Senate Standing Committee on Public Safety

Good afternoon and welcome to the Joint Informational Hearing for the Assembly Committee of Public Safety and the Committee on Accountability and Administrative Review. This hearing is regarding the armed prohibited person system. This afternoon I am joined by the illustrious chair of the Accountability Administrative Review, Assembly Member Petrie-Norris, as well as Members from both committees. For Members of the public, I want to make clear that this is an informational hearing only.

We will not be taking any votes or hearing any measures at this time. However, we do encourage the public to provide written testimony before the hearing by visiting the Committee website at Assembly. I'll read the whole thing HTTPs APSF, which I don't know what that means. Assembly A-S-S-E-M-B-L-Y ca Gov. Please note that any written testimony submitted to the Committee is considered public comment and may be read into the record or reprinted.

All are encouraged to watch the hearing from its live stream on the Assembly's website at HTTPs semicolon www. Assembly. CA Gov. Today'events the hearing room will be open for audience of this hearing. Any Member of the public attending a hearing is encouraged to wear a mask at all times while in the building. The public may also participate in this hearing by telephone. We encourage the public to monitor the Committee's website for updates.

So after I'll say a few opening remarks and then my colleague, Ms. Petrie Norris. Katie Petrie Norris will then she has a few words to say. We'll go from there again, good morning and welcome to the Committee hearing. California leads with some of the most stringent gun laws, but gun violence is a daily reality for communities across our state. Just last week, we witnessed three mass shootings in Goshen Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay.

It is not enough to offer our condolences to the families in mourning as we await further details on these shootings, we know that gun violence across California requires stronger action. Research has shown that keeping firearms away from individuals who are at a high risk for committing violent crimes is an effective violence prevention strategy. California is the first and only state in the country to create a system for identifying individuals who are prohibited from owning firearms.

APPS is a database maintained by the Department of Justice that cross references information from multiple databases to identify people who legally acquired or registered firearms and people who are prohibited from owning firearms. Generally, these individuals have been deemed too dangerous to be armed due to the felony or violent misdemeanor convictions, active domestic and gun violence, restraining orders, or serious mental health issues. California law requires the DOJ and local law enforcement to proactively recover firearms from prohibited persons.

The information at Apps is instrumental for state and local authorities to remove firearms from prohibited individuals in order to prevent and reduce gun violence. As this is a joint informational hearing, the committees will not be voting on any legislation today. Through the testimony we hear today, I hope we will all leave this hearing with a greater understanding of Apps to guide our future decision making on legislation in this area. I would like to welcome our witnesses and thank you all for joining us.

We have four panels today consisting of law enforcement experts and advocates representing diverse perspectives on the issue. Our first panel is Anita Lee, a principal fiscal and policy analyst for the Legislative Analyst Office. Anita Lee will provide the Committee with an overview of apps. During our second panel, we will hear from the California Department of Justice on this annual report to the Legislature on apps.

Joining us from this panel is John Marsh, the chief of Division of Law Enforcement, and Michael Redding, a special assistant Attorney General for the California Department of Justice. During our third panel, we will hear from local law enforcement about implementation of apps at the local level. During our third panel, it's the City of Irvine Police Department, Sergeant Sarah Turncliffe, Sergeant Thomas Dillon and with the City of San Diego Police Department, and Nicole Crosby, Chief Deputy city attorney officer of the San Diego city attorney.

Finally, our fourth panel is a presentation from gun violence prevention advocates. The fourth panel includes Julia Weber, a consultant at Giffords Law center to prevent gun violence, and Steve Lindley, the program manager at Bradley center to prevent gun Violence. I look forward to hearing testimony from our speakers. We have a full agenda today, so I ask that you use your time judiciously so that we have sufficient opportunity for public comment. We will provide time for public comment after we have heard from all panels.

With that, I invite Assembly Member Petrie Norris, chair of Assembly Committee on Accountability, administrative review, and any other Committee Members to make opening remarks if they would like to do so.

Well, thank you, Chair Jones-Sawyer, and thank you so much for your partnership on this absolutely critical issue. Today's hearing is all too timely. Over the course of the past 10 days, we have seen four mass shootings in California and across the nation. Since the start of this year, we have seen 39 mass shootings. There have been more mass shootings than days in 2023.

And as we work to confront this uniquely and horrifically American tragedy and continue to push for action on the federal level here in California. We are doing everything in our power to keep our communities safe. And we, as the chair noted, we have the strongest gun safety laws in the nation. And a really important part of our job as legislators is ensuring that those laws are being effectively implemented and effectively enforced. That's why we are here today.

The armed and prohibited person system apps was first established here in California in 2001. It is first in the nation and unique in the nation. However, the program has been plagued with numerous issues and challenges since its introduction in 2001, and there are currently more than 24,000 individuals on the apps list. That is just not good enough. And over the last several years, the Legislature, we've enacted number of pieces of legislation and allocated budget resources to improve the program.

My goal today, and I want to thank all of our panelists for joining us for this important conversation. My goal is really to understand what is working and what's not, and what does the Department of Justice and what do our local law enforcement agencies need to make this program work. And the bottom line is we're here to do everything that we can to keep guns out of the hands of people we know are a danger to our communities.

So the stakes are incredibly, incredibly high, and we have got to get this right. So thank all of you for your engagement and partnership on this issue and look forward to identifying solutions that we can pursue as policy in the year ahead. Thank you.

Okay, are there any Committee Members that would like. Yes. Thank you, Ms. Davies.

Thank you both, Madam Chair and Mr. Chair, for holding what I think is a long overdue hearing on the critical state program in our efforts to reduce gun violence. I think now more than ever, Californians need to know what protocols we have in place to get dangerous guns and criminals using them off our streets. Last week, I introduced AB 303, which will help our state and local officials better share investigative information about individuals in the APPS database.

I, of course, invite all my colleagues here to coauthor with me. Again, thank you for your leadership of both our chairs, and I look forward to hearing from the speakers.

Thank you. Anything from Mr. Lackey and our Vice Chair?

Just a quick remark.

Sure.

I'm excited to talk about this topic just because it's been long standing, and it's kind of mystifying to me why it continues to remain such a big problem. We're pretty aggressive on how we enforce other statutes that relate to weapons, and it seems to me that this would be a high priority because we have behavior associated with the weapon. And so I'm frustrated by the fact that we've been told since I've been in this position that if we got the resources, we would eliminate it.

But the resources have been provided and we have not eliminated it, and it remains a very serious threat. And behavior is not getting better in our society. And I think some of that's related to public policy, but that's for another day. But I will tell you that I look forward to this discussion because we need to be Frank. We need to be open, we need to be honest, and we also need to work together.

And that's something that the public really, really needs because we seem to take sides. And I think that that's hurtful. I think we all agree on this particular issue as it relates to the term that many people use gun violence. I think that's misleading because I don't think guns are violent inherently. I think they become violent in the hands of irresponsible people. So I'm thankful for this discussion.

I look forward to it, and I'm thankful that we have leadership here that's very respectful to all points of perspective. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Lackey. Any other Members? Okay, seeing none. Then let's begin with the overview of the armed and prohibited person system. Anita Lee, principal fiscal and policy analyst from the Lao Legislative Analyst Office. And whenever you're ready, you can begin.

Great. Good morning, Members. Anita Lee with the Legislative Analyst Office. For those of you who might not be familiar with the Lao, we work for you all, the Legislature, and we provide nonpartisan fiscal and policy advice. And we serve as the Legislature's eyes and ears to ensure that policy is implemented in both a cost efficient and effective manner. And so we develop our expertise or familiarity with programs in a variety of ways, including through our budget work, as well as Member requests, initiative work, et cetera.

And so in that role, Committee staff asked us to actually come today and present some key context and background to frame the discussion that you're going to be having in the subsequent panels. So there's a handout that I believe you have copies of, and that will really serve as a guide for our comments today. If you turn to page one of your handout, we're first going to start with an overview of California firearm and ammunition laws.

So, under federal and state law, certain individuals are not allowed to have firearms. These prohibited persons include individuals who are convicted of felonies and some misdemeanors, such as assault and battery. They're found by a court to be a danger to themselves or others due to mental illness, or they have a restraining order against them in California, if you're not permitted to have a firearm, you're also not permitted to have ammunition.

Both federal and state law then include various regulations related to firearm sales, and state law also includes regulations related to ammunition sales. Key examples of that are laid out on the page before you, but include that individuals and businesses selling firearms and ammunition are generally required to be licensed. Those sellers are also generally required to request a background check from federal and state databases before completing sales to ensure that the purchaser isn't not a prohibited person.

The dealers are also required to collect and report certain information to DOJ, and there are various other regulations as well listed on this page if you turn to page two of your handout, state law also authorizes the removal of firearms from prohibited persons. So DOJ operates enforcement teams, also known as Apps Teams, and we're going to talk a little bit more about that shortly.

But DOJ maintains this database of individuals who have legally bought or registered a firearm with the state, and then DOJ can use that information to subsequently remove firearms from individuals who become prohibited persons.

At the same time, state law requires that the courts inform individuals, including those who are convicted of an offense or are subject to a civil restraining order that makes them a prohibited person, that they must relinquish their firearms, and this can be done by turning them over to local law enforcement or, for example, to a licensed firearm dealer for storage. Probation officers or the individuals themselves are then required to report on whether this occurred.

Turning to page three of your handout, we're going to provide some information on that enforcement and how we Fund that. And so DOJ specifically through its bureau, firearms is primarily responsible for regulating and enforcing these firearm and ammunition laws, and the activities can range from conducting those background checks, licensing sellers, and ammunition vendors, as well as various other activities as well.

State law authorizes DOJ to charge various fees related to firearms and ammunition, and those are deposited into one of various state special funds to then support their activities. So, for example, an individual who purchases a firearm currently pays fees totaling $37.19, which are then deposited into three different special funds. Between 201213 and 201920 the bureau was generally supported only by fee revenues. This changed in 201920 when some General Fund support was then provided.

Despite that happening, still at least half of the bureau's costs were supported by these fee revenues. If you look at the table before you on this page, we provide kind of a five year overview of funding. If you look at the rightmost column for 202223 you can see that 55.7 million was provided that very first line item includes the General Fund amount of $22 million, which is about 40% of the budget. And then the remaining amounts were generally coming from these fee revenues.

The amount that is in the General Fund, most of that is used to support those apps enforcement teams if you turn to page four of your handout, we're next going to talk a little bit about apps, the armed and prohibited person system, which is maintained by DOJ. As both chairs mentioned, it's a database that includes all individuals who legally purchased or transferred firearms, as well as all known firearms associated within each individual.

So, as of January 1 of 2022, there were nearly 3.2 million firearm owners in the app's database. The database then also includes a prohibited armed persons file, which consists of individuals who subsequently became prohibited from owning or possessing firearms. And this is what law enforcement uses to identify those prohibited persons who might have firearms. So as of January 1 of 2022, there were 24509 prohibited persons in the system.

If you look at the figure before you on this page at the very top, the line graph shows that the number of prohibited persons in apps continues to grow. If you look at the bars below the line, this is generally due to more people being added than being removed. So if you look at the rightmost column for 2021, you can see, for example, that 9848 individuals were added, but only 8937 were removed, and so that contributes to that growth.

Of the prohibited persons that were removed in 202160% were removed because they were no longer prohibited, 36% were removed due to firearms being seized from them or lawfully being surrendered, and then 4% were removed because they were deceased. If you turn to page five of your handout, we're next. Going to speak a little bit about gun violence restraining orders, or gvros, so the courts can issue both criminal and civil protective orders that prohibit individuals from purchasing or possessing firearms and ammunitions.

Example of those civil protective orders include gvros, as well as domestic violence restraining orders specifically related to gvros. State law authorizes law enforcement, as well as certain private citizens, such as immediate family Members, employers, or coworkers, to seek gvros when there is concern that an individual poses a significant and or immediate danger to themselves or others. Temporary or emergency gvros last about 21 days, and lengthier gvros of one to five years may follow after a court hearing.

Looking at the figure before you on this page, you can see that DOJ data indicates that the number of gvros issued has increased annually since 2016, and so in 2021, it reached nearly 1400 gvros being issued across 34 counties. Turning to page six of your handout, we are next going to highlight some key funding actions that were taken by the Legislature to provide for the enforcement of firearm and ammunition laws. So the first way that that happened was that additional resources were provided specifically for DOJ.

So in 2013, the Legislature provided 24 million over three years in additional fee revenues to help address the growth of perverted persons in the system. After that, various actions have also been taken to stabilize the level of funding provided to support the Bureau of Firearms and their activities, which included addressing some of those operational shortfalls facing the special funds that support them.

