Public Health & Safety Committee Meeting

Okay, I'm going to call to order this meeting of the Assembly Public Health and Safety Committee. Welcome everyone. It is Wednesday, October 1st at 11 AM. We are noticed to be in here until 12:30. If we can go around and do the roll.

So with that, is that just Yara Silvers, Cameron Perez-Verdía, and Mr. Geckrey, you're on the phone? Yep, I'm here. Okay, great. All right, um, uh, well, we've got a full agenda today, so let's jump right in. Uh, I think we're going to start with the mayor's office.

Let's start. Thanks. Thank you, Chair. Um, Thea Agnew-Bendon, special assistant to the mayor. Um, so I'm here with Ben and Brendan from the IT And we've been working on a project that we've kind of mentioned to you a few times, and we want to give you the first draft presentation of it.

Um, so this is related to our crisis response system here at the meeting, and we've been working to develop a dashboard of metrics that you can then be regularly updated on. So that's what I'm going to start off with, an overview, and then hand it over to Ben to walk you through the work that we've done so far. So as you know, the mayor has a public safety strategy called Safe Anchorage. Um, it's really working across many different departments. Uh, we have 4 main goals.

First is a robust public safety workforce. Second is less crime, more accountability. Third is the one that we'll be talking about today, which is more people access crisis care. And then the fourth is that roads, parks, and trails are safe for everyone every day. Our main outcome from those 4 goals is really that we maintain a safe and welcoming community for everyone here.

So let's talk about the third goal: more people get access to crisis care. As you all know, the Muni's really been a leader in this area for quite a long time. We are working towards developing a full crisis continuum And this is part of both a statewide effort and a national effort, so this is work that's going on all around the country. This diagram really shows you the different points in the continuum, and this is following what's called the Crisis Now framework. So that's a nationally adopted best practice for improving response to people who are experiencing a behavioral health crisis.

So the first step in the system is that people have someone to call in a crisis, and nationally about 80% of incidents can be resolved through the phone. Uh, the second one is someone to respond, so that's someone to actually come to you where you are, and that's again the kind of remaining— 20% of calls require a mobile response, and about 80% of those get resolved where the person is without them having to be taken to another location. And then for that remaining 20% of the 20%, um, there's a place to go, which is, uh, generally thought of as kind of two layers. The first is a location where people can go where their crisis can probably be resolved within a 24-hour day, so without requiring an overnight or bed stay. So in those locations, people are served in recliners and they get very rapid access to a whole array of services to stabilize the crisis.

If they need further support, they can then go into what's called short-term stabilization or, or crisis residential is what we call it here in Alaska, and that can be up to 7 days stay. And sometimes people might be in that level of care under an emergency detention and they can be evaluated for an involuntary commitment. So that can be both a voluntary or an involuntary stay. I just have a brief question.

The stabilization, I've always thought of that as being a sort of a primarily a mental health stabilization, like some sort of mental health crisis. Is it also true of somebody who is experiencing a crisis because of drugs. Yep. Is that, does that, is that the same kind of stabilization, that they would be stabilized because they're having a crisis due to drug overdose or drugs? Yeah, generally in a crisis, just in the same way that when you go into the emergency room, you don't always know what exactly is wrong with you.

So in a crisis, you're experiencing a crisis that's defined really by the person. So there could be a whole array of symptoms a person's experiencing, and then when they go to the stabilization center— well, actually, at any point along this continuum, that's really part of the process, is trying to understand what's going on and help the person resolve it. But at the stabilization center, that is why you have both medical staff, you have behavioral health staff, you have peers, and you really, you know, provide that kind of multidisciplinary assessment to understand what's going on. Sometimes people can get medication, sometimes they need other support. So that's, that's sort of full range is addressed there.

And that's why we use the term behavioral health, because that really refers to both psychiatric crises, substance-related crises, could even have other, other origins. Great, thanks. Good question. Okay, so back in December we formed the Crisis Response Workgroup. So this brings together the Health Department, the Police Department, the Fire Department, the I-team, the meeting manager is part of this, and the mayor's office.

Our goal is really to improve and optimize our response to people in behavioral health crisis so that we can reduce community impacts, we can sustain services, and really our goal is to get the right response to the right— to every person wherever they are. So that's like a pretty big goal, but that's what we're trying to do. Right now we're really focused on those first two steps of someone to call and someone to respond. Partly because we're kind of waiting for crisis stabilization centers to open next year. South Central Foundation should open theirs in June, and then we just got word that Providence is, is back under construction again, so we're hoping that could be open by the fall.

We also do here at the municipality have our Anchorage Safety Center, and that's, that is also being used in a kind of limited way for stabilization. That's part of what we've been working on. So that's kind of our second objective, is really to develop that place to go, because what we find is our first responders often can't— when they can't resolve the crisis in the community, they really do lack locations to bring people. So that's something we really need. And then a longer-term goal is that we figure out how we can bill health insurance for eligible services here at the muni.

That's a pretty big project. It'll probably take us a couple years to complete that. Once we begin, which we haven't really begun yet. But that is a goal that we're working towards. So I printed this out for you, and I won't go into a ton of detail here.

I'd be happy to talk more at another time or answer questions, but I just want you to know that our workgroup has put together what we call a theory of change. That's kind of a fancy term for, like, what's the story of this project? Like what are the resources we have, what are the activities we're doing, what do we hope to achieve in the both short and longer term. And so in that middle column, outputs, those are the things that we're doing, kind of, that we can be measuring, like how many encounters, like how many people do we have working, how many people did we get into treatment, you know, those are things we can count. And then on the outcomes column, those are kind of more longer-term impacts, which we also will be able to count, we're not quite there yet, so we're what you're going to hear from Ben and Brendan today is really focusing on that middle column of first, just let's make sure we're counting the work that we're doing and sharing that information out.

So some of the projects that we've been focused on this year, um, first we want to divert more calls to Careline, both from the police department. So that's when you call 911, you first get an APD dispatcher, or if you call 311, you also first get APD and then it's usually routed to AFD. We realize that we weren't diverting enough calls to Careline, and instead what was happening is some people were using time with one of our crisis clinicians that could potentially have been better spent in the field while that person was talking to somebody at the Careline. So we're increasing the number of calls we send over there. Under Someone to Respond, as you know, this summer we did an outreach pilot project where we really focused on getting more crisis care out to people who are in public spaces.

And that involved adding a second mobile crisis team that did outreach. We also changed how our safety patrol was interacting with folks, and I think we got some really good results there. And you'll, you'll be able to see in what Ben shares that we certainly did increase our encounters with folks this summer. We're working on developing a medication-assisted treatment program both at the fire department and with the health department, working with some of our community partners. We're just at the very beginning stages of that, but that's, that's a really exciting project.

And then we're also working on getting the Hope team a location. It'll.

Most likely be between Beans and Third Avenue Resource Center, where they can pull together all of their outreach partners and really coordinate that work. So we're excited about that. In terms of a place to go, we have been kind of adjusting the criteria for who can be transported by the safety patrol and who can stay at the safety center and under what conditions. We've also been increasing our navigation support for people at the safety center. As you know, APD is working on pre-arrest diversion to treatment, and then we've also We've also been working with South Central Foundation as they develop their crisis stabilization center.

