 I mean, I'm sorry, I just to hide, this is above my pay grade. No, it's not anymore. Do you know why we didn't define necessary? Because I'm looking at the California statute, which this is modeled after, and they did define more necessary. Do they define it in the introduced version, or the as... Yeah, I'm doing actually a comparison between introduced, at least in the introduced... I'm in the introduced California bill. So it did not wind up in the version as passed by California, the definition of necessary. But why not define it necessary? I don't know why they didn't wind up defining it. My understanding of that bill is that it was introduced in a way that got a lot of pushback, and it went through a lot of... I think that it lost a lot of support along the way, and it marginally... I don't think it was ever fully supported by law enforcement. I think they didn't oppose it by the time it passed. Do you need help to define necessary? I think that it would... In the statute, I heard the bill, I should say. Just like any time you define something, it leaves it in the hands of the legislature as opposed to letting the court decide. I think if you do not define something, you're essentially leading it up to the courts to decide what it means. I don't want to qualify them there. I don't know about that, but if you do define a term, it limits what a court can do when you're doing that term. Or if you just don't define it, it allows them to interpret it. Right, as long as it's constitutional. So, since the intent of this bill, I think, was to draw out the conversation around interactions between law enforcement and people in the mental health crisis and necessary in the defense of human life, does that also include the life of the person who's having the confrontation with law enforcement? I would think so. I mean, I think that's how it's phrased, yes. So, I'm wondering if there's anything about this that meaningfully changes the interaction when someone is threatening suicide and whether law enforcement feels the need to use deadly force to preserve human life. That's an interesting question. I take it that you mean use deadly force against a person who is threatening suicide? That person. I struggle to see how that would preserve a law enforcement officers. I think that if a person is threatening suicide and a law enforcement officer, I don't think anything about that language would direct a law enforcement officer to take a person's life to prevent them from committing suicide. But would there be the equal justification of that choice to use deadly force, even if the threat to human life was the suspect threatening their own life? Right. I imagine it may lead to law enforcement needing certain trainings about how to manage those kinds of interactions. If the subject was threatening suicide, was holding one or more hostages and threatening them as well, I could see it coming into play then certainly. Yes. People can threaten to commit suicide themselves, but it's where they point the gun in the end. It makes a difference on what the officer has to do. So it's my understanding that the standard and the thresholds that we have now have been needed to be constitutionally corrected and lying, even without going down this route. It's a constitutional standard. The legal standard is a constitutional one, so it's been developed by the courts, yes. And the current standard that we're using currently has proven that to be. Right. In Vermont, it's also whether or not law enforcement's actions are objectively reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. The other question that we've been on, so I saw Julio float his head in those videos. So one of our other witnesses will not be back until 145. And so there are a couple of other witnesses who I don't believe have presented themselves yet. Jacob and Rachel, do you? I emailed them earlier to see if they would be going to even call in and go through you to make those arrangements. So Michael Shirley, are you able to join us and answer a few questions about how? Absolutely. Let's change things from your perspective. It's fine. Show me the move out of the way. Let's hear from you first. For the record, Mike Shirley, Commissioner of Public Safety, each time I come there's another set of testimonies, so there's a larger context of things to respond to. What I don't know at this stage is, is the goal to reduce the number of encounters that end fatally with police? Or what's the end game? Obviously that's our end game every day. So the goal is to do that through policy. This is not going to do that. This isn't going to change anything except the litigation landscape. If you pass a law around use of deadly force, we will not know for the better part of the decade what the actual impact of that law is, because we will spend millions of dollars litigating each one of these events on a chance that plaintiffs' counsel can win money as a result, because we won't know how to define the terms even if you define the terms. I should back up another step. On topics of criminal justice and law enforcement, I would challenge you to find someone who's more progressive with a small p than I am. I'm willing to try anything to improve operations to get a better result for the taxpayer, a better result for the organizations I've worked with in, but this is a construct that I have a hard time wrapping my head around. It's a system that's not broken. By that I mean the construct within which we operate relative to the use of force. The outcomes, we are always looking for better outcomes, but I would submit that as I testified in part in the joint session, what is broken in the systems is something else. We have folks that we are encountering who are in far deeper crisis that face far greater challenges than we ever have in the past, and that is leading to worse and worse outcomes. Despite the fact that we keep increasing training, we keep increasing the tools available, the physical tools available to law enforcement officers, we keep increasing the number of officers we're able to place at a particular scene, and the results continue to be poor because the other side of the equation we have not touched. We have not created a good mental health construct. We keep eroding the efficiency, the efficacy of the criminal justice system, we keep eroding accountability, and frankly we're dealing with folks that in many instances are suicidal, and if you look at a cross-section of these fatal encounters, they're looking for a way to end their own lives. What you're not looking at when we enter these conversations is the thousands of events that happen every year that are successful. It's the four or five or six that happen every year that are unsuccessful. I'm going