42:10 Corporal Nitevia, other members of our heart team. This isn't just a police group. This is a multidisciplinary group where you've got a lot of input from a lot of different angles, so I think that would be the next step would be developing something along that line with support from agency heads that is attended by people that are actually doing the work. Kathy with Ridgefield PD. Sorry. Everybody, wake up. So I did want to address the counselor, and I think we know it. I see it. We need people with passion at the policy level because when they're passionate about things, we have the passion on the street. We have the chiefs who need to be supportive, but we all know when somebody really dives into something and they want it and they fight for it, and especially at a policy level,

1:43:05 council members, mayors, they make change happen because they're willing to get behind it and they empower those on the street through their chiefs. This will happen, and then it happens, so we need more of that. Hi, I'm Marilyn Burke from Chemis. Green light? Is it on? Okay. It was too low for you. Yeah. Listen, I came up here about to ask some questions, but as I stood and listened to responses, I just want to say thank you so much because you had mentioned that you're not boots on the ground necessarily at this level, right, but you were, right, and you care for your people who are boots on the ground, and I couldn't be more proud to stand before you and just listen to what you've had to say, particularly my hero, Chief Jones. I was going to ask specifically what could we do tomorrow? What can I do Monday at my meeting? Of course, I'll talk about this.

1:44:05 I have many notes, and I've already shared some things with our mayor, but I agree. Conducting some sort of a panel like this, our systems analysts that we're working toward, that position couldn't be more important right now. I think what we have is random acts of excellence all over the place, right? We used to admire problems in the school district where I just retired, random acts of excellence, but together we can make such significant change. We can change lives and hearts and save people, so what can we do like right now, right now? Well, Kathy Doriot with Richfield PD, I think that you don't let it stop. I think that we all go to trainings and we leave with the best of intentions and we're all excited and ready to go and I'm going to change the world, and then Wednesday comes and it's like, "Oh my gosh, I got another meeting," and we lose momentum. So I guess my challenge would be keep the momentum going, be relentless, don't let it become the topic of yesterday, make it stay the current topic of today until you start

1:45:04 seeing noticeable changes and it catches traction. And I would also add, though, just like that, right now, like you said, it's the past. It's the passionate part. And I think, again, without bringing up Vancouver, but because they have this as a much larger problem and they devote resources to it, it's something that's always talked about. Since we don't have it as often, yes, we want to do it. But let's be honest, and the next problem is tomorrow, typically the calls that we'll get is, "What are you doing about traffic safety with this and that," and so you're trying to devote those resources. So until we have something that's more refined that says, "Here is a program that we are going to ask that you send somebody as a representative," it needs to be the boots on the ground, that they are there, and that they can report back.

1:46:03 And then echo gets to here, "Here's what the progress are. Here's what we're doing when we have somebody who is that service resistant," or, "Gosh, we have tried everything on that. The judge is going to sentence this person for this minor," whatever it is, that we can say, "Gosh, we've never dealt with this lady before," and Shawn says, "That's not quite true. I have a whole program that says everything we have tried, so what else can we do?" Gabe showed jail services. Sorry, stupid mics. I was just reminded that actually some of these meetings already occur, so we have a provider's meeting with all these folks that show up April 23rd will be our next one. So if some of your representatives would like to come participate, you're welcome to. We have, again, and a lot of those providers actually aren't just Vancouver centric.

1:47:01 Some of them are countywide, so there is a space there. The crisis system service meeting actually happens monthly, and you can actually talk about some of these individuals by name, and some of those different efforts. And then, of course, they have another meeting by name list meetings in the homeless system. That happens monthly as well, so if you have particular folks in your community. So thank you, Anna, for sharing that with me. And again, it's the ability to communicate about those different efforts, as you're mentioning. So those are some things we can do right away, is include more people in the silos so that it's not siloed conversations, it's less siloed. And may I ask, how are people aware of those meetings, besides... What I would tell you is I didn't know about it until just a second ago when one of my primary resources shared that with me. So again, there are groups working outside of this realm or knowledge of law enforcement, and it's just a matter of making those connections.

1:48:00 But I think that first meeting with the providers would really be an opportunity for this team here to come and be a part of that, so you're welcome. We got two minutes left. Just saying, get some on the calendar. We need... Especially to get this group here today is like an act of Congress, which is saying something these days. But just scheduling something far enough out so we can participate, this is important, and we all showed up, but we also would love it to be more interactive, maybe one of the next ones. So... Am I the last one? No one? Hi everyone. Diana Perez here, City of Vancouver City Council member. Thank you for being here. This was a vision we had a few years ago when we started looking at the complexity of just the homeless ecosystem and the landscape, and this is quite, I think, a milestone for

1:48:59 us to have it here, and I love what Chief Flynn said about, "We set the vision and then others set the sail." And so I think it's important that for ECHO and all of us here is that we do set that vision cohesively, and this is the part about we can't do this alone jurisdiction by jurisdiction because that's part of the silo problem that you so well identified. And we have so many systems and services out there that we don't know about, but what we need is an infrastructure to really show the commitment that we are going to work cross-jurisdictionally to address this, and so that is part of the vision. And I'm hoping that a lot of the conversation that we had here and what you've identified, that you don't stop there, that you also keep feeding that to us policymakers as chiefs, and also like Corporal Metivia setting that up to others, and we're in this together.

