 I thank the Kellogg Hubbard Library and the League for sponsoring this panel. Last year the League sponsored a similar panel on race and policing. Well a lot has happened this year and tonight our panelists will address what we've learned about racial disparities in Vermont and next steps that are needed. We are honored to have three very accomplished, knowledgeable and committed advocates for reform in the criminal and juvenile justice system. We have Professor Stephanie Ceguino, a professor from UVM. She has a PhD in economics, and she has a very impressive and long resume. So I'll just pick a few highlights. She has an international presence. She started in South Africa, she worked in Haiti, she's worked with USAID, she's worked with UN and the World Bank, just to name a few. Fortunately for us in Vermont, Stephanie teaches in Vermont and she recently completed a comprehensive five year analysis and study of car stops and race. So we will have the opportunity to hear her speak about that study and others that she's doing. Also joining us tonight is Rebecca Turner, who was a supervising appellate attorney for the Office of the Defender General, a former immigration attorney, and a current member of the advisory panel on racial disparities and the criminal justice system, which I believe was established by the legislature. She's going to explain the recent work and our report and ideas for recommendation. And we're also very fortunate to have Sarah George, who is the Chittenden County State Attorney. Sarah runs the office that basically handles the majority of Vermont's criminal and juvenile cases. She's on the front lines of these issues every day. She's going to address race and policing and the juvenile justice system from a prosecutor's point of view. So I will be monitoring your questions. And now I think we'd like to hear from Professor Seglino. Thank you. Thank you for having me I'm going to share my screen. Thank you all for being here. I really appreciate everybody's interest in this topic and I'm so delighted to be here with Sarah George and Rebecca Turner who are just really models in terms of addressing these issues in Vermont and nationally Sarah has become known nationally for some of the work she's done. And I thought what I do is just start out by talking about where we are today because we're going to talk about what the opportunities are for change for reform and what directions we might go in. And what I thought I would do is share with you just a little bit of our recent study that came out. And for those of you who are not familiar with this, the legislature in round 2013 required all law enforcement agencies to collect traffic stop data by race. And the purpose was to identify racial disparities in policing. The work had originated actually in the Chittenden County because the community of color had had voiced their concerns for quite some time about bias and policing and in particular driving while black. And they began to collect collect data voluntarily. And some of the earlier studies that came out of that show that there are racial disparities and I think that may have been what propelled the legislature to require all law enforcement agencies to collect these data. So when we did an initial analysis of this data in 2017. We only had one year's worth of data which is not much for, especially because many of our towns are small. And we need large sample sizes but also many towns didn't submit their data. But here we are five years later and we now have data from all 79 agencies in the state. It's allowed us to compare and contrast. We've also been able to look at what's been the impact of cannabis legalization in Vermont during this period of time. So I just want to show you a little bit of a few of our results here. One of the things that was really striking in this data was that nationally, the number of stops per 1000 people is around 86 so around 8.6% of the resident population nationally is stopped in car stops a year. So even leaving aside the issue of racial disparities, what we find in Vermont is that the police in general overstop all drivers relative to the national average. So you can see here some of the larger communities, Bennington, Brattleboro and so forth and you can see just how much higher their stop rates are compared to the national average. I mean, literally in Bennington almost seven to eight times greater than the national average, and decreasingly. In fact, it's only Burlington that stops at a rate lower than the national average. And a few years ago they really, their stops have decreased by 60% because they made that decision to do so. And it found that it's had no negative impact effect on public safety. So I think it's a really interesting discussion about what police should be doing and the extent to which they should be intrusively stopping vehicles because it is an intrusion. And I have to say that in some cases they were not really even the worst if you look here, Richmond Vermont stops almost 4000 drivers per 1000 stops. Milton 2000 drivers per 1000 residents and Heinsberg, Castleton and so forth so many agencies overstop generally. But police overstop black drivers much more so than white drivers in Vermont. So here what you have is the ratio of the stop rate per 1000 black drivers divided by the stop rate for 1000 white drivers and that number tells you how many times greater is the stop rate of black drivers. So in Pittsburgh, Vermont, black drivers are seven times more likely to be stopped in when you ski more than five more times, and so on and so forth you can see here. The, that the numbers are pretty high for a lot of them. Killington might be influenced by for example tourists coming to ski. So you have to interpret these numbers carefully but I think that some of these numbers tell us quite a bit about the racial disparity and that's really, you know, in my view, let me just say that for all agencies the average was 1.78 so black drivers are stopped at roughly almost twice the rate of white drivers and that's the national average. But really, you know, I think where the telling the results are around traffic stop data or what are the racial disparities and arrests and searches. And let me say this first that traffic stops are not the only way clearly that the public engages with the police, but it's the most frequent connection that most frequent experience that citizens have a police. So if they feel that that experience is not just if it's not fair, it really reduces confidence in police and trust in the police it makes it more difficult to do their job so these issues are brought are important not only for the great racial groups that are stopped over arrested and over searched but for all of us it undermines public safety in general. And so why I think that arrest rates and search rates are particularly interesting is because we don't really have, you know, we don't have precise estimates of the driving population what percentages black so on and so forth. But once a driver has been stopped, we know precisely what the arrest rate is what the search rate is of each racial group. And so you can see here that in Vermont as a whole and their disparities by by town that black