 I believe John is down the hall with the health care committee. So, and Marcia had an appointment this afternoon. So, we're coming back to some testimony on age 464. And this is related to data collection and de-escalation training, model policy of sensitivity, cultural awareness in law enforcement. And because there are oftentimes stories that really tug at the heart about the interactions between law enforcement and people experiencing a mental health crisis, I wanted to invite representative of the Vermont Psychiatric Survivors. And also, I believe that you are or were the chair of the Brennan Commission. So, please come and help orient the committee since they may not know who you are. Thank you for being with us. Thank you for having me. I greatly appreciate it. My name is Wolda White and I am the former executive director of Vermont Psychiatric Survivors. Vermont Psychiatric Survivors is a civil rights advocacy organization on behalf of people discriminated against because of mental illness. I led that organization for three years from 2015 through 2018. Currently, I am the chair of the Vermont Mental Health Crisis Response Commission. And that commission was created by legislation of this body in 2017 as a result of friends, families, and colleagues of Phil Brennan, who was killed in March of 2016 in his own home by law enforcement officers from the Burlington Police Department. And of course, it was captured on video. That video was released to the public and it caused a great deal of trauma and consternation, upset. And I think that's what spurred people to want to do something to avoid these types of deaths. Or understand, first of all, why it occurred and how to avoid it. I was on the ad hoc group that got together to see what could be done about it. And one of the things I noticed was that what people wanted to do about it very much depended on where they sat. So if you were a mental health practitioner, you wanted to do mental health. If you were maybe a citizen who had problems with the police, you wanted to do police training. So one of the things I pushed is, you know, before we go out and try to figure out what to do, and why don't we look at it more than just as what happened in that room, but see if there are kind of larger elements, larger issues that brought us to this place where Mr. Grannon was hiding in his bathroom and then ended up being killed by police. And so as a result, this commission was created. And I've been the chair of that commission for the last two years. And we have just completed our review of that encounter. And we expect the report to be released by the end of the month. It's already been drafted. We're just proofreading at this point. So I've learned a lot from that commission. Most of the people in that commission are connected to law enforcement. There are representatives of police chiefs. There are representatives of rank and file. There's representatives of the criminal justice training council. There's representatives of team two. I don't know if you know what team two is, but it is the collaboration between both mental health providers and police. It's voluntary, but several police agencies send their officers to team-true training. So the person who leads heads up that is on the commission. Representative from Disability Rights for Montt, which is the organization that provides legal services to people who've been kind of caught up in the justice system on the civil side, because of perceptions that they have mental illness. There's a representative of NAMI, which is an organization that represents family members of people who have people with mental illnesses. And then I'm on there as a representative of people with lived experience of mental illnesses. And so, you know, there's just this one kind of lone voice of people who've had experience with mental illnesses. And it was quite interesting to hear, just to see the difference and just looking at the same information and seeing how different people can interpret that same information depending on where they come from. But I have to say that as disheartening as it has been at times, I feel that everyone in that commission has made a great deal of progress. And seeing each other's points of view, and we've all moved. I came in there with just some kind of evidence that someone could kill somebody in their apartment. A police officer could kill someone in their apartment, and I was quite angry with those officers. And sympathetic at the same time, because I think it must be hard to kill somebody in your line of work. But I have seen the situation in very much a new light. His death was completely preventable. It should not have happened. And one of the things I think is important for you as you consider this legislation is you have put all your bags, all your eggs into the policy basket. And I want you to know that there are policies in play at this issue in this encounter that simply were not adhered to. And these policies have been in existence for decades. They simply were not adhered to. So I would caution you as you look at this legislation to think more deeply about what it is you're trying to accomplish and then how to go about accomplishing it. Because I can tell you that a model policy is not going to get us where I think we want to go. So the other thing that I think about this policy is that I'm here to talk about mental health issues. And I notice that in your policy, it's silent on that. You speak a lot about racial data collection. But you don't talk about the mental health, mental illness part of it. One of the things that you should know that kind of the people who are at the greatest risk of being killed by police officers are actually