 And we have a lot on the agenda, so let's get started. Welcome. We will begin with introductions, but just to note, I think you all, all members know that Aton could not be here tonight. And so I have the unenviable position of trying to sell his shoes to keep this meeting moving. Please don't have any expectations of me like you would of Aton. That's an impossible job, but I'll do my best. And of course, Aton did so much behind the scenes work, even though he's not supposed to be working right now. So we can all give him a hard time about that when we see him. But let's do introductions. And oh, I should just also note that our Grant Taylor, our minutes taker, cannot be here tonight either, but he assured me that he would review the recording. And so we will have minutes of this meeting per our open meeting law responsibilities. Okay, let's go around and just say who we are. Are you gonna actually, you're not recording it right now, so. Yeah, thank you. I don't have to record because we have here helping us with that work of media. So then I don't have to do that piece, but thank you, because that is often something I forget when I say I'm gonna do it. So, hi everybody, Aaron Jacobson, and I am the Attorney General's office designee to this amazing panel. And I'm just gonna go down my list of folks next on the list of participants here. I have Matthew Bernstein. Hi everyone, my name is Matthew Bernstein. My pronouns are he, him, I am the child youth and family advocate for Vermont and attending at the committee member. Thank you. Thank you, Matthew, Judge Morrissey. Hi, my name's Mary Morrissey. I'm one of the Vermont Superior Court judges and I am the Judiciary's representative on this committee. And we can see your face now, so that's good. Yes, I figured out, all I had to do was slide that thing on the top of the screen. Yeah, it wasn't all that complicated. It was mechanical, not technical. Yeah, it wasn't too tough. Yeah, good. Christine Hughes. Hi everyone, is there a prompt? Am I supposed to explain? Oh, you can just say hi. And if you wanna mention your role on the RDAAP or just an interested community member, if you wanna add anything official or not, you can just say hi. Hi, I'm the director of the Richard Kemp Center in Burlington and I was the first chair of the RDAAP. So it's nice to be here. Yeah, that's who I am. And I probably won't leave my camera on if that's okay. I mean, I could turn it on if I have something to say, but I'd prefer to just listen. That's great, we have no protocols about that kind of thing, so make yourself comfortable. Nice to see you Erin. Yeah, you too, hi. My little list here on the margin of my Zoom is flip-flopping. So I will likely forget someone. I apologize in advance. You all can help me make sure that we, everyone gets to say hi. Next on my list is Chris Loris. Yeah, Chris for Loris. I'm a research associate with Crime Research Group here observing full disclosure. I am also an appointee to the Vermont Criminal Justice Council, but I am not wearing that hat tonight. Thank you, welcome. Dan Bennett. Hi, Dan Bennett of Mont State Police. I work for the Seren and Parks and Police Committee and I'm sort of ETON's right-hand man. He's doing really well, brought him home today, and he's definitely a little upset that he couldn't attend the city, so. Well, thank you for being here, Dan, and I appreciate that positive report. I'm glad he's on the mend. Doing great. Good, really glad to hear that. Derek, me, definitely. That was so well pronounced, Erin, thank you for that. I don't need to repeat my correctly pronounced and difficult last name, but I am the Department of Corrections designee to the R-DAP, and my pronouns are he heavens. Nice to reconvene, thanks. Thank you, Derek. Elizabeth Morris. I'm Elizabeth Morris. I am the juvenile drug coordinator at the Adolescent Services Unit at DCF. I am not the designee for DCF. That is Tyler Allen. Thank you, Elizabeth. Good to see you. Emily, and then my little trusty list trails off, so I can't actually see your whole last name. Emily Magus Russell. Hi. Yep, we got it, thanks. Hi, y'all, I'm M or Emily Magus Russell. She, they pronouns, and I am joining you all to maybe talk a little bit at some point about the Brattleboro Community Safety Review process. Great, welcome. Thank you for being here. Jen Furpo. Hi there, Jen Furpo. I am representing the Vermont Police Academy as their designee. Hey. Awesome, really. Oh, wow, lucky you. I'm waiting for my children to bring me takeout that I'll eat at eight o'clock. Jennifer Pullman. Hi, I'm Jennifer Pullman. I'm the director of the Vermont Center for Crime Victim Services. I'm not an official member, but I've been hanging out for a bunch of meetings, so thank you for including me. And thank you for being here. Representative Arsono. Hi, everyone. I am a representative Arsono, I guess. My name's Angela, she, her pronouns, and I am a representative from Williston. I serve on the Judiciary Committee, so I'm here as a very interested listener-observer type. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Rebecca Turner. Hi, everyone. Rebecca Turner designee for the office of the Defender General Panel Member. Jeffrey Jones. Yes, sorry, I had to jump off because my dog just grabbed something off the table and ran away. Oh, no. What should I be saying? Just saying hi. Hi, everyone. And why you're here. I guess original panel member. The question of why I'm here is an interesting one. I'll leave it to you. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you for being here. And then I think we have Reverend Hughes. Hey, good evening, everyone. I'm Reverend Mark Hughes. I am the Executive Director of the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance. And yeah, just popping every now and then, this was a result of our work from Act 54 and 17. Great, thank you. Sheila Linton. Good evening, everyone. Sheila Linton, she, her pronouns, original panel member. Thank you, Shay Witzberger. Hey all, Shay Witzberger. They, them pronouns here as one of the co-authors to talk about the Brattleboro Community Safety Review with Megas Russell. In my other life, I'm also at work at the Safe Space LGBTQ Plus Anti-Violence Project. Great to see you. Thank you for being here, Shay. And Tayisha Green. I hope I said your name right. Please correct me if I did not. You did, you did say my name right. Okay, good. Hi, everybody. My name is Tayisha Green. Happy to see some familiar faces on this call. I am the former Director of the REIB and I am here to talk about the CNA report that the REIB did in 2021. Thanks for having me. Thank you for being here. Laura Carter. Hi, everybody. My name is Laura Carter. My pronouns are she or I am one of the data analysts in the Division of Racial Justice Statistics within the Office of Racial Equity. I believe Tiffany will be here as well, but I know Susanna will not be. Okay, thank you. Thanks. Tyler Allen. Good evening, everybody. And my name is Tyler Allen. I think I am still at present the designee from DCF because I'm not seeing Rachel Eden's here. So perhaps that transition hasn't happened yet, but it is wonderful to see everybody. Thanks, Tyler. Wichee R2. Hi, everyone. My name is Wichee R2, pronouncing him his. I am a health equity and data systems expert brought in by, appointed by the Office of Racial Equity to this committee. I'm also Executive Director at Vital Partnerships, a consulting agency focused on community-owned community organizing. And I am on the Community Safety Review Subcommittee along with Sheila. Great, thank you, Wichee. And Winston Longmore. Hello, everybody. My name is Winston Longmore. I am the Director of Outreach and Wellness. And I've been, this is actually, I believe my second or third time on these calls. So I'm happy to be here again and just learn about what's going on. Thanks for having me. Thanks for being here again. I think I just need to call on maybe Isaac, so I don't see your last name. Thank you. This is Isaac Osam, the Director of Community Engagement and Support with the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance. And I think we're strong stakeholders in this matter. So here I am. Thank you for having me. Indeed you are. Thanks for being here. Oh, I'm sure I'm forgetting somebody. Professor Brown. Did I miss my name? Professor Brown. No. Hi, everyone. My name is Jessica Brown. My pronouns are she or her. I am an out-large community member appointed to this panel, former public defender, current assistant professor, and Director of the Center for Justice Reform at Vermont Law and Graduate School. Great. I think now I might have gotten everybody, but please, if I missed one of you, could you just speak up? Yeah, I'm Don Stevens. Oh my gosh. I'm pretty good in all he can try, but I was appointed by the Attorney General, been on the panel for, I don't know, five or six years. I've been absent for a little while, so I apologize for that. But anyway, I'm also the Executive Director of Abenaki, Huffin Abenaki, that helps our community. Thank you. Thank you, Chief. I'm so sorry that I missed your name. You're right at the top of the list now, too. No worries. No worries. No excuses there. Okay, is that everybody? Great. So we'll get to the agenda announcements. We all know Aton's not here. I mentioned that because Aton is not here, I would just ask that we not make any big decisions. So the agenda is kind of designed around that. We are going to hear reports out from our subcommittees and hopefully we'll learn a lot about the work of the subcommittees, but also with an eye toward our report that we have to really get serious about drafting and thinking about what is going to go into our report for the legislature that I believe we're trying to get to them by January or February 2024. That will be here like, it'll feel like tomorrow whenever there's a due date, it'll, it's coming up quick. So towards the end of the meeting, that's another thing we wanna make sure we've discussed is what do we envision going into the report? Again, not making any big decisions tonight, but we, Aton did ask that we start getting serious about that. So with those announcements from me, does anyone else have any announcements? Okay. I do. Oh, good. Yes, very exciting. So I just wanted to say that today is actually, I am the co-founder and executive director of the Root Social Justice Center in Bratibro, which is a all-by-pop-run organization on centering blackness and growing a movement for racial justice. And today is our official 10-year anniversary. And yes, yes you are. Yay. And we are kicking off our 10-year fundraising campaign as well as we invite all of you. Thank you, Shay. Thank you, everybody. We invite all of you to attend our 10-year anniversary party happening on October 7th, which is Indigenous People's Weekend. And we're inviting people from statewide. We are doing a racial justice parade, meeting at the Root Social Justice Center at 11, kicking off the parade at noon. It's a very short route through the middle of town. And then we are going to be carpooling out to Susu Community Farm, which is one of our wonderful sibling peoples where we will party there from two to six. You can find out more information on our website or on Facebook, if you like, the root sjc.org. And I really hope that you come and bring your families and friends. Everyone is invited. And thank you all for those of you who have contributed or supported or volunteered for our organization. We couldn't have done it without you. So thank you, everybody. Thank you for your leadership, Sheila, and congratulations. Thank you, Christine. That is fantastic. Can you say the date and time again of the parade, please? Just so we all have it. October 7th, the parade will kick off at noon at the Root Social Justice Center in Bradaburro, which is 28 William Street. 