So examples of that include as part of the 201920 budget package, a decision was made to actually shift support of the apps enforcement teams entirely to the General Fund and 17.5 million in ongoing support was provided. That consisted of 11.9 million from shifting existing teams over, as well as 5.6 million in additional support entirely.

Also in 2019, law was enacted to enable DOJ to actually increase the total fee charged when purchasing a firearm from $25 to $3719 cents, which provided more fee revenue that was able to support activities. A second kind of major way that recent funding has been provided is to grants to local law enforcement. Funding has been provided in recent years for grants to county sheriff offices specifically for activities related to seizing firearms and ammunition from prohibited persons.

So, for example, the 201920 budget package included $3 million that were subsequently allocated to four counties and the 202122 budget included $10 million, of which $8 million has been allocated to 14 counties. Additionally, the 202223 budget package also included $25 million for competitive grants to law enforcement agencies generally to support gun buyback programs. Turning to the final page of your handout, page seven, there are just two additional kind of actions taken that we wanted to highlight for you.

The first is as part of the 202223 budget package, there was $40 million in General Fund provided for the trial courts to enforce court orders removing firearms and ammunitions from prohibited persons, and the priority was supposed to be related to civil orders including gvros and domestic violence restraining orders. As a condition for receiving that funding, each court was required to partner with at least one law enforcement agency and provide at least 30% of the funding it received to support law enforcement costs.

Finally, the 202122 budget package included $1 million for the San Diego City Attorney's office to conduct GVRO training statewide for law enforcement, and this was on top of money that was provided in 201819 and 201920. With that, we'll conclude our comments and are available to answer any questions as well.

And I know I said we wait to the very end, but you went so swiftly. I think we can ask for questions right now after each. So are there any questions for the LAO right now? I had one.

Okay.

So I know it's been difficult going through these lists. And really, should the Legislature really consider targeting the removal of firearms from certain and maybe high risk individuals and work our way down prohibited persons? And if so, is there any kind of prioritization so that we can make the public safer if we go after? Because I haven't seen the list.

I'm just trying to think of a way we can ensure that we can get to the most dangerous people sooner, and then they're all dangerous, but the least of them we can get to later because it doesn't seem like we're making a big dent in it. So should we prioritize any of know?

I think your subsequent panels with DOJ and local law enforcement will provide insight in terms of how they go about prioritizing. I think in recent years, in terms of the things that we highlighted for you, I think the Legislature has made a targeted attempt to touch on the various areas where that happens. So a lot of the investment originally was addressing apps, right? Those individuals became prohibited sort of down the line.

And so with some of the recent funding investments, the Legislature has provided funding to local law enforcement to see whether or not there could be actions taken there kind of more locally in supporting those activities. But also in that final action that I talked about as part of the 202223 budget, the Legislature invested $40 million into these court based programs. And so the concept, our understanding of the legislative intent at that time was to basically provide the money.

At the same time, some of these orders were coming down. And it was also focusing on the civil side in terms of both GVROs as well as domestic violence restraining orders and the requirement to partner with law enforcement as part of that funding was to ensure that there was sort of like a chain in terms of the pathway was sort of being followed. That program is just being implemented.

Some grants have been awarded, and so it's a little bit too soon to kind of understand the exact impacts that have occurred. But I think that that is something that the Legislature has thought about in terms of how to distribute the money and how, as Mr. Chair you mentioned, to get the money kind of earlier up front and kind of targeting it in that way.

Petrie Norris, thank you.

That was a really helpful and comprehensive overview in terms of some of the recent budget actions that we have taken, and you highlighted that at the close of your comments. Do you know what is the status of how much of those grants have been dispersed to local agencies and the second pot dispersed to the courts?

So in the grants to local law enforcement of the 201920 that 3 million, our understanding is that one has gone out of the money, the 10 million included as part of the 202122 budget, around approximately 8 million of that has gone out to about 14 agencies. And then for the court monies, of the 40 million, our understanding is 18.5 million has gone out to seven different courts.

And is DOJ awarding those grants as well?

The court ones, no. So the money went to the judicial branch, and then judicial counsel was responsible for soliciting applications for that money and then awarding it. And so as part of those applications, when the courts presented, the individual courts presented their applications, our understanding is they were required to basically present some of those requirements in terms of demonstrating that they had partnered, they had identified the partner law enforcement agency, and then what they were planning on doing with the resources.

Great.

Thank you. Okay.

Thank you, Ms. Li. And now we'll have the annual report to the Legislature on the Armed and Prohibited Persons System by the California Department of Justice. I have John Marsh, Chief Division of Law Enforcement, California Department of Justice, and Michael Redding, Special Assistant Attorney General of California Department of Justice. Good afternoon, gentlemen.

Good afternoon.

Good afternoon.

So whoever wants to start first can begin.

Great. I will begin, and I'll turn it over to Chief Marsh here in a second.

First of all, thank you, everybody, for the opportunity to testify before this joint body today, and thank you to the Public Safety and Accountability and Administrative Review Committees for this invitation. As you said, my name is Michael Redding. I'm a Special Assistant Attorney General for criminal justice, law enforcement, and firearms at the California Department of Justice. Beside me is John Marsh, Chief of the Division of Law Enforcement.

All right.

The Attorney General is committed to working in partnership with the Legislature to solve this endemic problem of gun violence in California. He advocates for an all of the above approach, from disarming dangerous individuals to providing mental health services to those in crisis and at risk of harming themselves and others. APPS is an essential component of that approach. It is not only the first of a kind, it remains, as somebody said, one of the only statewide Armed Prohibited Persons Systems in the country.

This fact is often cited, but it's bared repeating. That means that not only were we first, we're one of the only states that has an understanding of the problems that we face and the number of armed individuals who are prohibited from owning those firearms. Those problems exist across the country. California has taken the first step by knowing that and trying to disarm those individuals.

Our testimony today is intended to provide further insight into APPS, the system itself, our efforts to remove firearms from prohibited individuals, and recommendations for further improving the system and removing individuals. First, Chief Marsh will provide some additional background on APPS, and I will conclude by discussing the recommendations, many of which are included in the 2021 APPS report. Before I turn it over to Chief Marsh, I do want to point out one clarification on the data that we're discussing today.

Each year, over the course of the first few months of the year, California DOJ compiles the data from the previous year and issues the APPS report sometime in the spring. So all of the data that we're talking about today will be from the report that was issued in 2022 about the 2021 numbers. That means that some of it is stale as of today, and we were also under a stay at home order for part of that year. This was certainly part of the pandemic. With that, I will turn it over to Chief Marsh to provide an overview of the APP system.

Thank you, and good afternoon. There's some familiar faces in this room regarding this topic. A little background on me. I've been at DOJ 20 plus years, and I've worked on an APPS team. I've supervised an APPS team, and I've managed the APPS program. So hopefully I'll be able to give you some insight.

But because there are new faces in the room, I thought I'd start off with what APPS is and kind of pull the cover back so everybody can have a better understanding of what it works and how it works. There's a lot of questions about the system, so hopefully I'll touch on some of those things, and I put a PowerPoint together for you because pictures are always great. So we will start off--I don't know who has the clicker. I don't have it.

Next slide. Next, again is just the Bureau of Firearms is where we're getting the data from. Next slide. I'm going to talk about some data, what the prohibitions are, APPS enforcement, and then local APPS assistance. Next slide. So this is why California is able to do it--and nobody else is able to do it--because our AFS system, and this is information for registration, firearms registration. So in 1996, we started collecting firearms registration or registration for handguns.

Then in 2014, legislation was passed to start collecting long gun information. We also have self-reported firearms registration in there, and then also assault weapon registration. So there's other states. The federal government would like to copy the APP system. They can't because they don't have the foundational information that the State of California has. So this is where everything starts. Next slide. So AFS is down at the red in the bottom. It talks to those other four. That's criminal history, restraining order, mental health, and wanted persons.

So those systems, if someone gets put into the system, will connect with AFS to see if there's a match. If there is a match, gets pushed over to an analyst. We have analysts at DOJ, our program side, that go through each triggering event because all of this information is human inputted, so we want to make sure and ensure that the people that we're going to put into the APP system belong in the APP system.

So a human actually looks at the prohibiting factors, ensuring that they are still the registered owner of the firearm, and then the person gets put into APPS. Next slide. From there, I talked about the triggering event. An individual looks at it and it gets put into APPS. This all happens on our program side, and then the person is put into the APP system. Next slide. There we go. Then we have a different crime analyst pull the individual again and put together an investigative package.

And this investigative package puts everything about the person together to be turned over to a special agent. The special agent then looks at it from an investigative lens, reviews the package again, and then the six teams that we have throughout the state put packages together daily to go out and do regional enforcement actions. We're often asked, do we prioritize specific cases?

We try to do it regionally because the state is so big and we only have six teams to try to get the most bang for our buck, because, as I'll talk later, these cases are very labor-intensive. But the question did come up by the Chair about prioritizing cases, the one that--when the APPS case that comes in is restraining orders because there's an active activity related to APPS, the person, so we prioritize those towards the top. Sources of--next slide, sorry--of why people are prohibited, this is the breakdown here.

The biggest is still felony convictions, but we have probation, we have misdemeanors. There's 30-some odd misdemeanors that will put you into the APP system. A mental health event, restraining orders, and then the Federal Brady are federal offenses that aren't necessarily captured--and I'll talk about that in a little bit--here in California, but they're still federally prohibited. Next slide. APPS numbers. So the top one, these are the individuals, the 3.2 million registered gun owners in California.

So that's AFS, that number that I was talking about that bounces off the prohibiting factors, that next number, 24,500, that's the big number of prohibited people in the APP system, and then this is where the discussion always goes a little awry. So I'm hoping to put it in a visual for everybody. 10,033 active cases, and as we said earlier, this is from our 2021 report, and then the 14,476 pending cases. So I'm going to go into detail about those. Next slide. So pending cases.

6,800 of those pending cases are unable to clear. So what does that mean? That means the case has been investigated. A special agent or law enforcement has contacted that person. We recovered all of the firearms that they had in their possession, but we can still not take them out of the APPS database. Why can they not come out? So I'll give you a little example to try to bring it to more focus. So an APPS team goes out.

A person has five guns registered to them in AFS. They make contact with a person. The person says, 'yes, I have guns.' You shouldn't, but, yes, I have guns. They go in, and they seize three guns, and three of the guns are registered to them in AFS. They might have another five guns that weren't registered.

They could be long guns or guns that they've acquired not legally, but those two guns that they had registered to them that I talked about at the beginning, they don't know where they're at. Sometimes they'll say they sold them. They went through a tough part in their life. They might have traded it. They no longer have those guns. We did everything that we could do to search the residence, try to identify those guns.

Even though we seized eight guns, that person has to stay in APPS because there's two guns unaccounted for. So that's when this person goes into 'unable to clear' because we've exhausted every investigative lead that we can to ensure that that person doesn't have the guns. So we can't take them out, but we put them in our APPS. Do I just leave them there? No. I'm not a computer person, but a tickler, which means that they will get recycled, this group, after three years, and push back to an analyst unless something comes up triggering again that pushes them in.

They just don't sit in there forever. We look at them again. We put a full investigative package together again to ensure that that person--nothing's changed, and then if nothing's changed, we put them back in. If something's changed, then we push it back to the investigative teams and they work that person again. Next slide. This is unable to clear. Unable to locate. My bad.

So we're at unable to locate. So, agents, the full packets have gone together. Agents have gone out. The tough part about APPS cases is a lot of times, people don't live at their last address known to law enforcement. So we spend a lot of time going to different addresses. We've done everything that we can to try to locate this person, and we can't find them. So all investigative leads are exhausted. They get put into 'unable to locate.'

Difference here between the last one is, they get a one year tickler. So they only get to sit in there for one year before we pull a full packet on them again, but not only do they sit in there, but we put them into other databases that we have that if any new address comes up through public source or law enforcement databases, they get kicked back over to the active status. Next slide. Pending cases continued. So we've identified the person to be out-of-state, and there's about 4,000 of those.

We took a suggestion from this group, and I'll talk about that later, and then the 1,500, and those are Federal Brady prohibitions. We work with our federal partners, but as state law enforcement officers, we don't have authority to enforce a criminal activity against them because they're not prohibited within the state, but they're federally prohibited. Next slide. So this is what APPS has done since 2007. 70,000 APPS cases investigated, over 35,000 firearms seized. That's about an average 2,500 a year, 10,000 magazines no longer in circulation, and millions of rounds of ammunition off the street.

Next slide. Pictures from APPS cases, typical cases. A lot of times, most of the time if we were going out, maybe one of those handguns or two of those handguns would be in their APP system and then other guns are located during the investigation. Next slide. Ammunition denials and APPS: so great that Prop 63 and SB 1235 were passed. This gives investigators a new tool.