people with what they call untreated mental illnesses. And that's anybody who, that's not simply somebody who's not seeing a doctor. That could be somebody whose medication hasn't worked. That could be somebody whose psychosis was triggered by medication. It's just somebody who's... And so people with untreated mental illnesses are 16 times more likely to be killed by police. In Vermont, since we're renting staff, we've already had five people, kind of by law enforcement officers who were thought to have been in a mental health crisis at the time that they were killed. So if anything, I think this legislation needs to take the count of that fact and include something to address that. Because one of the things I've learned from talking to police officers is they don't really have time for training. They feel like... And they feel like they're at the point of being over-trained or too much training or the brain can't control, containing more training. And they seem very resistant to training. And I don't think it's a bad motive or anything. I do think that they feel like every time they're in training they're not in the field or the training, I think... If they're so resistant to training, I think there must be something about the training that they don't feel like they're getting a whole lot out of it. So if you want to do the training route, I do hope that you include in it measures that both address what the main topic of this legislation seems to be, which is use of force against people who aren't white, as I understand it. But include in their training that also encompasses training for preventing these deaths involving people and mental health crisis. So instead of saying four hours for this type of training that's here, try to combine, right, try to get whatever training it is to accomplish all use of force no matter who the subject of it is. Because I think you'll find that the police officer will be much less resistant. And also you'll be, I think, one of the things that will come out of our commission. I don't think I'm telling tales out of school just because our report hasn't been released yet. But, you know, that report does recommend more training. And so I think we need to consolidate this training instead of having this commission recommend four hours, this commission recommend four hours. You can consolidate it and then avoid this complaint you're going to hear about. There's not enough time. The other thing I find troubling about this piece of legislation is you designated the people whose views will be, you designated stakeholders who are supposed to be involved in creating this model policy. But you haven't, I don't know why you designated these particular people or why you think they have any particular expertise in this area. And one of the things that I've learned is that in many times the people who are considered stakeholders, they don't know what they don't know. And I'll give you an example. So in the case of Phil Brennan, officers didn't know, so Phil Brennan, he was likely psychotic at the time that he was killed. And psychosis means you either are, you have any of your five senses, you perceive things within any of those five senses that aren't part of the consensus reality, or you have, or you believe things that aren't part of the consensus reality. But one of the things about psychosis that I've learned from personal experience and also that's in the literature is that people who are psychotic have altered sensory phenomenon. And so you can, when I was psychotic, I could hear things. If somebody were whispering 15 feet away from me, it sounded like they were yelling in my ear. I could hear it very clearly. I could listen to music if I could tolerate it and I could hear, and I was a huge jazz fan. I could hear every single instrument clearly as if it were being played on its own. So why is that relevant? Well, and when the police officers around Mr. Brennan's apartment, they didn't have a staging area. They talked about what they were going to do to get him out of his apartment within 10 feet of him, thinking that he couldn't hear them. The fact that people who have psychosis have extraordinary hearing. And he likely heard every single thing that they were saying, and the things that they were saying were not the things that were going to get him to come out of this room. Now, most people don't know that. Police officers haven't been trained that people who are in a psychotic state or a manic state have altered sensory phenomenon and have extraordinary hearing, can have extraordinary strength. And so I think that's just an example of how that lack of knowledge and lack of knowledge because they were trained by people who lack the knowledge interfered with that police action that night. And so I feel like this piece of legislation is going down that same path of designating people as stakeholders to create a model policy who don't have all the information that they need to create this model policy because they don't know what they don't know. And so I think one of the things that would improve this legislation would actually to think more deeply about, well, who should, who are the stakeholders who might bring some knowledge to this endeavor that we can't even think of because we are so unconscious about what we don't know. The other thing I think this legislation could benefit from is maybe some legislative findings about exactly what you're trying to achieve, particularly what values we're trying to advance because you're asking police officers to develop a model policy. Well, I think the policy that police officers might come up and consider a model may not reflect the largest societal values or what we expect from police