 Bryn, this is Senate judiciary meeting on September 10th, 2020. We're meeting today about house changes to S119, which continue to occur. Schedules today are Commissioner Shirling, Colonel Birmingham of the Department of Public Safety, and Julio Thompson of the Attorney General's Civil Rights Division, as well as someone else. Who did I miss? Alice, what's the matter? I'm just wondering what draft version we're looking at that they're going to speak to. So it's 2.4 is the draft that's posted on your committee web page, and that is the latest draft that the House Judiciary Committee is working from as well. OK, thank you. Thank you. That's actually a good question, Alice. And I know and so I'm going to try to get to our web page on a different device and try to look at that. So it's Thursday, September 10th, draft 2.4, or yeah, 2.4. And so we're asking Commissioner Shirling, Colonel Birmingham to begin with problems you see with the bill, and also a better understanding of how the governor's executive order that goes into effect, I guess, this week. How that impacts S-124 and S-119, if at all. OK. You plan to talk about something different? Just I wasn't prepared to talk about how it impacts 124. I was only on prepared for 119. We're a little overwhelmed over the last couple of days with the number of bills and testimony. We should only stick to 119 then. And I've got to announce it's raining in Bennington. I've got to move inside. So if you would continue on, I'll try to do my best to move inside without losing our Zoom meeting. Alice? Senator White. So Commissioner, we'll have you since 124 came out of GovOps. We'll ask you to talk about that next week. Great. That will give me some time to read the most recent version. Thank you. OK. OK, I guess we're all set to go ahead then. Great. Thank you for the record. Michael Sherling, Commissioner of Public Safety. There is quite a bit to cover on this topic. But I'm going to try to keep it at a satellite level. And I'm not actually going to be talking about version 2.4. We've only had it in our hands for a few hours. The most important thing I think I have to say is that the call here is for accountability, I think, based on the House testimony and conversations with legislators there. We are absolutely in support of modernization, progress, accountability. By way of example, in January, we put forth a modernization strategy that is in part in response to various legislation that's been put forth over the years. In June, we accelerated our fair and impartial policing strategies in response to the current climate. But that fair and impartial policing and ethical policing work has been underway for more than a decade. And significant progress has been made. We are still there is still much additional work to be done both in state government and throughout the public safety framework statewide. The second most important thing I think I have to say is to walk the committee through is that any notion that folks have that the existing landscape of legal guidance on the way use of force is supposed to occur, whether that's lethal force only or all use of force is simply not accurate. There is no place in constitutional law, criminal law, that is more well-formed than this area of the law. The use of force on a person by the government is a seizure of that person pursuant to the Fourth Amendment. And the courts have laid down over the last 50 years a robust array of case law that very specifically guides the way that is supposed to happen. And we have developed robust training and policy that flows from the guidance that the courts have handed down over the years. And that guidance is constantly evolving as additional cases make their way through the system. It's being refined on an annual basis, sometimes on a monthly basis. But it has taken decades to get to a point where we have this level of refinement and depth to the guidance that exists. Creating a new statutory framework would in essence eradicate that foundation. We would have to start over again. It would create, I think, the antithesis of what we are shooting for, which is to enhance the predictability of good results, enhance accountability, enhance our training, and ultimately get to more reproducible good results. And it would do that because it would take years, if not decades, to create a new array of case law to interpret the language that's passed in any statute. It's just the way the system works. There will be litigation. I would offer that some of that litigation will be, I testified to this in one other committee and apologies to some of the plaintiff's bar in the tort system. It will be a boon to that bar. I have no doubt that a cross-section of the litigation faced in any realm, including government, is organized extortion and ambiguity created by a new statute. Because we won't know what it means. We'll create litigation simply to try to get money because the risk of not knowing how the outcome is going to play will create a really unstable foundation. That same risk and the instability and the inability to fully interpret will also create an instability in training. We will, frankly, we will not know exactly how to train. We will make the best effort if legislation is passed around use of force, but it will not be accurate. There will be no way to know exactly what a word like necessity means until there is a robust set of case law behind that, in particular, in Vermont and in our federal circuit if it makes it to federal court and not in state court. We've heard testimony that the word necessity has been vetted in other places. We're not able to find where I'm just using that as one example, not focusing on that word, but because there's been testimony about it, we're not able to find where that has occurred, where it would be on point here in Vermont. So not to over-focus on a single word, but that's an example as a note so I don't spend the entire day with you. Also of note, we employ over 1,200 police officers in Vermont. The overwhelming majority of them want to do things correctly. They want to use the best current standard. And we need to set them up in a way that they can be successful in doing that. We need to set them up for constant progress for iterative change. And again, I don't believe the statutory framework for this kind of a thing is the right way to do that. And the reason I say that is, A, we've already mentioned the difficulty in trying to establish training when we don't actually know what things mean for some time. B, a statutory framework is relatively static. It does not allow for iterative change and improvement as experience is gained. We are constantly evolving our policy, including our use of force policy, sometimes on a monthly basis. As we gain experience with, in the state police, the roughly 115,000 events that are responded to every year. Of note, I think it's important to put use of force in context there. In 2019, the last year of full statistics, out of over 115,000 events, force was used 183 times. 183 out of over 115,000, which means the number of contacts was more than a quarter of a million. So it gives you some sense. Can you clarify for me, when you say force, is this definitely force or any form of force? That's a great question, Senator. Thank you. That's any form of force. So anything beyond compliant handcuffing. If we hold someone's arm in an arm bar, if they have to be tackled, if a taser is used, if pepper spray is used, if any kind of a compliant technique, grappling technique, or a punch, or anything like that is used, that's counted in those 183. Thank you. So we want, those 183 events are among the most critical and the things that we want people to have clarity on exactly how they are supposed to play out. So setting up our employees and our police officers for success is critical in those instances. And having clarity is the best way to do that, to ensure that the same outcomes. I'll note that the California standard that we've heard much about is actually that was adopted in response to a prior statutory standard that was found to be unconstitutional. So California was reacting to a prior statutory framework that they had that was antiquated and updated theirs because they had to. So I can clearly envision instances where the statutory framework, we have to come back to you and say this no longer fits with the Fourth Amendment constitutional standard. It doesn't fit with best practice. There are a variety of potential challenges in memorializing things in that manner. The elephant in the room here is that we're well aware of the amount of social activism around this both in Vermont and nationally and give great deference to that. We are very much on board, as I said in the beginning, with modernizing. The challenge is to translate that activism and the calls for change and the calls for modernization that we support into pragmatic public policy. And we believe the best way to do that is to memorialize a best practice policy statewide, not a model that people can pick and choose from, but memorialize a mandatory statewide policy that meets the accreditation standard similar to the current state police policy, that meets the best practice, that meets our overall community standards, and to make the alterations to the language there because we can specifically train to that standard. We will know based on the definition that's embedded in that policy exactly what it means. It will not be subject to years of ongoing litigation to try to figure out exactly what it means in the statutory construct. How to create accountability to hold people to that standard is the second piece of the puzzle. So a piece of what's in the governor's executive order, and I know there are conversations going on legislatively around this topic as well, we are going to make progress on statewide investigation