 Hi, everyone. This is Carol Hinkle. We're delighted to have you with us today. This is our second lecture of the fall series already. A couple things I just want to remind you that CCTV is partnering with us this year to showcase our wonderful lectures and we thank them. Please check the emails we send out to you the Thursday before and look for information on how you might be able to help them out and send a donation to them. We would love that. Also a reminder to please access your Q&A button on your screen. You can touch the screen and that Q&A button should come up. Please tap it, type in your questions anytime during the lecture, even during the Q&A period. So we'd love to have your input. So now I would love to introduce to you our own Michael Arlansky who's going to introduce our speaker. Thanks Michael. Thank you so much Carol. And today we're pleased to welcome Brian Pete, he is the chief of police in Montpelier, Vermont. Chief Pete leads a dedicated police department of 27 full time members. This department provides wide ranging services to residents, workers and visitors to our state's capital city, which has a daytime population of more than 20,000 people. Coming to Vermont, Brian Pete served as chief of police in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Before that, he had a long record of service in the Chicago Police Department, which is the second largest municipal police department in the United States. His positions at the CPD were patrolmen, field training officer, and chief forensic audit investigator for public safety and police accountability in the city of Chicago's Inspector General's office. Chief Pete also had extensive service in the United States Air Force as an aircraft maintenance officer, and later in senior operational and investigative positions in federal law enforcement. He served in Afghanistan, coordinating us and Afghan forces encounter terrorism intelligence and force protection missions. Brian Pete earned a bachelor's degree in sociology at Southern Illinois University with emphasis on employment relations. And here in the master's degree in police psychology at every university in Chicago. The final of today's talk is the future of policing, strategic planning for community safety and partnership. Please join me in giving a warm, tripling welcome to Chief Brian Pete. Hello everybody good afternoon thank you so much Michael and Carol for that. I am excited, and I'm extraordinarily honored to be here. Again, I appreciate this privilege. My hope is just to provide my perspective on a very significant issue, which is of course policing right now in today's day and age, with everything that has gone on from our profession, and a focus on where a profession can go in the future, and I'm hoping that we have to know where we've been before we can continue to chart out what the future will be. So the again my intent is to give personal insight and opinion as to our profession. And, and again just to look to move forward and I'm hoping that this is a good discussion between all of us, a very honest and candid discussion because I'm also looking for your ideas and input, because it's not our profession that determines where we're going to go. It's the people within our communities that let us know what they demand and what they expect from us and that's, that's our north star that's our compass and where we want to go. So I'd like to share my screen and look at it. I've got a PowerPoint presentation. I'd like to know, can, can everyone see the screen. Yep. Okay. And I will. All right. And again, my name is Brian and with the Montpelier police department. Breaking it up of course into numbers the threes, what I'd like to discuss in regarding strategic planning for community safety and partnership and how we move into 21st century policing is to talk about where we've been the origins of policing to talk about where we are the current state of policing and the future where we can go from here. What I'm what the origins that I'm going to talk about the research points come from a gentleman by the name of Dr. Gary Potter, Gary Potter, I'm sorry, and Dr. Potter I believe is the is a professor at Eastern Kentucky University. And he's been in the news a lot. We're also going to talk about where we're going to talk to him on policy today regarding policing, where policing has been from. And because he's done a lot of research in the topic, and they're going to be some folks. There are some people that are out there. I think there's in getting away from politics and getting away from the chaff is to determine what in the research that we can take away as a profession, as a community, as a nation, and learn from and build on. So those are gonna be the primary things that I'd like to focus on. So according to Dr. Pott, you had in looking at policing and what started it out, there were two primary paths, one in the North and one in the South. So in the North, there was something that was called the Night Watch and that started in Boston in 1636, New York in 1658 in Philly. And it was composed of volunteers, folks who were, according to Dr. Potter were, sometimes they were a little mischievous, sometimes they were a little drunk at night. They fell asleep a lot at their posts. They were trying to avoid service within the military. So you had a group and their primary charge was to keep the community safe when it was dark, to keep an eye out who needed help if they saw trouble coming to alert the rest of the community. But that evolved into more of a constable form. And then it finalized into police agencies who were paid with taxpayer funding to provide safety to the communities. And the first police agencies were Boston, Albany, New York and Chicago. And that was from the mid 1800s. And then the second pathway was in the Carolina colonies in the South. And Dr. Potter says that that started with