We want to make sure we have really good coordination with our EMS and control and other first responders. Some of the things that we're still kind of like in process with are AFD is still hoping to have an advanced practice provider on staff. So you remember the core team, they're trying to really bring that back. And then the Health Department right now has an RFP out to secure a community behavioral health provider that will work both at our micro-units project and at the former Gold Lion once that's remodeled. So those are things that are in process.

And then our work we're going to talk about today that we've been really focused on is getting this crisis metrics dashboard for you. So that's what Beth's going to present on. And before we go there, I just wanted to show you, you know, at the beginning of developing this dashboard, We looked at other communities to see what they're doing. Durham, North Carolina has a really great model and a really good dashboard that you can kind of click through and get live updates. You know, we're not this advanced yet, but this is kind of, you know, one of our models that we're looking to, for example.

And then I just wanted to share a couple of charts that I think are really helpful, and these are ones that mostly APD and the crime analysts there worked on. What you're seeing on the left is, and this is just looking over 2023 and 2024, we have more recent data in Ben's presentation, but this is just looking at the total calls per month that APD was getting at that time. So you see it kind of bops around 20,000 calls per month. And then when you look at how many of those calls are coded as a mental health response, it's really, you know, around 2,000 calls. So just to kind of, you know, make sure that we understand kind of the magnitude of the calls.

PRDU. Yeah, that's the one there. We're on the last page of that. There we go. Yeah.

And then this last chart is something that's more in our outcomes column, and we're not able to reproduce this for 2025 exactly as you see it here, but I wanted to share this with you just So you could see that these teams, even though they're, they're responding to a pretty small fraction of the overall calls, they're making a big difference in terms of providing an alternative response, which is really our goal. So in the blue there, you're seeing our non-mobile intervention team, like mostly our patrol officers and their responses. So you can see before we really increased the mobile intervention team, like up until kind of midway through 2023, they were responding to most of these mental health calls. And then as soon as we expanded the mobile intervention team, not only are we overall able to respond to more calls, but the proportion of them that patrol's responding to has gone down. So that's a really promising measure of the type of effect we're trying to have by, by adding these teams.

And with that, I'm going to pass it over to Ben to walk you through our workgroup.

Oh yes, sorry. Yeah, so I'm kind of looking at this chart and then the one that preceded it, um, yeah, the proportion of AP calls that are mental health calls, and it's a very small line, but it does look like it is generally trending upward over the 3 years that you include there. And if I look at that and then also the following chart, is the fair assumption that we're seeing more calls for mental health, um, Coming from the community? I think— I'm not sure I totally want to conclude that. I think as we get our— the work that Ben is doing, as we get that rolling, we'll be better able to see that.

I think to do the charts you're seeing right here involves Brianne, who's one of the awesome crime analysts at ABD, looking through all the notes of the calls and kind of defining which ones go into this second category. And so it may be that, you know, some of that coding was, you know, done more later, less earlier. So I don't know if we know that there's a huge increase. I mean, I think one thing we know from the fire department is their call volume is way up. And when we really dig in on why is that, like, what are the reasons for those calls, it's a lot of things.

It's not only kind of behavioral health-related calls. It's like, you know, people with, you know, Symptoms of stroke or heart attack, those are big ones. So I think it's a really good question. I want to know. I want to know the answer to that, but I don't think we're quite there yet.

Yeah. Ben? One thing Breanne did mention is as she's looking through this data, she's also working with the police department to label things better. So I think there's an effect where when you're trying to measure this, people start recording that information more, so you get a slight rise. That's just a theory.

That's not a conclusive conclusion, but that is something that Brianne has mentioned, that as she's working with the police officers, people are labeling stuff better. So you, you do see an increase in measure of— they're still there, they're just being measured better. And that's part of the work we're doing now, is trying to really standardize those definitions so that it doesn't require Brianne to be looking through all the notes, um, and we can just get a much more regular recording of the data so that then you can depend on it a little bit more. Yeah, it's an interesting question. And I understand it's very hard to kind of parse all these things out and really control for all the variables, especially the space man capacity.

But get a better answer at some point. I'm curious. Yeah, I mean, I think this one does share that, you know, we are able to respond to more of those calls with MIT. And sometimes what happens with crisis care is that people who otherwise maybe wouldn't have called or wouldn't have gotten a response start calling because they're like, oh, I could get MCT now. You know, I would— I'd like that.

You know, whereas before they may have not called 911.

So there's a little bit of that effect in there too. And if you can just share your name for the record, just to make sure we know who we're talking to. Brendan Vowd, Chief Innovation Officer for the Municipal Housing Authority. Thanks. So just one brief question before we move on, and this is a question that could be a longer answer for later, but I do want to really, especially for those in the community listening, I really want to get to what we mean by crisis and what we mean by someone who's in crisis, and this is why the question around, is it mental health, is it behavioral health, is it alcohol, drugs, is it some kind of sort of other thing that is going on with them?

Because when we use mental health as a term, I think oftentimes there's an association with someone that's having a sort of a mental health issue. They're schizophrenic or they have some kind of sort of diagnosis that, that it's crazy or creating a crisis for them. But when we think about this, this system we're building, we're kind of broadly categorizing a lot of people in the community are in crisis, right? And we're separating crime from crisis, right? We want, we want the police to address the crime, and we want a crisis response to address people in crisis.

And that could be a wide variety of things in terms of what that looks like. So a lot of the people that we see, as I've described to you, when I'm driving down the street or walking out the street, are in crisis. And that's, that's how we're defining And so I just wanted to sort of put that out there that it's not a narrow category of a mental health diagnosis that they're responding to only, but it's a broad range of people who are experiencing what we're calling "crisis." Yes, and just so you know, like our workgroup had like many conversations and discussions around that to try and come up with the definition that we wanted to use. And you'll see at the bottom of the printout that I gave you of the theory of change, you know, we have those defined.

Point now, so I can provide the definitions that we're using, and they really do come from national toolkits and resources, so we're not just making it up, like, you know, it's— but it does— I think the tricky part about it is that I think historically we love to make this distinction between mind and physical, and reality is that's not really the case. So especially with the type of substances that our people are using today, and even with alcohol, which people have been using for a long time, we now have we have medications that are very good at helping people treat their withdrawal symptoms, which is a big part of what allows a person to get into treatment. And those, those types of medication weren't available even 5 years ago. So some of the— and that's a, you know, a physical, you know, you're taking a medicine to address something that's going on in your mind. So I think just understanding that these are Both sometimes substance-related, sometimes, you know, someone might have been, you know, has a psychiatric disorder, but oftentimes those are very interrelated, and they're also related to trauma and things that happen to people or that have happened in their family history.

So, you know, think of the people you know. We all know somebody who struggles with mental health, drugs and alcohol. I mean, we all know many people. So that's what we're talking about. Thanks.

You're up. Great. My name is Ben Matheson. I work on the innovation team as a data analyst, and with me is Brandon Babb, the Muni's Chief Innovation Officer. So over the last several months, I've been working with Thea as well as the analysts from APD, AFD, and health departments with the goal of supporting Anchorage's crisis response teams.

So we want to help to track, understand, and share the investments across Anchorage's crisis response. So more specifically, the goal is to provide a regularly updated data snapshot that quantifies and describes this work being done by specialized teams— hola, first responders, law enforcement, EMTs, and others. We've got those unique teams with unique responsibilities, and to the degree it's possible, we want to bring that all together and see how that fits into the system as a whole. And so for who, for what audience? Primarily it's the communities and white crisis response group.

