 Good evening. We should go around and do our introductions for the camera and so on. Do you want to start? Sure. I'm Sheila Linton from Bradiver. Are you she, her pronouns? And I'm representing myself as well as the Group Social Justice Center. Don Stevens from Shellburn. And I represent the Nalhegan Avenue in Detroit. Gary Scott, I'm a lieutenant with the state police. Jeff Jones from Monk in the Monk. David Chair with the attorney general's office. James Pepper, Department of State's attorneys and chairs. And Aiton Nassred and Longo, a chair, and I use he, him. Thank you. OK, you've been riding along. Oh, now wait, you. I'm sorry. I'm staring at the little box in the middle of the table. Go ahead. Great. Thank you. Sorry. It's hard to get used to the computer age where little boxes are people. So the minutes. There have not been a lot of moments or minutes, one could say, between the last meeting and this meeting. So the minutes from the last meeting are not yet prepared and ready to be disseminated. So that's why I don't have written there what I usually have, which is approval of the minutes, because you don't have them yet. So they're not going to be getting approving them. And at the moment, given how many people we have here who were actually at the last meeting, it would be a little strange because there'd be two of us, three of us, who would be approving the minutes. So I'm actually kind of glad that we don't have them. And we can put that off and have two sets of minutes to look at next month. That's all I needed to say about that. Sorry about that, but there were some unavoidable things that came up and beyond my control and our control. And there it is. Announcements. Anybody have any? I will go last. Anything? I would just say that there in a personal policing quarterly meeting from ESP is coming up next Monday night at the law school. That's right. That's right. 5.30 pizza, 6 o'clock policymaking. So there it is. The regrets I got for this evening are, well, Chief Don thought he'd be late, but he wasn't. And Judge Grierson didn't think he'd be able to come. He has some commitments that he has to see to. Poor Monica Weaver has the evil cold that has overtaken all of the Northeast. So she won't be here. Those are the regrets that I've gotten. Obviously there are more, but we'll do with what we have. I gave out to everyone this bill that came to me. They come to me in a very haphazard fashion. There are certain plants that I have who very kindly send them to me so I actually know what's going on, as I don't really have the time in my life to spend on the legislative website that I'd like to have. So this one came across. Do you have that, Sheila? OK, good. That's right, you asked for it before. I'm forgetting things already. This is an H381, an act relating to racial impact statements. I thought it would be important to put this out to everyone because this came up at our last meeting when Robin Joy was giving us her take on data collection, which certainly was difficult in some ways to hear, although very honest. And one of the things that came up, and actually, you were part of that. We were talking about data impact statements, I'm sorry, racial impact statements, being something that might be good. I cannot remember, and I need to look at the minutes when they come out around this, whether Robin Joy herself brought it up or what. But I remember that being an issue, that somehow racial impact statements would be a way of keeping the notion of personal bias in the front of people's minds, and that being an issue that we all thought was important. So when this came across my desk or computer, I thought I would bring this up to the notice of the entire panel. I'm not sure what I'd want for a response, or if I particularly want a response. If you have a response, we'd love a response. But I thought that it would be important just to show it to you, because as I say, this came up last meeting. I underlined, not on your copies, but on mine, a few lines. On the first page, lines 11 through 13, this bill proposes to require the Office of Legislative Council to prepare a racial impact statement on certain proposed legislation. On page 2, lines 6 through 11, that would be a subsection B in section 431. Racial impact statements are tools to guide policymakers in proactively assessing how proposed sentencing initiatives impose racial disparities in the criminal and juvenile justice system. Similar to fiscal and environmental impact statements, they provide legislators and state agencies with a statistical analysis of the projected impact of policy changes before legislative deliberation. The way this was supposed to work, or is supposed to work, when and if indeed it is passed. Page 3, section 433, subsection B, the racial impact statement shall be made available to the committee prior to a vote on the bill, resolution, or amendment. And then there's what it should include, which takes up more space. On the last page, the significant part for me, beginning on line 10, subsection D, if the General Assembly finds that a bill, resolution, or amendment has disparate impact on members of racial minority groups, the author of the bill, resolution, or amendment shall, one, offer an amendment to the bill to reduce the disparate impact of the legislation on members of racial minority groups, or two, provide for the members of the body in writing his or her reasons for advancing the legislation without amending the disparate impact of the legislation on members of racial minority groups. That's it. I just thought we should know about that. You're making an interesting face, John. I'm wondering how, when they say that, if they know it's going to impact minorities, if they knew that, we wouldn't be in the situation we are. Interesting point. My question is, how are they going to determine, or who is going to determine if it impacts minorities? I mean, I have another concern, which is inherently weird, like on the page where it says Native Americans who have origins in any Indian tribe of North America before 1835 or just new American tribes just pop up. I mean, I don't understand what that means. Does that mean only that are on federal rolls? Does that mean, I mean, we got recognized in 2011. Does that mean we're excluded from any of this? Within the state, I mean, that's just, that's inherently biased right there. I mean, within the state of Vermont. So that means that we can't, we're not legally a minority if you look at the statute, it says we are. Okay. I mean, so I'm just saying there are some things in here. There are some things. I mean, I'm just looking at this for the first time. Yeah, no, and that's, I didn't expect people to have, you know, fully formed responses to it, but I just thought we should start with it at some point. And my only other thing is, all of these bills that are being introduced, this seems like there's been a flurry. Who is combining these or vetting these as a totality? Because like the one that was for the AG, creating a new working group that kind of circumvented what we're doing. And then, I mean, there's like all these things coming in and play, even like, I think there's Mark Hughes even spending one. So there's like a whole bunch of them, kind of almost like they're either overlapping, competing interests or how, I don't even know how this is happening. It is a bit, it is a bit confusing because I'm feeling like a lot of these are initiatives that we're sort of commenting on and have been working on commenting on and people are writing bills already and I'm like, okay, well, that's done. I'm not sure what our role is at the moment, but. Yeah, because part of our charge is to recommend one central location for data collection and all that, but yet even this has to do with collection and other things. So I'm just, I guess I'm a little. What do we do? Well, I'm a little confused about how this is all, there's no sense of like there's any coordination at all. I mean, so how does all this stuff impact each other? I mean, I don't. That's a good question. I'm wondering myself. And how is it being vetted through the communities of color that are being mentioned here? Because like, what you're saying right here, I put a big X, like I'm like, so were you at the table when this, these four lines were created? Right. No, I didn't even know this bill was created. And you put in your people? Exactly. So how are we in this without even being asked? Like, this doesn't even make sense. And I'm reading who's at the top of it. You know, one of my legislators, my actual legislator is at the top of this document. But how are people speaking on behalf of us that aren't part of that community in making up legislation that is either incorrect, outdated, or doesn't represent the people in a correct manner? And not organized like they said with all the other legislation that's coming out. We, there are some big questions and I'm gonna get on that. I don't know what I'm gonna be able to do. I'm saying that very bravely, but yeah, and the other one that I had was exactly what you were expressing, Chief, about who decides this? Who's deciding that there's a racial, I mean. Where did they come up with 1835? I mean, what, I don't even know. Right. I'm just, I'm like. It's gotta be from the census. And it's just plain offensive anyway because it's just still the, it's still repeating basically the sentiment that you are all not people. And that goes again too with providing the proper documentation. My issue is that, I mean, that's like, if you go up to an African-American community and say, let me see your papers. Yeah, it would be on there. I'm just saying as we had the, we're the only race of people that can't self-declare. We have to prove who we are in order to get recognized. So if we're part of a recognized tribe, then obviously then we are recognized. You know, so I'm just saying is that, I don't even know like proper papers. I mean, I don't even wanna, this whole thing, I don't even wanna. I mean, we should be included. I'm glad they at least have Native Americans will be included. I mean, that's, that's, I mean, that's, sometimes we don't need to be out of town for certain things when we can. I was actually nice to see that because we are often forgotten. I mean, but, but, but yeah, that, yeah. Hey, John, I'm sorry if I'm just saying this, but is this the bill that they asked for you to provide to us? No, no, this is new. Wow. This is, this is one that came across my computer that I've not, I can't remember who sent it because they're coming in really fast and furious at the moment. But we had, remember, Rob and Joy had discussed exactly this issue and I got on it and went, oh, that's a great idea. And you and I were sort of having a little moment when we were sitting there about talk about the idea of racial impact statements, keeping that, you know, keeping people's bias mechanisms at the front of their minds and such. Do you remember that last meeting that we were having? Okay, well, I was really appreciative of that, but so I thought that when this came across, I should bring it up to the, to the panel because this is something that came up on the 26th of February. Just for the record, I applaud this for being late. I appreciate all of you who drive to Waterbury every month because I can not get here on time. I'm Jessica Brown. I think Rebecca is on the phone. Rebecca started texting me like when I was 10 minutes away and she is at the library in Waterbury. So hopefully she is at least hearing this. But I feel like there was a bill that, one of the bills we talked about last time, she was our boss at the Defender General Office had asked her