to tell you a story about, that's fully public knowledge because Seven Days wrote about it, but it's about a gentleman named Muhammad Said. He was a new American in Burlington who suffered with protracted, repetitive mental illness, and it was so substantial that he didn't do what we often see, which is repetitive calls for help, claiming they're going to do something, or asking for assistance. He just walked to the Wendyski River Bridge and jumped in, and he was saved, brought to the hospital. We held on to him. The collective system held on to him for a period of several days after which he was no longer a danger to himself, so he was let go. Two weeks later, he had a new apartment on Riverside Avenue. He told the police and was very overt in what he said was going to happen. He was going to force the police to shoot him. He was going to come out with a gun. He asked that we apologize to the officers and their families for what he was going to force them to do. The nature of the response, because we knew exactly what we were walking into, was completely different than the unknown, which is typical of what was going to happen. So the scene was very well lit. He stayed on the phone with crisis negotiators for a period of time, and eventually emerged from his front door with what he claimed was going to be a firearm, but because it was nighttime and the scene was so well lit, we could see it was a cell phone. So he was not shot. He wasn't shot with a beanbag. He wasn't tased. He was just taken into custody without any significant effort because we were able to see that it was a ploy to get law enforcement to kill him. So we drive into the hospital again. He spends two weeks at the hospital. He's now made two as overt as they can be efforts at taking his own life, one using law enforcement as the instrumentality of that effort. And two weeks later, he is back out, and we didn't hear from him for a period of time until, I think it was about two months later. This is going back a few years now, but the neighbors in his new apartment began to smell something that didn't seem right. He had finally actually taken the action he found away, and it was his body that was found rather than being fished out the river or being saved as a result of a law enforcement response. There is a significant cross-section of the events that end fatally in encounters with police that are suicide. If you were to take those out of this equation, you can count on one hand, typically far less than one hand, the number of fatal encounters of law enforcement in Vermont in any given year. Now one is too many, but we are putting training, policy, hiring practice, supervision, data collection, new tools. We're investing millions of dollars every year in trying to find better outcomes. Changing the constitutional standard that has stood the test of time is not the answer. It is only going to lead to similar bad outcomes, but much higher price tag for Vermont taxpayers as a result. All that said, I have a variety of information on the constitutional standard that's sort of a base of training to give you some sense of how this actually works. The overview of the constitutional standard was good, but it's a fraction of one percent of what we actually train and what the various case law actually says. It is incredibly robust in its guidance. At the highest level, some actions stop, and if there are questions, take those, but if not, I'll sort of walk you through how we operationalize this standard. So I'll admit, I've probably watched too much mainstream TV and in doing so, you know, watched events, you know, television shows with police involved and thinking in a situation that might have taken place here in Vermont, why don't they just, you know, shoot them in the shoulder or kneecap or, you know... Shoot the gun out of his hand. Maybe not to that extent, but instead of going for the body mask, which I'm not sure you can probably address this, is that the training or...? It is, and the reason is simple. It's human physiology. Sharp shooters, if they were a sharp shooter's ability to hit a small target is pretty limited to say nothing of a handgun, which has a very short barrel. Police officers are reasonable shots, but the premise that we employ these, you know, tactical operators who are going to be shooting the apples off people's heads is not reality. There are a couple that are like that, but for the most part that's not the case. So it is always the center of visible mass. We are shooting to stop. You often hear in the movies and television shows it's shoot to kill. That is absolutely not the case. It is you're shooting for the center of visible mass to stop whatever the harmful action that is occurring from occurring. The center of visible mass may be a leg. If someone is what we call bladed, they're around a corner and they keep taking shots at you, but they've exposed a leg. You're going to shoot for the center of visible mass. You're shooting for the leg. But if they're standing in a standard three-point stance about to fire a weapon at you or they're coming at you with a baseball bat or a knife or they're pretending or really taking a weapon from in back of them these things occasionally happen where they're doing this and there isn't anything there except a cell phone or wallet. But based on the circumstances, and I'll get back to that in a second there's a shot for more fire. It's always the center of visible mass to stop the action. It's not for any other reason. It's trying to stop what's happening. I'm going to say on that topic, so this motion that sometimes you will see in news coverage of these events, typically knock on wood outside in Vermont. One of the ways, this is not a constitutional structure but one of the ways we have historically trained on this topic is to use a triangle called ability, opportunity, and jeopardy. So how do you determine objectively whether the person that you're facing poses a risk of death or serious bodily injury to the officer, to another person, or to themselves? And then what is the standard of force that you can use as a result of that? So ability, opportunity, and jeopardy. Do they have the ability to cause death or serious bodily injury to you or to another person? Are they carrying a knife, a gun, a baseball bat, another implement that could do that? Do they have the opportunity? So are they within range? If they have a knife and they're 60 feet away, they don't have the opportunity to pose that threat. And then the third piece is their jeopardy. So it might be someone walking down, we used to deal with this with some frequency in Burlington, someone who's carrying an AR-15 down the middle of Church Street, they have the opportunity, they have the ability, but