 Welcome to Live at 525 with Vermont Interfaith Action. My name is Debbie Ingram. I'm the executive director of VIA. And VIA is an organization that has over 70 member and affiliated congregations who work together to affect systemic change on issues of social justice. And today we have an interesting topic for you about police engagement with the community in one particular neighborhood of Burlington. But I first want to recognize my guest for today, Bill Neil. Bill, would you tell folks who you are? Yes, glad to be back. I'm my second time here before the cameras. Retired pastor, worked as a pastor in many places over the years. But I keep coming back to Vermont and now that I'm retired, I'm back to Vermont for the rest of my days. And I'm even going to plan to make a reservation in the Memorial Garden of First Congregational Church for my final resting place. Glad to be back. You are definitely planning on being a permanent resident. Yes, that's great. Well, we joke, but we have a very important topic to talk about today. And as I mentioned, it's about policing. And this is an issue that came to the forefront really as a result of the George Floyd horror, horrible killing. So several years ago now, we've had a couple of different organizing committees that have focused on racial justice, on the treatment of marginalized communities by police throughout the state. And so we've taken a variety of different steps, haven't we, Bill? You want to go over some of those that we've... Right. Well, normally in our work, we start out by doing a lot of research, inviting people that we identify as having some area of expertise and that larger issue that we're looking at. So in this case, in terms of policing and racial justice, we've talked to police chiefs and officers. We've talked to state police and local entities. We've talked to folks in the justice system, in the courts and the lawyers, etc. And as we got farther along in our conversations, we felt like the most important thing we could add in the life of any local community would be to help local citizens engage in some kind of conversation with their policing agency. And in order to facilitate that conversation, we developed a guide. Several pages focusing on questions that a local community group of citizens might bring to their policing agency for conversation to understand better. How are they dealing with training around racial bias in policing? What are their actual experiences with various persons of different categories? That guide was presented at a public presentation last year. So then the question was how to get it into the hands of local folks and see it get some traction and engage some folks in conversations. Yeah, thank you for that. And I would also just like to point out that we did base a lot of the questions and the categories on the Obama-era guide to 21st century policing. And so yeah, as you say, it's meant to be a way for folks to hold, hold police accountable, but also just really enter into a solid relational interaction with police. There are some questions there about how police deal with the stress of their jobs, which is tremendous. What they love about policing, why they got into it. I really encourage people to try to find common ground and really concentrate on the safety of our neighborhoods. But yes, as you said, we were trying to find ways to get into communities and we were having sort of varying degrees of success. But we are excited to reveal today that we have some traction with the Burlington Police Department. And a lot of that is because we decided to actually partner with another organization. So you want to tell us about that? Yes, one of our very active members in our committee knew of a fellow named Jud Allen. And Jud works with an outfit that he has developed called Healthy Cultures, Education and Research. It is a funded nonprofit that he has organized and developed. His own background is in social science, psychology, and we actually recently found out that he started out as a community organizer in one of his earlier communities. But he is currently working and creating these kinds of dialogues with folks in the Rhode Island area and has some outreach to some other communities, what he's working with. And again, the goal is to engage the local community with their policing agencies in ways to promote public safety. He has developed a very simple, quick, but very helpful questionnaire or survey that is presented to the residents. And as they respond to this survey, they are identifying their primary concerns around the area of public safety. So for example, one community was identified that safe walking to and from school for the school children was the most urgent, important need in that particular neighborhood or community. So this is a wonderful undertaking. We were wondering how to get our guide put into the hands of people that would make a difference. And say, for example, in Burlington, you already have a police commission that's organized. It's part of the community's process of discussion. But then how does it get to the citizens, to the residents in their various neighborhoods? So Jud's survey provides, we think, that in-road, that way to connect locally with the individual residents of a specific neighborhood. Yes, that's such an important point. Because some of the feedback we got about our guide specifically is that some of our questions are kind of heart-hitting and we were sort of asking people to kind of dive in the deep end of the pool. And Jud's philosophy and his questions, his methodology provides a little bit of a softer way to get in. And we're hoping that that will work well. So actually, we brought some slides today to show a little bit more about this plan. So he calls it the safer together solution. And so it's all about neighbors and police co-creating the kind of culture that they want to see in their own