drivers are significantly more likely to be arrested subsequent to a stop than our white or Asian drivers as our Hispanic drivers. And here what you see is the ratio of the black arrest rate to the white arrest rate. What you see for blacks is the three and a half times more likely to be arrested subsequent to a stop than white drivers. Let next folks are twice as likely to be arrested, and Asians are half as likely to be arrested. And I think it's really interesting to understand why we see this disparity with regard to Asians. And that is because in US culture, Asians are often perceived to be a model minority, or honorary whites. And in fact some police that I've done ride alongs with me have told me that they have actually had, you know, one told me for example that he stopped a driver who was Vanessa and he, he coded him as his race as white. And I think it speaks volumes to the stereotypes, through which police officers and all of us view, view drivers. The, the, whoopsie daisy here. I'm sorry, my slide didn't work so forgive me, I, I tried to animate my slides and made a mistake but that's okay. So, darn, not used to doing this on zoom sorry. All right, so yes, this is the ratio of the search rate of black drivers to white drivers which is three and a half times double for Hispanics and lower for Asians. And one of the interesting things there's numerous ways to identify bias and traffic stops right disparities don't necessarily mean that there is bias it could be that one group is has a different driving behavior than another group. But one of the ways that we assess bias is to look at search rates, and to find out whether in fact drivers who are over searched are as likely to have be found with contraband I mean that's the motivation that the police often give me when they tell me why they are more likely to search black drivers and brown drivers is that they believe that these are the folks that are trafficking drugs, bring them into Vermont. And yet the data with the data tell us is that actually black and brown drivers are less likely to be carrying contraband than white drivers and what that infers is that police officers basically use a lower threshold of evidence with which to search initiate a search of black drivers. So, these data as I said, they give you, this is just a portion of policing, but I think that from these data, we can infer that if there's bias in traffic stops, there's likely to be bias and other aspects of policing. And so I want to show you some data from Burlington on use of force, we don't have this for all communities but we do have this for Burlington and I think it would be important to look at it elsewhere. And so Burlingtonians, black Burlingtonians are one in 16, one out of every 16 Burlingtonians is black, but one out of every four people against whom the police use force in Burlington in 2019 were black. And this, I would say, in absolutely astonishing disparity. And in addition to this one of the things that we find is that black, black use of force victims are also more likely to have a gun pointed at them, rather than white suspects. And also from the use of force data in which the police identify what they think is the condition of the person that you use force on. And one of the things you'll notice here is that very few of them, a small percentage are under the influence of drugs or perceived to be, and that percentage are under the influence of blacks and whites, under the influence of alcohol, again, lower for a blacks and whites. One of the ones that I find very interesting is the difference in identifying a person as being mentally or emotionally disturbed. And the fact that the police are less half almost half as likely to identify black suspects as having a mental or emotional episode during the use of force incident is very consistent with what we find in many of the other social psychology experiments and medicine and so forth. And that is that that that blacks are tend to be perceived as more criminal, more threatening. So you, I think that influences the perception of the officer that rather than seeing a person who is mentally or emotionally disturbed, they simply see a threatening person when that person is black whereas with a white person, they're better able to identify whether they have mental health issues. I wanted to just lay this out as we begin this discussion to just give you a sense of what the racial disparities are today in policing. And just to say that we didn't find any evidence, I should say very little evidence that there have been improvements in these racial disparities over time. The agencies have shown some improvements in Vermont State Police is one of them. They've worked very hard at this, but in many agencies the numbers have actually gotten worse with regard to racial disparities. One of the interesting things is that with the legalization of cannabis, we might have expected that that that might have been one of the motives that we see brown and black drivers stopped and searched more because again of the inaccurate information that black and brown people use and traffic drugs more so than white people that the evidence doesn't support that. And what we found is that search rates of all drivers declined once cannabis was legalized but that the racial disparity continues to exist black and black drivers are still three times more likely to be searched than white drivers. So I will leave it there and come back to you when we get together to talk about what is going to happen in the future what process of the future is for addressing these issues. Thanks. Thank you Stephanie. Sarah, do you want to chime in here. One thing. Hello everybody. Thanks for having me and I'm Sarah George and the state's attorney in Chittenden County. I think that the one thing I would just want to quickly add to Professor so Guino's slideshow there is that when we talk about these disparities in policing and how she said that if bias exists in traffic stops then bias is going to exist elsewhere. And that is certainly true for the criminal legal system and the more people that are disproportionately searched or the more people that bias is presenting against those people are going to have more cases coming to us for review for criminal charges. So when we're getting cases, we're not aware, often until a lot of the work that these reports have shown we really weren't not just aware but like, told, really shown like actual data that showed that the police departments in our state or over policing black and brown people, which will automatically mean that we are over prosecuting black and brown people because that we're all a part of the same timeline the same process. So, I think that without real interventions that are at the police level. It's really hard not to have that disproportionate impact follow through the entire criminal legal system. There are things that we're trying to do to, you know, to nip some of that but it really does start at a ground level with policing. And I can certainly go into the things that we're we're trying to do here to counter that but I don't know if this this is the time for that. Yeah. So, in Chittenden County, like Professor Saxman said we have about