And so we want leadership from departments as well as decision makers, policymakers, to be able to see how the system is working and how it's evolved and grown and changed month to month as we continue to invest in people and try to connect that right responder to anyone who's experiencing a crisis. The question then, what, what do we want to track? How do we decide to choose those things on what's going to give us the clearest picture of what's happening and how it's changed. We're starting with the community's crisis response theory of change. So as, as Thea mentioned, it's this system view and it describes activities over time so we can understand how we're investing in people and services to address the wide range of people with behavioral health crisis.

So we try to bring that together, get this 30,000-foot view into how all the work aligns with the theory of change. So we came up with a short list of what we think captures some of the most important metrics. And I'll go through these pretty quick here. The bracketed metrics you see here are more so Phase 2. They're one step more complex than the kind of initial outputs that we're focused on right now.

So these are organized roughly in the CrisisNow framework. So starting with someone contact, we can see the number of calls for service coming to 911, 311, as well as officer-initiated activities and crisis team-initiated calls. Track the number of calls going to Caroline, again from 911, 311, officers and crisis teams. And then the mobile teams. So if there is a mobile team sent, we can track those high-level encounters per month, per year, per team.

How many unique individuals are each of these teams meeting each month and per year? We've got a basic kind of high-level housing status for each encounter that the team has, a basic disposition on whether the person stayed in the community or further law enforcement or EMS cuisine at the end of that— end of that call. And Narcan, we can see how administration of Narcan has largely grown over the past 5 years. Then finally, a few from Sobering Center and A Place to Go. So the number of admissions to the safety center, and we're developing a daily census of who's in the safety center at one time, number of unique individuals that safety center sees each month, and then also developing kind of the average length of stay at the safety center.

So on a very practical level, what we've tried to do is tap into data that's already being collected and already being reported as either part of internal tracking or as something for the Anchorage Crisis Collaborative. That's a separate effort that brings in more than just the muni and has a lot of metrics tracking crisis response. And so with that, there's a monthly cadence that we're able to connect with data and ultimately not have APD and AFD's analysts have to create more spreadsheets or more reporting or ultimately do more work. So we're still working on a lot of the details, but we do have the majority of big sources that are now brought together. So this project is definitely standing, standing on the shoulders of AED and AFD's first responders, as well as the super talented data analysts from each department that knows this data really well.

It is complicated and sometimes messy data, so for them to bring together makes this possible. We are focused mostly on the outputs, so this is calls responded to, this is people transported, services rendered, calls coming into the system, and those responses we send out both in response to a request and things through proactive outreach. So outputs, it's the challenging daily work that's being done every day. But with that, I can show you a few snapshots of this internal dashboard that we've been building out to try to have a shared view into how this work is happening and how it's changed over time. So starting here at the, uh, kind of trying to capture the need from the community.

We've got calls that ABD dispatch answered. This is 2025, kind of first half or so of 2025. So we can see, you know, in excess of 30,000 calls a month in some cases are going into— into ABD dispatch and split up here between 911, 311, also working together the officer-initiated activity that comes along with that.

And then if we have a mobile team that is dispatched and responds to a call, we can see how those, those calls for service have grown over time. So in light blue here is Safety Patrol, that's the kind of largest number. Darker blue is the MCT team, and then in orange is MIT. We'll get a closer look at this, but there definitely has been an uptick this summer with— you'll see the MCT numbers have grown compared to to, uh, previous months here. Let me interrupt you just for a second.

Just for the record, uh, Mr. Rivera and Mr. Constant, uh, so we're still working to bring in, uh, kind of recent history prior to 2024 to get more of that time series here. But as we build out this time series, we can, you know, document and understand the kind of changing and growing elements of the crisis response system. So there's lots of pilots going on, there's expansion in services, expansion hours in some cases. There's outreach, there's a lot of outreach happening this summer, so we can see how that impacts the system of crisis response.

And to break this down one step further, we can see how many unique individuals teams are encountering. So 2025 year-to-date, MCT is the chart here on top, so 412 unique individuals in the most recent month that MCT worked with. Below is MIT, and so you can see in August, the most recent number of 156 unique individuals. I just asked a question that I know that there's been a shift, um, from only calls in some cases to patrolling. So we can't necessarily say calls, right?

So these are, these are contacts with folks, is that right? I believe it could be initiated through proactive outreach or through There's telephonic things, but there's— yeah, there's outreach, there's response, there's telephonic, but these capture encounters with people. Okay, so these are encounters, physical encounters or phone encounters?

I would have to check for sure with the analysts from MCT, but I think there are some phone outreach that MCT team does that, yeah, that's a number.

Thanks. And Narcan, um, on a very high level, we can see how AFD— or sorry, AFD's administration of Narcan has grown since 2020. This is kind of our very first look at this, so we're looking forward to developing this further with AFD. Yes, yes, Mr. Johnson. We're not— there are not duplicate numbers between public and AFD Narcan here, right?

So if I'm looking at that, the red number, for example, 2024, would be 447,000 So that's 679? Um, to the chair, there— those might be duplicated because, um, someone may have had Narcan administered to them before AFD gets on scene, and then sometimes they have to administer it again, so there might be duplication there. Okay, interesting. Um, it's just— it's a frightening trend to look at. And next, a high-level disposition of a call, so kind of the result of the call.

Whether the person was able to stay in the community or whether there was transportation via EMS or further law enforcement needed. So light blue here is where the person stays in the community. Light blue is, is good. Purple is where EMS transportation was required. That's— you can see that MTT on top.

And below, the other one I highlight is the pink. You can see that, you know, when the response kind of concluded with further law enforcement, you can see that in the MIT numbers. A bit further. So definitely focus mostly on outputs, how the— what work is being done, but we are starting to get closer to getting into some of those actual public health benefits, how people are faring, and then the overall ability for the community to send a credible response to each call and see things like ABD Patrol and AFD's EMS spending less time on crisis calls. Sorry, quickly, can I add— the text that accompanies the yellow portion of our— got cut off— can you just Um, tell us what the full sentence was saying.

Thanks, Chair. The yellow refers to responses where the mobile team transported a person to another location. So it's a transportation to, uh, I think a mixed, a mixed bag that's not law enforcement, that's not EMS, but it's transported to another location. Is that like private residence or different type of treatment or—. Yes, so both MCT and MIT can transport people.

So if there's a safe location for that person to go to, if they need to go somewhere different than where they are, they can both do that. And MIT, you know, is obviously doing that in a police car, so it's more common for them to.

MCT does it at their discretion. Gotcha. But that could be very broad in terms of the—. Mm-hmm. Okay.

Yes. Just one other question. In terms of the— there seems to be good alignment of outputs and outcomes related to MCT and MIT, essentially doing a similar kind of work. Does that differ with ASP, for instance, or HOPE team or others that staying in place or being transported, does that not translate for those other teams? You're saying, do we have that data?

No, no, just in terms of like what the purpose of that team is, and is that— is that a— is some of that data aligned? Like, for instance, is ASP trying to keep folks in place also if they're responding to someone versus transporting them? Yeah, that's a really good question. Um, I would say that some of the operational changes we're making right now to the safety patrol, we actually want them to encourage people to come with them. It used to be that they would only transport people if that person needed to be under a protective hold, so it was involuntary, and we've changed that criteria so that they can take somebody if that person would like to go to the safety center.

