- But I wanted to introduce to you the father of the Safe and City Task Force and the brains behind the
- project, Mayor John Fernandez. John. Good morning and thanks for coming here today. I'm tempted to make
- a joke about the father comment but we're being taped so I figure I better be good this morning. Actually
- Chuck and his group have
- done a wonderful job on this project, and I want to thank Dr. Barnser right off the bat for all the
- time and effort he's put into this project. There's no way that we could have moved forward without
- that kind of commitment and that kind of support from Indiana University. For the last several months,
- we've been working very hard to address what is a very complex issue, and that's the broad subject matter
- of public safety.
- And typically, especially during heat of campaigns and such, the issue gets reduced to very insignificant
- sound bites of quick fixes and slogans. But in reality, there are so many complexities involved with
- these issues that it really does take a thorough analysis and a lot of effort. And moreover, it takes
- a community-based approach
- And that's what we've attempted to do for the last nine or 10 months now is to work through a number
- of complex issues and develop a reasonable and practical plan with many different action items in it
- that we can implement here in Bloomington Monroe County to make a real difference in the issues of public
- safety. So today we've come to an important part of the process.
- The various working groups that Dr. Bonser will be talking about here momentarily have developed a series
- of recommendations in six broad areas. And today we need to hear from all of you on your views on these
- recommendations. We don't pretend for a minute
- to think that we know absolutely everything about these issues. We don't pretend for a minute that our
- recommendations are perfect and that we've covered everything that there is to be covered. So please
- feel free today to talk constructively about the recommendations, point out weaknesses, point out things
- that we can build on, and certainly point out any omissions. We've tried very hard over the
- last year to include as many people as possible, and I think this is a really good effort. And so today
- I want to just simply thank you for coming out on a Saturday to work with your community to develop
- the best plan possible for all of us. So with that, let me also thank BCAP for coming out today to help
- record these proceedings. I think it will be important as we share this information over the next month or so
- with the public and continue to get input. So again, thank you very much for being here today. I'm going
- to turn it over to Dr. Bonser, who's going to lay out our game plan for the rest of the morning and
- afternoon. Thank you. Thanks very much, John. I'd also like to thank everybody for coming out today.
- I'd particularly like to thank the task force for what's been about nine months of hard work for them.
- The mayor and I started, the mayor approached me on this. It was last May. It's almost a year ago. We
- began talking about it and he and I and Chief Kennedy met the mayor's office to discuss it in ways in
- which we might approach trying to improve the safety and the perception of safety in our community.
- And then we had our first task force meeting in July and the task force since then from July till early
- in the fall
- grew to about 60 people, more than 60 people, actually. And there's a list, I believe, in the handout
- that you have. I wanted to introduce to you, however, the task force chairs who have been responsible
- for driving the program and the working groups, which is where most of the work has gone on. And as
- the mayor indicated, we have six working groups within the task force.
- The first one I wanted to introduce is the Youth Programs Workgroup, which is chaired by Mike Fitzgerald.
- Mike. And working with Mike is SPIA graduate assistant Kathy Giles. Where's Kathy? Right here. OK. And
- we're breaking up into these working group sessions here in a bit. And assigned to each of the working
- groups as a recorder, we have some undergraduate SPIA volunteers. They really are volunteers.
- And they're going to be recording and taking notes. And I want to introduce them to you in the youth
- programs group. Matt Bubness, where is Matt? Over here. The second group, the second working group is
- what we've called crime prevention. And the head of that is Carl Salzberg. Carl's in Europe. I'm sorry,
- Cheryl Brown. Yeah, mitigating at risk.
- is Cheryl Brown. Where is Cheryl? Hello. Hello. I'm sorry. Well, it's wrong on my list. I'm sorry. I
- know better. Jay Hoffman. This is screwed up. Hang on. Let me get my other list. Okay.
- Police law enforcement issues is one of our working groups. That was chaired by Roger Parks and Alex
- Weiss. Alex is over here. Roger Parks has an illness and his family was not able to come today. And
- working with them today is Eric Martin over here. Eric's my research assistant and has helped me throughout
- this whole process and the overall project. The mitigating at risk situation.
- situations, and we spell that out in the report about what we mean by that, was chaired by Carl Salzman.
- And the research assistant there is Jay Hoffman. And working with Jay in the group today is Tom Cramsey
- over here. He will be the recorder for that group. We created a group that is a little bit different,
- I guess you would say, in
- safety kinds of issues. We believe that civility was an important component of safety, so we created
- a working group on civility. It was a very difficult, very slippery concept to get a hold of, as you
- can imagine, but I think you will find that their work was really interesting, and they came up with
- some, I think, very valuable recommendations. That group is chaired by Steve Saunders here, and Jay
- Hoffman also worked with Steve.
- The young man, the boy is going to work with them this afternoon, and that group is not here. I'll let
- the group introduce him then. The fourth group is Crime Prevention. That was chaired by Cheryl Brown.
- Sorry, Cheryl, over here. And working with Cheryl was one of our research assistants, Ann Sorensen,
- over here. And finally, we had a group called Enhancing the Safety Environment, which had to do, as
- you will hear,
- with physical kinds of arrangements particularly and things that we might do to the physical environment
- of the community to make it safe and also improve the perception of safety. And that was chaired by
- Dan Sherman over here and his research assistants Ann Sorensen over here. Okay? So those are the groups.
- Now what were we up to? Basically what we're up to was trying to improve, we had really three goals.
- One was to try and improve the capability of the community's law enforcement system. Secondly, to develop
- proactive citizens' programs and techniques and try to enhance both the safety and the perception of
- safety in our community. And finally, to improve citizen civility. So those are the three goals that
- we set out with. Now, as I indicated, we established six working groups to do that and the report
- spells that out, this preliminary report that you have. The task force met once a month throughout most
- of this past nine months, and the working groups met much more frequently than that. So most of the
- work was done in the working groups. In the task force, we would have people appear before us. For example,
- some Lieutenant Comer came and talked about school systems. We had people from the Bloomington Police
- talk with us about
- crime statistics and so on. And we would have programs like that throughout the year. But as I say,
- most of the work went on within the working group sections. I wanted to say also that we regard what
- we're talking about today as a draft. And our plan is to get as much feedback as we possibly can from
- the community on this draft. And then after today,
- Then we'll convert that to a final report, which we will then take back to the task force and to the
- mayor. And we hope to have that done hopefully before we're into the summer very far. Well, before I
- walk through the schedule with you briefly, I wanted to maybe just throw up a couple of transparencies.