a third of the state's population. So we do have a very large number of the criminal cases that exist in Vermont. And I think as a prosecutor, and as a reform, you know, quote unquote reform or progressive prosecutor, we have always since I've been here tried to divert more cases and send more cases to diversion and we've certainly tried to limit the number of cases that we are, you know, the people that how many people are incarcerating, but I think what I have tried to do beyond that is get out of this idea that we need to just divert low level cases and instead start to talk about not charging low level cases about really just not bringing those criminal charges at all, declining them sending them back to the communities to address whatever harm may have been caused. Or more importantly, address whatever issue that particular individual is dealing with, which is usually just basic needs and trying to meet those basic needs so that they don't continue committing low level offenses. Because as soon as you charge a case, even if you're diverting it, even if you're sending it through some alternative program, you're still charging that case. And not only is an incredible amount of resources that are spent on even the lowest level of cases, but the outcomes are not good. We really don't have great outcomes within the criminal legal system so the processes that can occur within communities like restorative justice processes for example, have significantly better outcomes, not just for the individual who's committed the crime but for the victims if there is one. There's statistics that say that victims who go through our typical criminal process, I think are 8%, 8% of them are satisfied with the outcome, whereas if that same case goes through restorative justice process and never comes through the legal system and their 88% satisfaction with the system. So there's a question in the chat asking you if there's any data and how often people of color are offered a pre charge restorative justice process, as opposed to whites. The answer is no, there isn't. And so I was going to get to that too that one, the police actually do have, especially now I think that at the, at the force of Professor Saguino and the legislature they are starting to have pretty good data and ways to extract that data. The Department of State's attorneys and sheriffs does not. We have a program called just where and I think the defender general's office uses the same one. We can input quite a bit of data, but it's nearly impossible to get it out. And a lot of the work that we do in the legal system isn't as easy as just entering something in or doing it using a click down you know there's a lot of factors that are involved in offers that we make or you know when evidence data is our offer may change or things get suppressed. It's, it's actually quite hard to extract that data in a really meaningful way. But no, we don't have those numbers and I do know that nationally, there is a lot of evidence that says that victims who are white, when the person who committed the crime is black, are much more likely to want a more severe sentence want a more severe punishment against that person than when it is a white defendant and a white victim. And so we are trying to be very cognizant of that, not just in our restorative justice approach but also our current court, our probation terms are incarcerated of sentences, any, anything that we are offering as an outcome, being aware of those situations when there might be a black person who committed a crime and the victim as a white person, and trying to trying to mitigate that whenever we can. But I think it's the most important thing that prosecutors can do is just limit the number of cases coming into the system at all. Across the board because if you do it across the board you were by the by the very nature of that decision you are going to limit the number of black and brown people that are coming in. In Chittenden County we eliminated the use of cash bail that in itself will drastically reduce the number of black and brown poor and and homeless people that are in our jails. So again by by making a sort of blanket decision like that you will automatically hopefully swing that scale the other way for black and brown people, and just having far less conditions of release that far less conditions of probation far less convictions in general, and especially with COVID we have so much time where cases are pending that we're spending a lot of time just working with defense attorneys to have people do particular things. While we're all kind of just waiting around for the courts to reopen, have them going to counseling, have them doing community service if they can have them doing whatever might be safe for them to do, and then not requiring a conviction and dismissing the case expunging it from their record and any anytime you can limit the number of people coming in and limit the number of convictions or supervision that they have done the road that is automatically going to benefit the people of color that we have in Vermont and everybody. Even though we don't have the statistics from county to county as to, you know, prosecutors charging is the way that you're suggesting to limit some of the numbers coming in is that the prosecutor will not charge, even though the police officer may be bringing a case or is it the police officers are not going to be charging. No, yeah, so it. So here, I'll give an example in 2019, the Chittenden County office declined to charge about 315 cases, either because we didn't think there was probable cause or it was just too de minimis of conduct that we just decided it wasn't necessary. And in 2020 through coven, we declined over 1400 cases. And most of those were just because we didn't they did not need to take up our space and our resources and our time in this office. And so police sent them and asked us to charge them. Some of them had probable cause. It wasn't that there wasn't probable cause, but they were a lot of low level retail thefts or unlawful trespasses at businesses or DLS is people driving without suspended licenses, because they were trying to work. You know those those types of cases that we would typically divert, we just declined to charge for the sole purpose of not having more cases backed up in a courthouse that is already backed up. And so we're trying to find ways of just putting all those back into communities and having communities lift each other up so that, you know, the legal system doesn't have to do it because we're not very good at it. So there was another question, which is, do we think that there are no. Wow. Do we know if there are a higher percentage per capita of police officers in Vermont than other states that might account for all these small towns over charging over searching. Do you know Stephanie, I don't know. Oh, you're muted though. I'm just going to venture response in terms of Burlington. I don't know at the state level and that would be interesting actually, and I will look into it but at many of you have heard about the resolution to reduce the number of police officers in Burlington and the analysis that that decision was based on basically compared Burlington to