there is no jeopardy. They haven't done anything to indicate there a danger. But if they were to unsling that weapon and say, I'm going to kill you, you're now justified in using lethal force, which typically is a firearm, but it should be noted that in this construct of law that we've been given by the courts over the years, it could be a vehicle, it could be a flashlight, it could be a radio, it could be anything that we can use to stop someone that has a likelihood of causing a death or serious bodily injury under the circumstances. That would be legal under that objective standard. So ability, opportunity, jeopardy. Do they have the ability, do they have the opportunity, have they done something that places you in jeopardy? It's not always in the moment either. It is, the use of domestic violence has been a topic on another bill for the last couple of weeks. Let's say John Smith has just tried to break into his girlfriend's house, he's fleeing, screaming, I'm going to kill you, he's got a weapon, he's got a firearm, we'll make it easy, it gets more interesting if he's got another type of weapon he's got, that objective standard becomes more and more complicated, right? He's got that weapon, he has indicated he's coming back to kill her, can we shoot him? Can we shoot him in the back as he's running away? It depends on the circumstances, but based on the very simple construct I've just given you, we are likely justified in shooting him in the back to stop that action, to prevent him from coming back and carrying out something that could cause death or serious bodily injury to another person. All of those examples are fragments of why, if you change the standard we won't even have the ability to train on this because we will not know, even if you define certain terms, there will be no way to know how the courts are going to interpret those things. And because use of force for everything else remains a Fourth Amendment constitutional construct, we'll actually end up with two different standards. We'll have a standard for the use of force and everything else, and we'll have a standard for the use of deadly force, and we'll now have to train 1,100 full-time law enforcement officers and hundreds of others how to use two different systems. That's not a suggestion that you take this construct and place it onto the rest of use of force because that gets even more complicated. I feel like I should take a break because that was all like one long breath because there's so much information and I'm fearful I'm going to run out of time. What else would be useful? At what point do officers decide that using a firearm is the best weapon versus something else like a taser or a bag or whatever another means of force that is not lethal? It's a great question and there's a million variables to that and it depends on the circumstances. So are you in Burlington or South Burlington or Winooski where we can put multiple officers at the scene at the same time? Or are you in Essex County where the single Essex County sheriff or the single trooper is going to be there for 45 minutes on their own? And it's based on what's the best information you have at any given moment in time? Do you know that the subject is presenting an object or weapon that might cause death or serious bodily injury? In that case, there's no need to progress the standard of use of forces. There is no need to always progress from verbal commands through all the various layers. There's been all kinds of different training models. The continuum, the latter. Right now I believe it's a continuum or training. You don't have to progress and hit each different section before you get to the ability to deploy lethal force because you may not be able to do that. Now that said, if we can put five officers at a scene or if we're controlling the circumstances, we're going through a doorway where we believe there may be a threat on the other side, we can script it so that we have multiple options. So it is not uncommon to go through that doorway with an officer with a can of pepper spray, an officer with a taser, an officer with a beanbag shotgun, and an officer with lethal option and then be able to escalate almost instantaneously depending on the threat that you face. And those things are based on the temporal overlay of the event you're responding to, how much can you slow down that event and how many resources you can put there at a given time. We also use, in the 21st century, a completely other operating methodology, which is leave. 20 years ago that was not an option. And we still face risks in making that decision today because we get sued when we do something and we get sued when we don't do something. It doesn't really matter. There's litigation for everything in the world of law enforcement. So what I mean by that is if a subject today is threatening to harm themselves and they're alone behind a closed door in their house, there is a likelihood we're just going to walk away and let the chips fall where they may and not introduce a threat on our own or a weapon on our own. If we don't know if the person's armed, maybe we do know the person's armed, an escalation when you don't have to. It doesn't always work that way. There may be circumstances again. The reason that this is an objectively fluid standard is the courts set it up this way very intentionally so that the courts can look on a case by case basis and judge the objectivity of the totality of the circumstances because you cannot script all of the variables and the possibilities. When you look retroactively, as the current version of 808 actually would suggest, to look at the officer's conduct, there's no temporal overlay to that. So the officer chose to respond, are we now going to be sued because we chose to respond to an event that with the benefit of 2020 hindsight, someone says, well, you just shouldn't have gone. Well, I can say that about 70% of the things that we go to, but we don't have an option. The moment someone says to us, you can stop responding when people call, we can have a whole different conversation. But that is not the standard in contemporary policing. The buck stops with 911 and getting a police officer for pretty much anything. There are some things we, like I said, will back out of those suicide events. We've started to tell people no to other kinds of things they'll call and say, my 10-year-old won't go to school. Can you help me get them to go to school? We don't do that for the most part anymore. It depends on the circumstances. But you would be amazed at the types of things that people are calling for assistance with. And the moment we can stop responding to some of those things, you're going to change the outcomes on a variety of things, which goes