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.