So if we did have that data for them, which I don't think we do, we could look— we actually have a lot of data on the safety patrol, so that goes back a long time, so we could look at that, and we'd actually probably want to see more of a shift towards them doing more transport. They've also been really helpful for other types of transport, you know, kind of similar situations where maybe MCT is working with someone and then they can call Safety Patrol and Safety Patrol might transport them and then let MCT go off to their next call. So we've been doing more of that lately too. Because I'm thinking about the— again, as this is expanding, that in a traditional setting, the MCT or MIT, if they are responding to someone who's in crisis, for instance, at their home, then you want them to stay in place. That's the ideal.

If they're in crisis on the street, then staying in place isn't necessarily a good metric, right? It's because ideally we transport them somewhere where they would get help, right? So anyway, just thinking about how those things—. People do get stabilized in public places too. Sure.

So, but yes, I think you're absolutely right. Like, it's not a slam dunk that we want to leave everyone in place. Yeah. Thanks.

Next is a high-level look at housing status. MCT on top, MIT on the bottom. So light blue is housed, kind of purple is unhoused, and orange is if we don't have data on that. Working to bring in more historic data as we can on housing status here.

Yeah, Miss— Miss Silvers.

I have a question. When we're looking at this data and we're discussing behavioral crisis response calls, are these calls sometimes including people that have committed a crime, and so that's how the crisis response call has been initiated, or are these people that are calling and saying, "I'm, you know, in a mental health crisis, can you help me?" Or is it a mixture of both? So the way the calls are triaged is the call comes in and then it's really the job of the dispatcher to try and understand kind of what response is needed. And so if it's considered a high-risk call, so for example, someone's threatening to harm themselves or someone else, if there's a weapon present, if something in that sort of level of risk, then they're most likely going to dispatch Mobile Intervention Team. So So that's where you have both a police officer and a crisis clinician going together.

And then sometimes they may also send patrol, and patrol might even go first. So it really, that's up to the dispatcher to really determine what's the right mix of response. And then if it's considered lower risk, then that would be when they would dispatch the mobile crisis team or potentially the safety patrol. And so in those higher risk calls, that's where Perhaps a crime has been committed, or maybe you're trying to prevent a crime from being committed, and again, that would be where APD would be used. The mobile crisis team at the fire department can also always call for police support, and they often do, so we really do try and coordinate those resources to make sure that we're kind of addressing the situation that's in front of them.

Does that answer your question? Not really, but—. What's the question? I guess I'm asking specifically if calls where crimes have been committed are being counted in the behavioral crisis response calls.

Is your question like, if I called and said, um, if somebody— somebody just punched me, Like, are we going to dispatch an MIT team to that? Is that the question? Somebody breaks out a car window and they are high and they're going through a mental health crisis at the same time, would that be counted in here? If the dispatcher decided that they needed a mobile intervention team as well as a patrol response, then these are counting when those teams are dispatched. So potentially, yes, especially that MIT numbers.

Okay, yeah, yeah, that's just kind of what I was trying to figure out. Okay, thank you. Sorry, one other real quick question on this, this chart, um, on the housing chart. What this is saying is, uh, in the month when these folks were dispatched and they had contact with folks, this is the percentage of people that were housed when they had con— they went to their house, went to whatever. Like, this is So, so what I can interpret by this is that, is that, you know, in, um, in June, July, and August of this year, we saw an increase in the number of people that they interacted with that were unhoused.

It is counting individual encounters. It's not a percentage here, but I believe— like, I'm reading the chart the same way— is that there are more unhoused status counts this month? Yeah, thanks.

Sure, that's because— I think that's because of our outreach project. Yeah.

And so a few highlights from the SAFE Center here. This is the number of admissions each month at the SAFE Center, going from 579 in January up to 553 in June. And then counting the number of unique individuals below, 261 you can see January and 309 in June. Also working on getting more metrics from the Safety Center. We do have a lot of data from the Safety Center on length of stay and, um, yeah, a variety of metrics there.

Great. And, uh, yeah, so, um, can you explain why in March we see such a significant uptick? I mean, that's like almost 50% above what might be our baseline. Um, I mean, just thinking back to March— this is this year— this is when, um, we were operating warming, and there is quite a bit of crossover between warming and safety center. And I know that at that time, during that month, warming was very high.

Like, we had like 100 people a night trying, so we were doing like 2-hour shifts at warming. I can't remember like what the weather was like or sort of what was leading to that.

Um, yeah, I don't have a great answer. We could pull some more information to try and answer that. I can't remember if it was like because the weather was bad or— there weren't other things, like we didn't shut shelter down or there wasn't something like that that was going on. Okay, thank you. And then the other thing that maybe is more of an observation than a question, unless I'm reading strong, but if I look at the number of admissions divided by the number of unique individuals?

It seems like the average person goes— who uses the safety center goes there about twice a month. Um, that might be the average, but I don't think that's as much of a telling, um, data point. So when we look back at like 5 years of data, it's pretty interesting. There's probably— I think Brendan can check me on this, but I think we found about 60% of people only went there one time. So there was actually quite a lot of people who went there one time, and then there was about 150 people who over that 5 years had gone there 10 times or more.

So I think really with the safety center, there's— I was surprised at the number of one-time use because that wasn't kind of what I imagined. But I think there's a fair bit of that, and then there's a small, much smaller group of people who are using it very frequently. Yeah, that seems to track. Yeah, and that's the kind of data that we want to pull out for you. We just haven't quite gotten there yet.

Yeah, thanks. Great. And I just want to make a note of time, so we probably need to wrap this, this up. So I'm going to just finish up. Good timing.

Last time. So with that, we're looking forward to adding some more resource sort data, getting things to update automatically, provide regular updates to the crisis response work group, and move on to those kind of phase 2 outputs and move on to outcome metrics. Thanks very much. Sure. Thank you guys very much.

That was great. Okay, let's have the Office of Emergency Management come up. We're going to have presentations from the Red Cross,.

Okay. Oh, so do you—. Yeah, I printed the— I printed that. If you could bring that up for him, that would be helpful. Okay, thank you.

Did you want to start? Yep.

All right, welcome. Um, uh, you'd like to share your name for the record? Yes. Good morning, my name is Samira Loach. I'm the director of the Office of Emergency Management here in Anchorage.

Today I brought, I brought some visitors from the National Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer and the Alaska Red Cross. Both of these visitors are brought to you because of recent questions from the committee regarding tsunami warnings and some lessons learned as we're working through that as a new risk for Anchorage and newish risk for Anchorage. And then as well, our Red Cross partners were brought to you because of some questions regarding meaningful contributions by constituents in terms of volunteers. So we wanted to have the experts brought to you to help with that. And with that, I'll turn it over to Bridget Byboda from the Alaska Red Cross.

Hi, my name is Bridget Byboda, and I am the American Red Cross Community Disaster Program Manager for the New Municipality of Anchorage. I've heard that there have been some questions from your constituents about how they can meaningfully involve in their community and address health and safety concerns. In the Red Cross Disaster Cycle Services, we have programs to help individuals and communities prepare, respond, and recover from disasters. Across the state of Alaska, we receive about 2 calls a day notifying us of disasters. These could be anything from a major wildfire to a home fire.