back to my initial premise, which is this is a systems problem. If we build systems that create reproducible results that deliver services at the right time with a combination of compassion, treatment, and accountability, you're going to get better outcomes. But right now, that's not what we're delivering. And we're vilifying police officers at the other end no matter what they do. It's doing too much or it's doing too little. And there is no way for a 25-year-old who we've trained 1,100 hours to be able to solve society's problems. We can't do it in a committee room. They can't do it in a snowstorm on the side of a highway. So what specifically in the system needs to be different in order to curtail this use of lethal force with suspects who are struggling with mental illness? First and foremost, deliver a continuum of mental health response that starts at the field level. Street outreach, we call it. In Burlington, we call it embedded social workers in other places. But instead of getting a police officer to a mental health crisis, you should be getting a crisis worker to a mental health crisis, unless the person already poses a risk. And then there... I think I started to talk about this. It's a piece of testimony in a variety of different committees, but when someone needs a crisis bed, that bed needs to be available to them immediately. So they can access it, get whatever services they need, and come back out. And then, same... There are a variety of levels, and there's no... I tend to look at it in four levels, but this isn't... That's not the official system. When they need a bed, that's more long-term, a placement bed so that they can actually get treatment and not be Mohammed Said actually just getting recycled back to the street, we need to be able to provide that bed. We don't do that right now. Everything from what I call tier one, folks that need longer-term care who have such significant problems that they need help on an ongoing basis, cascade all the way through the rest of the levels of the system, because we don't have the capacity. They wait in emergency departments for 7, 8, 10, 30, 40 days waiting for a bed. Or they just leave, and they end up dealing with law enforcement on the street. Or they end up hurt, and they're not going back in the ER, but either way, it's a bad outcome. That's where it starts. It's about building capacity to respond using the correct instruments instead of everything falling to law enforcement. We're not going to train our way out of this, we're not going to equip our way out of this, and we're not going to create a staff-story construct that's going to change it. When you're facing someone who's got that deep a crisis, you're not going to fix it in the moment. At that moment, if we wait to that point, I could put a team of psychiatrists in front of them. It's not going to change the outcome. They've already decompensated so badly that you're not dealing with a rational actor. They're going to swing the machete at their psychiatrist as much as they're going to swing it at a police officer. You've got to deal with it early. It's a medical model. Prevent, do early intervention, find alternative methods, and then do surgery if all else fails. Thank you. Thanks for coming here. I think highlighting the complexity of this. Being from Wyndham County, I've seen the benefits starting with what Keith Clark did in Bellows Falls and then a sheriff with social workers, and I just heard you talk about that. That was the first one in Vermont? Yeah. In that first year, I think arrests went down 50% in Bellows Falls because she was able to diffuse situations before they got to the point of crisis. One of the challenges is and I see this in my work too, you can't force people into treatment even when they're facing the choices, you lose your children, you go into treatment, they don't make the choice. And I would agree we need more embedded social workers. Do you have a number? I don't have a number because we have to met, part of this goes to the data overlay that I've been talking about as well. We've got to do a better job of measuring the impact of mental health response and opiates and a variety of other things, so I don't want to get mired only in mental health. But data will inform that and then the efficacy, testing the efficacy, like you said, we know the model works because no matter where it's been deployed, you see a reduction in the number of contacts with those folks. You're saving the emergency department resources, you're saving ambulance service resources, you're saving fire safety resources, you're saving law enforcement resources and you're getting better outcomes because you're putting the right thing at the scene at any given time. The numbers though we won't know without, we don't have a statewide test, so that's what now is deploy embedded social workers in as many barracks as possible this year in that, if I'm repeating myself, please let me know to be quiet about work. Department of Mental Health Corrections and Public Safety are all going to co-invest in that this year and then we'll see what happens and then we'll have a better sense of how much more we need to build on going forward. Just to quickly follow up, Christine Bullitt is one of the best we have and Westminster, we were there. I'm not going to change it. It works. Sometimes when someone is good they're kicked upstairs. Performance punishment. We're talking about police officers responding and people getting hurt in some way. How often does the police officer end up getting hurt in this state when they respond to these calls? You don't see it as much in the paper, but I know that one was shot down in Parliament years back. Luckily it's rare that police officers get shot, but here is the 2018 use of force data. 223 unique events across 100 almost 18,000 unique events. This is just for state police. 