Policy Session · 27 January 2026

1. 0:53:32Thank you, Mayor.
2. 0:53:33Good afternoon, Mayor and members of the Council.
3. 0:53:36We are here today to provide you an update on the public safety action items and directives, as the Mayor mentioned, which were approved by the City Council in September of 2024.
4. 0:53:45This is our fifth update to the Council on the approved items, and today we are going to focus specifically on updates since our last presentation to you, which was our annual update in September of 2025.
5. 0:53:58Joining me today from the police department are Chief Matt Giordano, Assistant Director Jody Wolf, Assistant Chief Jeff Benza, from the Community Assistance Program, Program Administrator D.C. Ernst, and from the Office of Accountability and Transparency, Director Shannon Yohani.
6. 0:54:16I want to start by thanking the Mayor and Council for your leadership on this issue and as we maintain our continued focus on improving public safety in the City of Phoenix.
7. 0:54:27It is important before we begin the presentation today that I take a moment to emphasize the critical importance of transparency and accountability in public safety and to reaffirm our unwavering commitment to these principles as we move forward.
8. 0:54:41It is also important to remember why we do this work.
9. 0:54:44We do it for our community and we will continue and we commit to continue to improve and to respond to the needs of all members of our community.
10. 0:54:53We will have successes and we will make mistakes and when we do we will take accountability for them.
11. 0:54:58As I said in our first policy meeting regarding these action items in September of 2024, it is my strong conviction that accountability and supporting our public safety employees are not mutually exclusive.
12. 0:55:10We can and will do both.
13. 0:55:12I want to start by thanking all of the amazing city employees that have contributed to the progress you will hear about today.
14. 0:55:17Each area we will discuss today will demonstrate our ongoing commitment to improvement,
15. 0:55:23through enhanced policies, programs, training, and accountability.
16. 0:55:27And to begin the presentation and provide an update on the work of the police department, I will turn it over to Chief Matt Giordano.
17. 0:55:33Chief.