- to give you a feel for the overall situation that we were looking at. I'll move through these rather
- quickly. This won't tell you a lot. I'm gonna show you some graphs on this. This is the database
- Bloomington Police Department crime statistics, and it shows you over a period of 1980 to 1990, the
- frequency of a variety of crimes in our community. So I say I'm going to show you some charts on that.
- You can really see what was happening with it. Okay, so
- The top is simply total offenses, and you can see numbers change from 1980 from about, what, 2,300 to
- something over 3,000 in that 15-year period. Violent offenses, you can see the pattern of change there
- over that period. And criminal homicides seem rather random.
- This is going to give you kind of a flavor of what the background statistics that we were looking at
- as we began this project. These are statistics on certain kinds of crime. There's a lot of dispute about
- the rape statistic, because the problem is a lot of rapes aren't reported or aren't reported properly.
- So these are the official statistics.
- Some folks would argue that they very much understand what that real situation is. Robbery statistics,
- as you can see, have gone up considerably. The period since 1980, an aggravated assault has gone up
- particularly since 1980,
- Okay. Total property crimes, burglary, larceny theft patterns over that 15-year period. Again, limited
- crime statistics. And finally, motor vehicle theft and arson statistics.
- These are in the report, but I just want to give you some flavor for those of you who have not been
- involved in the task force with the kind of preliminary data we began with. Okay, we also had a survey
- conducted in the community, citizens in the community. We interviewed in early November, roughly 560,
- 570 persons in the community, randomly selected, of course, and interviewed by the IU Survey Research Center.
- And what we're interested in is finding out how people regarded safety in the community. So their reactions
- to, in a way, perception of safety is what we were, I suppose you could say, coming up with here. The
- first transparency I want to show you has to do with the question where we ask in general, do you think
- people in our community are very friendly, somewhat friendly, not too friendly,
- not friendly at all. And you can see that in there. So it come out somewhat friendly in that category.
- This has to do with the issue of civility and how civility ties in with public safety. That's what we're
- trying to get at here. When we asked the sample how concerned they were personally about grime in our
- community,
- 40% said they were very concerned and roughly 40% said they were somewhat concerned. We tried to get
- a reaction from them about how comfortable people felt in certain kinds of settings. And so this is
- part of that series. This question had to do with
- how safe how safe do you feel when you're at home alone? And you can see the response there. Most people
- felt very safe. Then we asked how safe do you feel alone at night outside in your own neighborhood?
- Again, in a relative half
- of the people surveyed said they felt very, very safe. And a sizable proportion said they felt somewhat
- safe in their own neighborhood. Did you do any work looking at it from the point of view of men and
- women separately? Yeah, we did. Yeah. We also did some cross tabulations, which came out rather interesting.
- Then we ask how safe people feel alone at night in downtown Bloomington. You know, less than half said
- they felt somewhat safe. What's that about the third? Felt very safe. Balance, full concern. When we
- ask them how safe they felt alone at night on the IU campus,
- A sizable portion said they didn't feel very safe. What's interesting, I'm not going to have time to
- show you the cross-tab on this, but it'll be in the report. But when you broke this down by who was
- responding, what came out in the statistic is the people who aren't very familiar with the IU campus
- didn't feel very safe there. People who are very familiar with the IU campus felt
- relatively safe. So these are some of the cross tabs that will come out in the report that are a bit
- more illuminating than these raw statistics. When we ask how safe from crime do you feel in our community,
- a sizable portion felt that they were very safe or somewhat safe. Well, I don't have time to go into
- any more of these.
- as you see the cross tabs are in the report there and you can have a look at them. The bottom line of
- all this is I think the perception of safety in the community is quite high. People generally feel safe
- in the community and feel that we don't, I would argue don't have a serious crime problem right now.
- Although when you look at some of the statistics, some people are concerned about where we're heading.
- So anyway, at the moment, I think the perception of safety is fine, but I'm clear where the training
- is going. Okay, again, you can look at that yourself in more detail. I wish I had more time to go into
- it, but we want to spend most of our time today in the working groups and getting your feedback. Any
- questions on what I covered there?
- Okay, I'd like to walk through the schedule with you briefly. Everyone by now should have been assigned
- to a working group section. We have three working group sections this morning and two this afternoon.
- This morning, the youth programs working group chaired by Mike Fitzgerald is going to meet in the bank
- one is abandoned room, which is down this hall.
- past the main hallway and to the left. And the crime prevention and mitigating at risk groups are going
- to be meeting to the room immediately to your right as you come out of this room. It's called the J
- room. And the third group, the bank, the police law enforcement group is going to be meeting in the
- bank one Hanson room, which is again down the hall, past the main lobby there.
- and on your left. The sessions will go on until 12 o'clock there. And then we'll meet back here for
- lunch. And then we'll go into, there's no program at lunch. We'll go back into an afternoon session
- for an hour and a half from 1 until 2.30. And I'll give you those assignments then, those room assignments
- then. They're different than what shows in this program. Finally, we'll meet back here at 2.30.
- and receive reports on the feedback to the recommendations from the working group chairs. And we've
- allocated an hour or so for that report. Okay, are there any questions on that? Yeah, Steve. Good feedback, yeah.
- Well, it is mixed up a bit because we're only dealing with three sessions this morning and two this
- afternoon. I think I'd like to try it the way we have it set up right now, and we'll see how it goes.
- Just a word about the process in the working groups. Again, the purpose is to obtain feedback. And what
- we're interested in, these kinds of questions, did our working group identify the problems correctly?
- Were the right issues covered? Do the working group recommendations make sense? Can they be realistically
- implemented? So we're trying to get ideas from you and reactions from you with regard to those questions
- and any recommendations you may have that we missed, things that you think we need to explore.
- As I say, each working group will be chaired
- by the chairman of that, each roundtable discussion group chaired by the working group chairman with
- the assistance of their graduate assistant and a recorder there to take notes. So again, the questions
- of the working group should revolve around these. One, did the working group get it right? Other, have
- we missed or ignored important issues or programs? Secondly, which recommendations do you think are
- most important in the working group? Do you have other ideas?