This translates to 289 homes or 778 clients assisted in FY '25, 94 households and 220 clients in the Municipality of Anchorage. My favorite preparedness program is Home Fire Campaign, where we install smoke alarms in people's homes and talk about home fire safety. After 10 years of this program nationwide, we have installed 3 million smoke alarms in 1.2 million households, preparing 3.1 million people. Through this program, we have also documented 2,462 lives saved. 31% Were children under 18.

In Anchorage, we always have a waiting list for smoke alarms and typically visit 3 homes a week. In our Service to Armed Forces program, we vet and facilitate emergency communications between service members and their families, along with teaching international humanitarian law, facilitating mental health workshops for service members, volunteering at Fisher House, and coordinating the animal visitation program. The American Red Cross is comprised of 90% volunteer workforce. We rely on community engagement to implement our mission. Red Cross is ranked one of the nation's most trusted nonprofits, with 90 cents of every dollar going to our operations, including assistance— assisting our clients and emergency preparedness.

This is thanks to our incredibly supportive volunteer base and generosity of donors. Whether you can donate your time or money, the American Red Cross is an avenue for your constituents to be meaningfully involved in their communities. I have also a number of flyers for you all. So, um, we are having a smoke alarm install event on October 11th. Everybody is invited to participate.

There's no training requirements. You can just show up and get involved. Service to Armed Forces, what services we offer. To summarize, we offer programs not just to active duty service members and their families, but also to veterans. Our FY25 impact report, a letter from our philanthropy department about donating to Red Cross and Red Cross programs, and a flyer about volunteering.

So I have all of that for y'all, and if you have any questions Let me know. Thanks very much for being here. I do have a quick question. Yes. The Home Fire campaign.

Yes. How is that, how is the information, how do you get that out to folks so that folks know that it's time to not only check their batteries and check on that? So how is that communicated through our city? So oftentimes we post on social media. We also are invited to a number of health fairs through the different programs in the municipality, including the Anchorage School District, where we talk about home fire safety because it's important to change your batteries but also replace the whole unit after 10 years so that it can still detect the smoke.

So we get out that information that way. Thanks, very, very important. Well, thanks, thanks for being here. Okay, thanks, Bridget. And, um, Bridget didn't mention this, but just this past week the Red Cross supported us with a number of volunteers in opening a shelter at the Spenard after a multi-unit fire.

So we are utilizing our Red Cross partners here in Anchorage quite a bit, and we appreciate the work that they're doing and any way that people can support them as well. Thanks, Bridget. Okay, so turning it over to Dave Snyder with— there's two Dave Snyders, there's one volcano Dave Snyder and one tsunami Dave Snyder, but this is Dave Snyder from the Tsunami Warning Center and And I know that we're just now understanding our rare but real risk of tsunamis here in Anchorage, and Dave is our tsunami warning expert, and he is going to talk to you about some of the corrective actions that the Weather Service has been working on in regards to warning in Anchorage. Go ahead, Dave. Thank you, Director Loach, and here in support of the National Weather Service forecast office in Anchorage, we are a national center, the National Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer.

And work with all of our forecast offices across the U.S. West Coast and Pacific Islands and territories, as well as the U.S. Atlantic Coast and the Gulf. So what I want to talk to you about today is some of the changes that we've made using our current tools and capabilities. We're in an exciting time within the tsunami warning system, a lot of rapid development and expansion of how we're doing things and trying to catch up to current technologies. But today we're still using some of those current systems and tools that are are frankly pretty antiquated. So we're using what we have.

Considering mid-July and one of our first series of the summer alerts that we had before we had that very large Russian event, this is looking at a more common event for Alaska, which is an earthquake off of Sand Point on the Alaska Peninsula. Typically earthquakes and tsunamis resulting from these smaller earthquakes in the low 7-point range are going to happen a lot more than the really big ones that we saw off of Russia, the 8.8s. We're designed for those really large earthquakes and large full ocean crossing tsunami events. The smaller quakes, the ones that are closer to our shore and the ones that are going to be more likely, are not really what we're designed to do. So we've adapted a lot of things to make these things work.

We're also not designed to alert and warn inside waters including Cook Inlet, Puget Sound, San Francisco Bay, etc. We're designed for outer coastal warning systems, so places like Sandpoint, Kodiak, Sitka, Ketchikan, those places are a little bit better served by our system than what we're trying to do here for Cook Inlet and therefore Anchorage, Matsu, and other locations along the inlet. So with that, we know that we have had a historic problem with over-alerting where we associate public weather forecast zones with what we call breakpoints inside the center, and that allows us to alert a large group of coastline all at once with a known tsunami hazard area. What we have to do then is group like areas with a large cluster of alerting potential geographic areas to push that button all at once for those people. What we have chosen to do with working with the state and local municipalities including Anchorage and Director Loetscher is shift some of those zones or boundaries from areas around Anchorage to a different location in order to support a reduction of over-alert.

It's a very complicated way to say we've changed our risk level, changed our risk strategy to something we think will be less likely because we think that an earthquake around the Sandpoint area would be more likely to happen again. This is a common area, very active area seismically, and I'm not a seismologist, but I feel comfortable saying that. We think that when this event repeats again, we can limit the over-alerting and the unnecessary alerting of Anchorage based on cascading events and other technologies that kind of overlap into the, the end result of Anchorage receiving a wireless emergency alert that is not necessary. So with that,.

What you see in the next couple slides here is a way to try and explain that. It's a very complicated system, unfortunately, and I'm happy to dive into this in any other way that you need. But what you're seeing here in that red dashed line is the region that is typically over-alerted from this type of event. Every event is different, but this specific event will probably play out again. What happens is when we send an alert to an area that gets very close to the southern tip of the Kenai Peninsula, including Soldovia and Homer, that event cascades into other geographic boundaries that are out of the Weather Service control.

And because of that, it touches cell phone towers and then goes even further than, than there's ever going to be a tsunami hazard or risk. So what we've done is take the Kenai Peninsula zones and shift those eastward to another location that we refer to as the Hitchenbrook Entrance breakpoint, which should remove the possibility for another quake that happens in this area, that happens at that lower magnitude, and not alert Pina Peninsula Bureau, and therefore keeping Anchorage out of seeing a wireless emergency alert for this type of event. Okay, if that is confusing, I completely understand. There's a lot there, and I'm really brushing it over. If you would hit the next slide for me there.

What I really want you to understand is This is for this specific type of event in a low magnitude earthquake in this location. What it does is it shifts the risk eastward. So if we have an earthquake of similar magnitude in the northern Gulf that is also a low likelihood for producing an impactful tsunami in Cook Inlet, we will automatically send that alert into the Cook Inlet region. Okay, so we're shifting the risk. We're not fixing the problem because these are current technologies and tools that we have today.

Unfortunately. But the benefit is that we reduce the potential of overlearning for more common events. Hopefully this improves the complacency problem and unnecessary alerts that travel to folks in Anchorage, including where I live in Eagle River, up in Matsu, or the Kenai Peninsula. They just don't have that problem. But we're accepting the risk that a smaller quake in the Northern Gulf or Prince William Sound might create the same problem.