other cities or towns that had a university had a, you know, you know, controlled for the violent crime rate and so on and so forth. And so Burlington is the number of officers was literally 30% higher than the median of this set of top towns that were very similar in many different ways in terms of the need for policing. So that's the only evidence that I have is is Burlington itself and it would be interesting to actually do a comparison nationally. You have another question. I'm not sure if some satisfaction is high with restorative justice, but are there disadvantages to it. How often is it used, should it be used more. I guess that's for you Sarah. Yeah. So I, I am incredibly passionate and very biased about restorative justice. I teach. I started a program at Champlain College around it and I teach it. I have never seen a process that works better for, for healing harm and, you know, essentially mediating harm and trauma between parties. And the accountability that is required in a restorative justice process far outweighs anything that our criminal legal system ever requires of an individual. It's a kind of plea where somebody pleads guilty and, you know, goes through the entire colloquial colloquial with a judge and a victim gets to say whatever they'd like to say, if you compare that to what an individual has to say or count for an restorative process. It really is. There's no comparison. There's no other disadvantages. I haven't found any other than resources. I mean, if we could, I mean, even the mere fact that the resources for most of our restorative justice programs in Vermont come from the Department of Corrections budget, which in my opinion is terrible, like that money should go directly to communities so that they can build up these programs on their own without having the Department of Corrections be involved. But they don't have enough and especially, you know, I send so many cases through a restorative justice program which they, they appreciate and they want, but they need, they need more resources. How often is it used really depends on the county. We use it for really serious cases in Chittenden County and I know a lot of counties only use it for kind of low level offenses but it's actually proven to work much better the more serious cases that it's used for. And yes, I think it should be used more. It's actually prohibited by statute to use it in domestic violence or sexual violence cases, which I would actually like to change because having done the domestic violence docket here for four years before I became a state attorney. I think that it would be just an incredible use of that process. It is not for every case. And the people that do it would have to be specially trained in the power and control dynamics involved in a domestic violence relationship. But again, the research is very clear that it works so much better than anything that we have in our current system. So I think that's something that's in the works. I know that Hartford count Windsor County in Hartford has a pilot program around db using restorative justice and db cases. So hopefully that will play out in a way that the research says it will, but we don't really know yet. So the next one I see there is what does RJ require the offender to do. It requires them to take account of take responsibility for whatever harm they committed. And so it's the victim doesn't have to be involved. They can be or they can send somebody in their place but it's community members, the person who committed the crime and the person harmed. And they literally sit in a restorative circle and talk about how the crime impacted them the victims can ask them whatever questions they want they have to be accountable they have to answer them. Most questions are why did you do this, you know that's what most victims want to know, and they want to know that it's not going to happen again. Which again, our legal system doesn't require them to ever answer those questions, and a lot of victims never get those answers. So, and then there's usually a conversation about what that victim wants them to do. Sometimes that's community service somewhere sometimes it's just a conversation with them sometimes it's counseling. They can come up with a plan and the person has to follow through and do what's asked of them with the speakers feel comfortable giving their opinions on the Burlington resolution from Monday Monday night. I don't know what resolution that is, do you know Professor Sabrina from Monday. The, oops. The police chief had asked for to raise the cap for the number of officers from 74 to 84. The council turned that down, but did approve hiring 12 new people who are community service liaisons, which would be people that would respond without guns to low level incidents like noise violations, possibly traffic stops, things like that, as well as some community service officers. The nomenclature backwards but those would primarily be social workers. So I personally, first of all, I'm on the police commission so I just to say that and we've deliberated on this as well. But I will say this that when the resolution was passed this past summer. There was also an agreement that the city would hire consultants to actually help the city understand what was the ideal size of the police force. And what services could better be undertaken by other agencies, other types of services, and the, the contract has been awarded, and that is likely to be done by early April or mid April. So I think one of the considerations was that it was premature to ask to raise the cap, just as we're about to spend $100,000 to answer the question about, should we raise the cap. But the other is I think profoundly important, we really at a moment, I think, in this country, with regard to a change perspective on the criminal justice system, aside from the issue of race, although race has really brought this to the fore. And that is that we're moving from a world in which we understand criminal justice as punitive that we punish people for their behavior. Rather that we have a deeper understanding of different practices, like which restorative justice that we we now more deeply understand the role of trauma that influences people's behavior. That is not because they're bad people but because they have experienced certain things that cause them to dysregulate. And so, I think, taking, you know, having a police who are on patrols but who do not carry guns, they are better able to engage with people and hopefully they will hire people with those social skills, as well as social workers is precisely the direction we want to move them. So I, I, that would be my opinion about the outcome of the resolution I think it was mistimed since we haven't yet heard from experts who would help us look at what we need and also I think it's most definitely just a really a move in the right direction with regard to treating behavior, which is often criminalizing poor people, as well as people of color, treating them in a different way that is much more evolved from what we know from brain neuroscience and recent years and just our evolving ethics and morals around policing and public safety. We have a question here. And maybe any of the three