So someone goes in to buy ammunition and they're denied. We automatically check them against APPS. That helps our investigators to be able to have fresh information. We've always been asked, why don't you just write search warrants? Why do you have to knock on people's doors? Because the information in APPS isn't reliable enough for a search warrant. This then makes it reliable. The person is trying to buy ammunition. The normal person would have to have a gun to put the ammunition in.

So if they're in APPS, they try to buy ammunition and denied. We're able to write search warrants and go contact those people. Next slide. Some of the successes from this last year, the teams conducted six major sweeps with law enforcement, conducted 2,000 cases during those sweeps, seized 439 guns. This is one of the recommendations for those people out-of-state that this Committee in the past has given.

We reached out to every Attorney General's Office in the nation and every U.S. Attorney's Office sent them letters letting them know that they have APPS-prohibited people in their state, and will coordinate with them and provide the information if they reach out. Several states have reached out, several U.S. Attorney's Office have reached out, and we're working with them as we speak. Denial letters: this was another thing that came up in a prior hearing.

When someone tries to go in and try to buy a firearm, they're denied. We used to fax the denial to the local law enforcement. Sometimes that could take weeks. Now we are doing it through eFax daily. So local law enforcement, police and sheriffs are getting daily notifications if someone tries to buy a firearm in their area or ammunition. Also, the APPS list, the availability of law enforcement--we've had this discussion in the past also--that used to be pushed out monthly to law enforcement.

Now we send it and update it daily through the Clue system. So law enforcement has daily access to the APPS individuals in their area. And then also training: we've been doing training not only on APPS, but AFS, how AFS works, and why AFS is so important and data entry is so important. Next slide: Gun Violence Reduction Project. This was mentioned earlier. This was the first in 2019 given out to the four counties. Next slide. 2021. It was two sets of grant funding disbursements.

These are the current participating counties: Contra Costa, Lake, Los Angeles, Orange, Sacramento, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, and Ventura. The grant recipients put applications together and they were awarded depending on the amount of APPS people they had in their area. Next slide. What can law enforcement do to assist?

Make sure they're in Clue--it's a common law enforcement access that statewide keeps law enforcement connected--establish APPS investigative priorities, proactively investigate cases, forward supporting documentation to DOJ so we can put them in those appropriate classifications that we spent time talking about, and then the importance of AFS is really important to make sure that any gun seized throughout the State of California is entered into AFS within seven days pursuant to penal code 11108. Recommendations. Last slide. You got that?

Yeah.

All right. Michael says he's got it.

I didn't want him to steal all of my thunder. So, moving on to--exactly--the final thing. So this has a longer list of recommendations. If you look at the APPS report, the recommendations are in the APPS report both at the outset and then again in a little bit more detail further on.

I'm just going to talk about and summarize four recommendations that are, overall, how the Department of Justice believes we can reduce the number of people in APPS, and specifically on the Prohibited Persons List.

So the first one is to remove firearms at the time of prohibition. So as Chief Marsh indicated, every year, give or take, 10,000 people are added to the Prohibited Persons List. About half of those, and a little bit more than half of those are because of a felony or prohibiting misdemeanor, which means that about 5,000 people every year are standing in a court told that they can no longer possess firearms.

We, the government generally, knows that that person has a registered firearm whether it's looked up in each case--it's determined on the case--but we know somewhere and it can be known, and then that person is either released without any follow-up or no paperwork is done, meaning either the gun can either be seized if it is actually in that person's possession or in that person's possession at home, or the person can fill out paperwork indicating that she or he no longer has the weapon. So that's sort of where we begin.

There are about 73 Bureau of Firearms agents at the Bureau of Firearms in the State of California. There are just about 70,000 local law enforcement officers. Really, the beginning is that we need to focus on relinquishing firearms at the time of prohibition. We commend the work of local law enforcement. That is simply not something that ultimately, a bureau of less than 100 agents is going to be able to get through everything every single year.

And one thing I did want to highlight that Chief Marsh mentioned is exactly. Not only is that a lot, but also that the information comes in and is stale after a while, meaning that at that time of prohibition, persons put on probation, we might have a lot of information about that person. By the time it makes its way to us, as Chief Marsh said, we can't necessarily go in.

If they're on probation, we can partner with probation and do a probation search, but in many instances, we don't have probable cause for a warrant. The gun was purchased years ago. A judge is not going to sign a warrant for something that says, 'this guy bought a gun ten years ago, became prohibited three years ago, and we don't have any further information about the firearm.'

So what these agents are doing is going--knocking on doors and really doing the best that they can to convince people to give up their firearm to allow for a consent search, and that's a lot of the work. It's a lot of driving around, it's a lot of waiting, and it's a lot of really using interpersonal skills to try and convince people to give up their firearms. Local law enforcement, local courts, probation departments, DA's offices, we welcome the partnership with them.

To do this not only is the safest option, but exactly--it means that we're not going to increase that number. A couple of ways that this could be done, and in many instances is being done, courts and DAs can create programs to ensure that anyone convicted of a prohibiting offense shows proof of relinquishment of the firearm, so at or near the time of prohibition.

Probation officers can work to retrieve the firearm, either by consent or by a probation search shortly after the time of the conviction, and trying to decrease again that amount of time that a prohibited person is in possession. And then local law enforcement task forces can work with other entities, probation, DA's offices, to work to remove these firearms. Just a note on that, Chair Petrie-Norris, you asked about the Gun Violence Reduction Program grants.

So there were--the Department issued--there were two tranches of money, about five million dollars each year. The first, we received 14 applications for ten slots. That five million dollars, it hasn't all been distributed. Well, I guess now it would have been because it's a two-year grant. The second tranche, we only received six applications for ten slots. Both years. We extended the application deadline. We did extensive outreach. Obviously, we can't do targeted outreach. We did extensive outreach to everybody to try and convince sheriff's offices to apply for that money.

We only received six applications. One did not qualify. We gave out five applications or five grants, rather. So that's something that we're continuing to work on, but ultimately, we need the participation of locals there. And I do want to highlight the San Diego Police Department and the San Diego City Attorney's Office are here. They have a great program that works not only to get GVROs, but to do the hard work of then going to retrieve the firearm.

And that's just a classic and perfect example of a partnership: two people working together to, again, get that prohibition and then retrieve the firearm. So that's the first high-level recommendation. The second is--and these next few, I'll tear through a little bit quicker--but the second is the Firearms Modernization Project. As Chief Marsh discussed, we were the first one to build the system. The system was built 20ish years ago. It is out of date, and there are a lot of different systems.

These systems do not communicate with each other in order to get updated information which is relevant to both, whether the person remains prohibited, whether they still live at that address, takes a lot of groundwork and going from system to system to pull it. We are in the process of modernizing that system so that we are able to not have that be such a tedious process, and we can get to the meat of trying to take firearms from prohibited individuals.

I do want to thank the Governor and of course, the Legislature for continuing to invest in that project. Third: local partnerships. So even if we shift more of this to front end relinquishment, there's always going to be APPS work taking place. The Department of Justice obviously very much values that work and will continue to do it. We hope to partner with local law enforcement, DAs, courts, probation, anybody to do the kinds of sweeps that Chief Marsh discussed.

Those sweeps are better when everybody works together and increases the number of people that we can have and increases the capabilities. And then fourth and finally--and this is again discussed in the APPS report--but recruitment and retention of Bureau of Firearm agents. Our special agents are the finest law enforcement in all of California. Every day they put their lives in harm's way, quite literally going door to door to individuals that they know to be prohibited and potentially armed to seize these firearms.

It's laudable, commendable, heroic work, but it does not come without some sacrifice. At any time, the Bureau of Firearms has vacancies. Currently there are 56 agents and 17 vacancies. One of the reasons for this is that the pay is not competitive with other large law enforcement agencies and other statewide agencies.

This turnover means two things primarily. One is, of course, that we are regularly understaffed and we regularly have vacancies. Two: we spend a lot of time recruiting, training, and bringing new agents into the field.

It's a significant amount of our time. The 12 percent increase that was approved in 2021 by the Legislature was a huge help, and we are certainly very appreciative, but without additional resources, this will continue to be a problem. We will continue to lose agents to other law enforcement agencies where especially young agents with young children see that they can get a pay increase by going somewhere else.

They are categorically going to continue to leave the Department. So in sum, I would just say there is no panacea. This is obviously true of all firearms work. No one law will fix everything.

But if we focus on these topics that we've discussed today-- relinquishment at the time of prohibition, modernizing our systems, continuing to build state and local partnerships--we can continue to reduce the number of individuals on the Prohibited Persons List. With that, Chair, welcome any questions or we can defer to later.

Okay, and I want to thank you. I've been here ten years, and I think Mr. Lackey has been with me for a large part of that. This has probably been the most effective and efficient explanation of what you do, and I thank you for that. So I'm going to ask, can you get us those slides so that we can look at that? Because--and I'll give you an example. I'll give it a name.

It's probably not the right name, but you have what I would call 'repeat customers.' So the explanation, the example you gave of going into a home, seizing three weapons that were on the list that you knew they had but you didn't got five other firearms, but you have to keep them on the list because there's two that you just couldn't find. And whatever the reason or rationale, you keep it on that. So I think we've been beating up DOJ because of the backlog.

I think that adds to your backlog, and maybe in some minds, you did the best you could and you should take them off, but you probably shouldn't take them off because of safety to the public. So you're in a catch-22 situation and maybe that's a side data point we need to put on because you are reducing the number of people on APPS or you've at least come in contact to reduce that number.

But because of the methodology you have to use, you can't really--it's like one step forward, two steps back, and that's got to be extremely frustrating. And so I want to know about that, plus you were talking about the FBI--not the FBI but the federal arms.

You got to keep that on or keep those names on because federally you're required to, but you may not be able to take care of it to reduce it, which then keeps your numbers high, which probably isn't fair for us--you see what I'm saying--to put that burden on you when maybe there's another way to that.

So if we can think through that, again to make sure we keep the public safe, and then I would like to know the salary delta between--I guess we gave you money but it still wasn't enough. So let's figure out what that number is. Are we talking a 10,000 dollar difference, a 20,000 dollar difference? God forbid if it's like a 50,000 dollar difference, and I know you're never going to get anybody to come in or to retain, and so it would be good for us so we don't just give you a little bit at a time that we actually solve this problem.

So you can get the number of people you need, 17 vacancies and keep increasing. But if we can plug that in some substantive way or figure out a way to make sure you don't lose people because of money because it sounds like the people who stay are doing it because they believe in what they're doing, then we need to keep those people because they believe in it.

And so if you have any other suggestions on how we--a better way to look at the backlog, because that's the crux of what I've been dealing with for the last ten years.

You guys come back and you take care of a lot of people or you get a lot of people off, but it seems like you get 5,000 but then there's 6,000 we add on, and so if you can give us a better clarity on maybe who keeps coming back on or who the new people that come on and why is it. I mean, I also saw the data points you had, whether--I mean, most of it was felonies, but you had other categories in there. Which one is spiking this the most so that we can better focus like a laser on how we can reduce the absolutes? I know I probably asked you three questions.

No, I feel like that's what the Bureau tried to do, is to really look at what an active case is, and the reason we don't take them out is, God forbid, the guy had the gun at his grandmother's house and then went and got that gun back and we took him out of the list and now he has the gun again.

There's ways for those people to get out of the system and we help them any way we can, but they have to take the action, right? They have to say, 'I sold this gun.' They have to go to local law enforcement and fill out a form saying that, 'yes, I transferred here,' or 'I no longer have this gun.' We have things on our website that they can sign under the penalty of perjury that they no longer have that gun.

And that helps pull them out of the system. And we work through them with those issues, but some people are not going to do it so we leave them in. So we try to look at that active number is what's really there, and it's about 10,000 a year. It's a churning, right? 10,000 people come in, but we take 10,000 out. So it's just that churning number.

So we're never going to get it to zero because people come in every day and they go out every day and it's year by year that 10,000 is staying consistent because new people are coming in, we're investigating them, they're going down, so it's that churning number. But we'll see what we can do to try to provide more clarity to what that looks like, but we're trying to be as transparent as possible. I want to keep that number. Hey, this is really the number.

It's 24,000 because we've done interdiction on 14,000, 15,000 people. Now it's up to them to take the next step or how do we get them the rest of the way out of the system, and some of it lands on them.

Okay. Maybe that's a discussion we had, and is the salary kind of a state secret?

The salaries, the 12 percent was fantastic. I always like to refer back to Mr. Lackey if I could get my agents to CHP legislative to fall within that stay so they don't have to bargain. It's a bargaining issue, but it's a retention issue.

But I've been before you before saying I have a 35 percent vacancy rate. I'm a 23. So we're working really hard to recruit, but it's harder because we are below the state average. But we have that data. Human resources--

If you could just get it to me, I'd like to look at it.

Yeah, of course. Of course.