slave patrols and they had three primary focuses. That was to apprehend and return slaves to push back and prevent slave results, revolts and then to discipline slaves. So the big thing here, we can agree or anyone or the conversations that are happening out there within the community regarding policing in the past on what that evolution is. But unique to the conversations, the arguments out there, the information's out there. And one of the things I'm gonna hit on the most is perception and legitimacy with policing. And that's where our past is. There is a tie to that past with policing. And for me, that the common denominator and understanding and acknowledging that, the common denominator has to be in moving forward is what I've learned is the definitions and the responsibilities, the roles, just like anything else, any other profession, anywhere else that we are in history, it's defined by what the norms are, what the current pulse of society is at the time. So my take on that is that priorities are strongly influenced by societal norms. Even in the past, when policing first started in the 1830s and the 40s, society was grappling what should police have use of force? What is the appropriate amount of use of force? And that's amazing because that's where we still are right now, which will bring me to another recurrent theme. Have we learned anything from the past? And if we did, my argument is that we wouldn't be in the same situation that we are 100 years, since 100 years has passed. So with this, with the use of force and with societal norms, Potter had noted that, and I'll go ahead and just read it, is because the police were primarily engaged in enforcing public order laws against gammon and drug business, surveilling immigrants and free slaves and harassing labor unions, public opinion, favorite towards restrictions in the use of force makes a lot of sense to me because the police were involved or involved themselves. And again, it could be a sense of sign of the time, but I think leadership stands from a courage of conviction. And we were involved in political influences. We were involved in case systems. We were involved in haves versus have nots. And what were we enforcing? What were we doing? And that goes back to that whole perception in the beginning. We're enforcing slavery. If we're enforcing anything that's going to push back against somebody's human rights, there's always gonna be an upheaval. There's gonna be a revolt and have we learned anything from going there. So again, the whole point in this is to know where you've been, so you know where you're going. And what this courage of leadership is in what our department and moving it up to modern times now, our departments, our profession has to have leadership abilities. It has to have a courage of conviction. It has to have a courage to say we are going to push ourselves away from political influences and we're going to focus on what we're supposed to be doing, what we swore to do is to protect people, to keep people safe. And not to be whims of anything else. And we can't do anything that's going to erode the public trust in us. We cannot do anything that's going to promote in us versus them. And that's where we're at. And I think it's heightened even now more than ever. And we have to push back against that. And the essence of service of what police departments should be doing is there's a discussion within policing right now. You have a warrior mentality and you have a guardian mentality. And a warrior mentality says we're military, we're going to go out and there's the enemy. We have to defeat the enemy. We have to defeat crime. There's a war on crime. We have to be prepared to deal with that. And then there's a guardian mentality that says that we are charged to make sure that we keep our community safe, that we look out for the interests of everyone within the community. And there are times that one may, if there is a life or death struggle, that you may have to revert to a warrior mentality. But not everyone we meet on the street is deserving of a warrior mentality. We don't have to look at everybody suspiciously. And so when we look at things like how we train in the future, the different things that we're doing for ongoing training, for continued certification, is our training getting in the way of being part of the community that we're sworn to protect? So the current state of policing right now, of course, what we're looking at is, or what we're dealing with is what happened in Minyanapolis, George Floyd. And in that murder, that stemmed civil unrest all across the country and all across the nation even. And Vermont was not exempt from this, even here in Montpelier, which is where that image is, the demonstrations. And you had police agencies and self included grappling, just begging for positive news, for glimmers of hope that gave more of the stories that we do on a day-to-day basis that talked about who we feel we are in doing the jobs and answering what we call a calling, a purpose, a meaning, and they weren't coming. And there were even times that I was watching things in the news and I just, I looked back and I'm like, you know, my wife is sitting next to me and she's like, I really hate cops. And it's like, yeah, me too. It's like, what is going on? And so there was a lot of desperation there. And then these events spiraled up from people who said that they supported the police to the events on January 6th at the US Capitol. And on top of that, law enforcement was still struggling and dealing with the norm unfortunate of day-to-day tragedies, of mass shootings, domestic violence, homicides, and other violent crimes. And then the other tasking that we found ourselves dealing with in a post-911 era is dealing with terrorism, but not just foreign point right back to January 6th to domestic terrorism. So ultimately, in talking about our past and