of you can answer this and maybe Rebecca would like to chime in at this point. Are there successful strategies we're working on here in Vermont, or that others have had success with. Hello. Hi, my name is Rebecca Turner. And I'm coming from the perspective of a public defender defense attorney and technically a public defender. My work in the Office of the Defender General in Vermont comes from the perspective more statewide, because we handle all of the appeals from criminal convictions, juvenile delinquencies, child welfare, criminal rights cases, all of that from the entire state. And also in position I've been put on several sort of various government stakeholder committees and testify the legislature on whatever initiatives and so where I'm I love this question, which is what are we what strategies are we working on here successful strategies not just any strategies I love this like I love the focus. So what successful strategies are we working on here in Vermont this is the question that haunts me and keeps me reading and digging and going to the last pages of all these brilliant books that are coming out for like the solutions. Because the important great work that doctors sing why no keeps doing and, and her latest report confirms I mean it's extraordinarily disturbing to me her latest report and those slides and the data she just showed to me, someone was disturbing is when she pulls out a comparative national analysis that we know it's been bad in Vermont last year when we did this we had that same racial disparities results with traffic stops for a lot. We know disturbingly a year later, things have not changed. Now we know how much heart. It's incredible here in Vermont so, so, and, and if we wondered it we certainly now know and this past summer what's different from a year ago when we last time. COVID, but just the, the racial, the racial injustice crisis the murders and how much it just built to this national awareness that came here to Vermont so when I think about successful strategies. To me there is nothing that we can accept as successful unless it goes after institutional racism and structural racism. And so, to me, it's been actually at the forefront of a panel I'm on. And, and Anna talked about it at the beginning which is the racial disparities advisory panel, which is a creation of the legislature and and I'm that designated for the Office of Defense General and their representatives from all the various government corrections, prosecutors, generals, DCF and community members, BIPOC representatives from all over the state. And we're sort of tasked broadly with, can you help identify and offer up solutions, and one of the most controversial at the very end of this our depth was how to how to talk about this is this bias is this implicit bias is this explicit racism is this individual racism is this institutional racism is a structural racism. Right, is this white supremacy. That is the problem because I think critically to get to the successful strategies we have to understand what the problem is. And I think where we are now a year later is phenomenal in terms of this ability to go to the legislature and say white supremacy and this Vermont's criminal justice system is a reflection of this structural racism, and not have that just thrown back out you is a change for the good, because that is where the problems are and it is a term we tossed around but I want to share how I understand it, which is through this intersection of, again, it's bigger than individuals, individual biases, right, it's where practices and policies and laws combine to perpetuate and cultural cultural biases and racism and it's combined to just keep it going. And so, when we're focused on just the criminal justice system and I know the focus here is on law enforcement, and that angle of it. So our debt, we got to the summer, and, and then we got a specific request from the legislature, which is we have this data on traffic stops that Dr. St. Glenn has been working on. But we don't have much else we don't have required production of data sharing or collection anywhere else. And should we do it and if so what kind of data should we collect. And what, for what purpose, right I think a lot of the motivation initially was maybe to confirm or deny whether there was racism in this system I think now the, the, the understanding is no there is these numbers that you are hearing about who's inside just looking at proportionality and ratios of who lives by pocket color outside and who's inside is very is disturbing in terms of for disparities there. So then the then our depth sort of took it upon itself to say well where is what should we practice focus on, is it number you know is it number of arrests is it this or that and what we started realizing was that every point of the system where discretionary decisions were being made was an opportunity for racism to come in. And, and because those decisions were being made by humans bringing in their own recent racial biases, explicit implicit, and we realized that if we could identify every point, and not just from a rest or initiation of a, of a juvenile malinquency, or a charge, but initial encounter with someone who got them to got this kid before a judge, right and it wasn't necessarily the police, it could have been a mandatory reporter could have been a teacher counselor, and, and they were required to report, right we wanted to track from there all the way to assuming it didn't get deferred the case, and they got a disposition, a sentence, and then they were in custody and state custody and then, could they finish and then, ultimately, could they get this record of who was getting all the way those decisions. And so it turned out there's quite a minute, quite a few pages and pages and it was a very painful process, or we just kept going and going and building and we just didn't want to stop because what was profoundly difficult to really absorb. And it's clear just going through the exercise of just identifying all those potential decisions, how much the compounding effect of it led to where we are now. And so, when we realize that well actually legislature we recommend that you collect data at all of these points, right. Some examples and are from, you know, decision to call the police. The police arrived how do they respond to the scene do they do they let someone go go or do they do they cite them do what kind of site do they arrest them bring them into full custody, or do they release them pending arraignment or do they sit in jail. We consider an arraignment are the prosecutors what type of charges are they bringing, or for juveniles what kind of dispute, you know, similar things what kind of offenses are being charged, and who's getting out on bail. Are there pre deals going on on and on. So, when we realized all of these decisions, we thought I we should recommend some prioritization to this is this is this is a huge effort. And what we found is that, that all of this isn't being collected. Although some of it was and that and Sarah talked about how hard it is to extract this data in some of our databases, we may have similar ones but they don't talk to each other. And so, what's going on in