neighborhoods. The next slide. So the goals of this simply stated are to build trust. And it's both between the neighbors themselves and with the neighbors and the police. And then secondly, to generate transformational deep and sustained culture change. And that really is Jud's background is in what he calls cultural touch points that help to make change. Things that people can all agree on and that actually by addressing them, it makes an even deeper change. And then thirdly, to adopt a scientific step-by-step approach to reducing neighborhood crime and violence. So thanks for those slides. So we'll be able, we hope to not only broach the subject with the survey, but then to go even deeper. And Jud has some training that he would like to do on the cultural touch points. And then we have training that we would like to do on community organizing techniques. And so I think that this could be, you know, we're really hoping, we're excited, right? We're really hoping that this will be the kind of process that Burlington, you know, could really use that could really benefit from a long term. So let's talk a little bit, though, about how the process began in terms of getting. We do have kind of authorization from the powers that be. And you've been there every step of the way, Bill. So you want to tell us about how we did that? Well, we had originally introduced our guide itself to the police commission so that they would realize that that was a tool that might be available in some form to be put to use here in the Burlington area. But as we started working with Jud, and then we formed this partnership, we first met with the co-chairs of the police commission. And they said, well, you know, we want Bayon also to be aware of this through the Public Safety Committee of the City Council. So the Public Safety Committee includes representatives of the police commission, but other counselors and other folks from the community. So we met with them and gave our presentation. And then they referred us back to the police commission as a whole so that we could then be under their immediate sort of awareness, supervision, if you would say. So we met with them finally again for the final time for an authorization. They're not able to take this on as their project with us doing it on their behalf. But they were happy to have us do it and to have us do it with their okay, with their approval that we proceed. So it's our project and we'll be responsible for the entire effort as it goes through. And they will be completely in the loop. And of course, as Debbie has said, it's not just the neighbors that we'll be talking to, but the policing folks, the police officers and members of the policing department also will be invited to take the survey and participate, so that when we come to an understanding of what those priorities are, it will be a conversation, an ongoing conversation with not only the residents, but also the policing folks themselves. Yeah, so we are very pleased that we've gotten such good cooperation from the Police Commission and City Council as well. And yeah, I think it is a really exciting experiment, I guess. I have to be honest and say that we don't exactly have evidence of this whole process of us working together with, I mean, Judd has done some of this in the past in places, but this really focusing on policing is kind of new for him as well. So yeah, we're anxious to make sure that the people in neighborhoods of Burlington who may have felt unheard or left out of discussions, who may feel that because of some systemic biases or practices that aren't particularly favorable to them, that they've been singled out or they've had particular problems, I think we should just be candid about all these kind of challenges that we all face. But it really is our hope that folks will feel, everyone will feel listened to, that we'll be able to come up with a new definition even of public safety so that it really includes everyone. You know, there's certainly critics who say that the whole discussion around public safety is that, well, there's public safety for some people, some privileged people in our cities and towns all across the United States, but what's safe for some people is incredibly dangerous for other members of society. So we want to make sure that we're really honoring our values here in Vermont, which is that we want everyone to feel safe, to feel welcome. We want everyone to be able to flourish in our towns and cities, and I think that's part of what we love about Vermont. Absolutely. Yeah, so first of all, we're going to start with this survey. So we'll go back maybe to the process a little bit more specifically, and we are currently recruiting teams from our different congregations, many of them downtown Burlington congregations, to try to get them to go door to door. You don't hear that a lot, maybe. We are going to do some advertising on social media and websites and that kind of thing, right? But we do want to go door to door. But let's take a look at that survey, shall we? So we have slides there, so it's not that many questions, and basically the way it's going to be set up is that you state your level of agreement. So either you strongly agree, or you agree, or you're neutral, or you strongly disagree with all of these different statements. So you can walk safely. You can walk the streets safely day or night. We have safe workplaces is another one. We're safe from environmental pollution. The fourth one is marginalized groups, such as women, religious minorities, people of color, and LGBTQ plus are safe from assault and harassment. Another statement is we care for and protect those struggling with homelessness, mental illness, and substance abuse. So next slide. Then we go on and ask about whether people agree about the fact that property crimes are extremely rare. Are they? That violent crimes are rare, that our children are safe, and