officers. I hear so often when police officers, you know, shoot for, you know, use use of force, lethal use of force in the line of duty. You'll let people say, well, why don't you just shoot them in the knee or why don't you just shoot the thing out of your hand. I think about the fact that police officers are trained to shoot at, you know, the biggest body mass, but we watch so much television and we, you know, we have a completely different conception about what is reasonable use of force. And so I think that we, as a community, need to communicate to our law enforcement, what is it that we value, right? We had a person who had a mental illness who was threatening to kill himself standing on the side of the road with the gun pointed at his head. And he was shot by a law enforcement officer. And I read the newspaper account where the representative law enforcement said that police officers don't have to feel like their lives are in danger before they shoot, you know, to kill, which came as a complete shock to me. I just didn't, I would never have guessed that it would have been within the appropriate use of force for a police officer to kill a person who was threatened to kill himself. And I think this kind of disconnect between what our community thinks of appropriate use of force and what police officers are trained as appropriate use of force causes a lot of conflict and misunderstanding. So I'm concerned that without legislative findings or without a statement of our values in this legislation that a model police policy on use of force would only reflect what police officers have been trained historically constitutes an appropriate use of force. I haven't been talking enough, Doctor. If there are any questions, I'm going to take my breath. Thank you for coming. Thank you for your help. Part of the process we're in, we're just seeing this now, too. And what would be helpful as we start to process this, we have notes that you could share with us. That would be helpful part for us to be able to inject into the process as we continue to, I don't know if you have notes in that. I don't have them, but I will bring them. I typically, if I don't bring them with me, I follow up my testimony with a written. That'd be great. And I would do that in this case, too. Thanks. Maura? The report that you're about to official, can we get that? Yes. Electronically? Yes. Thank you for the assistance that we could have. I'd be interested in bringing them. I will do that. Thank you. You're welcome. Robin, then, how? Thank you for today. You're welcome. I will have to say when I did that yesterday, I had some of the very same questions. In fact, I asked them what was the mental component to this. Because that did seem to be a huge part for me. And the same question about some stakeholders is, what are they bringing to the discussion here? A question I have for you, though, is, you know, you were talking about the training for law enforcement. And I've actually heard that a little bit myself as well. But one of the comments that I had heard of me was that they have to get an awful lot of training. And the concern is that they're going to get some of this training, whether it be a four hour or whatever it turns out to be. And then they're going to be faced with this situation and have to make an immediate assessment. I mean, one of what, where this person is, whether they're in crisis, if it's a mental crisis, or whatever. And then two, are they going to have enough training to really be able to, one, make that assessment that quickly, and then two, decide, of course, if action is appropriate? Is that a reasonable thing to expect, do you think? I don't think that they can get it all from a four hour training. I think it comes from repetition. But it also has to, there also has to be some post-encounter critique. So what we found, I'm going to just speak personally right now since our report hasn't been released. So what I found in the Brennan case was, the Berlin Police Department, they engaged in a post-incident critique. But here again, they don't know what they don't know. And so they uncovered nothing. And now the reasons I think that this happened, they didn't know that he could hear them or he might have been able to hear them. They didn't know how loud they were speaking. They never even figured out that Phil Brennan, the reason he acted the way he acted was, he thought the police were coming to his apartment to kill him. He had told his psychiatrist that in advance, that I think the police are coming to my apartment to kill me. And if they do, I'm going to defend myself with knives. A letter was found in his apartment after he died saying that the police are going to come to my apartment and kill me on March 18th. Well, they killed him on March 21st. Brody's and police department never did any investigation to figure that out, even though they did a complete debrief of this incident. And so I think what happens is, training is not enough. And then when they make a mistake and they go in and do these internal debriefings, they don't have the right people in the room to sort through what they could have done better. And that, I mean, we learned the most from our failures. And so if you don't have more than just the same people in the room who run the incident trying to help you sort it through, you're not going to learn anything. And I think that's one of the valuable things about this commission on law, because we have extensively reviewed that encounter with every videotape, every sworn statement, talked to, you know, all witnesses. And we uncovered so much more than any of those other individual organizations involved could have done on their own or did on their