Thank you. Any other questions? Ms. Davies and then Mr. Lackey.

Thank you. Thank you very much, Chief Marsh. I know you've touched upon this a little bit, but in your opinion, what more investigative information can you provide or do you think would be helpful for local law enforcement agencies regarding people legally possessing firearms?

Yeah, and this goes back to the system. It is the best in the nation, but mostly antiquated at the same time. It's like this, very difficult--we built it as a one-way system, and we come before the Committee and everybody wants all this data. It doesn't give us data. It doesn't present information for locals to get it.

That's our goal when we do this firearms modification, that we're going to have a system that everybody in law enforcement can access and be able to put notes and everybody work together. Right now, it doesn't do that.

You need funding to get this upgraded big time to be able to do what you really need to do.

Yeah, and we're working towards it. It's in the process, and right now, the heavy lift for local law enforcement is you have a name and a gun and it takes a lot of investigative work to do it. It's not like I can just hand that to a patrol guy and say, 'hey, go get this guy,' because they'll tell you their frustration. They run around in circles because it's got a name and date of birth, and it takes a lot of investigative work to put these packets together. And that's the disconnect right now with the locals, and once we get the system updated, it's going to be fantastic for everybody. But we're not there.

If I may, a second question, you talk about funding for these agencies, but you're out there promoting that the funding is there and there's still funding sitting there because it's agencies. Why is it the agencies aren't going--local agencies aren't applying for this?

Sure. Yeah. No, it's a good question, and it's a difficult one. Obviously, it's hard to say exactly where this happens because there are 58 local sheriffs that could have applied for it. A couple of things: one is priorities. One is moving it up the priority chain.

Two is--and this is tough--but these individual tranches of money are tough for local law enforcement or any law enforcement agency because as Chief Marsh talked about, this is hard work and it requires officers and agents, and we can't hire people and say, 'hey, you're going to be here for two years and then we lose the funding and then you're going back to where you came from.' Exactly. These people are looking at that and saying, 'well, we can't do it.'

So they might be in a position where they're not able to take that money and utilize it in a way, and then the last one is that it is hard work. I mean, Chair Jones-Sawyer, you talked a little bit about--or you honed in on this with the person who remains in APPS because they've still got two firearms in their name. It's an open question how much time we want to invest in that.

We've got new people coming on to the system every single day, and then we've got somebody who claims at least that the firearms aren't there. How often do we want to send agents out to the door to get that? And I think local law enforcement deals with a very similar issue where, just to be absolutely clear, they are doing incredible work to stop the crime, investigate the crime that's happening there.

Obviously, you know, we at the Department of Justice and the Attorney General thinks that this is a top priority because this can reduce violence by taking firearms away from people, but it's also a little bit different when you're dealing with, we're not investigating robberies down the street in the same way that we are. We have a Bureau of Firearms and we can go get it.

They have to deal with other cases there, too, and have to justify to--in the case of sheriffs, their constituents--why they're prioritizing this work when there are crimes occurring. So it's a tough question for them.

Go ahead.

And just one more add, it was restrictive. The grant funding was restrictive. We have 400 law enforcement agencies and 58 sheriffs, so if we could expand next time around, maybe, if we can expand it to all law enforcement, we might be able to spread it out a little bit more.

And just a final comment with that, we've seen this before, especially during Covid and we were trying to get mental health instructors into our schools, but when you go say, 'we're going to do one-time funding,' no one's going to go ahead and quit their job and say, 'I'm going to take this on knowing that I may not have a job next year.' And I think that's the concern.

When we've got numbers like this, we need to actually figure, here's money for three years so that you can go and do what you need to do, and then hopefully we're at ground zero and we're starting from there, but we can't just fund one year. It's not working. We see that. You need to be able to get good help, trained staff that know that, you know what--because we know it's not obtainable to do this in one year, and yet we fund sometimes like that.

So we need to make sure we're giving you the funding and the time that you need to actually make this work and get good staff and be able to get the job done. Thank you.

Thank you. Mr. Lackey and then Ms. Bonta.

Yeah, thank you. I want to first of all commend you for that information. It was very, very helpful. Some of those explanations I've never heard before and the unable to clear, the unable to locate, and the pending, it's still very unclear to me and I hope you can help me understand the difference between an active versus a pending case because I think that's where a lot of the misunderstanding truly exists by those of us who are dealing with these policies and it's not clear to me the difference between a pending case and an active case.

Maybe you can help me understand--

Yeah.

I think I can.

Differentiation, because it's very, very important that I understand it.

Yeah. So pending, we did something. Active hasn't been worked yet, so that active group of about 10,000, there's been no law enforcement action yet. I mean, there could be packets or investigative, but nobody's been contacted.

But is there a reason why they haven't been contacted? You just haven't got to them?

Yes.

Okay. That's important for me to know that.

So they're in the system. Yeah. They're in the system, they just haven't been pulled out yet.

Okay.

The pending is law enforcement's gone out there and all those things that I explained--

But there's entanglement still of some sort.

Yeah. We either can't get you out or we can't find you or you're out of the state. But we took a law enforcement action. Does that make sense?

No. That's very helpful.

Okay.

And secondly, are there any statistics that have been kept on the successes by tracing ammunition? I would love to know that. I would love to know how many people you've actually been able to recover through attempted ammunition purchases because I think that that's a very valuable tool, but are we having real success or just having a little bit of success? I would love to know that. I think that's important to know.

The data is there. I'm almost sure it's going to be in our new report, and if not, I'll get you the data.

That's fair. And my final comment has to do with--you were talking about becoming competitive in the law enforcement world. In case you weren't aware, and I think everybody in this room is probably aware, the morale amongst law enforcement is quite low right now. All agencies are having trouble finding good, qualified candidates because the incentive has been thwarted substantially over the last couple of years for a number of reasons. And I feel like the ask to try to do pay increases, it's beyond that.

It's beyond just salary right now. I think all agencies are having real trouble finding the servant's heart because that's really when you get good law enforcement and salary increases are not irrelevant. Salary is truly an issue, but it's not the only issue. And I think society needs to recognize this fact that everybody hurts when we demonize an entire profession because of the misconduct of a few.

And I just want to make that point very, very clear because I think it deserves to be said and I wish us all well, and when I say us, I'm a retired law enforcement professional. Very proud of that, and I'm very saddened to see the condition that is eroded, and you're impacted by it as well. And so we talk about the delta that exists between that agency and other agencies. That's a very complex issue. That's a negotiated piece, and I think the Legislature can play a role, but it's beyond us. And that's really all I wanted to say.

And I really appreciate those comments and feel it every day and have conversations with the biggest police departments, the chiefs that are getting paid very well, and they're saying the same thing that you're saying, right. It's getting candidates. I can pay you one million dollars, but getting someone to get into a profession that isn't held as high as it once was is causing difficulties for everybody. So I appreciate those comments and bringing that up.

Ms. Bonta.

Thanks. I wanted to just hone in a little bit on the nature of the pending cases, which I think is--

Think for us to really focus it on in my district, Oakland, East Oakland. We were one of the mass shootings that happened. We had 154 homicides, the majority of which were caused by or there were guns involved in those deaths. It strikes me that there's a time lag issue that's incredibly concerning, right? Essentially, guys, 62% of the pending cases are either unable to clear or unable to locate where. It seems like it requires incredible investigative energy to be able to dig into that.

And it really has to do. Thank you. It really has to do with the fact that time has passed and information has gone stale. And if you add the 27% that went out of state, it kind of increases that number.

So I really want to appreciate one of the recommendations that you made of, instead of kind of dealing with all of this exposed, where time is not on our side, and we've allowed those guns to continue to exist, what we can do to really buttress up the time in hand when people are in front of us to be able to take weapons out of our communities.

So I just wanted to give you a little bit more air time, because I thought the recommendation was really quite fitting to really focus in on something that capitalizes on more immediacy and urgency that would actually reduce significantly, if we were able to do this, by 89% the number of pending cases that you have.

Yeah, absolutely. Obviously, we agree there. I think examples that I would throw out is there are places up and down the state where this is happening and this is working. I was a deputy DA in San Mateo County when Prop 63 passed, what we would do as DAs, we would go run people out in the system to see if they had a registered firearm.

If I was going downstairs to take a felony plea, and I knew that person was going to become prohibited that afternoon, I would run them out. I would go down there. The courts, we set up a system. The courts knew about it. I would say, after the person entered their felony plea, I would say, your honor, I've run this person out. They've got a registered firearm to them. The court would take it.

They would say, you have 21 days to show proof that you have relinquished this firearm. Come back in 21 days, you're ordered back to court here today. It took resources, it took coordination, but it wasn't a massive, onerous system. But it helped us address that at the front end.

Obviously, there's ways to expand that, partnering with probation if they're not able to do it, and courts could and did order probation searches or suggest probation searches if there wasn't relinquishment and some reason to believe that the firearm was still in the possession. Santa Clara DA's Office has a great program that they run. They do a wide variety of things to aimed at reducing crime, reducing violence.

But something that they'll do is exactly follow up on civil orders, GVROs DVROs, workplace violence orders, and see if they are ripe for a warrant and ripe for follow-up to go retrieve the firearm from them. So those are the kinds of things that we're seeing, and we really welcome it and we welcome that collaboration to focus on it again. And I don't want to beat a dead horse, but it reduces the numbers.

But the biggest thing is that reduces the amount of time that a prohibited person is in possession of a firearm.

And I just have one additional question kind of on that same theme, because removing the firearm at the time, prohibition just seems kind of painfully obvious. While I'm really pleased, and we were, I think many of us were big champions of the $40 million investment in last year's budget, it's also really frustrating that it's kind of taken us that long to get to that point because what you described happening when you were a DA in San Mateo just again, seems so obvious, right?

That's how it should be working. In terms of the investment that we have made, I'm a little concerned because it feels like that's still kind of an opt-in program. And are there other things that we need to do to ensure that we have kind of a functioning system at the time of Prohibition that's working all across the state?

Yeah, absolutely. I think what I can say right now, these are the recommendations that we've had in the report or that we've issued in the report. I do want to be clear, and I hope I have been, that courts, probation officers, local DA's offices, city attorneys are doing yeoman's work to try and get at this. So it's not the case that anybody's sitting on their hands, not at all that that's what you're suggesting. These are the recommendations we have.

I think we're very open to talking further about it. You're going to hear more examples about the variety of things that are happening. I'm with you. And I think that's been the frustration is that we haven't seen it happen. We are seeing it happen, and there's a lot of, you know, work being done and different examples that I think hopefully we can take. The goal of the gun violence reduction program, which is the grants the two tranches of 5 million to go to sheriff's office.

Obviously, one, we wanted to give or given by you all, but one, we collectively wanted to give money, but two, we wanted to get good examples of programs that work so that we could expand on them. And that's something the Attorney General very much believes and is taking what's worked and sharing it up and down across the state. So we are seeing renewed interest in that.

We don't have all the answers, and certainly, I don't want to go to the courts and say, this is how you can make it work. I know they're doing it and there are great examples of it, but I think that's a continuing conversation so that we can see what's working and try and spread it out well.

And so thank you, Mr. Redding and Chief Marsh. That's actually, I think, a good segue into our next panel. So thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate your testimony. So we'll transition now to panel three. And the subject is the local implementation of the Armed and Prohibited Person System.

We are going to be joined by Sarah Tunnicliffe, who's a sergeant in the Threat Management Unit at the City of Irvine's Police Department, by Thomas Dillon, a sergeant from the City of San Diego's Police Department, and Nicole Crosby, who is the Chief Deputy City Attorney in the Office of the San Diego City Attorney. Thank you so much for being here.

Good afternoon, Chairs. Good afternoon, Committee. Thank you for having us. I'm Nicole Crosby, Chief Deputy City Attorney from the San Diego City Attorney's Office. I know that the sergeant from Irvine is remote, so I'd like to take leave to allow her to make her comments first.

Okay.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Hi, Sergeant Tunnicliffe, can you hear us?

Hello.

Yes, I can. Thank you.

Hi.

Great. You can go ahead and jump in. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you. I want to start by thanking this Committee for inviting me today and for being so accommodating and allowing me to appear remotely. As a working mother of a two-year-old son, I really appreciate you allowing me the opportunity to balance motherhood and representing my Department and my profession. I want to thank this Committee for the opportunity to highlight the great work being done by local law enforcement across the state to keep our communities safe.

I'm here today because several months ago, I shared the important work the Irvine Police Department is doing with our GVRO process with Assemblywoman Petrie-Norris. Over the last 12 months, we've created a GVRO system at our Police Department that dedicates officers, a sergeant, and our city attorney's office, ensuring that we safely recover weapons and are active and present in the GVRO court process. For background on GVROs from 2019 to 2021, the Irvine Police Department issued 10 emergency GVROs but zero permanent orders.