11 o'clock if you want to come make signs and be prepared and ready, but it will kick off from there at noon. Well, thank you, Sheila. Any other announcements? Yeah, hi, Erin. Can you hear me? This is Matthew. I can, Matthew. Go for it. Oh, thanks. I just wanted to say real quick that... Well, first, I wanted to thank Sheila for her leadership on so many issues, including the creation of the Office of the Child Youth and Family Advocate. And also just a lot of support to me personally and professionally. So I will do my best to make it, Sheila. That's amazing. And if you could put that info in the chat, that would help me get there. And just a quick announcement. We're co-hosting a webinar on youth homelessness, which is a week from today, Tuesday, September 19th from 12 to 130 on Zoom. And it's gonna be really awesome where we've been a little bit late getting the word out. But please join us. We've got an amazing panel and a bunch of folks with lived experience and a bunch of awesome policy people. So it's gonna be a mix of all Vermont folk, a little bit of national, but mostly Vermont focus and a focus on lived experience and the experience of BIPOC and LGBTQ youth. So please join us. I'll put the registration link in the chat. And thanks so much. Thank you, Matthew. And by the way, there is no chat because it creates issues with open meeting laws. So you won't be doing that. And Sheila can't put the celebration info in the chat, but do feel free to use this or email it. It's a good contact. I'm not sure I've access to that, Lauren, but sorry, I called you Lauren. I'm not sure I've access to that, Erin, but I'll check in. If not, maybe if I could just email you the link. Yeah, you can send anything to me and I'm happy to share it around. Thank you. But it's not anything where we would be doing business or making decisions because again, if that goes out in an all group email, then that constitutes a meeting under open meeting rules. You can see that I'm all very concerned about following those rules tonight now that I'm in charge. Okay, Elizabeth Morris, do you have an announcement? Yeah, I just have a couple of funding opportunities that I was gonna say I was gonna put in the chat, but I will email the links to you. So one is for youth drop-in centers across the state and another one is regarding the beginnings of a programming specifically for emerging adults who are either court adjudicated or at risk for intimate partner violence because there is currently no program specific for that age group. And both of those fundings are coming from the Council for Equal Youth Justice which is another public group as well. So I'll send those to you, Erin, so you can, you know, share them with the group. Good, thank you, that's exciting. Any other announcements? Reverend Hughes. Hey, thanks, Erin. And I just wanted to mention that we're in our last days of hosting the 1619 traveling exhibit over at the Richard Kim Center and we've recently deployed a cultural arts permanent display at the center, which was just commissioned over the last few days called diaspora, which is gonna be there. But the first African landing day, traveling exhibit, if you wanna stop by and take a peep at that, I think you can do that between, I think it's probably between noon and five or something like that over the next couple of days. And I just wanted to give a shout out for Black Affinity Space on Thursday and game night on Friday where there's some pretty lively spades games happening usually if you wanna drop in and get your butt handed to you because there will be some trash talking going on. And also wanna just let Sheila know just how excited we are because we're gonna be all hands on deck as many of us as possible down in your neck of the woods to support you the day before and leading up to and through that. And I'm gonna apologize in advance for having to hop off the call because I need to go to another call. But thank you so much again, Sheila, for all you guys are doing down there. I can't wait to see it. And thank you for coming up for first African landing day. It was good to see you. Thanks, Mark. Do you know the last day of the 1619 exhibit? Did you say what the last day was? I think it's Friday. I think the last day is at the end of the day on Friday. Okay, thank you. That's really good to know. Any other announcements? Okay, then without, oh no, I know what we have to do, do business-y things. Does anyone have anything to add to the agenda or does anyone want to suggest any changes to the agenda? Erin, could I just ask you a quick question? Sure. So I heard you mentioned to people if they send stuff to you, you could send it out because I definitely do have a couple of things I'd like to share with you, but I'm just curious about like who's the list? Where does it go? Well, if you send it to me, I can get it to Aton. And then Aton as the chair of this panel can share it out. Yeah, but I just want it, because we don't use the chat, it can be tricky to kind of get information out. That's a document that's on paper. So that's what I think we'll do with it. Just send it to me and I'll make for Aton, gets it, and then we can share it around. Okay, thank you. Thank you. No modifications to the agenda, I hope. We have enough to get through, I think without adding anything, but okay, doesn't sound like it. Then we have to approve our minutes from our August meeting. Can I get a motion? I move to accept our previous minutes from the August 2023 meeting. Thank you, any seconds? I'll second that. Super, thank you, Tyler. Any discussion? All right, all in favor, please raise your hand or say aye. I think that's everybody. Oh, look, your hands show up in the participants list. That is helpful. Erin, I'm abstaining from the minutes. I was not at the last meeting. This is Sheila. Thank you, Sheila. Yep, and I'm abstaining too, because I wasn't there, you know. Okay, so Chief Stevens and Sheila Linton are abstaining. Any other abstentions? Any objections? All right, now we get to the fun stuff. Cool, well, I did love the announcements also. Okay, so I'm going to turn it over for our first report out from the Community Safety Subcommittee. I believe that means I'm handing this discussion and presentation over to Sheila and Witchie. Take it away, please. Yeah, awesome, I can go ahead and start. Apologies, I'm going to have to keep my camera off. I'm starting to get a headache for those six o'clock Zoom meeting headaches when you've been on Zoom meetings all day, that one. Yeah, so I want to really appreciate Shay, Taisha, and for coming with us today to talk a little bit about the community through reviews. So the subcommittee is me, Sheila, and Singh. Singh is not here today, but between me and Sheila, I feel like we have enough questions to ask of you, especially if there's extra time. I wanted to ask before I begin, is there a preference for having, Taisha, go first, ask for the Burlington Sea and Community Needs Assessment or having Brattleboro go first or having you all go at the same time is there a preference for that? I defer to you and Sheila as the co-chairs of the subcommittee. However, you would like to go about it as fine with me. Thanks, Erin. Yeah, and I'll put that back out to the presenters of what is best for them and their timing of tonight or so have you. I am okay, so whatever, I mean, I'm ready, I'm ready to go whenever y'all are ready for me to go. Do you want to go for it? Start us off. Sure, I could go for it. Thank you. Again, no problem. Again, my name is Taisha Green. I'm the former director of the Racial Equity, Inclusion and Belonging Office for the City of Burlington. In 2021, we did a functional and operational assessment of the Burlington Police Department and that was led by my office. I am just here to answer questions as far as I understand. I don't have a list of questions from Witchie and if y'all want me to start there, I can. Yeah, I would love for you to start there, maybe talk about why was sort of like as an introduction, why was the community needs assessment created in the first place? What was the need that this was trying to address? You're muted. Thank you. The needs assessment was created by City Council as far as I understand. It came through a resolution. There were two parts to the assessment. One was a community-based kind of like focus group, trying to figure out and hear from the community what they thought that they wanted in their police department, what problems that they see. That's discussion with the community. It was probably a good eight meetings. I know that we went to every single like neighborhood organization meeting and we had the Talitha who we hired for that portion of it. They came in and they did a qualitative analysis of that data that they received from the community. Second part of that was the CNA portion and CNA is an organization who does police reform. They're known around the country for doing so. They follow best practices and 20th century policing models mostly. They have a lot of former law enforcement personnel on their team. They have data people. They have people with PhDs. It was a pretty succinct and a very broad level of understanding of what needs to happen in Burlington. So it came through the resolution. I believe that resolution was in December of 2021. I'm sorry, 2020 or either January of 2021. And I was appointed by that resolution to manage this project, this process. My role was basically to be a conduit between CNA and the Burlington Police Department. So there was a lot of data gathering that needed to happen. So it was my job and my team's job to make sure that data got from the police department to CNA so that they can analyze that data. Giving them lists of people that they should interview, like the mayor, the chief of police, certain people in police departments, certain community members. I know that the Racial Justice Alliance was a part of that as well. And I believe that Mark was probably one of the interviewees for that. And we also talked to the Battery Park, Battery Street Park movement on folks as well for that. We talked to the Burlington Police Union. There were several people that were talked to. We talked to the Church Street Marketplace. There were a lot of interviews that happened in that process, but my role was generally to give CNA the space to do their job, but also to encourage the police department to do their job and give us all the data that we needed. Thank you, Taysha. And anyone can pop in for questions. I feel like this can be a good open collaborative space. I just have a quick follow-up question on that. Was there any emphasis on assessing needs for communities of color, or was it just a general broad approach? The entire resolution was focused on communities of color. So it happened shortly after the murder of George Floyd. There were two different resolutions. One happened in June, and that was the one to... I know people like to call it defunding the police, but I disagree. It was one that when a police officer leaves and so through attrition, the funds for that police officer would be dispersed to help community, in particular black and brown communities for the city of