all right ready yeah i want to thank all of you for being here today um on our first day with the focus intervention team starting their operations uh this is a great day for us it's been a long time in the making it's taken a while but we wanted to get this right we've got great officers here behind me who are coming back to do this you know dangerous and tough work in the city what we've experienced the last year and a half or so with homicides and shootings has been really really tough on everyone and we're glad we can now field this team to address some of the gun violence in our city we had over 46 people put in for this position we interviewed over 44 and we selected 12 officers and two sergeants and we've got the right people for this work and i'm very happy that they've chosen to do this work i'm very proud of them for getting through the selection process and the training and i'm really hopeful that having the community voice the focus intervention team community oversight group will lend support to this work that we haven't had in the past i think that community voice is so important and for us it's a really i think of it more as a community collaboration than community oversight but we're really happy to now start this work and hopefully make a difference with gun violence in the city it's not going to happen overnight it's going to take time there's going to be relationship building and a lot of things that need to happen but i i just want to ask everyone to uh to support this team as much as i do we made the point it's not going to happen overnight um and you guys been saying that for you know for a while now what do you hope chief to see in the immediate future like in the first few weeks i mean is there anything tangible that the community can look for or what do you expect to see here well i think one of the very important things is relationship building and also deterrent we haven't had this focused gun violence deterrent in a while and i think that's going to help right off the bat it's hard to say you know with a number because we don't know what's going to happen tonight or the next nights but my hope is that over time we'll see a decrease in shootings in the city you know the first thing i'm telling them is i support them uh to be safe this work is more dangerous than it's ever been and focus on building relationships too a lot of this work is centered around knowing people having communications with folks and uh and trust uh i think the people we've had doing this work in the past did that really well and i think uh that's a real important component but i i visited with them on saturday i came to their roll call today and more than anything i want them to know that i support them that i'm willing to do whatever i need to do to help them be successful in this work because it's just so important to the like you have the community you need from city hall for this to be successful i do i do is this a gun violence team or a gang team uh gun violence team we're focused on gun violence throughout the to accuse us of being city gang team people would say bring the bring the gang focus team back what would you say to both sides you know i would say we've done this work before whether with the gang enforcement team with the gun violence reduction team those are good officers doing good work and that work proved unsustainable we're always looking for ways where we can do this work in a manner that's one and consistent with what the community expects but also effective at reducing gun violence and and will work so i think there might always be those criticisms out there but we have to remain flexible and try to come at this work in a data-driven way and uh be as effective as possible yeah well ecst has been well formulated for a while but now uh fit and ecst will be together housed under our strategic resources division so they'll be able to work more closely and i think you know for us it's like what makes the most sense to have this concerted effort where we have officers out on the street in uniform proactive with relationships and then an investigative arm that has access to those office officers so we can go out and do invasion investigations quickly and effectively and i think you know we've put a lot of resources to gun violence in the past year and a half resources that we've taken from other things in the city as well so we'll have a focus on gun violence but we also from my standpoint have to be mindful of the other things going on in the city that require resources as well i feel like this is the logical next step there might be more we may learn as we go some additional things i think there's there's probably a lot of things a lot of people can do around gun violence this is something that's a heavy lift and we're not going to solve it ourselves we need our partners the da's office office of violence prevention community partners and a whole host of others to help the biggest challenge you know i think the biggest challenge is probably just doing this work safely i think that to me is always kind of the forefront and the foremost thing we have a lot of a lot of shootings a lot of people have guns and we want to approach this work in a safe manner so everyone goes home at night community members and police officers what can this team do that a patrol officer can well one of patrol officers really you know assigned a district they're assigned to answer 911 calls for service this team will be focused on gun violence going to scenes where shooting has occurred they may help out on calls you know if it's a busy night and and they're free they can help out on some calls but they're going to be focused solely their number one goal is going to be gun violence what else you know i think with this team we have a new approach i think having the the fit cog the community oversight group allows us to have that community voice at the table and it's incumbent on us to listen to that voice when we meet with them when we talk with them and they say hey we think you should be doing this differently or that differently we need to listen and we need to do the work in a way that the community supports too and i think that's kind of what was maybe missing in our earlier efforts i think my message to them would be one we care we're uh we're moving resources we're constantly you know within our constraints trying to do everything we can to bring resources to this issue there's a lot of issues in this city gun violence has risen to the top but there are others too that affect a lot of people particularly those in neighborhoods but um having a safe city where there isn't 90 homicides a year is important to me as the chief and important to the people standing behind me which is why they're here doing this work so i want everyone in the city to know that we're serious about gun violence and we're going to do the things we can with the resources we have to try to reduce it