30 times officers were injured, 72 times subjects were injured. We sort of expect that because we have a tool built and typically the subject doesn't most of the time they're fighting by hand. So we have a variety of weapons. So we have a variety of tools that we get sprayed with cast on or other implements. Dogs. So. So as far as backup goes I draw from your conclusions that the underfunding of the Department of Mental Health and the diversion of those probably beneficial interactions to the Department of Corrections is not a metal earning ceremony here. And you just mentioned that corrections to mental health and public safety are coming together to put something together would it simply be better if we had a state hospital system again that had beds available. They're full now. They're deficient. They're underfunded. It's going to take a while to get there and they let me back up a couple of steps. Well when you back up specifically go to the corrections piece because I've been to the Refland jail a couple of times and I'm not a mental health facility. Part of what's driving 117,711 calls and the increase in fatal encounters and just the overall workload for law enforcement over the last 40 plus years is deinstitutionalization which was the correct policy idea poorly executed when I say that lightly. Not just in Vermont. This is a nationwide problem. It's a failed promise of alternative treatment methodology. We're going to treat you in the community. We're going to wrap around you. We're going to provide field supports. We're going to reinvest the dollars we save from what used to be 1100 people in the office building that we now occupy. That never happened. And we simply use the criminal justice system as the surrogate for a meaningful mental health system today. Talk to any county sheriff or corrections department anywhere in the country and they'll tell you there's a cross-section of people in their facilities who belong in mental health treatment not in jail. But that's not the way it works. The way it's operationalized over the years. So here's the field police officer view. When I started 30 years ago, if someone posed a danger to themselves or others that is the legal standard in Vermont for hospitalization just quick hospitalization to get an evaluation. The way that actually gets operationalized has eroded over time. It went from your danger to yourself or others to you pose an imminent danger to yourself or others to you demonstrated a danger to yourself or others you've harmed yourself, you've harmed someone else to the Muhammad Said model which is you've repeatedly demonstrated that you're a risk to yourself or others and we still don't hospitalize you because we don't have the resources. That's how the two things intersect. So what's the play out of the Woodside thing? We already don't have the option of corrections for juveniles. We're eliminating what has been an option. Mental health has no capacity to deal with them either. They go to a foster home which is not the best thing unless they need to be detained and then who knows what happens. What's the role out of Woodside that's happening now? Small volume moderate to high impact so it's three or five kids a month as I understand it in recent years since the changes in the juvenile justice system that have been made so you need capacity for those folks but you don't necessarily need a facility that's quite as large so a little more nuanced version I think is where EHS and Secretary Smith are headed for that. You need that capacity but it is not high volume. It's not the mental health system where there is a there's a volume that's higher than 25 or 50 out of 626,000 people that need more help than we can provide and I should be really clear that I am not in any way suggesting A that there should be a stigma that goes with having a mental illness or B that we should be taking large swaths of the population suffer from mental illness and finding hospital beds for them. We're talking about a relatively finite number of people but they're super high impact. It's a couple of hundred people probably but it's not 25 and it wasn't 50 the common misbelief is that Irene caused this Irene did not cause this. We did not have capacity when we had 56 beds in Waterbury we were turning people away every single day because there was not capacity and they were clear to any lay person let alone trained professionals they clearly needed more than we were able to provide but the waiting times in the ERs were the same they were 30, 40 days people were sitting in hallways waiting for beds. So committee I would like to switch gears if that's possible and we will definitely want to have more conversation with you as we continue our work on this but we have Julio Tom sitting with us right now for about 45 minutes I understand so I'm going to take that long but that's when I have to leave the committee I gotcha. Well please join us and as I said to other folks in previous days that we worked on these subjects we're relaying some issues out on the table to discuss around law enforcement interactions that result in use of deadly force so we're trying to separate out the different components of these bills one of them being a desire to see better data collection so that we have better ability to analyze what's going on another proposal to change policy and yet another proposal to do something in the way of training and so I would leave to you to share with us your thoughts on any of those issues. Sure so for the record I'm Julio Thompson assistant attorney general director of the attorney general civil rights unit but by statute the attorney general's office is responsible for the training at the Vermont police academy for the hate crimes course so talking about criminal and civil enforcement for hate crimes and I've been the instructor for that class twice a year since the spring of 2010 so I've had a few classes through there that is a class where we talk about issues relating to scene response we talk about issues relating to bias but it's not the only block in the academy and it's never been that deals with the issues of bias in those things so if you want to hear more about the hate crimes class and what we teach there I can speak to that because we're responsible for proving and delivering the curriculum by law but for the fair and impartial policing course I do not teach that although I'm familiar with the state fair and impartial policing policy so I think we have some observations on the bills I probably would prefer to start with H-464 if that's okay because I think that some of the ideas they were advanced in there I think if they were consistently implemented and I don't have a view about how consistently the practices are implemented today especially with police agencies other than Vermont state police and state police here to tell you what they do but the idea there about having an emphasis or ensuring that there's consistency and I think a frequency in training officers on DAS de-escalation my experience is and this is from more observation work outside of Los Angeles I worked on a lot of policing issues when I was in Los Angeles before I moved to Vermont was a deputy monitor for the alley sheriff's department for roughly 10 years and saw them change towards a de-escalation model I think emphasizing I think also having performance expectations for de-escalation is the way really that you're going to likely have safer or even safer officers you're likely to have less force use in the field without I think sacrificing law enforcement outcomes de-escalation as I think the commissioner just