1. 0:57:33Thank you, Chief Giordano.
2. 0:57:35Mayor, members of council, it's exciting to be here today to share with you some technology initiative updates, three of which we have been working on very diligently over the course of the last few months.
3. 0:57:47The first of which is the records management system, or RMS.
4. 0:57:50The second that I'll be sharing with you is the real-time customer engagement tool.
5. 0:57:55And the third, which I will close on, is the public sentiment survey platform.
6. 0:58:01The first technology update I'll be providing is our records management system, or RMS.
7. 0:58:06As you all know, we went live on September 9th, 2025, and we've been working since that timeframe on completing all of the required go-live activities, and we're nearing completion.
8. 0:58:19As we move forward, we'll be focusing on, in the next phase of the project, system optimizations and upgrades which will help us improve the performance and add additional capabilities of the system.
9. 0:58:33Since Go Live, we've been focused on two really important activities, the first of which is updating our crime reporting from the UCR crime reporting that most people are familiar with to the National Incident-Based Reporting System, or NIBRS.
10. 0:58:49You'll hear us talk about NIBRS quite a bit going forward.
11. 0:58:53This is a modern way of reporting crime data and is more accurate than what we have been reporting historically.
12. 0:58:59It allows us to report all offenses for each individual incident, including both completed and attempted crimes.
13. 0:59:08In order to achieve NIBRS certification and report that data to the FBI, we have to share three consecutive months of data with our state administrating agency, which is the Arizona Department of Public Safety.
14. 0:59:23I am very happy to share with you today that we achieved NIBRS certification on January 8, 2026, earlier this month.
15. 0:59:31This is a huge milestone for our department and for our city, and it wouldn't have been possible without the support of council, as well as the hard work of all of our teams.
16. 0:59:43The next activity that we've been very much focused on is providing enhanced data reporting that Council had requested.
17. 0:59:50This includes adult arrests, juvenile referrals, calls for service, time spent on calls, subject and vehicle stops, city parks, and adult arrests.
18. 1:00:04Before this meeting, we shared the last quarter of 2025 data with all of you per these enhanced data council reports.
19. 1:00:12And going forward, we'll continue to share these with you on a quarterly basis.
20. 1:00:16So you'll receive your next update in April.
21. 1:00:21The next technology update is focused on a real-time customer engagement tool called Community Connect.
22. 1:00:28This is an innovative public safety engagement solution that allows us to automatically send updates to 911 callers, crime victims and reporting parties.
23. 1:00:40These are real-time notifications that allows us to also share them in a multilingual capacity.
24. 1:00:48It also affords us extended support to victims that carries information sharing with them throughout the history of their case, not just the initial incident.
25. 1:01:00And then one of the greatest tools that this platform affords us is the opportunity to receive feedback from those individuals after each engagement with them.
26. 1:01:09Over the course of 2025, we shared 1.6 million automated messages.
27. 1:01:17And for those individuals that responded to the request for feedback, 74% reported that they were satisfied with the department.
28. 1:01:27This tool also allows us to gauge our customer service satisfaction.
29. 1:01:33And over that same timeframe, the overall department satisfaction score was 3.94 out of five stars.
30. 1:01:42The overall officer satisfaction score was 4.39 out of five stars.
31. 1:01:48And the overall communications team's satisfaction score was 4.21 out of five stars.
32. 1:01:58The final technology initiative update that I'll be providing to you is on our Public Sentiment Survey platform, which is Zen City's BlockWise program.
33. 1:02:08This is a tool that allows us to gauge public sentiment.
34. 1:02:12It allows us to understand how the community sees the police as well as how they feel about the police.
35. 1:02:19The cornerstone metrics associated with this tool are those related to procedural justice.
36. 1:02:25They include how safe do people feel in our community?
37. 1:02:29How fair do they believe the department is?
38. 1:02:33Do they feel that the department respects them?
39. 1:02:37And do they feel that they have a voice in policing matters?
40. 1:02:41We launched this program six months ago and to date through the end of December collected over 15,000 responses.
41. 1:02:52Based on our first six months of data collection, here's what our residents told us in comparison to our regional cohort.
42. 1:03:00Now the regional cohort is a collection of cities that also participate in the BlockWise program, primarily in the Southwest and also those cities in the state of Arizona.
43. 1:03:11So our residents told us that 56% of them feel safe in their community in comparison to 59% in the cohort.
44. 1:03:2052% believe that the department has treated them fairly as compared to 54% in the regional cohort.
45. 1:03:2763% feel that the department treats them with respect in comparison to 64% in the regional cohort.
46. 1:03:35And 63% report that they have a voice in policing matters in comparison to 63% in the regional cohort.
47. 1:03:43This establishes our baseline level that allows us going forward to be able to understand how we can align resources to those things that the community has identified as important to them.
48. 1:03:56We will also be working with city staff and Zen City to create a public dashboard so that everyone has access to this information going forward.
49. 1:04:06And now I'm going to turn it over to Chief Binza who will provide an update on several of our other efforts.

1. 1:11:16Thank you, Chief Benza.
2. 1:11:18Mayor and members of council, starting on December 15th of 2025, we created a new option for callers calling into our emergency centers.
3. 1:11:29Call takers now ask call takers, or call takers now ask callers, do you need police, fire, or behavioral health?
4. 1:11:37If caller requests behavioral health, operators still triage the call to determine whether a police or fire response is also necessary or if behavioral health professionals can handle the call without police or fire assistance.
5. 1:11:53When only behavioral health is needed, the call will be transferred to our behavioral health dispatchers at the Phoenix Fire Department who will deploy a community assistance program team.
6. 1:12:05The goal is to ensure the right help is sent to the right calls.
7. 1:12:10This chart shows all of our calls, the total number of calls diverted to a behavioral health resource in 2025.
8. 1:12:17This means that no police response was necessary.
9. 1:12:21The green line indicates the total number of calls diverted,
10. 1:12:26The yellow line indicates the number of calls that we transferred to behavioral health professionals, which means that no police or fire response was necessary.
11. 1:12:35And then the orange line indicates the number of calls that were transferred to our behavioral health unit colleagues in the fire department.
12. 1:12:45and it's really exciting development that I'm here to share with you today for the first time ever the total number of calls that we transferred to our BHU colleagues in the fire department exceeded the number of calls that went to our Solari professionals or behavioral health professionals
13. 1:13:01at Solari.
14. 1:13:02This is a new development obviously since the implementation of this new option for callers and so we're going to track this with a lot of attention moving forward and we'll be happy to share the results as we understand more broadly the impact of this change.
15. 1:13:19And now it's my honor to turn the presentation to DC Ernst from the fire department for the next update.

1. 1:27:44Mayor, members of the council, that concludes our presentation.
2. 1:27:47We'd be happy to answer any questions if you have any.