Future technology should allow us to completely fix this problem, change the way that we send tsunami alerts to known tsunami hazard areas, and more effectively and accurately target the public that needs to receive that critical, timely, and effective alert. So we're over— over-alerting, not under-alerting. I guess the question that came up before was, was there— the only risk from my perspective of over-alerting is it creates a desensitizing folks in terms of what would those mean. So there's some effort to correct that, I see. We want to get closer to an accurate alert all the time, but I think you'll find with any tsunami alerting structure and strategy that we have today that it's always going to be trending toward that over-alerting just for the factor of time and the effort it takes to move a mass amount of people quickly.

For sure, for sure. Thanks. This is great. That helps. I hope that was a lot clearer.

Thank you very much. And I am assuming you're a federal employee? Yes. Thank you for your service, and in light of what's going on right now, I appreciate your work. Okay, I don't think we have any other questions.

Thanks for your presentation today, really appreciate it. We're going to change the agenda just a little bit, and we're going to have Chief Case look over first just because he needs to respond to something else happening in the world.

Welcome, Chief. Okay, get started when you're ready. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Uh, while we're pulling up, uh, the policy agenda is going to be on screen.

I just want to go back to, uh, Thea's original presentation if I may and clarify one question.

The question was asked by Member Johnson about the number of crisis calls. Are they going up, going down? Seems like they're kind of staying consistent. And when we first started the program, we did a very, very granular look at all of these calls for service. By granular, I mean we had an employee that actually read through every single one of these calls and reports to collect the data.

So we knew we had a really fine pulse. And what we found is the majority of the crisis calls across the board, whether it was someone being arrested, whether it was a regular call for service, a disturbance, across the board, the vast majority of our crisis calls that we respond to are people who are completely functional. They have jobs, they have homes, they, they, you know, they are, they may have a behavioral health issue, but they are completely functional. And something happens that causes them to have to request intervention from either police or fire, and then a short time after that, they, they go about their normal life. And so it's not like we have 80% or this large volume of call.

We can say we have 10% of the population that's contributing to this massive call, and that's a little bit unique to Alaska. When you look at other jurisdictions, you usually see there's a high volume of of high utilizers, we have it spread very broadly throughout the, uh, throughout the municipality. So I hope that helped to answer your question a little bit, but kind of important data point for us to know. All right, with that, I will go, uh, so for the next 3 months, I will visit one of the 3 new policies related to the, the technology approval that we got from the Assembly last Tuesday. And the first one is the Real Time Crime Center policy.

A couple of things to point out before I get into some of this is our— not only a Real Time Crime Center policy, but the two that will follow, which are drones first responder and our automated license plate reader policies. I would put these— all these policies as drafted very, very far on the restrictive category. There are some jurisdictions around the country that have specific codes or ordinances that place some limitations on surveillance. So those departments usually have pretty restrictive policies.

One that comes to mind, if you want to take a look at it, is the code in San Francisco. And even with those types of codes in place that are very restrictive, their retention, for example, is 1 year, whereas at Sierra, retention is 14 days. So We've created a, a very restrictive policy primarily because we're trying to weigh the benefits with the protections of individual rights, and that's, that's kind of the nexus that we use in that. Every piece of technology that I will reference here, we have currently, with the exception of these new video feeds, the Jerome's First Responders and automated license plate readers. So everything else that has access, or the employees in the Real-Time Crime Center have access to, we already have those systems up and running.

So I don't want to confuse the long list of what they have access to, to things that are— that some are new, some are not. Um, when we look into the procedure, page 2, Section 4A, um, the first part is that we need to talk about looking at the videos, because primarily that's what we're talking about, the Real-Time Crime Center videos, these that come into The feeds that are not police department or municipal owned, those feeds are all coming in from private business or private residents that can request to either have us know that they have cameras available that we can request access if we have a crime in the area, or they can allow the police department to have access to their video feed. So, you know, let's say a retailer that wants us to have access to their exterior cameras, uh, if that is the case, all ability for us to access those cameras comes from them. They could have it partial access, they can have it 24 hours a day, and whatever the retention log for those cameras are is how, how we can look at that data. If they rewrite or copy over their recordings every 72 hours, we can't recover anything outside of 72 hours.

The only time we have access outside of that retention schedule for these private businesses or owners is if we determine there's evidence that's retained, and then we take that evidence, that video, and we pull it into our, our evidence retention system under our current retention schedule. I have a question for you, Mr. Roberts. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Chair. Not so much a question, but, um, for the chief, uh, but maybe for the clerk.

Um, do we have, uh, email copies of these or printouts of this policy somewhere?

Thanks. Okay.

Go to page 3 on operational objectives. Yeah, this is—. Thanks. Um, at this point, be a question for the attorneys, John. I don't know, um, in the agreements that you have with potential private business owners and property owners, so are those recordings considered public records?

Not the evidence ones which go into that evidence system, but for whatever time period you have access to these cameras and are using them, are those considered public records? Uh, those are not considered public record. We've already looked at this, and the reason why they're not considered public record is because we haven't captured that data. Uh, once we capture it, we have control of that data. In other words, we take that then it becomes part of, like, the government now owns it, and so now we have to fall within the records retention.

Our ability just to view a camera, like, that viewing is happening, but we're not capturing that data, so we don't have— we have nothing to give anyone, if that makes sense. It certainly raises a number of questions, not that we'll solve here today. Thank you.

Moving on, page 3, operational objectives. Ultimately, what we're trying to do with this policy is to provide real-time information to incidents that are active or current investigations. Kind of, kind of the name of real-time is what we're trying to capture. It's why we're— another reason why we're limiting the retention period down to 2 weeks if it's not related to a crime. It is so that we can help with some of our staffing issues where our officers can't be on scene for everything, that we have a resource that we potentially can have some sort of law enforcement response through the use of cameras in immediate investigations.

The other thing, number B4 there, coordinate on large-scale events. Think about if we have a natural disaster or, you know, forest fire or something like that, where we can utilize some of our technology that's going to help in the overall response to a large-scale event like a natural disaster, where it's not just APD volume. Under authorized use, you see some of the things that we're going to use that will be coming into the Real-Time Crime Centers. Our city-owned cameras already coming in, privately owned cameras, as I've already mentioned, traffic camera systems, this automated license plate readers— we'll talk about that in a couple of months— buying more camera feeds. Right now, prior to this contract being signed, we didn't have the ability to look at body-worn cameras in real time.

There's no cellular connectivity with our body-worn cameras in that currently. When the officer gets back to the patrol car, that feed then uploads to the— our evidence system. The new cameras that we'll be getting, and I believe what I said was, uh, within the next year when I was testifying before the entire body, uh, looks like now that we have things moving, it's probably going to be much sooner than a year that we move to the next version of the body-worn cameras. Which means they will be chipped with cellular service, which means we would be able to view those body-worn camera feeds in real time once that, that new technology is here. We have access to public safety databases that already exist, and then drones, their G-UAS is referred to as drones as well.

Some of the technology that we currently have access to, it's not accessed in real time. So even though we have access to some of this technology, we have nobody that's staffing some of the systems that can bring up some of the databases or cameras that we have in real time. So that was one of the benefits to having this technology and building out the Real Time Crime Center. We have dedicated personnel that will be operating the Real Time Crime Center so this information can be used while an incident is occurring to be more proactive instead of in a reactive mode during the course of investigation.