Burlington. They had put a 74-person cap on the police department in Burlington, and that became a really large political battle as far as from the mayor's office and in the police department as well. I believe at the time, Burlington had a cap of like 115 officers. One of my discussions surrounding that was... I live in Minneapolis, and I came from the city of Bloomington, which is a suburb of Minneapolis. Bloomington has an international MSP, International Airport, which is two, so they have the Humphrey Terminal and the Maine Terminal. They have the Mall of America. They have about 85,000 residents, and they have 115 sworn officers. So in my head, it was like, well, you have Burlington, which is about 40,000 soaking wet. You have a really small airport, which could be considered regional airport, but I know it's considered an international one. And Bloomington also had three colleges and 50 colleges within a 20-mile radius of the city of Bloomington. And so the argument from the people who wanted to keep that cap at 116 or 115 was that they have an airport and they have UVM and they have all of these things, but so does Bloomington. And Bloomington is a lot larger and they have a lot more people coming in on a regular basis, excuse me, because of the Mall of America, which gets millions and millions of people coming in from across the world every year. And it is also on the target list for terrorists. So there's a lot of DOJ presence in the city of Bloomington because of terrorism, but I just didn't see how the two compared. So one of the key findings of this report on page Romo numeral four said that the city of Burlington should only have 72 to 75 sworn officers. That really, like I said, became a key contention in this entire thing. And most of the focus went towards that number and not towards the substance of the report itself. But to get back to your question, Witchie, you said your question was as focused on BIPOC people. And yes, to answer your question, yes, it was. Thank you. That was very insightful. I really appreciate a thought comparison because I think we maybe get a different view of it through the news. So it was interesting to hear that perspective. I'm hoping to know, you know, if from your proposal, what kind of positive impacts have we seen in BIPOC communities? Sorry, I didn't mean to do that. So the positives, I would say the implementation of the CSOs, which started, I know that this report says that it started before the report, which is true, but it also started with that same resolution after the murder of George Floyd, which put the cap of 74 and the implementation of CSOs were asked for by city council at that time. So when I left, I think we had two CSOs in the city of Bloomington. I'm sorry, city of Burlington. I'm not sure how many they have now. I hope that they have a substantial number to handle. Most of the calls that are don't require an armed police officer. And especially the calls that have mental health issues attached to it. So, but they had two at the time that I left and they had one at the time of this report. So I would say that is probably a good, a good change that came with this report, but it also started well before this report. Got it. And do you mind defining CSO for us? Community service liaison, community service officers. And then there was also CSLs, which are community service liaisons. I think that the CSOs receive more training as far as I'm going to the police academy training, whereas the CSLs do not. So it is my understanding that they are both unarmed though. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but that's my, my, my general recollection of it. And these are different from police officers. These are just unarmed workers from the police department who do patrolling or. They don't necessarily, I don't believe that was one of their goals was to patrol. I think I know that they did need to have a link to the community. So they need to be a trusted member of the community. So I know that that was one of the search criteria for them. I'm not sure that they patrolled, but I know that they went out on calls the same way that patrol officers did to houselessness, people with drug addiction, people who are having a mental health crisis, things of that nature. So. Got it. Thank you. Can you share with us maybe some of the biggest challenges that came into either the creation of this report or implementing the recommendations? Yeah, yeah. So the biggest challenge was the police department. In my view, the police department refused for months to, to give up any data. To CNA. And it after the CNA. So there were two reports that were done. One was done at the end of August in 2021. And the other one was done at the end of September. So when they did the first report, because they weren't getting that data, they assume that data did not exist. And so they put some recommendations in to say, this is what you need to do, because this is what we asked for. You did not supply it. So we assume that this data does not exist. After in the beginning of September, the police department finally gave like a really big dump of data, but it was too late at that point to. The CNA contract had run its course. They had done their work. They had asked for an extension to try to get the police department on board. And even with that extension, the police department still would not cooperate with this, with this, this assessment. So, I would say that the police department was the biggest hindrance in this, because the mayor's office did not step in to ensure that the police department were doing what they needed to do. Just to clarify, that data did not get reported to the state. That was just data local to the Burlington police department. Yes, it was just data that was local to the Burlington police department, but they're, they have this program called sharing or share officers where there's officers in Chittenden County area that can come into Burlington and give tickets like to pull people over, respond to calls, et cetera, et cetera. And that was that had started long before my tenure began at the city of Burlington. So there was some, some things that had to come from the outside of the Burlington police department, but not very much. And it was only if we wanted to grab some of that data from those other police departments like South Burlington is, is what's coming to mind. I know we use them a lot in Burlington. Got it. Thank you. If you could pick two or three recommendations, you know, to be able to put up to the state legislature of things that you feel would be better implemented as state policies, what do you feel that they would be? One would be recommendation 1.18.2, considering instituting a citizen review board to review internal and external investigations rather than having the chief serve as a final authority on those facts and the discipline. I think that that one is incredibly important to black and brown people, not just in Burlington, but across Vermont. One of the things that I learned living in Vermont is that per capita Vermont incarcerates more black people than any other state in the United States of America. And I think that this, having someone have, have a citizen review board to review these instances of whether it's complaint or internal and external investigation would go, would go a long way in helping the state of Vermont figure out why they are incarcerating black people at such a high rate. The other one, so I don't believe in implicit bias. I don't think it exists. I think that it is typically used one second please. Sorry, I think my cat is like rattling something. So I don't believe in implicit bias. I think that is a scapegoat that people use to say, oh, everybody has it and you know it's it's subconscious it's unconscious and there's nothing we can really do about it. But the, the recommendation is to say that they need to have implicit bias training courses. I would change that to say they need to have anti racism training courses, because there's no reason why you need to be trained to treat someone like a human being. And so when we get down to the core of what racism is, it is our fight to be considered human beings. We are still three-fifths of the human being to a lot of people in this country. And so I believe that training people to treat other people like human beings is ludicrous, but training people to understand where racism comes in and understand that they have been taught racism and understand that racism is a fabric of United States of America, then we can start there. And then we can be able to move and try to shift and change what's happening throughout the country. Implicit bias training is not going to do that. But I do like that they put training into call out racism, but without calling out specifically racism. I think that those two would be great for the state of Vermont to pick up. Thank you. Yeah, actually something that comes up for me as you said, that's a recommendation. It's just sort of the fact that police in the first place were invented to catch slaves and hunt indigenous folks and I don't know how many people actually know that. So definitely worth examining the history as we talk about criminal justice, examining the history of criminal justice itself in this country and thinking about approaching or training from an anti-racist perspective. Sheila, is there anything you would like to add or ask before we open it up to the rest of the panel? Not at this moment. You do an excellent job with she and if something comes to mind, maybe we can loop back around, but questions have been really thorough and your presentation has been really great. Thank you so much. Thanks, Sheila. Anyone else from the panel would like to ask questions or presenters if you have questions as well or observers, those fly on the walls. All right. Well, thank you so much for your time, Tyesha. I really appreciate everything that you were able to provide for us. One thing is reading it, another is hearing it. So thank you. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you, Tyesha. Are you going to stick around for Shea and M's portions too? I can, yeah. I'm curious to hear what they have to say and how it might inform a question that I know I have for you, but then I was hoping I could wait until the end if you're willing to stick around. Absolutely. Okay, thank you. Thank you. M Shea, I think that was your cue. Hello. If you could just, just one more time names, pronouns, affiliation, the role that you played in the community safety reviews and how or why did you get involved? No big deal. You want to start? Help me to start. Would you be up for starting Shea? I am Shea. I use they, them pronouns. I was a co-facilitator and co-author of the Brattleboro community safety review project. Other affiliations include Uncle, Scholar, Puppeteer, and survivor support worker by day. Many things by night. And I was a former collective member at the Root Social Justice Center before it transitioned to being a BIPOC-led exclusively group. So much congrats to you, Sheila, on the big anniversary. Can't wait to party with y'all. You should introduce yourself and then we can get started on how it got started. Sure. Thanks. I'm M or Emily, either is fine. She or they pronouns either is fine. I am a somatic trauma therapist in private practice. So I am also was one of the co-facilitators of the community safety review project with Shea in 2020. Wow. And have followed through to some degree till present day. The impact of that review. I also have been involved in, I've been a leader in community mental health in Brattleboro for years before transitioning to private practice and also have been involved in several different community organizing efforts throughout the bit more than a decade that I've been in the area. This being this being one of them. So that's sort of why I'm why I'm showing up here. Yeah. And I also want to say thank you to you. It was like really amazing to hear you share about this project. A lot of residents, a lot of differences and a lot of similarities. So I'm looking forward to exploring that. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. I've read about your work a bit and I'm so grateful to meet you and hear from you about your work directly. Thank you so much. Yeah. The genesis of the project was similar and different, I would say in Brattleboro. Similar. But it was a lot of work. It was a lot of work. Timing probably and like larger cultural impetus. 2020. The murder of George Floyd and. More people in the Brattleboro area. Getting organized and active around. Harms from police. And correct me if I'm wrong. Emily or Sheila or Wichita y'all were there, but it was a lot of work. So I'm looking forward to working with the ad hoc community coming together. Lots of sort of multiracial organizing, coalitional. Organic coming together to try to put pressure on the select board to make some change. Which kind of shook out into a. Negotiation toward between this ad hoc community organizing and the select board of Brattleboro into a request for proposals. For recommendations. And. Please do. From a timeline perspective, add one more thing in. Thank you for that, which is that. You know, whereas it sounds like Burlington's impetus had to do with a resolution that was that was created in past. One of the things that happened in Brattleboro. When the COVID pandemic hit. Is that it disrupted what is sort of a unique little. Political process that occurs in Brattleboro, which is the representative town meeting. Where we have town representatives myself and Sheila are. Our service town representatives. That meeting usually happens in March. And March of 2020 that meeting didn't happen because of the pandemic. And the state of emergency that was initiated. And one of the many things that happens at that meeting is that the town budget is passed. And so that meeting never happened. It was never a backup solution to that. And we got really close to the beginning of the fiscal year. July 1st. And the select board in Brattleboro went ahead and passed an emergency. Budget essentially passed the budget through an emergency declaration, which was a. Which did not follow the, the usual protocols. And so that was the beginning of the fiscal year. And that was the beginning of going to the RTM, the representative town meeting body. And therefore community members through their representative town meeting members were not able to. Have the usual discord and debate that occurs at that meeting. Around the use of the budget. This is of course happening in the wake of. George Floyd and the uprisings in response to police brutality and violence. And that emergency budget that was passed included a little bit in the budget. And so that became a really huge factor in our local organizing around what she was then speaking to. What sort of came frankly down to a compromise. Of this review process, because the budget had already been passed for the next fiscal year. Do this emergency process. And so instead of making changes to the police budget or in the town committee, to do that for the emergency budget that was passed, what, what was decided on was that there would be in the town would implement a broader police review of some kind. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you for that. And part of that request for proposals that we put in some other people put in ours was selected included. That this would happen through a town committee in open meeting structure. And so we did that by a town committee with M and I as noncommittee member facilitators basically. So we facilitated community safety review committee through the town. You know, open meeting structure. Frozen cons to that structure for this type of work happy to dig in later differently about that if anyone's interested. But that group of people was really pulled from as much as possible and paid a small stipend, a tragically small stipend as determined by the select board, not by me. And guided some of the process. And I facilitated that process. And it was the process was largely two fold a listening project. Focusing on listening to parts of our community. Parts of our community that are most policed specifically black people and other people of color and disabled people. People who are mad or psychiatrically labeled or have experienced psychiatric involvement. People who've include who've experienced systems involvement of other kinds. Taking a look at not just the police department, but also policing systems. That includes DCF. That includes the mental health system that that psychiatrically incarcerates people, et cetera. And then also. Aside from this large listening project where we listen to how many people Emily. 250. 25 organizations maybe. Also Emily really largely led a deep dive into the policies and procedures of the world police department and did a sort of analysis of their. Data and policy. And then we wrote a behemoth report that was. Massive and. Deep and long. That included a lot of qualitative stories and. Information from people about their experience. Yeah, and I'll just add to that. Thank you for saying that. And I'll just add that the. The listening project that was really led by Shay, the listening side of things we came up with a. Four different ways in which we were going to gather information. So we did an anonymous survey that anybody could access. And that was sent out far and wide. And we sort of did some outreach around. We did small listening groups that were based on identity based information. We shared experience space. We collaborated heavily with organizations like the root and other organizations that serve folks who are most heavily policed. To do what we can to enter into those spaces as safely as possible. To. Participate and to gather some information about not only people's experience of harm, but also also their visions for safety. And so we've been able to recognize throughout this process that we are white bodied people coming to this work with strong anti racist lens and perspective and orientation. However. You know, we can't take off our whiteness and also. One of the ways that we navigated that is that we worked with as much as possible. We paid and facilitated like for other people to facilitate and gather this information and then give it to us. Deidentified. So that even though the information we ultimately received and then decoded and. Shared with the community and with the select board through the report was de identified. That we offered a few different layers of de identification. So even the information and data that we got from these listening sessions could be de identified if that's what felt safest and most accessible for folks. And so that was one of the things that we did. Another form of listening that we did was one on one conversations phone calls. She had many, many, many phone calls and with individuals. We also paid. A few BIPOC black facilitators to be able to have those one on one conversations with people who didn't feel safe talking to share. I because of our whiteness. And then or any other reason and then. And so that was the fourth and final format for listening where public forums held via open meeting. Laws and this was at a time everything was virtual because of where we were at in the pandemic. And so we had these public forums that served as. As sort of sharing and community building. Opportunities as well as opportunities for us to continue to gather people shared experiences of their personal experiences of their. Personal experiences with harm and brought up real and also their visions for safety. And in addition to all that, we also talked to a ton of people who work inside of these systems. We talked to police. We talked to people who work at DCF. We had a DCF listening session for our local office. We talked to folks who work in the mental health system about their perspectives on how the system is going from the inside. And when given anonymity, people had a lot of really. Interesting things to share about their own, the state's attorney's office, all kinds of folks. So that was the bulk of it. I think the process. I want to say one more thing about how we got there, which is just that Emily and I had the time. As freelancers ish. To be able to do it ish. We didn't really, but we did have the time to do it sort of. And it was sort of a community effort to like figure out who was going to put in the proposal and. Who would be selected. And we did recognize whiteness as a. Barrier to. You know. Being fully embedded in some ways. And we are both people from within the Brattleboro community who have done multiracial organizing for a long time. And so. There were some proposals from like far out groups, like, you know, firms. International firms that worked with Wells Fargo. Wanted to come in and do stuff. And it turned out that we. You know, where so our proposal was selected. Which sort of came out of that organizing group. So that's kind of how we became the people to hold this. Thank you both. I can understand why it became a behemoth of a report. That was that's a lot, a lot, a lot of work. Thank you for doing that. I wanted to ask maybe about the impacts of your work. Maybe you can talk a little bit about what kind of thing, what kind of positive impacts you've seen on the community. Especially Bob Paxons. This is a lot having to do with racial disparities in our panel, but talking about positive impacts in the communities. That came from that report. Yeah. Thanks for that question. Right after the report came out. One of the main features or one of the main areas. Of study and therefore a recommendation and findings and recommendations of this report has a lot to do with. The impact of the, the coupling of police policing and mental health response. To in Brad, the impact of that on community members. And one of the greatest impacts that we saw right after this report came out. Was sort of a real sort of like stepping on the brakes of that. Moving train of, of coupling mental health response or welfare checks with police response. Over, you know, I have to look at the data, but a good. A good. Portion of the use of force. Incidents that occurred in the time span that we studied the two years prior to the review. A significant portion of them and I can look at the data and tell you more specifically. We're responding to welfare checks. And not. Criminal activity actually. And so. The willingness to really analyze and look at that. That the concerns and risks associated with having police respond to. What we're being called welfare checks or mental health calls. Has, I think positively impacted a lot of community members, including BIPOC folks. I, you know. We haven't seen a lot of the recommendations be implemented to be honest. The town manager who was in the office at the time. The first set of recommendations were to acknowledge and reckon with the harm caused. That was uncovered and spoken about recognizing that people were really taking a big risk