where we've been in the past, those who don't know history, they're doomed to repeat it. So have we learned anything? Will we learn anything now? And that's the big question. And my argument is thus far, we haven't learned anything as a profession because we're still here. It's still cyclical. So the changes that revolving around accountability, police accountability in George Floyd, I'm gonna talk a little about something, a little bit about something called the Ferguson effect. And this is something that's been coined in law enforcement circles and research circles, even in the media. So in 2014, Michael Brown was in Ferguson, Missouri. He was killed by a police officer, revolving an incident where he was suspected of stealing. And there was an extraordinary amount of scrutiny that law enforcement found. And there were political elements to it. And of course there are criminal elements to it, as there should be. But a lot of law enforcement folks felt that it's, I have no support. I don't wanna be the next viral sensation. I don't wanna be the next person on YouTube. I don't wanna be the next person to be arrested. So there is a perception that law enforcement, and I would argue that it's true that law enforcement has stepped back. And in some places it's worse than others. But law enforcement kind of stepped back and said, we don't wanna cause any waves. I don't wanna get in trouble. I wanna get arrested. Or leadership might be saying, we can't do that. We don't wanna be in trouble. I don't wanna step into anything. So police dial back a little bit. Now, whether that leads to increased crime, don't know. But the perceptions again, we have to deal with perceptions as they are reality because that's how people see things. So this Ferguson effect is what we're looking at now and how that brought us to, that it became even more significant after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis. And then again, the increased civil unrest, the demonstrations, Black Lives Matter, which was founded in 2013, had become more prominent. There were more calls for civilian oversight to the fund police agencies, school resource officers because of brand, if you will. Because of reputation, because of perception, police officers, police agencies were looked at with hyperscript. And whether or not police agencies should be existing in the first place. And then there were calls to increase policing on the other end of the spectrum. And then there's the middle. What are good jobs or what are the responsibilities that police officers should be dealing with rather than being having this ever-increasing mission creep that if there are other social agencies that are not being funded or other mandates that are coming down for whether it's a state or a national government that will ultimately fall on police agencies because for the most unfortunately, our society is currently kind of conditioned to call 911 for everything. And is it appropriate for the police to be responding to every call for service? We've seen, it's been a longstanding trend that cities and municipalities have been sued for use of force for civil rights violations. And now we're starting to see trends where cities are being sued for inadequate protections, arguably because of the Ferguson effect. Law enforcement not going out there and getting and doing what they're supposed to do. And again, that is a manifestation of what I believe is this us versus them mentality that it's society is against us or the police are against society that they're sworn to protect. And it's going to take strong courage and conviction to push back against that. So in looking back again to narratives and to transparency, has anyone ever heard of the phase? Please unmute yourselves if you can. Hands up, don't shoot. Well, so hands up, don't shoot came out of the incident with Michael Brown. There was a witness to the interaction that Michael Brown had with the officer. And according to that witness that he said Michael Brown was yelling at the police officer, hands up, don't shoot, don't shoot. And there's information out there that says that wasn't true. That the findings were that, no, that never didn't in fact happen but that narrative prevailed, that perception prevailed to serve and protect. So now even now folks are looking at police officers and like, is that what you really do? Is that what you meant to do? So there's another issue that police officers have with this whole, thinking back to the older law enforcement cartoons and police shows about nothing but the facts, ma'am, and just this very cold fact finding kind of a mission very unapproachable and a lot of law enforcement agencies popularizing this, no comment, no comment. Well, in absence of communications with the communities that we serve we allow a narrative to come up. And in an absence of that information, that perception, that narrative becomes true. And we have to be trustworthy. We have to communicate. We have to immerse ourselves in the community and we have to regain legitimacy. And what is legitimacy? Legitimacy, in starting with this conversation what gives me the right to pull you over? If you're driving along the street and you look up and you see those blue lights and your heart kind of sank, she's like, oh, what's going on now? And you see those blue lights behind you? What gives me the authority to pull you over? And we could argue that it's the law. We could argue that it's a municipal ordinance and well, that's what I've been trying to do. That's what I always do. Well, the truth of reality is what makes you stop is you. You don't have to stop. And this is the definition of legitimacy. It's respect worthiness. And I'm using a definition of a really good one that I found was the Rand Corporation and when they're doing their research on legitimacy policing. It's that police officers need to be seen as