said is something that's already as part of tactics so if you are the first officer to respond to a scene there's someone at a bus stop and they have what looks like a knife at least that's the report that's come in for the call if you're the first person there it's a matter of just basic tactics and I'm not a sworn officer but just as I think common sense tactics is that if you exit your car and close the distance with that person you may in yourself contribute to your own peril because if it is an edge weapon they're in a position to use it on you de-escalation sort of emphasizes that distance is your friend especially if you're the only people on the scene that barriers are your friends so standing placing a barrier between you like your patrol car leaving verbal commands but may not only may not resolve it finally but often will by the officer time so if there are other officers on the way they can have the superiority of numbers which sometimes the superiority of numbers contributes to safer outcome so that the officer can move to a more tactically safe position it could be that they arrive in a place that's unsafe for the officer or the threat is it might be near water or the person might be elevated or has some position of advantage so that just several of many reasons why de-escalation first and foremost is in the officer's interest and I think that you know the question then becomes what happens I think from a policy standpoint what other agencies outside the country and encountered and I think jurisdictions are quite different than Vermont where there are very large police forces that are hard to train regularly we have thousands of officers it's hard to train them regularly but what happens when the officer disregards their training so that they do something that everyone who's been through the academy agrees is tactically unsound and the officer closes the gap and doesn't have a tactically or a sound reason for that what is the consequence of that I think that that's some of the for many departments nationally there is no consequence if an officer is someone about to stab him under the Fourth Amendment that officer is going to be able to discharge his weapon to save his life but the question becomes if police departments have to grapple with and I think Vermont trains officers to grapple with this is what happens when the officer contributes to the barrel unnecessarily back in Los Angeles they should just call those lawful but awful doesn't like, can't prosecute the officer can't sue him under section 1983 but everyone who looks at it thinks it shouldn't have gone down that way my perception and my experience is that the way agencies have done that around is not through statutory mandates because frankly when an officer is in the moment they are in a high stress situation and if they are close to the subject they may be having what could fairly be called a near-death experience and few of us have had that I sometimes have taken my eye off the road and find myself swerving off and you have that split second it's not something where I'd be thinking about what the vehicle code tells me I should be doing but rather maybe what my own training experience would tell me what to do but the way that it's been addressed typically is through training and policy with performance expectations so to have a consistency so that the agency says you're doing something that's contrary to our mandates there's a carjacker who stopped and everyone is setting up for a high-risk vehicle stop and then you just decide on your own you're going to disregard your training and run up to the window you might only have a quarter second to see that what the person has is not a firearm but a cell phone you might be justified in discharging your weapon but the larger question from a policy standpoint is what do we do with the officer who runs out to the window and all of their training and maybe common sense tells them they shouldn't do that I think that is for many departments in the United States there is no section maybe they get more training they don't get discharged, they don't get disciplined they might not be reassigned because it's not a violation of any policy the firearm, the use of force which is the firearm discharge is judged from the moment of the trigger pull not the events that led up to it so what we're seeing, I think increasingly is we're seeing a separate obligation a performance expectation that officers will de-escalate that they won't contribute to their own peril unless there's really no other feasible alternative so that you don't have unnecessary risks that the officers are doing that's contrary to their tactics and the way that's been done is basically through training in conjunction with policy and a philosophy that comes from the top of the organization down where we are going to be smarter and more deliberate whenever we can when that's safe to do so rather than rushing in and placing hands on when our training tells us that we shouldn't do that and that there would be some sort of consequence to that there really isn't a model for doing that legislatively. California was the first state to do that this past year although I would point out that I'm not sure it's that big of a change for California because it might be for Vermont in 2013 there was a federal lawsuit brought against the San Diego police department at a case called Hayes versus County of San Diego where the officers were sued following a fatal shooting not only for constitutional violations but for common law negligence and part of the analysis under California negligence law was looking at the actions of the officers prior to entering to contact with the suspect who was reportedly suicidal and using deadly force so that had already before the California law had been passed that was basically the governing law that California for better than half of that game so it's not that big of a change for Vermont it's quite different I can say that I've done any statistical study the types of shooting other agencies can do that but in terms of dealing with the problem of critical incidents from a broader spectrum not just deadly force of cases involving deadly force and often the transition from a lower level of force to deadly force is almost instantaneous and so agencies that have seen decreases in the use of force in a major department decreases as an officer is being killed or shot at or stabbed or seriously injured has followed that focus on de-escalation trading that's consistent that's understandable that's refreshable or it's refreshed and where the department's own policies will hold the officers accountable if they are in a position where they are for no good reason disregarding their own de-escalation policies