 Thank you all for coming. I am Dr. Aiton Nassred in Longville. I am Chair of the Advisory Panel on Racial Disparities in the Criminal and Juvenile Justice Systems. I'd like to introduce various panelists and speakers to this. I guess I'll go away. Monica Weber, who is the Administrative Services Director for the Department of Correction. David Cher, Assistant Attorney General of the Attorney General's Office. Susanna Davis, the Executive Director of Racial Equity. Captain Julie Scribner, who's the Incoming Co-Director of Ferret and Partial Gleasing and Community Affairs for the Vermont State Police. And Attorney General T.J. Donovan. I would like to say that Senator Sears wanted to attend, but he's provided a letter if he's dead and I will read that shortly. I have a short statement for you. I'd like to thank several people both for their assistance and kind attention. Senator Dick Sears, Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has been instrumental in helping some of the issues that the panel has raised become policy. I'd also like to thank Attorney General T.J. Donovan for his consistent support of the panel and for his work in putting that body together with a mandate to address racial inequities in Vermont's criminal and juvenile justice systems. The panel is required by law to create a report every biennium. We did so last year and submitted it in early December. The statute that created the panel asked that body to look carefully at the issue of data collection. This is important to the reduction of racial disparities insofar as it is critical to determine the extent of those disparities in a scientific manner. Our recommendation has borne fruit in the recently passed Act 148, the so-called Justice Reinvestment Act. This act requires both the panel and the sentencing commission to make very specific recommendations for both modernizing and integrating the data system used in the criminal and juvenile justice systems with regard to racial concerns. We are quite happy with this development and are working hard to create a set of very specific ideas upon which the legislature can work. This second report is due on the 1st of December. While we are gratified by this work, we are as a body frustrated by the fact that other pieces of the report remain unaddressed. Indeed, during the many legislative hearings held in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, it became clear that many of the recommendations were unfamiliar to the legislature. This was because people simply were unfamiliar with the entirety of the report. It would be offensive to underestimate the amount of work that our legislators perform. However, given that this report was commissioned and that the notion of racial disparity itself is written into the name of the panel, it is rather incredible that the report seems to have gone largely unacknowledged since the body submitted it in December of last year. It is even more incredible, given the explosion of racially focused civil unrest across the entire nation, that has been a constant since the day that George Floyd was killed. I certainly cannot give even an outline of the entire report here. People who are interested can certainly read it on the legislative website. But one highlight of the report addressed the need for legislation that impacts minority communities to be created with the involvement of those self-saved communities. For those who do not know, the phrase is, not about us, without us. One can only imagine how such participation on the national level would have impacted legislation that led to the mass incarceration problem that minority communities across the country confront every day. In Vermont, hearings held in the building behind us are not enough. In fact, hearings held over the late spring and summer over legislation such as S219 left some people of color and their allies across the state feeling very excluded and angry. One Caucasian woman who participates in the work of the panel noted that it seemed as though that in regards to the legislature, quote, Black lives may matter, but clearly white careers and egos matter more, unquote. She said this when asked to testify in front of the legislature barely an hour before the hearing began. She felt that there was a lot of grandstanding in advance of this fall's elections. Clearly, a rush like this does not allow not about us, without us. In fact, such a rush makes certain that that will not happen. So we take this time to reintroduce our report. It is our hope that legislators involved in working for racial justice in Vermont will think of the report as being brought to them yet again for the first time. We hope that they will take its recommendations quite seriously as the body of 15 people who created them took them seriously as they devised them. We hope that this process will begin again renewed with a clear focus upon the change that the report suggests. The panel that created this report is full of people of good conscience who are working hard to make the systemic changes that are required by minority communities across the state. We introduce our report with the hope that the methodical, considered and sustained effort that went into its creation will now, through the legislature, go into its implementation. I'd like to allow now Executive Director for Racial Equity Susana Davis to speak. Here today, pleased to be here today, I'm grateful to have been invited. I'm here not as a member of the Racial Disparities panel, I'm not one of those 15 people who are fortunate to perform this work. But as someone who attends the meetings of the panel, there lies a very common function on that panel because no one is more expert in the effect of to guide my work. And I look forward very much to continuing to work with them as they move on to new topic areas and new areas of inquest in upcoming reports. As someone who's directly benefited from their expertise and from their work. Of course, I urge every Vermonter out there during your free time perhaps to take a look at this report for some leisure reading and some