to look into as well. So she might be on mute, but Rebecca, if you're there and you want to say anything about any of these bills. This is H 381. Yeah. Hello, honey. Yes. H.381. Sure. Yes. I told folks that I tried to figure out what's going on and in my capacity here as a member of the Racial Disparities Panel, I'm particularly interested in sort of where that crossover of our mandate lies to the language of the bill and thinking about that way. To the extent that it comes up on my radar, any details I'm happy to share. I don't have anything to share useful on that bill you're talking about now or any others because I am just getting spun up trying to catch any updates on it. He's not. He's not going to be here tonight. For our both here. Well, Pepper has something to say, yes. Yeah. I can provide just a very brief bit of context of this bill in particular. Because I was at the legislative or democratic caucus when the lead sponsor, and I don't believe it had any other sponsors at that point, just introduced this. It was in about a 10 minute segment anyone who had a new bill that week said, hey, this is the bill, this is what it's supposed to do. I'm going to pass it around the sheet and you can sign up as a co-sponsor. And so a lot of folks when that happens, and I'm not saying that happened in this bill, they don't read it, they hear the concept, they like it, they want it, they think through the legislative process they'll be able to fix the problems with it. And as far as the idea that there is this flurry of bills and there is very little coordination, that is true. There's no barrier to seeking a bill or putting your name on a bill and introducing it and having referred to committee. I would say that to the extent that they're kind of usurping the role of the Racial Disparities Council, I don't think that that is true. I think that there is a lot of excitement about the proposals that this committee is going to put out and that a lot of this other stuff, they might be, who knows why they're motivated or, but this is seen as the expert panel. And we've had conversations, or I've had conversations about the House judiciary and the Senate judiciary, kind of updating them informally on the work that we're doing and just saying that we intend to come out with recommendations related to the report that were required to release. And I think that there is actually a lot of excitement and there would be a lot of excitement which you've done already to come in and kind of update people on the progress of the committee because I think there is a lot of momentum right now that people want to do something to address racial disparities. And as Rebecca Turner mentioned, there is an ACLU bill. It doesn't look like it's gonna quite make the kind of deadline for this year. But there is, I know, I've been told that there is gonna be a discussion about that bill and it's largely a data collection bill. Okay, yeah. Excuse me, Mr. Chair, yeah. Saturday we've got an ACLU meeting, board meeting. Okay. And I can forward anybody's questions about the particular bill of representative Rachel's and of course, we'll be there as well. Okay. If anybody wants to fire me an email, I'll pass it over. Great, thank you. And I have one statement, this Chief Stevens, one statement, one concern. The statement is that now there's two panels. Now there's our panel and now there's the racial advisory panel too. So there might get some confusion going on because that's a different panel doing some of the stuff. I know we're dealing with criminal juvenile justice, but that's kind of overall arching support to the new executive director whenever that happens. This is a legal question or concern for you, David and Pepper. If a bill like this one would have gone through in the past, where it's defining minorities, is it restricted to this bill or does it change? Like in 2006, we were given minority status. I mean, I think people were given minority status, right? That was in 2006. So if for a reason they're defining what a minority is, so does that change? Like does that then over, does that then discount what we passed in the other statute or is it just referring to this bill? Because I mean, there's some legal ramifications of what bills can affect. It may not so much, maybe it's narrow to us. But I'm saying that all of a sudden they could erase somebody from being a minority but just, I mean. Can we worry about that? Yeah, I worry about that a lot when we mess with definitions and bills and what legislative council tends to do is they try to limit it in impacts, as you can see on page two, line 13, as used in this sub chapter, meaning sub chapter six of TPSA 13. So it would just be limited to this racial impact statement but it is something where it's very, you never know what sort of second and third order effects tinkering with definitions is gonna happen. I see a lot of times things added to our statutes that we weren't even aware of. Like for instance, somebody goes through and says, we don't want electronic gaming. All of a sudden that shows up on our bill and we didn't even know it got there or put it into our sub category that native people can't do electronic gaming. Where'd that come from? You know, I'm just saying is that stuff get added all the time and we're not even aware of it. So I just wanna make sure to protect our interests and I know I'm speaking on behalf of our people because we're in a different, well we're in a separate, we're in a weird category because we're actually a government and we can't self declare and we have to get your American government to say you are really Indian. So there's a whole structure around that that's different than any other race. So we're in kind of one of these weird situations and I just wanna make sure that when these bills come through that all of a sudden it doesn't erase the years and decades and that we've worked hard to get to where we are, I guess and I don't want that because we're often forgotten, like I'm saying is people don't consider us a minority even though we are. I mean they don't look at us and say oh you're a minority, it would be like we're a minority in statute, so legally we are but people don't look at us in the same manner because of our color of our skin. It's just a fact. So I just wanna make sure that, I don't want to belabor it but I have a real concern when it comes to this stuff that nobody's vetting that piece of it either. David, do you mind? Yeah, I mean I think a couple of things I wanna know your concern is very valid that this stuff, all the various issues aren't always considered when legislation is proposed or even when it goes through the process and just by way of context I would say, especially that initial stage of legislating which the introduction of bills is complete chaos without any oversight. Anybody can choose anything and often times it's really an expression of political desire or priority as opposed to a serious future law. And the expectation is that for those things that actually just get acted on which is a minority if everyone gets introduced that hopefully the legislative process will allow these issues to get vetted you would call it all the people who may be affected, all the groups might be affected. In an idea world the legislative process irons out all these problems and would catch the issues that you're pointing out. We don't live in an ideal world. The reality is that things do get all the way through the system without these problems getting ironed out. But having spent a bunch of time in that building the legislative process is very chaotic and so your concerns about seeing something and you're like what the hell does this come from? I mean, this happens all the time. It's a, it's a, it's a. Well that's why I was asking. Part of our recommendations is maybe making sure that legislation, whether once it hits legal or whoever gets vetted by the people like there's no, there's really not a native person there that they can go to, right? That's the thing I've been complaining about for years. I mean, we have the VCNAA but they're on a commission once a quarter once. There's nobody that works in legislation or works at the state level all the time as a native liaison. I don't think there is right now of a person of color doing that. That's what this executive director is supposed to do. But I'm just, I don't know if part of our recommendation, I don't, it might be outside of scope but I'm thinking maybe we should say there should be a process put in place where since we are such a diverse state now that legislative effecting those individuals should be vetted through somebody. A policy could be created or something. Some workflow could be created to then make sure nobody's missed. I don't know if that's something we should think about. That's part of our recommendation to the legislature. Well, because the irony is that the bill seems to exemplify the problem it's supposed to address. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking about. It's not to do exactly what it's messing up. Right, and it's getting it wrong. You've got an example of why you need to. Yeah, right. I mean, this is, sorry. I would just say, just on an informal basis, I mean, this could be a part of a recommendation, but I would. Make sure to write it. Yeah, I would really recommend introducing yourself to all the committee chairs and just saying, hey, listen, if there's something that impacts you, I would like you to try it. Most people know me. Yeah, well, yeah, I just want to be contacted. They'll do that. Sometimes some of these bills just, you know, if it involves criminal justice, the same five people get called every single time, and that's it. And then they hear from those five people, and then it's either yes or no. I've been fortunate that people on committees say, hey, you want to testify, or do you know anything about this? And they'll call me, but that's not always the case. Right, but anyway, that's here or there. It's not a policy. It's kind of you're hoping for them remembering that view of the system. That is the reality of how this stuff works, is making the committee members need to know who they should be contacting. And I do think they are conscientious about wanting to hear everything, but they sometimes just don't know. And you're absolutely right that having the presence there makes a big difference, and that's something that we need to think about. I have to say this process, because this is the first time I've gone through legislative season and been chair of this. This is keeping me up at nights. I mean, I'm a little like, and people keep rattling off numbers to me, and I know what's going on. And it's like, I don't know, algebra. I mean, I'm like, that's lovely. Yeah, I know all about it. And I'm wondering, I guess, with this, I'm glad I brought it up to the panel, because there's been a lot around it. I feel like it's a recommendation that we would want to make in a perfect world about racial impact statements. That doesn't seem like a problem. Correct me if I'm wrong. That just feels like something that ought to be down, because we keep talking, or at least we were at the end of February, about the need to keep bias and stuff at the forefront of people's minds, particularly people who are policymakers. This is a way of doing that, it seems to me. But it also seems to me that, and I don't know if what I'm about to ask sounds like a question from a child, which it is, it seems like we ought to be testifying about this. Yeah, it definitely should be. I don't expect this bill to come up this soon. The crossover. OK, never mind. The crossover for non-money bills is the end of