1. 1:30:12Thank you, Mayor, members of council, Councilman Robinson.
2. 1:30:16I think that your question is very astute.
3. 1:30:19Our records management system and our evolution into modern day crime reporting is a significant advancement for our department.
4. 1:30:28In addition to being the official record for all incidents within our department and calls for service that we respond to, it allows us to understand how we work,
5. 1:30:41It allows us to collect data that before today we weren't able to collect.
6. 1:30:46For example, demographics associated for those individuals that we engage with across those enhanced data reports that I mentioned to all of you, that was a specific council ask.
7. 1:30:57and it allows us to be able to share with council the demographics including age, race, gender, ethnicity and housing status.
8. 1:31:07That's information that we've never been able to be able to afford either council or the community.
9. 1:31:12Having access to that type of information allows us to attempt to understand and answer questions that are of interest to all of us.
10. 1:31:21Questions that are critically important, especially in today's environment to be able to answer.
11. 1:31:29So that is significant in terms of being able to afford our community that information.
12. 1:31:35We're only four months into this project.
13. 1:31:38We're at the very beginning of our efforts and we expect and anticipate
14. 1:31:42that are reporting capabilities and our use of the records management system will advance moving forward.
15. 1:31:50As I mentioned, we're gonna be focusing on system optimizations and adding additional capabilities.
16. 1:31:57To the second part of your question, Councilman Robinson, is the evolution into the NIBRS reporting, the National Incident-Based Reporting System.
17. 1:32:07And this is the modern way in which we report crime data.
18. 1:32:11Historically, it was through Uniform Crime Reporting, UCR.
19. 1:32:16A lot of people are very familiar with that, used to seeing that information.
20. 1:32:20But under that system, you're only allowed to report based on a hierarchy of offenses that occur with each incident.
21. 1:32:27So the highest offense type is what gets reported.
22. 1:32:31So if we have, for example, an aggravated assault, drug possession, and so on, only the aggravated assault would be reported under UCR.
23. 1:32:40Under NIBRS, it allows us to report both of those offenses in addition to any other offenses to include both those that are completed and attempted.
24. 1:32:50So it'll allow us to understand with more granular understanding
25. 1:32:55Thank you for that.
26. 1:33:00I go back to my time with the police department.

1. 1:33:43So in terms of creating that information or that data, that is an ongoing process as officers engage and utilize RMS throughout their shifts, throughout their cycles.
2. 1:33:56That data then gets checked by our data integrity unit.
3. 1:34:01So we're looking, and there are certain parameters within the technology system
4. 1:34:05that flag NIBRS priorities to ensure that we're collecting that NIBRS data.
5. 1:34:12Then our data integrity unit reviews that information, and then that information on that entire data set is transmitted to the Arizona Department of Public Safety.
6. 1:34:22They do a data quality review of that data once they receive it, and they return it to us with particular or potential issues or questions.
7. 1:34:32For the first three months of sharing that data with the Arizona Department of Public Safety, we had 0% errors.
8. 1:34:38It is incredibly powerful, and we're going to be able to see so much more into our systems than we've ever, into our activities than we've ever been able to do before.
9. 1:34:48In terms of how protected it is, obviously operators have to be criminal justice information systems certified, or what we call CEJA certified.
10. 1:34:58they become terminal operators that allows them to utilize the system then information once validated and reportable after the review with the Arizona Department of Public Safety then that information will become public so it'll get put on our open data portal we report that up to the FBI it becomes the baseline for our crime rates and
11. 1:35:24and the other types of metrics that people are used to seeing when it comes to monitoring crime in our communities.