that people drive safely. And then I believe there's one more group. So then we also want to look at relations. So do people agree that police in my neighborhood have good relationships with all the neighbors? Do they agree that there's good coordination between police and other community service organizations? Do they agree that police and local government keep neighbors well informed about crime, violence, and safety? And then finally, do neighbors actively address crime, violence, and safety, and not just leaving it up to the police? So tell us about what's going to happen when we go door-to-door, Bill. Well, the first big challenge was to choose an identifiable neighborhood that we could focus our attention on. We initially came up with one idea, and that seemed a little bit maybe not the best, and then we tried another one, and that was way too big. It was a little bit like the mama bear and the papa bear and Goldilocks. I think we finally have settled on what is probably the most appropriate way to proceed. So we've identified the King Street neighborhood, which includes Maple Street, King Street, the sort of the immediately south of the downtown section of Burlington. There are individual homes. There are multiple dwelling apartment buildings. There are longtime Burlington residents, and there are new Americans. There are a nice, really good stretch of variety of Burlington residents in this area. And it's confined to a sort of a 10-square-block area, which would allow, hopefully, our volunteer canvassers to make very good contact with a number of residents. We have identified three visiting times on Wednesday afternoon, September 27th, or the early evening from 5.30 to 7.30, and then two times on Saturday, September 30th, 10 to noon in the morning and two to four in the afternoon. Both, all three of these canvassing times will begin with some get-together training, and we'll be going out in teams of two. Do I have it correctly? Are we having tablets for access? Yes, we do. We even have tablets. We're quite technologically advanced. Most of us, I would have been going with my clipboard in a piece of paper, but we'll figure out how to run the tablets. We'll do as many as we can in a good solid hour of door-to-door and then go back to our gathering place for a debriefing time for some refreshments and see how we did. So there are three separate occasions each time in groups of two, each time with the training and then the final debriefing to end. So really a solid hour of canvassing for each of these three time slots. Yes, thanks for that description. We really want to make sure that we reach out to people. It's not incumbent upon folks. We will post it on social media. We'll have links on websites because the whole survey can be accessed completely online. And I want to make sure everybody realizes it's totally confidential in terms of your name will not be associated with your answers and nobody will ever know how you've answered. And there are no right or wrong answers either because it's all about your opinion and your own personal experiences around the questions that are being asked. But we do want to make sure that we're being very proactive in terms of trying to reach people and not just do it in kind of a passive way where it's just like posted and it's up to you to figure it out. And then we're also hiring interpreters, different languages, folks who don't speak English as their first language. And we also wanted to not just translate the written survey and just say, well, here, we wanted to actually hire people that will be part of these canvassing teams who will be able to explain in somebody's native tongue in the same way that we explained to native English speakers so that we can actually have a conversation about it and fill out the survey together. So we're looking for folks who can be interpreted in Swahili and Nepalese, Burmese, Vietnamese, French, and Mai Mai, Smolian. We're thankful to Judd's Foundation for the grant that is providing the funding for these interpreters for the refreshments and snacks, et cetera. We're actually spending some very well-intentioned dollars to help this happen. And nothing is being paid for by the city or by any other fundraising process. It's Judd's money. It's going to a good purpose. That's right, yes. Thanks for bringing that out. The police commission seemed particularly pleased about that. Nobody has to appropriate any money. I'm sure at every level of Burlington's they're happy with that. That's right, that's right. Well, it shows the fact, too, that minor faith action is a community-based group. We are community members who are engaging in this, right? You've already said, Bill, that you're a resident. You've come back here from living in other places and this is where you call your home. But there are folks like me, too, who don't live directly in Burlington, but I consider Burlington to really be part of my community. I live out in Williston, but I come in to Burlington to go to work, to have doctor's appointments, to see concerts and plays, to eat at restaurants, to visit with my friends, to go shopping. I mean, it's very much a central, a center of our social life in Vermont and I think not just for people in Chittenden County, but all over the state, right? So, yeah, we think of it as our community. One of our instructive wisdom pieces from our police chief was Burlington is really Vermont's downtown. And that includes in the policing department because the city has this police department, but when folks come from every which way, and that's true in Williston, too, the drivers that go through Williston, et cetera. So I think all of Chittenden County really realizes that the policing issues are much bigger than just the immediate residents of their local communities, which adds a whole other dimension to working together. Absolutely, absolutely. Yes, and the survey, too, is