this week on the House and the Senate next week. Yeah, I don't think this will be considered this year. Well, I've just wasted 45 minutes of everyone's time. Not really, because it still will go in committee. It still got next year. I've still got next year that it can come up, because this is not a biennial year, so any bills that aren't taken out this year will go stay in committee until next year. That's right. Absolutely, and I also think the larger point remains that what you're saying about attention even to be paid in areas where it's not always paid or speaks to bias also is true for many bills. And so, and I also want to echo what James Pepper said, which a little bit ago, which is that the Judiciary Committees in particular are very aware of this committee. So yeah, they are aware of it and they want to hear from it. I'd love to, they'd slow down and be a lot easier. They're not a forgotten entity, because they're not a forgotten entity. Forget me, I don't care. Just do the work. It's just this is a little dizzying. It is, and especially if you haven't spent time there, it's very hard to figure out what's really going on. So this is the reality of it. Anybody else, what, does there's something, somebody that we should, I guess we should just table it for right now? Well, no, I was just saying my recommendation, Eitan, is that as chair of this committee, I would reach out and say, we have concerns with H-3-8-1. And bills similar, please, if they're coming up, let us know so we could testify or address them. I would at least reach out and say, we have concerns about some of these bills. Once it comes to the forefront, we need to have a voice. I'm writing what you're saying. Especially, you can use the example that I can do too. I mean, it's like, we're considered a minority in the state of Vermont, my statute, and that's kind of is contrary to that. Right. Thank you. And I would even step it up a notch of talking about us being vetting. Everybody keeps saying everybody knows about us. But every time I hear us talk about us, nobody seems to include us. So I'm confused. It's contradictory statements that are being said consistently with this group. And I think that I personally, as a person who is impacted, would be impacted by this bill, that I don't want to spend time having to testify for something that should have never been created in the first place. So I'm concerned that this is a way for us and disproportionately for us as communities of color to have to be in the rigor and more order of going all the way around and around and around for something that shouldn't even really exist for the reasons why we've even mentioned here. So I would love there to be more of a vetting process or something to when it comes right off the press and it impacts any of the issues that we're addressing that those communities that are most impacted do get a call and that we are on the roll dex both as groups, organizations, or as individuals because I don't want to wait another month for this and then testify at this committee, do this committee, for what reason when this shouldn't exist in the first place in the manner that it is written right now. Got it. I think the only way to prevent something like this from even coming up is to have our own recommendations at the forefront and center and saying, hey, listen, this body is dealing with racial disparities. Don't as a one-off bill do something that might be unintentionally harmful. Well, I'm not saying we need all of us to be in this. And so I'm not saying that people shouldn't be creating bills. I'm saying that they need those people who they were creating bills for to be at the table creating those bills with them or to be communicating with them and being in communication when that is happening is what I'm saying. It's great, but if this was to come to us, I mean, I don't know when this was written, but so let's say, okay, so last week, maybe we should have gotten this so we can be like, oh, because what you said is these people who are co-signing to this, they don't know. They don't know what they don't know. So they're thinking maybe- They're thinking they're helping. They're thinking they're helping. And so we would like to save them time and energy. I mean, right? Yes. I wanna save my own time and energy. And so why get down the line because we're gonna be having the same conversations and be more tension in the room down the line than if we just said, hey, you know what? Here's what we're thinking about. We realized we didn't include you. We're gonna include you next time. And then we realized, that's not such a great bill. Let's move on to something different. I'm hearing like two different things. One is, well, they're forming as two different ideas in my brain right now. One is that ultimately maybe part of our recommendations, whatever form that finally takes, includes recommendations about who, like how to involve people of color, members of defined minority groups, however they're gonna be defined, in creating any bills that are going to be proposed to address anything having to do with those groups. Whether it's, well, particularly with regard to anything about the criminal justice system. The point of this panel is to specifically address criminal disparate impact in the criminal justice system. But then also it seems like there could be a way to figure out, I hear what Sheila's saying in terms of like, we don't wanna get bogged down testifying a bunch of hearings on bills that no one who's affected by them is involved in creating in the first place. At the same time, like now that we know that a lot of this is happening and we do exist, I mean, someone did ask you, Atan, to testify. So it seems like at a minimum right now, like there should be some way to overlap a little bit with having someone from, in my opinion, the most likely person would be you, at least be contacted. And Rebecca did say that she is in her capacity for the defender general. I mean, the defender general is certainly a presence at the legislature every year and makes themselves heard on any legislation regarding criminal justice. So I feel like there are ways in the interim until we're presenting our official recommendations, which I think should include something. To me, it's beginning to be apparent that it should include something with regard to how legislation is formed or proposed with regard to people of color and minority groups in the criminal justice system. But in the interim, we should have a presence, if nothing else to say, hey, stop making up crazy bills that no one, I mean, we appreciate the intention, I guess, but like, slow down. And I personally think, because of working around legislation for a lot of years, usually a legislator has, oh, we got this idea. They hand it off to the legislative secretary who puts it in the legal jargon that they need to. And I'm not sure if it's vetted by the lawyer at that point or after it's been adopted. One, it's in there somewhere, but I think before it gets assigned a bill or as it gets assigned a bill, that process says, as you create that bill and write it in the form that it needs to be like this, the proper people get notified because you're never gonna stop people from putting in bills. So, I mean, they're not gonna wanna, because one of the problems that we have too is that not everybody in the same community agrees 100%. So I'm just saying, as long as we get a mechanism to say here it is, we might want the ability to testify, and once we get it, we work in our own communities to say, hey, how do we do this? How do we come with a united front? Because you know, the legislators, if it's controversial, they'll shelve it and they'll put it right in the committee most of the time unless they're really passionate about it. So I mean, it's like, I don't want them to say, okay, we're never gonna deal with minority issues because it's such a pain because they always have, everybody has to vet it, never comes out. I don't want to create that atmosphere. So I'd rather that if we're notified, we look at it, if we have suggestions or want to testify, we deal with it. But I think that's reasonable for them to be notified. Not so much we have to vet it. But I mean, at least get it before it hits, we know what committee it's gonna be in. We have this, and then I think at that point, if we get notified, we have time to talk about it and work on it before it even comes up for discussion. I know that's kind of a pain because then you're looking at everything. No, I mean, in your point that, why should we even be there? But I don't think we can get around that. Just now, you're never gonna get each community to agree on everything. So they're gonna have to sort that out in testimony, right? I mean, some people will be for things. Just while I'll use the same bill that we used for the ethnic study, some people wanted anti-Semitism, some didn't, some wanted this, some didn't want that. So that has to be sorted out by the legislators. But at least we're all notified so we can at least, right? I'm assuming there, and correct me, this is sort of a question to you, Pepper, like how does the public become aware of a bill like this when it's at this stage? Yeah, so. Is it just finally looking at, you know. Right, so this bill, you know, it was a Democratic caucus, a lead sponsor stood up. This was one of four bills that she did at the exact same time. She just kind of read the intent and she said I'm passing it around for sponsors. And that's just literally a spreadsheet of every legislator, and you just check your name if you want to be a sponsor. You don't even have to read the bill. Is the very first person, the person who proposes it and the rest of the sponsors, okay? And then so that Democratic caucus or any of the caucuses are open to anyone. Then it goes on the floor and it's read for the first time on the floor, just this bill is called racial impact statements. And then the speaker says it'll be referred to the rules on committee, which is when it was referred. And then from there, it's up to the chair to determine when and if it ever comes up. And so that is a very difficult process. Every single Monday morning, I read through all the committee agendas just to see what is coming up that week and all of the committees. And without that, I mean, there's no way to really know, you know, someone can be, this is in the rules committee. You think this might be in the judiciary committee or it might be in the government operations committee? You wouldn't know unless you just read the rules committee every single week. And as far as whether this, I don't believe this is going to come off the wall, quote unquote, come off the wall this year, but it could be taken up for testimony and then brought, you know, just because it's not being cross over, I mean, they can't take testimony on it and then it might come up next year. And then, you know, it's kind of a elusive process. But the common thread though of all of this is the legal secretaries that the legislators hand this to have to create it in this format. So that is the common thread of where all bills have to pass through, no matter who's submitting them. So if you get that common thread of those one or two individuals that put it in this format to notify people that you won't miss anything. Because I know I have to go on the website and look at legislative bills and kind of read through as a pain. But I think if you can get to that common thread, don't matter where it comes from, but it always has to pass through the guys putting it in this format. Okay. Always. Major, are you there? I am. She'd like to make a comment. Please. I was