trustworthy, unbiased, neutral. It's you have to earn the respect. That's what gets people to pull you over. That's what gets people to stop when you ask them, please stop, may ask you a question. When you're interacting with people, no one gives you authority as a police agency. You have to earn it. And that comes into another concept called the Pelean principles of law enforcement. But that's a whole another discussion. But it talks about the community is the police and the police is the community. It talks about re-engaging with the police. That's where we come from. And that's where we have to remember a humanization, if you will. So in this whole crisis that we were dealing with within our profession, we had pretty much two agencies, two types of police agencies, agencies that had legitimacy, but we were all hard hit. And those of us who had built up credit with our communities, we still were looked at with hyper scrutiny. We were still looked at that, hey, what are you doing to make sure that you're not like the other communities that we're seeing on TV? So we're using every bit of credit we got to say, no, no, that's not us. We're not like Canadian athletes. We're not like Chicago. We're not, you know, so you're going out there and you're pretty much anybody that'll hear you. You're pleading and you're begging, but you got some money in the bank. You've got some legitimacy built up that people are giving us the benefit of the doubt. And then you might have another department who may not have immersed themselves within their community, who may not have taken the time to communicate, to be transparent, to hold themselves accountable when something happened. And those are some of the agencies that are struggling with a lot of things right now. Consent decrees, civil lawsuits, that's where we're at. So, and as a total profession, we've all been damaged because of this. And I'm not saying it's because of something we didn't do. It's the reckoning that we're dealing with as a profession. And we've been damaged by that because we can't even recruit and retain officers or attract people to our profession anymore. And I consider that is a failure on leadership and as our profession, because again, did we know where we came from and did we take steps to keep this stuff from happening? Why is it always a pendulum swinging? Why is it always simple? So I will start and just kind of ask as like an exercise in talking about defining or perception. So a lot of police officers will complain about, hey, are we getting a fair shake in community? We can look at what the media's role is in telling a story and media wants to sell a story. But internally, again, what did we do to push back against what we, what many of us consider a false narrative? And I think that's where a huge mistake and what we've done with. So with this exercise, let's talk about the thin blue line, the blue line flag. The blue line flag, what the blue line flag itself was created in 2014 by a college student to show support for law enforcement. The blue line within, depending on the circles of law enforcement, it's pride, it is kinship. It is just a dedication to our community, it's a dedication to our profession, and it's a calling, it's a service, it's noble, it's honorable, it's a rallying cry. But the narrative has changed in certain places that now possibly depending on the community that the blue line might represent something else. So that narrative that's been allowed, that it was initially started out to be something that was supposed to be more positive and some circles are being seen as more of a negative thing. So with the same discussion, there are certain people in the community that feel that they can't raise the American flag because they'll get, there's a negative connotation to it that they don't wanna be associated with, again, I'm not trying to jump into politics, but like conversation out there, I don't wanna be accused of a Trump supporter or people who are claiming to push American ideals, let's go with January 6th, people waving the American flag, but at the same time storming the nation's capital. So that contradiction in terms, but the American flag to me means something that I've given a lot for in my service to the country, my service in the Air Force and my service as a law enforcement officer, 9-11 just happened, but there are media stories and pushes out there that talk about this narrative. Is it a progressive thing that only, that progressives, people who are democratic or Democrats or progressives, they don't like the American flag. What's that narrative? So then you have other narratives that's like even here in Barry, there are discussions locally about why didn't Barry City endorse to fly the flag on 9-11? Is it political? What is it? I don't wanna get into the politics, I'm just bringing up the whole point of perception and the whole point of what narrative do we allow ourselves to have in moving forward? So again, part of this last exercise I'd like to ask to each of you all, when you see this personally, what does it mean to you? Some folks it means support, it means solidarity, it means empathy, it means understanding the plight and other folks may see it entirely different. And then when you add the component of LGBTQ plus, now what does it mean? So all of our experiences mean something to everyone. And again, ultimately, what if we as law enforcement leaders learned about it? So in Vermont to really briefly discuss some nationwide trends. So these are some numbers that came out through the commissioner's office a few months ago. And on this chart, you'll see the number of law enforcement officers leaving Vermont has vastly outpaced, newly hired or newly certified officers. The forecast full term time officers in the coming years will show far fewer than what the departments are self-reporting in 2021. So departments are being