of internal affairs investigations, and we're going to develop constructs for communities to use for community oversight. So that work is being done in parallel. How do you ensure that departments adopt and maintain that current best practice policy? You've taken a first step there in 2019 that was passed earlier in the session, where adoption of policy is tied to grants that flow from the state. I would suggest taking it one step further. Adopt this best practice policy, or not only can you not get grants, but you can't access training through the Criminal Justice Training Council, and you could go a step further than that and say you can't access the information technology supports from the state that are run by the Department of Public Safety, which essentially would neuter someone's ability to function as a law enforcement agency. You wouldn't be able to function without those things. So in the same way that the federal government imposes highway standards that we have to follow and then money flows from that, that same construct could be used to ensure that all of our police agencies are adopting best practice, not only in use of force and fair and impartial policing, but in any other critical area that the legislature thinks is appropriate. And we've had for decades, one of the things that has hampered consistency in progress is the value we place on local control. And I don't mean to be dismissive of that. Local control is an essential piece of Vermont's ethos, but on certain topics, having a variety of way of doing things is not appropriate. And this is one of those areas where having malleability is just not the right way to go. So it's not an attack on local control. It's an observation that doing things in a creative way from municipality to municipality 251 times sometimes doesn't make sense. And I think this is one of those instances. I'm just going through a few more notes. I think I'll abbreviate my testimony at this point. Well, one other thing I think it's imperative to mention, I've been reading and when I have an opportunity of listening to some of the testimony that's occurred on the House side, and I am concerned that while the folks testifying may not be trying to mislead the General Assembly that some of the things that have been said are inaccurate, including some legal advice that the House got where a question was asked about whether this new standard would create confusion, would be difficult for officers to interpret in the field. And part of that answer was that was, well, the answer was no, that the new standard would be something the courts would have to interpret would be interpreting. It wasn't something the officers have to worry about. And I'm paraphrasing that is entirely inaccurate. You're talking about a statutory standard if we were to adopt it, that the officers absolutely have to have a full understanding of, be trained to and have to execute with granularity. So I rarely, actually I can say clearly I've been involved in legislative testimony for a couple of decades. I've never seen anything scare me. This is scaring me that we're, it just doesn't seem like we've got accurate information flowing with the scope and depth necessary to deal with a topic that literally is life and death. So I would be remiss if I did not bring that up. I've got a number of questions. Then Senator White, and I'm sure the committee knows it was welcome, Mr. Colonel, if you'd like to answer any of these feel free to scream at us. My first question I guess is the house, the Senate passed a use of deadly force bill modeled on California, and was specific to the use of deadly force. And then the house in their bill seek to expand that to all force. Are you as concerned with the Senate version as you are with the house first? Or are you concerned with both? I'm concerned with the construct of a statutory overlay to this because it is inflexible and it doesn't allow for an iterative evolution, which is critical on this topic. And equally concerned that it will do the opposite of what we're trying to achieve, which is clarity and consistency and accountability. It will create ambiguity, confusion and not lead to consistent outcomes because we literally will not know how to interpret it for years. Okay. Second question. I did hear yesterday from a person whom I have a great deal of respect for used to be a prosecutor is no longer a prosecutor. He says that, and I quote, mental health cases and how to treat them outside the criminal justice system, but excuse me, we have an absolute mess with the lack of training for law enforcement and on how to deal with the mentally ill. General population of so many more people with major mental illnesses today, but cops still apply the same ladder of escalation of force to this population. Most people with a mental health issue are not responsive to verbal commands, but if a cop gives a command that is not obeyed, they go up the ladder of force and will use non-lethal force like at the time or a case as often as not this population will resist the force and the cops will think about lethal force. So his, he also says that the Academy, Preacher's Office for Safety Every Day, first thing, last thing, and the crime statistics on black populations is a formula for abuse. I don't know if you would care to comment on that, but in his view, it starts with the police academy. You've obviously identified better ways to deal with those who are mentally ill and come in contact with the officer by embedding within your state police officers, but would you care to contact on the training? Absolutely, and there's a lot embedded in that email or question. So let me go in reverse order. Of the 183 uses of force in 2019, 10 were persons of color of 223 in 2018, six were persons of color. So that was sort of a side fragment. 15 or 20% in an average year is an underlying mental health issue where force is used, but again, overwhelmingly de-escalation is successful. Again, 115,000 events in 2019, 183 had a year of use of force, so they're not super common, but they're incredibly impactful when they happen. That's not to diminish the 183 that occurred in the state police. There is quite a bit of training in de-escalation and recognizing and responding to mental illness, but I would submit what I have submitted to this body for the last 15 years in various testimony. The level of training that someone has is irrelevant at a certain point, at a point where someone is in such a deep and protracted crisis that they're wielding a machete, a knife, a gun, they're driving a car at someone, they're throwing chairs at people, they are posing a risk of harm to someone else. It does not matter whether that officer is a medical doctor of psychiatry, has a graduate degree in psychology, they're not going to be able to de-escalate that person in the moment. And that's where these responses and uses of force are the unfortunate, very ugly backend to those tragic escalations and decompensations. So the author of that has hit the nail on the head on something we have been, and I was just in the Senate healthcare a moment ago, we've been begging for for the better part of two decades, more mental health response, more investment in the mental health system. We have a, I testified to, I can't remember which committee a couple of weeks ago, one of the greatest failures of public policy in my opinion on a national scale, not specific to Vermont, is the failed promise of de-institutionalization. De-institutionalization was the right thing to do. It just didn't have a, the back end promise of field supports and investment in communities never happened. And now we're bearing the brunt of that in 911 calls, emergency room visits in the back of ambulances and in our correctional facilities. We've got to invest more in those things. And we have proposed doing exactly that, a $525,000 expanded investment in mental health outreach. And I just told the Senate committee this as well, I am scratching my head at why we are getting pushback on expanding programs that have been wildly successful, statistically, anecdotally, and in all the feedback we've gotten, they have been wildly successful for two decades, starting in Bellows Falls and then moving to an outreach worker in Burlington. And now two outreach teams in Chittenden County, two embedded workers in Barracks, the original social worker in Bellows Falls and many others. I'm at a loss as to why we're being, our efforts to modernize are being accelerated by advocacy. And at the same time, we're being criticized for putting forth these expansion of modernization initiatives that have been shown to be nothing but successful. I just want to comment on that from my own, just from my own, in my view, if anything, the 500,000 is too small and we should be doing double or triple that so that we have, so that we are working in conjunction and in the long run will save us money and it'll save us money because instead of locking somebody up who's seriously mentally ill, we will hopefully find solutions within the community framework. And I read that you are with the pushback to move that money into the department of mental health rather than with the department of public safety. So I don't know how that, I just don't understand that. And I am strongly in favor of the funding that you have proposed that I wish I could go forward. This is a perfect segue, Senator, to taking us back to the satellite view of how to address the accountability, the consistency in outcomes that we're looking for, not only on use of force with the policy construct that we're suggesting is the best way to go, but in our 10 point plan and in many of the things the governor embedded in his executive order around best practice in hiring, best practice in promoting, so we have the right supervisors, best practice in hiring chief