1. 1:35:57Mayor, members of council, Councilman Robinson, great question, and it's something that I get really, I have a lot of passion for.
2. 1:36:05And before we started utilizing tools like Community Connect, which is our customer engagement platform, as well as our public sentiment tool, there wasn't a way to gauge how the impact, except anecdotally, was our presence or our activities we're having in the community.
3. 1:36:24And beyond that, being able to understand individual performance at the officer and the communications operator level was data we never had access to.
4. 1:36:35And so in order to make good decisions about how to improve performance for individuals that work within the department and routinely engage with our community, we need that type of information to understand where opportunities for improvement exist, as well as where we're doing well.
5. 1:36:53I think that this is something that we've never had access to.
6. 1:36:56And frankly, historically, in law enforcement, we've never talked about customer satisfaction or how do we rate our performance from a community perspective.
7. 1:37:08especially in a data-driven way.
8. 1:37:11So these tools are going to be incredibly important to us moving forward.
9. 1:37:15And I don't want to discount all of the services that that tool also affords those individuals that we engage with, with the real-time messaging in a multilingual capacity so that they understand that their 911 call has been received, the officer has been dispatched, the officer is pending in however many minutes.
10. 1:37:35and then after each engagement, the respondent has an opportunity to tell us how we did.
11. 1:37:42And that existence, that relationship of sharing information continues beyond the initial incident.
12. 1:37:48And I think in my mind, one of the most important things that this engagement tool affords us is to support those victims through the life of their case.
13. 1:37:58If the suspect is outstanding and becomes arrested at some point in the future, that engagement tool allows that victim to know when that arrest is made.
14. 1:38:09It allows them to know when their case has been adjudicated.
15. 1:38:12And that's information that historically has not been automated.
16. 1:38:15It was a very manual process.
17. 1:38:17So really powerful for our victims when we engage with them to have access to that information, both seamlessly from an automated perspective.
18. 1:38:26And then there's a victim portal tool that they can log into.
19. 1:38:29And when they want to find out what's going on with their case, who the detective is and what its status is.

1. 1:48:35Mayor, members of council, Vice Mayor Hodge Washington, thank you so much for the question.
2. 1:48:39I think it's really important to recognize when we have opportunities for improvement, but also when we do well.
3. 1:48:46And so when we, I was excited to be able to share with you all our overall satisfaction scores for an entire calendar year of 2025 based on interactions related to officers and our team members in our communications department answering 911 calls.
4. 1:49:03And if you recall, the overall officer satisfaction is 4.39 out of five stars.
5. 1:49:09Now when I'm looking at customer satisfaction scores, to me, anything over four stars means that we're doing something right.
6. 1:49:17So I think we are, those individual interactions between officers and members of our community are positive, overall positive.
7. 1:49:26as well as those between our 911 call takers and those individuals calling in.
8. 1:49:32Now you'll notice that our overall department satisfaction score is 3.94 out of five stars, so just under four.
9. 1:49:40What we need to do is delve a little bit deeper into that to understand why, and that goes back to looking at the question that they're answering when they make that rating.
10. 1:49:50And the question is, how satisfied are you with the department in serving public safety?
11. 1:49:55So we need to be able to understand that to a greater extent, and that's something that I think that we'll be exploring moving forward.
12. 1:50:02That tool allows us additional options aside from just offering an overall rating.
13. 1:50:09We can do surveys related to that, which we have not enabled yet.
14. 1:50:13We wanted to be able to master and understand the data set that has been
15. 1:50:17that allows us to collect.
16. 1:50:20So that's something that we'll be looking at moving forward.
17. 1:50:23In addition to the public sentiment tool that I shared with you, this is something that we are on a journey together to learn it.
18. 1:50:32We have six months worth of survey responses.
19. 1:50:36Those four procedural justice benchmarks, which deal with safety, fairness, respect, and voice,
20. 1:50:44Those, one of my questions to our colleagues at Zen City was, okay, we got, I believe it was, let me just look real quick.
21. 1:50:5556% of our community feels that they're safe in relationship to 59%.
22. 1:51:01So I wanted to understand what does that mean in comparison to our cohort?
23. 1:51:06We also have the ability to compare ourselves to all 86 cities that are participating at the national level.
24. 1:51:13And one of the powerful things about this tool that I think that it's going to afford us is that we're able to drill down to the precinct and potentially even the neighborhood level to understand how our public sentiment occurs within our localized communities.
25. 1:51:30And so we had the members from BlackWise here last week.
26. 1:51:34They scheduled meetings with every precinct commander, lieutenant, and our community action teams that work out of those precincts to help them understand locally how they're relating to their community.
27. 1:51:48And then that allows us to develop strategies based on this data-driven approach
28. 1:51:54to get to what the community believes is truly important.
29. 1:51:58And so it's a little premature to understand exactly how this is going to roll out, but I'm optimistic about the potential that it affords not only the members of our department to understand how our community feels about us and how they're evaluating our performance, but it'll also allow us to engage in a conversation about those priorities
30. 1:52:23that the community has identified so that we can work on things that are important to them and always be committed to continuous improvement.