optimistic, but statistics are showing that we're going to fall short. Is this a product of the Ferguson effect? A lot of people getting out of the profession altogether. We have slide, this slide here talks about respondent staffing totals. And we're looking at right now that available officers are down 14% when you compare it to a three year average that people are leaving this profession as soon as they can or they're not even waiting for, well, there's folks are saying I'm waiting for my pension and some folks like I don't care, I'm leaving now. Looking at this particular slide here, it talks about the attrition for the year. And you'll see here that folks who have separated and folks who have resigned and retired, what that difference is when we are in 2021 compared to the first three years compared to 2018 to 2020. This next slide here talks about full-time officers in Vermont, self-projection and what the state projects and states looking at it, we're being positive. We think we're going to come up and that's why we've got the blue dotted line and the red dotted line says, figures are showing more of a downward trend. And then this last slide here gives an idea as to how many folks who are graduating are scheduled to graduate from the Vermont Police Academy versus the attrition for officers this year. And it's projected, we're looking at, this was a couple of months ago, they've just brought a new Academy to start here in October, but without that Academy, it was projected for about 160 officers to leave this year and compare it to only 23 coming into the profession throughout the state of Vermont. So I'm going to go out and let them here. I've been through a couple of places and what I've seen in going through the training of Vermont, I think it's very trauma and victim informed. I think there is a huge emphasis in training in Vermont to weed out in us versus them mentality to talk about working within the community. That's been my experience since I've been here and I've seen other places that weren't so conducive to that 21st century style of policing. But I haven't seen significant information that suggests that Vermont has an issue of sustained significant patterns of systemic issues within the police culture. Have there been officers and staff members who have done criminal acts and who are not worthy to wear the uniform or the badge that I wear? Absolutely, absolutely. But as far as sustained constant incidences that have been going on, Vermont is not necessarily in the news as much as other states, other municipalities have been. Looking at January 6th, 2021, Montpelier Police Department itself, we've looking at based on domestic violence or I'm sorry, domestic violence elements that are in the country right now, especially what's going on, we've assessed our threat level within the city of Montpelier is elevated. Looking and these are some of the challenges again that we're facing as we're dealing with this reduced staffing. The CDC has just come out with overdose fatality data and there's been nationwide increase about 30% and Vermont OD fatalities have gone up nearly 60%. And that means that Vermont has the largest increase percentage in the United States. So Vermont is dealing with again, another opioid crisis and an uptick. We anticipate upticks in domestic violence related instances, violence to children. And this is something that we've historically been seeing and have we prepared ourselves for it? Are we ready to deal with this as we're coming out of this? And the last bullet foreign domestic, foreign terrorism and influence on civil unrest, what makes me personally upset about this is our communities need us. And as leaders, have we done everything that we could have done to prevent it from getting to this point? So real quickly, where can we go from here? We're waiting for current strategic plans or recommendations from community groups. There's an overwhelming desire here in Montpelier to re-immersion to the community, to regain that trust. And that's what we're looking for. That's what we're looking to try to do is to rebuild our legitimacy, to put that credit back into the bank, to provide training and resources to protect against the trends and the threats that we see and to look at intelligence led policing so that and to have a victim informed policing style. We look at how do we take care of our officers and our staff? How do we strengthen their resiliency and their resolve? And how do we increase morale? Where we can go from here? It's no secret sauce and training. We treat people the way we're supposed to be treated. And it's nothing but organizational psychology. So in organizational psychology, it's UID training and development needs. You design optimized work and quality of life. You formulate and implement training procedures. You just move forward. We also ask the questions, what should police be responding to? We're real with expectations internally and externally. We try to stay away from the generalizations, too much at stake. And we have to have the courage of conviction to stand up to things that are not just on either side, whether it's something going on internally or whether the police departments are being called historically to enforce things that we should not be enforcing. We look at civilian oversight and that we have to train our leaderships. We have to get them involved. We have to do succession planning. So one of my favorite quotes, leadership at the highest levels, John, not necessarily, I'm not trying to preach everybody, but John 832, the truth shall set you free. But Ben Stone Law and Order Season One, but it won't always make you happy. So with that, I thank you all again for this opportunity to be here. And I hope I didn't make too many people upset, but I am ready for any questions or any comment that I can give. All right, thank you Chief Pete. We have a large number of