sharing their experiences with us. One of the big risks is that no change might happen, right. And I think that at that time there were some steps taken by the town manager who was in office at the time to really, to really reckon with and acknowledge that. You know, institutionalized racism. And that was something that we had to really take into account. And I think that the things that we've been doing with the kind of work that we've been doing in the past two years. Which is, which is, which is the key to the job. And the key to the job. And the key to the job. And I think that the new policy are, in fact, part of the picture here in regards to policing and town government elsewhere. We've had a lot of turnover in all of our positions of leadership associated with the police department, including the town manager set with few times now. people so there's been a ton of turnover leadership. Right and I'll just say one more positive impact I think is the deepening of camaraderie and collaboration among community members and community organizations who are organizing for racial justice. This project really provided a place to coalesce, shared energy and shared vitality around the impact of white supremacy and racism in our communities and so for example we still have a lot of momentum in our organizing community around this project and there's a monthly meeting happening for organizers who have been involved in this process for three years now to continue to organize around what, how to support the town in following through with accountability of the project and also accountability to implementation of the table, the implementation plan. Yeah. Thank you. I don't know if she or she wanted to add anything to that. Yeah I think I agree with you that the that I think that the majority of the positive impacts that I've heard about interestingly are not at the select board level or the police department level but are rather at organizational levels where organizations working in social services looked at these implement you know at the at these recommendations and are implementing as much as they can to sort of decarcerate internally, etc. I think personally that the town you know the select board's commitments to these recommendations were quite soft I would say, soft commitments, a little hard to hold somebody to a real soft, smooshy, yes we've we we promise that we will look at this you know. Some things have are on the way to be implemented or have been implemented but a lot haven't. So something helpful that the town manager did was also say these are things we can't implement because of they're not at the town level. There are some things here that we can't do because of state statute as an example we can't decouple traffic simple traffic stops or speeding tickets with policing. That's a Vermont statute situation that would have to change at the state level. We can't you know when an officer is involved in in something you know harmful we can't put them on leave without pay because that's actually a national level you know statute that says that we you know we need to give government employees due process so we can't implement some things on the town level. That kind of information is really helpful and may inform you know that implementation of table is available for y'all and may inform the work that you do on the state level. There are opportunities there I'm sure but quite a lot of what we talked about was at the town level the local level. Thank you Sheila do you have anything Todd? Yeah I just wanted to say that how impactful this was for our youth in our community. Youth were a huge part of those listening sessions in those groups and what I think it also did for the youth and the youth organizers doing anti-racist work is to excuse me to for people to recognize the connection between school and community and how that is the same in one really and it gave the youth who were at the time trying to have police out of schools it's a big statewide campaign many of you might know about it and because we were implementing something in the community which was asking to look at different alternatives of policing and saying that police are not the only way to create safety in our communities it really brought credence and support to our youth within the school systems to not have police in the school systems as well so I think to in addition to what Shay is saying those organizations and our groups now had not only more people power but more substance as well with policy with people but also having the backup of all this sort of research and understanding as well to say hey how can we do this in our schools if the community is doing this. Right and the youth led their own listening session youth participated in in in leading and asking their own you know other youth for info and yeah and we're doing you know parallel adjacent work on their own around the impacts of police presence in the high school in Brattleboro as well. Yeah which is one of the reports that we've been reviewing as well I didn't quite know that that was a direct influence so that's that's cool to to know that that was one of the impacts. Rebecca I think you had your hand up first but you put it down. Oh thanks Wichita I got us some of the answers I thanks for coming and sharing all of this information it's hugely helpful I'll focus the questions I know time is short on your point as to follow up on of the report and the dedication of people meeting monthly to discuss implementation how to hold the town accountable and I just heard how you've learned that there are certain things that can only be done at a state level a statewide level. Do you have or maybe I'm missing it somewhere in another in a report recommendations from these monthly meetings as to how these local organizations government organizations can be held more accountable and implement the recommendations of the report are you guys compiling specific recommendations and if so I think we would love to see them. Yeah that's great to hear thank you for your question and for your interest I'll say that the formal monthly meetings are just starting next what Monday because we've had several kind of ad hoc reactive meetings you know reacting to governmental opportunities or lack thereof frankly for community involvement in decision-making around how this implementation process happens one of the greatest challenges we face to anticipate the next question that you you know that you that you sent to us is the turnover that we've experienced in town in the town the the great degree of turnover we've seen in the town manager's office in the police department and the select board has made it very difficult for it's not that there are individuals that could theoretically you know hold the thread of accountability but there's been a lot of opportunity to not have to do that because there's been a lot of reprioritization and this has consistently gotten kind of kicked down the road as a priority for all kinds of reasons right you know no judgment on on those reasons but consistently the the town manager who was in place Peter Owell at the time that the report was happened was very supportive and was was moving pretty quickly around think relatively around implementation created a town generated implementation table based on the recommendation findings their recommendations table that we had which like what she was saying told us directly these are things we can't address because they're not at the town level but these are the things we can address and created a timeline an implementation timeline that was extremely swift and responsive it really dissolved and is now heavily contested by the you know by the current folks in those positions that have a say so that's just been really challenging and it's why those of us organizing around anti-racist work are sort of holding our own piece of accountability this report is very helpful not just for the town it's very helpful for anybody organizing in the town around anti-racist work and you know dealing with the impact of police brutality and policing on our community and so there's a lot of good information in here that we also get to work with and frankly because one of the largest recommendations has to do with investing and supporting community responses to safety and harm and therefore decentering police responses that work needs to be done one of the confusing things about this is that we just keep trying to get the police to do things or not do things but we're actually talking about decentering the police when we talk about safety and that's something we didn't mention at the beginning while this has a police review part of it where we reviewed two years of data and policies and practices and procedures also we really we really put this forth in our proposal as a review of safety and harm and not policing because we really see the hyper focus on police as a bit of a red herring or a barrier to really looking at what we're talking about is what makes communities safe and you know even our police department says you know I've had many conversations with folks in our police department you know some of our police department members understand better than many of us that you know things get delegated and relegated to the police because they're the 24 hour responders in town and I have a quote here from our our chief saying like we didn't ask to be mental health experts we never were mental health experts and once we became the go-to mental health responders there was great tragedy associated with that that's from that's from the mouth of the chief of police for several decades in Brattleboro so you know a lot of this work actually is about community and community perception and community perceptions of safety and that's a huge struggle we have in Brattleboro where community perceptions of safety have to do with things like commerce and things like our downtown businesses and and maybe the people who are experiencing harm and experiencing a lack of safety on a regular basis aren't centered in that conversation on a daily basis and certainly not usually centered in town government conversations and those meetings they're ongoing there are no new recommendations coming out of those meetings the that's organizers thinking about the recommendations that already exist and how to to be in the now with those and keep it moving I will say around government accountability generally and police accountability generally that uniquely differently in Brattleboro than in Burlington there has been a community oversight of the police body that has been radically toothless I would say toothless than more toothless than a than a 30 year old cat it is it is not doing anything for anybody and they say that's from listening to that group they acknowledge that themselves like it's not working the form of it that's happening in Brattleboro is not working there's no process there's no continuity there's no accountability in the community accountability for the police here so one of our our recommendations was to revise or or eliminate that that false sense of accountability that this specific form of that committee was providing also M M and I have our whole own other careers than this and there was no single organization that housed this project that the beauty of the coalition is also the risk of lack of continuity right no one no single org bottom lining and so it has been this reactive process since then to say ah they're gonna like you know go against what they