With our new process in 2022, we've issued 21 GVROs in a single year, leading to the recovery of over 70 firearms, along with suppressors, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and more than 100 magazines. The 21 GVROs are a combination of emergency and ex parte orders, and all orders have gone through or are going through the civil court process if there wasn't another prohibition identified along the way.

This would not have been possible without dedicated detectives working on this civil process, taking time away from their regular investigative assignments, as well as the support of our city attorney who has been instrumental in the legal process, including working to find resolutions that are fair and focused on the heart at why the GVRO was requested. We received great training from the San Diego City Attorney's Office as a base for creating our process.

Through this journey, we have learned several things that have stood out on GVRO cases, and today I wanted to offer some thoughts from our team's perspective. There are a few things that we found conflicting in addressing laws with GVROs as compared to mental health WIC 5150s, which also carries firearm restrictions. From a community safety perspective, there is an automatic five-year prohibition for a 5150 hold when entered by a physician.

But in the GVRO setting, the same fact pattern can have a prohibition ranging from one to five years, depending on the court's discretion. So when evaluating both 5150s and GVROs, we found it hard to understand why a mental health hold can potentially have a longer firearm prohibition than a GVRO if they're both designed to keep the community safe. And in the same framework, I would ask this Committee to consider California Penal Code 18205 versus WIC 8103.

From a criminal investigation perspective, at the arrest phase, it's a misdemeanor in California under the 18205 to possess or acquire a farm after you've been issued a GVRO. However, if you do the same after a mental health prohibition under WIC 813 it can be a felony or a misdemeanor.

So this distinction can mean the difference between counties in many counties, from someone being issued a citation and being released back into the community immediately, or that same individual being taken to a county jail until they make bail or can go before a magistrate. This is just an example of some of the inconsistencies in some of the laws for firearm prohibitions that local law enforcement must enforce in an answer to our community on

So I would ask this Committee to consider looking at some of these applicable sections I've highlighted today and consider opportunities for that consistency. The last recommendation around consistency I would like to share comes from the GVRO court process. The San Diego City Attorney's Office has been incredible in sharing their lessons learned. However, we found that what may be applicable in a San Diego courtroom may not be applicable in an Orange County courtroom.

So we've seen differences in when personal service of subpoenas or court orders is required, and also some inconsistencies in when we see a one-year versus a five-year GVRO being issued. And while some of this may be shored up with case law in the coming years, I share this concern because there are times when the great training provided by San Diego may not be applicable in our courtroom, making it one of the biggest struggles we had in building our program.

And finally, I wanted to share that on top of all the great things the GVRO process offers to keep our community safe, it's only a valuable tool if local law enforcement has the funding and resources to utilize it.

The Irvine Police Department model for handling GVROs encompasses a new process for our records processing, funding to cover the cost of our city attorney's office, help from a crime analyst and our court liaison to keep track of any criminal cases that parallel the GVROs, as well as the dedication and training of detective, a supervisor and officer teams to handle the high-risk recovery of firearms under search warrants.

I know in speaking with other police agencies that not every Department has the funding or resources to dedicate what is needed to use GVROs as an effective tool in community safety. Because the GVROs are in a civil court and not in criminal court, a local agency has to rely on their city attorney to navigate the court process rather than simply the county DA's office. We have learned that this can be a really costly process and the more GVROs an agency request, the higher that cost becomes.

Lastly, while the GVRO law allows for community members such as domestic partners and employers to apply for them, it's been our experience that those who could attempt to secure a GVRO on their own often don't and instead rely on local law enforcement to handle. This is because we have more experience in the court process. We're forced to absorb the cost of that court process.

We can more safely provide service of the order to the restrained party, and we have the tools and ability to immediately collect the firearms of concern. Expanding the GVRO law to allow others to acquire them is very well intended, but it has been our experience that it is a rare exception and the burden of GVROs falls overwhelmingly on local law enforcement. So in Irvine, we're fortunate enough at this time to have the financial support from our city to support this process.

But as I've shared our process with other cities, I find many are not as lucky. Funding from the state to support attorney representation and dedicated officers to this critical and impactful tool is the only way to see that it is used and applied as it was intended, which is to save lives.

Funding for regional task forces may offer a great advantage to many agencies because of the shared use of resources in the way of personnel and equipment, as well as dedicated legal representation for the GVRO court process that a task force could provide. Additionally, funding for agencies that have established programs would ensure they can continue to exist.

As I've shared, it takes a dedication of equipment and resources and man hours to be used to their fullest potential, and I would ask this Committee to consider funding dedicated to ensuring local law enforcement agencies can utilize this life-saving tool. APPS is also an important parallel program to GVROs in keeping our community safe and taking firearms out of the hands of those should not have them.

At Irvine PD, we are very committed to attempting to collect firearms from all in the APPS system, but generally speaking for local agencies this is a difficult task to accomplish, as we've also heard from the previous speakers. For context, for us, once a month a PDF list is generated by DOJ, which is used by local law enforcement to seek out and remove the firearms from those who are prohibited.

The PDF contains information that's not very user-friendly because it contains county-wide information that we have to sift through in order to find any Irvine-related cases.

While this may not seem like a lot of work, for perspective, the December list from APPS alone was over 2,800 pages that we had to go through. And because the system comes in a PDF rather than a more user-friendly and interactive delivery system, we have to spend man-hours creating our own systems to keep track of whether or not someone is in a new entry or an old one, as well as parcel out any updated information on the old entry.

And because we only receive it once a month, we find ourselves at times spending valuable time looking into cases that have already been reviewed or handled by another agency or jurisdiction. So local law enforcement really needs the ability to interact with APPS in a more user-friendly manner with updated systems, as was referenced in the presentation by DOJ.

And secondly, but equally as important, is that continued access to funding. Local law enforcement agencies need access to regular training to know how to read and use the information in APPS. Assignment changes or new hire onboardings are common across the profession, so the ability to regularly train our personnel is essential to ensuring knowledge isn't lost along the way. I know when my unit started looking into APPS, we found that some of our own agency institutional knowledge have been lost through promotions and assignment changes.

So continued access to regular training from DOJ in any format could ensure this doesn't happen. And in addition to the training, having that grant funding available for officers and or task forces at the local level to all law enforcement agencies to help address the recovery of weapons from prohibited persons is essential. Our county sheriff's department, as you saw, was on the list and has been given an overtime grant to address the APPS list.

But due to a lack in information in updating the APPS systems, we find that we're often overlapping our efforts with our limited resources. And because it's an overtime grant, they're only devoting time and resources after their primary assignment is done.

So much like GVROs, funding for departments with the size and resources to work independently, or funding for task forces where departments can share resources and personnel dedicated to this task, would go a long way in allowing local law enforcement the ability to be proactive in the recovery of weapons from prohibited persons. I would like to highlight that we have a great relationship with DOJ and appreciate their efforts in collaboration, but recognize that the burden of firearms collection falls mostly on local law enforcement.

So we're appreciative of any assistance the state can provide to support our efforts. So I just want to thank the Committee today, again, for the opportunity to share with you my perspective as a local law enforcement officer on these very important topics and to highlight the work Irvine PD has done to keep our community safe. So thank you very much.

Well, and thank you, Sergeant. We appreciate you being here. We'll go ahead and turn it back to our two guests from San Diego.

Okay, so, as I said earlier, my name is Nicole Crosby. I'm a Chief Deputy City Attorney at the San Diego City Attorney's Office. I'm the Chief of our Government Affairs and Accountability Unit, and our unit focuses on proactively protecting people. And that protection comes in a variety of ways. And in order to understand a little bit of why our program is so successful it's important to understand the origin story, what we do, and then how the origin of the GVRO program started.

So our unit. we work to reduce firearm violence in the community through GVROs, firearm destruction petitions, supporting operations to move ghost guns from city streets, finding and prosecuting armed prohibited persons, and information sharing with agencies across the region and beyond. We have a public ethics and integrity section investigating corruption in government and public service. We also have a LIFT program.

It's life-saving intervention for treatment, activating county resources for behavioral and mental health needs for underserved and high utilizers, stressing local fire, emergency medical systems, and police departments through legal representation in court with probate conservatorships, assisted outpatient treatment referrals, and additional pathways. So when I was first tasked to start a GVRO program from scratch, I was the Chief of the Domestic Violence and Sex Crimes. And that's important because it makes perfect sense, that type of work, identifying red flags as part of your everyday job.

It is easy to see, and it also makes sense for law enforcement to be involved, and not just for this simplicity, but it really does remove the burden of families in times of crisis. We don't want to make it harder for individuals in our community to make things safer for themselves and for their loved ones.

So I unearthed a little known and not very used GVRO law years and years ago, and I directed one deputy city attorney to work with me, create a training and operation plan. We dispatched it across the city. It was not a quick process going back to 2018, but with support from the top, and this is important, the chief of police and the city attorney's office were invested. And because they cared, we were able to grow into the state-recognized program we are today.

So we created a POST-certified program. And when something is POST-certified by the Police Officer Standards and Training, it encourages law enforcement to actually go because they get advanced credits and they get to train. And now that it's part of many academies like in San Diego, the more seasoned officers, I will say, want to know more about GVROs, but they don't know anything because now all of the new academy and recruits know something.

So it's becoming part of the culture, and that's what time takes to happen. We now have a staff of 10 and includes attorneys, dedicated SDPD detective, a supportive sergeant that we have here in Tom Dylan, a city attorney, investigator, secretary, paralegal. And before it was made a law, we even had a victim advocate at Your Safe Place, which is a family justice center in the City of San Diego.

In order to make sure that victims of inter-partner violence or anybody in human trafficking, they were provided information about GVROs and if they wanted their information forward to law enforcement, we would handle that process for them. So most recently, as noted earlier, I defended our GVRO court hearing process, an evidentiary procedure in the Court of Appeals. This published court opinion, it now provides attorneys and judges across the state with framework for the types of evidence that can come during a GVRO hearing.

It provides consistency, and it's more akin to workplace violent order and civil harassment order procedures. It also makes GVROs less intimidating, less procedurally complex, and much more useful to help police and families protect our communities. In that particular case, Assembly Member Lackey mentioned ammunition and prohibited persons. In that particular case that I argued in front of the Court of Appeals, he was a prohibited person. He did have a mental health prohibition, he was prohibited from having ammunition, and he was denied at Walmart.

But he still had in his possession firearms until the San Diego Police Department relieved him of those firearms. So that is a very real example of APPS and GVRO intertwining. So the support that we have had from the California Legislature, it has allowed us to grow in this program because money does matter.

With grants from the state, we have trained over 500 agencies, thousands of officers, local, county, state, federal, and we are available night and day for law enforcement and attorney questions and any agencies interested in starting their own programs. Heading into our fifth year of statewide training, we are proud to see many agencies grow. Like Irvine, one of our earlier supporters, Riverside Sheriff's Department, has really done a successful and great job at starting from something scratch at a county level.

So five years have also shown us where we've seen red flags since 2018. About 40% of cases involve intimate partner violence and family violence. About 30% of cases involve threats of suicide. And then the remaining the dangerous school threats, workplace violence, acquaintance violence, all of this violence is too much. But this dedicated group of local law enforcement agents, working with their attorneys, are able to work to reduce and remove the violence from the community.

We have worked over the past five years with agencies in smaller cities, as the sergeant mentioned, in rural regions, and they struggle for lack of law enforcement personnel to execute GVRO or APPS operations, or they may not even have the dedicated legal support. Not everyone has a city attorney. They have contract attorneys. And as you've heard from the sergeant, the cost can be prohibitive. But cities and smaller departments are not always able to lean on support from their county.

So there exists sheriff departments that have not made an effort to create a GVRO program or dedicate any resources towards that effort, despite having the luxury of county council or even their own independent council and regional jurisdiction. But there is hope. We started by bringing GVRO legal services and training to our Police Department. Now we are seeing departments eager looking for help. They're looking for legal help.

So the idea is it's not the law enforcement that doesn't want to get engaged, they do, but they need help and support because nobody can do it alone. So we've asked ourselves, so how can we make a GVRO program more attainable for everyone across the state? Have the framework of law enforcement and legal support available to see the petition through court process, not just fall off at day 21? Well, this works for GVROs and for APPS.

On a single jurisdiction scale, it's not feasible and it's cost-prohibitive. You've heard from the DOJ. 73 Bureau of Firearm Officers. That's not sufficient for the state. But what Michael Redding did indicate is that we have 70,000 law enforcement officers that are working in the communities every day, capturing information every day, and wanting to be part of the solution. So by including local law enforcement, not just county, it gives more ownership to the local law enforcement who may not have had access to the information.