a first step. We want to make sure that people understand that. I mean, that's our primary focus because it's coming up real soon that we're going to do this door-to-door canvassing. But then once we get the survey completed by hopefully a fairly large number of people in that neighborhood, we will tabulate the results and we will get back to the people who filled out the survey, of course, but also other people in the neighborhood who weren't able to do that. And we're going to hold a community meeting first to reveal the results. And from that, we're hoping that one major issue will surface as, oh, this is obviously something that is of top concern. And as you already mentioned, the police are filling it out also. We've asked them to do that, and Chief Merred is cooperating with that. So that'll be very interesting on it to pick an issue. And then what's going to happen after that? Well, those that are interested and available will then form a task force designed to address that very specific hands-on issue that has emerged from the community itself. And that task force will meet, will look at resources, look at possible answers, solutions, fixes, and using judges' touch points of working for deep-level cultural change. We'll see how we can make the changes that would enhance that issue to provide greater public safety on that specific concern. And hopefully, in six months or so of meetings and effort, there will be a celebration of some significant substantial change that will affect the quality of our human lives in that community. To be quite honest, I say this as a longtime pastor, but it did bring tears to my eyes when I thought of this vision that we could actually address an issue, make a change that would change people's lives for the better. There's nothing in my view more empowering and more important than that kind of effort. Yes, yeah, thank you. I know exactly what you mean. The idea that, because as people of faith, we do hope to bring healing and reconciliation. That's one of the objects, one of the goals of all of our different faith traditions. And the IA does encompass Judaism and Catholicism and Protestantism and Islam and Hinduism and Buddhism and Unitarian Universalism. And all of those faith traditions emphasize bringing people together and respecting the dignity of all people and trying to help resolve conflict and bring reconciliation to communities. So it's really, and that's what we do, strive to do in the IA all the time, but this really has been kind of more obvious how, if it all comes together and if it all works well, how wonderful it could be if it actually comes to fruition. Yeah, yeah. And then this becomes, we hope, a repeatable process that having done it with some level of success and accomplishment in the King Street neighborhood area, then perhaps a year from now or less, we would be looking at another set of streets and neighborhoods in order to start all over again and see what that neighborhood is looking at as their issues and concerns. And not only in Burlington, but this process then can become a model for other communities throughout our state, throughout our region, throughout our area of interest and work. We have something here that we hope will be a repeatable process for making improvements that make a difference. Absolutely, yes. That's also very exciting to think that, yeah, the old North End, all the different parts of Burlington, we can also repeat it in the King Street neighborhood and we start over again and pick a different issue and focus on that. But yeah, I was just talking today we have organizers now of Runner of Faith Action does in different parts of the state and I was talking to our organizer in Brattleboro just today and he is waiting with a bated breath to see how this turns out. He's excited for us because that might be something that can be used in Brattleboro. We also have an organizer in Bennington where they've had a lot of challenges too around their policing and their judicial system. So, yeah, so we'll see but we are hopeful. Of course, as people of faith, we are hopeful people. Okay, if I had hope. That's right, there you go. So, all goes together. Great. Well, yeah, so I think that maybe we just kind of close out our time here by saying how much we appreciate the police commission and all the work that they've been trying to do. We've been following their work and this whole idea about community, community oversight, community engagement. I think it's really the key to having police departments that work well for everybody and we appreciate that our Burlington Police Commission has reached out and has definitely focused on that and seen us as not as like competition or anything to be feared but pleased to have us do this. We hope it will be a win-win for the neighborhood and the policing folks as well. Yes, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And, yeah, and we do want to hear from the police themselves too. That's also really something that we want to stress that we, as you said earlier, we interviewed so many different police chiefs as we were preparing this and heard a lot about analysis of data. Nowadays, that happens more and more. We hear about them being much more focused on scientific methods of really verifying how people are treated by things that can be tracked but then also having that sense of qualitative analysis of what people's experiences are. So we're looking forward to bringing all that together as well. Well, great. Well, if you want to find out more about this project or about anything to do with the VIA, please visit our website. And if you live in that area in the King Street neighborhood, please come answer your door when we come knocking and stay tuned to hear the results of the survey and then the next steps. So thanks very much, Bill. It's been a great conversation. Amen. And thanks to everybody at home. Bye-bye.