- And finally, moving from policy to action, given the policy recommendations that we've made, how do
- we move from there to implementation? So, that's all I had to say about that. Let me ask if there are
- any questions before we break up into the working groups, okay? Everyone know where you're supposed
- to go? Okay, we'll see you back here then at 12 o'clock.
- And with respect to resources, we made three particular recommendations. And for the most part, these
- are recommendations which in the last several weeks and months have actually, we now know that these
- things are going to happen. So we're kind of pleased by that. First of which, our recommendation is
- that the Bloomington Police Department increase its staffing. The city has taken some very positive
- steps in recent years to do that. We believe that's a positive trend.
- Based on our analysis, the department does not have sufficient sworn resources. And I think I should
- point out also, and I think it's an often raised question, it is the case that there are other large
- law enforcement agencies in this area. And certainly with respect to some operations, access to those
- other organizations is valuable, but I think
- At the end of the day, crime control strategy in Bloomington is going to be the responsibility of the
- Bloomington Police Department. And I think it's incumbent upon the city to make sure that that department
- has enough resources to do that. And we applaud the plan to move into the new police facility. We think
- it's going to be terrific over there, significantly enhance the capacity for police community interaction.
- We recommend further that the department investigate other kinds of facilities. For example, small facilities
- in shopping centers, in public housing, downtown. Once again, the goal being to increase the number
- of contacts between police officers and citizens in non-threatening and in non-emergency situations.
- Every one of those contacts that you have, you strengthen that relationship and it works out being for
- the better. Finally, there's a plan
- being implemented now to establish a combined public safety communications facility which would involve
- the local law enforcement agencies and police and EMS. That's certainly an appropriate plan and we commend
- that. Now with respect to managing resources, there are a couple of general directions. First,
- the Bloomington Police Management Information Systems is at present inadequate
- to do much strategizing or, for that matter, actually to do much managing. So steps are underway now
- to develop a new management information system. We applaud those. Some of us on the task force will
- be working towards the implementation of that. And what will come out of that, I believe, is the capacity
- to much more effectively manage the resources of the department. Now by that, we mean in a couple of
- areas. For one,
- We need to closely look at the allocation of police resources, both respect to temporal allocation,
- geographic allocation, that has implications for work scheduling. We want to make sure that the department
- administration has the capacity to put officers in the places where they need to go and at the times
- where they need to be there. This is very, very important. If you're going to have a crime control strategy,
- that strategy is going to be based largely on your capacity
- to be responsive to change in crime patterns. You need to have the officers to do that. That's going
- to take some work, but I'm quite sure we can get there. The second area that holds considerable progress,
- and we've heard that in a number of groups today, is the general area of geographic information systems.
- We now have the capacity to produce essentially real-time maps of crime patterns and disorder in our
- community. That's going to be invaluable information.
- Many cities now take this information and make it available on their worldwide webpage. For example,
- citizens can query the webpage and find out about crime in their neighborhoods. And of course, the reason
- why that's so important is that for most people in most neighborhoods, there's less crime than they
- think there is. And they get to see that in a fairly clear presentation. The other application of this
- GIS technology, of course, is for police officers.
- In Chicago now, for example, a police officer can walk into a police station and make a real-time inquiry
- about crime in their own beat. They can find out what crimes occurred in the last 12 to 24 hours in
- their beat and what information is relevant. So it's a very, very valuable tool. But the real objective
- of all this improvement in kind of information systems is that the department can shift its focus from
- one of incident-driven policing, in which we simply
- wait for 911 call to come in and then go take care of it and then go do something else to an emphasis
- on solving problems. Knowing about the nature of problems in the community will allow the BPD to solve
- those problems or a substantial number of them and that's certainly an objective. Finally we think there's
- two areas in which the department needs to closely reevaluate its mission. The first is in the area
- of managing criminal investigations. The department needs to look again
- at its work scheduling for investigators to make sure that that's consistent with the workload demands.
- And they need to improve their capability of communicating with victims and witnesses about the status
- of criminal investigations. There are management information systems that are available that have been
- developed some time ago that can do that. And our final recommendation has to do with the general orientation
- for the Department towards community policing.
- Now community policing is a word that we often hear in those of us in the police community often wonder
- out loud what it means. But what it means in general terms is the following. One, you have an organization
- that is more interested in solving problems than responding to incidents. We've talked about how to
- do that. It's an organization that's decentralized, one in which beat officers and supervisors
- and neighborhood police officers work in their communities to solve problems and to
- fix the problems in those communities. Finally, you have an organization that's responsive to the community.
- And by that, we mean an organization which goes to community meetings, talks to neighborhoods, talks
- to residents, but then does what the people want them to do. And that's an important change. That's
- a big change. And I believe that the resources and the capacity to do that is in place now in the police
- department.
- And I think these changes that we make with respect to infrastructure will facilitate those and support
- that general trend.
- anything else? Okay for the information of the working group chairs the sequence I'm going to do this
- in is Mike Fitzgerald will be next followed by Cheryl Brown and then Jay is going to report for Carl
- Salzman and then Steve Saunders and Dan Sherman. So Mike Fitzgerald on youth programs.
- background on the youth programs is just to say that what we found every week during the entire process
- was four or five more great programs that we hadn't known about the week before. And I think from our
- point of view the really good news is that everywhere around the community we have really strong programs
- that are together. The bad news
- or what we think is the key need is a means to coordinate and facilitate the overlaps that are inevitable
- in many of those programs. And that really leads into the centerpiece of the proposals from youth programs,
- and that is that there be an establishment of a joint city county commission for youth. We were very
- lucky in our meeting just now to have with us the mayor,
- some commissioners and people from both the City and County Council, and I think that there's a universal
- acclamation about this notion for the establishment of such a commission. I'm not going to go over all
- of the purposes and notes that are outlined in written form. I think the key thing to highlight is that
- this would be a vehicle for coordination, for helping to identify certain redundancies
- and solving certain of those problems. One good example is that there are 30 great mentoring programs
- or good mentoring programs here in Monroe County. However, there's no unified method right now for training
- mentors or establishing a certain baseline of professional criteria for those. This is the type of thing
- that such a commission could do.
- The specific recommendation would be that both the city and the county authorize in no later than a
- June by July 1 timeframe a general authorization resolution stating their support behind this proposition.
- And then by September each of them working out a mission statement that would have certain recommendations
- on composition, et cetera.