deep introspective thinking about what role each of us plays as an individual and what roles we play as institutions in either perpetuating or interrupting inequities that persist in our criminal and criminal justice systems. Dr. Ness Redding Longo said earlier that occasion any of our issue last year that I would say are critical importance to the future of the state. I believe on equitably that this would be the letter that Senator Sears wrote for us since he could not be here today. First, I want to extend my gratitude to Chair Aiton Ness Redding Longo and the members of the Racial Disparities Panel for their hard work and critical efforts to address issues of racial disparities in our criminal and juvenile justice system. Thank you for all you are doing. I very much regret that I am unable to be here in person to thank you and to join this call for action. But from Bennington, I stand with you today as you ask the legislature to take up the recommendations of the panel's report. As Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, it has been my honor to work for progress on these issues with leaders from communities of color around Vermont. I am grateful for their efforts and I am glad the Senate Judiciary Committee has been able to pass legislation like the law that created the Racial Disparities Panel, the mandate to collect traffic stop data, and the recent effort to address inadequate data collection in our criminal justice system. But I know much more needs to be done. The December 2019 report of the Racial Disparities Panel is a key roadmap to reform that the legislature needs to follow. The December 2019 report of the Racial Disparities Panel is a key roadmap to reform that the legislature needs to follow. This will include efforts to create a stronger public complaint process to address implicit bias across all systems of state government, proposals to decrease the frequency of racial profiling, and the continued expansion of race data collection practices in our justice system. Again, my thanks to the panel and to leaders of color across Vermont who have stood up for years for racial justice. And it's time for all of us to stand with you. And now I would like to pass the podium, as it were, to Attorney General T.J. Donovan. Good afternoon. I'm happy to be here joining my good friend and colleague, Dr. Ezra de Longo, and other panel members in calling the legislature to act on this report. I want to thank the panel members for their hard work. I want to thank Lieutenant Governor Zuckerman for being here today, who has been a long time steadfast champion of racial equity and racial justice. I want to thank Susanna Davis for her good work for the state of Vermont, her presence today, and her remarks. And I cannot agree more with her remarks about the panel members and the community members who are directly impacted by racism, our experts on this issue, and we need to listen to them. And I call on all Vermonters, as Susanna Davis said, to take a look at this report, and for me to look at the preamble that sums it up, and talks about, but talking about race and racism is a hard conversation. It causes discomfort, but as Etan said, we're calling on all Vermonters, all people of good conscience, to engage in this conversation because it is long overdue to embrace the discomfort, an effort to move us more towards a more just state to address the issues of racism, of discrimination, and white supremacy, and to be scared of this conversation because we need everybody at the table. The Racial Disparities Panel has provided that roadmap for the legislature to rely on it and to utilize it during this session and sessions in the future. We're not going to solve this issue overnight, but together we can make real progress by relying on the work that has been done, that has been lived, that has been experienced, and folks who are in positions of power like myself or need to simply not only be an ally, but sometimes a co-conspirator to lift up digs with voices and the experiences, the lived experience of people of color in the state, and to listen, and to learn, and to reflect, and not to suggest that you have all the answers, but sometimes stepping back and letting other folks tell you their experiences, the answers can be found by simply listening and lifting up people's voices and experiences. So I want to thank the panel for their good work. I want to thank the legislature for their good work. I want to thank Lieutenant Governor Zuckerman and Governor Scott for their good work. We are all in this together. We have to address the issue of racism in this state. This is hard. It's long overdue. So I look forward to working with everybody, it provides everybody, maybe for success. We know we are in a process right now of learning and exploring. At least some of us are learning and exploring the implicit bias of the experience process and take their words, ideas, examples of the injustices that have occurred and work to change our laws to better reflect the society we want to be. So I want to thank the Attorney General for the opportunity to speak briefly here today to stand with you in the work that's before us and to give you the tools because you have to work with the tools that the legislature puts in front of you whether you like the tools or not. And now we're working to make our laws better. Thank you. Thank you, Lieutenant Governor Zuckerman. I want to acknowledge and I want to thank members of the Vermont State Police who are here today, who are members of this panel. Law enforcement is part of the solution. They've been at the table. We thank them for their hard work that we need to support the men and women of law enforcement advocating for changes to reform our criminal justice system but we would not be here today without the good work and the Vermont State Police will want to thank you for your presence here today. And that pretty much concludes the remarks that we have prepared and we'd like to open it up now to any questions that you may have and you may not. Thank you for coming and thank you for your time.