Moving on to D for prohibited use. We don't have any predictive analytics that are built into any of this technology. Anytime we look at analytics to try to help us determine where we're going to put resources and how we're going to respond to particular crimes in the area, we want to leave that into an actual individual or intel that's looking at data and then talking to officers, detectives, and applying it versus an analytic metrics that comes up in, in some sort of piece of technology. And that's just so that we can ensure that we're interpreting the data and applying it properly, and we're not relying on an algorithm code that was written by somebody outside of our control. We also have, uh, it's best specified that the prohibited use, it can't be based on the individual characteristics.

That's obviously a violation of law, but also work putting inside of the policy. I'm going to move to page 4, Section F, uh, collection and retention. And again, as I mentioned, that is where we put some pretty significant restrictions in the policy, uh, the 14 days on all cameras that are owned by us. And to kind of go back to Chair Constance's questions, those cameras that are owned by us, those are our feeds. So all of that is public record in that 14 days, whether we caption attached to a case or not, because we own that footage.

If we need access to one of our own cameras outside of that 14-day window, we just simply can't recover it. It's, it's gone from the system. Um, and then we also have two other policies that currently exist within the, the police department that covers digital evidence collection and criminal justice information disposal of information that comes into the police department. So we have multiple policies that kind of govern all this information that comes into the police Police Department, that isn't necessarily worthy of adding 2 or 3 additional pages to try to get into that since they are standalone policies and they are also available to the public. I have a question for you, um, Ms. Silvers.

I have a concern from constituents that I was hoping that maybe you could address a little bit, uh, and the concern is that these cameras, um, may be granted access, uh, to ICE. Can you talk about that a little bit? So there's limitations in the— from our perspective, we can't control what the— what a business or what a private citizen does with their cameras. What we can control is when we have access to the cameras, and we have some— again, this is another pretty significant limitation that we put in the policy. Most even restrictive policies open it up to— for legitimate law enforcement purposes, we will share this information.

A lot of agencies actually give other law enforcement jurisdictions complete access to their information that they can tap into the feeds, uh, as long as it's for legitimate law enforcement purposes, which generally means if you're a law enforcement agency, it's kind of granted. Uh, that is prohibited by the policy. In fact, any law enforcement agency that requests access to the law enforcement or to the footage that we have, not only does it have to be for a legitimate law enforcement purpose, but every single request has to be approved by me. So I will know every single agency that is being given any of this information that we, um, that we have. And we're not giving them access— we wouldn't give them access to a feed.

We'd give them access to if they have a request. Um, you know, say the state troopers is investigating a homicide and, you know, we potentially have evidence, uh, we would supply them. You know, if I granted that, we would supply them with that piece of evidence that they request versus an open access And one of the things, and it's articulated in the policy, that goes into the decision-making on whether or not we're going to grant access to our information is it has to comply with this policy. So if they're asking for it and it's in violation of this policy, we're not going to let another law enforcement agency have access to that information. So that's why we put those controls in measure— in place.

Thank you.

Yeah, uh, so my question goes back to, uh, Section C, the authorized use. So it does talk in here about policy, state law, federal regulation, but I see that municipal code is not mentioned. And I know that there are a couple of instances where UASs and Facial recognition is mentioned in code, and I am fully confident that right now the policy aligns with that municipal law, but, um, would love to make sure that this particular section encapsulates that for the future.

Yes, sir, I can add that. I think it's in here somewhere. I need to get to it, but, uh, yes.

Thank you. Um, let's go to— meet me on page 4, Section G, for protections. All of our evidence— you can just take out this policy. We already have a lot of video evidence that we collect— body-worn camera, dashcam cameras, and all other digital technology that is evidence that we already have a government secure evidence management system that's FedRAMP certified, it's encrypted, it's got audit trails, and so this information will be put into that same.

Evidence system, uh, and maintained where it's login and password protected. So anybody that even views it gets logged— dates, times, who viewed it. And so it's easy to run an audit trail and determine what videos or what technology, what footage is being viewed, uh, and for what purpose. So that's part of the protections that we've already had in place for all of our evidence stuff, and this falls into the exact same information.

Page 5, I, access to the Real Time Crime Center. One of the concerns that we've heard is how much information is accessible to just all employees throughout the police department. So the limited access to these technologies to employees within the Real Time Crime Center, we anticipate that we'll have both professional staff and SOAR members that are full-time assigned to the Real Time Crime Center, and this data information is accessible by them. They'll be processing requests that come in from officers or detectives that the entire department, or just because you're a sworn officer doesn't mean you're going to be able to access these databases and pull out information even if you have a legitimate purpose. Those requests will be going through those employees.

Section J, Privacy.

We— here's where we talk about the constitutionally protected activities. We put in two things as potentially being able to use some of this technology. This This is kind of one of those conversations where we want to allow either a specific or credible threat, or that an organizer requests that we use this technology because they have a concern. And again, this is kind of that delicate balance where we're trying to— we want to keep protected speech activities safe and secure. We also don't want to overreach where there's a concern that we're going to be doing this, you know, using camera technology where there isn't a credible threat.

So that's That's one of those I think, you know, over the next couple of weeks there's certainly some opinions that, that may be brought forward to try to hone that language to where it meets the exact needs that we're trying to accomplish. We also have specific restrictions on collecting data for any areas where there, there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. Um, a court-approved search warrant must be obtained to get access or to allow us to record in areas where that is an expectation of privacy, or there's some sort of immediate life safety emergency before we can utilize these cameras in the area where there's— where there is an expectation of privacy. We have two reporting components. One of them is a quarterly review.

We'll probably modify this sentence a little bit to say at a minimum it will happen every quarter. That quarterly review will be done by myself and the Municipal Attorney's Office, and that quarterly review is specifically to look at the balance between are we getting a benefit out of this, weighing that against the expectation of privacy or citizens' privacy. And because that's something that we're always going to weigh, we're always going to monitor that, that risk-benefit. And so doing that a minimum of every quarter, more often if something, some sort of concern comes up, we can certainly do it often, but at minimum we'll do that every quarter. Again, to keep that privacy concerns in the forefront.

And then annually we'll do an annual report that is going to include the number of feeds that we'll monitor, external agency sharing if we have done any external agency sharing, so that won't be a secret, any warrants obtained because of this technology. So in other words, we use it as an investigative tool and we were able to get, you know, arrest warrants or search warrants because of it. Any misdemeanor or felony arrests that are linked to the use of this technology. So again, reason for a criminal investigation, we were able to get a felony arrest warrant for Homicide, would be an example. And then the number of First Amendment events where video recording was obtained.

So I mentioned up there a little bit earlier about whether there's a credible threat or we're being asked by an organizer to have recordings. We would report back that we had, you know, 2 protests or First Amendment type of events that we use recording devices. I would expect that that number is going to be right around zero every year. With that, that's the end of this policy.

Yes, Mr. Rivera. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Chair. Sorry, I'm, I'm going through this in detail because that's what I like to do with these things. I'm a little behind.

So on— what is this— Section H, where it talks about the record retention, records division for citizens' requests, it talks about violation of a court order. It is— maybe I just didn't notice it— is that a normal part of review process for citizens' requests? Yes, anytime there is a request for a public record, the Records Division looks at that records request, and there is actually a binder— it's relatively thick— on what has to be redacted, what can be released, when it can be released, if it's attached to a case. We regularly review that process with the Municipal Attorney's Office to make sure that we are not releasing things that we shouldn't be, in all of our, in all of our releases. Okay, thank you.