- The notion would be that a youth advisory board be created that is composed of youth around the entire
- county and that one or two youth sit on this commission so that they can facilitate ideas back and forth
- between youth and the community figures that would be represented here so that it's a way to really
- facilitate dialogue
- The further recommendation would be that the MCCSC meet and discuss the mission statement that's being
- formulated here and hopefully adopt a resolution supporting this proposition because the recognition
- is that there will need to be a really active dialogue between the school system and the resources that
- they control and such a youth commission.
- Kathy, have I left anything out on the Youth Commission? Right. I think the other points then, in terms
- of the generalities there, that it would be a vehicle to implement a variety of different suggestions,
- identify the gaps, really try to promote those programs which are the most important, but not necessarily,
- as John Fernandez said,
- supporting its own programs and competing with resources of other groups, just helping to facilitate
- that process. Going then very quickly over some of the things that we discussed, the notion of whether
- there should be one or multiple gathering places for youth, I'm not going to try to go into any detail
- again with the limited time. It's in the notes.
- We think it's very important to have a variety of opportunities for youth to come together
- in an extracurricular circumstance, but also using the schools in certain ways. For example, really
- trying to promote and increase the opportunities for adults in the community, particularly retired and
- semi-retired people, to interact with the students in much more broader based ways.
- This can be done in cooperation with the school system in a number of ways. I think I already mentioned
- the mentoring program coordination, the mentoring program training, so I won't go back over that.
- The resource identification in the community of parenting resources, the Sunrise Publications Parenting
- Guide is the best that we've got so far, just a start obviously. Many of you are familiar with that.
- It lists probably a thousand different organizations of one sort or another that are doing this or that
- on a variety of different functions. We want to continue to use that as a baseline to continue to improve
- it and then get it out
- Again, reaching to different aspects of the community. We want to involve businesses in creating parenting
- programs. The guide has a checklist and information on how businesses can do that. We want to have youth
- bulletin boards throughout the community to advertise the things that are happening for youth, both
- in general and specific events that are coming up. We want to have an annual youth exposition that really
- broadens over some of the things that have been done in the past that brings in job fairs, job information
- with it, for youth, under this umbrella, so that we not only see what all of the youth organizations
- are, but we start to understand the opportunities for youth. We want to improve and increase the Indiana
- University student volunteerism that already exists. Again, it's a question of bringing together the
- information and disseminating it back out.
- We also had the idea for creating some what we'll call school videos here on the outline, which is code
- for making the MCCSE a little more user-friendly in a variety of ways, particularly to people who might
- be parents of at-risk youth who have a certain feeling of disenfranchisement
- and we want to get them involved to know how to get into the MCCSC. And we think that videos and other
- information so that there are multiple points of access could help facilitate that in many ways. And
- then getting that video out into the parenting programs in the businesses, again, just disseminating
- information at all levels. I think that really highlights the key that we've had.
- Questions or comments? Thanks. Thanks very much, Mike. Cheryl Brown on crime prevention. Cheryl? OK.
- Our committee, we discuss crime prevention. We learned that through the survey,
- There wasn't that much crime in Bloomington as people felt there was, but we felt like we still needed
- to talk about it because there was enough people that were concerned about crime in our community that
- they felt like it was something, some important issue. So going forward, we decided that there were
- a lot of groups already in Bloomington that were working on issues in crime. A lot of the task force
- had already started some of the same things we were discussing.
- And they could deal with them in different ways that we couldn't. So we decided that the biggest thing
- that crime prevention could do was education. And we felt like through packets that were sent out, we
- discussed sending them out through different organizations that deal with people that have problems,
- housing additions, packets would go out to new people buying homes.
- We could deal with that that a way. And to the school systems that are dealing with crimes, maybe there
- would be some things that some of the social services could help them with that have problems in the
- schools. We dealt with putting it in the newspaper. The HT could run different things on that in the
- different columns. Different organizations could
- present their issues on a monthly basis. We would run different issues through the HT for preventing crime.
- We decided that we could provide citizens with an up-to-date information on an ongoing basis as to what's
- going on in Bloomington with the City Safe Civil Task Force. Some of the things that we discussed that
- some of the other groups also went into were the Yoda program,
- alternative transportation, extended outreach education for senior citizens. We talked about mentoring
- programs, parenting resources, we talked about that, and coordinating school volunteer programs. And
- hopefully some of those programs that youth programs and mitigating at risk with the programs that they're
- presenting, crime,
- we felt is that education that they're also giving out would prevent some of the crime that we have.
- And our biggest problem it seems is with the middle school kids and high school, we've got a lot of
- good programs running right now for the grade schools. So we felt like if there was more mentoring programs
- that the youth program is offering, that that would help our crime prevention.
- Educating the smaller kids starting out was our biggest key, and if we could find ways to educate them,
- and we felt like a lot of the human resources organizations that we have out there that are already
- dealing with a lot of kids and families, and they could give that information to the families. We talked
- about a home page, a kids page in the newspaper where we could put something on a kids page in the newspaper for kids.
- The board of realtors, maybe in some of the banks when they're selling the homes and showing homes would
- give information. I know a lot of times you're probably getting information in neighborhoods when you're
- buying a house as to what crime goes on in that neighborhood. So information packets there. Downtown
- community, we talked about alarm systems. I work at the college mall, so I kind of know some of the
- things that the stores there do as far as
- people working in stores as how they teach their employees how to watch for crime. And that same thing
- that neighborhood associations and groups like that do, teaching people how to watch for crime. We also
- talked about how to call crimes in. That would be in the packet, how to call crimes into the police
- department so that they would know whether it's something that they needed to respond to right away.
- Is it a life-threatening crime? What number do you use when you call a crime in?
- This kind of information would be in a packet. Information as to how to design your landscaping would
- be in a packet. And we'd hope that maybe the city would provide people with, or some organization would
- provide people, homeowners or developers, with good ideas as far as how to do that when they're building
- a home or redesigning or remodeling a home, what things would be good.
- We hope that packets and information through the HT, even radio spots, or maybe even some TV spots,
- if someone has the funding to do that, would be good for crime prevention. So education is the main
- thing that I think we can do if we want to prevent crime, is educate people on how to prevent crime
- to themselves and to watch for crimes for others.
- Thanks very much, Cheryl. Jay Hoffman is going to give the report for Carl Salzman on the mitigating
- at-risk situations. Jay? Cheryl and I actually voted for a shorter podium, but we lost.