1:49:57 I know I'm committed as a city council member to do that, and working with Glenn as chair there for the county to really look at this infrastructure. We talked about a solution-centered dialogue a couple years ago, and I think that would be a wonderful next step to how do we move forward in identifying the mechanisms and the platforms to develop this infrastructure that we need and have the right players at the table to do this. I don't think it's fair to go to these other meetings that are already taking place because they have their set things, but I think it's important to identify how do we incorporate all of this, and I believe that our next big effort that we're trying to do with this system analysis approach will identify that and identify those gaps. So thank you for being here. Thank you for raising youth and domestic violence.

1:50:52 That is another area we need to tackle, and that's exactly what we're doing at ECHO, tackling to end homelessness. So thank you for coming on board. Hi. Sue Marshall. I chair the Clark County Council. I want to thank the leadership of ECHO for rounding you all up. I know that's not an easy thing, and for all of you for carving out some time in your schedules to be here. You've provided us with some valuable, valuable information, and we're grateful for that, and I agree that it's all in the value of all of our time here today is all in the follow-up, and you've given us a lot to chew on, and I think there is significant momentum to bring some of this forward. As you leave, if you have other thoughts of next steps and things that we should do, please feel free to get those to us.

1:51:50 I would just like to mention, I think if someone and the public were listening to the discussion, it would seem like the primary issue for the homeless population is addiction issues and mental health, and I have thought that it's really just a lack of resources that people aren't able to afford housing, and that there is a huge number of people that are teetering right now on the verge of becoming homeless, and it's getting more difficult every day. So I just, I don't know, you could comment on that, but I think it's something to be aware of, and if you can identify people who would be the appropriate people to come together in that follow-up gathering, then hopefully we can have, that would be great, but anyway,

1:52:42 thank you, thank you, and I agree, we're in this together, so thanks so much. Thank you. Unfortunately, we don't have any further time. We'll take just a moment of privilege, though, and just, I want to show my appreciation for all the work that you do in our community, and I know that you're being asked to do more than you can in so many different ways, and I think this conversation has been very helpful, and one thing that I think has become very apparent is it is such a complex issue, and there's so many different aspects to it that, I mean, we don't even know who's having meetings where, right? We don't know how to facilitate each other and bring each other together to have a cohesive conversation. There's so many different elements of the system, and none of them really communicate together very well.

1:53:39 Additional bureaucracy doesn't typically help things, but that communication is something that we need to work on, for sure. Communication just among jurisdictions, and then, you know, here we are, we're having this fantastic conversation. We do have some of our local lawmakers here, but we're a representative from our jurisdictions. We're not the entirety of the council, so it's on us as ECHO members to bring this information back to our colleagues for discussion, but again, it just illustrates how difficult this process is to move through and get things to change, and I feel like we've hit that consistently over and over, resources, resources, resources. I don't know if there's going to be a lot more resources coming online, so to me, it's about prioritization and re-prioritization, where it needs to take place, so we have not

1:54:38 had enough time with you folks. Please stay in communication with us. Jordan is a great person to communicate and bring messaging to the group. You're also always welcome to come and participate in our meetings. I wanted to thank Jordan for the work that he's done, and also Michelle and all the support staff for putting this together. It's been a lot of work, and I think it shows a lot of commitment in our community towards solving this problem, so again, thank you for all your work. We have just a few minutes left if anybody has anything else to add, and then at that point, we will go ahead and close the meeting. Yeah, Monica, do you have a quick comment? Hi. Good to see you all.

1:55:36 I think from the state level, just want to also share my gratitude for you all coming together and showing the compassion you lead your departments with in our community. I don't think enough people see that, so I wanted to thank you for that. Just wanted to also let you know I heard my assignment here, that funding is not sustainable and often good at starting up good ideas but not keeping them going. I will take that back with me. I know that often when local partnerships are working on solving community problems, the state can overstep and not be so helpful, and other times can be super helpful, so I just wanted to leave an open invitation for you all to know that where the state needs some redirection from you all in your work, I welcome that and look forward to hearing from you about that in the future, and then finally, just kind of wanted to point out one thing that wasn't mentioned that I've learned about recently is that some of our

1:56:33 unhoused folks that are really struggling are children who are parents because the law does not allow for them to find ready access to places that are safe for them, and so when we have minors who have a baby living in a car, they are even harder to place, so these are the kinds of very nuanced challenges that I hope you'll continue to bring to my office to help find solutions to, but really appreciate the collaboration here and the leadership of ECHO. I've attended this meeting a couple of times as a state legislator, and each time come back with both work to do and feeling like I've learned a lot, and finally, really proud of my community, so thank you all. Thank you, Monica. I'll say one final thing. Thank you to staff. Thank you for audience members for being here today. Thank you, ECHO, for helping organize this, and thank you, of course, for keeping our county streets and roads safe.

1:57:29 I want to leave us with one last quote, and it says, "This is a great step, but it shouldn't be the last step," and that was from Chief of Police from the City of Richfield, Kathy Doria, and I think that it's something that we really, really ... And you mentioned that earlier. We can't just leave here thinking that we have solved problems by simply having one conversation. We need to identify actionable steps, work together to be able to, and I'll say attempt to solve a problem that's only getting worse in our community, so thanks again. I look forward. I've taken a lot of notes. There's a lot of information for me, for us to take back and really mull it over and think about and reflect about how we're going to move forward and what next steps we're going to take, so thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate you. Hey, officers, don't leave yet.

1:58:27 We're going to take a picture. Okay. Thank you.