meant to along the lines of Al. It does sort of feel like hurting cats with some of this. Yeah. And then with DPS, we have this process. But I'm just, my comment is that it takes a lot of work to try to keep track of all this stuff because these bills are fast and furious. And so we have a process where the house and bills are assigned as they come out. Any bill that has any impact on public safety, any one of the entities under the public safety heading, they get doled out to the captains and majors to review. And we have to go through this entire process of looking at the external stakeholders that might support the bill. We have to comment on the external stakeholders who would be opposed to the bill. We have to talk about the programmatic impact that could have on the department. So it's, and then, you know, so then they'll be like at any given moment, there's 35 members of the department who are all tracking one bill through the entire system through the session. And it's, it is just very hard to organize and keep on top of these things. And then that person will be called to testify maybe or try to go and listen to what's happening over there. So my point is simply just that it does take quite a bit to keep track of all the things that are coming out of there. Okay, thank you. I'm thinking out loud. One of the things I'm thinking is a recommendation we may want to put forward. And as I say, this is half-baked, actually less than half-baked is something like what the major was talking about the DPS does, that I don't know whether this body or the new racial equity board, but somebody ought to have that kind of clearing house function to get things out to stakeholders as they come up so that we actually can have the kinds of conversations that Sheila's talking about, but there's gotta be some sort of method to all of this. Otherwise, we're in this situation that we're in now where everybody's just sort of scratching their head. I would just say that that in and of itself could be a full-time job. Got it. And it sounds like the other systemic racism, racial person is a paid full-time position. And so maybe that person should have a staff member or I don't know what it is. That person could be doing that in close coordination with our council. Write that down. That's a good one. Yeah, I mean, they can just as, there's things called bill reviews that major Jonas was talking about and part of that is all the impacted people that the bill might touch and it seems like the systemic racial mitigation position should be in very close coordination with us. I like that. Anybody else feel, I like that. Yeah, that's part of the charge. I mean, he's looking at policy to reduce systemic racism and bias. And that would help. So this is part of that process. It's not only stuff on the books, but it's stuff coming out. I would write, I mean, but you know, oops, sorry, I don't know. I mean, they would have to put that on, they have a lot of work to do whoever this person is, I mean. So they're gonna have to figure it out, but I think our only scope here is just criminal, juvenile justice, but this is a bigger topic and just all bills. But anyway. Okay. I like the idea that that executive director should be all, but they should identify all the players. They have to, not they should, they have to identify all the players that need to be, that they have to work with, including our buses and other people. Okay. We've got, I think we can put this aside for the time being and move on. Is that, they're feeling that that's all right right now? Anything else anybody wants to add? People electronically connected? Okay. So you have one action item, right? I'm here still. I said your action item is to contact them and let them know that. Yes, yes. I need to get on that. I need to figure out who to talk to, and I will do that. The next item was what I thought was going to be the bigger discussion. Wow, got that wrong. About the bullet points that I have sent out to you some weeks ago, and we had talked at the last meeting, as you'll remember from, even those of you who weren't here, I sent out the email about this meeting, talking about looking at broad areas of overlap so that we can start identifying large topics, large ideas that would inform our recommendations for this final report. And I'm hoping that we can go around the room and do that, and that pork pepper will take really great minutes so that I'll have something to work off of. And that was what I was hoping would be the biggest body of this meeting. I suspect that we're going to do this now and we're probably going to be doing this next month too. But let's get going. Why don't we start? I'm hoping we can go around the table. Is that, am I right? Yes, no? Good, let's go around the table. And everybody hold forth for a bit and talk about your bullet points, the overlaps you saw, the big issues that you saw, things that you saw lacking altogether that you feel should not be lacking. And let's start making some actual notes towards this. That would be my suggestion. We've had a lot of time to look over this. I don't think it's pushing it, but I do want to move us and give us what I would like to characterize as a gentle nudge. So Sheila, do you want to start? Actually can I not start? You can not start. Major, do you want to start? You're not as well. Okay. Pepper, do you want to start? Let me pull up my bullet points. He's pulling up his bullet points. Give it a moment. My word is just- Yes? Yes. Go for it, Rebecca. No, please go ahead. Quickly before, but investigator, a long time, the pulling of the opposite that our general came and submitted professional experience, long time working in the system, the emphasis is different. Instead of spending rent or whoever, judges, prosecutors, et cetera, correctional officers, he thought, why not spend money on training these people who have ill-plicated bias? Sort of a train on know your rights, right? Know your rights program on where as people should be informed, what they have the right to do and not do in an initial encounter with the police, right? Right to an attorney, right to silence, or two of them all, right? Right to have people who has their best interest, right? Not a principal. Sign it over or whatever thing so that they can talk to the cop, right? So that was, I thought, an interesting angle. And I like hearing sort of full pitchers. You don't hear that part of training. The second piece I wanted to throw out there, we've heard a lot about data collection, the limitations of data collection. We heard from DOC about how the data they're looking at is inherently flawed because of the threshold input data. Can't be trusted because you're not comprehensively collecting race data, one, and two, it's not standardized. And so we don't seem to even have a baseline understanding of what we're collecting, how we're collecting it, who's identifying whom, or is appropriate, the definition itself that we operate under these certain presumptions, but seems like there's no standardized sense of that. So my recommendation is to start at square one. Can we, as one who's a stakeholder in the system, to apply a standardized sense of definition and a standardized procedure so that when we do collect data, we can trust it? Even if it'll take a few years to get enough to work with it. All right, that's all I have. I like it, thank you. Okay, and you've got that? Yes. Thank you, because I'm really gonna be depending on you for making whatever chicken scratch I make for everyone. Yeah. It's hard to facilitate and remember everything at the same time for me. Yeah, how am I going? I think quickly, what I'm seeing that is the common thread, not only in the training, I believe, is I think minimizing continual punishment of people. For instance, when someone is arrested, right? If they can't make bail, then they are incarcerated, they can't, they lose their job, the family split up. I mean, you've got the cost of incarcerating someone instead of maybe having them serve their time at home or whatever, because that impacts mostly minority people because they can't afford bail, right? And then if they plead, they get a record and then all of a sudden, now you're a habitual offender. So I'm saying is look at the minimize, like does everybody need to be incarcerated? There should be, like I put in here with bail, it should be, it's outdated, it should be the ability to pay versus flight risk. I mean, really bail was really initiated in the beginning was what's the flight risk or danger to the person, right? I mean, if there were danger, they wouldn't get bail. If they're at least, if they got bail, is what's the flight risk and whether? So I mean, I think we've lost that and everybody then says get set bail and then you can, you may not make it. Same thing with, once you pay your debt, you continue to pay for it. I think that maybe from a criminal standpoint, it should be maybe you could view it, but I think from a background check for jobs, it should, you shouldn't see it unless it was a something really heinous that it might affect somebody's work. You know, like maybe you were a rapist or a murderer or something that maybe that might impact if you're going to be in LNA at a hospital. I think that allowing it to be seen from the criminal juvenile system but not from an employment because you know as well as I do, if you see something on the record, oh, we're not hiring that person, whether they could legally do it or not, people tend not to hire that person. So they continue to pay for their crime after they've already served their time, which is not fair. If we're in a society saying you paid your debt, you really haven't because it's on your, that's why I'm glad to start seeing some of the expungements starting to happen because I think that after a certain time, I mean, if you pay your debt, your record should be expunged, at least from a job. I mean, I'd like it expunged, period. But I mean, at least from employment background check because if you can never get a job, then the likelihood of re-offending is high because you're trying to make a living, you're trying to feed your family. I just think it just compounds. I think looking at risk compared to the impact on society, I think that could be done by prosecutors, it could be done by judges, it could be done by social workers, whoever. And one of the things that are one of these things, also one of the things that stuck out to me is incorporating minority communities in being a solution. In other words, sometimes there's outreach places that can maybe be the person responsible, not I don't want to say be the person responsible, but you might have a parole officer. He doesn't care, he's just saying, are you there or not? Or you might have somebody in the community that knows their situation that can actually help them. And not so much just say, are you here and not on a flight risk, but actually provide services for the family, knowing that they may go into incarceration, or hey, I did this because I have a drug problem and I need help, or hey, I need some help. Parole officers are bail, they're not doing that, right? So I'm saying get the community involved with these outreach, these communities that might be able to help provide that family with the services they need and work closely with the parole officers or the bailiffs or whoever to say, what is the real situation here, right? Is it that they're just bad dudes, or is there really a reason why they went down this path and maybe do more of a court diversion because maybe they don't need prison, maybe they need rehab, maybe they need a job, maybe they need something other than prison. I