own. So I think it requires, you asked about, is this training enough to know what more is required? I think post-incident reviews that involve more than just the people who are involved in that review. And it requires repetitive training with different scenarios that are critiqued by not just law enforcement officers. I know I've been involved in some of the... I've been invited to the police academy to talk to officers about mental illness. And, you know, I feel like I have been underutilizing that because they sit there and listen to somebody's about where I come in. Every time I come in, there's a PowerPoint slide that's up that I think, oh my God, that's what they've been talking about. And then I give my little personal story, which might have some utility, but there's ways that I could be way more involved and way more helpful to these officers if I were just utilized. And so I think they need that utilization. And one of the things I personally think that had an impact on Fieldman and Steph, and this is not been shared by the commission, but it's my personal view, is the role of unconscious bias against people with mental illnesses that played out there. Because I think when you have these unconscious biases, you don't... First of all, fear is usually operating and you never make good decisions when we're afraid. And then they have a stereotypical view of people with mental illnesses that they see on TV that's really not just stereotypical. It rarely plays out in reality. And you become less patient. You think that it doesn't matter if you, or you think it won't be effective if you spend a little extra time to try to engage with the person or you think engages are possible. And that's a, you know, I think another way to address unconscious bias is actually improving more people in the process to counter those stereotypes. You know, every time I go to the police academy and talk about my experience, they all want to say I don't have a mental illness. Just simply because I don't meet the stereotype. And what we need to try to get them to understand is that nobody meets the stereotype. Or very few do. And that everybody, you know, anytime that you go, what I want them to believe and what I say to them is every time you go, when there's a person with whom you think has a mental illness, I want you to think of them as me, who you thought, you know, couldn't have a mental illness. That's who you, that's who you're, that's who they are. That's me, you know. They're at their worst, but they have a better. And you can help them, you know, get to that. If you try to manage your fear, read the signs. But they need a lot more training. And particularly in the mental health field, they need a lot more training. And the training cannot come from the typical stakeholders because they just don't know. They need to try to involve more people who have experienced a mental illness or a mental health crisis. Particularly if they call these officers during that and they've lived to talk about it. Does that answer your question? Yes, thank you. Great answer. Sure. Thanks for being here. So in terms of the way the bill reads today, what do you think is the most important element that comes out of the bill? What should be its focus? Or is there something that's missing in terms of what the focus should be? I think legislative findings are missing because it's always helpful to people to know what your role was when you wrote the legislation, what the connection between your findings and the particular provisions in the legislation. And right now I don't see that. I don't know when you say cross-cultural awareness policy. Do you think lack of cross-cultural awareness is what's causing excessive use of force? I'm not convinced that that's the reason. Perhaps, but you haven't made any findings to tell me that. I don't even know what a cross-cultural awareness policy is. I've never seen one. And I don't even know if the people you've charged with doing this will know what a cross-cultural awareness policy is. So I think there's a lack of legislative findings. There's a lack of definitions or lack of connections between a problem you're trying to solve that's not clearly identified a year and the solutions that you proposed. And I think the lack of... the stakeholders that you're identified are insufficient to get to where I want to go. And I think the... there's an intersection. When I told you that people with mental illnesses, particularly untreated mental illnesses, 16 times more likely to be killed by police, I mean, it's even higher if the person is black. And so that's completely missing from this legislation, figuring out how to address kind of almost the intersection of race and mental illness. Go ahead, guys. So in terms of stakeholders, who do you think is missing? There's nothing in here about mental illness. And I don't think the Vermont Human Rights Commission has any ability in this area whatsoever. And the Vermont legal cities and towns, likewise the executive director of racial equity, who I don't know, but that's certainly not within her bailiwick. But there's nothing... advocacy organizations from our psychiatric survivors or people who've expressed an interest in this area, both the mental illness and race or just mental illness. But there are several advocacy organizations on behalf of people with mental illnesses in the state. There are groups who are trying to figure out what to do about use of force when it comes to mental illness. They're missing. And I'm always a big believer in just citizens and not people who are being paid to do it, but people who are just... We live in this society, we live in this community, and we want to make it better. And