questions from our members and guests. So let's get right to that. One questioner asks, what ideas do you have for recruiting and retaining police officers? I think that what we need now more than ever with what society is looking for with the huge demand of justice, of social justice, of treating everybody with dignity and respect is to tap into that and to define our profession to saying that there's no more noble way to give back to your community and to come in here and the best way to fix any broken system is to be part of the repair of that system. And I think that we need to tap on that energy and challenge folks, challenge young people to come in here to bring that culture to our profession. Thank you. Another questioner asks, how many of your staff are on patrol and how do you determine how many should be on patrol for each shift and where? So there are certain formulas in certain companies that look for calls for service. Do you look at the data points, how long it takes to deal with a call for service, the more routine types of call for service, and then it looks at safety parameters and how many officers should be there. So there's a formula, but it doesn't, it's math, but when you're dealing with human dynamics, it's not always the same. So for our staff, we have 17s for and including myself. And I'm sorry, what was the rest of the question there? Officers on patrol and land and who? So unfortunately, it's, we have to guide ourselves with data and we have to guide ourselves with common sense. So the FBI does have, they do give statistics on what the averages are. Now, those are just the averages, it's not necessarily what everyone needs. There may be some communities that have arguably more police officers than they do, than they actually need. But in looking at those studies and looking at what the demands of the community are, I think that data and hard figures are a very good starting point in answering calls for service. Okay. What were some of the most interesting topics that you studied in your graduate program in police psychology? It was, it was, it was, it was resiliency and it was how law enforcement has a knack for siloing itself off from first, from our own family and friends. Well, first from our community, then our own family and friends and then it kind of leads to a downward spiral because there's a lot of negative stuff out there. And then I was extraordinarily upset with how law enforcement dealt with folks who are dealing with some very stressful situations. And it was the old mentality of, you know, get up, dust yourself off and get back out there to work, rub some dirt on it and you'll be fine. Which, which makes law enforcement and sometimes in a lot of cultures, that's still prevalent, which leads to increases in suicides, divorce rates, health issues. There are a lot of police officers that die only a year or two right after they retire. One questioner asks about whether it's possible to set up a cyber task force in Vermont or cybersecurity task force. I think it's absolutely possible. What I'm going out on a limb here, Vermont has very limited resources. It's a small state. Chicago had more people in my old city than the entire state combined. But since it's a smaller state, we have smaller resources. We have smaller, you know, we have people who aren't trained as many things and we can't rely on the state police to do everything for us. So I think that we should look at different ways of regionalizing our resources, pulling our sources together, whether it's through a county system or whether it's through a Northern, Central or a Southern part of the state. And then looking at that, because every time that we're ignoring things like that, like cyber crime, that whether it's, we're looking at human trafficking or whether we're looking at people who are losing their savings account because of cyber crime, it's something that we should be focusing on. But there's a way to do it. We just have to make sure that we do it. Okay. Have you ever been involved in a hostage situation? If so, how did you and your colleagues handle it? Oh, so hostage situation, I think that that, and not looking at a hostage situation in the terms of like the old, like TV shows where you have one person, you have a bad guy here and you have one person here in their hell, at gunpoint. Not many of those. There have been those situations, but other situations in which there, you might be dealing with a family member who might be holding an infant. I've been in some of those and they're in a very angry crisis or criminal state and dealing with that, it's extraordinarily scary. And it's just finding a way to communicate with that person, to bring that person down and not acting emotionally and not overhyping or escalating that situation. Is your department responsible for any state government buildings or events? Technically, we should not be. However, anything that within the state follows anything here within Montpelier, any call for service for assistance, we're gonna be the first ones to respond. And if it's a more of a drawn out event, then the state police may step in to deal with the situation, but so we do respond to it, to provide that mutual assistance, but even though these are more or less state resources. Okay, thank you. One questioner would like to know about whether police work and firefighting work, why it seems to run in families. Do you have any thoughts about that? I don't know, it might be something in the blood, but it might have something to do with influences as young folks, because I'll tell you that my mother was a police officer, then my father was an electrician from Northwestern Railroad. And then he left that job and he became a police officer in Chicago. And then I became a police officer in Chicago. And then my brother became a police officer in Chicago. So I think where what it used to be