executives in law enforcement, taking a wholesale look at modernizing the way we train. Better job of doing transparent investigations, figuring out ways to ensure the balance between transparency in those investigations and what's publicly facing with employee privacy, and then creating community accountability models. It has been observed, of course, that elected bodies and select boards, mayors, et cetera, are that accountability at the moment, but adding some construct to that is also where we're going. So, and then modernizing the way we deploy services using technology, using more mental health outreach workers, more specialized services, that is where we've been headed for years. We're accelerating those initiatives now at this moment in time, and all of that will create more accountability, better outcomes. It's not one thing, it's not one law, it's not one policy, it's not one approach. It is a suite of things, and we're well positioned in Vermont, both based on the history of the work that's been done by the General Assembly, by the Department of Public Safety, by local agencies, and now really bolstered by the advocacy that is happening now, but I'll go back to a point I made earlier. Translating that advocacy into pragmatic public policy is the difficult pivot. We totally understand that we're, and that's where we're at now, is trying to make that pivot to make this all work. Senator White and then Senator Baruz. So just a couple of comments here. A lot of what you were just talking about around discipline and training and community review and stuff is actually in 124. And I just would make the, also in 124, we did expand the, that the, if an entity does not comply with the best practices, that they don't have access to the training, to the academy. And I would suggest that maybe you testify to House GovOps because it's in there now and ask them to also put in the information, access to the information systems, but it is in there, it is in 124 that they would not have access to training facilities. Great, thank you, Senator. Any other questions from Senator White? Not right now, thank you. Senator Baruz, thank you for your patience. Sure, thank you, Commissioner. In an odd way, your testimony reminds me of the testimony that we took when we were doing medical monitoring and strict liability. And the reason for the similarity is that the people that were going to be regulated by the language we were talking about desperately didn't want that language to go into effect. And so there was a whole host of hyperbolic assertions about what would happen if we passed it. And they made very similar arguments about trial lawyers. And so we were constantly being frightened with the prospect of trial lawyers run amok. And I'm struck, you know, when you visited the other day and today, you continually use the phrase organized extortion, which is it's a very, very serious charge. It's not only charging one lawyer with extortion, but that there's a collective desire to use a law like this to enrich the people at the bar. And it's the sort of charge that gets deployed when a company in particular really, really doesn't wanna be regulated. And I think honestly, there's no organization in the state of Vermont that finds it in a sense more offensive to be regulated by statute than the police. And so what we did in 219 was to create an actual crime that an officer could be guilty of for using a prohibited restraint. Now we're seeking a statutory overlay, as you call it. But your testimony boils down to if the legislature acts in this instance, we're going to destroy a well-established legal framework, we're gonna unleash an army of lawyers and the world is basically gonna go to pop. And I guess what I would say is for someone like myself who believes that the evidence is out there and strong that police departments nationwide are in need of themselves regulation and statutory control, your comments strike me as a kind of full-throated defense of the status quo, even though you use the word modernization a lot. So I don't think it's a crazy idea to have a statute that says force, particularly deadly force, should be proportional. And I don't think that would prevent in any way an iterative process at the local level or at the department level, because all of those use of force policies in those departments, whether we pass this or not, they're gonna continue to operate in an iterative fashion and try to update periodically according to what they know. So if we pass this, it won't stop them from iterating new policies and better policies. There's a lot in that statement, Senator. I don't agree with your characterization of my testimony as focused on A, the status quo, B on litigation being the core, that's an ancillary component of this outcomes are the primary component and consistency, predictability, ability to train are all the most important things. I make no apologies for the organized extortion comment. If I'd be happy to walk you through some of the events in government where the calculus is, can we create enough ambiguity in the outcome that we get lawyer's fees that are five times what the plaintiff is actually going to is gonna get? So I am an advocate for tort reform in the United States and it's been written about many times how broken that system is. So giving folks another opportunity to use that system against taxpayers is something I will not be apologetic for. Again though, that is ancillary. Take that off the table if you'd like, this is about outcomes. And how can we improve systems to ensure that we get the outcomes we're looking for and a statutory framework will create ambiguity, not consistency. The bottom line is it'll take years to interpret. So that's just a fact, that is the way this works. And I also would take issue with the characterization that we don't want to be regulated. We're heavily regulated. Remember, we have three branches of government. We are regulated by those who appoint us. We are regulated by a variety of statutory frameworks already and we are heavily regulated by the courts. There are treatises on search and seizure that regulate exactly the nuances about how we operate. And that's just in one area of one section of the law. That's just search and seizure within criminal law. I just, I can't overstate that. The premise that there is a lack of oversight here is just wrong. There's no other way to describe it. It is the most robust area. Actually, commissioner, I didn't say there was a lack of oversight. I said that police departments would fight additional oversight and to go to my basic point, we're seeing, and this is not just nationwide, not just George Floyd, not just other incidents nationwide in Burlington, there are right now somewhere north of 40 people permanently encamped in Battery Park because officers like Bellavance are still on the force after committing crimes that you can look at on the video and you can see that that person should have been jailed, not just fired, but should have been prosecuted. Now, why don't individuals in Vermont and other states get prosecuted or if they do, why aren't they successfully prosecuted? It's because the robust system that you're defending isn't working. And so that's why the legislature has been called upon to step in. And I understand from your institutional perspective, it seems unwise and we should allow you to develop best practices and then have some mild sticks in terms of finance to enforce them. But I have to say the one thing I think the house has right and that's built on our bill is that a statutory overlay at this point, as you call it, I believe is necessary. I don't think we're gonna agree here, Senator. And again, to me, this goes back to basic civics. We elect our prosecutors in Vermont. And if the community standard is that they, that the community wants certain action emphasized, there's an opportunity to emphasize it. And I can't get into a factual debate on a particular case. Neither of us is privy to all the facts of. So I just, that's one of the troubling things about the point in time we're at now is we are, myself included are collectively making judgments about events we see without all of the detail. Well, I will just say one more thing. If you watch the Rodney King video back in the 90s, you saw a man being completely taken apart by a group of officers with billy clubs. They said they were using their billy clubs in quote, the prescribed come along manner. And what they did was they put him in the hospital for a period of a couple of months. It was all caught on video. And then in court, what they argued was that you couldn't believe your lying eyes because things were happening outside the frame of the videotape that gave them reason to fear for their lives. And so they were justified. In the case of officer Bellavance, you see it from the time he leaves his car to the time he walks up and blindsides a person that he has yet to introduce himself to and knocks that person unconscious before they're aware of his presence, a person who's standing doing nothing. And that's not an absence of detail. Everybody has seen it. Everybody knows what happened and we want him gone and we can't get rid of him. And that's why we find ourselves in the position we're in today. Again, Senator, I defer the prosecutors on that. If that's what the evidence shows, then we have a different problem than the one that we're trying to solve here. I'd like to just come back to what I perceive as the problem and it's to some extent, agreement with Senator Baruth as to the problem. I don't know the details of the Bellavance case. I live in Bennington County. Of the 1,200 officers, it would be naive to think there aren't a few bad apples. There are in every profession and everywhere we go. The question is, how do we hold those officers accountable for that behavior? In