don't know, I'm just saying those of my arching, I mean, I had a whole list of things by bullet point, but I'm saying the overarching thing is we've kind of lost being an advocate for the person who is actually in trouble and more towards the legal system, which just wants to get them in and get them out. Well, we don't really know the root cause of why they were there, does that make sense? It does. Good sign. I don't know how we changed it, that's part of the... Well, luckily we have lots of people who write bills. Well, that's what I'm saying, I think part of this recommendation is to look at, stop punishing the people even after they've paid their debt and we don't do a good job at that, I don't think. Thank you. Are you, Pepper, do you have? Yes, yeah, and I would like to just respond briefly that the bail issue is a serious one and I think that we, you know, stakeholder group led by the Attorney General's office tried to tackle bail reform last year and it's a difficult issue. I know that the, because all misdemeanors must be bailable per the Constitution, so just thinking about the danger to the public, you know, that kind of versus the flight risk, I think that, you know, if someone might have committed a minor crime but has deemed a danger to the public, he might buy a judge that he still has to impose cash bail, sometimes it's a large amount of cash bail, which is a de facto kind of a ret, or... Yeah, he wants to keep my car straight. Right, it's something that, I think that one option that has been talked about a lot with respect to bail is offering some sort of risk assessment tool at arraignment and then having some sort of electronic monitoring option or some sort of supervision option, like a pretrial monitor, which the federal system has, that of course involves a decent amount of investment from the state, so there were some reluctance to some of the, just kind of flipping a switch in doing that, but I think that that is a topic, especially I think you may have seen that Senator Tim Ash suggested that, or challenged the judiciary committees that reduce the prison population by 250 inmates in the next four years, and a huge chunk of those people are pretrial detainees that are being held because they either can't pay bail or they're held without bail, and so Senator Sears just today was talking about what we need to find a way, I think judges would be more willing to release more of that 400 detainee population if there's some more monitoring during that kind of pretrial period. With respect to expungement, I was working on a study committee and actually a bill passed out of the House Judiciary Committee today, 10 to nothing, that expands expungement to I think probably about 15 new felony crimes, which is a big deal, it doesn't go far enough and in fact we propose having just a standard ceiling, which is kind of what you're talking about, where it's not accessible to the general public, but it could be accessed by a law enforcement officer if they're seeking a warrant or something like that or a judge if he's sentencing someone for subsequent crime. We had a proposal and we're gonna continue to work on it that would apply a standard timeline to all crimes for ceiling and expungement, so seal first and then expunge second. And that would be all kind of non-series violent crimes, I think I should say. And that's something that we're gonna continue to work at because this kind of piecemeal out of few crimes here, out of few crimes the next year, you know, I think just a more universal holistic approach to ceiling expungement makes a lot more sense than that. With respect to my bullet points, I think that my bullet points really, I think focused on the high impact, high discretionary decision points in the criminal justice system from the prosecutor side and I took them largely from the article that you sent around. And I just, I'll summarize them quickly here, just the initial charging decision, the utilization of criminal justice alternatives including pre-charge programs, diversion, Tamarack, youthful offender and drug treatment court, making plea deals and then state attorneys, we don't actually sentence people but we do make recommendations and those should be tracked. And then the expungement decision because we are involved in that as well. I would say that there's a great number of counties that have had people outside groups come in and look at those data points and if you look in the article that you sent around, they referenced this very institute kind of public awareness project that did this in five or six counties and it was very informative that kind of results and there were racial disparities. I don't think there's a big surprise there. And the one thing that I would recommend though if we do go down the kind of data collection is that if there is a mandate to do this, it's gonna fall to me and I'm not gonna get paid anything extra. It's a huge project. We're talking about 14 state attorneys, 22,000 cases a year. And I would just say that if we do make a recommendation about data collection, that it involved some people to actually do the work and they should be independent from the state's attorneys. It shouldn't be a thing really. It wouldn't look good. Right. So that would be my, another thing that I gotta say is that part of the contribution to this kind of churn in the criminal justice system, just get people in, get people out is that there are a huge number of cases. People don't get to spend enough time on the individual. They don't get to know the individual. That's true of the public defender's office and the state's attorney's office. I think that there is a lot of pressure to accept plea deals, make plea deals, just because of the caseloads. And so, I mean, I know it's not self-serving, but paying public defenders more, paying state's attorneys more, might actually have a better impact than creating more churn. Having more people involved might actually reduce the disparities, not increase them. Well, I guess that's why my question is is that if the defense attorneys are overwhelmed because of the caseload, then by putting monitoring devices, if you need to, to allow the individual to continue to work, be with the family, and until their case comes due, that would remove the pressure that we have to do something. It also then would allow defendants like the people who have minor offenses in prison to be able to then go out on the street and then you could pull back the people from out of state. But I'm saying is that would be the money justification of saving money, not only to the system of incarceration, could what is it like $80,000 or $100,000 per, what some, I'm saying is so, so if you look at it, every one they incarcerate, it's gonna cost 80,000. I doubt ankle braces is gonna cost 80 grand, right? If that's what somebody wants to do, right? Or, you know, bringing that prison population back, which is then gonna save, but also the defense attorneys because if they're overwhelmed and they can't do a good job for the person that they're defending, then that's a disservice to the person because like I said, if they're gonna take a plea deal just to get out, then now they become a habitual offender the next time because they've already got a record. That compounds the racial disparity issue. So I'm saying is, I just think that's a huge, and how can we support you on that, those other efforts that you're talking about because I think they're all important. I mean, that's just my, I don't want to take up because there's other people wanting, but I'm just saying is, I think we've hit on to something that we could really make an impact on, but that's just my thing. I keep saying, let's take great notes because I'm gonna write this up. I'm showing most of what people are saying and I'm just feeling like I need to name the fact that community based advocates for survivors of domestic and sexual violence are probably not in support of some of the same jail kind of conversations that I've heard this evening and I just want to name that because I think we can't, that brings us, but I just respect their opinion and their insight on that in terms of what it means for safety, given that domestic homicide is such a real issue and is oftentimes half the homicides in Vermont every year come out as being as a result of domestic violence. So I just want to put that out there. And also in terms of habitual offender, that status and there are people in the room who obviously know a lot more than I do, but that is not an easy status to attain as far as I know. I can think of very few cases over a long period of time where that was ever the case and this is repeat sex offenders and so I don't know how easy that really is that has given some of the scenarios that we talked about today, but I'm totally open to hearing other points on that. I just don't want us to get too far ahead thinking that there's rampant habitual offender status being handed out in Vermont. Thank you. I can echo some of the things that were said there. One of their reluctance to putting, we have a home detention program for people that aren't pre-trial detainees and one of the reluctance to putting violent folks on that is the fact that it takes at a minimum two hours to respond and that's under the best case scenario. And so that for people that are committing domestic violence is just sometimes an unacceptable risk. And with respect to the habitual offender, in order to be charged as a habitual offender, you have to have three felonies and then commit a fourth felony. Yeah, I'm not talking, when I'm saying habitual, it might be the wrong term, but I'm saying is you're gonna show up on the radar as having a record. And I think to your point, Major, is that we're not talking about letting maybe this process be for violent criminals or in domestic abuse situations that I'm talking about maybe a drug bust or some petty theft or something that's non-violent that wouldn't be so much a victim threat. I'm talking about those kind of things that wouldn't be a threat to a person or to the public. That's more what I'm talking about. Yes, okay. I think it's also just important to keep in mind that our charge is, for example, just using bail laws as an example, our charge is to make recommendations to the legislature to make sure that whatever bail statutes are in effect are not being applied disproportionately to people of color and minorities. So I don't see us necessarily. And some of the ideas that may come out are about ways that some statutes do need to be changed because they can't, in the way that they are presently enshrined in statute, they just can't be applied fairly to everyone or they too easily can be applied disproportionately to communities of color. But so I guess I just wanna make that point sometimes it's easy because we're talking about the criminal justice system. I think sometimes it's easy to sort of forget the focus on we're not, I mean, I absolutely hear you Ingrid and I know that there are advocacy groups that are always gonna want to be heard on any issues around amending statutes that have a potential impact on victims. But I think it's important to keep in mind that we're talking about just making sure that whatever laws we do have an effect or however our system is working is not being applied disproportionately. Yes. I don't have a lot more to add because I never did bullet points and maybe by next month I will. But don't write that. That's gonna be the last thing. It's on film though. But I do, well, a couple of things. Aton, I actually found a note from last month that goes to what you were talking about earlier about the discussion. I