so I always would like to see slots reserved for people who step up because they're interested and they have something to offer. One of the things that's most challenging for people who've been labeled with mental illnesses is this thing of epistemic injustice, which probably none of you have heard of. But epistemic injustice is when people, because of prejudice, don't have the opportunity to participate in knowledge creation. There's two forms of epistemic injustice, and I've just described what's called injustice and hermeneutics means the science of interpretation. And what happens when groups, particularly marginalized groups, are not allowed to participate in the creation of knowledge, that knowledge doesn't get created. Things like I just told you about the altered sensory phenomenon that people born psychosis hit. So you probably would never see that because we don't get to speak. No one listens to us. And when we do speak, they don't believe us. But there's so much epistemic injustice that goes on when it comes with people with mental illnesses and people in many marginalized communities, women, black people, that we don't get to speak. And so this is an opportunity to challenge epistemic injustice by allowing those groups who are traditionally marginalized to speak and contribute what they know. Because we know not only what our experiences are being labeled mental illnesses, but we also know what it is to live in this world. So we come with more than just our lived experiences of mental illness. We come with our lived experiences of mental illness coupled with our lived experiences of living in a world that marginalizes us. We come with knowledge of the dominant culture and knowledge of that marginalized culture. And I think we have lots to contribute if people would just give us an opportunity. I think it would make for... It would improve these situations. A couple years ago, we had a conference, a group of organizations that work in this area of mental illness, and we had Madeline Cunin speak as our keynote. And one of the things she shared with us that I think she was quoting somebody else, but I will quote whoever she was quoting now, where she said, people who are closest to the problem are close to the solution. So I think you need to involve more people who are close to the problem. That is your question. Thank you. So one of the things that you... that you pointed out is that the language in 464 that's in front of us talks about implicit bias in the context of race, but that there is also implicit bias for folks who are experiencing a mental health crisis. And I'm really struck by your sort of vision that one-time training is not enough. And I'm wondering if you can imagine a way that there could be more of a continuous evaluation of incidents and training and retraining of law enforcement in a way that would help foster a better understanding of the many different kinds of mental health crises that people might encounter. Well, I think I've alluded to just one of them is just after you have an incident, invite members of the community during your debriefing or part of your debriefing, offering them access to the same evidence that you have and asking for their opinions. And so that goes... that kind of addresses a couple of things. One is it helps with your community relations because you're reaching out to the community. You're getting to know people who possibly have been in mental health crisis when they're at their desk. Familiarity helps with unconscious biases. And then I think the continued support of the Mental Health Crisis Response Commission is good because I think... and I hope this is shared when the reports released, I think there's some trepidation about it because we don't want to upset people, but we also want to be helpful. But continued support of that process where we actually review these killings and make recommendations. But I think it has to happen on a community level where you please talk, please invite community in to revisit these. And also when they audit their trainings because I think they're... I think police officers are being trained to do things that aren't helpful. One of the main tools of a police officer is command presence. But command presence does not typically work when a person is in the throes of psychosis. First of all, when you're psyched, you know, like I tell you, some people, they cannot tolerate noise, or loud noises, so you're yelling at them, that's just going to agitate them. And so there needs to be some kind of auditing of that training by people who know the population that these interventions are intended for just so that we're not doing things that are harmful. But I think it has to be on the community level. More tools in the toolbox. Yeah, different tools. Different tools in the toolbox. Any questions for me? Great. Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon. Thank you for having me, I appreciate it. So committee, we have sometimes set aside who are a joint hearing with the judiciary committee who has a bill that's been assigned to them that is related to the topic of this bill. H808 is a bill that would provide for the creation of a statewide policy on deadly force by law enforcement. And so it would ask us to keep our eyes and ears open for other perspectives that we think would help to inform us as we talk about book 464 and this 808. And in particular, we're looking at, and I don't want to lose for a moment the important conversation about data collection because that's a part of 464 that I'd like us to take a look at. But I think the more thorny issue is, do we believe that there is a need for better policy or do we believe that there's a need for different