too many cases, and this is not just Vermont, it's nationwide and I think that's what's frustrating. In too many cases, the officers aren't held accountable as horrible as the George Floyd case was. Those officers were fired immediately. They also were charged almost in terms of the court system immediately within a short term period of time. They would dealt with very quickly within that system. Here, it appears too many and in other states, you take the Buffalo case where that elderly man was pushed by officers, you can see it clearly. It seems to take for a long time to even deal with those actors. So for me, S119 represented an attempt to deal at least with that when it's the use of force and the word proportionality. That was the most important word to me in the whole thing. A $20 counterfeit bill ends in the death of the subject who was arrested. And I think that's where the community, our constituents are going after, right? I think there's general still respect for the, let's say 1,190 sworn police officers in Vermont are doing a great job. I agree with just about everything you said, Senator. We haven't talked about this yet. I've now been in a leadership role in the two largest police departments in Vermont. I have fired or constructively fired a number of people for misconduct. The goal in doing that is to do it before we get to a point where something like Rodney King or George Floyd or these large events happen. So again, it's about a suite of response that starts with hiring, goes to training, has good policy, has good supervision, has good executives in place, has community oversight. That's why one of the things we're looking to accelerate the adoption of statewide is, are these oversight models, the checks and balances that are necessary. So we're going in exactly the same direction. I would argue it is more important to retrain if it's a minor thing and improve conduct because we don't want to discard people. But if conduct is on a path where an early warning system has indicated that the employees just is not a good fit for policing in Vermont, we need to be able to get rid of them way ahead of some tragedy occurring. And that's what we're trying to fix. It goes to our criminal justice and public health construct. Prevention is first, prevent bad things from happening. There are lots of different ways to do that. So we're going in the same direction. I think there's just, there are enormous complexities and we're trying to address all of them simultaneously. Senator Benning has a question. So let me say first commissioner, you and I met when I was chair of the Human Rights Commission and we were dealing with a similar issue that we're talking about right now. One of the things you've said here this morning about organized extortion struck me as kind of odd because I've been in the business of being a trial lawyer for 37 years now. I'm a member of the Defender General's List Serve. I received the Vermont Bar Association magazine on a monthly basis and I have attended seminars frequently every year to talk about topics and how to bring change. I just want to make it very clear in defense of my own profession that there is no known element out there of attorneys that is salivating at the opportunity for some plaintiff to walk in the door and sue a police department. And as a matter of fact, one of my earlier cases was a young man who walked in my door that was a former altar boy in the Catholic church who had been abused. And this was long before this ever came to light in Vermont that there was a serious problem. And taking on a case like that in a small town especially is an incredibly difficult thing to do and it's not something that people jump at by any stretch of the imagination. And I just want to be clear that I am in listening to your testimony believing that you at least have this perception that there's an organized club out there and I'm not aware of any such club. You did make one comment that has me very much concerned. As I think we all agree there are bad apples in every profession. And you made the statement that the house committee was receiving incorrect legal advice. That very much concerns me. Now in the interim between my last Zoom conference this morning and this one I watched the first 37 minutes of what appears to be a two-hour conversation in the house on this very subject. And I was not all the way through the list of witnesses who were providing testimony. Are you telling me that there is an attorney and I'd like to know the specific attorney that was giving improper advice to the house because that does very much concern my profession and I view it as my responsibility ethically to get to the bottom of that conversation if you're making that allegation. I have, I've passed along the details of that and the specific point at which that testimony occurred to the chair of that committee, Senator. And on this recurring topic of the tort system, I should make a couple of clarifying comments. A, the organization I'm talking about is not attorneys, it's the system itself has flaws. B, I am guilty of not being precise and over generalizing. It's a hand, much like the problems we have in law enforcement, it's a tiny handful of people, not the overall profession. So thank you for the opportunity to clarify that and apologies for an over broad description. One of the things that the legal profession does constantly is evaluate what goes on within our system and where necessary we make changes. I think the reason we're all here this morning is because we recognize that there is a systemic problem that has continued in law enforcement community. I'm not trying to say that there's any specific group of law enforcement officers who are out there collectively trying to make problems. I am suggesting that there has been a reason to change the training and a reason to react to the outcomes that we've been seeing that brings legislators into the picture and that's why we're discussing this legislation. I was struck by the house testimony where one of the witnesses was providing testimony to suggest that there is a different way to treat someone in a mental crisis with force then there is treating someone who is a suspect in a crime with force. I'm struggling with that because I think the end result that the police officer is looking at is a direct threat. And I guess what I'm trying to say is there's a whole lot more to this conversation that leaves me feeling like S119 is just not yet ready for prime time. I don't want it abandoned. And clearly I was under the impression from hearing your testimony, you suggested that that should be abandoned but there's a whole lot more to this conversation getting to the bottom of how you deal at the end of the day with the threat to society that is trying to be curtailed as opposed to making decisions as a police officer through training, how do I handle this person versus that person? It's a very difficult task for anyone to be faced with. So I'm sympathetic on the one hand to your testimony and I think we need to continue the conversation but I don't wanna leave the public with the impression that we don't need to worry about the end result because the end result is problematic and we need to deal with it. I'll leave it at that. I agree, I appreciate you bringing up the difficulty and distinguishing when behavior becomes violent. We actually train police officers that there are a host of reasons that that can happen. It may be criminogenic. It may be mental health. It could be an imbalance of electrolytes in someone's system. It could be diabetic ketoacidosis. It could be a head injury that they've sustained that's caused an altered mental status, an acute head injury from a car accident that just occurred and that causes them to pick up a weapon and charge a police officer or someone else. So you're absolutely right. The difficulty is in that moment we're stuck having to respond to whatever the threat is and the genesis of that threat can be lots of different things. We've again spent decades trying to modernize the way that, I'll stop using the word modernize because I don't wanna offend Senator Baruth, improve the ways that we respond to things with new tools, with new techniques, with better training and there has been tremendous success. At the same time, the legal overlay has become more nuanced and detailed as well. I worked with people in the, when I was first hired in the late 80s who had been police officers in the 50s before there was a police academy. And when the deadly force standard was you could shoot a fleeing felon of any kind. All of those things have evolved over time. So a really long way of saying, it is complicated and there is constant improvement occurring and we're nowhere near perfect yet. I have to take care of a couple of things and then we'll get to Senator White, I believe has a question. But I think the place where we're at least in agreement on and I, is that police officers who need to be held accountable, just as any other profession should be held accountable whether it be lawyers, doctors, whoever needs to be held accountable. On a ministerial function, I think that's the right word. Peggy, I noticed on the agenda, we have the diversion budget and yesterday in appropriations, I think we took care of that problem and understood where the problem came from. So I don't think it's necessary to hear from them. If you could cancel the diversion people and they'll give us time to hear from Julio. Okay, I'll let them know. Okay, so we've had almost an hour with the commissioner either final questions and Colonel Birmingham, if you'd like to speak up as somebody who rose through the ranks and has been in this evolving position, we'll be happy to hear from you as well. Senator White, you had a question. Well, I was just going to say that a lot of