See, additional questions. I know we're short on time. Just the, the one piece I'm still trying to process is the difference between your cameras and using other people's cameras, and the distinction between access to that information, when that, when that, when that becomes yours, when you own it, and the different sort of that, that separation. Because it— this, this is a combination of both, is that correct? Yes.

Okay. And so that's the piece I'm still trying to process, is, is accessing other people's cameras, and if that is explicitly— if there's explicit sort of policies around the use of that versus your own cameras and how that information is handled. And to, to Mr. Constance's question, like, when that becomes— when we, when we have control of it, when it becomes ours. So I'll answer that question, then maybe we can add a little piece of the policy to make it a little bit clearer. So think about an employee in the Real Time Crime Center that we've been granted access to a business's cameras to the outside.

And they've got, you know, a consistent theme or pattern of vandalism, for example. And so based on that pattern, our Real Time Crime Center employees are now accessing the camera that they've been given access to, and they're watching what's happening outside of that business for potential vandalism. And nothing happens, or let's say nothing happens, that video is being viewed in real time that video is being retained by the business owner. So we're just watching— not by us, we're just watching a video, their video, their cameras in real time. And so we don't— there's nothing we have to give anybody, right?

But just because we've seen it, our observations are not public record. You can't say, hey, Officer, what did you see? You know, so let's assume now that they see something and it's a crime that's taken place. Then that, our access gives us the ability to take that 1-minute, 2-minute, 5-minute clip of video and extract it. They still have, they still have their digital stuff.

We're taking a copy of it, just like if they handed us a thumb drive, right? We're doing that thumb drive electronically. Now that we did that, it's like I own that thumb drive. That is now a piece of evidence, potentially discoverable based on if you were to ask for records. You can have a written agreement with them that allows you to extract that.

That's correct. And then we would store that in our evidence management system. Thanks. Okay, I'm sure that there'll be more, more questions coming, but, uh, appreciate your time today. I appreciate going over that.

Um, Director Ratz, would you like to come up and do a brief presentation on the RFP?

Good morning everyone, Kimberly Rash with the Anchorage Health Department. Um, so I presented this probably 2 meetings ago, introduced it, and then I just wanted to provide a little bit more of an update. So last night, um, the mayor's office, ACDA, and the health department had an information session on the micro-unit for recovery residents, and you can listen to that on the mayor's Facebook page as well as ACDH's project page. So currently the Health Department has an RFP out for a community behavioral health and treatment and recovery supports provider that is currently posted in BidExpress, and the proposals are due October 15th by 12:00 PM. The project background, and this kind of ties into Thea's earlier presentation that she provided to the body just now, that this initiative is part of the MOA's broader response to homelessness and substance use, aiming to rapidly expand access to transitional housing, scale up low-barrier treatment models, and improve outcomes and cost-effectiveness.

Of community health systems. The program will support the vision developed by the Anchorage Assemblies Complex Behavioral Health Task Force focusing on increased healthcare engagement, reduced homelessness, and effective, efficient use of community resources. Some key components of the project: the selected provider will be responsible for operating the recovery residence and the micro-units, providing outpatient SUD treatment and recovery services at the MOA-owned facility, which is the former Golden Lion, optional service delivery at additional MOA-funded locations such as low-barrier shelters and Anchorage Safety Center. The provider will be partnering with outreach teams including APD's HOPE team, AFD's mobile crisis teams, the safety patrol, as well as our own mobile clinic team. This project, as we know, was funded wholly by the opioid settlement— opioid remediation settlement funds.

And as such, there has to be a focus on opioid use disorder, including medication-assisted treatment, outpatient behavioral health services, peer support and supportive housing, transportation and wraparound care, and services for individuals with co-occurring mental health conditions. The providers are— must demonstrate a capability in delivering evidence-based treatment, including harm reduction and recovery-oriented care. Operating recovery residences, providing outpatient SUD behavioral health services, collaborating with community partners and municipal teams, and supporting participants through employment, housing, peer support, and aftercare. So again, you can view the live feed on the mayor's Facebook page as well as ACBA's project page if you would like to find out some more information. Thanks, Sophie.

Do you have a timeline on when you think this provider will be selected? Yes, so currently we are looking probably in November to come forth with body. Thanks very much. So, other questions? Thanks for your time.

Okay, we've got time for public comment. Do we have anybody who would like to— uh, why don't you come up here? Can we set up a microphone for Welcome. As you know, state your name for the record and you'll have 3 minutes. Okay, uh, Jamie Lopez East Anchorage.

Good morning, Mr. President, Mr. Johnson, and Ms. Watson. Uh, unprepared remarks, oh, but you know, you know what I'm gonna say. So, uh, public health and safety, it means different things to different people. And, uh, you know, pretty much watching the presentation of today, you know, different presentations. So the first one is obviously specifically based on mobile crisis team, mobile intervention team, and things of that nature.

Uh, you know, it's, it's— on one hand, I appreciate the, you know, the data flow diagram session, essentially the processes involved. But, um, yeah, you know, I, uh, I look at this in a top-level way. Where, you know, you can't police your way out there. You can't perform as many regression analyses as you want because the data is bad and you're getting slanted data and, you know, from the people that are going out there because they tend not to— or the people that are outside tend not to identify with the police that are going in, so it's never going to be good data. But yeah, The cold is coming.

There isn't enough housing. And so, you know, there are a lot of people in this room who have not been exposed to adversity in any way or had to deal with the elements that are outside. And they're unforgiving. They don't discriminate when they come at you. And so the simple fact of the matter is I look at the policies coming as well— coming— that are being pushed forward, and I see bad judgment because the outcomes are predictable when you pursue a path where you do not allow people any quarter.

And if they can't build layers of insulation and there is no housing, they're going to start turning into popsicles and losing fingers and toes. I mean, the question is what metrics are going to be covered for that, like the number of outdoor deaths policy by APD right now is if you die without a fixed address, you know, you're counted as an outdoor death. If you die outside and it's suspicious, they don't count you. If you die in transit, they don't count you. If you die in a hospital, they don't count you, or in a shelter, or anything else.

But there are any number of unhoused people that are dying inside at the same time, and maybe they popped in for a day or two, but it just doesn't mean that they don't exist. And so that's kind of how it goes. And, you know, I do believe, you know, you understand it, Jukavik. You lived there for a long time. Could you stay outside, you know, a week in the cold up there?

I don't think so. I lived in Fairbanks for a couple years, and it was 60 below, and I'm cold. And I think Mr. Johnson, you understand this as well, it's your background and experience and, you know, time served. And Mr. Rivera cares, and Mr. Sharkey gets it, you know. And I think Mr. Ashe also cares, but there are other people that I knew that— it's not that they don't care, but, but it is a judgment process with predictable outcomes.

And obviously, uh, I'm hoping at the very least that you reevaluate, uh, you know, the process that you're going forward. You need to have more support outside, not just the reaction, uh, to the calls people talking in foreign series language. Thank you very much. Thanks, thanks so much for being here. Would anybody else like to testify at this time?

I don't see anybody else. Any comments from members? Oh, okay. Uh, thanks so much for being here everybody today. Uh, we are in order.