training and which of those, or both, do we think we should be concentrating on? So we're going to hear a number of different perspectives on that and I would just ask you to be in touch with me if you have thoughts about who else could inform that conversation. One of those same lines, I mean, it makes a very good comment. We don't know what we don't know and that's so true and that's why we're here to ask questions. But I don't know what we do for training now and I would think the Criminal Justice Training Academy might be able to give us some insight and that advisory council or committee that sets this and I don't know what they have for all the policies. So Rick Gough here is going to be with us on Tuesday when we're sitting down with the Judiciary Committee. I've been representing the State Police for a long time and saw trends that when I first came into this sort of world like just about a good cop I knew would go through their courier and pull their gun up a number of times. Now it seems like it's often, and I wonder if there's a link between, it used to be people that came out of high school and did this now. It seems like a lot of the police were hiring our ex-veterans. So what we train people to do is maybe just as important as what we tried to extinguish the training that they had before. I go back to the, I talked to the participants before, the incident in the bathroom is not the one that's telling for me, the one that's telling for me is that the north end when somebody came out of the garage with a shovel and they were too early to police officers there and one of them got shot and the other stood there and one was a seasoned officer and one relatively new. And what was the difference in their approach to the situation that caused them to do that? That's a real puzzler to me. And I think maybe a solution to some of that. So for those of us who weren't familiar with that, was it the seasoned officer or the newer one? It was the seasoned officer that tried to talk the guy. That's my reflection from reading the reports. And you know, you gain a certain familiarization with your community by being out there in it. And I just pass the note. I don't know what component of this just simple fear has because society has changed so much that Joe Friday anymore who will arrest somebody and takes them away without a basic firearm who would now progress past my antibodies to the point where everybody's shooting everybody in. I could not go to work every day worried that somebody was going to shoot me. And that has to play a new reaction to when you face some situation that you don't have background in. Can you have seconds if that to decide? You know, just as many seconds to walk back. But it's still seconds. Well, along that lines, and you really did a nice job and made me think about some stuff, but an officer's in that situation and you've got just mere seconds. Does it matter what the motivation is of the party that you're interacting with if you're fearing for your life or somebody else's and I'm not sure what all the criteria that they have that comes into play there, but do they really have the time to go through that sort of thought process? If it's, I mean, if somebody's pulling a, you've identified that somebody's pulling a firearm or a knife out at you, that's an entirely different situation so any treason for their club compartment or reaching into their pocket and it's frequent that those sort of actions result in death also. That's, I mean, these things are very pleasant to be able to answer. And I think also the reaction is directly related to whether or not that person's white or black. So implicit bias is policy work. So if you're not aware of it, you can't manage it. So if you could take a few more seconds, you might be able to go, oh, that's actually an undercover black officer versus, you know, a thug and not a shooter. But like, see these two scenarios here that we're talking about, I don't, neither one of them are personal color-worthy. The gentleman in the shower, the one in my country said a shovel. I don't know if you've got a shovel or a shovel about this. Mental illness was the stereotype of those cases. Mental illness was the stereotype of those cases. Yes, yes. So the implicit bias, once again, is what that worked. And the sad reality is that many times when our local law enforcement are interacting with people who are in a mental health crisis, these are people that they have probably already interacted with. I know in my community, you know, there's some folks who frequently have abnormal behavior in public and, you know, citizens might call the police and, you know, there might not be anything dangerous going on most of the time, but police are already aware that, you know, this person has exhibited different behavior. And so, you know, I think if we can just put our brains in the mindset of is there something that we can do to help bend the landscape so that there's a greater understanding of implicit bias as well as explicit bias. And, you know, the word de-escalation is in the title of the bill. You know, are there more tools that can be given to train four police officers that will help them go to that tool if it's appropriate. And welcome anyone who's sitting around the room or any committee members to stick around and chat about who you would like to hear from either on Tuesday or if we come back to this here in this committee. Tuesday we'll be sitting with the Judiciary Committee because they happen to be assigned H-808, but because these are two related issues we probably will end up taking possession of H-808, but I thought it would be helpful for us to hear from the Judiciary perspective as we consider that.