the, that there are changes going on all the time and around just around the discipline and holding people accountable that up to this point, there were very limited reasons why a police officer could be decertified or yeah, decertified. That we've been working on that through the academy and the training council for a number of years and have made changes. And I hate to keep going back to S-124 but there are major changes in there around how discipline is applied and when you can decertify an officer and when you get to that bad apple. So I do hate to keep going back to there but it is in the process right now and there are a lot of points in there that have been brought up that are in 124. And so if we can get that passed we will be continuing to make progress. It deals with the training council and with the discipline and with transparency and around agreements, non-disclosure agreements. All of that is in there. I just wanted to point that out that we have been working on this. That's a great point Senator White. Senator Baruch made the point that there's this frustration with a particular department and an inability to fire officers and without just using that as the backdrop but not casting any judgments on that. If the statewide standard that the legislature wants to impose is you get one error on the... And I'm just making this up. I'm not sure this is the right thing but by way of example, you get one error on use of force and your second one is decertification. That is a mechanism that is predictable. It's easy to execute. It's another way of getting at these consistent outcomes and accountability that you're looking for. Again, I'm not prescribing that as exactly the way to do it but by way of example, using that mechanism is something that is available as well. Colonel, any comments? Thank you Senator. The commissioner's covered it very well so I don't want to take up the committee's time unnecessarily. I will just say that I agree. I can only speak for the state police. That's where I spent my career and where I've been the director for the last five years. We have a statutory construct for accountability in our internal affairs process that works incredibly well for us. Nobody wants to hold people more accountable than the good people that are in law enforcement. Of all the 99% of the people that are doing this work they do it tremendously well. They do it with good intentions and it hurts them when these things happen that are very public and very damaging. So police have evolved to a level where accountability is important. It's crucial to our function. So I don't want anybody to believe for one second that police do not want themselves to be held accountable to these standards because they certainly do. On the use of force issue though, which is a level, one of the biggest areas of accountability that exists in our profession, it's so important and I've seen it evolve over the 22 years I've been in law enforcement. It's so important that the flexibility exists to adapt to new standards. We are constantly evaluating new use of force techniques, new use of force technology standards, new best practice standards nationwide. We're Kalea certified in Vermont. So we are accredited. We have our policies reviewed every year. We have external use of force experts that we consult with. I would worry that if the use of force standards beyond deadly force, because that's a different conversation I think, are codified in statute, it will make it much more challenging for us to adapt to those as opposed to what the commissioner said as a model or a statewide use of force standard that can be altered by the criminal justice training council or can be changed, not relatively easy, but easy enough that it meets the standards that we need because I completely agree that we can't have a use of force standard in Bennington and a different one in Middlesex and a different one in Newport. Every Vermont is entitled to the same protections on use of force by law enforcement across the whole state. So on that regard, I have to emphasize that it's important that we have some flexibility in evolving on use of force because it's a never-changing part of how we evolve. So that's really my two cents. I support the commissioner in his testimony and the state police has been ahead of many of these issues for many years and no agency is perfect. We're doing our best, but this conversation, it did not start a month ago or a year ago for us. These are things that we've been working on for decades and so I'll leave it at that if there are any other questions. Thank you, Colonel. Any questions for the Colonel or for the final questions for the commissioner? Joe, you got the final say. I just wanted to make an observation, commissioner. You made a statement that error one is dealt with. I'm not sure your exact words, but error two is decertification. I think what we're trying to achieve here is the best outcome, which is there are no errors. And I don't wanna leave the impression that it's acceptable for somebody to make a mistake and then we come back. If it's a second mistake, we get rid of them. I think the objective here is to try to eliminate the systemic idea that force should be used. And it's a situation where force is not really necessary at all. And it's a fine line to walk, but I think that's the subject of this conversation where society in my humble opinion needs to be moving towards. I think you're absolutely right, senator. And as I mentioned, we testified earlier today on expansion of this mental health outreach program, which is just one piece of the puzzle in trying to ensure that force is not required in some cross-section of events and reducing from 183 to get to zero because it injures police officers as well. Just nothing good comes from a use of force and we're well aware of that. And if I may, when I was talking about accountability, I left out the piece where I was critical earlier and that is the tort system does hold us accountable and we get sued and we get sued rightfully when we make mistakes and we settle and lawyers present us with cases in a pre-litigation and say, look, you made this mistake and we think it should cost you some money and we say, yep, that was definitely a mistake and we concur. So not to dwell on, again, litigation and torts are a tiny fragment of this and I just want the committee to, I wanna be mindful not to overemphasize that and also for that limited emphasis that it cuts both ways, that it is a piece of the puzzle in holding government accountable as well. Again, I mute myself then I unmute. I have a couple of comments ended I need to make. One is that this committee passed a bill on the use of deadly force. It got expanded by the other body so we need to look at that and whether we would even agree with that expansion. Secondly, we're going to hear later next week, hopefully from folks from Seattle who have been dealing with some of these policies and other law enforcement groups through the Justice Center to better understand the ramifications. The committee has made no decisions on what to support, what not to support but the basic questions are gonna be asked are, would we support the expansion beyond what we passed in S119? Would we concur with the House? Would we not concur? What will we decide to do? So that's the real question for this committee. We don't have the bill anyone. I wanna say also that I have complete confidence in the legislative council staff that we have and I have complete confidence in there what they're doing. Frequently, we ask them questions and they're nice enough to answer them for us without calling us idiots. But I think, I just need to say that if there's any question of the quality, the Senate Judiciary Committee has been extremely fortunate to have three great attorneys working with us and I have full confidence in it. Thank you. Thanks, commissioner. I appreciate your time and we'll keep fighting the fight on the mental health workers. Thank you. And as I exit just a note where I started, we're very much with you on the need to make improvements and to continue to make progress on all of these things. So please don't interpret any of my testimony as trying to put a handbrake on progress. Appreciate that. Colonel, thank you for hanging in there. Some days before this pandemic's over, we hope to get to see your smiling face. I'll jump on the video next time. How's that sound? That sounds great, Colonel. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Well, we're all here and so we are live. So we'll pick up with Julio Thompson. Julio is kind enough to come back to talk to us about the latest version of the House S119. I want to be clear, we have basically two choices. One is to concur with further proposals of amendment. The second is to ask for a committee of conference by not concurring and actually there are three and that would be just to concur. I doubt, I don't see us doing that. Isn't there a fourth, Mr. Chair? What's that? Not acting on the bill. Well, that's true. Yes, just ignoring it. I mean, our discussions have included that possibility. Yep, I suppose we could. But one of the things I've heard repeatedly is that, yes, we should be acting, but we shouldn't be in a rush to act. We should get it done right. And I was watching the House testimony and the witness that I was listening to happened to be the same witness that was in institutions talking about exactly that. And I guess I'm a little leery given all of the conversation we've been having that we've A, seen the last of what the House is doing because I understand they're still working on it and B, even if we get the bill, this just doesn't sound like it's in prime time yet. I mean, I'm a little uncomfortable about trying to deal with it. I'm certainly not gonna ask the witness to determine whether it's in prime time or not, if the Attorney General's office, specifically the division on civil rights. I was concerned with the bill. I'll be upfront. I think work we did on use of deadly force could have been improved on by the House and I'm happy to look at that. I'm a little more concerned about broadening it to all uses of force, but that's just my personal. Julio, please provide us with any intel you'd like. Sure thing, good morning. Just for the record, I'm Julio Thompson, Assistant Attorney General and Director of the Attorney General's Civil Rights Unit. So with respect to House revisions or proposed revisions to S119 as passed by the Senate, and I'm gonna apologize in advance that sometimes I'm gonna have to stop facing you on screen to look at a different computer screen because we actually received two sets of revisions. Monday, I'm sorry, Tuesday, we were starting to talk about the side-by-side version where there was an initial round of House proposed revisions. And then during that testimony, we received another document which contained some revisions to their own revisions. The version that's I think been posted today, version 2.4, seems to highlight the most recent revisions to the House's proposal, but doesn't highlight some of the other revisions. So I have two documents really to refer to. Let me just start briefly by, I think framing the perspective that we come at it from the Civil Rights Unit. On the issue of raising the standard from the Fourth Amendment bare minimum, which is objectively reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. A lot of the work that's been done in the area of emphasizing de-escalation, limiting force to when it's truly necessary and proportional to the circumstances and the lawful objectives of the officers. I don't want the committee to get the impression that the impetus for a lot of that work really comes from the legal profession itself. The work in this has been done by police executives for 20 plus years. There's a nonprofit that's called the Police Executive Research Forum or PERF. I would suspect that all the chiefs in Vermont belong to PERF. It's basically one of several police think tanks. And in 1992, which was when I was just getting involved in policing when I lived in Los Angeles, they published a landmark study called Deadly Force What We Know that emphasized or identified uses of force, particularly deadly force where officers were making decisions that led up to the force, which reduced the officer's choices. So officers would take a number of, make a number of decisions, minutes or seconds before even on holstering their weapons that sort of committed them to or limited their options to deadly force. One example might be that be easy to visualize would be an officer who knows he's stopping an armed robber and running up to the window. The officer in doing that enters what police recognizes, what's called a kill zone where the officer has no cover, doesn't have a benefit of distance, doesn't have an angle. And if there is a sudden movement by that person, the officer knows or believes is an armed robber, the officer's limits, their responses to a threat are very, very limited. And so back in the 90s, police professionals, police chiefs and trainers, as well as academics, as well as civil rights organizations started making a push for taking a broader view of policing. And in 2016, on the issue of, I think Senator Sears, you mentioned the issue of proportionality. In 2016, PERF put out a publication that's called the 30 guiding principles of officer's use of force. And that includes proportionality. That did not come from, it was not a conference of lawyers or academics. They, in January, 2016, in Washington DC, they convened a couple hundred police chiefs, academics, scholars, trainers, psychologists to develop those principles. So a lot of the work in the area of increasing officer accountability for decisions that are made, that set them on the path to using force has come from the law enforcement community. Next week, if you hear from folks in Seattle, they'll likely talk to you how since 2013, Seattle has required for all uses of force a reasonable necessary and proportional standard. I think the question really here for the committee is how much detail goes into the statute versus the development of a statewide policy. There are other legislative mandates for having a statewide use of force policy. The bill that was passed by the Senate was something we supported. It was very much like the California standard. It puts Vermont up there as having the most progressive statutes to deal with the issue of use of force. But then the question becomes, and this is the question that the house's proposals really presents at the committee, which is how much of this detail do you put into statute versus putting it into a policy? Much of the language that is drawn from the house proposals that I've seen were taken from a police policy, the Seattle Police Department's use of force policy. At least some of that language I recognize. Well, what's not apparent from this amendment, and I draw to the committee's attention is that Seattle's suite of policies that relate to use of force in de-escalation, because there isn't one, there's like five of them. Collectively, those policies span about 35 single space pages. So there are lengthy definitions of what counts as de-escalation. There are discussions of what counts as force, and there's a proposed expanded definition here, but some departments like New Orleans, for example, specifically includes pointing a firearm at someone as a use of force. And it's not clear from these proposals here whether that would be considered to be the physical coercion you're talking about. There are issues about particular types of conduct that would be defined as deadly force. So there are specific examples. That might be striking someone in a head with an impact weapon, firing a taser at the head or neck, firing a taser at a visibly pregnant woman, using vehicle maneuvers on a high speed chase called the pit maneuver to rear end the car and cause it to spin out in certain conditions. That might be used as deadly force because it can cause cars to flip over and injure bystanders or injure the driver or passengers. So there's a lot that's packed into a use of force policy. And there'll be, I think, pursuant to the proposed mandate to have a uniform statewide policy, there'll be a lot of detail and clarity about that. If they are consistent with what are considered to be the better or best practices in use of force policies, there'll be just flat out prohibitions, like no firing warning shots, not to use a taser on an elevated platform where a person might fall over and die from a fall injury. So I think that what we got from the house is a small piece of the larger policy. And it seems to us in this abbreviated timeframe to provide a useful and workable guide for the use of force by only taking part of the picture and doing that in a way where we only have a few voices that have contributed or offered perspectives. I listened to the house testimony that I think a few of you referred to. And there were some really important points that were laid out regarding individuals who are dealing with mental health crises. And at least the witness I listened to asked the committee for them to welcome other people to continue to add to that discussion. My experience with use of force policies and use of force reform is that you need to have a lot of discussions, a lot of people at the table, lots of drafts that are circulated among the different individuals who are participating in that development process. And then opportunities for the public to look at the actual draft. It's somewhat analogous to rulemaking at both to the federal or state level where you have a public comment period on proposed regulations. I think it's a concern we have in the civil rights unit is that the effort to put in some of the details which we think need to be provided but we're concerned that putting it in statute in an abbreviated timeframe with limited voices may not be the best way to proceed. I think the point about that we heard earlier today about lack of flexibility in statute. I think it's a valid one. Most good use of force policies probably have been amended three or four times in the last three or four years. And that's done in a much more streamlined fashion than any legislature has done. The mechanism that the legislature has used before when it's dealing with policies has been, the closest analog I can think of is the fair and partial policing policy where they set a baseline mandate. Everybody's gonna have this policy. We'll be set to have a fair and partial policing policy so that accountability includes biased addressing implicit and explicit biases, fair and partial treatment of individuals, procedural justice and the like. And then it created a mandate for the formation of a really detailed policy with the involvement of the community. And then that is subject to revision over time. I think the details, all the many details about things like totality of the circumstances, what counts as de-escalation, what factors you would consider or not consider. Absolutely, those need to be developed. We're just, we're not confident that that could be done in statute in such an abbreviated timeframe. So let me, if I might ask a question, Lillio. Sure, of course. If we were to say we concur with further proposal amendment, the further proposal amendment is requiring that every law enforcement agency have a minimum standard of responsible that any use of force is responsible, necessary and proportional to the alleged crime. Would that do it? No, I think, I mean, I think with the bill that's already passed the Senate, I think it's good to have that higher standard in the bill. I think that's good. I