wrote Aton and then I wrote is there a way to document the racial impact of certain decisions? Because we talk a lot about training and stuff and so for example, when we were talking earlier it was in the context of this proposed bill and like sort of putting into law a requirement that you discuss the racial impact of a potential law somehow and the chief's point it's like if we knew what the racial impact was gonna be then we'd make the perfect laws, right? But the example that we used when we were talking about it last two weeks ago was for example, we talked so much about trainings and I am fully on board that a lot of people need to be trained about a lot of stuff. But like how do we then determine if that training actually had any effect? Like if that training actually has the outcomes that we are hoping it will have. And so I don't know how we do that but it's something to keep in mind I guess when we continue to talk about trainings. And I also just speaking of trainings I did want to follow up on Rebecca's, what Rebecca shared from the memo that Reuben wrote. Rebecca and I last October went to Baltimore for a conference that was put on by the national one of the national criminal defense organizations. And it was talking about these very issues like there was a woman from Philadelphia like the public defender of Philadelphia who talked about this program with this guy from California I came to Philly and helped develop these. They're sort of know your rights programs but they're ongoing, they're like you develop it he helps you start it in your community. And it's a regular event where people in the community can come and like either they're involved possibly or they have family members who are involved in the system and they can get their questions answered essentially. And I feel like I'm not gonna remember the name of it and I've made myself a note to try to find the information that I got at that conference last fall so I can talk about it in more detail to this group. But I do think it is one of the goals of it is to have it be community based and community run sort of like this issue that we've been talking about about the failure to include the people who are the stakeholders who are directly impacted so I do think there's an aspect and an element of that and so I think it kind of dovetails with what Rebecca was talking about and I would love to see as part of our recommendations some talking about some way to get the community more involved in knowing the rights but also sort of when they're involved in the criminal justice system having sort of monthly meeting that they like that gets publicized in their community that they know that they can go to to get information about what's going on not specifically what's going on with their case or their son's case or whatever but just in general about the process. And I think that that will inevitably something like that would inevitably reach a lot of communities, color, immigrant communities, minority communities if it was done in such a way that it was accessible to all of those people. Right. Thank you. I just wanted to mention a point brought up is like, yes, our charge is to say, is this law applied equally? But I think we can give a little more richness because in other words, if you say minimum bail is set at $1,000, yes, that is charged to white, black, Asian, doesn't matter. It's equal across the board. The problem is statistically people of color are poorer and they can't afford it. So then, yeah, even though the law is applied equally and they're all charged the same amount, it impacts people of color more because they can't afford it. So I think we do have some sort of obligation to say even if the law is supplied equally, it's implicitly hurting people who can't afford bail. Because the playing field is that. So I think since we have this diversity on this committee, I think part of that charge is also saying that this is why it impacts those people so much. And that's why we're recommending this change, even if the law is, OK, everything's set to $100 or $1,000. Because it does. I mean, if you're a person of privilege and you can just throw out $1,000 without blinking an eye and you're on bail while some people can't do that. And that's why I'm saying is that's where how we're going to make change. Because if we just go in and say, this is applied equally, and yes, it's $1,000 for everybody, they're going to say, OK, that's equal. Move on to the next thing. And you know what I mean? We have an obligation to bring that to light. Oh, I think we do. I mean, you just made me think of one other thing that I wanted to talk about, which is I see a little bit of a threat and some of the different bullet points about consistency isn't exactly the right word, but the results of the same type of criminal case in different counties in this state can be wildly different. And that's because state's attorneys are elected and take wildly different approaches to criminal justice in their counties. Different judges take different approaches and impose different sentences, wildly different sentences for the same thing. And so on the one hand, that's a problem. But on the other hand, people like the other end of the spectrum is sentencing guidelines. And we know to your point, sentencing guidelines also are a problem because, for example, in the federal system, the guidelines for crack cocaine were much, much higher than for powder cocaine. And that disproportionately impacted communities of color as opposed to white people. So I do think it's important. I don't know the answer. But I do think it's important to point out that there are layers to this. And it becomes overwhelming, I feel like, when we talk about it. Because really, we're trying to come up with ways to achieve equality in the criminal justice system when the criminal justice system is actually the end of the problem. It's not the beginning. And so sometimes, right now, I feel like this whole discussion is somewhat futile because no matter what we do, I mean, it's not futile. We can do what we can try to do to improve the system that we're talking about. But it is kind of the end. It's not the beginning where the problems are really starting. So that's great. Thank you. So the way I looked at all this stuff is I just have, I was overwhelmed by the document, by the bullet points, by the cross going back and forth. And ultimately, at the end of the day, it equaled for me where we have to understand the proper diagnosis of the problem to understand the cure. I think we can agree with that. And for me, the problem that I see is white supremacy. And that's what you're really talking about. I'm just going to put words to it because I'm brave enough to do that. And if we're not here or here or here going to address the bigger system that's that play, which is white supremacy, that goes into the things you talked about, about the disproportionate crack cocaine that goes into everything we know to exist, if we're not willing to do that and be on the same page, that that's what's actually really going on, then we're not going to get to the cure of what we need to do. So even in this room, some of us are offended by the way we use race or racism or even white supremacy or implicit or explicit. If we are uncomfortable, we should be uncomfortable. Because it's a serious issue. But we can't all get on the same page that the diagnosis is actually white supremacy and what that means and how each of us play into that. Because white supremacy affects us all. It just affects us each differently depending on how we navigate through the world. So when you're talking about that, that brings up a lot of points I had. I think the organization you might be talking about is LEAP, which was law enforcement against prohibition. They would travel around and give flexure rights trainings. And though I think that that is great, I've been a part of those, I've helped host those and I think they're a great initiative, it's not the solution to the problem. Because I know my rights and they haven't helped me yet. So people can have, know their rights and be fueled with that information, but that's not what the problem is. And then again, that's putting it back on the people who are the ones who are most disproportionately impacted. So it's for me, I didn't know my rights, that's why I got jacked up today. Because I didn't know my rights. That's not why I got jacked up today. And so I just, I want us to be careful that I think there's a yes and, I'm not saying that those trainings are good, I think that they need to be complimented with actual training within across the fear of all these departments. And that training includes anti-racist training, all the different, whatever language you wanna use for equity, racism, cultural competency, and those words do matter. But something that actually gets at the root of white supremacy and what's playing out. Because white supremacy is playing out in our policies, it's playing out in our laws, it's playing out in our language, it's playing out in our behaviors, it's playing out in our roles, period. And we keep on talking about data. I'm done with the data conversation because we keep on talking about how to collect data. We, every single piece of data that's come forth to this group, we've all been like, are you serious? It hasn't been anything we haven't known for again, 10, 20 years. We keep on acknowledging we've written reports, we have bills being created. We understand that there's disproportionate treatment, outcomes of facts, behaviors, everything with regards to race. I think we're in agreement of that. So I'm trying to figure out what collecting, so I'm not gonna personally send you to collect more data because I'm trying to understand that yes, the data that we've collected is not a good collection matter. And we know that racism exists and we know that brown and black people are disproportionately being affected and we know that this is going on. So I don't understand the whole data collection when we talk about that. It really confuses me of why we keep going around and around to collect something we already know that exists and that we need to actually do something about it. The other concerns I have is, I agree with basically most of everything that you said, Chief Stevens, and some of the issues you brought up when looking at this other bill that we were looking at of age 381. And certain language that's used. I mean, even in the languages that we create and in the laws and the systems and the bills, it has a lot of racist language in it. And so as that gets funneled out from bill to bill or committee to committee, we are inherently putting that back out and putting that on ourselves and we're perpetuating that cycle even amongst ourselves in this group. So even in some of the documents we read and some of the bullet points, there was a question about what does minority areas mean? That's an example. So what does that mean? And we could all have a different example of what that means. But when we start putting language to things and we don't have the same understanding what that language means and then we don't understand how that language oppresses people or how it hurts people, that's a real problem. So I'm concerned about how we use the language, how we explain the language and what we mean by the language when we're using these things. I'm concerned about, I try to do the whole comparison thing and that is like, yeah, we're all like trainings and this and that but some of the things that came up for me is discretion. The huge amount of discretion that the department has across the board in so many different