Chittenden County and what Sarah is doing. So here, what other prosecutors are doing in other counties, but how much can we quickly extract and analyze and compare, right and so for us it became this important critical tool to not just know where things were happening but then to compare, and really see where the disparities were happening there. So we just decided to recommend the front end of those decision makings because we thought, again, as Sarah sort of instinctively is identifying how can you, how can you make decisions will have the greatest impact. It is at the beginning side of it, because if you can stop cases from entering in, then you can cut off the compounding effect of having people stay in their systems. And we are, we, we, we spend a lot of time building up towards that list and, and file that report of recommendations the legislature in December. And so they have started this, this session, we're working towards getting the bill introduced to get that kind of data collection. But hopefully, that is such a small piece, doesn't it, it's just a part of like, to me that's, that's, that's not a successful strategy to success, it's the beginning to get a strategy because it's then to understand what to do about it. So that doesn't answer the question, but it is a beginning. There are lots of ideas on how to do it. I think to Sarah and Stephanie back questions to you. How do we, how do we get what you're doing Sarah or how, how is their communication in terms of, of generating these ideas beyond Chittenden, right, whether it's at the prosecutors level of my, my, my vantage point is that I see a lot of differences in practices in the question earlier about the downside of restorative justice or who, who is going in, do we have race data one of the collection points you want to know was who was getting referred, who was making the referral was the race of the prosecutor making the referral, who, what was the race or ethnicity of the kids or adults who are getting referred. And that's just one part of that who gets accepted once they're referred by the prosecutor who gets accepted into these programs, who is actually the accepting person what is the race of that person. And not only that once you're accepted who's actually completing these diversion programs. Right. What we are hearing anecdotally all of this is anecdotally. But it is very hard if someone is referred by a prosecutor to still get accepted into a program if the person who's in the programming is uncomfortable with with with the person who's being referred now uncomfortable again like what is the basis for being uncomfortable. And, and if we have data to look at if that's playing out on in a racial lines that will be a way we can check that again transparency accountability will come with the data. I hope we can check that. There's question for Sarah. Who gets to determine who gets into RJ. Is it just the prosecutor. I mean, so police can refer cases directly to their local restorative justice program. And actually community members can, you know, we had a neighbor dispute that the neighbors went themselves to the local restorative justice program and asked if they could partake in the program so that can happen. But it's rare police are getting better and better, at least in Shannon County because they're sick of us just sending it back to them to do it so they are getting a little better with practice of, of immediately doing it. But if that's not happening then yes it is up to the individual prosecutor who gets that case on any given day and is deciding what to charge if to charge and what to do with it. And, you know, to Rebecca's point, and I would just say generally that prosecutorial discretion is a shield and a sword, I mean, it is my greatest power, and the reason I can do a lot of the really, in my opinion, good stuff that we can do in Shannon County and that same discretion can be used and has been used for decades to destroy people's lives. I mean that's, that's the reality of prosecutorial discretion it can be used for incredible good at dismantling systemic racism. But it has, it is the reason that we have the, the system that we do. But how can people in other communities, determine what their state's attorney is doing in terms of restorative justice, etc. How do they know. Yeah, I mean it's, it, I am very vocal about the stuff that I'm doing. And I know a lot of states attorneys aren't and that's, you know, each to each their own I suppose but they are still elected officials so it's like you would a city counselor or you would a state rep they are, they work for you. So I would certainly suggest reaching out to them and asking them what they're doing. Unfortunately, you know we just struggle as a department and this is not any individual state's attorneys fault we struggle as a department to extract the data that people want, and I want it and a lot of the states attorneys wants it wanted so it's easy in some ways for us to sort of say like well I think I'm doing a good job, but I don't actually know, I mean even in Chittenden County like I don't really know if what I'm doing is working. And, which I think is ultimately why just keeping cases out of the systems and there's less data I have to worry about. And we can just, you know, let the police data speak for itself or restorative justice data like a lot of the other organizations that we work with and I know that it's just the program that we have right now is it is capable of doing that but we don't have the resources as a department to keep it up when they require million dollar upgrades every year or whatever it might be. And so I think, ideally, meeting with your state's attorney and just asking them, you know what are you what are you doing and if you aren't happy with those answers. Start talking to your community members about that what accountability looks like they are elected officials we are elected officials and that is part of our job to answer those questions. So I wonder if each of the three of you can talk about recommendations for next step sort of, is there anything specific that you could see is that we should be doing or try to do. I can jump in there. My connection is a little bit unstable so I might freeze my apologies. Somebody popped in the chat an article by I actually think I thought it was a great article and I think it gives points to directions. One, you know that both Sarah Rebecca have talked about his data is what is going to guide us in this what's working and what's not working. The, the data is useful for policymakers but it's also useful for community members, because that's the only way that community members can hold their local agency accountable there's no really, except for the Vermont State police it's not as if municipal agencies are monitored, if you will, or beholden at the state level it's really the community that needs to do that. And so I just give you some examples of things that have worked one is that that Neil Gross talks about is ending pretextual stops, the Oregon State Supreme Court banned pretextual stops pretextual stops are those stops in which the officer uses one of thousands of traffic rules as a pretext for stopping you to get a look inside the