think rather than just saying abstractly, go develop a standard to set a new baseline, I think is appropriate. But in terms of filling in all the many details, because there are many, many different types of uses of force and there are varying levels of officer culpability. Just to give one example, like for just, for illustrative purposes, one of the questions that's presented by the House proposals was whether you would take into account the training and experience of the given officer who uses force. Do you take that into account or not? In the initial draft from the House that we were going to discuss on Tuesday, they said, yes, you should consider that. And then while we were in testimony, they sent a revision that said, no, you shouldn't consider that. It's a fair question to ask. How do you evaluate what the, what is the applicable standard for the officer if you're going to determine whether their use of force is reasonable or not? There are fair arguments to be made in both sides. The trouble is that if you are doing this in such abbreviated standard, you may not be getting all the perspectives that you want. And there might be a middle path that is better than it's been proposed by either side. So I would, then I don't wanna put words in your mouth. Are you suggesting that the Senate passed version of 119 is what the House should pass? What I would endorse is that, what would be that, and maybe you're going to do it in 124. But I think what we would like to see is that there'll be a mandate that, you know, these terms will be fleshed out in a statewide use of force policy. And then to identify, you know, the benchmarks for when that'll be done and who's going to be responsible for working on it. And, you know, some general parameters for input in the way that the fair and partial policing bill was done. Because I think everyone agrees that just leaving the as-passed version of 119 as the only word on the subject isn't really sufficient. But the question I think really is just whether you flesh it out in policy or statute. And I think given the complexities and the broad range of voices that have yet to be heard on this and some of the expertise that hasn't been brought to bear on this, fleshing it out in policy seems to be a more practical, flexible and more inclusive way of doing it. Thank you, Jeanette. And then I'm going to ask Bernadette a question. So in one, you're right Julio, it is in 124. And I don't remember who is, there were different groups that were directed to work together to come up with the different reports that are to come back. And I don't remember who was involved in coming up with the statewide use of force policy but it is in there. And I believe it was probably the Human Rights Commission and the ACLU and the training council. I don't remember who it was but we could always change who was supposed to come up with it if it isn't appropriate, but it is in 124. Okay, well, I mean, I think that that, I mean, that's the way that it's been done. There are police departments that have significantly reduced their use of force, particularly in interactions with persons in crisis, whether that's from a latent illness or if it's result of drugs or alcohol through those policies. And so, I think the Seattle folks, they have very good examples of the reductions of force. And at the same time, Seattle revised its policy, I think two months ago, three months ago, because they wanted to make further refinements on that. But that isn't to say that the legislature doesn't have, I'm not suggesting that the legislatures can completely untethered from the issue of use of force, as I said, we supported S119 as it went through. But a lot of the details, I think are just, it just seems more workable. And I think there is a track record for seeing how others, I mean, there's probably a dozen or more major agencies that have a reasonable and necessary standard. And all of them went through a process roughly, similar to what I'm describing, where you have different people circulating drafts and providing inputs and having town forums to talk about particular issues and then a public comment period. So I'm more inclined to follow that path to raise policies than to just try to do it in a very abbreviated way through statute. Bryn, if we wanted to not be in conflict with 124 to expand our S119 version, to just include that directive that Julio was talking about or the directive can be an S124, their companion bills, how do we accomplish that? Can we do that? You could do it. You even understand what I'm asking. Well, I'm wondering, I think I understand what you're asking. And I would imagine that one way to do it might be to reach out to the house since they have possession of S119 currently to talk about making that revision. I know that they have expressed on the record their desire to work with the Senate Judiciary Committee because they know the limited timeframe that you're operating under. So that would be one way to do it. Another would be to prepare an amendment to it now. So that is- But the problem is I don't wanna be in conflict with 124 but at the same time, we almost probably have been combined but I'm concerned that we passed 124 in response and I think it's a good bill. 119, I think 124, good too, all, but talk about 119 now. And I would just like, even if it's the same exact language as in 124, to look at developing those baseline standards similar to what we did in the fair and impartial policing, it seems to make sense to me. I don't wanna, I don't wanna throw the baby out with the bathwater here. And there are voices who are saying, slow down, you're going too fast. And there's voices saying, you're not doing enough, you're not responding to the crisis. You're not defunding the police, et cetera, et cetera. So, I mean, we've got a wide variety of voices as representatives of the public that we're dealing with. So, I don't know what the thought of the committee is. What I'm hearing is Seattle is a policy, it's not a law. It's a standard policy that is based upon what they did and the house basically began with looking at Seattle and then incorporating that into legalese. Is that fair? No? I just wanted to speak to an element we, I don't believe we've considered yet, which is this draft of the house bill does as opposed to the permissive language around the prohibited restraint in the first draft, this one does seem to say a prohibited restraint will not be used for any reason. It doesn't, however, lift the sunset on the prohibited restraint as added in 2019. So whatever we do, if we go forward with this, I would ask that we draft language to lift that sunset. The stated reason for the sunset was because they wanted to work on this bill. So if we pass this bill, I think it's fair to ask them to lift the sunset. Yep, right. And something? Yes, please do. I just wanted to elaborate or follow up on a comment you made about the standards in Seattle. It is true that the language or some of the language that's in the house proposals appear to be, at least, they look very similar to language that's in the Seattle policy. However, Washington state law has its own justified homicide statute which addresses use of deadly force. And that includes this necessity standard which is quite similar to what's in the California law and what's in S119. If you'd like the citation for, you know, I can give it to you now. It's from the revised code of Washington or RCW. It's section, or it's title 9A, 0.16, 0.040. I'm sorry. No, go ahead, finish your thought. And so part of the standard includes when an officer using deadly force when it's necessarily used in good faith to overcome actual resistance and then it identifies the types of threats that would be confronted. So Washington has put it in statute but only recently and after Seattle had enacted its policy in 2013. So the way it worked in Seattle was policy and then kind of the underlying, you know, very, kind of the structure, the underlying necessity standard was recently enacted into law. So I just wanted to clear up that there is a statute and a policy that applies to those. The policy became before the statute. Yes. And we keep talking about Seattle, which is just that it was probably the first really developed policy that emphasized a lot of these issues about de-escalation and to put a marker on that, that the approach in modern policing on dealing with de-escalation is to create or like have a separate policy that addresses just the duty to de-escalate so that it could be in the moment if an officer is being fired upon by someone who's discharging a weapon might meet the standard to defend themselves against in a gunfight, but might nonetheless be culpable within the department and its policy for failing to de-escalate before they got to that point so that you're able to separate the two out. When you blend the two together, the question becomes if the officer did not de-escalate and de-escalate doesn't, failure to de-escalate doesn't necessarily mean provoke. It might mean you just, you either ignored or missed opportunities to try to slow things down and stay in a safe area. But if that doesn't work and then the officer ends up in a gunfight, the question is, do you sanction the officer for defending himself in a gunfight because they made an error minutes or moments earlier? The approach that police departments have taken is to separate out the two so that the officer, if they're gonna be sanctioned, retrained, transferred, demoted or even discharged, might be for, well, we agree you had to defend yourself. You were shot and wounded in this case, for example, and it is an extreme example. But nonetheless, you failed to meet the training standards about de-escalation. So we find that you're in violation of that and you're gonna be subject to sanction for that, but not for defending