of training so I think that's where when you see success stories in cities like Seattle or New Orleans de-escalation Seattle is a separate policy for de-escalation but more fundamentally it's a change or it's embracing that philosophy in Seattle which was under a consent decree just about to end the consent decree but the way that Seattle turned it around in terms of the use of the force phenomenally used as a force with individuals who were seeking to self-harm or who were mentally ill was de-escalation was slowing it down whenever possible to use the superiority of numbers and emphasized all of their members that this was tactical that this was not you know going easy on the bad guy or guys but rather just sound tactics and take their training I mean they changed it to tactical de-escalation that's what the course is called and then they ran the officers through scenario based training we're in a safe environment they're able to identify in order to do an after exercise critique and say well you know there was you had a subject with a knife and there was a kitchen we put you in a kitchen and there was a table there and the table was between you so if that person decided to rush you then I would at least slow them down so that if you to retrieve or you know use your weapon or to get out of there then you could do that but to do that in a realistic manner of training rather than you know the death by power point that's been the bane of a lot of training and adult learning in the United States sorry I'm losing my voice the idea of the bills are you know so specifically on 464 do you, one is the bill necessary two if it is and here you what would you recommend to change I was asked that's why about this bill this morning so I don't know that I could be the final word on whether it's necessary because I couldn't tell you right now the criminal justice training council requires in terms of officer certification for de-escalation in terms of the collection of use of force data I don't know whether agencies in a Vermont state police is quite good about that I'm not sure how hard that is really to collect I mean officers would be reporting to their superiors of use of force anyway so it seems to me to be useful information I'm willing to know how often force is used but the type of force that's used and part of the bill which I think is useful is that the model of the bill I think calls for some sort of collaborative exercise to develop the standards for example some agencies count as a use of force for their data and their reporting pointing a firearm at somebody not having it out at your site but pointing it they count that as a use of force it may not be unjustified but maybe it may be the only reasonable response but they still count it because they want to know how often that happens and if that requires any adjustment to their training because all the departments don't count it as a use of force so I think there would need to be some work on identifying what you would count as a use of force if someone's getting out of the car and they're reluctant and you have their hand on the arm you're not really jerking them out of the car some agencies won't count that as a reportable force there's no complaint of misconduct, there's no injury or complaint of pain other departments might count that so I think you would want to have some uniformity if you're going to have use of force reporting because I don't know whether a given sheriff's department is putting into the system numbers of the state police would you'd want to have consistency and in terms of yeah I think you definitely would want to have consistent training standards on de-escalation but what they're doing now versus what this would call for I don't know because I haven't examined it you were right well before 245 that's always up thank you for joining us is there anyone else who is here to testify on either of these issues or Commissioner was there anything else that you didn't have a chance to talk about that you would like to I didn't get to 464 at all do you want to do that now or yeah that would be great I understand that the state police are certainly very well trained and it looks like most of the municipal forces are received ongoing training what about some of the auxiliary law law enforcement people like fish and wildlife or different control would they receive the type of training this de-escalation training that we're talking about because I know that they're called in once in a while for a crisis situation they would but the details of that I would not have off the top of my head I would have to ask those organizations for additional detail okay thank you following up on that the Marine all the other sort of non-full-time you still have we do we have to be very different is there a tier 2 certification can you do me a favor and identify the director of the state police thank you the goals of 464 I think I would agree with the methodology to get there I think there's some alternate ways to get to the end game that's proposed here and actually I would suggest we should go a little bit bigger and that it might not necessarily require legislation but that said better data collection is at the core of our modernization strategy not just on traffic stops or mental health as we were discussing a little while ago but on all topics related to law enforcement from off policing and public safety more broadly and the operations on a day-to-day basis so we are actively working right now to try to locate we're in the middle of an RFP process to select a computer-aided dispatch and records management system that if we're successful could be deployed statewide and act as a repository for that information both an intake mechanism and a reporting mechanism for all responses statewide the idea is that this is one of the things that I observe the state should be doing as a core support function for public safety operations throughout the state and my hope is that we're able to find a way to do that at no cost to the agencies that would be using the system in exchange for a variety of things including the ability to do statewide aggregated reporting on topics like are addressed here in 464 but also many others informing our conversations about mental health and opiates, crime in general informing what types of things are headed over to corrections and sort of the backdrop of that rather than just the sort of flat look at those things that historically has gone over in a paper case file so that's data model policy there should be a model policy on use of force which includes de-escalation they exist in most departments in Vermont today however in the last few weeks we've engaged with the chiefs association the sheriffs association