- I'd like to begin by first recognizing our committee. It was rather small, but it was a committed group.
- And although they haven't made it through the day, some of them, it's been a long day. I would just
- like to briefly recognize them. Our committee was composed of Shadia Garrison, Chuck Holloway,
- Brenda Ogborn, Carl Salzman, and Toby Strout. And I just want to thank them publicly for doing a great
- job and sticking with us all the way. Their deliberation and insights and professional expertise were
- just invaluable in putting together a tremendous amount and variety of recommendations from this committee.
- Mitigating at risk situations is a very diverse topic, and it might actually be, in my opinion, the
- most fun one for the task force because we were able to integrate all the different aspects of crime,
- safety, civility, youth, you name it. We could talk about it in our committee because all those deal
- with at risk situations. In designing some of our recommendations, I was reminded of a quote the other
- day that the truth is all around you. What matters is where you place your focus. And with that, I would
- just like to say that
- Although we approached certain areas and we feel that the truth might be in those, we know there are
- many areas that we didn't touch. And we know that there are many service providers in the community
- who are already doing a tremendous job in these areas. And we hope to build on and innovate and offer
- creativity to those groups, not replace and rebuild. With that, our first recommendation that we proposed
- is called the After School Program, Integrating Foreign Language and Computer Skills. And this one has
- really generated into something very creative and innovative.
- where we're targeting after school kids grades one through five and we realize there are a lot of programs
- already targeting this group but this particular program seeks to teach these kids a foreign language
- skill which may or may not be exciting to them but we hope it encourages their parents because we all
- know that it's easier to learn a foreign language when you're young than when you get a little older
- in college like myself when it gets a little difficult. But how do you make that fun? We thought well
- you know if these kids had a pen pal in Germany or a pen pal in Spain
- And they created a home page that kids all around the world could look at and see that, hey, I'm learning
- this foreign language. I can communicate with you. It's a simple idea, but it's innovative. It's something
- creative. It's something that no one else in the country is trying. And we thought it might spur interest.
- And there was some pretty good comment from this particular recommendation in our group. But people
- did emphasize the need that we do need more youth programs aimed at the 13- to 18-year-old, the true
- at-risk kids. And I know that youth programs did a fantastic job of addressing that, and we need to continue.
- The second recommendation that we put forward was for the suspended and expelled school. And this is
- something that's already up and running in the community. And this gives kids who are suspended or expelled
- from school an opportunity to get back in the saddle, so to speak, an opportunity to get back into school
- to wipe out that expulsion, to wipe out that suspension so that they can learn, which is, after all,
- what school is all about. We're not trying to get rid of kids. We're trying to educate them. And this
- is something that the community started about three months ago
- and our committee, one, wanted just to endorse it, and two, offered some ideas on how we might expand
- it. The third and fourth recommendations really go together, and they talked about comprehensive health
- education. Now, we've all had health education, and unfortunately, many people consider health to be
- that subject right after study hall or right after lunch, and it doesn't really matter if you stay awake,
- and we wanted to get over that conception because
- Healthy people are less at risk for just certain things than other people. And health encompasses more
- than just a healthy lifestyle. We're talking about mental stresses that we all have, and drug and alcohol
- abuse, and all these different things, and the need to comprehensively integrate them throughout your
- life. And we believe that a healthy community is a community that is less at risk for many situations.
- And Shadia did a nice job of putting together many things, many recommendations for not only the schools,
- but for the daycare system. And I think we could see some interesting things come out of that.
- The next recommendation we had was, again, we call it the latch key or summer school program. What might
- be a better name for it is program for middle school kids. We just put forward an idea that we need
- to try to develop more programs for middle way, middle, excuse me, middle school children. And Wendy
- Perry has been instrumental in visiting with us about programs that one, are already in existence and
- two, how we might get the ball rolling on some of these sorts of programs.
- We also put together what we call the Herald Times Spring and Fall Insert. And what we came up with,
- we had several parents on our groups, and they were saying, you know, what's happening is, I get all
- these advertisements in March, and I enroll my kids in these great programs. And then in April, I get
- a whole other set of great advertisements of things my kids can do in the summer, but I've already enrolled
- them in these other events. So we thought, what a great idea it would be if we could coordinate all
- this advertising together in one behemoth advertising effort.
- by the newspaper so that parents could plan their summer vacations and plan Christmas and birthdays
- and holidays and have all these summer school programs available at the same time. And then repeat it
- in the fall so that parents can, again, plan out the school year of, OK, my kid is going to be in flag
- football and then in baseball and whatever the particular interest might be. So it would be nice to
- have all that in one spot that parents can turn to. And we hope to visit with the Herald Times and get
- their input on how we might move forward on that.
- The next recommendation we had was something that the mayor had specifically addressed in many of the
- meetings, and that has to do with the overlap in social service delivery that we have in the community.
- We want to say that the social service delivery we do have is absolutely outstanding, but so many times
- we don't know what different agencies are doing and are they already attacking a particular problem.
- And we thought by getting together in various forums and discussing in roundtable formats what's already
- going on, we might be able to, one, eliminate some overlap and, two, just improve the general delivery
- and getting people to work together a little bit better
- And we hope that some things come out of that. We put forward the alternative transportation network
- proposal. That was really Brenda's idea. And we had concerns that people just can't get from place to
- place as well as they should in a town like this. And that might limit their ability and access to certain
- programs or agencies or whatnot.
- The landlord responsibility neighborhood relations proposal was a proposal that we designed in response
- to the neighborhood association's needs to try to get landlords more involved with their tenants when
- their tenants make mistakes or do things to disrupt neighborhoods. And the whole key to that is finding
- a way to let the landlords know that there's a problem with their property. And so we designed a strategy for that.
- Toby provided an excellent report on domestic violence, which goes into not only what is going on in
- the committee, but offers some good recommendations on how we might step forward. And if we've learned
- anything on this recommendation, it's that we still have a lot to talk about. And I'm sure that we can
- all agree on that.
- And finally, the extended outreach for education and for senior citizens. We had some excellent help
- on that from the Area 10 agency. And that was primarily a recommendation to put together a packet for
- senior citizens, letting them know what sorts of situations they might be at risk for, what sorts of
- scandals they need to be on the lookout for. We wanted to say that this kind of information already
- does exist. We were just trying to brainstorm on ways it might be expanded and on ways that we might
- be able to further distribute this kind of information. That's primarily what our committee focused
- on. It's a lot to digest.