yourself against gunfire. So I think that that's the sort of issue that can be teased out when you're in a policy-making process that's very difficult to do in the legislative process in an abbreviated Stanford. Everybody should be de-escalating. Everybody should be moving to a point where force is really the last resort. But how you get there and how you articulate that in a way that officers can understand and apply and train and train new partners that come on, you know, that's a challenge and that's the subject of historically of policy-making. Well, going back to Commissioner Shirling's remarks, one thing that he said that strikes me and it may or may not be true in Washington state, if there's the same bedrock of policy in Bennington versus Chittenden County, why should I get treated differently if I'm a person in a similar situation in the two? I'm curious if, for example, Tacoma and Seattle are very nearby each other in large cities and whether or not somebody in Tacoma is working under different standards of somebody in Seattle. So there needs to be those base standards, I guess. Well, historically, the base standard has been the objective reasonableness standard from the Fourth Amendment. But police professionals as well as civil rights organizations, legislators, all sorts of lawmakers have been saying that just because you have that, that it is a consistent standard or it should be under the Fourth Amendment. The question is whether communities can decide that they want officers to perform at a higher level than the bare minimum to avoid a constitutional violation. And the answer has been in the profession for quite a long time now, yes, we need to have policies that demand more of officers than the constitutional minimum. There's no Fourth Amendment case law saying an officer has to deescalate, for example, or that an officer might be accountable if they could have resolved the situation just by tactically stepping back a few feet so that they had so that or behind closing a door on someone who otherwise might present a threat to them. But police departments have tried to raise the professional standards, which I think is makes officers safer and it certainly makes the public safer. So I think what I've been hearing in both houses is that people wanna get to that standard. The only question is more of a technical one, whether you do it in statute or you do it, some in statute and then the details in policy. And my judgment at this point is that, especially since we keep hearing great testimony from new witnesses that come in that offer new perspectives, it's like, what else are we missing if we try to fill it in all now? So that's a perspective I'm offering. Thank you. Other questions for Julio, this has been extremely helpful to me, but I'm still a little confused about what's in 124 that we would like to see as a companion to 119. I would hate to see one pass and not the other, but it sounds like 124 is more. So, Bryn, can you coordinate that? I don't know who drafted 124. Betsy Ann. Can you all coordinate that? Even if it's in the same bill, I'd like to look at 119 with any changes that we should make, but limiting it to deadly force and then looking at a new amendment that would have the basic, what Julio has just suggested about, which would allow the conversation to continue. I do think part of the problem is with the training. You know, we face a similar problem with corrections, by the way, corrections officers and the professionals in there, and we've talked a little bit about that in this committee, where they are capable of escalating situations that should have been de-escalated, and also the need for better training and better professionals. I am still confused by how the governor's executive order interacts with 124 and 119. Very wave. Is there a simple answer there, or do we need a side-by-side-by-side? Hi, we're going to have Commissioner Sherline come in on Tuesday and tell us how they compare. And I believe that a lot of what is in the governor's executive order is also in 124. They may be worded slightly different, but we've asked them to come back to the legislature with the reports from the stuff. And 124, remember, has way beyond just these reports and these studies. It deals with discipline matters. It deals with training. It deals with EMS personnel. There's a lot in 124 that isn't just this. I realize you're very proud of 124, and you should be. We are. But my question is more specifically, what is in the three bills? House version, Senate version 124. That's not in the executive order. Oh, tons. There are a way to figure that out. Well, that's what I want to try to understand. Yeah, I'm trying to understand how they interact. But 124 is not just the things that are in the executive order. I understand that. But I need to understand what's in the executive order. Okay. How are they similar to 124 and how are they similar to 119? What's in there that, I mean, I don't care who gets credit for this. I don't either. So I know, but without understanding, there's three different processes going on here. Well, that's why I said we're going to have Sherline come in on Tuesday. Yeah, but that doesn't solve my problem. We got two weeks left. It doesn't. I'm not sure that we need to address 124 in here. We need to address 119 and how that's related. You're missing. I'm not explaining myself clearly, I guess, or you're not hearing me clearly. I'm not trying to argue that we should have 124 in here. I'm trying to understand what is in the executive order. That is not in, that is also in 124 and 119. That's what I'm trying to understand. Bill, do you have a, can you? Yeah. At times you translate my... I would just say that we're in a shortened time frame and there are three pieces of, you know, two pieces of legislation, one executive order that are all swirling around the same thing. I would also, you know, we hear lots of references to 124 as well as the governor's order. I would love to have a side by side by side just to understand the totality of what is being considered in this area, which is not to say that we would have jurisdiction over the bill, but just to know, because I feel like now I'm looking through a pipe at a landscape and there are stuff outside of my point of view that's relating to it. So, you know. Have you ever considered being an interpreter for me? I just took that on as my job. Thank you. I'm glad to create a document for the committee. I can't tell you right now because I don't, because I'm not legislative counsel for 24, so I don't have a great sense of what's in it, but that's the end. I think it would be helpful at least to the five of us to know what we're talking about. So I can create a document that summarizes what both bills do and how they overlap with or don't overlap with the executive order. That would be extremely helpful. Julio, any final comments from you? Back on video there for you. I don't, you know, I am, I think going to sit in, I think it's a 12 or 1230 hearing and house judiciary about S119 and the proposed amendments. I think the Attorney General may be appearing there briefly. So, you know, I'm just trying to collect, you know, trying to get more perspective on the rationale for the proposals because I haven't, I've only had a brief opportunity to look at the most recent revisions. So we're trying to keep track of all of that. And I do appreciate that the, you know, the silver lining for the Zoom medium is that it does enable us to access safe testimony because I found some of the earlier testimony that I heard, especially dealing with issues about de-escalation and mental illness and individuals in crisis. I thought that was really valuable and good to hear. And I think there's a lot more voices out there that I think we're going to hear on it. So I think that was good. I don't have anything else about the language because I think it doesn't sound like we're at the point of going through a particular language. No, I mean, because we don't really know what they're going to pass, but we're trying to keep up with it and trying to articulate a position. Well, Bryn, again, thank you very much. Peggy, thank you for arranging a day, a morning off for us tomorrow morning from the meeting from 9.30 to 11.30. I'm going to do all the things I haven't done. I won't get them all done in two hours, but at least it gives me a head start on a few of the things that I haven't done around the house. Great, and I'll wait to hear from you on next week's agenda, nothing to do with this. I think next week really depends upon Marshall Clement from the CSG Justice Center and what we hear from him. Okay, I'll wait for you. The only thing I would schedule is continuing discussions of where we're at with 119, 124. Bryn has that side-by-side. We'd start that either Wednesday or Thursday with her, depending upon, that's the only thing that I think we have outstanding is 119. We might have something on S54 with Michelle to update the committee, but we're going to wait and see what the house wants to do. Okay, so 10 to 12 on Wednesday and 9.30 to 11.30 on Thursday, and I'll book Bryn. Well, book Bryn when she's available, but we're really awaiting to hear from the Justice Center what, who might be available and when, and we may have to adjust those times to be a little bit later because they may be in Seattle and we don't want them talking to us at 5.30 a.m. Okay, so I'm not going to post anything. I'm going to wait to hear. The only thing I would post is that the committee will meet Wednesday and Thursday. Okay. From, with a to be determined. Okay. 119. Yep. I don't think there's anything else. Who knows, maybe there'll be something that another committee wants us to look at. Right now, I don't know of them. I have a great noon hour. We'll see you all at one o'clock. Have a nice weekend, everyone.