car. And often it's based on suspicion or hunch, and we know that suspicion is much greater for black and brown people, and that if we could end pretextual stops, we would reduce at least your freezing. All the time with those stories and just today somebody called me a white woman whose husband is black, who in Chittenden County was pulled over by a female police officer because her back light was just not bright enough on her car on his car. I mean, we hear these stories all of the time so pretextual stops is one way. Another is, you know, I think it's that what we see places like Vermont State police which is actually trying to make some progress is that they use the data to with their officers. So they will show their officers you know if they have high stop rates or high search rates of black how they compare to others so it's like an internal early warning system if you will. And I don't know that much can be done at the state level, but certainly, you know I think that that's the direction that we need to go is that officers need to become more aware of their behavior. So Sarah George said that in her office, even though they're conscious of the work they're doing you don't really see the patterns in the decisions you make unless you have data that summarize what your actions. I was definitely losing you. That was put out that all departments would have to do it. The seven year sound just really freezing up. Can I piggyback off of what she recommended. I love that she was she turns, she turns substantive changing some of the laws that are perpetuating and she talked about the proxies that the proxies just the traffic stops right and prohibiting those and certainly that that can be in terms of recommendations that that I would suggest you as Sarah suggested, you know holding states attorneys accountable through elections and I would just add the legislature to contact your representative and let them know that these are important and that these are the types of changes you want. But we could go a long way which is changing the legal standards for what it takes to stop, or really, really put consequences to bad behavior. We don't just rest on a prosecutor's discretion or police officers discretion to not arrest to not charge. Well, if it comes out through litigation that that stop was a proxy for racism. If that stop was otherwise illegal, then that you you have that stopped you have that suppressing thrown out. There is that roundup is looking into whether or not we want to make some recommendations on what basic standards should be for civilian oversight board. I know that Stephanie here is involved in Burlington, and others in the community around the state are our depth and think we'll be looking at whether or not. There's a role for a state level versus a community based one. Again, and looking at the pros and cons of various civilian oversight boards across the country, and figuring out what is the best fit here. Again, from my perspective, really the key is independence if you're going to have a civilian oversight board, looking and reviewing police behavior. And we do need it to have independence to be able to to assess and then be able to discipline. All of that requires a lot of finances, and whether local communities can actually finance something like that or whether it should happen at the state level and pull all of those. And maybe that's when you look at but there are a lot of exciting initiatives that are happening around the country and that we can do here but also demand from our elected officials. In the article that Stephanie's talking about for the New York Times, you know, we can fix the police. We suggest three things. And I asked my law students to read the article and tell me which of the three they really like. And so far the majority is transparency. We don't know who's stopping too many, you know, it's back to the data and citizen knowledge. So, I don't know how that's going to happen. I think it happens somehow. I just jumped in on that that this issue came up in the police commission in Burlington recently because we're passing, we're looking at a policy to require that an officer's past disciplinary records be made public. Right now, as I understand it in Burlington, the police union contract purges any discipline after one year. We would, we would like to have that discipline made public. I think also one of the issues, one of the major issues is officers who have been fired or forced to leave the department because of misconduct. There's not necessarily desertification and they can get a job at another agency. So that's a place where I think transparency is very, very important. It's a difficult situation because police union have arbitration in their contract. So if they get sanctioned for something and they don't agree with it, they go to arbitration. The outcome of arbitration and that is private. It's not, you know, it's completely confidential as our personnel records currently in Vermont. So that's a huge area where transparency might be opened up. Anything else from our learned people. I don't want to leave the question lingering in the chat, but I, you know, there's a question about the refiling of the Veronica Lewis case, which is obviously very personal to me. And I don't, you know, I, I don't know, I don't know the answer to your question. I think that there's a there's a serious balance there in that particular case about whether it's institutional racism or our insistence on criminalizing mental health and disabilities. Either it could be both. Or it could be neither. I, you know, I, that question is more for our attorney general and it is for me, but I certainly appreciate the comment because it's not lost on me for sure. Any next steps that we're going to take Stephanie if you're still with us. Any additional steps that Burlington's going to take. Well, I guess I, you know, my world has changed by joining the police commission. So I feel like I'm going to shift now to my police commission role from the researcher role. And that is, you know, being on on a commission, which is not really a truly civilian oversight board and learning firsthand what the complexities are of that. I mean, it is an opportunity for the police to hear from the community, from people who represent community values about how they feel that policing should be done what public safety should be look should look like. But the structure of that relationship can be one in which people are who on the commissions are silenced are not listened to. Many of the things you know the information that we get is determined by the chief we don't actually know the full range of information sometimes. And so the ability to provide oversight is really a function of what that structure looks like. But I think that that that is an important direction to go to have community input. I have learned just in a few short months just how complex that is, especially in smaller towns where civilian oversight boards really are the town is so small that it doesn't make sense to have a an independent board that has its own lawyers, investigators conducts its own investigations and so forth. What we really you know the size of our towns and Vermont