said that they were gonna do again let's all get together and go to that meeting but there hasn't been like a very strong through line so we're working on it I see yes thank you both for for this amazing insight there's definitely some powerful stuff that that's coming out of that I'm gonna ask Taisha Green to come up thank you um yeah that was really great I saw a bunch of parallels with what's going on in Brattleboro and what happened in Burlington one of which is like moving away from policing like trying to reimagine what public safety actually looks like and and policing is is a very small part of that I would say that policing has nothing to do with it but it is a very small part of it because I know people like to hold on to feeling safe with police but there are there's a subset of people who do not and have never and probably will never feel safe with police so I do like that y'all were thinking about decentering police because that's what the original resolution in Burlington was about the no police in schools I I really thought that Burlington was the only ones that had police in schools and I was really happy that they were removed from those schools I did ask a question about what other towns in Vermont had police in their schools is it all schools across Vermont or is it just the schools that have a significant number of black and brown kids in them because we uh there was a school that's in Chittenden County and I'm sorry I'm not that familiar with but there was a school in Chittenden County that was a hundred percent white and they had no police officers in it and so I think that the presence of black people the presence of brown people is what encourages that although most school shootings happen from white individuals so that's really interesting and the last thing that I wanted to say was the community oversight of the police in Burlington that that group has no authority and which is why in this cna report one of the recommendations is to give that group a high level of authority that actually passed city council and the mayor vetoed it so the mayor does not want community oversight of the police and neither does the police department and so this report unfortunately even though it has a over a hundred and fifty recommendations it's a very well thought out thoughtful report sits on the shelf when I left the city of Burlington nothing has moved forward on any of these recommendations and I don't think they intend to and and that's really sad because there was a lot of work that went into this report as well as the community led report thank you for giving me that time yeah of course thank you for naming those comparisons just my last question for Shane M and then I'll open it up to the rest of the panel I was I was wondering you all talked a lot about things that needed to happen at the state level or the federal level for the state level are there things that we should be considering writing into the recommendation for the Vermont legislature when it comes to reducing racial disparities in a criminal justice system yeah she do you mind if I say some things first here okay so the first thing that I recommend you may or you may not be familiar with a report that was written by Stephanie Saguino from the University of Vermont trends and racial disparities and traffic stops and she did this that they they you know analyze this data across the state Brattleboro and Burlington were among the highest rates and Rutland I think were among the highest highest rates of trend of racial disparities and they're alarming they're extremely alarming I think addressing traffic stop related racial disparities has huge implications and also probably would need to be taken up at the state level it seems like the low local municipalities don't have the you know vision or you know scope to be able to address this but there are some really radical pilot programs like one in Berkeley California where they're looking at decoupling traffic stops and police response which would involve the creation of a different type of municipal department that is not armed to be issuing traffic violations and and things like that recognizing at a national level how dangerous the coupling of armed police response and traffic stops are and in our own community how much we saw we heard from black folks in our town about the experience of being profiled over and over and over again through traffic stops so as well as many other experiences but traffic stops are a big one so that's one thing I would say to look at the other thing that I want to echo what Taisha said is that a big recommendation that just kind of blew the minds of the folks in power down here and was really hard to articulate is that we recommended a freeze in the training budget because one of the things that was happening and this sort of for me lands in the like good trying to be good white people category one of the things that keeps happening is that like there's some layer of recognition that there's some kind of problem happening without a deep analysis or you know a sort of receiving of the deep analysis that is already in process and so there's a bit of a like let's throw money at it let's throw training at it and we did some analysis of the training budget and this sort of like response to increasing the training budget by 48 percent to sort of increase implicit bias training which sort of looks good on paper but actually has really really poor outcomes when you look at the data around the effectiveness of implicit bias training usually when people leave an implicit bias training we're talking about you know an eight hour training right that you know 24 hours later usually people have retained almost nothing of what they have they learned and of what they learned and I really believe in my work as a psychologist as a psychological provider and focus on anti oppressive work that a lot of this has to do with readiness and one of the things we did listening sessions with the police officer there was a perception among the police officers that they were heavily trained in DEI and it's that perception does not match what's actually happening right um it was a pretty aggressive perception actually I will say um and the what they felt like they needed was more firearms training they get a lot more firearms training than they get DEI training at the time of the of the two to a year span of review and um they actually many of them aren't using firearms I mean they're obviously armed but they're you know in terms of how many times the firearms is drawn in those two years is um compared to how many times they may be interacting with a personal caller right and so um the readiness you know what our recommendation was really about having the police department actually look at readiness individual officer readiness for anti racism training rather than throwing a 48 percent increase in the budget to just force all these officers who are many of them not super interested in going to this training um to just check the box it really felt like that and it was really confusing for folks to say wait a minute you want us to be less racist but you don't want us to go to training and it's like no first of all there was a 60 percent reduction in use of the training budget so they wanted to increase the training budget by 48 percent but that year they had used like 60 percent less of the training budget than they had used the year before right so it was it really felt like a box checking rather than a sort of critical analysis of what it actually means to you know train police officers in anti-racism right so that's just something I want to illustrate across the state to really be careful about again what I sort of chalk up to the the sort of good white person response of like let's let's put more money let's put more resources let's get more training and to really look at what actually makes training effective is like a readiness and a willingness for the person to be trained in the topic to pay attention to listen and to integrate the information as well as opportunities for integration and learning not just you know an eight hour training and then you're sort of check the box you're trained in this and this is really important because a lot of the use of force documents start off like have straight up routine sentence starters like you know my training in mental health first aid tells me that blah blah blah and so these trainings kind of get used as justification for the implementation of use of force the mental health trainings and so there's just really a lot of concerns that are really subtle if you don't kind of hard to think about right away it sounds good to do DUI training but to really look at the impact of that training quickly one other recommendation that people get confused about a lot that's related is that we heard about the very negative impacts of having a social work liaison embedded in the police department the public perception of that is that oh there's a social work at the police department that means that that's the person who alone is going to go and deal with the mental health calls and that'll just gentle everything down right because it's a social worker and so what is social workers ever done right um they're they're good guys in this gentle framework right um the the functionality of that in our community is not that the social workers going alone to any wellness checks it's that it's a faster path to psychiatric incarceration for predominantly the most marginalized people in our community black people brown people disabled people um and that a lot of harm was happening within that pathway to again slow down and really think about is this actually increasing the power of the system or not is this actually creating a decoupled support that people don't have to engage with policing if it's not for the police can we decouple any of these things from the police and adding more stuff to the police is is a very different strategy and just to be thoughtful about that as those proposals are coming down in your own communities um are there ways for people to engage totally voluntarily in supports that might create safety that was a lot of our recommendations are fund totally voluntary community led supports that's where people are finding safety in our community black people are finding safety at the root social justice center and susu community farm more than they are at the retreat or the police thank you that was that was really helpful and uh can we just get a clarification when you talk about training and training budget we are you talking municipal or you're talking state training yeah great question um i don't know because i don't know the source of all of the trainings that folks are being offered i was provided a list of the trainings that again really showed up in the data as like a check check this person went to this training this is the title of the training um so i'm not i'm not sure where the the trainings are being sourced from um i think it's a mix i think there's a mix of municipal well there's a mix of definitely like statewide and and more national and some municipal trainings one of the recommendations that we made um to sort of shift the energy a little bit from these trainings to building community relationships with organizations that serve BIPOC folks uh psychiatric and labeled and met people um you know people who use drugs right like that that's some of that energy and time can actually go towards building coalition building within