- There's a lot to go through. Are there any questions? Anyone had? Good participation this morning. Yes?
- I recognize the need for it.
- Fortunately, Brenda did a nice job of articulating this, and I'll try to do it justice.
- What we want to do is try to create a seamless web of the different sorts of transportation that are
- already available. Boys and Girls Club offers transportation in a van. The city bus system
- offers transportation on the bus. Indiana University has a busing system. We have taxi services, but
- none of these work together. You don't ride a school bus to get to the mall.
- Now that might be a little bit of a leap, but kids need to get from different places. This is how this
- was all born. And they can get on the school bus and ride home, but they can't get on another bus and
- ride to maybe soccer practice or whatever. And we need to talk about how we can make our transportation
- system more
- efficient for those people who don't have transportation, specifically children and older adults? And
- how do we integrate these different, I mean, if the Boys and Girls Club has a van, can we get that van
- to take them to the bus stop to where they can go so they can get on the bus and make it to soccer practice
- or piano lessons? And it's this kind of intricate planning and intricate development that we need to
- look at. And our recommendation is just a cursory of what might happen. But I think it's kind of an
- exciting idea if we can make it work. It is.
- Well, you're absolutely right. Is Judge Vitalia Farrow still here? She is not. I know that Judge Vitalia
- Farrow has had an opinion on this and has spoken to it. Skipping school is actually, if I'm correct,
- is a misdemeanor. And the courts have been trying to get involved to a certain extent on mediating,
- not necessarily charging, but mediating these sorts of instances where more kids miss school, they have
- to go into some sort of a mock sort of court setting. And I know that's one program that they've experimented with.
- There are other youth programs also in the city already such as show cap, which is something coming
- out of the prosecutor's office where if it's a continual and habitual problem that we can deal with
- him in that sort of an intervention setting. So we do have some social service agencies already dealing
- with the problem, but you're right. It is a very entrenched sort of problem and when it's hard to weed
- out. Uh, I would suppose that there is, but that'd be a question you have to ask the judge. I'm sorry.
- OK, she said both Yoda and the Aurora school are dealing with that. So that's good to know. Thank you.
- And if I could speak, I'm with the probation department. And last year, actually the summer before last,
- Jim Trulock, who was our lead prosecutor for the juvenile division, worked very hard with the schools
- at getting some sort of systematic referral system going. Last year was the first year that that was
- implemented. And we received, I think, in excess of 170 truancy referrals. Not all of them ended up
- on probation. Not all of them ended up going back to school. But I think somewhere in the middle
- compromised with the majority of the families that we came in contact with. One of the things that we're
- trying to work with is to get them before it becomes a truancy problem, 7th or 8th grade. Usually the
- absenteeism starts much sooner, but we realized we need to start someplace, so we looked real closely
- at middle school and high school. So we're working on it. Nobody has a good answer. We don't have a
- turn-on officer in the community. We don't have anybody who goes out every day and knocks on your door
- to make sure Jimmy's at school, but it's certainly something that probation's aware is
- I think the judge said this morning, a gateway crime, that kids who start out not going to school usually
- end up doing other things that they shouldn't be. So we're at least beginning to address it.
- Our next report is from Steve Saunders on the slippery issue of civility.
- If you want to think of this task force as sort of analogous to the university's academic departments,
- I guess Alex would be sort of like the criminal justice department. And as you'll hear from Dan, they're
- sort of the school of architecture. And our committee was the philosophy department. We dealt with issues
- that everyone sort of understands and recognizes at some level, yet are rather difficult to get a grasp on.
- not to say agreement on. I think it was very visionary, though, on the mayor's part and on Dr. Bonser's
- part to recognize that issues of civility, and I'm not even in this
- presentation going to attempt to define that, but we do have a very nice definition in the report. Issues
- of civility are intimately linked with issues of safety, maybe more specifically issues of the perception
- of safety, that if people are in an environment where social capital and social interaction and mutual
- respect break down,
- the expectations about how safe that community is start to break down, and it's a vicious cycle. If
- safety is not present in the community, people become less concerned with quality of life factors, those
- little steps that you take to go out of your way, to be respectful, to learn about other people, to
- enhance what we call the social capital of your community. If you feel that other people are not taking
- responsibility for upholding
- basic safety and security in that committee, so really intimately linked. We also start from a premise
- that the work that we have begun here needs to continue in a very decentralized way. There's not going
- to be a civility czar, there's no civility department in Bloomington, but rather it's something that
- we all kind of understand at one level
- what we're talking about. We just have to take responsibility and feel empowered to enact that in everything
- we do. And there are ways that these issues translate into youth programs and after school camps. We
- can imagine ways that they translate into what goes on in our schools. We can imagine how they translate
- into issues in the public debate in our community, the political debate in our community. When a person
- calls someone on the carpet or calls them out for engaging in political discourse which is over the
- line, that's one way of safeguarding civility. When we do a program for kids at Parks and Rec summer
- camp about mutual respect or politeness, that is a way of improving civility. When we take action on
- or consider reports that the Human Rights Commission publishes about incidents of
- hate or discrimination in our community and resolve to try to do something about that in our own way.
- That's a way of improving civility. So we recognize that these have to go forward in a very decentralized
- way. What city government and the mayor's office can do, though, is to create an environment where people
- feel empowered to take action on these issues, where they are made aware of these issues and feel as
- though they're given some inspiration and tools to make an improvement in their community.
- And there are various ways that city government can do that. Our sort of centerpiece recommendation,
- as I call it, has to do with a media campaign. We're encouraging the mayor's office to
- foster a campaign that would involve media broadly defined in the community. This could incorporate
- everything from public service ads and WFHB and some of the other radio stations to a poster or an artwork
- contest which could be sponsored both for youth and for artists in the community to design original
- posters for the mall, public service announcements and ads that could run in the newspaper, a coordinated
- campaign with a consistent theme that puts forward images and messages about civility. Steve Howard
- has talked about using the cover of the Chamber's business directory next year in some way to emphasize
- and underscore this theme. We talked in the meeting here about how customer service and a campaign or
- training about
- customer service and maintaining high levels of customer service in business, local business, is one
- way of improving civility. And so a media campaign is part of this strategy. Another part of the strategy
- involves working with neighborhood associations. We recognize the really key role that neighborhood
- associations and strong neighborhood associations play in maintaining a tenor of civility in the community.