So the answer, however, isn't a regionalized, as a sergeant mentioned, GVRO APPS task force. And this isn't just one group of individuals. This is everyone in the county who wants to maybe opt in, as Chair Petrie-Norris mentioned. But really, if certain people are opting in, I think everyone's going to want to opt in, mostly because of optics. So all counties, cities, communities across the state would benefit from a regionalized task force.

And I know this because in the City of San Diego, the Police Department, and the city attorney, we regularly work on GVROs and involve APPS that cross jurisdictions. We have worked with other city police departments because when the incident may happen in San Diego, they may live in Chula Vista, Oceanside, they may live in Riverside, and as well as state and federal agencies, we have a large military population in San Diego, and there is no federal red flag law.

But that doesn't mean that law enforcement working in federal departments aren't looking for solutions and help in order to make communities safer. They work with us, they share information with us, and we have a partnership that really does work proactively together to move the needle in terms of one changing the culture about how GVRos are perceived and understood, and about relinquishing individuals who are a danger in our community from firearms. So with this, coordination is key.

It's key to manage known threats of firearm violence, you know, dispatching resources together, because nobody can do it alone. Until very recently, California Highway Patrol, a large statewide agency, did not have legal support for GVROs. It is something I had been discussing for many years, and I do. And I want to recognize Attorney General Bonta for obtaining legal representation for GVRO petitioners coming out of the CHP, because that's a big deal.

There's a large jurisdiction that can't necessarily be accessed by cities or by the state without that support. Because even if California Highway Patrol gets that GVRO, then what? Then what? So we recently trained deputy attorney generals in the San Diego and Los Angeles offices, and we're hopeful that state departments in Southern California will be able to now look to someone for that kind of support.

By pooling law enforcement and legal resources, state, county, and local agencies will be better able to cover the jurisdictional gaps, improve cross-agency communication of the red flags, and create one regionwide GVRO point of contact for consistent investigation, expert analysis, efficient petitioning, and firearm seizures as necessary. The legislation for search warrants. So during the DOJ presentation, there was a note. So if you're an APPS individual, a search warrant can be obtained.

You just need to go to a court and get minute order that the individual is convicted and they haven't relinquished their firearms. But that does take work. And if you have one group of individuals whose sole task is to proactively do the work in their region, then that isn't work, that's their job. And that's okay, because like Sergeant from Irvine said, this is not a pickup game. This is their daily work. And we can really make a difference if we focus on it.

This task can also lead the local ops recoveries proactively and regularly. Because they are the officers and deputies most familiar. They can have partners with the Bureau of Firearms as a state representative in the task force. Because there are many benefits to access to information in the way the information is maintained currently, but also jurisdictional crossovers when you have task force. So if there are individuals that are not participating in this type of program are not able to petition for GVROs, that hurdle is now removed.

So to combat the APPS backlog is to recognize the problem and make the requisite changes. Local agencies are unable to safely rely on the DoD database. There is inaccurate data that lingers, and although critical information is known, it's slow to be input. But that aside, dozens if not hundreds of different local data systems have been created and they've been maintained over decades and decades across the state.

And this effort in the looking forward to the technology of this particular state to coordinate any type of law enforcement information should be a statewide system, a complete overhaul, collecting data from all agencies, including blockchain technology, where certain individuals can input in their regions, they can access their own data, but then the state who is the possessor and maintainer of the data, just like the current CII, can still access the information, whether it includes DMV, including the information that will close the loopholes for APPS that's already available and was discussed by the DOJ in very disjointed form.

So what this would do, it would also assist the Department of Justice and Legislature to review in real time data. Local law enforcement will be able to input the known information and instead of just having a one-way interface, there are notes in there. So obviously in a new system, we wouldn't have to just rely on notes. We could change things that say this person we made contact with and they are falling off the system for a reason.

But even a note would be better than nothing, right? So the ability for DOJ and local law enforcement to be able to pull data and assess with real-time awareness the potential threats, the consolidated format is just not limited to restraining orders and APPS, but all relevant history is really important for assessing potential threats. Sergeant Dillon is going to talk about a few of those threats.

So with the Legislature's support and encouragement, law enforcement agencies will be able to work together, especially in counties where gvros and apps are not being sought proactively, if at all. State support will promote and validate the importance of gun laws reduction and acknowledge the efforts of peace officers that have low morale all around California who want to do better for their communities because they cannot do this alone. How do we quantify engagement, or lack of engagement at the agency level regarding this work?

Well, the legislators directed that every law enforcement agency in the state have policies and procedures about GVROs. Well, to assess their use, a Legislator could request regular reporting from law enforcement about emergency and temporary orders that have actually resulted in permanent orders. We do this regularly as a matter of best practices for our client, the Police Department, so change is possible. What I have seen and heard across the state, even in the most conservative of regions, officers on the ground have embraced GVROs after our training.

They have a better understanding of how the tool is used to keep communities safe in ways that they have never been able to do. Before. Leadership at the top of agencies and jurisdictions across the state is the controlling factor for a successful program. Consolidating personnel regionally can overcome staffing and philosophical shortcomings for safety, and we thank the Legislature of the State of California for focusing on this public safety, and I turn it over to my colleague.

Good afternoon. My name is Thomas Dillon. I'm a sergeant with the San Diego Police Department. I'm currently assigned to our Chief's Office and have the responsibility of overseeing our Gun Violence Restraining Order Unit. Our Department was one of the first in the forefront of the GVRO application through proactive efforts and over the past five years, we've built an efficient unit through our cooperation with the San Diego City Attorney's office.

Through the early success in finding ways to overcome various challenges, we were recognized by the state and asked to provide training to law enforcement, legal counsel, and elected officials. This has resulted in our unit becoming the point of contact for inquiries into GVRO matters all across the state. Every week, each one of our members fields dozens of emails and phone calls from law enforcement officers and community members requesting information about our program, as well as the practical application of the law.

We provide many resources to aid their officers in the field, as well as during their investigations. Our statewide training and continued support after that training leads to additional and more expansive training requests. With more training comes more interest and deeper understanding of how our GVROs, as well as increasing number of agencies utilizing the tools in the field. As we speak this afternoon, the city attorney and our police officers are training at Alameda right now, hosted by the Alameda City Attorney's Office.

We recently returned from a trip to El Dorado Hills and Modesto, as well as Laguna Beach. We're currently scheduling out trainings in the next coming months to Los Angeles County, with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office, Orange County, and with the Bay Area's California Narcotics Officers Association, who covers the counties from Mendocino all the way down to Monterey. These trainings have connected us with multiple agencies across the state.

We have also identified the benefit of pooling resources and the consistent application of law to protect the citizens of this state. At the City of San Diego, we have embraced a cross-jurisdictional responsibility within our region. This has allowed us to aid municipal agencies that do not currently have the legal support that they need, as well as state and federal agencies. I would like to highlight a few case studies to elaborate on topics that I've mentioned, as well as the DOJ and the sergeant from Irvine.

From one referral, a federal employee was suspended over performance issues. The employee told co-workers that he was upset and he was going to grab his gun and come back and shoot up the place. The organization, having limited personal resources, reached out to us after having heard of our recent success in the news. Upon receiving the referral, we notified our regional fusion center and began working on obtaining a GVRO and a subsequent search warrant. The respondent made threats in our jurisdiction, but resided in neighboring county.

To safely execute our operation, we reached out to contacts that we made in Riverside County, a connection that we had made during a recent training. We executed a simultaneous cross-jurisdictional operation, successfully serving that individual with the order. Another example I'd like to point out is where we've had to file GVROs on top of prohibitions that were already in place based on the active intelligence. A business received information that an individual is planning to shoot several employees within their facility.

After notifying the employees of the threat, they reached out to us to see if there was anything we would be able to assist them with. After conducting a records check, we discovered that the individual had a five-year mental health ban and showed in possession of three firearms within the APPS system. We filed the GVRO based on the fact that the case. We filed a GVRO based on the facts and discovered only upon service that the respondent had previously surrendered those firearms.

Upon further follow-up with the DOJ, we learned that the respondent had in fact surrendered those firearms, but the information had not been entered into APPS in a timely manner. It is a public safety issue for known information not to be entered into the system and available within real-time. Lastly, I'd like to touch on the system and databases officers have access to in the field.

The DOJ already touched on this and has notified us that they're expanding on their systems that they have, but I want to sort of bring to light what we actually have in the field. Currently, the AFS system is limited to digital inquiries of only 12 firearms. While large seizures are not a daily occurrence, they do happen often, and last year, during a service of a single GVRO for a mental health concern application, we seized over 220 firearms from that individual and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

Operationally, this information would have significantly changed the approach that law enforcement took, as well as elevated the risk assessment prior to recovering those firearms pursuant to that GVRO. This is obviously an officer safety issue. Anecdotally, I can speak to APPS operations that I've personally participated in within our region. I went out on three operations, and in those operations, we contacted approximately 30 individuals or at least served 30 investigations. Of those, we were at 20% of those locations. We were unable to contact anyone.

There was no person at the residence or neighbors had no information to provide. 70% of those locations the resident no longer resided at that location and had not for years. And 10% of the people that we ended up actually contacting had already submitted paperwork related to their firearm relinquishment to other agencies that had not been properly or timely entered into the system. And during all three of those operations, we took possession of no firearms, ammunition, or magazines.

The biggest concern we have related to APPS is the ability to maintain accurate data in real-time. Additionally, the creation of regional task forces would serve as a force multiplier to aid the Department of Justice with a team of people all concerned with and specifically trained on the focus of addressing gun violence. Their mission will serve as a central location for agencies and community members to receive information. When we say see something, say something, they will have one place to go.

It will be easy for all agency, or there will be a coordinated place to fill the gaps for agencies struggling to piece together their own independent programs. A task force would provide the legal support lacking in many regions. We would be able to provide advice and recommendations for agencies new to utilizing gun violence restraining orders.

This task force could proactively ensure that gun violence restraining orders are being utilized appropriately and efficiently and dedicated to addressing threats within the community, while also assisting the APPS recovery within their region. We'll obviously open it up to any questions that you have.

Well, I just want to say, before we open it up for questions, I want to say thank you to both of you and also to Sergeant Tunnicliffe for your leadership in this area. You have stepped up in a huge huge way, and no doubt you have saved lives across the state. So thank you. Thank you.

And also, before we open up for questions, I know my office and some other Members were receiving calls that people have not been able to get through on the line for public comment. We're going to open up those phone lines once we get to that portion of the hearing. So we're going to finish with this panel, and then we've got one more panel, and then we will open up the call lines for public comment, and I'll look forward to hearing from everyone at that point.

So with that, we'll go ahead and open up for questions from the Members. Mr. Lackey?

Yeah, mine's more a comment than it is a question. I do believe very strongly about the force multiplier and the establishment of multi-agency task forces. That's proven time and time again and its effectiveness. However, I do see a little bit of concern in the current atmosphere right now because of the decline in most numbers, most agencies, and having difficulty with routine services.

But I still think we should consider the establishment of such a mechanism because clearly the APPS system needs support, and we heard that from the previous statements before, and the minimal number of agents that they actually have, I don't see that growing anytime right away.

And so I think the only way to really address this would be through a force multiplier, using a task force system, because it's already proven, and I think you bring a very valid point, that I hope that we in the Legislature can be a support in the establishment of such a mechanism. I hope you don't need the Legislature to do that, but maybe you do.

But we need to communicate better on that front, because I for one, can tell you that I'm a strong believer because I know of the power that comes from the personal contact, and the knowledge that local law enforcement has is invaluable, and especially when we have the northern end of the state, which I've never lived in. But I do know that the distance is quite immense from community to community, and the agencies are usually quite small.

And so that's really the only hope that they have to have real effective service and improvement in this APPS system. So thank you for bringing that to our attention.

Thank you.

Your officers out in the field, are they able on their MDTs or whatever to get to the Clue system? Are they able to look that up, or how does that work for you guys in San Diego.

Specifically with Clue? I don't know if it goes under a different name within our system. I was going to look into that with DOJ after this presentation to see how we're best able to utilize that and make it available to officers within the field. But that is one of many databases that officers have access to.

And as technology increases, we're able to bring more of that into the patrol vehicle so that officers have the ability to make real time decisions based on more access to information in the field.

Thank you. And for the APPS system, are you guys on that on a daily basis able to look at that as well?

We can go into that. It was pushed out primarily to the sheriff's departments. San Diego Sheriff is the one who managed our APPS program, so we coordinated with them to do operations.

So in terms of running the information, we would reach out to their analysts, and they would provide us specifically for running target packets to do those contacts, as the chief was discussing. Obviously, within large regions, you want to make sure that you do it in an efficient manner, as opposed to going throughout the entire region, picking a specific area and hitting multiple locations just to save resources.

Yes. So this task force, do you guys go out monthly? Do you guys go quarterly? Is this an everyday thing?