which is a tricky tricky thing for the police to do right so that has to be we provided a little bit of thought around this but in terms of like you know recognizing that police there's a lot of people like taisha said who the police will never be safe um or feel safe to contact the police or to collaborate with the police right um and so we also need to see some you know acknowledgement of that but i think i offer that to you all at the state level because i think the state is probably as liable to make these mistakes well you know as any municipality is to sort of throw di training at a problem uh throw money at you know training money training budget money at this problem and i think that a deeper analysis of each department's readiness and how do you get police officers ready to do anti-racism work like let's have that conversation um it's a cultural shift it's a huge cultural shift that we're not going to be able to get in an eight-hour training um sorry to interrupt um i just am trying to be mindful of the clock as as low as i am to do this that because this is really such a valuable i mean really just so grateful for you all being here and sharing what you've learned it's really eye-opening and it's a lot of food for thought like a lot so um i also wish feel a linton and which we are too good luck with the subcommittees work in trying to figure out like how do we how do we share all of this information out and what does our path want to do with all of it next but um i don't want i also don't want to just completely interrupt it just really we have two other subcommittees we need to get to two so maybe we can take chief stevens questions and then if there's any last thoughts from our guests um before we'll turn to the other subcommittees it's more of a statement than a question almost almost no law enforcement ever asked for any cultural competency from the indigenous community i i can tell you i've i've done a lot of cultural competency in the prisons because they want to deal with cultural practices once someone is incarcerated but i just wanted to mention that obviously we don't have the same profiling as black and brown people do but it's no less an issue when it comes to poverty and the people taking your kids and doing all kinds of other things that i've had to be involved with i just want to say that most of the time we're often overlooked on the training by park all kinds of things never trickle down to the indigenous people and i just don't want us to lose sight that we are often marginalized within the same community of of of that work so i just wanted to at least state that and hopefully that that changes as well thank you thank you for for reminding us of that too that's one reason we really appreciate you coming to these meetings too um elizabeth did you want to add something it was just going to offer um i'm part of the jj subcommittee which is i believe next on the agenda and i just want to say that you know i'm so thankful for our guests here today so i want to say you know we are happy to be moved to the next the next month if that's appropriate i think i want to honor all of the work and the time and the questions that are here so i'm just speaking on behalf of of our subcommittee then that's great i appreciate that we would we would probably need to bump somebody anyway at this point we would at least have to bump the conversation about what is our homework i know everyone's gonna be sad about that um okay so maybe that can we'll take you up on that elizabeth and tyler will move you to the october meeting um that's i think that's a welcome offer thank you jeffrey and but i still do want to get to the second look folks too so go ahead jeffrey though um i have perhaps uh unique and bizarre reasons for being on this board uh panel i was the first black policeman in vermont and i was a trooper and i think the strongest area to have impact over the long term is to put appropriate people on the hiring panels and you can't train a bad horse and it's kind of that simple to me it's come down to that i don't know if the chief would agree but um i've never seen any his people on a hiring board and when they put me on a hiring board they quickly slid me off um that's a whole mother movie i'd be happy to speak to anybody about what the inside looks like there were a lot of years where i was the only black police officer in vermont and i got jacked up and stopped all the time because that's what the movie is only i had resources i had sufficient resources to have an attitude and not get shot too which didn't hurt that sounds like an exaggeration but trust me it's not thank you for sharing that jeffrey do our guests want to wrap it up with any last comments thoughts i'm glad you all addressed the accountability issue that was on the top of my mind when tayisha was speaking i just want to say one thing before i leave um first thank you for inviting me to to this i uh i appreciate it talking about it um i haven't done it in over a year so thank you for that um the thing that i wanted to talk about was just safety and and keep in mind that word safety and and what that means and i think you know if you look across the whole the country and you can see what a safe neighborhood is versus what people have deemed a not so safe neighborhood and it's all it all boils down to social determinants of health and if we can focus um as like legislators leaders etc on increasing the social determinants of health for black brown lgbt qia folks indigenous folks um honoring treaties of indigenous folks we can like focus on those social determinants of health then your neighborhoods will start to look very differently then you won't be able to tell a bad neighborhood from a good neighborhood or a white neighborhood from a black neighborhood or you know an indigenous reservation for a non you won't be able to tell because you have healthy human beings inside of that what we are talking about is a system that has is so complex that has tied up legislation into ensuring that black and brown people will never be healthy people ensuring that our demise and and we have continued to survive so as we are continuing to survive we're not going to kill us off we tried to do that with the indigenous folks didn't work since we can't be killed off why not focus our energies on making sure that everyone is a healthy individual um and the last thing that i want to say is you know i would really love for this country to move away from policing um i think that you know because of his origins uh police officers are still out here catching slaves and and and it's not okay and so we have to abolish that system as we know it and if we want some kind of public safety apparatus we need to rebuild it um without having um what the the first black police officer that gentleman just spoke um saying that he was a police officer and he was targeted himself but he had resources now everybody has those resources so we're out here still causing harm to a lot of people that we always caused harm to so why don't we abolish that system of harm and build something different because it's clearly not working and and so those are those are the things social terms of help build everybody up let's let's find a new way to to um protect people and the people and i'm not saying that we're never going to have any criminals or people who do harm to other people or you know people who are very violent people but those people are also not throw away people and they also need some kind of help and and we have to start thinking about it in that way instead of locking people away because when they come out they're still that same person that they were when they went in so we need to figure figure that out we can't just throw people in in cages and throw away to keep that's all i have um thank you for letting me speak and give me the the floor to do so appreciate it absolutely thank you so much for being here thank you shea and thank you and for all the work you've done too um witchy i mean um yeah i want to share that we are um you know not working on this full time or for money anymore but are somewhat reachable you know capacity allowing and that i think uh the the report that we're talking about is really big but there are some um shorter ways to access that kind of info if you're looking for like an in route we can't use the chat but one of them is the implementation table that the town put forth that's each recommendation does it happen at the town level or the state level and what's the commitment it's old but it's something if you're just trying to get into like the nitty gritty and there's also like key findings and recommendations instead of the whole deep dive the deep dive does include a lot of really sad valuable stories um and good ones too and visions um but uh you know uh i know it's a lot to think about a reimagining as taisha is talking about completely reimagining how especially white people are thinking about what safety means uh and it's really really important work that we can do together we can break stuff down and make changes in our communities that are not just kind of like putting more money into things that are not working so really really grateful for y'all and your labor and i hope that you can take a look at some of what taisha has done in you know and what what we've done and um keep it moving thank you witchy and shella thanks for making this happen too do you have any other thoughts i just want to thank taisha um am and shea for coming on here and continuing to do the work even though y'all ain't getting paid and doing the work in the first place and for just being real i really appreciate y'all thank you so much yeah just wanting to to add gratitude uh not just for everything that got named but also for the amount of emotional work it takes to stand up not just in a committee full of uh people with authority but also every day in this kind of process and every day in the every day that passes is just more and more emotional work of having to keep ourselves together so we can help keep our communities together so just really appreciating that unnamed labor thank you thank you especially your labor taisha i know what you know i know the i know the vt digger level at least of what's been going on up there yeah big props and love thank you i appreciate that thank you so much thank you everybody have much gratitude thank you everyone so much thank you thank you all right thank you jeffrey i see your hand is still up but i didn't know if it was if you had another thought you want to share if it's just from before ignorance on how to bring down my hand okay and it probably has nothing to do with my total accuracy in in the way i act um just ignore me like everyone else does okay i would never want to do okay then i think we can hand it over to rebecca rebecca you don't have a mind do you want to report out this evening or do you want to report out um in october you know erin let me let me just take because this is a lot it's a lot to think about i almost feel like it's it's what i want us to sit on this but i think i want to share just five five minutes so people can hand hold in there and hang in there and then ask it on to put this on the agenda for october because there's a lot to talk about um sounds good thank you and i agree we've all just heard a lot and there's a lot to think about so i appreciate it yeah i know it's an approach to move forward a little bit but yeah we'll come back to this in october as well all right so five