back in the, for folks here with more life experience, the concentration was more or less, set yourself up for financial freedom and get a job that gives you a pension. And then so that's what kind of drew folks into that. But then now I got my daughter walking around the house with my hat on and wanting to ride in the police car. And it kind of scares me. Unfortunately, it might run based on that influence. Okay, one questioner asks, I understand that all new police officers who are hired by Evermont Town are trained at the police academy. Who determined the style, method, or culture of that training? Do poor practice actions of local officers arise from police academy training or other lack of training? So basically the criminal justice, it used to be the criminal justice and training council sets the parameters for training and what's required. The state also has some mandated training that officers must complete to be certified. But as far as the, as far as the, you know, there are just universally accepted standards as far as what policing is going goes through. I think that we need to have more time at the academy, but lessons learned are the culture is set by the staff. And in some places, you'll get somebody who goes to the academy, you come out bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, you ready to take it on the world, you're gonna make a difference. And the first thing that the next cop, the grizzled cop tells you on when you hit the street is everything they taught you in the academy, forget about it because that ain't true. Let me tell you what the real life is, what the real street is. And that right there just throws everything that the academy has been trying to build up on culture. I have not seen that in Vermont. I've seen the academy pushing that and I've seen when folks have gotten to their departments that they're like, oh yes, you will do this, this is what Vermont is. And I think a lot of that is also baked into the law and what officers can or can't do, especially when we talk about lodging or arresting people. But yeah, I think that in as far as our training, it's peppered with mistakes and with criminal actions of what other law enforcement officers within the state and across the country have done. There's so many highlight reels that we watch on how not to do it. Okay, the next question is about community outreach. Do you reach out to communities and go door to door and introduce yourselves? Door to door, I can't because depending on the calls for service or the other requirements that I might have to do, the administrative requirements, yes, I don't do that. Do I walk around Main Street and State Street, go to as many, I'll go wherever, if somebody calls me over and says, hey, I got three people coming over, can you come over and I wanna talk to you about your department. Well, guess where Brian's gonna be at at that date and time? So I think that we have to make ourselves available as much as possible and that, again, law enforcement has historically been seen as very unapproachable, even internally. That's the Ivory Tower, what a lot of places call it. We have to be approachable to our staff members as well as to our community. Okay, one question has this, are you deploying mental health profession in Montpelier? Oh, yes, so my predecessor Tony Fakas and Chief Bombardier and Barry and Washington County Mental Health Services had got together, pulled some resources and now there is a social worker who separates her time half in Barry, half in Montpelier. And in Montpelier right now, we've just stood up what's called a crisis intervention team program. And we have a CIT, that's CIT and we just created a CIT steering committee with NAMI with psychiatric survivors with Karim, Dr. Mark Deppman from the hospital. And so we have stakeholders that form this, what this response model should look like when we're dealing, when we're working with people who are in mental health crisis and looking for ways to divert away from the criminal justice system and towards help for their families as well for whatever support network they have and then with an emphasis on safety of life and preservation of life. Okay, I have a question regarding is the Black Lives Matter BLM movement or organization involved in crime prevention and assistance involving suspects of color? I'm not sure how to answer that. I'm not sure necessarily that the answer to that question. I can say that I've reached out to some folks, me personally, I've reached out to some folks that I understood to be with BLM or BLM but I've gotten no response back because I'm looking to partner. I'm looking to find out what we need to do right and what are the values of our community and how do I implement those values here? Okay, what skills would you like to have in the Montpelier Police Department? Empathy, competence, life experience and just an overwhelming desire to give back to their community. Can you tell us please, what do you like most about being the police chief and what do you like the least? The hours, the work, I'd say at least in dealing with unfortunate situations, whether it's internally or whether it's seeing people and families at their worst days, that's hard. But what I like most about it is to be in the position to help people. That's my high and that's one of my reasons to live in. Okay, in the training process, is there psychological testing of potential police officers to demonstrate their mental stability? Yes, it's required from the state of Vermont to take the MMPI, I can't remember what the Minnesota, I can't remember what else, the personality inventory, I can't remember, but the MMPI too is required for here and in Montpelier, we've actually upped the ante with that one and we have another system that we brought on board called Critical Hire and Critical Hire is another psychological based profile that helps us