suggests that we would have a review type of civilian oversight board in which the chief makes recommendations around discipline or, you know complaints and so forth, and the the civilian oversight board approves or disapproves it sends it back to be reconsidered but as I said that relationship is not one in which the civilian body actually has the power to make independent decisions, because it doesn't have its own independent expert support. And that's really the only way that it can work is you have to have an arms length relationship with the police chief and the police department, in order to render an independent decision. So I think it's an important way to go. You know we're in the process of learning how to do that here in Vermont. So that S124 Act 156 last summer or fall the legislature passed legislation. Huge piece relating to a lot of these issues but specifically assigned the Attorney General's office to consult with whoever. On what on the question of civilian oversight boards. And so perhaps this organization might want to reach out and share thoughts there and I know that that is a process that is getting started now. So I'm happy to connect people with, with the contacts there if that's an interest certainly our DAP would take any, any, and I would love to receive and hear anything we're taking that up on our next month's agenda. It's a very interesting discussion and I've learned a whole lot. And the slides from Professor Seguino. Will they be available outside of the recording. I'd be happy to share the PowerPoint with you if you'd like to post it. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And yes, there's a question. Will this recording be available for people who aren't here. Yes. And Michelle will explain how that is going to happen but I assume it'll be on the website for the library. It will be on the color covered library adult programs page and I'll put the link in the chat so you can know where that is. Yes. And in the chat are, you know, the really interesting studies of the Brattleboro study which we didn't talk about at all. I think the next panel next month maybe focusing on that. But it looks like a number of towns are very interested in the issue of the community and the police and how to work with, you know, together. I'm excited to hear that, you know, Burlington's leading the charge. And maybe Brattleboro too. And we'll see what happens next. Other questions for our panelists. This is your chance. Last words from the panelists. Okay. Thank you. I'm happy to say a few things. You know, I've really been deep into this and I, you know, I feel like we are at a political moment and that we have to seize this moment. The death of George Floyd really I think brought into relief that policing has changed in the United States. I don't know, you know, many of you don't maybe not don't know this but my father used to be a police officer. And policing was very different 30 or 40 years ago. There was an interesting book that I think encapsulates what we've seen in general and that is the book is called the rise of the warrior cop. There has been, I think, many people expressed to me in Vermont this experience of police being militaristic sort of warrior like an adversarial and an us against us versus them stance. One of the causes of this has been identified as the returning veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq who are trained in a particular way and it brought that into policing. A task force last fall in Burlington sought to determine what percentage of Burlington police officers were returning that's from these from these places and 30% are. And so I think, you know, we are at a moment that as I mentioned we have this brain neuroscience research research on trauma that is changing things. We are changing our ethics around that moving from punishment to rehabilitation as a country, I think that we're doing that. The recent video of George Floyd demonstrated to us the worst excesses of the police and their lack of accountability when it comes especially to black and brown people. And I don't want to suggest that the police are worse than the rest of us we all have bias because we've drank the cancerous water that this country that has distributed for the last 400 years, but policing is a life and death endeavor and can ruin lives not only through being killed but also ruining job opportunities, breaking up families, leaving children, childless and so forth. And so I just would say to everybody that we are in a political moment. This moment will disappear. We need to take every opportunity we can in the coming year or two to make these changes to push these changes through. And I would be the first person to tell you that it's not easy and that the backlash sometimes is very tough to deal with. And that, and yet, those of us especially who are white have an obligation to do this work. Last words Sarah. No, I mean that I thank you for saying that I think that that's exactly right. I have. I feel the same way I think that this is our, this is our opportunity. There is so much demand on us right now to do this, especially leaders who are white, and it's, it's our obligation. It's not the obligation of people of color to educate us and fix this. This is our problem that we got ourselves into and, and I say that as a white woman and as a prosecutor, that we got ourselves into this, and it's, it's not. I mean, people often say that the system's broken. And I really try to push back on that because the system's not broken. It's doing exactly what it was designed to do. And that was to continue slavery in a very in a different way, in a systemic way. And so we need to break down the system we need to dismantle it we need to build communities up. And now is a time that everybody is really talking about that we really have to do it. Vermont is second in the country for the most disproportionate number of black and brown people in our jails. And so we are, we are not doing a good job. And I think Vermont on a lot of things likes to think that we're different, and not only are we not different or second worst. We are worse than Texas we are worse than New Orleans. Those are things we do not want to beat those jurisdictions and so we have a lot of work to do and I think demanding it from any elected official that you possibly can is a really great start and not stopping until they actually do what you were asking them to do or at least promise to do it and give you reasons for ways that they're going to do it. Thank you. Rebecca, any last words. Oh, the last words. Yes, no, everyone I can I love the comments and the set and the, and the polls and the sharing of the hyperlinks. You all have access to the ideas to and to just make sure that your voice is heard. Right. Just reach out and and as you know just reach out to the two are elected officials and make it them know what you support and what you want and what you will not tolerate. Thank you for having us. Thank you so much. Our wonderful presenters. Thank you, Michelle. And thank you for the League of women voters who's been putting on these great panels. So thank you all for coming. I wish I could see you all. Thank you everybody. Good night. Good night.