minutes um so so changing our approach uh reminding this panel of why second look we wanted to think about recommendations that we could have that address racial disparities for people who are already identified by the police already convicted and sentenced right already subjected to the juvenile and criminal court systems and so um second look of course is um a generalized uh idea of legislation that's been passed in various uh states and we have a pending bill i think it's s155 that was introduced last session and we heard alex bailey earlier this year come in from sentencing project to share with us the key points of that bill at the heart of it it is about creating an opportunity to review what is otherwise happening here in vermont which is perpetual and unreviewable sentences and when i say unreviewable there is actually one point of review allowed in the vermont law currently and that's 90 days after a conviction and sentence becomes final 90 days so if you've sentenced to 10 years life life without parole there is no statutory scheme in this state that allows for a relook unlike other jurisdictions so this is the concept of second look do we want it here our dap decided early on yes we're interested so what the second look committee's been looking at is been dropping in on various other states legislation in this regard we have this wonderful law clerk from brooklyn law type up for us this beautiful excel spreadsheet to compare what are the parameters who becomes eligible what are the target groups involved uh you know in no instance are people automatically meeting parameters and out right in no instance it's about setting up a procedure to review people and what they've been doing on the inside after serving a certain amount of time so we've been looking at that consistent and parallel with this effort of education education of subcommittee members we also are taking up our our depth mandate of educating community-wide on this issue and jess brown who's here you know panel member and really a critical co-leader on the subcommittee on this front we are we talked before before this panel about creating our working with vls the law school vlgs sorry to who's who's willing to host a conference uh related to second look uh and uh consistent with their regular sort of events the school uh in terms of conference planning so this year november third there is there are plans afoot to hold a second look conference uh and we are um in regular efforts uh meeting to get that conference together um and jess you can share if you'd like to jump in here where that's at but there are two exciting sort of pieces going on complementary to each other all of which next month i'll come back and share sort of more specifics um we're hoping to get some some speakers on national national experts on various issues as well as people who can drop down on vermont specifically um but all towards the end of this report that a ton reminds us is is is is quickly approaching as to what do we want to what do we want to do and say as to our adapts recommendations as to second look um and so i'll stop there jess do you want to jump in um i won't add too much to what rebecca has said um because we're still hammering out the details but it will be november third in south varelton at vermont lawn graduate school um and oh actually so and we don't necessarily need to take a poll now but like i want to put this question out to this group and people you know my email is on all of the all of etan etan's emails um so anyone can reach out to me or rebecca to let us know but like this is going to be an in-person event we're going to be bringing in speakers from mostly the around the east east coast um but we really you know and we really want butts in seats um and we're hoping to attract um stakeholders um practitioners legal practitioners legislators representative arson i hope you'll be there mark your calendar um uh judges etc um so judge morrisey please start telling your colleagues um to mark their calendars um with that said we also want to make it as accessible as possible and we are weighing different ideas about um i mean it will definitely be recorded the question is will some will some part of it maybe keynote speaker or the entirety be live streamed and so um rebecca and i thought this would be a good group to sort of uh get some feedback from on that so like i said um in consideration of time right now please feel free to reach out to me and we'll revisit this in october but please feel free to reach out to me um if you would like to let me know your thoughts on that thanks that's great thank you second look subcommittee and thank you for um providing some updates but also just being able to do it in such a short time frame um so next month we will have the concrete discussion about forming the upcoming report which is that's nice i mean i think that kind of gives us the opportunity to um think about everything we've heard tonight to look forward to dcf's report as well to hear more from second look but also be thinking in the interim about what we think we would want to see in our report um so we can have that concrete discussion at the october meeting um for me i will be having a conversation with a ton about um this meeting but also in general you know it occurs to me i feel like we don't have a really great way of sharing everything that we've heard about in any kind of um i don't know efficient or effective way like we've heard about all kinds of um celebrations and fundraising opportunities we've heard about reports we've heard about a conference coming up um and then where does it go so i would if anyone has any thoughts about that and how we can share these things in a way that works for everybody please let me know and i and i'll have a conversation with aton too but um we just always learn such incredible information and there's always so much cool stuff going on and then i feel like it just kind of how do we keep track of it all and share it all in a way that is accessible to everyone i would love some advice there um with that is there any new business before we close okay oh chief steven i just wanted to ask a quick question um with the second look and all the other work that's been done i know people say when you've done your time you know you've done the crime you've done your time you should be fine but we all know that those convictions follow you throughout your lifetime has anybody ever thought about coming up with a processor procedure that after a certain length of the time after you've been convicted you might be able to get some of that either um expunged or um not open to like records checks or something that gives people chances because like you know the people when they've been convicted they lose jobs they can be hired you know and even though they've done their time they they're still that crime is still following them and it still keeps them suppressed so i was just wondering if that's part of the consideration someday of of also having if they've they've done well and haven't reoffended that they might be able to have some of that um removed from the record so it doesn't follow them forever i was just curious we do in vermont have um expungement and sealing laws that allow for record clearance um but it's not all of the it's not the whole list of offenses in our criminal code it's very few felonies for one thing and then there are a lot of parameters around what can be cleared um when and then who could have access to any records that aren't entirely destroyed or expunged it's always an ongoing effort to update those laws and to try to expand record clearance but um i agree with you that's a really um important factor to helping people be able to move on past past mistakes and not have those mistakes follow them around for the rest of their lives um sorry that was mostly around drug convictions though wasn't it there's um almost all misdemeanors can be cleared from your record at some point if you meet other requirements and then write for the felonies that is primarily drug possession erin can i just add that um chief some of that some of those expungements are supposed to be automatic um but i just also want to put out there that um part of the center for justice reform is a clinic and we are always working to sort of grow the services we provide to people in the community and one of the ways we're specifically trying to do that um in our in a new iteration of this clinic is um by providing expungement services for people so we're always looking to um develop partnerships with different organizations or different groups that you know are engaged with uh populations of people who might uh have criminal records be trying to get back into the workforce etc um and who don't understand if they're eligible to have certain convictions expunged and um we uh like i said are looking to build partnerships um so that we can provide those services or access to those services for people so again jbrown at vermontlaw.edu anyone can reach out to me to talk about any of this thanks i think shila has her hand up so i'm going to pass to shila well thanks jessica oh sorry i was trying to call on you but i was muted thank you um i just wanted to also say that the root social justice center has been providing expungement clinics specifically in infinity space for bi-pop people and we are um just ended a four month series and we're going to be starting that backup as well so if there's anybody in the bradabur era of course it's free you meet with an attorney it can be confidential you can set up an appointment and again it's for um people who identify as bi-pop and we are partnering currently with vermont legal aid on that um i will say that um many some of the da's i have um worked with our da here which is tracy shiver um and participated in expungement clinics here so it has been done on the da's level and i would really encourage you chief stevens if in your area i don't know what exists or how that even works but um being able to maybe provide some type of clinic and information up there either through your organizations or through community other community organizations up there the attorney general's office also has expungement clinics throughout the state um every few months our next one will be in washington county at the end of october so look for information about that but i'm also happy to talk to any community member or community advocate or anyone who has questions about expungement and sealing or setting up expungement clinic opportunities in your community happy to help in any way i can with those it's really gratifying fun work too anything else wow 758 amazing okay we'll all have a lot of homework after october's meeting but i'm going to make aton be the the person giving us all homework i don't have to do it um really nice to see all of you thank you again to everybody who brought all of that information and incredible um people doing incredible work in our communities it was yet another awesome rdat meeting much gratitude say that with enthusiasm erin um i was i was just realizing i was saying all of that whatever i just said that i we probably have to have like a motion to adjourn right i was gonna say you need a motion i'll make a motion we have to get official that's why my voice was dropping i was like oh no i'm not doing the the official part very well okay jessica brad with a motion i make a motion to adjourn thank you second okay anyone objecting to that all in favor hi hi thank you for your time