the Vermont police association and a host of other players of law enforcement advisory board which exists to impart inform you and the governor and myself on criminal justice policy with the idea that we adopt we create and adopt a variety of model policies not just on use of force, parent and partial policing which exists now on other things up to and including hiring vehicle operations and a variety of other things feedback on that concept is due this week and the hope is that work will begin there's been universal acceptance of that idea that I've heard so far I haven't heard anyone indicating that they're not on board with that concept work would begin on those immediately using the existing law enforcement advisory board as the center of that activity but engaging stakeholders both within law enforcement and throughout the state in communities, special interest groups et cetera on how to model those policies again probably not a big lift because the models do exist in Vermont already it's really about taking the best of all of them putting them together and then disseminating them statewide for adoption and candidly one of the questions that's come up in the initial conversations about this is well what if there's two or three or five departments that don't want to adopt them we've got some ideas on how to politely create carrots that would incentivize the adoption that aren't quite ready for prime time but we are thinking along those lines about how to get people to have 100% uptake on them what we have initially identified as the top six policies that should be universal should be noted that one of the reasons to have these policies be universal is not only to mirror best practice from place to place to place but because not a day goes by when multiple departments aren't working together at a particular scene so whether you're talking about driving or use of force or de-escalation or some other key topic search and seizure they all should be using a policy that's if not identical pretty close so that there is not disparity with the way they're operating when they're standing next to each other and then on the third piece relative to reporting out racial equity findings not only in traffic stops but across a much wider array as I've been talking about of outcomes and data related to operations I think we ought to have that available to everyone not just the director of racial equity or researchers, the legislature whether it's reports dashboards, raw data it should all be available on a rolling basis and I think one of the witnesses last week talked about doing that on a much more rapid timeline a 60 to 90 day timeline and we concur wholeheartedly that we should be getting that data ready for being published not a year behind but in as rapidly as possible probably a 90 day window to start with a hope that we could accelerate that as we get more experience with whatever the new data system is to a 60 day window as quickly as possible so these are all directions that we are headed whether there is legislation or not and I think really the primary limiting factor in the legislation is we can go faster and we can do more without having to chase a smaller cross section of this through a piece of legislation so perhaps I spent the last two years saying no more reports no more reports, we can't handle any more reports this might be an interesting one that would lend itself to report back in December on progress toward model policy data collection on a bigger scale than has been envisioned initially was that a reflex? it was a reflex, sorry I thought you were going to hit me you just woke up response though any questions committee do you have an appropriation for the data system that you would like in your budget? we do not because what we are trying to do is simplify a variety of systems that are currently bolted together that don't yield particularly good results they cause us to have to manipulate multiple systems they have to have systems in between the systems to talk to each other and then it's very difficult to get data out the back end of those systems the hope is that we will be able to do this structure for multiple systems by collapsing them into one more nimble 21st century data system put a little asterisk next to it that if we fail at that we may be back next year for an appropriation but we won't be coming back looking for millions of dollars just be marginal if we can't thread the needle with the money we've got so this is maybe a broad general question but I wonder how well are we doing in law enforcement so that those in service reflect those who are in the community which I think has a direct impact on cultural intelligence it's a great question at the end of the day we should be entirely reflective of the community in race, gender, sexual orientation all of the various ways we measure population today we're doing better than we have historically done but we're still far short of in every category that said we're far short of recruitment and retention targets in every category as well so as Vermont continues to face its demographic and workforce challenge that cascades into public safety not just in law enforcement but in the fire service with ambulance services closing and the it's also a great question because it in part relates to everything we're talking about the more complicated we make the operating environment the harder it is to recruit and retain and folks that look at what we do today and we bring them to start training we bring them in to do ride-alongs I skipped over my most important point at the beginning of all this which is I would not spend a shift in a police car absolutely that would be so cool it might be cool it might be incredibly boring or it might be very illuminating but you should do it Saturday nights might work winter's a little odd because it depends on a lot of different things but it will give you a different view of everything if you were in the back of one of the handcuffs you would get only partial credits so it is related it's part of the reason that we have to do a better job at engaging communities broadly but in particular underrepresented communities is because if they don't trust us they don't want to be part of the organizations and then we can't do a job at engaging and policing those communities and it becomes this vicious cycle of an inability to one, be reflective but then to improve because when we talk about cultural competency the most important thing in each course is we don't know what we don't know so it's all related any other questions? thank you I promise on most topics it will be a little less scattered but there's so much hard to keep it for me at least we're fine so thank you for your indulgence thank you