So our goal is to create the task force. Currently, within the City of San Diego, we have myself, the officer that's assigned to me, and then the rest of the personnel within our unit is housed in the city attorney's office. So our task force at this point is informal.

We reach out to other jurisdictions within the area or contacted by them, and then put together an operation from that point, either us as lead, if it's within our jurisdiction, or providing administrative and legal recommendations on the back end to the other jurisdictions.

Got you. And it's obviously much smarter. Like you guys pointed out, it's better for me to have a local in the area for officer safety reasons, too, who has that knowledge of that person that I may not have or may not be in that computer. Which brings me into my, and I'm sorry, I have two more. The delay that you mentioned in being timely and properly reported, what are the steps that have to be used to report, and how do we know this?

Or how does this explain to other agencies?

So if you look at the numbers that were already provided today, where you have 24,000 APPS entries, and 75 people actively working those, that is a huge information load for them to process in and of itself. So I don't know what their actual analyst level is. Obviously, 75 people aren't going to be actively doing that. People are going to be compartmentalized into different positions within their organization.

So to get the information from our departments, through the analysts, to then have somebody actually physically look to make sure that that information is correct, that's where your delay is going to come from.

Okay. And then my last question with this delay, you also mentioned that you guys were out in the field. You contacted somebody who did not have or did surrender the weapons, and it was not in the database. And what was the time frame for when you guys made contact with that person to the point where they said they had turned them in?

In terms of we got the information served the GVRO, in terms of the confirmation from DOJ to the fact that they had surrendered their firearms, I don't have that information for you.

Okay, so we don't know, like weeks? Are we talking years?

We have a great relationship with Bureau of Firearms at this point. We have points of contact that we're able to get information in a more timely manner. But in terms of a 24-hour type system, that would be extremely beneficial. That's going to take an extreme overhaul. I don't know exactly what their system of the modernization is going to look like, if it's going to have that capability.

But in terms of running a report, like I mentioned, we get 12 firearm reports back, and it could take weeks for us. It previously would take weeks for us to get that response back as to how many firearms they actually have. Thanks to Mr. Redding, we're able to significantly shorten that time frame. But it's not the live real time information that you would understand is extremely beneficial when you're out in the field at three in the morning.

Yes. Thank you. Thank you guys for coming today.

Thank you. Assemblymember Davies?

Thank you all for your time. Obviously, listening to the DOJ, we know that the information that they're providing to you, also right now with the data system, there's limited information that can actually get to you with the system they have right now. What other information would you like to be able to have if they were to upgrade this that you think would help you be more efficient in what you're doing?

Ultimately, a consolidation of all of our state information within one system that talks to itself would be extremely beneficial. In order to run somebody for a complete criminal history, we're going into five, six, seven different databases that all have their own sharing abilities. So, it gets very complex whether you're going into a federal, state or local system. So the consolidation of that information so that there's no duplication or misinformation, misentries. Obviously, they're creating different things that pull from multiple databases and are blending them together.

Those are helpful, but it would take a complete system overhaul to make something that you would see on TV, because what you see on TV is not the reality.

A lot, is it not? Also, when I was listening to the information, obviously, we know that recruitment is down by about 30 percent, and that's one of the biggest issues. And when listening, that really when you have time for your staff to do this, this is now in overtime, right? This isn't something that they go in and this is their nine-to-five job. This is something they actually have to work on as overtime.

And I think that's huge right there, because first of all, that's another reason when you're talking about why people aren't looking for the funding, you can only do so much. And when you're down 30 percent recruitment, we already know our officers are working time overtime to begin with, so there isn't even time to use the overtime because it's being used on the street and protecting our citizens. So I think that's something that's really important to acknowledge. And I just had one question, too.

When they come and they're arrested, and hopefully the main goal is to actually, hopefully get the guns at that point, what is the ramification? Because you're basically saying, you know what, you need to go ahead and you've got so much time, perhaps to bring these guns in. Is there a time limit and what are the ramifications if they don't? Is that something that also needs to be looked at? Thank you.

I guess I have a clarifying question for you. Are you asking about GVROs or through the APPS program?

No, GVROs.

The gun violence restraining orders. So the way that we operate in San Diego, when we serve them, per the statute, we ask them to surrender those firearms. If they do not, they have then violated a court order. And if we have known possession of a firearm by that individual, and they're failing to surrender their firearm, they're also in violation of another penal code specifically for gun violence restraining orders. So they've written into the search warrant authority, the ability for us to obtain search warrants.

So if somebody does refuse right there, upon service of the GVROs, we are able to obtain or have an anticipatory search warrant in hand to be able to go ahead and effectuate that seizure at that time.

What happens again if you can't find it?

Obviously, we do the best we can. As was already discussed with the DOJ, there are often times when we go in looking for five specific firearms and we come across eight additional ones. We do our best efforts to search the properties that we're aware of, or properties associated to that person. But obviously, just like with the APPS list, we do our best effort, and then it maintains either on the list as an APPS.

Obviously, with our GVROs, we do make referrals to the APPS program for when we're not able to find those sorts of firearms. So we're trying to tie everything together.

Is there any policy that would help you on that?

I think it would be more of a reporting fix, and I think that would go with the dynamic input and sharing of data between the state and local agencies. I think that would be the biggest fix there.

Thank you.

Assembly Member Dixon?

Can you hear me? Following up on Assembly Member Davies' question, you mentioned it can obtain a search warrant, so that's not a uniform practice. Did your jurisdiction do that individually, or how was that accomplished that you added a search warrant to the GVRO?

So the GVRO search warrant authority was added. It's Legislature, it's penal code 1524(a) 14.

But not everybody does that, is that correct?

Everyone that we train does.

So, that's a big part of our training is explaining the application of the law. And like we discussed right now, our team's out in Alameda right now. We have several trainings coming up, but that is a big thing that we push out, that you do have the authority then to obtain a search warrant, and that is how we want to do it, so that the person doesn't end up being on the APPS list in the first place.

So, if we're proactively able to get the firearms at the time of service, the way we train people, that's how you want to do it.

Excellent.

And a regional task force, because the next code section to the search warrant authority for GVROs also goes to APPS. So if the task force had a group of people who were focused on this, they then could do the investigation, get the information from the court minute, order, whatever it is, and then execute search warrants in order to really do major cleanup on individuals that have been hard to contact or have outstanding.

And not only may not know, but then it goes back to the resource issue. So pooling the resources.

So to distill this discussion down, we have a technology issue. Remind me when this has been in existence. In 2003. Is that it? 20 years for GVRO?

2001.

Okay, so 22 years. Has the system been upgraded? Do you know? Does anyone know?

It sounds like they're in the process of that.

Okay, is there a deadline, a target completion date?

That is a question for DOJ.

Yeah. So that is underway.

All right.

Presently, though, I think a question that we can follow up with DOJ on is whether or not that includes some of the enhancements that you brought up.

Let me ask you a question that if you feel comfortable answering. So on a scale of one to 10, how much will your work and all of other jurisdictions be improved with an improved system? 100 percent?

Significantly. But the problem that comes with databases is, it's the data in, data out issue. So the information needs to be updated in some manner.

If we had a better or improved technology which is being worked on, would there be a related resource issue? Is it because the inefficiency of the current APPS program creates the resource problem?

It would definitely help the resource issue because these are high risk situations that you're going into that take a large team to manage. In certain situations, it's larger than some police departments have the capability of actually handling themselves safely, which is why the pooling of resources, having a member within the task force. So you have a small department, you have a member that is part-time or full-time within the task force, you then have the entire team to safely execute the issue.

Okay. Thank you very much.

All right, well, thank you again for joining. Really, really appreciate your work and your perspective today.

Thank you.

All right, and with that, we'll go ahead and transition to our final panel. We'll be hearing from gun violence prevention advocates. We're joined by Julia Weber, who is with the Giffords Law Center, and Steve Lindley from the Brady Center. Thank you for being here.

Is Steve on the line? Okay.

Good afternoon. I am Julia Weber and I'm an attorney consultant appearing today on behalf of Gifford's Law Center to prevent gun violence, where I, up until recently served as the implementation Director and am now in a consulting position there. I've worked in violence prevention for over 25 years.

Between 1999 and 2017, I was with the Judicial Council as co-counsel to the Family and Juvenile Law Advisory Committee, which is tasked with working on all of the restraining order forms, rules, doing training for judges and court staff on all of the various issues we've talked about today. I drafted a lot of legislation, rules, curricula, addressing all of the various firearm prohibitions, including working on implementation of the gun violence restraining order and domestic violence restraining orders.

I've since then continued to train judges and court staff on all of the issues we've been talking about today. I consult with the council regularly on those issues. It also included a lot of training and work and technical assistance on the California law enforcement telecommunications system CLETS, which is the overarching database that we've been talking about, including the automated firearm system and APPS, of course. So I've been doing this for a long time.

I've worked with post on law enforcement training and I work nationally on all of these issues, too. And as I think it's been mentioned many times today from some of my esteemed colleagues, we are very lucky to be in California with the arm prohibited persons database and related systems, as well as the team, of course, associated with APPS.

So at Giffords, we advocate for jurisdictions to focus on reducing the time between when someone becomes prohibited and when they are separated from any firearms they currently own or possess. That's been emphasized as well. The key here is that APPS has made this point in their legislative reports.

We have to handle firearm prohibitions and relinquishment primarily and immediately at the local level when someone becomes prohibited, long before the APPS team is involved to avoid any kind of delay because it's such a dangerous time. We have lots of policies in place for that and many good practices. We've already talked today about the 24,000 people in APPS. Just a reminder, there are many thousands more who are prohibited, right? Those are only the people who are known to have firearms and are prohibited.

So we have a much greater number of folks who are prohibited, possibly armed, because we don't know about all the guns we don't know about. Right? So it's important to remember that, because once in a while it gets shortened to prohibited persons. There aren't just 24,000 prohibited folks, many more. And every day there are prohibited folks coming through our courts.

So we obviously have to reduce that number, and we have to fully implement existing legal requirements, including that within 24 hours after becoming prohibited, it's 24 hours, the prohibited person needs to have relinquished their firearms. And with 48 hours, within 48 hours, there needs to be a receipt in the court file showing that they've complied. So you have a handout? Two handouts, one of them is it shows information about SB 320, and another one is a chart of civil restraining orders.

A couple of years ago, Calmatters did an investigation. It should be red and blue, probably. So, Calmatters did an investigation into how domestic violence restraining orders, which are firearm prohibiting, firearm and ammunition prohibiting, and have been around long before. Those firearm prohibitions were around long before the GVRO. How often you saw evidence of the receipt of the relinquishment in the domestic violence restraining order file? And out of the 20 cases they pulled, there were two receipts. And this is pretty typical.

This has not been an enforced policy. And one of the concerns I have that, and I'll speak to this in more detail in a moment, is an overemphasis on the gun violence restraining order will be dangerous and do a disservice to the many ways people are prohibited and the protection that's provided by a whole host of other firearm prohibiting remedies.

So that chart shows you people are prohibited in a domestic violence restraining order matter at the emergency stage, at the temporary stage, at the order, after hearing stage. That's huge. Very few states have those prohibitions. They're prohibited in an elder abuse order. They're prohibited in a civil harassment order, when a neighbor is harassing you. They're prohibited in a workplace violence prevention order.

What we really need is more consistency and investment in ensuring that no matter what door folks walk through when they become prohibited, we follow through on those firearm prohibitions. And again, the overemphasis on GVROs, while a lot of that work is commendable, I'm deeply concerned about the lack of attention. The victims of all of those other kinds of violence, which represent the majority of incidents of mass shootings, have some connection to domestic violence.

And that's what we've seen this week, connections to other forms of relationship violence, right? Workplace violence abuse and harassment. GVROs are the most limited remedy because they only address firearms and ammunition. They don't address any of the other remedies. For example, attorney fees, child custody, pet protection, property division, housing issues, referrals to services. All of the other remedies provide additional remedies in addition to the firearms and ammunition prohibition. So 96 percent of GVROs have been pursued and obtained by law enforcement.

There should be very few GVROs in APPS. Law enforcement acts as petitioners in 96 percent of GVROs. The other firearm prohibiting civil orders involve, almost all of them involve self represented litigants, Members of the public who, if they want those firearm prohibitions enforced, have to rely on the courts and law enforcement, right? So those are the people I'm very, very concerned about. So when a person becomes prohibited at a court proceeding, they should find out how they can comply.

It's been amazing to me, as I've been working on implementing SB 320, which is a piece of legislation that Gifford sponsored. Senator Eggman was the author and I worked with her team and another advocate on drafting that piece of legislation. We've been working for the last year, training thousands of people in the state, judges, court staff, law enforcement on implementation, how often we wrote into that law.