ways from being elected to the officer gets to the side, you get a ticket today or a warning to judges make, I mean, the discretion is unbelievable. And that goes across all of the different categories that we're mentioning and how do we create systems and checkpoints to not have that discretion to or if there is that discretion to be documenting that or to be doing something with that discretion because I found that to be a very serious issue. And so thinking about discretion, I think about oversight. And again, it's internally investigated usually, right? So people are investigating themselves when all of this happens then we still haven't figured out an external accountability system. And so going to the community, I agree that there should be community oversight. I agree with some of the solutions. There have been different oversight committees that have been created in different communities such as my community where I come from, there was a police community committee that was created and I actually sat on that oversight committee but it had no teeth. It had no power. It had no, it had nothing. It had nothing, it was just a body of people that they decided to place there to have a placeholder. And if we're not going to actually listen to the people or engage the people or give the people power then I'm a little bit confused of how we're doing that. I'm concerned that we brought this up numerous times. Again, I'm gonna say it again, not about us without us. And that we have to be at the table. We have to be notified. We have to be there. We have to be part of talking about these solutions within our communities and what is going on and that has to be across the board with everything. Some laws that I personally think they need to be changed is the actual laws of immunity or sovereignty that officers hold. That feeling as though they are in a bubble and there is nothing you can do to flex your rights. Because from what I've learned and discovered from the legal stuff that I've read is that officers are not even considered people, which I found to be very interesting, at least by the language that's being used that I read, is that they're so protected that whenever anything happens that how are you supposed to find justice or how are you supposed to go through that complaint process when at the end it's full blown immunity in these situations. So I have some concerns around the laws and why they're at such a higher level and what happens in those disciplinary realms, like what is going on to where we can't hold our law enforcement accountable for their behaviors. And all of this really equals, and I take point to what you said, is I'm paying our attorneys better wages, yeah. And putting money where our mouths are. Like none of this can happen. I read through this report and I don't have maybe the succinct things that people want me to say because we can say whatever we wanna say, but we're not willing to, one, understand the diagnosis and two, put money to it, we're just gonna be sitting here for another year, doing absolutely nothing. And that's the bottom line. We have to understand what we're really up against, what we're really in, and we have to be willing to morally commit our finances to this. And that means, because everything everybody suggested in their bullet coins basically takes money, basically. So at the end of the day, we're just gonna sit here, oh, how do we get that money? Oh, we can't get that here, all this. Well, we do have suggestions, stop locking so many people up and then you got 80,000 a pop. We do have real suggestions, but nobody's hearing those real suggestions or it's not moving quick enough. And so, again, we have to be able to diagnose the problem and for me, sitting at this table, the problem was white supremacy and how it plays out across all these systems and that might be a hard word for some people to digest and that's okay, we can unpack that later. And money, if this is our moral commitment as the state of Vermont to do this work, then we need to commit our finances to it and we need to stop passing the buck around to somebody else because every time there's something going on, we pass it on to somebody else. It's somebody else's problem within the system rather than us knowing that it's ours. So I think those are the main things that I had to address. That was great. And yeah, I just want more accountability mechanisms and I want people to recognize racism as a public health issue and it's up to our society to make that better. Thank you. This is such a tiny portion of what Sheila just talked about but it just made me think of a question. Pepper, you talked earlier about Tim Ash, I think, proposing. Challenging. Challenging. I just wanted you to share your thoughts with Sherry, please. Okay, to, I know you said something about 250 feet or people. Right, 2022. Okay, is, are the savings from that, the theoretical savings from that, you're marked for anything specific? No, they're not. I think that number, the 250 people was chosen because that's roughly the number of people that are out of state, so it'd be pretty much bringing everyone back home. Yeah. Hey, can you say that out loud? I'm looking at the camera again. I don't have to say it. He's the one that did the challenge and that's his talking point. I'm sorry if that question didn't come to mind and I wanted to ask it. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a really good question because we, exactly, we can be doing all that and then it not actually benefit us in moving forward in the direction that we need to be used for something else. Well, I mean, so it is something to keep in mind that if we're talking about trying to reduce the number of people incarcerated, we can certainly make recommendations about what those savings should, how those savings should be funneled back to addressing what we're charged with trying to address. Write that down. Yes. Yes. You know, and I also, I mean, just to think, you know, not to disagree with Sheila because she has a lot of great points, but I know I took law enforcement in college and I wouldn't want to be a police officer right now because they're always being quarterbacked, you're making split decisions and then big cities say maybe not as much as Vermont but like Chicago or something. I mean, you walk out that door every day that you're just going to be killed just as well as people on the street. And I can tell you being in the service and being trained to be under fire, you react and sometimes you have a lot of trauma yourself. That's why police officers have one of the highest rate of suicide, right? I'm just saying is I don't want to pin it. Yes, there's bad apples sometimes and yes, I think recruiting more officers of color as well, putting the money into reaching out to the inner cities or these places that really have a lot of population of people of color to bring people in, I think to be part of that conversation. I don't know how much, I know you guys recruit for people to bring people of color to be diverse. I don't know of any Abenaki police officers yet, but I'm just saying is I think that putting those dollars into recruiting in areas where people of color live or having some kind of intern on the job, try to pull people into that, into that realm will be tremendous. I mean, I agree there's some bad immunity where sometimes they say I felt threatened and now I'm off the hook. But, you know. I just mean any accountability. But I also think, I want to be also fair on the flip side that I know, I don't know about Vermont because I'm not in the police force, but I know out in other areas, they're under tremendous pressure and suicide rates and secondary quarterbacking. I mean, I'm not defending either way. I'm just saying is I don't want to put and all thinking that cops just do whatever they want because there has been some that are prosecuted for different things, but. And I hope I didn't give that impression. No, no, I just want to clarify it. Because, no, no, I'm just saying, but I just want to. And I will say that, I will say that's it. Yes, and every day I walk out of my door as a brown person, I'm under attack. And so, and I don't get paid for it. So, valid. And it's valid on the other side, too. You know, I see, we see those banners that say, we were conquered, you know what I'm talking about. I do. Okay, you know where they're pointing that at, right? Because we were here first. Okay, so we won't go down that road because I don't want to give them any press. We understand, I know what you're talking about. But not quite as bad because of. Oh, in a different way. In a different way. No, but you know what I'm saying. We walk that walk, but we all walk it in a different way. Major. Major? Yes, I'm here. Do you, do you, I think you're the, we were hoping for your bullet points. I think we're at a quarter of age and we were hoping to hear from you, too. So, since I've read all of the other comments, I'm not sure that they are very commonalities. I think it's a difficult thing to learn a lot about data in our own process over the years. But I do think that standardization of data collection, if that is a road that we're going to recommend, I think the standardization of it has to occur because otherwise we're really making things very difficult. It's very hard to measure. And I did hear Sheila earlier say that data doesn't really matter. It's like, why do we need to have data to show us what we already know? And I hear that, but there certainly has been a lot of talk about data. And I think it's, you know, it's certainly something that can inform us around improper practices and or can give us a starting point to dig deeper. So if we are to make data recommendations, I do agree with all the bullet points or comments that have to do with some way to standardize and some way to start at the beginning and follow people through to the end and see where they end up. I think David, Chair, had some bullet points right then again, but we're there. He's not here at the moment. He had, he was called away. The person enters the criminal justice system. It's like, it's so late in the stage of things. I think that was really profound, raising and training around not just our conscious bias, but I think we have to talk about these kind of things. And, you know, police have made some big steps in terms of sort of points in the criminal justice and juvenile justice system. But I think there has to be a lot more about this more, our decisions when we have discretion. What that will lose trust and legitimacy as a system or as players in the system if we don't have mechanisms. I don't know what those all look like. And I think no police accountability, police accountability, because I feel quite some time and feeling like we do, like Stakely's has an accountable system and other people would argue that it isn't. And so I don't want to have any type of argument with that. But I do think the overarching point is mechanisms that people can believe in, which is, you know, the complaint mechanism that I think is we're cast with as a, as a buddy's point. So I think it's OK because we're just, we're trying to get someplace to start. Yeah. We'll be doing, I mean, we're going to, whatever I come up with, obviously everyone's going to edit and rip apart and we'll add and subtract and do that calculus. This is not something that we can just have lots of other responsibilities and full-time jobs and then just leave it to a panel on its own. And I think we can do a darn good job of being nice and valued as, you know, on its own to run these committees and be paid a good wage to work with all the stakeholders. And, you know, I