after folks take the test, whether they fall in areas that have historically had problems with authority, complaints from the community. So we add the two together and that gives us a very good tool bag and what we need to do as far as polygraph testing and how we structure our interviews. One questioner asks, why do you think Vermont's increase in opioid addiction is the highest in the country? That's a good question. The only thing I can do is speculate, I think that Vermont is more of a rural town and there may be, I may not want to touch that one but I think that because there's rural, there's more isolation and then looking at all the mental health issues that we're all grappling with right now with COVID, depression and coming out of it and then going back into it again, I think that folks are just feeling desperate. Sure. How do you coordinate with other police departments when necessary? Become friends with them, put ego aside and that it's not remembering where we are and what we're here for. So just becoming friends with my fellow chiefs, with my fellow law enforcement officers and then instilling that trust and then when one of us has a good idea, all the rest of us jump in to do it. Are there ways in your view that policing in Vermont is different from other places where you work? Absolutely. Give you an example, there was one of the first calls I came into was a person who had committed a homicide and I come from Chicago and Chicago's under consent decree and this individual, how the state police were speaking with this person and how the other law enforcement agencies that came in were speaking to this person were more empathetic and more personal even though this person had just done something dreadful. It was more humanistic than it was in other places that I've been in. Okay, one more question just came in. Do you have visibility into a potential recruits background for those recruits that have prior policing experience? So yes, so there are two things there's that the NDI, which is the national, there's a national database index that the federal government has that looks at why officers if somebody who's been a previous law enforcement officer they've been decertified but it's one of those voluntary systems that you have to volunteer to be part of and then you would put that input in and then I could, if I knew that somebody came from the Memphis police department, if they're in the NDI I can look them up and say, oh, that person resigned under investigation or was kicked out or lost their certification. Vermont just passed a law making it a mandatory requirement that officers are supported that if someone is, we're recruiting someone or someone wants to join our ranks and their private or prior law enforcement service that they have to give us access to all their records in some places in some states. The only thing that the agencies required to do is to say, yeah, they worked here from this date to this date, that's all I can tell you but Vermont took it a step further and if that person refuses to turn over that information to give it to us, we cannot hire them. In Vermont, the concept of school resource officers that is placing uniformed police officers in public schools has sometimes been controversial. In your view, how have SROs school resource officers worked out? I'm sorry, how have they been? Yeah, what is your view of the school resource officer position? It's, I've heard various points of view as to whether it is a good thing or not to have uniformed police officers in public schools. I think that first, I think that it's a sad place that we even have to consider having law enforcement officers in a school with children. The second part of it is though, I think that some of the reputation and some of the things that we've done in our profession in the past make it difficult to get that legitimacy and to earn that trust with some of the communities but I've seen more often good than bad coming out of school resource officer positions because the type of people who are put into those roles traditionally are people who are really care and who are really good with children. And it's another layer to be able to get people and to get families help because sometimes kids don't wanna go to teachers, kids don't wanna go to the counselors. Sometimes that SRO may be the difference. It may be that another person that can help them dealing with something that they're dealing with. And another one of the good things about an SRO position is if I've dealt with a family that had a significant domestic violence issue the prior night, I could let the SRO know who can in turn go to the school and say John or Susan had a really traumatic incident last night and we need to focus our efforts and rally around him or her. This may be the last question we'll have time for. As the chief of police, do you have a daily routine? Is there such a thing as a typical day at work? No. It's administrative, it's meetings and it's just trying to get everything I can squeeze and everything I possibly can within the day. Maybe time for one more. What is the relationship between your police department and the Vermont state police? Could you tell us a bit about that? Who asked that question? No, I'm just kidding. I think that we have a very good working relationship with the Vermont state police and I think that Vermont state police is overtaxed and a lot and they're struggling with bringing staff aboard as well. So I think that we have a very good strong relationship and that we're mutually supportive of each other and I think a huge example of that is what happened on January 6th and then January 17th and 22nd when we came together to protect the state capital. Thank you. Thank you. Carol? Yes, Brian, thank you so much. My pillow is very lucky to have you. We really, really appreciate your hour with us. Thank you. See you all next week.