- One of our recommendations has to do with encouraging neighborhood
- members of neighborhood associations and members of neighborhoods to get to know their student tenants
- since the friction between student tenants and landlords and permanent residents of a neighborhood is
- often a flashpoint for a breakdown in civility and so we have a recommendation which complements the
- recommendation in the mitigating at-risk situations that recommendation calls upon landlords to accept
- their responsibility for
- encouraging civil behavior on the part of their attendance, our recommendation calls on the permanent
- residents of community and officers of neighborhood associations to really make that effort to get to
- know your student tenants, to get to know the people who live in your community, because as we heard
- it very eloquently put by a number of neighborhood association representatives, if you make that
- first step in that initial effort to get to know people before a flashpoint occurs, that can have a
- very profound impact on how a situation is resolved or not resolved when a problem arises between a
- local student tenant and a permanent resident of a community. Some new ideas came out of the session
- that we just had, the idea of awards, bestowing recognitions that we should encourage the Bloomington
- voice to include in its best of Bloomington
- best customer service, most civil public official, lots of different creative recognitions that we can
- foster and encourage to get people thinking about this issue.
- I refer you to our report for more detailed discussion. I've hit just a couple of our major and more
- practical recommendations. We have tried to remain as practical as possible and to think about what
- city government can realistically do to improve this issue and to encourage debate on this issue. There's
- a brief report on what the schools are doing and also a report that provides just a good working definition
- of civility for those of you who are wondering how we define our terms in this respect.
- So with that, I'd be pleased to know any questions you have specifically about what we've done or any
- additional comments and suggestions. Yeah. Thanks very much.
- Thank you. I appreciate that. And I would be remiss, too, if I didn't recognize the members of the task
- force, members of my committee who are here as well, or at least who have been here for part of the
- day. Steve Boncheck from Harmony School, John Coomer, Superintendent, Dr. John Coomer from MCCSC,
- Jay Hoffman, who is invaluable in keeping the committee going and writing and drafting a number of our
- recommendations, Steve Howard from the Chamber of Commerce, Terry Skerven from the College Mall, a very
- high profile group and a group which
- presides over institutions and organizations that can really foster this message and disseminate it
- out into the community. So thanks, Jack. Thanks very much, Steve. There is a list of the task force
- members in the handout we gave you this morning. The final report is from Dan Sherman, Enhancing the
- Safety Environment. Dan?
- Thanks. As Chuck said, our committee had to do with ways in which the physical environment or changes
- in the physical environment can reduce crime or improve safety. We had seven proposals, and I asked
- our group this afternoon to choose what they thought was important, and we'd go down the line based
- upon their ranking of importance. And the first one was neighborhood improvements.
- be more aptly named neighborhood maintenance. It's based upon the theory or the broken windows phenomenon.
- And I think all of you on the test course have probably read more than you want to hear about broken
- windows. But the idea is that if you leave a broken window unrepared
- Other windows will be broken because people will see that the property is not being cared for. This
- leads to withdrawal of the people in the area and invites more crime. Simply put, order invites order,
- disorder invites disorder. So this is a proactive measure. And the idea is that if in Bloomington,
- neighborhood associations,
- and the City's Housing and Neighborhood Development Department work together and look at physical
- deterioration in the neighborhoods and address it, we'll be protecting ourselves from future crime.
- When this was presented to our group, we
- We heard suggestions that, well, we shouldn't leave this just to the neighborhoods. We have graffiti
- in the downtown. We have People's Park with litter. We should certainly have initiatives that address
- that. So that's something that you all brought to the issue today. We got into a discussion about just
- issues of civility or issues of neighbors relating to each other. There was some talk about,
- mediation between neighbors that disagree about the landscape or neighborhood issues. In terms of suggestions
- from the group, the group wanted the city to be more active in enforcement and provide more assistance
- to the neighborhood associations. One good idea was something like our rights and responsibilities brochure
- for renters and landlords. But it would be a neighborhood.
- or neighbor rights and responsibilities brochure, where we'd outline what laws are in place in regard
- to how you keep your property, and would indicate how one can go about getting violations of those ordinances
- enforced. So that was a good suggestion we picked up today. Second on the list of seven.
- had to do with crime reports and using the crime reports to gather information about the physical environment
- so that people in a position to make decisions about changes in the physical environment, developers,
- the city, will have access to information about what's, for example, if a crime report said someone
- was assaulted mid-block,
- And there was no lighting. And it was clear that a lack of lighting made a difference. This information
- would be filtered up. And when decisions on lighting were made, there would be access to incidence reports
- and whether or not lighting made a difference. And those who were deciding about lighting would say,
- ah, this means that we should put our money here versus somewhere else.
- This applies to all sorts of things that both the city and private individuals do. Landscaping, just
- maintaining landscaping and keeping landscaping low can make a difference in reduction in crime. So
- this was well received by the group. I think there was some discussion about including actions of the
- victim and not only getting beyond just
- suggestions on the physical environment, but also get information about how individuals can change their
- behavior in order to reduce their chances of being a victim of a crime. Let's see. The idea in brief
- is that we have easily identifiable information about the context of a crime, that it's easily retrievable,
- And that it's regularly analyzed and made available to both public and private sector so that you have
- timely and accurate information that can be used by those who are in a position to invest in changes
- in the physical environment. The third topic we took up was residential safety. And the idea here is that,
- You provide homeowners and renters information about the incidence of crime. And we heard about a suggestion
- that we have a map of the incidence of crime for the city as a whole. And that's one of our proposals
- here, is that we have that on the web, that we make it available at hard copy and places like the library
- or the police department. If possible, if the HT would agree, we would
- make it available for it to be placed in the paper periodically so that anyone could say, oh, this is
- where crime occurs. This is where it doesn't occur. What kind of crime is it? The second part of the
- proposal is to provide at least homeowners access to, well, let them know that we already have a program
- in the police department where an officer will go out and advise homeowners about how to change
- aspects of their property, secure their doors, secure their windows, cut back their landscaping, have
- outdoor lighting, and elaborate on that so that it fits the risks as they're revealed in this map. When
- it comes to renters, we suggest that renters, at the time they are leasing property, have
- also access to this map, and also have some way of knowing whether the prospective apartment is a safe
- one. So give them brochures, a checklist of what you would want to see in an apartment. Also bring in
- the apartment owners and have a voluntary program where appropriate owners
- Apartment owners go beyond what's in the ordinance and take special measures to ensure the safety of
- the tenants, get special recognition so that if tenants think that's important, they know which apartments
- to go to. So this is based upon a market model that people will make their own decisions and just provide
- them with good information.