1. 2:10:53Mayor, members of council, Councilwoman Hernandez, BlockWise does that, Zen City does that for us.
2. 2:10:59It's not something that the department solicits.
3. 2:11:01BlockWise does it at our request.
4. 2:11:04They are representative samples from the various precincts within our city.
5. 2:11:09My understanding is that these are questions or survey invitations for individuals as they're browsing to participate in a survey about their community and about the police department.
6. 2:11:21And so it's voluntary people that choose to click on the link and complete the survey.
7. 2:11:27It's supposed to be a very quick survey that allows residents to be able to move through those questions.
8. 2:11:33There are options for customized questions and allows them to provide information
9. 2:11:37Text responses, but that's all at the discretion of the individual completing the survey.
10. 2:11:43We work with Zen City to update or revise those questions going forward.
11. 2:11:49So we're excited about the platform tool in particular that it's representative of the community that's being sampled.

1. 2:12:12Mayor, members of council, Councilwoman Hernandez.
2. 2:12:15The goal is that this is a collaborative effort with our community.
3. 2:12:18We just started this program, so we're still learning.
4. 2:12:21As a matter of fact, as I shared, Zen City was here present with us last week to train each precinct leadership team on
5. 2:12:30The intricacies of each report, what the report is trying to communicate to them, how they may be able to use it, learning from other agencies that have been using this tool to help inform their strategy prioritization, engaging with the community.
6. 2:12:45So it's very early on for us, but the intent ultimately then is to create an opportunity to have a public dashboard so that the community also sees the data.
7. 2:12:55It's their data.
8. 2:12:56and we want them to see it.
9. 2:12:59The other tool that this platform affords us is the ability to build custom surveys.
10. 2:13:05So we can, outside of these representative sample surveys, create custom surveys based on the need at the time to be able to solicit input from our community about particular topics of interest to them and to council and to us.

1. 2:13:29Mayor, members of council, Councilwoman Hernandez.
2. 2:13:32To date, not yet.
3. 2:13:34Obviously, going forward, we're happy to share the information with all parties that are interested.
4. 2:13:41As I mentioned, it's intended to be public.
5. 2:13:44It helps all of us make better decisions about how we engage in a public safety arena within our communities.

1. 2:29:46Mayor, members of council, Councilwoman Pastor, that's correct.
2. 2:29:49BlockWise is a component or one of the software platforms that Zen City has within its catalog of resources and it's geared specifically towards public safety.

1. 2:30:15Mayors, members of council, councilwoman Pastor, I do know that the city uses the larger city platform for Zen City.
2. 2:30:23I was not as familiar with it, but I do, obviously we're very excited about being able to use BlockWise and then Future Focus, the custom survey option to be able to identify those priorities specific to both council and the community.

1. 2:31:29mayors, members of council, council and pastor.
2. 2:31:33That's my understanding.
3. 2:31:34Obviously my focus is block wise related to public safety.
4. 2:31:38In the data packets that we shared with council, we included block wise reports that you have the first opportunity to examine them.
5. 2:31:46You'll see that they are related to specific precincts within the city.
6. 2:31:50they will always have those four procedural justice benchmarks related to every survey that's produced.
7. 2:31:58And then on a quarterly basis, there's text questions where they can free text responses, like things, what are you most,
8. 2:32:07What is your number one public safety priority?
9. 2:32:10Where do you feel the most safe?
10. 2:32:13Is traffic and speed a concern?
11. 2:32:16There's lots of different ways for us to collect information through these reports, which we have shared with council.
12. 2:32:22I'm excited about the opportunity that it's gonna help us make good decisions moving forward.

1. 2:38:53Yes, Mayor.
2. 2:38:53Thank you.
3. 2:38:55Good afternoon.
4. 2:38:56My name is Mario Barajas.
5. 2:38:58I'll be interpreting
6. 2:39:02With me also my colleagues Oscar Monroy and Elsie Duarte.
7. 2:39:07I'll now take a moment to introduce ourselves to our Spanish speaking audience.
8. 2:39:11Buenas tardes, yo soy Mario Barajas y voy a estar trabajando junto con mis colegas Elsie Duarte y Oscar Monroy.
9. 2:39:19Queremos pedirles, ya que son varios en esta ocasión que van a estar hablando, si es que van a estar dando un comentario público,
10. 2:39:30All right, thank you.

Spoken in Spanish, transcribed as said

Some lines may be an automatic translation of Spanish speech, not the speaker's own words