guess my point is just that this isn't something we can just quickly come up with. This is a problem that came over to have more dedicated personnel who really. Great. Thank you, Jeff. First off, I have to agree entirely with Sheila, but I linearly connect money with people as the major was just saying. We just, I think people desire to be done here. I don't think anyone's really in the time of money or the time. Sorry to interrupt, but can you just put the phone a little bit closer over there? Sure. It's coming. Sorry about that, Major. I say people think about you, Nicky. Oh, no. OK. I don't know if that's what you meant, Sheila, but that's what I feel the money would be most useful for. OK. On the other hand, data, if you look at Burlington and the UVM study, just one disparity, people of color tickets versus warnings spoke very clearly and loudly to me. The disparity was enormous in Burlington for that. So I'm not willing to cast all data aside. I think that one actually hit the chief pretty hard in Burlington and he made it. Much better collection. Yeah, and did next time around. So it was a good piece. I've got some questions. Maybe Bill Tennant can help me out with this. Is lodging still directly connected to, quote, ties to the community as it was when I was on the road? It's gotten a little bit more. Now you're going directly to judges. That's to take more things into consideration. Seems to me that's a direct line again to stepping in the system. When I look at all of this, I can't look at any of it because it's so huge, it's all encompassing. So what I try to look at is how do we make entry into that pipeline, which is the criminal justice system, less disparate. That's all I try to think of because I can't look on the broad, broad issues. And pipeline entry in terms of limiting people's, the rest of their lives, is perhaps a look at the definition of felony, which closes almost all the major dogs in your life forever. And certainly addresses the major's issue of crimes against women, threats against women. But misdemeaned in a felony can also be how much is steal when you shop with it, right? And that to me. So I say crimes against people, crimes against property, is always the way I would rather see it. I mean, you could win it at $1,000. No, I don't even know what it is. It used to be $500. It used to be $500. It's $900, but those types of laws don't get reviewed for decades and decades. And values change so dramatically at that time. $500 is a pair of little nikes, right? So that's a felony. I don't know if it is here. You'd have to educate me. But they're ugly too, but that's another thing. So that's one area that I see. Again, I'm thinking of avoiding the pipeline in terms of accountability to police. I prefer it. I went pretty long on this with the ACLU last board meeting. I'd rather talk about transparency about what's going on. If I get picked up for anything, I'm on page three of the paper or on channel three news. When the police shoot someone, you don't even get their names. Gene Duplis was the first one I ever saw, which was this morning, which ours is released in 24 hours usually. Yeah, yeah, OK, but there's a lot of cases where there's no transparency in what really happened. And I think accountability, I think transparency is a better way to go in it. And then to discuss accountability when we have better transparency. You can't even get half of the body cams. But if they get you on the car camera, that's in the news the next morning, OK? That's not transparent. I'll be quiet here in a second. Basically, when I see bail, I see it bias, but it's not just that people of color is biased against the poor. And we're much better off addressing it in that fashion. Obviously, it's bias against people of color because the entire movie, the entire apparatus, affects people of color or Native Americans who may not be of color or much. The color we're red. Yeah, OK. Yeah, but you know what I'm saying, right? Chief, it's like, but it affects the poor people, right? And the Native Americans who suffer the same poverty that people of color do. And so I say this would be more effectively addressed by us as poverty, bias against poverty, which certainly covers all the people of color, all the single women who can't make it work, whatever color they are. And again, it's to me, I look at the thing that the problem is so big and it's so ingrained. And we've got people in this country making deals and parachutes for $100 million. They've got a lot of power. Let's just, if we can affect entry, then we can affect something. And that's really, I know that's perhaps a foolish dream. But once you're in that pipeline, you're screwed. Once you get in that pipeline, you can never maybe climb out again. And so you and I both know that I could, if I was on the road and I was being a jerk and I didn't like someone for whatever reason, and sometimes it was a woodchuck who had an attitude. All you got to do is when the warning snatch at their hand, they whip their hand back, resisting arrest, right? That's the charge. It's that easy to make. I'm not saying I ever made it, but it's been made on me when I was a kid, right? I just sat you. You're going to pull back. Resisting arrest. That's a charge. And it's an easy one to create after you step inside their space, right in their face, and crank them up. So what I'm saying is it's entry. And I'll be quiet, though. It's entry against the poor, which covers everybody, OK? And I think that may be a battle. I don't know if people disagree with me, but that may be where we need to fight the battle, OK? One thing I want to mention, too, is that, and this may be, I don't think it's out of line, but I'm glad you're here. Because I know you missed some. We're talking about the overwhelming work this is, and that one panel can't change it overnight. And to the major's point is you really need people to work on this. So since this is the AG panel, why couldn't the AG create a position or have a position that they haven't built and task people with this? Same thing, maybe with the state's attorney. Maybe the law enforcement community has a person dedicated to work on this kind of issue. Same thing with the Department of Corrections, who obviously at least is not here anymore. But maybe there are people already designated. But I mean, why couldn't this panel, without having to go to the legislature saying, oh, we've got to create a new position with more money, is there a way to convince the departments who have charge over this now to create those or fill an open position with that and just change what their responsibility might be? I don't know the answer to that. But I mean, if you have 100 people now, what's 101? Or if somebody leaves, oh, okay, maybe my budget can't handle that. Okay, somebody leaves, you still have 100, but 99 are working on this, and now that 100 person is focusing on this, just like in maybe your area. Why couldn't this panel ask the departments to do that? I mean, if we really want meaningful change, I mean, we have corrections, we have the state police, we have the attorney general, we have the state's attorney. You know how many five people could just say every one of those departments or even DCF too. Imagine if all those people created one position to handle all of this stuff that we're talking about today. What a difference I would make outside of meeting, I'm just throwing that out there, it's not only could we recommend to the broader community, but why can't we do something about it here within our own committee? Maybe I'm out of line, but. I think it's a decent idea, and I think that we've got 60 to 80,000 a pop from the people that are not going to be in jail to be able to pay them, so. You mean it, yeah, I mean. It's a good question, I think we have, you know, there's a lot of assumptions. Well, I know, but yeah. What do you mean by that? That there are going to be open places and departments that exist at the moment? Well, we have to make that our boundary, right? We have to decide it, because positions are money and money is value. And so we have to understand that we value this work and we value our commitment to doing this work. So we have to create those positions because they're part of our value. So if it's 101, just like Chief Stevens saying, it's a 99, we're working on something else, a two, we're on this, you know? So it's how we do it. I mean, we do that in our personal lives, right? We all have our own personal budgets. We value certain things over others. That might be cable. That might be our Nike shoes. That might be our car. That might be good organic food at the co-op, whatever it is, but we all shift our budgets based on our values of what we have for things. And we have to, as a society and as a state, we have to start committing our values to the money that we need to do things. Well, and as an example too, I hear law enforcement, I don't know about major, I don't want to speak for you, but a lot of times I hear in these meetings, we have a hard time recruiting people that we have a lot of open positions, but we can't fill them for whatever reason. So okay, if you have an open position, even though they may or may not be an officer, maybe that one of those open positions could be reshifted and maybe created to be tackled. I don't know, maybe I'm not lying. We did it. Well, that's what I'm saying, but I'm saying there may be other departments. So I'm not saying, I know you're doing it. I agree with you 100%. It's pretty good, I think Sheila said it. I think I'm still laughing because that's what we did with the FIT position at Darry's and... Right. But yes, they're going to do it. These guys are good. I agree with Sheila's saying. I can step it over. I'm sure you don't need to. I was saying, you'll be out of the curve, no. It's putting value where other agencies need to and I think that's something we've mentioned before is where are these other agencies doing it? They're doing it well and mimic that behavior. Don't make an additional, but how would we encourage that, though, because that's... Do you like the idea, Chief? The only thing to do, I mean... Okay, go ahead. Folks, we're going to start winding up, though, because it's after eight. I think in front of this, it's very not funny. Right, mine is your value, one of your values. It is a reflection of values. I also just want to say it's a sort of basic point that we found some years earlier. When this panel speaks, it will have a really impactful voice. So if you want to make that one of the recommendations, that may really go somewhere. So I just think... Can you, like, bold that one? How many is there? And David said... But when this panel speaks, it will have a powerful voice, and so let's not sort of lose sight of the fact that we, ourselves, sitting in this room, are going to be able to have an impact. Okay, Becca. Rebecca, are you still there? Did you have a final last word? You're... Quick. It's really staticky. Any last words, quick last words? Last words. Okay. I think she said she makes a motion to adjourn. Great. Okay. I will do that really briefly, but can I make the... There's no public commentary. I'm gonna start when I get the minutes scribbling stuff down. I will get that out to people to attack, change, add, so on and so forth. I don't think we need any new business. I think we have plenty of new business. The next meeting will be on the 9th of April, place to be announced. I will send out an email as always. Rebecca's already made a motion to adjourn. Does anyone second it? Second. Motion, all those in favor of adjourning? Aye. Everybody opposed? Anybody abstaining? Please don't. We have adjourned.