- If that doesn't work, and we have a town where we have very close to full occupancy so that tenants
- aren't always in a position of freely choosing where they live, if that's determined to be a problem,
- then this report notes that we may have to go into changes in the ordinance. And one of the possibilities
- there is requiring
- lighting at entryways. Apparently that's not required at the code and some places don't have lighting
- at entryways and it would be a good idea. The next three proposals have to do with lighting and sidewalks
- and these came from the survey and you've heard about the survey. One of the
- striking elements of the responses when it came to what made you feel insecure about Bloomington was
- a lack of lighting and problems with a lack of sidewalks, or sidewalks in poor condition. So these proposals,
- and there are three of them, are to promote our existing lighting program. We do have one.
- It's a way neighborhoods can get lighting. Our current lighting is predominantly serving vehicles, and
- we're proposing that we phase in more pedestrian-oriented lighting, which is mid-block lighting, lighting
- which is lower, which is under the tree crown, rather than higher up. In terms of sidewalks, basically
- we need more sidewalks, and we need sidewalks that are in better condition.
- need to find ways to fund it. And this is an obligation that will be borne both by the public sector
- and private sector. And the next proposal has to do with both lighting and sidewalks in the near downtown,
- near campus area. What the committee decide is that there is a lot of nighttime traffic in those areas,
- and both the lighting and sidewalks are inadequate.
- What I heard from the committee this afternoon is that we should expand that initiative to consider
- other areas, perhaps the West Side, wherever those needs exist. The last proposal is one to set up a
- forum on crime prevention through environmental design, which I found out today has the nickname of CEPTED.
- a way of looking at the physical landscape. I don't know if it's a discipline, but it's an area of study
- that's been around for a while and makes some concrete proposals about how you design facilities. And
- as a committee, we saw some real promise here, but we didn't know how it would work in Bloomington.
- So we suggested that we have a forum that, at this forum, we have
- people who are investing in making capital improvements, developers, designers, city engineers, city
- planning department, and familiarize them with these concepts and have the forum address whether it
- applies in Bloomington. One of the big issues, at least I can see in Bloomington, is how do you balance
- safety measures with aesthetic considerations, privacy considerations, and hopefully we could hear from
- an expert and see how those compromises are made and allow people to incorporate these ideas into their
- decisions about changes in the physical environment. One suggestion here was that we do this in concert
- with the 1998 review of our master plan.
- So we'll certainly do that. Another suggestion was that there are some, I guess we get the word out
- that we have more forums or conferences where people can learn about ways that they can protect themselves
- by changing the physical landscape. With that, those are our seven proposals. Thanks, Dan. Anybody have
- a question?
- Can I just ask you one? Sure. This came up this morning and I hadn't thought about it and I'm not sure
- if you folks discussed it. The question was would it make any sense at all for major new subdivisions
- or major new developments in the community to file a public safety impact statement similar concept
- to environmental impact statement. Was this talked about at all?
- That's a new one. But one of the attractions to this septic approach is that they want you to provide
- a measured response to risk. So some communities require security audits for certain projects.
- In big cities, parking facilities are perceived as a danger. We found out in Bloomington that it's
- that although people don't like to go into them, the incidence of crime there is nominal. But in other
- cities, it's been a problem. And some cities have required people who build high-risk facilities to
- do a security audit to find out what kind of dangers are out there and then address them with a management plan
- in return. So no, not sort of. Maybe something that when we move to our final report, your group can
- discuss a bit anyway. OK, thanks. Well, as you can see, we've taken a very holistic approach to the
- issue of how we build a safe and civil city in Bloomington and Monroe County. What's going to happen
- now is we're going to be incorporating the suggestions we got today into our draft report.
- And then the task force will meet and consider all the feedback we've gotten and from that then produce
- a final report that we'll be transmitting to the mayor hopefully before the end of the spring is our
- target for the overall report. I'd like to thank our chairs.
- for doing a great job today and for doing a great job all year. I thought that they really did a spectacular
- job. And I also wanted to thank and recognize our research staff. Eric Martin over here, Eric Wave.
- Eric was responsible for the overall coordination of the task force and a larger responsible for working
- with the IU Survey Research Center on the survey that we did. He did a terrific job in putting that together.
- I also wanted to recognize our three Lilly Fellows. The Lilly Fellows program is a program sponsored
- by SPIA for outstanding graduate students. And as part of their graduate assistantship, they're assigned
- projects like this, community service kinds of projects. And without all four of these young people,
- we never could have pulled this project off. They did a spectacular job of research and staffing.
- And again, they are Jay Hoffman back here.
- Kathy Giles and Anne Sorensen back there. Thanks a lot, folks. It's been really fun working with you.
- I'd like to thank all of you for coming today. It's really been a useful exercise for us, and I hope
- you found it interesting and stimulating based on the sessions I went to. That was certainly the case.
- I want to give Mayor Fernandez a final word, John.
- just add my thanks to Dr. Bonsers, to all of you for participating. As we said at the beginning of this
- process 10 months ago, that what we really wanted to develop here was a community-based plan of action
- on how we can work together to improve the public safety
- elements of our community. And I think what's been put forward through this whole process are some very
- practical, realistic ways to do that. And the key element, I think, to most of these proposals, as you've
- heard or seen during your presentations, is that those action plans are also community-based.
- It's not legislators or mayors waving magic wands and passing proclamations, but it's people at the
- neighborhood level and businesses and organizations from our schools to our social service agencies
- working together in a coordinated way for a community-based response. And that's, in my view, the only
- way we're ever going to get at these problems. So thank you again very much. Let me add my thanks to
- our graduate students. I got to confess something, Chuck. When I was a Lilly fellow,
- I got to tell you, I think that your work on this project is so much more substantive than the things
- I did. So thanks for doing it. Not that they were bad projects or anything. It's just a very different
- approach than doing your typical white paper development for policy analysis, but actually getting into
- a community and working.
- really appreciate your help. So again, thank you very much. We'll get this draft report out again, and
- we'll have it available either in hard copy or through our website. And I encourage you to continue
- to participate in the implementation of this process. So thank you for coming today.