And that's the summary you have, that courts are now required in domestic violence restraining order matters to tell people how to comply. The number of courts said to me, how are we supposed to tell people and when we don't know? And I said, how are people supposed to turn their firearms if the court doesn't know how you're supposed to turn in your firearms?

So, with implementation, including the support that the Legislature, the g1overnor signing the budget act, the $40 million that was mentioned, I'm getting reports from courts. It's anecdotal. But even prior to this, when we had court rules that required that people turn in their firearms, and the courts followed up, we are getting anecdotal reports all the time from the courts I'm working with, telling us that they're seeing an uptick in people turning the firearms.

So one easy way to do this is let people know that they're prohibited, explain to them how they can turn those firearms in locally. Certainly, it's been a challenge in Los Angeles when you have over 25 law enforcement agencies, but Santa Clara created early on, actually, a couple of years ago, an information sheet that says, here are the phone numbers for all the law enforcement agencies, or you can go to a firearms dealer, turn in your firearms, call before you do it.

Here's how you do it. That has a huge effect in terms of people complying. So the court should be explaining this, or their attorneys should be explaining this, if they have one. Certainly in the criminal context. We've worked with criminal defense attorneys and probation to help them remember that it's important to tell folks how they can comply.

And then when law enforcement, when they're serving these orders, that was an excellent description of how they handled gun violence restraining orders, when law enforcement serves those orders. When law enforcement serves domestic violence restraining orders, they need to be doing the same thing, and that isn't happening consistently. So there is no reason why we can't work harder on implementing local procedures that address all firearm prohibitions consistently the same way.

There are a lot of tragedies, of course, on my mind, and I'm sure on yours today, real people, adults, children, police officers, community members whose lives have been shattered by gun violence. Too often, of course, this violence is being perpetrated by people who are already prohibited from having firearms. I think today of Wyland Gomes, the 10-year-old who was shot and killed by his father, who then turned the gun on himself and died by suicide.

Wyland's father was the subject of a domestic violence restraining order issued in 2016 and extended through 2017. However, he was still able to purchase the firearm he used to kill Wyland from a licensed gun dealer while he was prohibited. Should not have happened. We need to figure out what's going on. The system failed Wyland that day, and I think of Callie Trout, a 32-year-old mother of three who sought protection from her abusive husband by requesting a DVRO against him in 2020.

Callie had the courage to check the box on the form indicating that, yes, she believed the person to be restrained owns or possesses guns, firearms or ammunition. Research shows that the presence of a firearm in a domestic violence situation makes it five times more likely a victim of domestic violence will be killed. Kelly also included more than a dozen pages describing horrific abuse.

And through it all was mention of a gun, including how he kept it in his pocket when he yelled at her outside their son's school, and when he threatened to kill her. At the hearing, the judge asked only one question about guns. Sir, there's no information that you have any guns or ammunition. Do you think you have any of these items? No, he replied.

Further delays with local law enforcement, separate investigation, and an emergency protective order that also prohibited him, but resulted in no enforcement of the prohibition, suggest there were multiple opportunities to intervene to get this armed, prohibited person separated from his firearms. But it didn't happen. And less than a month after the hearing, Callie's husband shot and killed her in front of their three children, ages six, four and one. So when people become prohibited, we need robust local systems, as has been supported throughout the testimony today.

We need those systems in place to do three things that, as of January 1, 2022 are required in domestic violence restraining order cases under SB 320, and that's the summary sheet you have in front of you. So, first, we have to ensure that courts have access to information that someone owns a firearm.

That information they can get from the automated firearm system, AFS, or from the file, or from testimony. Two, we have to ensure that those who become prohibited and own firearms relinquish those firearms by giving information to them and following up with review hearings. For example, if the receipt isn't there.

Number three, addresses that we have to ensure that law enforcement, including prosecutors, help reduce risk by fairly enforcing these firearm prohibiting orders under SB 320 when there is a violation, when that receipt isn't there, civil courts, family courts are required to report that violation to law enforcement and to the local prosecuting agency. They're required to report it immediately to law enforcement, and law enforcement is expected to take appropriate action, and they're expected to report it to the prosecuting agency within a few business days.

We want to see more action being taken by prosecutors, law enforcement, and the courts in this area. This is a systemic issue, and we need to see all of that more effectively implemented. Too many courts, while some are doing an excellent job, and the $40 million certainly is helpful. But as has been noted, one-time funding, hard to get that in place in a way that will allow them to hire people. This isn't a one-time problem.

We're going to need ongoing funding to support local efforts, and it's important that those local efforts, of course, be well coordinated with the APPS team. So, laws requiring partners who have been violent to relinquish their firearms are linked to a 16 percent reduction in homicide. So we know what needs to be done. We know that consistency, no matter how you become prohibited, is important.

We strongly believe that it is important to invest, yes, in GVROs, but also in all the other firearm prohibiting remedies which are reflected in the APPS database. The significant number of folks who are prohibited who are not having their firearms taken away, and the lack of support for the members of the public who are petitioners in these cases.

And often, unfortunately, people who are respondents who aren't given the opportunity to avoid unnecessary exposure to the criminal legal system. When we don't give people a chance to do the right thing, to me, that's also a fairness issue, as well as a concern in terms of public safety. We don't need people unnecessarily living out of compliance with these firearm prohibitions. So I'd love to see more coordination in this area.

Thank you for your leadership, of course, on this issue, and I look forward to answering any questions you have.

Thank you so much, Ms. Weber. Let's go ahead and turn to Mr. Lindley, who I believe is on the phone lines.

Hopefully he's there. He said if he has any technical problems, I'm supposed to pretend to be Steve Lindley.

Which won't be easy.

My name is Steve Lindley. I have 28 years of law enforcement experience and was the chief of the California Department of Justice Bureau of Firearms from 2009 to 2018. I am here on behalf of and representation for the Brady Campaign. Brady is one of America's oldest gun violence prevention groups, and Brady continues to uphold the legacy and vision of Jim and Sarah Brady by uniting people on common sense firearm laws.

On average, more than 124,000 Americans are victims of gun violence and more than 35,000 are killed each year. Access to firearms is a critical component of chronic violence. A comprehensive approach to reducing gun violence in our communities must include a focus on removing firearms from those who should not have them. Thank you for holding this hearing today and asking for input for the Brady campaign.

As previously stated, the APPS database became active in 2001 and was only based on information from assault weapon registrations since 1989 and handgun sales since 1996. Since firearm sales in California are roughly 50 percent handguns and 50 percent long guns, APPS was initially based on only half the legal firearms sold in California. This changed in 2014 when the DOJ was authorized to also retain information on long gun sales.

DOJ recognized and informed legislators that this will in time to really increase the number of people identified in APPS since twice the information will be available for analysis. Additionally, the number of prohibiting factors which APPS identifies has also changed over the last two decades. Historically, DOJ has done a good job with APPS enforcement throughout our great state. Is there room for improvement and better coordination with local agencies? Absolutely.

I'm very confident that Chief Marsh, who spoke earlier, is aware of these improvements and given the resources, DOJ can quickly overcome them. Over the past 15 years, DOJ has updated the manner in which it collects statistical data on APPS Enforcement Efforts in 2019 and 2020. APPS supports DOJ did not take full credit for its efforts and dropped several statistical characteristics, which provide legislators with a better understanding of their enforcement efforts.

I'm pleased to see the DOJ and Attorney General Fonta went back to previous statistical characteristics which more accurately reflect their enforcement efforts. Chief Marsh provided an excellent overview of this today. As designed in the early 2000s, APPS as a pointer system, not an investigative database. Due diligence is required before each investigations. Examples of this is people move and must be tracked down. This takes time and considerable effort. As previously mentioned, court files are delayed or can be inaccurate.

APPS may not list all the firearms a person may own or possess. Many APPS firearms are actually in the possession of law enforcement agencies, yet were never entered in the automated firearm system, thus not allowing APPS to disassociate that firearm from the behavior person. Local agencies often do not have the time or resources to track an app subject or their firearms from city to city, county to county, or even to another state. Is APPS in need of an overhaul?

Yes. Data systems need updating and more efforts are needed to make APPS as available as possible to local law enforcement. A 2020 report from the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform quantified the cost of gun violence in the city of Stockton, California, estimating that each firearm related homicide cost taxpayers $2.5 million. The National Institute for Criminal Justice further estimated that nonfatal injury shootings cost taxpayers approximately $962,000.

According to the Center for American Progress, in the 10 year period between 2008 and 2017, there were over 30,000 firearms-related homicides in California using reported cost per firearm-related homicide in the city of Stockton. These firearm-related homicides cost California taxpayers $76 billion, or $7.6 billion per year. APPS reduces firearm violence and firearm-related suicides. APPS is unique to California and there is no other system like it in our country or the world.

APPS can be approved and we should always look for ways to improve the system, improve communication, look for ways to retrieve firearms from prohibited persons as early as possible. APPS must continue to be a team effort between local law enforcement, the courts, and the state. Over the past 25 years, California has seen a significant reduction in homicides with the use of firearms and suicide by firearms.

APPS has been part of that reduction and needs to remain part of California's effort to reduce firearm-related violence in our communities. Considering the cost of firearm violence, APPS is cost-effective, is cutting edge and a system that California should be proud of. We support DOJ's recommendations for the APPS moving forward and the state's continued vigilance in preventing fire and violence. Thank you for the opportunity to appear and to testify today.

Thank you so much for joining us. We'll go ahead and open it up for any final questions from committee members. Mr. Lackey.

I have a comment and I want to thank both the presenters for their perspectives. This may come across as a gotcha, but it's certainly not meant to be. Back in 2013, as was just mentioned, we had Mr. Steve Lindley, who had a different function back at that time, and he had a very dominant position with the Department of Justice, and he was a firearms chief, I believe.

And he assured the members of this body that if they got the appropriation that came from SB 140, which was $24 million, that that appropriation would enable, and this is a quote, would enable the department to clear the then existing backlog of 20,721 active subjects in the APPS database within three years. He said, I believe we can arrest our way and investigate our way out of this. And I'm not trying to make you look bad.

I'm just trying to ask you, what do you think went wrong? Because we're still in a very similar situation, even after all the money spent and a lot of hard work has been expended. What's gone wrong since that time? Because I think you're a great source to turn to.

So I think that actually is a very fair question when you look at the money that was provided to the Department of Justice. At that time, DOJ was coming out of a layoff process. So there was a number of human resource issues that we had to work through with the union. And when officers, I'm sorry, agents, started coming back from unemployment, they went to the Bureau of Firearms, but unfortunately, they had the ability to transfer out.

So what we saw in a very short amount of time is an extremely high turnover rate of our agents. So that took time. And for us to kind of balance the agents that were actually staying in the Bureau of Firearms as compared to leaving. We had a turnover rate of almost 100 percent at that time over the next couple of years.

With that, different politics, and you also looked at what happened in January of 2014, when you started having the long gun retention as part of what DOJ was allowed to use to incorporate into the APPS database, we saw a large increase.

If you look what DOJ was able to accomplish during those three year period of that funding, we did work an incredible amount of cases to one extent or another, whether they were removed or put into an inactive status, whether we identified them as being incarcerated or they were out of state. So if you looked at that 20,000 number that was in existence in 2014, most of those 20,000 were cleared. It's just people were added on on a daily basis as normal. And then we had the increase with the long gun retention.

All right. Thank you. Any other questions or comments by members? All right, well, thank you both so much for joining us and offering your perspective. Really appreciate it. I'll turn it back to chair Jones-Sawyer.

We'll now open it up to anyone that's in the hearing room that we're now going to do public comment. And so we're going to open it up first to people in the hearing room before we go to the phone lines. So are there anyone in the hearing room that would like to have public comment? Public comment in the hearing room? Going once, going twice. So we have no public comment in the hearing room. We'll now go to the phone lines.

Is it still AT&T operator? Could you open up the phone lines for comments? Public comments? Name and organization, please, go ahead.

There is no one available for comment.

We had gotten a text earlier that people were trying to get in, and there was quite a few. So right now you have no one left?

That is correct.

We exhausted them. We wore them out. Okay. With that, there's no more questions. There's no public comment in the hearing room. There's no public comment on the phone line. So I will call this unless there's some final comments. Anybody want to make? Go ahead.

Well, just again, thank you for your partnership on this critical priority, and thank you to all the members joining us today for your engagement. Thank you again to all of our panelists. I think we all learned a lot. I'm encouraged by a lot of what I heard and hopeful that we're going to be able to continue to build on the progress that's been made. And I think we've identified some real opportunities for continued improvement.

So look forward to partnering with all of you in taking this forward in the legislation ahead. Thank you.

Thank you. And with that, we're going to close the joint informational hearing of the Assembly committees on public safety and accountability and administrative review.

Is that like, your thing? What is that? I know, he already warned me before.